Except if you're arguing that western companies are bound by stronger ethics, in which case I'd like to see some evidence.
I wouldn't say people in the west are "better people in their hearts" but they absolutely follow more strict norms regarding honesty and theft. This is one of the main reasons why companies pay a premium for workers in the west when they could hire from other places.
One example: accounting scandals in the US are rare. I don't think anyone trusts accounting figures for public companies from India or china.
> in which case I'd like to see some evidence.
The alternative to trust is enforcement. The evidence you are looking for is the prevalence of the latter principle in systems that deal with things of value.
I work in accounting. You’re right, I trust the US more than India or China, but you’d be surprised at the liberties US companies make and how many individuals from India are auditing their work. Auditors (excluding partners and some senior managers) are just not equipped to deal with the technical accounting concepts and to challenge management. Remember, the company employs the auditors. You certainly don’t want to ruin a $1MM contract for your firm but pressing too hard.
> You certainly don’t want to ruin a $1MM contract for your firm but pressing too hard.
Only in the west would you get any push back at all. The auditor would feel some duty to bring up an issue even if it reflected poorly on the company and even their own managers.
I agree they likely wouldn't push an issue beyond its welcome, but this particular value is unheard of in many parts of the world.
By this token "other places" companies would also want to pay a premium to hire US workers outside of sheer competency. Yet we're not seeing Samsung massively moving institutional operations to US centers for instance.
> accounting scandals
Whait, what ? You're telling me that while the crypto bubble is bursting and they're going to prison for egregious fraud ?
Also, scandals being few in number would probably be a sign of overcorruption and systematic rot or the controlling structure. I'm not sure that's what we want.
Culture matters a lot. Korea is a high context society, and relationship building is extremely important. Its very difficult to migrate functions to other locations when the way to get things done is through building trust and relationships over long periods of time. That said, Samsung does have significant offices all over the world.
It's not a competency it's a network effect.
> Yet we're not seeing Samsung massively moving institutional operations to US centers for instance.
Samsung probably has great trust developed among its senior management.
Perhaps your will object: "But the publishers/Disney/etc are evil, greedy entities and I don't owe them anything." But I'm sure anyone who's stolen corporate secret elsewhere can come up with a similar justification in their head! After all, that may well be why they left the company in the first place.
Then a step further from that, sure there are laws to prevent you from wholesale lifting corporate data and bringing them out as you leave, but as many laws it will be extremely difficult to detect and prove that happened in many low profile cases. That's why instead of just relying on the law you'll lock usb ports monitor network activity and get laptops returned when someone leaves.
It's kinda like preventing shop lifting, you know it will happen at some scale.
> US company / Chinese gov
How much leverage do you thing a Chinese company has to if a three letter US agency spies on them and pass the info to US companies ? And would you argue that scenario wouldn't happen if a specific Chinese company had a decisive advantage that could severly hurt US interests ?
Both for software products and manufacturing products, that's what is going on: exact copies of source code, assembly line configs, etc. Many folks write off selling to China for reasons like this. Initially that means underserving one big market for self-defense. Where it gets next-level painful and crazy is when cloners then take their derived works back to the international market to compete directly with the inventors. By then it has been tweaked, but the core is still the clone.
Though I cannot provide evidence for this offhand beyond anecdote and the corruption perception index.