This enormous global system of powerful corporations and nation states crafted this system because it was in their best interest. Feels sort of tone deaf to say "well, you got what you deserved, you created this sytem by buying this specific computer and cheaper food!"
Night/farmer's markets are quite popular here in NZ but we haven't toppled global inquality by visiting them yet and I doubt continuing to do so is going to make a difference.
I can choose to participate in “fast fashion”, or choose to buy some of my clothing second-hand.
I can choose a vacation by flying to Greece, or hiking the local area, or anywhere in between.
I can often choose to wait another year to upgrade my phone/computer/device.
Corporations don’t just do stuff, they respond to our actions.
Voting in booths generally works better to affect change in systems like these with externalities, but voting with action and wallets also works.
I do consider that I have a responsibility to act ethically versus other people, and that includes making choices as a consumer.
Corporations respond to our actions, certainly. But in the same way (and for the same reason), we respond to corporate actions. You can bet that every single one of those CEOs in the article is doing everything they legally can to prevent people from "choosing" to go elsewhere. Some are going beyond that.
No single raindrop can cause a flood, but many singular raindrops are required for it to happen.
Indeed, sometimes the role of the union is to get everybody doing the same thing, and provide a safety net for individuals who suffer repercussions for doing the thing.
I find that voting in booths doesn't tend to actually do anything, and voting with wallets actually accomplishes things.
However I really do wonder how much choice we have. Ultimately what I am going to say next comes down to believing the market is actually inefficient and prone to mistakes / manipulation.
While we can buy a gas guzzling car or a smaller greener vehicle, there is a lot of time energy and effort spent to manipulate the perception of the smaller vehicle so that its seen as less attractive to purchase, as well as less attractive to make.
More deeply, I'm not totally convinced that changing an individual to act ethically actually changes the group dynamic or consumption habits. Because by stating we have a responsibility to make ethical choices as a consumer we assume people act rationally all of the time when making purchasing decisions, which really isn't the case otherwise marketing wouldn't be effective. Finally, companies don't really respond to individuals, they respond to groups of people that fit their ideal customer profile. These groups likely have a different set of ethics than us and likely will not change to fit a different world view, at least in aggregate. Individually, sure, but not the whole group.
Maybe more succinctly, I believe there is a real distinction that occurs by looking at group dynamics which cannot be inferred or changed at the individual level and because of that choosing to act ethically as an individual wont ever get the attention of billionaires or massive corporations.
Not trying to be argumentative, I live in the same way you describe, but ultimately I don't think its going to change how apple operates. No matter how many people I tell.
And generally the people propping up these organizations are the people with disposable income because they're the ones who can pay the margins that keep the companies rich. If you can afford a new Macbook, you can afford something from Framework. The person without a choice is buying something used from eBay or doesn't have a laptop at all.
While that is true, typically the customers in aggregate have far more power, both in monetary powers (it's a distributed power), and in democratic powers. Yes there's lobbying in the US, but if individuals gave $25 per voter to their desired cause they'd exceed the lobbying power. ($3.5B lobbying vs 168M voters from quick googles).
> Feels sort of tone deaf to say "well, you got what you deserved, you created this sytem by buying this specific computer and cheaper food!"
Except that it was introspective, not finger pointing. I do prefer a system where i get to choose as opposed to mandated.
It is the other way around, consumers wanting to keep consuming and feeling good about it while blaming someone else.
I want cars I can wrench on, and software I can trust. I want things that are mine first, not the manufacturers.
It. Will. Not. Happen. Short of doing it ourselves, because businesses can't spawn around those values.
So to hell with you pinning this on "well it's the consumers fault". To hell with that. The conspicuously absent feature is entirely a byproduct of industry. Not consumers. No one can consume what "industry" decides is bad for business.
What do you think "doing it ourselves" is? If you want open hardware and nobody makes it, you make it, or do a Go Fund Me etc. Then somebody makes it.
Notwithstanding what other people say, customers do actually prefer these things, if nothing else because they cost less. Once somebody makes a free and open chip design, companies will prefer to put that chip design in their devices because then they don't have to pay for one and don't have to deal with BS where their own customers want updates but upstream provides neither updates nor documentation. Because now upstream is a community anybody can participate in that keeps providing updates for 20+ years.
Customers don't prefer these things only when they're forced into an unnecessary trade off against something else. You want a Ford or Toyota running open source software but your choices are a closed source product in mass production or a kit car you have to assemble from parts. You don't want to assemble it from parts so you pick the first one. But that only sustains as long as nobody is making a competitive mass-produced car which is open source.
As soon as you have one, the permissionlessness is an advantage. Repairs are cheaper so TCO is lower so Consumer's Reports tells normies to buy it. Then the competition has to do the same thing because it's better.
Consolidated markets are a problem. If you wanted to do "iPhone, but open" you can't just glue a screen to a RISC-V CPU, the chip has to be competitive and have third party apps etc. etc.
But not everything is like that. If you wanted to do "desktop PC, but open hardware," that's the sort of thing people are actively working on and could plausibly succeed. So support them, contribute, and buy it when it's available, because it's not impossible.
You might want certain things, but that does not mean you can afford to pay the price that would be sufficient to serve the market (since there would be so few like you). Consumers, as a group, will most likely choose price and getting the job done quickly.
Also, some things in life might just be so technically advanced that you will not find all the optionality you want.
Strong disagree. It feels like an attempt to convince the public at large that a) they still have significant agency and b) they should feel extremely guilty and/or empowered by that. This paradox is usually a polite fiction at best, and in the worst-case it's a well-orchestrated psy-op.
Like how "recycling" in many communities is just a different funnel that goes to the same dump, or how many good water-preserving citizens are encouraged to have short showers while we ignore the thirsty golf course next door. What are the real scenarios where the habits of the general consumer actually matter, if we stack them up against corporate consumption and those inefficiencies? Does it really make any sense for John Q. Public to feel bad about driving a gas-guzzler to work when the international shipping industry or the municipal/state government isn't looking to upgrade to electric? Or we could talk about the conspicuously missing mass-transit projects that would remove the need for the cars we're supposed to feel guilty about. Why are consumers who are already hard-pressed expected to lead the charge anyway?
> feeling good about it while blaming someone else
But we don't feel good! We feel bad because we got the wrong light bulbs and dishwashers. Every "drop in the bucket" matters, but going after drops in the first place is a paradox, so we won't feel good after we're living in dark rooms with dirty dishes either. I sure hope this actually matters and it isn't a scam to sell more dishwashers and light bulbs! Like come on, efficient appliances are great, but does it really matter when coal was still ~10% of total U.S. energy consumption in 2022? (source: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/use-of-coal.php )
Yes, recycling was a ruse to allow people to keep consuming and feeling good about it.
>or how many good water-preserving citizens are encouraged to have short showers while we ignore the thirsty golf course next door.
This one is a valid example, and it is very easy to solve. Marginal water prices. The more water you use, the more you pay. Same with electricity.
> Does it really make any sense for John Q. Public to feel bad about driving a gas-guzzler to work when the international shipping industry or the municipal/state government isn't looking to upgrade to electric?
Yes, because it’s John Q Public that will not vote for a politician to increase fossil fuel taxes high enough to curb excess consumption. In one fell swoop, the problem of carbon emissions and plastic degradation could be solved, but John Q Public WANTS cheap travel and cheap out of season fruits.
Also, in this specific example, John Q Public is literally opting to buy gas (and electric) guzzlers instead of more energy efficient vehicles. Nobody forced anyone to buy big SUVs and compact SUVs.
>Or we could talk about the conspicuously missing mass-transit projects that would remove the need for the cars we're supposed to feel guilty about.
Because John Q Public (at least those with kids) wants detached single family homes on a 0.1 to 0.25 acre lot with a 2 car garage and a front and back yard. And mass transit simply is not tenable at those low population densities.
There’s a few people out there willing to make the sacrifices, but by and large, the population will opt for short term comforts.
Kind of like this:
It is objectively true that the public has significant agency, and the empirical evidence is the number of companies that took a political stance on some issue and then had to reverse it because of (uncoordinated) public backlash. Your unfounded assertions are categorically refuted by concrete examples such as Target and Bud Light publicly reversing their stances on some issues after consumer backlash.
Second, no, it's absolutely not a cop-out. You mentioned yourself that nation states crafted this system. You're a member of one of those nation states, and there's a very strong chance that it's a democratic one, in which case you still bear the responsibility to elect responsible leaders!
The consumer absolutely bears all of the responsibility, because the consumer is, at least in the US and many other parts of the world, also the voter.
Your apathy in responsible company research and product purchase is extremely likely also coupled with an apathy in representative research and activism. No, merely voting for your preferred political party does not automatically install good regulators - you actually have to invest effort into research and activism.
The only intellectually dishonest comment here is this one.
https://www.euroncap.com/en/car-safety/the-ratings-explained...
Steep financial liability for pedestrian/cyclist accidents for not only the driver but also the vehicle manufacturer or anyone involved in modifying a vehicle would also help.
The question how valuable consumers perceive safety features to be, and what their rate of adoption would be; additionally, which ones would they choose? Two interesting examples are seat-belts and air-bags; the former is in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per life saved, and the latter is generally estimated to be in the millions of dollars per life saved. Was mandating the air-bag the optimal way to use that money, or did the government commit statistical murder (a term often used in the field).
And it's compounded with things like housing and food. You can't go without either unless you want to live a completely undignified existence and with a vastly shortened lifespan.
Another example to throw in there is indoor smoking too. People never stopped going out to eat or to bars when you were forced to sit in a thick haze of second hand smoke, and even if you did avoid it there were hundreds of other people who didn't care. I can't imagine how things would be if the push to get rid of it happened in more recent times rather than 20-25 years ago. Red states certainly would have never banned it and there would be droves of people going out intentionally to force you to inhale their second hand smoke to own the libs.
I think even diehard libertarians would admit that "regulations work" in the sense that using the government's monopoly on violence to force companies to do something will cause them to do said thing. The debate is whether the upsides outweigh the downsides (eg. due to regulatory capture).
For a point of comparison, software security is largely unregulated. There's no law that says Google needs to deliver security patches for 5 years, or they need to implement security measures like verified boot, yet they do so anyways, presumably to compete with Apple which is doing something similar.
That isn't really the debate, because we had that debate and decided it was (see seatbelts for an example). Though I guess literally every issue could technically be relitigated and debated constantly ad infinitum, so you're not technically wrong. But we didn't listen to people who said "if you want seatbelts required, just stop buying cars that don't have them".
What we see now, for the most part, are individuals who disagree with our consensus, but that's to be expected no matter what we had ultimately decided. So in this case, "it worked" is shorthand for "it successfully got us closer to achieving the goals we decided on"
Recognizing a car could be safer isn't contradicted by owning one. If anything, ownership should give you more insight into the material problems of the item in question.
Likewise, society is just everything. So suggesting improvements isn't contradictory.
However, there is some hypocrisy in lambasting the maker of the very luxury goods you purchase for exploiting people. You are kind of justifying the companies' exploitation by purchasing from them. And you can advocate for change from these makers without supporting them with your money.
And some people do come with the attitude of "I don't want to change a single thing about my behaviors or sacrifice a single thing, but I expect the world to get better somehow."
And if you point out any hypocrisy in a person’s action, someone will trot this out as if we can never call out people for contributing to a problem they are complaining about even if contributing is completely optional.
No matter which phone is chosen you can call someone a hypocrite for thinking that both google and apple ceos are overpaid. The illusion of a free market is no defence.
The benefits of local business are 1) that dollars spent there generate more wealth for the local economy, as they're not extracted to offshore bank accounts; and 2) that there can be more accountability to and involvement with the community served.
However, just because someone hasn't expanded their business to the state/national/international levels doesn't make them a good person, a good manager, a good CEO, or a good community member. The term "petty tyrant" is often used to refer to small business owners who abuse their employees and/or community.
This is only one side of the equation. Globalization also means the local economy is also "extracting" wealth from other economies.
>2) that there can be more accountability to and involvement with the community served.
Yeah, like car dealerships using their "accountability to and involvement" to forcibly insert themselves in the value chain?
... more than large corporations do? Nonsense
> Yeah, like car dealerships using their "accountability to and involvement" to forcibly insert themselves in the value chain?
I would suggest you reread the sentence you quoted and then go ahead and finish reading the rest of my comment, because this sounds like an argumentative retort but I don't think you understood what you're replying to.
Corporations aren't some entities from another dimension. Their earnings must ultimately go to someone. For the global economy as a whole, all the "extraction" that's happening ultimately net out to zero.
>I would suggest you reread the sentence you quoted and then go ahead and finish reading the rest of my comment, because this sounds like an argumentative retort but I don't think you understood what you're replying to.
I suggest you do the same. I was simply pointing out the dark side of the dynamic you described. Yes, car dealerships are pillars of many communities. They sponsor local clubs/sporting teams and local politicians. However, all that "involvement" means they wield enormous political power, to the extent that they're able to lobby state representatives to forcibly add themselves to the automotive value chain. Whether that's better for the consumer, and the local community as a whole is questionable. After all, they're getting the money from the local community, and if their services aren't needed (why do you have to go through a dealership rather than ordering through a web app?) then they're ultimately leeches and a net negative for the community.
I have no idea how this relates to what I was talking about. The reason I asked you that question is because the topic was "local business vs large corporations." What did you think I was talking about?
> I was simply pointing out the dark side of the dynamic you described.
You mean the dark side that I explicitly described in my original comment? Now it's my turn to stop reading, because this is not productive.
While the above scenarios reflect the CEO's contribution to an organization's ability to capture value - there is a useful debate on whether these organizations should be able to capture that value. If the organization has a monopoly, then they can arbitrarily increase the amount of value they extract at the cost of other, more productive, sectors of the economy. Over-rewarding organizations and their leaders for capturing value incentivizes such anti-competitive behavior.
Have you been close to these positions in a huge company?
I really don't think that's the case at all.
Ex: Look what happen to DIS after Iger left.
Most senior managers can coast for protracted periods as it's rare to replace the CEO in an upswing, and the CEO mainly has to not piss off those they work with. It's tough for any senior manager to read the tea leaves reliably, and as such - they are often replaced after N months/years when some decision goes poorly. The actions/results/impact of decisions are spread so far between that it's often difficult to assess a senior leaders impact in an organization.
DIS has had some high profile troubles since Iger left - but he may simply have seen the writing on the wall that the time to go out on a high note had come. I can think of several firms with similarly well-timed exits.
At first blush that may sound bizarre, as there are a lot more consumers than providers. But from an individual company’s PoV that may be reversed: internal decisions are easier to make than customer-responsive ones, especially as the number of customers goes up. This is why we have things like food safety regulations.
The only effective ways to deal with this are progressive taxation and labor regulations. Bring back the 90+% top tax bracket that Thatcher and Reagan disposed of. Tie minimum wage to regional cost of living indices.
Of course, this article only discusses wages. The truly wealthy don't make much from income. It's incredible that capital gains tax is less than income tax.
I do prefer market solutions that Charity/Philanthropy offer vs governmental spending. And sometimes I think about how many of the richest have a 100% tax bracket as they've pledged their fortunes to charity after death.
Probably seems contradictory to my parent comment, but as I said I'm just not sure of the best path forward tbh.
In practice, laws ostensibly intended to support philanthropy are used as tax dodges, money laundering schemes, workarounds of campaign finance laws, etc., with all manner of perverse incentives and conflicts of interest involved. The big money is generally less in "market solutions" and more in "hacking the tax code for the benefit of the wealthy".
In my opinion financial gifts to organizations should not offer tax write-offs for donors (especially of estate/inheritance taxes), or at any rate the maximum write-off should be capped based on plausible middle-class contributions; and universities, churches, and charities should generally pay the taxes businesses pay. If people want to spend their money on charitable activities, that's great, but the government should not be in the business of differentially subsidizing them based on the whims of the wealthy. If we want to have direct government subsidies of charities or educational institutions, it should be based on some transparent and democratically accountable grant system.
If we want to help ordinary people, the most effective method is universal direct cash transfers from the government (without means testing, weird income cliffs, or bureaucratic hoops), better labor protections, and restructuring the tax code to be more progressive (e.g. toward land-value tax and away from sales tax, treating capital gains as income, adding higher-rate income tax brackets at the top end, and raising caps on payroll taxes).
That's not the same as a 100% tax bracket, because those resources are free to be deployed while the person is still alive. Also, with charity, the devil is often in the details. The Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, for example, is focused not only on helping stop disease in disadvantaged countries but also encouraging stronger IP protection in medicine[1] and pushing for privatization of education[2].
Charitable organizations can be conduits for transforming economic power into political power. This is not the same as a tax.
[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/162000/bill-gates-impeded-gl...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/06/19/bill-mel...
I recommend reading the History of Equality by Thomas Piketty to better understand the efficacy of progressive income tax and wealth tax.
Tim Cook's 100k/hour doesn't get taxed at the current top rate, let alone a new 90% rate.
Shouldn't corrective action be directed at individual offending persons, not applied as collective punishment?
Consumer action is notoriously ineffective. It’s a well-studied thing in poli-sci and economics. You need government to overcome coordination problems there, even with overwhelming support for a cause. Because the price if you “cooperate” is way too high unless a huge proportion of others choose “cooperate”, and you can’t tell what they’re picking until after the fact.
[edit] it’s fine if your goal is to have good feels, on the ethics front. It’s a total waste of time and effort and expense if you want to have an effect on anything other than your own feelings.
Myself I am from Denmark. Here we don't have a minimum wage, but we do have a strong union culture. This ensures power dynamics on the labor market ensuring that everybody gets a fair wage.