Comment by miki123211 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by miki123211 | Hacker News Reader

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Then there's also the "rat-race" aspect.

If you're focused on teaching, building or caring instead of test scores, conversions and profits, you're going to lose customers and opportunities.

Parents choose schools with better test scores, not schools with better teaching. Customers use products with better conversions; this is literally what the word "conversions" means.

If you focus on making your employees happy instead of making your customers happy, you'll quickly find that your employees have no more customers to serve. You will be outcompeted by other companies in the great rat race.

This is why most of the companies we have now are the way they are. It's not because all CEOs are evil, it's because the non-evil ones can't survive.

> Parents choose schools with better test scores, not schools with better teaching.

Only because other signals don't exist.

Parents know test scores don't correlate perfectly with learning, but what other metric do they have to judge by?

There are some schools with a stellar reputation for learning, and they get to charge an obscene premium. Amongst private schools, the ones with the best word of mouth reputation get to charge a lot more!

Yeah, my post was not intended to be a value judgment.

Personally, I think it's somewhere in between. Yes, some degree of "actually make things people want" is an essential component of a business...but I think the amount of "required evil" is usually overblown.

If markets were so ruthlessly competitive that no one could afford to be not-evil, no one would be making a profit. Every company would be barely surviving and profits would be minimal. The fact that profits exist - indeed, are much greater than they have been in the past - means that markets are NOT that ruthlessly competitive, at least not between actors with comparable access to capital resources.

Every dollar of profit a company makes is a dollar they could afford not to make and still survive. And given that the feasibility curve of profits <> level of evil is likely pretty convex, choosing not to make $1 likely pays out many dollars of not-being-evil externalities.

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