The Era of the Business Idiot
wheresyoured.at
wheresyoured.at
> We live in the era of the symbolic executive, when "being good at stuff" matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff, where "what's useful" is dictated not by outputs or metrics that one can measure but rather the vibes passed between managers and executives that have worked their entire careers to escape the world of work.
We have redefined competence, but we haven't redefined it to be measured in nebulous ways. Far from it. Nadella does one thing and he does it well: he makes number go up. And that's all that matters.
Number gotta go up. If you don't make number go up, then how Grugg Ugug, MBA, to figure out how company doing? You no seriously expect Grugg to approach enterprise of measuring benefit of a business to society without one simple number.
We used to measure the worth of investment and expenditures of capital by their holistic benefit to society. That was way more thinking than business school graduates in this country wanted to do, so we distilled it down to the quarterly profit. At the very least, these people could understand addition, subtraction, and which number was bigger than the other. The "nebulous" way was what we got away from as a result.
I'm unconvinced that it's him so much as MS' entrenched position as a contractor, and ZIRP. There are a lot of companies whose number go up for whom number should no no go up, but it did, because they had first dibs at the money printer trough.
This seems specious, I mean, when? And how?
The article seems to contradict you, given that it is mostly focused on tech companies that do in fact spend billions in product development and tend to delay huge profits. Amazon, famously, was universally praised for its various innovations in e-commerce (i.e. benefit to society) while not making a profit for what, 25 years? The current business press gushes over "big data", the metaverse, AI, whatever, despite many such projects actually losing billions of dollars before being shut down or vastly reduced.
I'm not claiming these companies do actually benefit society, but Wall Street and the press is often willing to overlook immediate profit for the promise of long-term dominance (and the rewards that come with that) and in the meantime, they will at least promote the possibility of future societal benefit to justify their position.
> We have redefined competence, but we haven't redefined it to be measured in nebulous ways. Far from it. Nadella does one thing and he does it well: he makes number go up. And that's all that matters.
I think Ziton would argue that this statement was supposed to be one level below "number going up". His argument seems to be not that number shouldn't go up, but that the number that goes up used to be based on "being good at stuff" but now isn't.
His argument isn't that executives shouldn't focus on the money, but rather that the money has last track of what they were supposed to track. It's not the executive themselves, it's the economy. The executives would then be the outcome of skewed incentives by an economy that has disconnected from "useful stuff".
This also happens to be my favorite take. So I may just be confirmation biased.
Thanks for that! I'll definitely use that one...
> While CEOs do get fired when things go badly, it's often after a prolonged period of decline and stagnancy, and almost always comes with some sort of payoff — and when I say "badly," I mean that growth has slowed to the point that even firing masses of people doesn't make things better.
And I think that's what he was gesturing at in the beginning when ranting about Satya. He knows Satya is not an imbecile, he would not survive the cutthroat sociopathic business environment if he was.
The logical conclusion is that Satya is just bullshitting on a softball interview to prop up Microsoft's copilot thing. That is a marketing piece, not a proper interview.
And on bullshit, it is always important to keep something in mind:
"bullshit is speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care whether what they say is true or false."
Actually this is a pretty weak point. We have plenty of historical examples where a terrible person came up with a brilliant idea. So Friedman being racist or not (he was categorically not, Zitron is being unfair here) is kind of a non-issue. The philosophical problem is that favoring shareholder value above moral value or social value (or whatever you want to call it: the betterment of society; or Socrates' "flourishing" [εὐδαιμονία]) just doesn't seem to have any positive externalities.
"Line go up," sure, but what does that actually do? "Line go up" teleology is trivially a dead end moral philosophy. In fact, if history is much of a teacher, any economic teleology seems to be pretty morally bankrupt—from concrete jungle capitalism to Bolshevik communism to bartering. I'm extrapolating, but here, I do agree with Ed.
The person who is good at consistently making the value/number go up and to the right on your money; or the one that gives vague ‘social good’ reasons why they aren’t?
Especially if the ‘social good’ stuff is often vague and non-concrete?
The world is a much different place from when Socrates was around.
This has nothing to do with the broader point of drafting policies that further social flourishing (there's disagreements as to what this means, of course) as opposed to drafting policies that further "line go up." In fact, I'd argue that the latter is meaningless without a foundational underpinning (we see this in imploding hyper-inflated economies).
In other words, who cares if I have a zillion Funbucks if the country is falling apart?
He was never saying just do what the fuck ever you can to flip a buck. The article quoted by Edward Zitron is Friedman responding to Nixon trying to shame companies into not raising prices during an inflationary period.
At a certain scale, regardless of what you personally choose (unless most others in the country do exactly the same thing you do), the country is going to either ‘fall apart’ or not regardless. Think of it from an election perspective - no matter how hard you voted for anyone but Trump last election in the US, Trump still got elected.
But, you can choose if you’ll have more money or not at the end, depending on which company you choose to invest in. So for instance, regardless of how you voted, practically, it would have still been a good idea to invest in some of the companies which benefit from Trump being in office, eh?
Yes, this does lead to larger scale problems when everyone does the same math. But at the same time, the actual math is the same for everyone, eh?
Money may be the root of all evil, but how much you have also decides if you’re going to be eating cat food in retirement, or have gourmet home cooked meals eh?
Monks may sleep better at night, but that is a trade off few others are able to make.
In the same chapter Friedman literally says:
> On the contrary, I believe strongly that the color of a man's skin or the religion of his parents is, by itself, no reason to treat him differently; that a man should be judged by what he is and what he does and not by these external characteristics. I deplore what seem to me the prejudice and narrowness of outlook of those whose tastes differ from mine in this respect and I think the less of them for it.
> Except Friedman wasn't a racist, and the quote is cut specifically to make it appear that way.
He doesn't say that Friedman was racist, you made that up.
He says that Friedman was a fundamentalist and that people should be allowed to discriminate on the basis of race, and the quote illustrates that well and the context doesn't change anything to that point.
> He says that Friedman was a fundamentalist and that people should be allowed to discriminate on the basis of race, and the quote illustrates that well and the context doesn't change anything to that point.
No, Firedman says that government force isn't the best way to address discrimination. Again the quote is clipped to mislead.
Page 93 (as numbered on the pages, IDK which PDF "page" [edit: nb the table of contents gets it wrong, one supposes the pages were re-numbered in the digitization process, or something]) or just search "Capitalism and Discrimination" and it'll get you there fast, for anyone who's interested. The chapter is... well, I found a real howler, but then I have odd taste in entertainment, sometimes, and my enjoyment was almost certainly not by a route the author intended. I'd recommend it just on that basis, regardless of its role in this thread but, uh, only for my fellow weirdos.
FWIW I didn't find Zitron's framing of it misleading, having now read it (I'd read excerpts of that book before, and maybe even that chapter, but couldn't recall for sure, so re-read it just now)
Instead he advocated that the absence of regulation would somehow, magically make racists who control capital be not racist anymore.
There's nothing misleading in that quote.
He also wasn't against all regulations, and specifically supports regulating positive harms.
You could read the chapter yourself in 15 minutes.
I know, I just think it is much like believing that fairies exist. Except that believing in fairies causes no harm to society. His beliefs did.
> You could read the chapter yourself in 15 minutes.
You just presume others didn't read it, when in fact you dislike their interpretations and conclusions after reading it.
> Except that believing in fairies causes no harm to society. His beliefs did.
I don't agree, and such a banal analogy is not exactly convincing.
Perhaps believing in fairies does cause harm to society.
Guess what that makes you?
I think it is totally within the bounds of reasonable discourse to discuss if minimum wage laws achieve their stated goals.
Prefacing that with "I am personally against discrimination" is pretty much meaningless. His awful economic doctrine and beliefs will result in discrimination anyway.
Let's not pretend Friedman needs to be presented in a bad light to make it clear he was an awfully evil person.
I absolutely think it’s ridiculous to call him an evil person, it’s a totally unfair characterization.
He is arguing against the only thing that could meaningfully reduce discrimination and increase equality. As I refuse to believe Friedman was an imbecile, the only possibility left is malice. He knows that his free market fundamentalism will result in more discrimination, but he doesn't care because government is icky.
> I absolutely think it’s ridiculous to call him an evil person, it’s a totally unfair characterization.
He was evil because he advocated for policies and doctrines that meaningfully make the lives of people worse. It's likely impossible to measure the harm he caused to the world.
Surely we can agree the freer market in New York was superior to the government control of contracts in North Carolina.
Free markets have demonstrably lifted billions of people out of abject poverty in the last 50 years.
In my view what lifted people from abject poverty was a measure of technological progress and industrialization. The places where people were mostly lifted out of poverty do not embrace the completely unregulated free market fantasy of Friedman.
I believe in government as a strong regulator to rein in corporations, because corporations are optimized to generate profits even when they cause harm to society in their profit-seeking mandate. Obviously you will disagree with this, because government icky, and you seem to embrace the fantasy that once free of the shackles of icky government, the benevolent capital holders will benefit the world somehow.
You advocate for something very extreme, and it is clear we won't find middle ground at this point.
Have a great evening, and feel free to have the last word.
I don’t disagree that governments have a role in regulating harms, and neither did Friedman. He did believe that taxing pollution was more effective than setting particular targets, but that’s a difference of approach not of aims.
I think we probably have more overlap than you imagine.
you are choosing to define segregation very narrowly - as in a government law requiring individuals to be segregated (attend separate schools, or use separate bathrooms, etc)
that is an absurd definition to use in this context, because the original example from Friedman's quote is a different type of segregation - a business owner hanging out a sign that says "we're hiring, but only white people".
redlining [0] created segregated neighborhoods, but not via government mandate, just from banks and mortgage lenders "voluntarily" deciding that certain neighborhoods should be whites-only. there were also housing covenants [1, 2] that enforced segregation via contract law.
if your definition of segregation does not include those practices, your definition is worthless.
0: https://www.brickunderground.com/blog/2015/10/history_of_red...
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/realestate/racism-home-de...
The Federal Housing Authority created in 1933 and the Home Owners' Loan Corporation created in 1934 created the zones and directed the banks where to make loans. I’d suggest you read a bit either. I’d suggest The Color of Law.
from the NYT article I linked to:
> In 1927, the National Association of Real Estate Boards — now the National Association of Realtors — championed racial covenants, creating a model clause that was inserted into countless deeds. It read, in part: “No part of said premises shall be sold, given, conveyed or leased to any negro or negroes.”
> The Federal Housing Administration, which was created in the 1930s to insure home mortgages, also all but required racial covenants to guarantee loans, including those for developments like Levittown, a community of mass-produced tract homes on Long Island that opened in the late 1940s and where only “members of the Caucasian race” were allowed to live.
there was legally-mandated segregation, but it was not exclusively done through legal mandates. some of it was "voluntary" contracts of the sort Friedman is defending.
your previous comment was that people in NY in 1950 didn't have legally mandated segregation. but apparently you are aware that there was segregation in NY in that time period?
maybe you're splitting microscopic hairs, and letting "in 1950" do some heavy lifting? because those covenants were enforceable in NY and elsewhere, but only up until Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948.
and of course, lots of other discrimination was legally allowed after that, up until the Fair Housing Act - for example, advertising apartment rentals in NYC as "whites-only" would have been perfectly legal until 1968 [0]. that's also a "voluntary" contract of the sort Friedman thinks the state shouldn't interfere with?
> I’d suggest you read a bit either. I’d suggest The Color of Law.
are you unaware of how condescending you come across with comments like this?
or are you aware, and are OK with it? (especially when "go read such-and-such" has been repeated in many of your comments throughout this thread)
it's quite possible for people to have read all the same books as you have, but come away with different opinions. responding to someone who disagrees with you with "go read this book" is kind of an asshole move. it carries a baked-in assumption that the person who disagrees with you isn't as well-informed as you are.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1968#Types...
I think we have a reasonable difference of opinion here, and while my focus is primarily on the force of law, you're right the the history of the racial covenants is important to consider.
Maximizing shareholder values can include treating your workers well if you think happy workers are more productive and therefore help with profits.
Same with good customer service, environmental regulation following, and other things.
The capital class finds it very icky when peasants are fairly treated. They typically punish ir by making like go down.
You don't need to have red skin and horns to take great pleasure in making those less powerful suffer.
To anyone else who, like me, has noticed this, the answer is: these interviews happen so that the interviewee can put out the message they want, and so that the interviewer can charge advertisers. Asking questions that could derail the theatre is not in the interest of the people involved.
This also creates an environment where the interviewers are self selected. Interviewers who derail the interviewee's exposition don't land important interviewees.
>The Business Idiot is the manager that doesn't seem to do anything but keeps being promoted, and the chief executive officer of a public company that says boring, specious nonsense about AI
The CEO being Aaron Levie who dropped out of college to start Box, now worth a few billion. I wonder how much the brilliant Zitron has achieved with the moanathons.
In particular the article linked in this blog post is Friedman arguing against Nixon's price controls and Nixon's insistence that it was "socially responsible" to not raise prices as you own costs went up. Stripping the article of this consequence is either dishonest, or stupid.
> “...consider a situation in which there are grocery stores serving a neighborhood inhabited by people who have a strong aversion to being waited on by Negro clerks. Suppose one of the grocery stores has a vacancy for a clerk and the first applicant qualified in other respects happens to be a Negro. Let us suppose that as a result of the law the store is required to hire him. The effect of this action will be to reduce the business done by this store and to impose losses on the owner. If the preference of the community is strong enough, it may even cause the store to close. When the owner of the store hires white clerks in preference to Negroes in the absence of the law, he may not be expressing any preference or prejudice, or taste of his own. He may simply be transmitting the tastes of the community. He is, as it were, producing the services for the consumers that the consumers are willing to pay for. Nonetheless, he is harmed, and indeed may be the only one harmed appreciably, by a law which prohibits him from engaging in this activity, that is, prohibits him from pandering to the tastes of the community for having a white rather than a Negro clerk. The consumers, whose preferences the law is intended to curb, will be affected substantially only to the extent that the number of stores is limited and hence they must pay higher prices because one store has gone out of business.”
In my view, the scenario and reasoning by Friedman in how he applies market forces applying to business decisions is a view where you have an assumption of 'knowing the result' of any decision and using that 'knowledge' as justification for reasoning. When in reality, you don't know the result, you can estimate, but that's about it. So when an exec is applying Friedman principles they're trying to 'know the market' and that's a fundamental error in my mind due to the chaos of the world how it can manifest across all avenues of life.
I don't thing that's a correct assessment. He talks a lot about the need to follow laws an cultural norms and the importance of society setting normative guardrails for behavior. Moreover he point our I believe correctly that a lot of the worst behavior of businesses stem from monopoly power.
> In my view, the scenario and reasoning by Friedman in how he applies market forces applying to business decisions is a view where you have an assumption of 'knowing the result'
I think it only appears that way if you take small quotations like this out of context.
> I think it only appears that way if you take small quotations like this out of context.
Can you help me understand this. Like the purpose of using logic to deduce decision making is because there's a fundamental structure in assuring the result from those deductions is accurate (or enough to continue manipulation of the problem data). When you try to predict market reaction to a decision and ascribe harm or success based on the decision you're creating causation out of correlation, often incorrectly. Again, not an expert in economics, but when i view theories of free market forces and how they're part of the logic of business decisions i can't help but think the people using this information are assuming their knowledge and logic aren't fundamentally flawed and as a result are essentially just guessing without thinking they are.
You're actually touching on why he argues against efforts to regulate negative harms, because the government has an imperfect ability to predict the outcomes and there isn't a great feedback mechanism.
But history has shown that business feedback sometimes takes us to undesirable places, and government regulation is sometimes necessary.
I've recently figured this out a out the company where I work, after an embarrassingly large number of years. My manager pays lip service to "high quality code" to justify his endless torrent of nitpicks, but when it comes to his own stuff he hides some times serious problems. Like, seriously, I've found undeniable evidence that he was aware of the malfunctioning of a data collection system and instead of reporting/fixing, he made sure to make it harder for anyone else to find it.
He's very well respected, however, and has this incredible aura of professionalism.
This realization also explains why everything is done so poorly in my company. Hitting the ill defined requirements in letter but not in principle, and then blaming a different team when problems are uncovered, is more than enough.
Is that not the function of the CEO? Pep talking the board of investors while everyone else does the work?
I don't even know what this article is about but I'm so irritated by the insinuation people write and receive well-written emails I am too irritated to finish the article.
Communication is (beyond frustratingly) not a highly valued skill in most of corporate America.
wow. i've met his son David and interacted a small amount with a couple of his grandchildren. this was in very poor taste. and i really hate some of the things he was responsible for!
How that translates in the spiritual realm is another question. A lot of religious texts focus on interpersonal behavior, so maybe friendly people with disastrous public policies would be judged accordingly.
Being a good person requires being good to your enemies, your victims, your oppressees, your ideological opponents.
Do you know how many actual murderers have people lining up to say "But they were so nice"?
At the cost of 10x in time cost? The argument is against the notion of summary?
> ... — and I’d argue that a well-written email is one that doesn’t require a summary.
And yet the world's population probably creates loads of important yet not well-written emails. Different contexts will also require different information to be extracted, so no matter how well-written an email is, the context might determine what the relevant information is.
> Podcasts are not there "to be chatted about" with an AI.
Really? Are written articles not meant to be "spoken aloud"? Are plays not meant to be "turned into a movie"? Who cares cares if someone can get information about media that they want to consume with a new method?
> Preparing for meetings isn't something that requires AI, nor is research, unless, of course, you don't really give a shit about the actual content of what you're reading or the message of what you're saying, just that you are "saying the right thing."
There was no statement about requiring AI. It was about leveraging AI as a benefit.
I use email instead of snail mail. I often watch technical talk videos at 2x speed to shoot past the filler. I read books in digital format instead of their physical counterparts because of convenience and access. I read online newspaper articles, rather than holding a physical newspaper, for the same reason.
None of these require technology, they're enhanced by them.
What a piece of shit article. I stopped reading after the first paragraph. This should read "The Era of the Technical Moron".
I strongly agree. This echoes the cartoon about using LLMs to write and then summarize emails (https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html).
If someone doesn't care enough about my time to compose a well-written email, with a tl;dr at the top if necessary, then I see no reason to care about what they've generated.
Speaking to the performative importance of cultural norms, many workplaces would not look kindly on certain white-collar roles if they wore a T-shirt to the office; even if it is more efficient, or comfortable to wear the T-shirt.
I stopped reading here. The author seems to fail to understand the new conceptual model that is interactive consumption. A conversation is a higher bandwidth form of communication and a two-way means of communication, it has features that a recorded piece of audio does not.
If you get confused 10% of the way through a podcast, you can't have the podcast change and suddenly spend an extra two minutes explaining a concept it mentioned. But you can ask a conversational AI to explain something you didn't understand.
If you find that the podcast is telling you something you already know, you need to skip around and figure out where it stops doing so and becomes useful again in a painful process. Within a conversation if you're the CEO of one of the world's most valuable corporations, you just cut the person off and say "I know".
The author also fails to understand that people can personalize content by expressing preferences to an AI agent and having it interpolate the content to some new form, or style transfer it. Change its language into one's native tongue. Change the tone to suit one's current mood. Be more concise or funnier.
I can only assume the author is letting their personal preferences for mediums of communication blind them to very real technological and communication advances happening.
That's pretty funny, but the book is actually called "Capitalism and Freedom".
There's the problem. Economics is the science of explaining tomorrow why the predictions you made yesterday didn't come true today.
We don't call people who successfully predict things "economists", we call them planners.
Plenty of economists' predictions hold up. Turkey's unorthodox economic theory that higher interest causes inflation did not pan out, and when they hiked interest rates inflation duely dropped. Most prices drop with increased supply and increase with decreased supply. There are some goods that buck this trend, but that's incorporated into economic theory. Moreover your comment implies that economists shouldn't try to explain when their theories don't match up. This seems entirely antithetical to science? Astronomers used to be believe in geocentrism. Is it bad for them to explain why their geocentrist predictions not hold?
>We don't call people who successfully predict things "economists", we call them planners.
I can't tell whether this is satire. For me, "planners" invoke either bureaucrats of command economies, which have a pretty lousy economic history, or people on zoning boards. Neither are "people who successfully predict things".
They'd be out-competed on being able to eat by the people who continued buying groceries without letting their personal biases affect their shopping. Then it's just Darwin at work.
Earlier in the chapter he says:
> On the contrary, I believe strongly that the color of a man's skin or the religion of his parents is, by itself, no reason to treat him differently; that a man should be judged by what he is and what he does and not by these external characteristics. I deplore what seem to me the prejudice and narrowness of outlook of those whose tastes differ from mine in this respect and I think the less of them for it
The chapter is discussing the appropriateness of government regulating negative versus positive harms and he makes the case that regulating negative harms is a short-sighted and ineffective means of achieving the policy aim of protecting minorities and that "fair employment" as imposed by the majority is not "free employment". In the same chapter he argues that "right to work" laws interfere with the freedom to engage in contracts. The arguments are far more subtle than Edward Zitron is making them out to be.
Importantly Friedman here and elsewhere refers to people who discriminate on the basis of skin as ignorant racists.
Throughout the book he makes the argument that if you remove the legal frameworks that enforced segregation, that people would over time choose to integrate as they found mutual advantage in doing so. Reasonable people can disagree with this assessment.
He finishes the chapter with this quote:
> On the other side of the picture, we should not be so naive as to suppose that deep-seated values and beliefs can be uprooted in short measure by law.
If anyone thinks that Friedman was a racist, they haven't honestly engaged with his writing.
> regulating negative harms is a short-sighted and ineffective means of achieving the policy aim of protecting minorities
still makes no goddamn sense. I take back the racism accusation until I've read more of his work but
> people would over time choose to integrate as they found mutual advantage
is still some dumb shit. If letting minorities shop or work in your store drives away the majority there's no "mutual advantage". There never will be. You're counting on, or rather praying, for hearts and minds at large to change in order to get voluntary integration. That could take generations, or it may never happen.
If people can't be nice on their own, maybe they need the stick (government regulation) until they learn.
> is some dumb shit. If letting minorities shop or work in your store drives away the majority there's no "mutual advantage"
That's not the argument he's making. He argues that it is always more expensive to be a racist, and that absent the legal framework of segregation then people will by financial necessity begin to do business across the color line which will change their preferences over time. He points out that historically there was a time when people would refuse to do business with Quakers, but that over time the free market won out and that discrimination or affect of taste no longer exists.
Again, I think you can reasonably disagree but it isn't obviously stupid to observed that racism incurs an extra cost and markets reward you for not being irrational in that way.
If the majority remains anti-integration then people will, by financial necessity, be forced to keep businesses segregated. A hotel owner who wants to let black guests stay will lose most of their white clientele. It's basic logic. Friedman says so himself in his example of the shop owner who would like to hire black clerks.
> He argues that it is always more expensive to be a racist
But then in the passage I originally quoted he says it also harms the business owner to not be a racist. Isn't that contradictory?
In the Quaker thing, did the free market win out? Or did communities become larger and more anonymous, and fashions changed so that telling Quakers and non-Quakers apart merely by appearance became impossible? That can't happen with minorities of a different skin color.
> But then in the passage I originally quoted he says it also harms the business owner to not be a racist. Isn't that contradictory?
It isn't contradictory if you read the whole chapter, its a single thought experiment and not his whole argument.
> In the Quaker thing, did the free market win out? Or did communities become larger and more anonymous, and fashions changed that telling Quakers and non-Quakers apart by appearance became impossible? That can't happen with minorities of a different skin color.
He's arguing that all of these prejudices are simply irrational preferences and will necessarily change over time. In fact today you find that preference have indeed largely changed in society.
And we all know that everyone chooses the cheapest option for everything to the exclusion of all other factors.
He also ignores that prices for minority consumers go up because there are fewer businesses that cater to them.
> He's arguing that all of these prejudices are simply irrational preferences and will necessarily change over time
And there honestly isn't much evidence for this.
> In fact today you find that preference have indeed largely changed in society.
I'm arguing that preferences have changed because people were forced to interact across race barriers and found that, actually, it was fine. Absent that forcing factor, there's zero guarantee that anything would have changed.
He also ignores the harms done to the minority as a result of discrimination. All this talk about "freedom" - what about the freedoms of the minority?
That's not what was observed in real life. There were form many decades black owned businesses serving clients at competitive price points and integrated businesses where allowed by law serving customers at price points lower than segregated businesses. Integrated Jazz clubs in the 50s served cheap drinks and had good music so white kids patronized them in droves. These interactions changed their preferences.
> And there honestly isn't much evidence for this.
Do you really believe that white Americans only interact economically with black Americans because the law forces them to? Because it looks to me like people's preferences changed. No one forced white kids in the suburbs to buy NWA albums, they were just good albums and no one stopped them.
> He also ignores the harms done to the minority as a result of discrimination. All this talk about "freedom" - what about the freedoms of the minority?
He literally does address this in the chapter. It isn't long, just go read it. You've said yourself that you haven't read much Friedman, you may find yourself surprised.
In 2025? Of course not. In 1965, in the American South, yes. Where "interact economically" is defined as selling or renting houses to, educating, employing, or offering services at all businesses to black Americans on an equal basis.
And I believe the law greatly accelerated this change.
Which also means there was enough broad popular support to pass such abhorrent laws. They didn't come out of nowhere. They weren't imposed by force by an outsider. It's great that your grandfather was not bigoted. The problem is not enough people were. Not enough people cared strongly enough to have these laws repealed in the state.
Not necessarily. Plenty of bad laws stay in force because people are ambivalent or politicians are cowards. The most radical people on a given issue are often effective at driving policy, we see this today all of the time.
My point is that lots of people weren't personally invested in segregation, but the state and police literally imposed it.
Friedman is arguing against that sort of government heavy-handedness. He makes the comparison of freedom of contract to freedom of speech, where the limits define the right. I'm not trying to say that things would have worked out perfectly if his ideas had carried the day, we obviously can't know that. What I'm saying is that he makes a compelling argument about freedom and that doesn't make him a racist or obviously wrong out of hand. He correctly points out that giving the federal government this kind of power doesn't have a good limiting principle and creates opportunities for abuse. He was making this argument when Nixon was establishing wage and price controls, so its important to understand the context.
Its not as though he was celebrating a right to discriminate, which the author of the article seems to believe.
Of course this rather misses a lot of the effects that cause racism to stay in place like redlining and actual acts of violence.
>"the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"
Can also be supplanted by
>Ignorant racists can hang around longer than your lifespan.
Or are we going to forget shit like the Tulsa race massacre where black and integrated businesses were burned to the ground? There is quite an advantage to be segregated if the other option is having your shit burned. Things like integration laws are just one piece in a legal framework to ensure criminal acts don't occur.
He also specifically addresses violence as positive harm that the government has a duty to prevent.
I'd really encourage you to spend the 15 minutes to track down this chapter of Friedman's book and read it because it addresses most of what you're talking about.
Careful now. Governments change, and along with it priorities for enformcement.
It’s not that there is no proper role for government, it’s that some paths end up being a Faustian bargain.
If enforcing equality of treatment and access in housing, employment, and education is one of those paths, then the government has gone to a very bad place. And literally everything has turned to shit.
Not to weigh in on the quote, but as to this opinion statistics might disagree, and is kinda the basis for positive discrimination: https://ncase.me/polygons/
It's also important to understand that this is a huge amount of what Zitron does. He is a rage-baiter who does not engage in argument in good faith.
> If just that one owner practices race-blind hiring out of their own personal beliefs they would definitely be harmed. If the law requires every store to practice race-blind hiring and the law is strictly enforced, racist customers will just have to get over themselves or stop buying groceries.
The harm is to the agency of the owners. The entire point of a free market is voluntary terms of entry, association, and exit notwithstanding contractual obligations to the contrary. There is no harm to a grocery owner who voluntarily chooses to defy the trend set by his competitors except economic self-harm should he suffer a net loss of customers over the decision. It's the freedom of the consumer to consciously or unconsciously boycott a store that doesn't appeal to his preferences (whether for or against racial discrimination), however petty such preferences are or irrelevant to his purpose (i.e. buying food). It is also the consumer's freedom to patronize a store that does. Conversely, the owner may find new consumers and thus a new of source revenue that outperforms that of his competitors through the practice of race-blind hiring.
> If the law requires every store to practice race-blind hiring and the law is strictly enforced, racist customers will just have to get over themselves or stop buying groceries.
Or the customers can move out to the countryside, a suburb, or a small town where they can only find white grocers. They can also look for farmers' cooperatives or food clubs unlikely to be staffed by any other race.
The status quo of discrimination caused harm to the agency of minority employees and shoppers. Why are "owners" more important than them?
> There is no harm to a grocery owner... except economic self-harm
So then there is harm. Economic harm is kinda the important kind of harm to a business owner. Every other "harm" is surmountable.
> Or the customers can move out to the countryside, a suburb, or a small town where they can only find white grocers
So what's the problem? They've added transaction costs for themselves to express their preferences.