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ecb_penguin

Sure, all those things could be "corporate greed". Opposite actions in different environments don't change the intent.

> Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever

It's an opinion piece about many of our shared experiences.

> blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees?

They explained their argument.

> Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off?

It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce workforce to survive? No. A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.

> Blaming corporate greed for causing high salaries?

They explained their argument in the article

> Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed?

It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce salaries to survive? No. A company worth trillions cutting salaries because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.

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If your framing is unfalsifiable, I question its utility.

They're identifying a driving force, greed, behind a range of actions. That's no more "unfalsifiable" than the claim that gravity is variously responsible for objects falling, orbits, spherically symmetric bodies, and stars collapsing.

So what would be impossible to explain in a world where “corporate greed” is indeed what causes all these things? The answer can’t be “nothing”—or “corporate greed” doesn’t mean anything.

I can say, for example, that under gravity, an object will not accelerate upwards when entering else stays down; if you show me that happening, I either have to say gravity didn’t cause it, or that gravity is not what we thought it was (and we should probably get a new word for whatever it has).

Any corporate behavior that doesn’t lead fairly directly to increased share price, profit, revenues, or market share would qualify.

But in the American corporate model, corporations almost by definition don’t do muck of that, because there’s an entrenched belief that increasing shareholder value is their primary mission. Positions to the contrary, like https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v..., are not widely understood or accepted.

The argument your link suggests is legal, not empirical. Legally speaking, there is no mandate, and acting like there is is almost surely bad for society. So I don't disagree there.

And as to the existence of exceptions, that is what makes humanities hard. Unlike physics, it is never all, it's always most, it's always shades and never direct. I use absolutist words in these discussions because it makes the points stick better, but I obviously do not mean them totally.

I think corporations maximizing profit is the default, and so writing an op-ed about how corporate greed caused something to happen seems pretty dumb to me.

Ultimately, all actions multinational companies take are rooted in greed.

Questioning that feels a lil naive?

Are you honestly of the opinion that big tech isn't primarily motivated by money and is instead being run like a family business with an upstanding owner that has the well-being of their employees at heart?

Yeah, the parent comments feel confused, it's kind of a truism that corporations make decisions based on greed. Capitalism, at it's best, tries to align personal/corporate self-interest with the interests of society. If you can't beat 'em, try to direct their interest towards things that benefit society. Keyword here is "try", I mean it's better than feudal lords pursuing self interest by constantly killing each other. The article does a good job of showing how that drive has really made a mess of the job market, and criticizing it because it blames all this stuff on corporate greed is really confusing since both critics and proponents of capitalism agree corporate decisions are all driven by self-interest, they just disagree on the outcomes.

Being motivated by money isn't greed. Per Merriam-Webster, greed is an "excessive desire for more of something (such as money) than is needed". The key qualifiers there are excessive and more than is needed. How do we determine what excessive employment is?

I'm not even sure how companies can be greedy. Many animals will gorge themselves on food far beyond what they "need" in the moment. There's nothing guaranteeing their next meal, so it's an adaptive strategy. In a competitive free market, growth is a survival strategy. Companies can and do die when their old sources of revenue decline and they failed to discover and grow new sources. Not only do they lose out on profits, but they have to fire employees. Avoiding or minimizing layoffs and the toll they take on lives is absolutely something many executives and managers have in mind, even at large corporations, when running a business.

We don't normally ascribe greed to animals, and it doesn't make much sense to do so for corporations, particularly commercial corporations. But to the extent we can equivocate the entity and the people who manage it, underlying motivations are mixed, complicated, and varied.

And I'd argue that not all corporations, even multinationals, are similarly aggressive and "ruthless", so clearly there are complex social dynamics beyond profit maximization. Corporations aren't moral agents in the same way we consider people, yet they're not pure profit maximizing automatons, either.

> How do we determine what excessive employment is?

Idk perhaps we have a slight hint in the tens of thousands of workers Microsoft _alone_ has laid off in the past year? I'm sure there is no way to intuit that big tech has indeed been over hiring with a clear disregard for its individuals beyond their utility at fixed points in time.

> Being motivated by money isn't greed. Per Merriam-Webster, greed is an "excessive desire for more of something (such as money) than is needed". The key qualifiers there are excessive and more than is needed. How do we determine what excessive employment is?

Turn it around. How do we determine what "enough" is? Ask any business person who is beholden to shareholders to define "enough" and they will tell you there is no such word.

If anything, I take corporate greed as axiomatic. Saying something happened because of it is stupid. There's no information in it.

And hey, look, turns out the article was AI slop generated to make the front page of HN.

How is this framing unfalsifiable? It is up to you to demonstrate that. Otherwise, I question whether you even understand what falsifiability means and why it is relevant.

Something can be falsifiable without being false. F=ma is falsifiable but not false. With humanities stuff it's less clear cut, but I'm inclined to be skeptical of ideas that explain too many things.

Falsifiability is relevant because I'm not saying the framing is wrong (I'm not even convinced it can possibly be proven wrong), I'm saying it's not very useful. In practice this has the same effect as me saying that "corporate greed" is axiomatic, so blaming it for things is like blaming water for flowing downhill.

It would be much more productive to frame this as an example, say, of market failure. Or a discussion of short-term thinking, or lacking negative feedback. All would be interesting.

PS: the author has now stated his post was AI slop written to make the front page of HN. I feel extremely validated.

>> Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off?

>It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce workforce to survive? No. A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.

>> Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed?

>It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce salaries to survive? No. A company worth trillions cutting salaries because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.

So your logic is that it's "greed" to cut necessary expenses even if you can afford it? Does this extend to people? If some rich wall st banker decided to cancel his personal trainer because he realized that a group class basically does 90% of the job for half the price, is that greed? Or is there some sort of double standard against corporations?

Per the banker analogy, it'd be like if the banker hired all of the personal trainers so other bankers wouldn't have access to them, give most of them nothing to do because it turns out the banker only needs one, and then fire them all once the other bankers won't be able to hire them as easily, all without any regard for the impact this strategy has on the trainers' lives and without being upfront and honest with the trainers about the strategy.

Yes, that's greedy.

  It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce workforce to survive? No. A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.

Is the argument against layoffs purely based on the stock market value of the company ? That sounds very reductive

Google's 2023 layoffs was pure for stock market as Google was pressured to do what everyone else was doing (like, no one got fired for buying IBM). After the layoffs the stock went up, and I remember people compiled data to try figure out the reasoning behind it without much success. It broke trust in the company and desire to work there, what for if the shareholders would be better off with the news of a new layoff? My manager who was doing a great job and took my team about 8mo to hire was laid off.

Oh, interesting. I meant the argument "they can afford it, they have enough money, look at the stock market", not "they are trying to save money and drive up their stock value"

>A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down?

What happens when a company keeps redundant workforce? Ah, yes, 'Bullshit jobs'*. So there's no way to win here. Such pieces are much better understood from a class interest POV.

* Also longterm damage to the economy from unused workforce.

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