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Comment by tancop | Hacker News Reader

Not every business owner is a profit obsessed psycho. Most multinational CEOs are but you can find good people at every level. The "only exist to make money" thing starts when you let in shareholders, but a company can stay ethical as long as they put up strong barriers before taking outside investment.

A lot of people get the wrong impression from reading Dodge Brothers and think companies are legally required to put profit first. What really happened is Friedman and Reagan planted the idea of shareholder supremacy, convinced schools to teach it and now generations of business majors think it's a sacred truth they have to enforce anywhere they go. Never let a MBA take over.

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It’s not about the moral or ethical qualities of the CEO. It’s about the structural incentives of the organization as a whole. This is even more true in a larger organization, where any one individual has relatively little effect on the behavior of the organization as a whole.

Companies that don’t do a good job of making profits tend to go away, thus there exists natural selective pressure to put profits ahead of other concerns. Note that none of the above has anything at all to do with morals or ethics.

Yes. Emergent behaviors.

This is why a healthy, society-aligned regulatory regime is impoetant, to set incentives. If you make more money being decent than you would being abusive, companies will adapt. They are more like corals than they are like people.

Being "a profit obsessed psycho" might help some people rise to positions of power, but I think the stronger point is that a corporation is an emergent superorganism with its own identity above the individual human level, without a psychology, that operates on its own principles of self preservation based on the incentives of the environment it operates in and that individual choices result in a gestalt of behaviors that no one person really has full control over even though they are part of it and what they do does affect the overall outcome, like a cell and organs making up an animal.

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