Make it easy for me to vote with my wallet
blog.joellehman.com
blog.joellehman.com
- Environmental (eg the furniture you just scanned was made from rainforest)
- Nationalism (eg if you call support it will be answered by someone in a different country)
- Manufacturer (eg pointing out another store carries all 5 colours instead of the 1 you see here)
- Reviews (eg metacritic scores)
- Social views (eg gay marriage)
I was hoping that price would be the least useful piece of information, and provide a way for sources of information (eg Greenpeace) to be connected to consumers who wanted to know about that for the product right in front of them.
Today you are still stuck with price, and in some cases reviews, and we are all the poorer for it.
I like thinking about the movement of the 'American system' as an evolution. Back in the day, all the stores were owned by a local person. You go to this store, that's Bob's store, he knows all about the fruit he gets, it's always the best, he goes over to the farmer's field and makes sure he gets the cream of the crop.
From here we have a huge population of stores (like neurons competing / cooperating to be heard). All over America, people are employed by running their own stores. Until one day, when a super store comes on the scene. It sells things cheaper than the other stores, and it has a bigger selection. Bob doesn't work there, but they have pretty much the same produce. Maybe the high school kid working there doesn't know the farmer where the fruit came from, but that's not so bad, I didn't know that farmer when I bought the fruit at Bob's. Slowly, slowly, ever so slowly, our world is shifted. Instead of going to the store, knowing the owner, striking up a conversation, getting the latest scoop on the happenings of the neighborhood, we go to the store to accomplish a task. This is efficiency, right?
There's another shift too, and it's a personal shift (that might not happen to anyone).
I go to Bob's store, and I see he mismarked his apples, they should be a $1 a piece, but they're $0.10 a piece. I don't want to rip Bob off, I know him, he's a great guy. I say "Hey Bob, is this right?" He says "Oh no, that's a mistake, sorry about that." That's alright, you have to make a living and I don't want to make you lose money by purchasing something from you.
I go to a big box - they mispriced something. Maybe I can slip this by them, and the cashier won't know the real price... I mean, there's no real people to hurt, right? I'm not ripping anyone in particular off, just the company, which is a bunch of people, and no single one of them is going to be worse off because I purchase a mispriced item.
Any way that you can represent that this purchase is not part of the 'race to the bottom of the barrel', that's great. All the efficiency in the world will not make a place that's happy for people. Efficiency is inhumanity.
It's strange. A corporation is made up of people and yet it has its own drive, becomes like an organism composed of people in the same way that a human is composed of cells and a human's motivations are an emergent phenomenon independent of individual cells.
I'm reminded a bit of Kevin Kelly's 'what technology wants' that discusses how technology has a life of its own, but in the context of corporations. Both technology and corporations have some kind of abstract life that we as humans impart to them; they are products of our thought but do not necessarily always serve our best interests.
1. Corporations cannot levy taxes on citizens.
2. Corporations are not democracies (whereas, most
modern governments are). Only the board of directors has a vote.
3. Corporations often generate profits. Governments are
not very good at this.
4. Corporations (in most cases) cannot use force
against a private citizen (unless they are on the
corporations property, for the US)
5. Corporations pay taxes. Governments collect taxes. I could name more differences, but I'm done.
Most governmental entities are indeed "municipal corporations" but there is a serious dissonance between the typical for-profit corporation and government entity. The police, public works, or fire department, for example, are municipal corporations. However, these are not governments. They are just parts of the government.
Globalization is the real culprit here.
Before the 1970's or so, the US economy was isolated by tariffs and higher shipping costs. Since labor unions had a monopoly on labor in many jobs, workers were able to extract excellent wages from their employers.
Now that goods and services can move relatively freely across our borders, then labor unions can't demand higher wages, because the union isn't a monopoly any more -- industry has the option of relocating operations overseas.
The downward pressure on wages from this has resulted in a redistribution of wealth from labor to capital (I'm not on board with many of their policy suggestions, but the Occupy movement was on to something with their "top one percent" rhetoric).
As they lose earning power, people start to cut their budgets. When you're watching what you spend, price becomes more important than product quality or the feel-good vibes from shopping at a small local store. This allows the Wal-marts of the world to win.
All of them. HTH.
That said, it'd be an interesting project, even if the metrics would be a complete nightmare; am I more pro- environmental regulation than I am pro- gun control? How do you rate Company X lobbying for Bill Y on a scale of Things I Don't Like?. I suppose you'd have to go down a machine learning path for individuals, maybe starting with presenting alternatives for whatever thing you're interested in spending money on, a la the plain English terms of service site that was set up a year or two ago (that I've lost the URL for[1]) and building a profile from there.
Realistically though, I think the whole exercise would just depress anyone who took it on.
[1]It was indeed http://tosdr.org/ - Thanks :) re-bookmarked!
I believe you're referring to: http://tosdr.org/
It is even more complicated than that.
What about some company that uses a Chinese factory that is known to employ workers under 18?
Evil[1] right?
Well sure, unless you dig in to the numbers and find out that the company mandates no under age workers in their portion of the factory.
[1] See discussion below, definitions of evil vary!
Hell, in the US, there isn't even a minimum age limit for farm labor[1], and the minimum age for non-farm labor is 14, with anybody over 16 being allowed to work unlimited/full-time hours[2].
[1]http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/youthlabor/agriculturalemployme... [2]http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/youthlabor/agerequirements.htm
A lot of people disagree with it and want to spend their money accordingly.
Many of these issues are subjective, I fully agree that it often isn't black and white.
Of course, that's a distraction. I worked for the government when I was twelve, but I only worked an hour or two a week.
Anything that centralizes this kind of information even if it doesn't completely parse out the good/bad would be nice
It can be used to build political counterweight to large corporations that want to flout law and regulatory guidances by way of subsidizing interests in the body of the government that performs such duties.
As per every endeavour the devil is in the details like page rank, colors used for graphs and general consumability of said service.
Really, I saw it as an interesting social experiment for people & companies to gauge the dollar amount a person's values were worth to him.
What would work, though, is if you could inform people proactively before, at the moment of, or after the purchase. The last case might be interesting in order to inform consumers so that they will not purchase the product in the future.
Lets imagine the situation where you walk into shoe store X, and it is known that the store is associated with child labor. I will not "google" this store before I enter it. However, if I get a push message the moment I enter it, indicating that I shouldn't want to buy here because I told the app that I am against child labor, I will respond to that!
I'd rather vote with my actual vote.
The 1% might have 80% of the nation's wealth tied up but the middle class and the poor have all the purchasing power.
So long as they're intent on saving a buck whatever the cost, corporations will pander to them just as hard as they possibly can. No matter the human toll. Walmart treats their employees poorly because that's what has to happen for Walmart to work like it does, and just wow does everyone love it. Walmart could go bankrupt in a year if everyone just started shopping at Target. But nobody does because it's not their problem.
It's so hard to pick out every little piece. As a parallel, I am a vegan, and I just have to accept that no matter how hard I try - even if I did have an app - I'm going to be using or ingesting animal products at some point. An app just can't take into account every little piece of the puzzle.
There are separate levels within the hierarchy of where your dollar is going, and optimizing less evil per dollar may not be straightforward.
However, any progress on this front would be good -- imagine if corporations really felt pressure to be better, because if not a news story would be aggregated into a evilness database that might convince many many consumers to choose their competitor over them as a result.
I'm curious as to whether consistent consumer buying pressure actually makes a difference. We see companies making changes based on PR spikes relatively often, but it's less immediately apparent [to me, I don't have any data on this] whether a persistent negative image affects how they behave. Perhaps if there was data to go along with poorer sales, but you can't really corellate a lookup into a database on business practices or political activity with a lost sale either (ie X people looking up Product Y doesn't mean X less sales).
This is looking at the situation with an eye to changing behaviour though, not simply putting bad operators out of business (or more likely just reducing profits) because there will always be bad operators.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_t...
The iOS app works well: just pick up a product and scan the barcode.
btw, if your bank is
jp morgan chase
citibank
bank of america
hsbc
you should be ashamed of yourself.
(edit) I meant this part: minimize your purchases with mega corporations. buy more from small businesses.
Edit: Not really hard to do that part either. Just do your grocery shopping at a locally owned market or farmers market instead of a nationwide chain. No need to avoid the national chains completely. Just move in that direction.
Instead, I should put my money with a small credit union with no money managers capable of getting me a decent return and so little clout when the proverbial shit hits the fan it'll be left to be roadkill.
What could possibly go wrong?
During the last meltdown we saw that the FDIC made everyone whole. Did you even hear about the NCUA bailing people out? I didn't. I tend to think that's because credit unions did OK during the crisis as most of them tend to keep their loans on their books and as a result, didn't get swept up in the diciest loans in the bubble.
As a result I would suggest that perhaps the parent is correct and that credit unions are the way to go.
Or is there some other kind of proverbial shit hitting the fan that you're referring to? In my mind if TSHTF, any money you have in the bank is gone; worthless or irretrievable. What's the scenario where it's bad enough you want/need the clout of a mega-bank but where the banking system and our government aren't both totally effed but a credit union is?
Cripes, tell me you don't keep money in a savings account or CDs. Keep it with your investment manager. The large banks cater to the mass affluent - which includes any software developer who's worked at market for a few years and has saved their money. You put your money with them, you make sure they understand your appetite for risk, and they go to work.
I'm sure there's investment managers out there that are better than the ones at large banks, if you have that much to invest. But for the rest of us, a large organization is the way to go. They have the resources to attract good quality talent and access to the information they need to make good investment decisions. You will do so much better than 0.9% over 120 months, it's not even funny.
FDIC doesn't cover much money, I might add, and it only covers money in those might-as-well-be-zero-interest accounts where you shouldn't be keeping money in the first place.
Why not just invest in an S&P 500 ETF?
By letting experts handle it, I get someone who understands my risk profile and helps allocate my money across a range of investments, some risky, some quite conservative. When market conditions change, they react, not me. While I don't capture all the gains I could when the stock market shoots up 50%, I don't lose that (and sometimes still make gains) when the stock market goes south. I'm hedged somewhat against rare events, which knocks a bit off the performance of my portfolio in the good times but pays off well should there be bad times.
I looked into setting something up like this myself, but I couldn't do it with a single ETF - I would pretty much have to make it a full-time job. Far better to pay an expert to do it for me - I don't do my own amateur lawyering, so why would I do my own money management?
If you have 50% of your money in a Treasury and 50% in S&P, then when the market loses half its value, you only lose 25% of your money. But when the market goes up, you get a smaller gain.
> I don't do my own amateur lawyering, so why would I do my own money management?
An actual lawyer will generally be much better at lawyering than someone without training. Financial professionals probably aren't going to do much better than someone without training.
And then there are rampant perverse incentives in this industry, i.e. financial professionals are too often paid when they sell you financial products you don't need, and aren't paid based on your portfolio's performance.