Reports like these make me so jaded and cynical about technology and all the supposed ills it cures. So much money goes into solving non-problems like 15-minute delivery or cryptocurrencies when such a huge swathe of the world still struggles with energy, security, and access to basic dignity.
It’s alright to work on things that don’t solve humanity’s problems.
But what’s so horrible in today’s tech is that a lot of people working on things like 15-minute delivery and cryptocurrencies pretend that they’re solving fundamental problems, improving the world, and rescuing third world people from poverty. Both gig apps and crypto are very much guilty of such overblown rhetoric.
It might be alright to work on things that don't solve humanity's problems, if they still give someone some joy or make something better or easier for someone.
But a lot of people spend a lot of time working on things that make things worse for a lot of people in order to enrich a few people, and I think maybe that's not okay.
A big chunk (most?) of the evil in the world is done by people convinced that they know what's best for everyone else, and so are justified in forcing it on them.
> A big chunk (most?) of the evil in the world is done by people convinced that they know what's best for everyone else
Not only do I think that's a small part of the harm done in the world, and that the vast majority of the harm done in the world is done through simple selfishness (with possibly overwrought moralistic rationalizations), but also that it's important to make the distinction that this is the source of none of the evil.
Evil can't include people trying to be kind badly, or else it's just become a general euphemism to give every petty grievance one has a grand, millennialist, Manichean cast. Or to be realistic, it's usually just warmed over early-mid 20c anti-New Dealer, anticommunist bullshit.
I'm currently considering the Pentecostal church which sent missionaries to Congo to build hospitals and teach/train doctors, for instance dr. Denis Mukwege[1], who was awarded The Nobel Peace Prize for his work helping and saving thousands of women who have been raped. The reason these women were raped is not religion, it's technology (the war is about valuable land with rare earth minerals).
The intense poverty and destitution and hopelessness in the inner cities suggests Americanism (America's brand of capitalism) isn't without it's own flaws though, so there's something to be learned from the communists
On the scale of banal evil, corporate tax accountants are a lot lower than the people directing them to do what they're doing. The benefits of Fancy Tax Practices are not accruing the people enacting them.
And where do you work? Who's used your stuff to be an antisocial jerk? How's the beam in your eye?
Like, I generally pride myself on never having worked for any company I wouldn't admit to working for later, but even some of those are kinda bad. (I contracted at a daily fantasy sports company for a while, and I'm not proud of that.) The recognition that labor is frequently if not generally in a compromised position is kind of the point when people are talking about "unrestrained late capitalism".
In any case, I work at a small (< 100) company, with very selective clientele. I am unwilling to disclose exactly who. I have explicitly resisted recruiters from FAANG (well, neither Netflix nor Apple) because of the immoral work I would expect I would be doing, at a significant salary penalty.
Both accountants and programmers have immense freedom to make a decent living, while using their expertise, even while choosing to avoid ethically questionable roles and activities. At some point, yes, economic coercion is unavoidable. That's understandable for someone whose realistic prospects are $50k or nothing. $200k or $150k is a very different matter.
> > "they're willing to do great evil for even less personal benefit."
> " And where do you work?"
This is not an appropriate response.
> The recognition that labor is frequently if not generally in a compromised position is kind of the point when people are talking about "unrestrained late capitalism".
Some jobs are much, much worse than others. Finding corporate tax loopholes is hugely evil, if hugely banal. That those people do it for a *relatively* meager salary does absolutely nothing to change the fact that it's evil.
It is wildly destructive to society to spend all day working to funnel money from social services to the yachting class. While it's very weird that they aren't seen as the hugely banal, hugely evil jobs that they are, once it's pointed out you might start thinking about it more.
> It is wildly destructive to society to spend all day working to funnel money from social services to the yachting class.
I don't see how this is relevant, given that it's not what corporate tax accountants do? All they're doing is figuring out how to use the tax system designed by the government to minimize the amount of money going to the government.
The government does not, as a matter of fact, spend all of its money on social services - vast amounts go to administration, national defense, social security (which is supposed to be self-sustaining), and other things, so this entire line of argument is invalid.
Moreover, the very fact that there are exceptions intentionally added to the tax code means that they're explicitly meant to be used, and therefore that using them is not evil.
Meanwhile, the fact that there are enough exceptions in the tax code and therefore less wealthy individuals and smaller businesses without the resources to make use of them are disproportionately disadvantaged is bad, and solely the fault of those who wrote the code in the first place.
You have a problem with the corporate tax rate and want it to be higher? Sure, that's valid. But randomly, axiomatically claiming that some people using the system the way it was designed are evil because they make too much money? Invalid.
By your logic, if a law makes torturing people legal, then the people who make it possible to do so - the psychologists advising, the guards, etc - are "valid" and not evil whatsoever. Only the law writer is at fault in your view.
While the US government may agree with you on that - other than the part where the law writer is at fault whatsoever - it's still very, very fucking evil to torture people. As is playing an essential part in the theft (morally and in reality, if not legally) of hundreds of billions of taxes.
Once again - legality is not morality. People seem confused on that point often, and it's very weird.
I'm reading my comment and I can't see where I said that legality implies morality. Where did I state that?
If you're talking about "Moreover, the very fact that there are exceptions intentionally added to the tax code means that they're explicitly meant to be used, and therefore that using them is not evil." - that's because the government is the writer, enforcer, and beneficiary of tax code - they have completely control over it, unlike someone who being tortured, who is none of those things. Completely different scenarios.
> As is playing an essential part in the theft (morally and in reality, if not legally) of hundreds of billions of taxes.
This is literally factually incorrect. There's no "theft" here - the government wrote the law to explicitly include these exception that corporate tax lawyers are using. "Theft" is taking something that doesn't belong to you. Taxes are the government asserting that some of the money that you earn belongs to them. When the government writes an exception into the tax code, that's them asserting that they do not own the money covered by that exception, and therefore it is not theft by definition.
You haven't even provided a single justification for your baseless assertion that this is "evil" - just a lot of misdirection and emotionally manipulative statements like "People seem confused on that point often, and it's very weird."
> What if I told you the villains are the ones writing the insanely complex tax codes with endless exclusions, not the ones using them?
How do you figure? Every dollar a corporate tax accountant saves Walmart gets redirected from food stamps and building public transport to the yacht class.
> Why is it ok for me to write off some tax breaks the government gave me, but the corporate tax lawyer is evil?
> How do you figure? Every dollar a corporate tax accountant saves Walmart gets redirected from food stamps and building public transport to the yacht class.
This is a non-argument. You can use the exact same emotional pleading to claim that its not ethical for corporations to do anything except donate all of their profit to the government (by overpaying their taxes) because every dollar is going to "food stamps and public transport" instead of "the yacht class".
> Scale and intent.
Whether something is evil or not is scale-invariant, so that doesn't matter, and there's no difference in intent between an individual trying to reduce their taxes and a corporation - the intent for both is "give the government less money".
Unless you have actually logical arguments against it, I think that the GP was pretty clearly correct in claiming that the root cause is overly complicated tax codes. US tax rates are set by the government ostensibly acting on behalf of its citizens and setting a fair tax rate. Companies and individuals are not only allowed but expected to take advantage of clauses that work in their favor (assuming that they're not behaving dishonestly to do so) - otherwise there would be literally no reason for those clauses to exist in the first place (it's obviously insane to add a tax clause to give tax breaks to college students and then condemn/prosecute them when they try to use it), so it's pretty clearly not wrong to do so.
Given that it's not wrong to (honestly) minimize your taxes, and the fact that complicated tax codes give a unique advantage to those able to spend lots of time and money on them (the wealthy and large corporations), you'd have to be crazy to think that it's not the fault of the authors.
(not to mention that complicated tax codes reduce government transparency, which is, uh, a bad thing)
Btw, I actually do not believe that the majority of governments are evil in intent on tax law. I keep seeing instances where their intentions are clearly "good" but nobody seems to appreciate the true cost of complexity.
The metaphor for me is that you have a code base with 1000 contributors, minimal pr reviews, no integration testing at all, and lots of global state. It is spaghetti and nobody is incentivised to simplify it
Yeah, I don't really think that most of them are "evil" either - perhaps "careless in a way that harms people" - I'm just arguing that the root of the harm stems from the tax code itself and not people trying to work it.
> "Every pound that a tax accountant saves a client is a pound which otherwise would have gone to HM Revenue. For a salary of between £75,000 and £200,000, tax accountants destroy £47 in value, for every pound they generate."
You can call the study 'socialist' if you like, but the disparity between what corporations ought to be paying and what they are paying is staggeringly vast.
Yet their loophole finding tax accountants are generally respected. WHY? This, while we STILL treat nurses like dirt.
While what corporate tax accountants do is 'legal', it's one of the most destructive roles possible.
You can blame this aspect of society on the politicians, the lobbyists, the voters - but at the heart of it, some twat is using his education and training to funnel money from social services to luxury yachts.
> But what’s so horrible in today’s tech is that a lot of people working on things like 15-minute delivery and cryptocurrencies pretend that they’re solving fundamental problems, improving the world, and rescuing third world people from poverty. Both gig apps and crypto are very much guilty of such overblown rhetoric.
It's testament to how effective the right kind of propaganda can be on the right kind of person. In a lot of these cases it seems to be founded on someone following base motives (e.g. personal greed) adopting a false, ego-protective narrative to justify their actions to themselves. But then they're so forceful and vocal about that narrative, a lot of other people are duped through repetition into believing it too.
I don't think it's a mere coincidence that these horror stories of people being enslaved, murdered, tortured, etc, all while the police is bribed to look the other way, seem much more common in countries suffering from desperate poverty. Not to say that such a thing cannot happen in a rich country, but it is certainly less common.
To say that only morals and values work to address these problems seems to imply that the suffering of these people in poor countries originates from a deficiency in morals and values.
It seems more likely to me that the root cause is their awful material conditions. Technology can help with improving material conditions (although it is not guaranteed to do so).
If you research history you'll find that not all societies share the same values and ethics. There isn't a perfect society, mind you, but some respect human life and diginity more than others.
Values and ethics can change very quickly, and can do so in response to material conditions. See for instance Germany's values and ethics 80 years ago vs now, and take note of the difference in material conditions.
The Soviet Union had no trouble at all monitoring and punishing tens of millions of people. It also operated forced labor camps (gulags) on a vast scale.
Actually, on average the rich countries that has diverged most from capitalism has been significantly worse.
I'm leaving out the developing countries on purpose here: they may have had it even worse but it doesn't feel fair to blame them.
Nazi Germany and Soviet/USSR (the whole time more or less) can't blame anyone else for the insane scale of human suffering that they created. Both are representatives of centrally planned economies where companies either don't exist in a western sense (Soviet), or only exist to serve the country (Germany).
Nazi Germany became Nazi Germany in large part because of severe economic problems, but by the late 30s, living conditions for conforming, “good” Germans had improved somewhat.
There was a reasonable supply of consumer goods for “good” Germans in the late 30s and early 40s after the economy started turning around, and food wasn’t a serious issue until very late in the war, and was worst in the years right after (again, for “good” Germans).
Weird little anecdote: my mother-in-law had her feet x-rayed in a shoe shop to check the fit of her new shoes circa 1943 in Essen. Absolutely no military benefit to ensuring that a 3 year old’s shoes fit, but definitely a market advantage for a shoe shop competing for sales (remember, we didn’t know that casual x-ray usage by non-radiologists was a terrible idea).
The big industrials were geared for military production, especially after 1939, but their owners often helped support the Nazis on their way to power, because they were more worried about Communists and Socialists, and either didn’t take the Nazis seriously, or figured the conservatives could get them under control… or actually agreed with them.
There’s a reason that the modern Social Democratic Party in Germany is the same organization that existed pre-NS era, but the Christian Democrats (conservatives) and Free Democrats (market liberals) were completely new post-war organizations.
Labor camps in the Soviet Union suggest otherwise. More likely, being an evil asshole is a human universal, and the (relatively) peaceful life and society we enjoy in the west right now is the exception in history, not the rule. Capitalism as a system at least has the advantage of acknowledging the existence of self interest and attempts to harness it. Communist systems try and pretend it doesn't exist or can somehow be socialized away (i.e. the New Soviet Man).
There are a a lot of people who believe that evil assholes are only created due to the oppressive forces du jour (whether that be capitalism, white supremacy, or whatever), not that it is innately a part of human nature.
Which is just patently silly from a cursory glance at history and the horrific acts committed under every economic, religious, and social structure ever.
> The emergence of free markets coincided with a dramatic decline in slavery.
Free markets are an analytical fiction like frictionless surfaces; they don’t exist in the real world. The emergence of the real-world economic system for which the term “capitalism” was coined (which is not the same system as the modern mixed economy that has generally replaced it, though both critics and defenders of the modern mixed economy conflate it woth capitalism, with which it shares some core elements) corresponds with the expansion of chattel slavery and the development of the slave trade, and pressure for its abolition corresponds with (and often involved the same people as) early organized opposition to capitalism.
> Free markets are an analytical fiction like frictionless surfaces; they don’t exist in the real world
Yes, they do exist. They aren't perfect. Nothing human is perfect.
Slavery goes back to the dawn of man. In America, slavery was the norm (including among the native americans) until the US was formed. Yes, I know that only half the colonies had abolished slavery when the union was formed, it was forcibly abolished in the rest in 1865.
> Yes, I know that only half the colonies had abolished slavery when the union was formed, it was forcibly abolished in the rest in 1865.
It had to be forcibly abolished because "free" market capitalism failed to bring about abolition itself; plantation owners had a vested interest in maintaining the institution of slavery.
In fact, said vested interest is sufficiently strong that we never actually abolished slavery in the US; we simply replaced plantations with private prisons, and chattel slaves with penal slaves. Said private prisons, penal slavery, and the broader prison-industrial complex are all the direct consequences of "free" market capitalism as applied to the American penal system.
> said vested interest is sufficiently strong that we never actually abolished slavery in the US
Actually, the whole point of the Confederacy seceding was it needed to protect itself from free market capitalism, because it made the Southern economy uncompetitive.
> we simply replaced plantations with private prisons
The numbers don't remotely compare with the number of slaves in the Confederacy.
> private prisons, penal slavery, and the broader prison-industrial complex are all the direct consequences of "free" market capitalism
They are consequences of the government, not free markets. The Soviet gulags were penal slavery camps, which the communists liked because they could work people to death in them, saving money on food, housing, and medical care.
Penal slave labor long predated free markets.
A theory I see all the time is that slavery is somehow more efficient than free labor. The most obvious refutation of that is the United States during WW2. The US free market was able to not only conduct a war on both sides of the planet, it also supplied the British and Soviet war machines. The US didn't just win, it buried the Axis powers under an avalanche of advanced military equipment and supplies of every sort.
No slave based labor could possibly compete with that.
P.S. The Union also buried the Confederacy under a similar avalanche.
> Actually, the whole point of the Confederacy seceding was it needed to protect itself from free market capitalism
The Confederates would disagree; from their point of view, they seceded to protect their "free" market - that being of chattel slaves - because their capitalist profit motive gave them a vested interest in minimizing labor costs to the bare minimum with which they could get away.
What the Union capitalists figured out (and the Confederate capitalists didn't) is that it's just as profitable (if not more so) to replace those chattel slaves with wage laborers, especially if you can get away with paying those laborers less than what it would cost to house and feed them. No need to care about their working conditions, either, since wage laborers are rentals and therefore (if you care more about profit than morals) entirely disposable (unlike chattel slaves, which had to be purchased upfront). Said laborers predictably recognized this to be effectively slavery/serfdom with extra steps, and thus organized into unions for better bargaining/negotiating power.
> The numbers don't remotely compare with the number of slaves in the Confederacy.
There were about 4 million chattel slaves by the Civil War, v. 1.6 million incarcerated today. Sure, it's lower nowadays, but not so much as to be incomparable.
> They are consequences of the government, not free markets.
They are consequences of the government seeking to save money by deferring government functions to privatized replacements competing in a "free" market.
You might've noticed those scare quotes I keep using around "free"; those are there because capitalism is at odds with an actually-free market (contrary to capitalists' claims); given the opportunity, a capitalist would vastly prefer to have absolute control over the market (a.k.a. monopolization) than to have to actually compete, because said control allows the maximization of profit for oneself.
> The US free market was able to not only conduct a war on both sides of the planet, it also supplied the British and Soviet war machines. The US didn't just win, it buried the Axis powers under an avalanche of advanced military equipment and supplies of every sort.
> [...]
> P.S. The Union also buried the Confederacy under a similar avalanche.
If I had a nickel for every confounding variable underlying those outcomes, I'd be able to bury the Axis powers and the CSA under avalanches of advanced military equipment and supplies of every sort.
Friedman: tell me is there some society you know that doesn't run on greed? You think Russia doesn't run on greed? You think China doesn't run on greed? What is greed? Of course none of us are greedy, it's only the other fellow who's greedy. This the world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn't construct his theory under order from a from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn't revolutionize the automobile industry in that way. In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you're talking about, the only cases in recorded history is where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worst off it's exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that. So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear that there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by free enterprise.
Donahue: so it seems to reward not virtue as much as ability to manipulate the system.
Friedman: and what does reward virtue? You think the Communist commissar rewards virtue? you think a Hitler rewards virtue? You think, excuse me, if you'll pardon me, do you think of American presidents reward virtue? Do they choose their appointees on the basis of the virtue of the people appointed on the basis of their political clout? Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest? You know, I think you're taking a lot of things for granted. Just tell me where in the world you find these angels who are going to organize society for us well now I don't even trust you to do that let alone myself
> You think the Communist commissar rewards virtue? you think a Hitler rewards virtue?
I know he meant it in a different way, but I find it makes more sense to think of political appointees as rewarding virtue. Of course, often times that virtue is simply personal fealty or loyalty to the party ideology, but I do believe that a despot rewards those he finds most virtuous -- as opposed to those that are the most productive or the most capable.
> as opposed to those that are the most productive or the most capable.
Why wouldn't he select those that are the most productive or the most capable in the context of the job he has for them? I.e. if he's looking for an enforcer that will, with an iron fist, reign in a province that's talking about self-determination a bit too loudly, will he choose someone who's very virtuous, or will he choose someone who's happy, maybe even eager, to rule with an iron fist?
Did Putin make a deal with Kadyrov because he found him virtuous, or because he found him the most capable person available at the time for the job he needed him to do?
If your appointee is charismatic, obviously competent, clearly virtuous, etc., perhaps more so than you are, then people may decide they prefer having him in your position. In that sense, a highly virtuous appointee may be a threat to a tyrant. I've seen claims that Putin has chosen some appointees where one can see that "not being a threat to Putin" was prioritized over other qualities.
Heh. Too good a line of argument to be David, but bad enough I was surprised it was Milton. Not that I know any other Friedmans than those two, but still.
[EDIT] Guess I should explain what's wrong with it. There are two chief problems:
1) It's not entirely clear which of these is going on without more context, but he's definitely either very wrong about a bunch of stuff or is operating, selectively on a definition of greed that is far too broad. I suspect the latter. This is what lets you pull tricks like "proving" that greed (extremely broad sense) is what makes the world run and then conclude "greed is good" like Michael Gecko (but you mean, specifically, the more narrow, generally-considered-a-vice kind—"huh, maybe not all greed is good" yeah, exactly my point, we have the word "greed" to describe the bad kind, it is all it describes). This and similar tricks are a favorite in... a certain crowd, let's say. You see it again with "This the world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests." Well... sure, if you do some tap-dancing with words you can make this seem true, but you're just playing games with semantics. "This world runs on individual cells pursuing their separate self-interests". I mean... yes, and also very much no.
2) This argument displays some major blind spots about the role of government in making markets function well, and in the nature of firms, such that several of his examples fall apart as soon as you think for half a second and some of his points should also apply to firms, but he refrains from taking that step, presumably because it would ruin the appealing simplicity of his argument. Again, pretty common error and/or deliberate trick to encounter in a certain category of writing.
