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I hope someday that a large majority of Americans come to the belief that the love of money is not always the best motivator. Being profit driven does not magi

by skh 8y ago

I hope someday that a large majority of Americans come to the belief that the love of money is not always the best motivator. Being profit driven does not magically make something more efficient or better. It only makes people try to maximize profit and usually at the expense of more important outcomes. The notion that government can’t do anything right is a destructive one and it needs to die quickly. Privatization in industries that ought not be profit driven is a bad thing.

amelius 8y ago
Americans already understand the importance of net-neutrality, which is a form of regulation.
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  Most Americans can't provide a coherent definition of net neutrality. What they want is cheap fast internet, but they don't know what regulations will get them that.
  - amelius 8y ago
    Perhaps, but you can replace "Americans" by "Americans who have more political influence than just voting power", and then the statement would be more correct at least.
ashleyn 8y ago
This is primarily the legacy of the baby boomers and the younger generations have a less profit-centric view of the world.
MrTonyD 8y ago
"It is a strange idea that the rich work better if they constantly get richer, while the poor just work better if they get poorer" John Kenneth Galbraith
gordaco 8y ago
I've never lived in the USA so I'm kind of talking out of my ass here... but I wonder if the awful costs of healthcare might prevent changes in that mentality. Here in Europe, if your income is about average or even a bit less, you might have some small trouble at some point of your life, but for the vast majority of people there will never be a single incident that sinks you into deep shit, financially speaking. Compare to the US, where a sudden accident or illness might suck your savings dry. Even worse, a lot of people will start their careers with a lot of debt because of the overinflated tuition costs and student debt. My point is: it seems there is a real incentive to accumulate a lot of money in the USA (which happens at both individual and collective level), and in order to remove those incentives, many things need to change. Private prisons may just be a particularly twisted product of those incentives.
- skh 8y ago
  From my perspective the country started on a bad path with Reagan. He popularized the notion that government is never the answer and he popularized the belief that lowering taxes is always the right thing to do. So now we have cities, counties, states, and federal government trying to lower costs and avoid having taxes raised to pay for services. We now live in a system in which fees, fines, etc. are used to generate revenue. Local police forces need to get a significant part of their funding from parking fines, speeding tickets, etc. I got a ticket a few years ago and the fine was $25. However, fees for court costs, administrative fee for processing ticket and other such stuff added $100 to the bill. But taxes are low so hurray! We privatize prisons and say the cost per prisoner should go down. This comes in the form of lower services for prisoners, lower pay for staff, and cheap food, and skimping on amenities and on rehabilitation programs. All in the name of getting a low cost on housing the prisoner. We Americans tend not to look at long term costs or on external costs. We thus end up in situations in which large numbers of poor voters rely on things like Obamacare and vote for people who actively want to dismantle it in the name of lower taxes. We are a money obsessed people always seeking the best deal. The most food for the cheapest price and that kind of thinking. It's weird that this is so because we have so many religious people and they seem to overlook or deliberately forget the Biblical admonition that the love of money is the root of all evil. As you say, the vast majority of the country is one illness away from penury.
tomohawk 8y ago
The notion that government does everything right and cost doesn't matter is destructive and needs to die quickly. Whether the government performs the work itself or contracts it out, it must do so competently, exercising appropriate oversight and regulation. In this case, the government failed to properly oversee their contractor, which isn't that different than failing to oversee government employees doing the same thing. So, yes, a private company failed to perform the job. But, so too did the government, on whose behalf the company was operating.
- skh 8y ago
  I've never met anyone say that government does everything right. Can you cite me a source of one politician that has ever said that? Reagan famously said: The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help. I know it was a joke to make a point but the fact is that I've never heard anyone expound that government does everything right. I've never heard anyone expound that cost never matters. Such a statement would be profoundly dumb and foolish. Yet I've heard prominent politicians expound the equally dumb and foolish belief that lowering taxes is always right and that more government is never the answer. I suggest to you that you have never actually heard anyone say that government does everything right. I suggest this is a bogeyman whose existence you've been sold on but one which doesn't actually exist. I further suggest you contemplate how it is that you have come to believe such a thing. Of course I could be wrong. I don't think I am but I recognize that I haven't experienced everything you have and it's possible you've encountered a fanatic who actually said that government is always the answer. You've never heard such a thing from a prominent politician in the U.S. though.
  - tomohawk 8y ago
    Just responding to this hyperbole: > The notion that government can’t do anything right is a destructive one and it needs to die quickly. Privatization in industries that ought not be profit driven is a bad thing. In the cited case of the article, the government was at least as at fault as the contractor. Just because the government contracts something out, doesn't mean that less quality should be expected. In many cases, the government may have the responsibility to do something, but lack the expertise to do it. Should the government go ahead and try to do it anyway? Or, should they try to contract it out? These are not always easy decisions, but in either case, the government is still in charge and is responsible.
rayiner 8y ago
Being profit driven does make things magically better. Countries like India suffered for decades under central planning policies, and have been going through a huge boom in prosperity since the 1990s thanks to reforms that took power away from government planners and made room for the market. At the same time, the government hasn’t proven to be any more “humane.” Most US prisons are public. Are prisoners treated humanely in Illinois, where private prisons have been banned since 1990? New York, another state that has long banned private prisons, is famous for the abuses in its pre-trial system, where non-convicts are sometimes held for years.
- skh 8y ago
  You claim that being profit driven does make things magically better and provide a single example. Do you really think I can't find a single example of where being profit driven made things worse? You can't think of a single example in all the history of the world in which being profit driven made things worse? I guess you wrote in hyperbole but it seems like you actually believe it and to disprove your belief I merely need to come up with a single example. However, to prove your point you need much more than one example. Indeed, you need to prove it in all examples. Good luck! Prisoners are generally not treated humanely in the U.S. They tend to be treated better in government run prisons than in for profit prisons. If your point is that since prisoners are not humanely treated in government run prisons then it is OK for them to be treated the way described in the article then I think your position is morally repugnant.
  - antidesitter 8y ago
    > If your point is that since prisoners are not humanely treated in government run prisons then it is OK for them to be treated the way described in the article Did the GP say that?
    - skh 8y ago
      The "If your point..." is important and should not be left out. I don't understand the point rayiner was making. I made a deduction on what I think he/she was attempting to say and specifically qualified my statement with "if your point...". This is an implicit acknowledgement that I'm guessing and could be wrong. Statements have implications and a part of communication is that both parties end up making assumptions/deductions about what the other party is truly saying. This is why communication is hard. This is especially true for written communication. So it's possible for a person to mean something without explicitly stating so. For instance if I make the two statements: All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Then one can deduce that I'm saying Socrates is mortal (and edit on my part here) even though I didn't make that explicit claim. Of course, if I'm illogical - and this frequently happens - I may or may not intend to imply this.
throw2016 8y ago
This is not an accident. It's the result of systemic neoliberalism propaganda by well funded think tanks and a fawning media. The economic crisis has discredited their irrational faith in markets and raised fundamental questions about economic theory but they persist. The economics profession itself is in crisis for capture, dubious theories, bad data and unrealistic assumptions. These are then used to spread baseless narratives of 'wealth creators', 'trickle down', 'financial wizards' all disconnected from reality. There are always economists on hand to scaremonger or justify any decision that benefits the wealthy, notice their behavior during Bernie Sanders Amazon bill. It's naked propaganda. A corporation is centrally planned but when it comes to a country we are supposed to believe a market will sort it out? How? This is fantasy. A country is not a corporation. This childish demonizing of government at the core is really about disenfranchising citizens and democracy so the wealthy can operate unimpeded.
- ArchTypical 8y ago
  Corporations make widgets in some form. Reproducible and uniform, which reinforces trust of consumers and provides predictable outcomes to measure and leverage. Society is a truck full of apples. Some are rotten, some are damaged and some are just abnormal in other ways. Corporations do everything they can to treat exceptions like they are uniform leading to pain on both sides.
jrockway 8y ago
I don't think that profit is the primary problem here. As always, the key to hiring someone is setting the right specification for their work product. In the US, the prison system's expectation is "torture these miserable criminals who were convicted by the 100% accurate and infallible criminal justice system". The for-profit prisons do that for $24/day instead of $130/day. Yay! The problem is that the specification is WAY wrong. Treating the criminal justice system as infallible is a huge mistake, many people in prison are wrongfully convicted or were bullied into a guilty plea. Treating it as a place to punish people for their crimes has no long-term value. They get out, don't know how to interact with the real world, and end up back in prison (hey, more profit!). Ultimately society is shortchanged because these people have value even though they can't necessarily be trusted in their current state in free society. (Some of this is society's fault, of course, which we take no responsibility for, because taking responsibility is expensive and if we spent our tax dollars on that, we couldn't have as many sports stadiums or wars.) I look at prison as a place where people who can't be trusted in free society to be more closely monitored. A case I always think about is Hans Reiser. Clearly he cannot be trusted to be alone with people that he wants to murder, because he'll murder them. Fair enough. But I don't see why he can't write filesystem code anymore. You can have a laptop with the Linux kernel on it and submit patches without being able to freely murder people. Why doesn't the prison system provide that? We as a society lose out on that possible value, and the prisoner loses out on the ability to be human. (The conflict here is always that that's unfair to people who haven't murdered anyone. And that's true, which is why the concept of basic income comes up again and again. If everyone is equal in their ability to have their basic human needs met, the world can be a much better place. That costs $$$ though and we must not spend money on boring things like meeting society's basic needs. Me, me, me! That's the most important thing.) Anyway, the TLDR is that right now the criminal justice system is severely fucked, and private prisons are a way of getting absolutely terrible results for a lower price. If we want to get good results, we will have to change things dramatically, and that will cost money. Nobody wants to pay the money, or necessarily even knows how to fix the problem with money, so here we are.
- eropple 8y ago
  The "right specification" for the work product is deemed what they say it is because they're paying to write the specification. You don't think private prisons' higher rates of inmate infraction (leading to longer time in prison, leading to more money) and the lobbying efforts against rehabilitative services for prisoners isn't directly rooted in The Search For More Money?

by skh 8y ago

amelius 8y ago

Americans already understand the importance of net-neutrality, which is a form of regulation.

fjsolwmv 8y ago
Most Americans can't provide a coherent definition of net neutrality. What they want is cheap fast internet, but they don't know what regulations will get them that.
- amelius 8y ago
  Perhaps, but you can replace "Americans" by "Americans who have more political influence than just voting power", and then the statement would be more correct at least.

ashleyn 8y ago

This is primarily the legacy of the baby boomers and the younger generations have a less profit-centric view of the world.

MrTonyD 8y ago

"It is a strange idea that the rich work better if they constantly get richer, while the poor just work better if they get poorer" John Kenneth Galbraith

gordaco 8y ago

I've never lived in the USA so I'm kind of talking out of my ass here... but I wonder if the awful costs of healthcare might prevent changes in that mentality. Here in Europe, if your income is about average or even a bit less, you might have some small trouble at some point of your life, but for the vast majority of people there will never be a single incident that sinks you into deep shit, financially speaking. Compare to the US, where a sudden accident or illness might suck your savings dry. Even worse, a lot of people will start their careers with a lot of debt because of the overinflated tuition costs and student debt. My point is: it seems there is a real incentive to accumulate a lot of money in the USA (which happens at both individual and collective level), and in order to remove those incentives, many things need to change. Private prisons may just be a particularly twisted product of those incentives.

skh 8y ago
From my perspective the country started on a bad path with Reagan. He popularized the notion that government is never the answer and he popularized the belief that lowering taxes is always the right thing to do. So now we have cities, counties, states, and federal government trying to lower costs and avoid having taxes raised to pay for services. We now live in a system in which fees, fines, etc. are used to generate revenue. Local police forces need to get a significant part of their funding from parking fines, speeding tickets, etc. I got a ticket a few years ago and the fine was $25. However, fees for court costs, administrative fee for processing ticket and other such stuff added $100 to the bill. But taxes are low so hurray! We privatize prisons and say the cost per prisoner should go down. This comes in the form of lower services for prisoners, lower pay for staff, and cheap food, and skimping on amenities and on rehabilitation programs. All in the name of getting a low cost on housing the prisoner. We Americans tend not to look at long term costs or on external costs. We thus end up in situations in which large numbers of poor voters rely on things like Obamacare and vote for people who actively want to dismantle it in the name of lower taxes. We are a money obsessed people always seeking the best deal. The most food for the cheapest price and that kind of thinking. It's weird that this is so because we have so many religious people and they seem to overlook or deliberately forget the Biblical admonition that the love of money is the root of all evil. As you say, the vast majority of the country is one illness away from penury.

tomohawk 8y ago

The notion that government does everything right and cost doesn't matter is destructive and needs to die quickly. Whether the government performs the work itself or contracts it out, it must do so competently, exercising appropriate oversight and regulation. In this case, the government failed to properly oversee their contractor, which isn't that different than failing to oversee government employees doing the same thing. So, yes, a private company failed to perform the job. But, so too did the government, on whose behalf the company was operating.

skh 8y ago
I've never met anyone say that government does everything right. Can you cite me a source of one politician that has ever said that? Reagan famously said: The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help. I know it was a joke to make a point but the fact is that I've never heard anyone expound that government does everything right. I've never heard anyone expound that cost never matters. Such a statement would be profoundly dumb and foolish. Yet I've heard prominent politicians expound the equally dumb and foolish belief that lowering taxes is always right and that more government is never the answer. I suggest to you that you have never actually heard anyone say that government does everything right. I suggest this is a bogeyman whose existence you've been sold on but one which doesn't actually exist. I further suggest you contemplate how it is that you have come to believe such a thing. Of course I could be wrong. I don't think I am but I recognize that I haven't experienced everything you have and it's possible you've encountered a fanatic who actually said that government is always the answer. You've never heard such a thing from a prominent politician in the U.S. though.
- tomohawk 8y ago
  Just responding to this hyperbole: > The notion that government can’t do anything right is a destructive one and it needs to die quickly. Privatization in industries that ought not be profit driven is a bad thing. In the cited case of the article, the government was at least as at fault as the contractor. Just because the government contracts something out, doesn't mean that less quality should be expected. In many cases, the government may have the responsibility to do something, but lack the expertise to do it. Should the government go ahead and try to do it anyway? Or, should they try to contract it out? These are not always easy decisions, but in either case, the government is still in charge and is responsible.

rayiner 8y ago

Being profit driven does make things magically better. Countries like India suffered for decades under central planning policies, and have been going through a huge boom in prosperity since the 1990s thanks to reforms that took power away from government planners and made room for the market. At the same time, the government hasn’t proven to be any more “humane.” Most US prisons are public. Are prisoners treated humanely in Illinois, where private prisons have been banned since 1990? New York, another state that has long banned private prisons, is famous for the abuses in its pre-trial system, where non-convicts are sometimes held for years.

skh 8y ago
You claim that being profit driven does make things magically better and provide a single example. Do you really think I can't find a single example of where being profit driven made things worse? You can't think of a single example in all the history of the world in which being profit driven made things worse? I guess you wrote in hyperbole but it seems like you actually believe it and to disprove your belief I merely need to come up with a single example. However, to prove your point you need much more than one example. Indeed, you need to prove it in all examples. Good luck! Prisoners are generally not treated humanely in the U.S. They tend to be treated better in government run prisons than in for profit prisons. If your point is that since prisoners are not humanely treated in government run prisons then it is OK for them to be treated the way described in the article then I think your position is morally repugnant.
- antidesitter 8y ago
  > If your point is that since prisoners are not humanely treated in government run prisons then it is OK for them to be treated the way described in the article Did the GP say that?
  - skh 8y ago
    The "If your point..." is important and should not be left out. I don't understand the point rayiner was making. I made a deduction on what I think he/she was attempting to say and specifically qualified my statement with "if your point...". This is an implicit acknowledgement that I'm guessing and could be wrong. Statements have implications and a part of communication is that both parties end up making assumptions/deductions about what the other party is truly saying. This is why communication is hard. This is especially true for written communication. So it's possible for a person to mean something without explicitly stating so. For instance if I make the two statements: All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Then one can deduce that I'm saying Socrates is mortal (and edit on my part here) even though I didn't make that explicit claim. Of course, if I'm illogical - and this frequently happens - I may or may not intend to imply this.

throw2016 8y ago

This is not an accident. It's the result of systemic neoliberalism propaganda by well funded think tanks and a fawning media. The economic crisis has discredited their irrational faith in markets and raised fundamental questions about economic theory but they persist. The economics profession itself is in crisis for capture, dubious theories, bad data and unrealistic assumptions. These are then used to spread baseless narratives of 'wealth creators', 'trickle down', 'financial wizards' all disconnected from reality. There are always economists on hand to scaremonger or justify any decision that benefits the wealthy, notice their behavior during Bernie Sanders Amazon bill. It's naked propaganda. A corporation is centrally planned but when it comes to a country we are supposed to believe a market will sort it out? How? This is fantasy. A country is not a corporation. This childish demonizing of government at the core is really about disenfranchising citizens and democracy so the wealthy can operate unimpeded.

ArchTypical 8y ago
Corporations make widgets in some form. Reproducible and uniform, which reinforces trust of consumers and provides predictable outcomes to measure and leverage. Society is a truck full of apples. Some are rotten, some are damaged and some are just abnormal in other ways. Corporations do everything they can to treat exceptions like they are uniform leading to pain on both sides.

jrockway 8y ago

I don't think that profit is the primary problem here. As always, the key to hiring someone is setting the right specification for their work product. In the US, the prison system's expectation is "torture these miserable criminals who were convicted by the 100% accurate and infallible criminal justice system". The for-profit prisons do that for $24/day instead of $130/day. Yay! The problem is that the specification is WAY wrong. Treating the criminal justice system as infallible is a huge mistake, many people in prison are wrongfully convicted or were bullied into a guilty plea. Treating it as a place to punish people for their crimes has no long-term value. They get out, don't know how to interact with the real world, and end up back in prison (hey, more profit!). Ultimately society is shortchanged because these people have value even though they can't necessarily be trusted in their current state in free society. (Some of this is society's fault, of course, which we take no responsibility for, because taking responsibility is expensive and if we spent our tax dollars on that, we couldn't have as many sports stadiums or wars.) I look at prison as a place where people who can't be trusted in free society to be more closely monitored. A case I always think about is Hans Reiser. Clearly he cannot be trusted to be alone with people that he wants to murder, because he'll murder them. Fair enough. But I don't see why he can't write filesystem code anymore. You can have a laptop with the Linux kernel on it and submit patches without being able to freely murder people. Why doesn't the prison system provide that? We as a society lose out on that possible value, and the prisoner loses out on the ability to be human. (The conflict here is always that that's unfair to people who haven't murdered anyone. And that's true, which is why the concept of basic income comes up again and again. If everyone is equal in their ability to have their basic human needs met, the world can be a much better place. That costs $$$ though and we must not spend money on boring things like meeting society's basic needs. Me, me, me! That's the most important thing.) Anyway, the TLDR is that right now the criminal justice system is severely fucked, and private prisons are a way of getting absolutely terrible results for a lower price. If we want to get good results, we will have to change things dramatically, and that will cost money. Nobody wants to pay the money, or necessarily even knows how to fix the problem with money, so here we are.

eropple 8y ago
The "right specification" for the work product is deemed what they say it is because they're paying to write the specification. You don't think private prisons' higher rates of inmate infraction (leading to longer time in prison, leading to more money) and the lobbying efforts against rehabilitative services for prisoners isn't directly rooted in The Search For More Money?