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The people in positions of power to make these sorts of decisions are almost never incentivized to do anything other than make the maximum possible amount of mo
by Benjammer 8y ago
The people in positions of power to make these sorts of decisions are almost never incentivized to do anything other than make the maximum possible amount of money for investors/shareholders. I've never heard of a corporate leadership structure that would, for example, reward the lowest executive/director on the totem pole individually for choosing to do something that has a good chance of limiting revenue from what is legally possible, but for empathetic/moral reasons around "caring about users."
And this isn't about some sort of explicit negative incentive against this sort of thing, it's just that the individual incentives to make more money are so much more tantalizing and rewarding. It's not about creating a non-zero incentive out of thin air around moral actions, it's about looking at the overall incentive structure and moving "user empathy" to a higher rung in the overall hierarchy, among things like reducing costs & increasing revenue. You could then argue with me over the appropriate place for "user empathy" in that overall hierarchy, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect mis-aligned incentive structures to produce many cases (always can be outliers...) of someone in a leadership position "doing the right thing" from a moral standpoint outside the numbers of the business.
- smallgovt 8y agoI couldn't agree with this comment more. Outrage may solve these issues on a case by case basis, but it seems more prudent to focus on the larger systemic issue -- capitalistic incentives.