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The elites of SF and many people on HN are caught in this loop: 1. Companies don't take personal responsibility when they do antisocial things, claiming they c

The elites of SF and many people on HN are caught in this loop: 1. Companies don't take personal responsibility when they do antisocial things, claiming they can't be blamed, since they are just following incentives in order to compete. 2. Companies follow incentives, and lobby government to incentivize the behaviors that make them the most money (even if those behaviors are antisocial). 3. Government, influenced by the belief that the only way to do things is incentives (since regulation risks losing companies to other jurisdictions) gives companies the incentives they ask for (even when those incentives incentivize antisocial behavior). 4. GOTO 1. We cannot trust markets to regulate the behaviors of companies. There is little to no benefit to any company, i.e. investing in ending homelessness when they can simply wall off their campus and prevent the homeless from entering. Companies might choose one or two social issues to do good on for marketing purposes, while creating equal or greater harm in other areas. Until SF (and indeed, the rest of the world) becomes more willing to regulate companies, things are only going to continue on their current trajectory.

mushufasa 8y ago
Absolutely. One thing most people don't realize is that citizens own corporations. Retail investors (anyone with retirement accounts) own or are beneficial owners of the majority of public company common stock. And as shareowners, you have rights. So, you can change this loop if as a shareowner, you change what happens between steps 1 and 2 by engaging with those companies. I built this site to try and make that process accessible. For example, this NGO campaign for fund managers to require companies to disclose political spending: https://www.yourstake.org/campaign/disclose-corporate-political-activity/ https://www.yourstake.org/campaign/disclose-corporate-politi...
- kerkeslager 8y ago
  While I applaud your intentions and effort, you're basically hoping that we can start trusting companies to self-regulate if we ask them to do so nicely. I suspect any change in spending habits you might see from companies would fall under what I mentioned: > "Companies might choose one or two social issues to do good on for marketing purposes, while creating equal or greater harm in other areas." So in this case you'd see companies saying, "Look how transparent we are about our lobbying! Look how we're only lobbying for carbon emissions regulation!" Meanwhile they've bought up a massive campus and put spikes on the sidewalks to prevent the homeless from sleeping there, and pay 75% of their workers minimum wage. And that's even if the disclosure of their political spending gives an accurate impression. It's quite easy to publicly spend to support an anti-carbon-emissions bill that will make a councilman's career, in order to buy that councilman's vote against the housing bill that would hurt your business. In the disclosure, it looks like your political spending was anti-carbon-emissions, when in reality it was anti-homeless. It's not plausible for average citizens to become educated and do enough research to catch companies doing this in every case: there are too many companies and it's too complex. It's the job of politicians to do that research and regulate accordingly, and we need to empower them to do that, and elect politicians who will use that power effectively. The only way out of this that I can see is to not allow companies to spend on politics at all--voters have the sole right to determine our politics, and that right needs to be protected from corporate spending.
terandle 8y ago
What sort of regulations are you looking for? I’m just not sure how regulating a company will end homelessness. Seems like the government should be using taxes to do that.
- kerkeslager 8y ago
  Well, to start, you have to close loopholes which allow corporations to dodge taxes to even be able to collect taxes to begin with. I'm not sure where you're drawing the line between regulation and taxation; they go hand-in-hand. I don't have enough context to say what's the best regulation to end homelessness in SF, as I have lived more in NYC area and am more familiar with NYC-specific problems than SF, but some ideas: 1. Require builders to build a certain percentage of low-income housing for every unit of high-income housing they build. 2. Require property owners to fill properties in a certain timeframe, rather than leaving properties empty waiting for a high-paying tenant, or simply keeping them as an investment. 3. Higher minimum wage so people at the bottom can afford housing. 4. Require a smaller pay gap between highest-paid and lowest-paid employees of a company (this addresses the corporate threat that if they are forced to pay higher minimum wages, they'll just raise their prices--the money for minimum salaries comes out of CEO's salaries instead of inflation).
  - TuringNYC 8y ago
    I'd add point 0: 0. Allow increase in supply, which fixes most other problems. Stop artificially constraining supply and allow more manhattanization.
apexalpha 8y ago
Coupled with the standard MBA phrase "companies are a-moral". Disconnecting them from any community they serve, work in or deal with.
- kerkeslager 8y ago
  Well, I tend to agree. Companies are amoral. Where I disagree with the MBAs who say this is the underlying belief, that companies can't be blamed for their actions. They can and should be blamed for their actions. When an individual behaves amorally, we put them in jail. When a company behaves amorally, we say "companies are amoral, we can't do anything about it!" If companies really are amoral, then we should treat them as a threat just like we treat amoral people as threats.
zaroth 8y ago
The companies are also the ones trying to build the new housing atop that laundromat, or open that ice cream shop. I’m not sure how you could read TFA and come away with companies need more regulations? True or not it seems besides the point. The soul of SF is empty as long as the laws and regulations of the city serve only the wealthy. The policies of the overwhelmingly democratic city have created a festering menagerie of wealthy post-IPO wunderkin and drugged homeless masses. The people that used to live in that city now drive 3 hours to get to their medial job in the city cleaning, catering, delivering, or transporting the rich urbanites. More corporate regulation? I don’t get it.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
KirinDave 8y ago
Pardon me, what? SF has a minority of VCs caught in this loop. You're talking about the folks 40 (okay well it's a Tuesday at 7am, so 90) minutes south driving on 280. To seamlessly conflate them is not my experience, and I have been working in SF for over 10 years in startups in various stages of creation or acquisition.
rayiner 8y ago
Companies are not the problem, San Franciscans are the problem. By all accounts, Texas regulates companies less than California. But Texas is at the national average in cost-of-living adjusted poverty rate, despite being a majority-minority state, while California tops the charts in poverty: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2018/08/27/of-the-5-big-states-texas-1-for-growth-california-1-for-poverty/amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevor.... As compared to California, Texas also has much higher rates of home ownership and lower unemployment for Hispanic people, with a lower Hispanic-White gap on both metrics. (The home ownership rate for Hispanics in Texas, 55%, is closer to that of Whites in California, 62%, than to Hispanics in California, 42%.) I spent almost two weeks recently in east Texas. I was shocked. It was a more diverse and egalitarian place by a good margin than San Francisco or Palo Alto. Everyone shopping at the same stores and eating at the same restaurants. Versus my memory of Palo Alto, where you’d only see whites and Asians in one place, and Hispanic people over in East Palo Alto (or in service jobs). It’s the difference between a functional, integrated society and a broken one.
- sidlls 8y ago
  You must have visited a relatively "blue" urban area. What you describe doesn't match the reality in most of the rest of the state. And while there are pockets of segregation and racism in Northern California by and large there are very few places as diverse as the Bay Area on Earth, much less the rest of America and particularly the south.
  - davidw 8y ago
    Houston is one of the most diverse cities in the US, because they allow people - and not just wealthy people - to live there.
    - hindsightbias 8y ago
      apples and oranges. Houston is over 600 sq miles, the metro area is 1000S. If you’re going to compare SF and Texas, start with Highland Park, Bunker Hill, 78746 or the Montrose.
rglullis 8y ago
Until SF becomes more willing to regulate companies... Alternatively, SF (and the rest of the world) could stop accepting lobbying as an acceptable practice, and your loop breaks. ;) Lobbying is the problem. Asking for more regulations when there are still opportunities for the big companies to get what they want through lobbying will never solve the problem.
- kerkeslager 8y ago
  I think we're in agreement; I view anti-lobbying regulation as a form of regulation. :)
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
throwaway284721 8y ago
Since when is cleaning the streets the responsibility of private companies?
- ageitgey 8y ago
  Since literally the last 30 years in almost every major city [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_improvement_district https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_improvement_district [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_improvement_districts_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_improvement_districts...

mushufasa 8y ago

Absolutely. One thing most people don't realize is that citizens own corporations. Retail investors (anyone with retirement accounts) own or are beneficial owners of the majority of public company common stock. And as shareowners, you have rights. So, you can change this loop if as a shareowner, you change what happens between steps 1 and 2 by engaging with those companies. I built this site to try and make that process accessible. For example, this NGO campaign for fund managers to require companies to disclose political spending: https://www.yourstake.org/campaign/disclose-corporate-political-activity/ https://www.yourstake.org/campaign/disclose-corporate-politi...

kerkeslager 8y ago
While I applaud your intentions and effort, you're basically hoping that we can start trusting companies to self-regulate if we ask them to do so nicely. I suspect any change in spending habits you might see from companies would fall under what I mentioned: > "Companies might choose one or two social issues to do good on for marketing purposes, while creating equal or greater harm in other areas." So in this case you'd see companies saying, "Look how transparent we are about our lobbying! Look how we're only lobbying for carbon emissions regulation!" Meanwhile they've bought up a massive campus and put spikes on the sidewalks to prevent the homeless from sleeping there, and pay 75% of their workers minimum wage. And that's even if the disclosure of their political spending gives an accurate impression. It's quite easy to publicly spend to support an anti-carbon-emissions bill that will make a councilman's career, in order to buy that councilman's vote against the housing bill that would hurt your business. In the disclosure, it looks like your political spending was anti-carbon-emissions, when in reality it was anti-homeless. It's not plausible for average citizens to become educated and do enough research to catch companies doing this in every case: there are too many companies and it's too complex. It's the job of politicians to do that research and regulate accordingly, and we need to empower them to do that, and elect politicians who will use that power effectively. The only way out of this that I can see is to not allow companies to spend on politics at all--voters have the sole right to determine our politics, and that right needs to be protected from corporate spending.

terandle 8y ago

What sort of regulations are you looking for? I’m just not sure how regulating a company will end homelessness. Seems like the government should be using taxes to do that.

kerkeslager 8y ago
Well, to start, you have to close loopholes which allow corporations to dodge taxes to even be able to collect taxes to begin with. I'm not sure where you're drawing the line between regulation and taxation; they go hand-in-hand. I don't have enough context to say what's the best regulation to end homelessness in SF, as I have lived more in NYC area and am more familiar with NYC-specific problems than SF, but some ideas: 1. Require builders to build a certain percentage of low-income housing for every unit of high-income housing they build. 2. Require property owners to fill properties in a certain timeframe, rather than leaving properties empty waiting for a high-paying tenant, or simply keeping them as an investment. 3. Higher minimum wage so people at the bottom can afford housing. 4. Require a smaller pay gap between highest-paid and lowest-paid employees of a company (this addresses the corporate threat that if they are forced to pay higher minimum wages, they'll just raise their prices--the money for minimum salaries comes out of CEO's salaries instead of inflation).
- TuringNYC 8y ago
  I'd add point 0: 0. Allow increase in supply, which fixes most other problems. Stop artificially constraining supply and allow more manhattanization.

apexalpha 8y ago

Coupled with the standard MBA phrase "companies are a-moral". Disconnecting them from any community they serve, work in or deal with.

kerkeslager 8y ago
Well, I tend to agree. Companies are amoral. Where I disagree with the MBAs who say this is the underlying belief, that companies can't be blamed for their actions. They can and should be blamed for their actions. When an individual behaves amorally, we put them in jail. When a company behaves amorally, we say "companies are amoral, we can't do anything about it!" If companies really are amoral, then we should treat them as a threat just like we treat amoral people as threats.

zaroth 8y ago

The companies are also the ones trying to build the new housing atop that laundromat, or open that ice cream shop. I’m not sure how you could read TFA and come away with companies need more regulations? True or not it seems besides the point. The soul of SF is empty as long as the laws and regulations of the city serve only the wealthy. The policies of the overwhelmingly democratic city have created a festering menagerie of wealthy post-IPO wunderkin and drugged homeless masses. The people that used to live in that city now drive 3 hours to get to their medial job in the city cleaning, catering, delivering, or transporting the rich urbanites. More corporate regulation? I don’t get it.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

KirinDave 8y ago

Pardon me, what? SF has a minority of VCs caught in this loop. You're talking about the folks 40 (okay well it's a Tuesday at 7am, so 90) minutes south driving on 280. To seamlessly conflate them is not my experience, and I have been working in SF for over 10 years in startups in various stages of creation or acquisition.

rayiner 8y ago

Companies are not the problem, San Franciscans are the problem. By all accounts, Texas regulates companies less than California. But Texas is at the national average in cost-of-living adjusted poverty rate, despite being a majority-minority state, while California tops the charts in poverty: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2018/08/27/of-the-5-big-states-texas-1-for-growth-california-1-for-poverty/amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevor.... As compared to California, Texas also has much higher rates of home ownership and lower unemployment for Hispanic people, with a lower Hispanic-White gap on both metrics. (The home ownership rate for Hispanics in Texas, 55%, is closer to that of Whites in California, 62%, than to Hispanics in California, 42%.) I spent almost two weeks recently in east Texas. I was shocked. It was a more diverse and egalitarian place by a good margin than San Francisco or Palo Alto. Everyone shopping at the same stores and eating at the same restaurants. Versus my memory of Palo Alto, where you’d only see whites and Asians in one place, and Hispanic people over in East Palo Alto (or in service jobs). It’s the difference between a functional, integrated society and a broken one.

sidlls 8y ago
You must have visited a relatively "blue" urban area. What you describe doesn't match the reality in most of the rest of the state. And while there are pockets of segregation and racism in Northern California by and large there are very few places as diverse as the Bay Area on Earth, much less the rest of America and particularly the south.
- davidw 8y ago
  Houston is one of the most diverse cities in the US, because they allow people - and not just wealthy people - to live there.
  - hindsightbias 8y ago
    apples and oranges. Houston is over 600 sq miles, the metro area is 1000S. If you’re going to compare SF and Texas, start with Highland Park, Bunker Hill, 78746 or the Montrose.

rglullis 8y ago

Until SF becomes more willing to regulate companies... Alternatively, SF (and the rest of the world) could stop accepting lobbying as an acceptable practice, and your loop breaks. ;) Lobbying is the problem. Asking for more regulations when there are still opportunities for the big companies to get what they want through lobbying will never solve the problem.

kerkeslager 8y ago
I think we're in agreement; I view anti-lobbying regulation as a form of regulation. :)

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

throwaway284721 8y ago

Since when is cleaning the streets the responsibility of private companies?

ageitgey 8y ago
Since literally the last 30 years in almost every major city [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_improvement_district https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_improvement_district [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_improvement_districts_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_improvement_districts...