7 ms·

The idea of trusting any institution whose naked reason for existing is making money is absurd. Neither employees nor customers should expect anything from busi

The idea of trusting any institution whose naked reason for existing is making money is absurd. Neither employees nor customers should expect anything from businesses but a concerted, rational, attempt to separate them from whatever value they might be capable of giving up and as cheaply as possible. Its crazy that these institutions, which are fully rational in their pursuit of profit, want to gussy up their relationship with customers and employees as "personal" when it manifestly isn't. They see you as an entry in a spreadsheet but they want you to see them as a warm friend.

mistermann 7y ago
> The idea of trusting any institution whose naked reason for existing is making money is absurd. Neither employees nor customers should expect anything from businesses but a concerted, rational, attempt to separate them from whatever value they might be capable of giving up and as cheaply as possible. Does this go for all businesses though? I know plenty of locally owned shops that certainly don't act in this way, and even some corporations like Costco aren't guilty of this, at least in my opinion.
- vincent-toups 7y ago
  The extent to which a business, in the current context, deviates from these behaviors is precisely the extent to which it is vulnerable to activist investors and other hyper-capitalists taking it over and liquidating it in favor of a more "efficient" model. Its no coincidence that these very sectors (locally owned businesses) are being squeezed out of the markets - they aren't "rational" enough.
danharaj 7y ago
> The idea of trusting any institution whose naked reason for existing is making money is absurd. There is an entire ideology that believes this trust could be the basis for society :^)
- vincent-toups 7y ago
  Which one?
- antepodius 7y ago
  Socialism?
chasd00 7y ago
I've always felt the common relationship between employer/employee was strange. One one hand you have employers who demand loyalty and commitment, on the other you have employees who have the "i've worked here so long, you owe me" mentality. To me, unless your paycheck bounces then your employer doesn't owe you anything. As for employees, unless you're cheating your employer out of what they're getting for their money then employees owe their employer nothing. if you go to work, do your job as per the job description and contract you signed and, in return, your employer compensates you per the contract then the deal is square. The "relationship" from business to customer is even more ridiculous. From my perspective as a customer, i'm giving you money in exchange for something of equal value subject to the terms of deal. That's it. To say an organization is a "trusted friend", whether for-profit or not, is crazy.
- vincent-toups 7y ago
  I actually believe that this state of affairs is really unhealthy for human beings, who are psychologically constructed to want actual relationships rather than transactions in their life. But it is the current paradigm.
  - chasd00 7y ago
    i know what you mean but work is not the place for that. Your life is the place for that but I'm opening a whole other can of discussion worms.
- yardie 7y ago
  > To me, unless your paycheck bounces then your employer doesn't owe you anything. I so wish this was the case. But in the interest if saving a few dollars now employers have increasingly relied on "the benefits" to offset costs. How many people get a company phone so they can be reached out of the office? Or, in the case of government and education employees, take a smaller paycheck now knowing the pension plan is going to a defined installment later on. In some cases I've offered to take slightly reduced pay just so I can have a more vacation time. Every time it's been denied. Because they know if they agree to it they are beholden to it. They don't care about the money. They want control of your personal life.
youareostriches 7y ago
This is completely true, but that doesn’t mean we should have to accept it as a static unchangeable property of this society. Corporate charters can be changed. The legal model of corporations can be altered to place other values (such as environmental stewardship, equality, privacy, etc.) ahead of raw shareholder profit. In fact, this was literally the result of the FTC’s latest decision on Facebook, which required a privacy committee on the board of directors independent from the shareholder majority (Zuckerberg). We can choose to enact a better model of corporations for society.
- vincent-toups 7y ago
  Right, but the critical idea here is that _we_ are acting on _them_. It is not a cooperative relationship. The public good should come first and it is entirely within the purview of the people to bring these large institutions to heel. Certainly we shouldn't be sopped with hollow rhetoric about "trust".
forgotAgain 7y ago
The idea of trusting any institution whose naked reason for existing is making money is absurd How ironic that the idea that businesses only exists to make money for their owners came from the same institution as the article.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  The shareholder value myth emerged from Chicago, not Harvard, FWIW.
  - forgotAgain 7y ago
    Thank you for the correction. I was referring to Jensen and Meckling https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=94043 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=94043 but the basis was Friedman.
closeparen 7y ago
I trust a rational, profit motivated actor much more than one intended to promote an ideology, a personality cult, family and friends of insiders, etc. Personal relationships depend on complicated and fickle social systems such as liking, jealousy, status, piety, taste, sexual attraction, gender roles, etc. Keep that shit out of the food supply. You eat because you provide value to your neighbors, not because the right people on your local committee get good vibes from hanging out. Economic systems should not resemble college fraternities. That’s been tried, and it’s a thousand times worse.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  >I trust a rational, profit motivated actor much more than one intended to promote an ideology, a personality cult, family and friends of insiders... You shouldn't. Many "rational, profit motivated actor" absolutely promote the use of "family and friends of insiders" all the time. And they are obviously promoting an ideology. Maybe you have an affinity with that particular ideology, and that's fine. Just saying that those motivated by profit or power, are the same as those motivated by ideology and religion. Any one of them would sell you, or your grandmother out in a nanosecond if they could get what they wanted out of that exchange.
- vincent-toups 7y ago
  You're probably right and this is a total 100% dichotomy between naked, machine like capitalism and Soviet style central planning with Gulags etc.
  - HarryHirsch 7y ago
    When you think about it, it's perhaps less certain. Consider a supercapitalist company like Amazon, where engineers are fired when they have outlived their usefulness, and Soviet Russia under Stalin, where the constant purges ensured loyalty and provided new blood in the administrative ranks. Both Bezos and Stalin had no patience for timewasters, Bezos is known to run tight meetings. Central planning works on the level of the Firm.
    - 7y ago
jhanschoo 7y ago
The article defines what it means by trust in this way. > Trust, as defined by organizational scholars, is our willingness to be vulnerable to the actions of others because we believe they have good intentions and will behave well toward us. By the definition, there are many circumstances where rational, selfish individuals can trust each other: when their interests align in a way that communicating honestly and working together is optimal for their own selfish profit. So, there is room for trust. In addition, the game-theoretic space is large enough and the lack of global information is severe enough that it is not certain in many situations whether betraying trust is indeed the optimal decision in the long run. Hence in many situations even in the most supposedly rational institutions there is a lot of leeway for its people to decide how the institution should communicate, and its strategy for profit. On the other hand, the reality is that many institutions aren't rational at all but heavily embody the culture and motivations of its decision makers. You can even think of it rationally like this: letting X person make decisions, regardless of their irrationality, has Y and Z assets, and it is in the company's best interests to secure Y and Z assets by letting X make decisions. In any case, I think that viewing institutions as rational machines optimizing for profit is hopelessly naive, and likewise for the conclusion.
- paulddraper 7y ago
  Yes, I trust them to act in their own selfish interest. If my interests align with theirs, then I also trust them to act in my interests. If my interests do not align with theirs, then I do not trust them to act in my interests. --- Individually, people have things like religion, families, love interests, mental disorders, etc. There is no singular, easily definable reason for their existence. Each is driven differently. Trusting an individual is a case-by-case thing. Capitalist businesses, on the other hand, have essentially one universal, defining purpose: to add financial value to their owners. They exist insofar as they accomplish that purpose. --- FWIW, Adam Smith had enormous trust/faith/whatever that groups of people in the market would act in their own interests. It's why he thought of the invisible hand as so reliable.
  - choward 7y ago
    > If my interests align with theirs, then I also trust them to act in my interests. Your interest would have to be making them money, so you would have to be a shareholder. Otherwise there is a 0% chance your interests will align with their interests.
rayiner 7y ago
Self interest doesn’t preclude trust because in general it’s good for your bottom line to do good things for your customers. To use an example, millions of parents trust daycares with their children, which typically are profit-seeking entities.
- petra 7y ago
  People in daycares are punished, severely, if they harm a child. And they deeply care about the children. But at most corporations, there are no large punishments, people are very far, psychologically from the results of their actions, they are guided by authority and peer pressure and the punishment for betrayel is pretty bad. All those conditions are known to generate bad behaviours among people. As for the self interest of big organizations ? Eh. There are so many cases of big organizations with quite bad intentions, so it isn't something that could be trusted upon.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    Sure, daycares are regulated to establish certain minimum conduct. That floor is quite below what most people would want for their own child. Daycare workers are not punished merely for being inattentive, unaffectionate, etc. While there is a floor, parents shop around on many dimensions: teacher quality, activities, facilities, etc. And somehow, profit-seeking corporations deliver on those things. (The daycare my son attends is run by a big corporation with 24,000 employees. It’s much better than the government-run daycare in Virginia my daughter used to attend, though not as good as the big-name franchise daycare my daughter used to attend.) It’s easy to be a knee-jerk cynic, but big organizations deliver great products and services all the time. Apple, for example, doesn’t build insane brand loyalty on the back of nickel and dimeing customers. You’re probably very happy with your car, your HVAC unit, your toothbrush, your bicycle, your dish soap, your mattress, stove, fridge, etc. People love Costco, Whole Foods, ALDI, Target, Trader Joe’s, etc. They love their mass-market beer, movies, cereal, burgers, etc. Even companies that people love to hate, for the most part, satisfy their customers. Nearly 3/4 of people report being “happy” with their cellular service: https://qtxasset.com/styles/breakpoint_xl_880px_w/s3/fiercewireless/1532704960/cowen-survey.jpg?3VGfVM61mmH3JtB1wiLcEV41FR5nKQE7&itok=CZ50cgMP https://qtxasset.com/styles/breakpoint_xl_880px_w/s3/fiercew....
simonebrunozzi 7y ago
100% agree. Latest example that irritated me: "Thanks for being part of the T-Mobile family". Family, really?
analog31 7y ago
Perhaps there's an alternative to trust, which is to accept and plan for a finite risk of betrayal.

mistermann 7y ago

> The idea of trusting any institution whose naked reason for existing is making money is absurd. Neither employees nor customers should expect anything from businesses but a concerted, rational, attempt to separate them from whatever value they might be capable of giving up and as cheaply as possible. Does this go for all businesses though? I know plenty of locally owned shops that certainly don't act in this way, and even some corporations like Costco aren't guilty of this, at least in my opinion.

vincent-toups 7y ago
The extent to which a business, in the current context, deviates from these behaviors is precisely the extent to which it is vulnerable to activist investors and other hyper-capitalists taking it over and liquidating it in favor of a more "efficient" model. Its no coincidence that these very sectors (locally owned businesses) are being squeezed out of the markets - they aren't "rational" enough.

danharaj 7y ago

> The idea of trusting any institution whose naked reason for existing is making money is absurd. There is an entire ideology that believes this trust could be the basis for society :^)

vincent-toups 7y ago
Which one?
antepodius 7y ago
Socialism?

chasd00 7y ago

I've always felt the common relationship between employer/employee was strange. One one hand you have employers who demand loyalty and commitment, on the other you have employees who have the "i've worked here so long, you owe me" mentality. To me, unless your paycheck bounces then your employer doesn't owe you anything. As for employees, unless you're cheating your employer out of what they're getting for their money then employees owe their employer nothing. if you go to work, do your job as per the job description and contract you signed and, in return, your employer compensates you per the contract then the deal is square. The "relationship" from business to customer is even more ridiculous. From my perspective as a customer, i'm giving you money in exchange for something of equal value subject to the terms of deal. That's it. To say an organization is a "trusted friend", whether for-profit or not, is crazy.

vincent-toups 7y ago
I actually believe that this state of affairs is really unhealthy for human beings, who are psychologically constructed to want actual relationships rather than transactions in their life. But it is the current paradigm.
- chasd00 7y ago
  i know what you mean but work is not the place for that. Your life is the place for that but I'm opening a whole other can of discussion worms.
yardie 7y ago
> To me, unless your paycheck bounces then your employer doesn't owe you anything. I so wish this was the case. But in the interest if saving a few dollars now employers have increasingly relied on "the benefits" to offset costs. How many people get a company phone so they can be reached out of the office? Or, in the case of government and education employees, take a smaller paycheck now knowing the pension plan is going to a defined installment later on. In some cases I've offered to take slightly reduced pay just so I can have a more vacation time. Every time it's been denied. Because they know if they agree to it they are beholden to it. They don't care about the money. They want control of your personal life.

youareostriches 7y ago

This is completely true, but that doesn’t mean we should have to accept it as a static unchangeable property of this society. Corporate charters can be changed. The legal model of corporations can be altered to place other values (such as environmental stewardship, equality, privacy, etc.) ahead of raw shareholder profit. In fact, this was literally the result of the FTC’s latest decision on Facebook, which required a privacy committee on the board of directors independent from the shareholder majority (Zuckerberg). We can choose to enact a better model of corporations for society.

vincent-toups 7y ago
Right, but the critical idea here is that _we_ are acting on _them_. It is not a cooperative relationship. The public good should come first and it is entirely within the purview of the people to bring these large institutions to heel. Certainly we shouldn't be sopped with hollow rhetoric about "trust".

forgotAgain 7y ago

The idea of trusting any institution whose naked reason for existing is making money is absurd How ironic that the idea that businesses only exists to make money for their owners came from the same institution as the article.

dredmorbius 7y ago
The shareholder value myth emerged from Chicago, not Harvard, FWIW.
- forgotAgain 7y ago
  Thank you for the correction. I was referring to Jensen and Meckling https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=94043 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=94043 but the basis was Friedman.

closeparen 7y ago

I trust a rational, profit motivated actor much more than one intended to promote an ideology, a personality cult, family and friends of insiders, etc. Personal relationships depend on complicated and fickle social systems such as liking, jealousy, status, piety, taste, sexual attraction, gender roles, etc. Keep that shit out of the food supply. You eat because you provide value to your neighbors, not because the right people on your local committee get good vibes from hanging out. Economic systems should not resemble college fraternities. That’s been tried, and it’s a thousand times worse.

bilbo0s 7y ago
>I trust a rational, profit motivated actor much more than one intended to promote an ideology, a personality cult, family and friends of insiders... You shouldn't. Many "rational, profit motivated actor" absolutely promote the use of "family and friends of insiders" all the time. And they are obviously promoting an ideology. Maybe you have an affinity with that particular ideology, and that's fine. Just saying that those motivated by profit or power, are the same as those motivated by ideology and religion. Any one of them would sell you, or your grandmother out in a nanosecond if they could get what they wanted out of that exchange.
vincent-toups 7y ago
You're probably right and this is a total 100% dichotomy between naked, machine like capitalism and Soviet style central planning with Gulags etc.
- HarryHirsch 7y ago
  When you think about it, it's perhaps less certain. Consider a supercapitalist company like Amazon, where engineers are fired when they have outlived their usefulness, and Soviet Russia under Stalin, where the constant purges ensured loyalty and provided new blood in the administrative ranks. Both Bezos and Stalin had no patience for timewasters, Bezos is known to run tight meetings. Central planning works on the level of the Firm.
  - 7y ago

jhanschoo 7y ago

The article defines what it means by trust in this way. > Trust, as defined by organizational scholars, is our willingness to be vulnerable to the actions of others because we believe they have good intentions and will behave well toward us. By the definition, there are many circumstances where rational, selfish individuals can trust each other: when their interests align in a way that communicating honestly and working together is optimal for their own selfish profit. So, there is room for trust. In addition, the game-theoretic space is large enough and the lack of global information is severe enough that it is not certain in many situations whether betraying trust is indeed the optimal decision in the long run. Hence in many situations even in the most supposedly rational institutions there is a lot of leeway for its people to decide how the institution should communicate, and its strategy for profit. On the other hand, the reality is that many institutions aren't rational at all but heavily embody the culture and motivations of its decision makers. You can even think of it rationally like this: letting X person make decisions, regardless of their irrationality, has Y and Z assets, and it is in the company's best interests to secure Y and Z assets by letting X make decisions. In any case, I think that viewing institutions as rational machines optimizing for profit is hopelessly naive, and likewise for the conclusion.

paulddraper 7y ago
Yes, I trust them to act in their own selfish interest. If my interests align with theirs, then I also trust them to act in my interests. If my interests do not align with theirs, then I do not trust them to act in my interests. --- Individually, people have things like religion, families, love interests, mental disorders, etc. There is no singular, easily definable reason for their existence. Each is driven differently. Trusting an individual is a case-by-case thing. Capitalist businesses, on the other hand, have essentially one universal, defining purpose: to add financial value to their owners. They exist insofar as they accomplish that purpose. --- FWIW, Adam Smith had enormous trust/faith/whatever that groups of people in the market would act in their own interests. It's why he thought of the invisible hand as so reliable.
- choward 7y ago
  > If my interests align with theirs, then I also trust them to act in my interests. Your interest would have to be making them money, so you would have to be a shareholder. Otherwise there is a 0% chance your interests will align with their interests.

rayiner 7y ago

Self interest doesn’t preclude trust because in general it’s good for your bottom line to do good things for your customers. To use an example, millions of parents trust daycares with their children, which typically are profit-seeking entities.

petra 7y ago
People in daycares are punished, severely, if they harm a child. And they deeply care about the children. But at most corporations, there are no large punishments, people are very far, psychologically from the results of their actions, they are guided by authority and peer pressure and the punishment for betrayel is pretty bad. All those conditions are known to generate bad behaviours among people. As for the self interest of big organizations ? Eh. There are so many cases of big organizations with quite bad intentions, so it isn't something that could be trusted upon.
- rayiner 7y ago
  Sure, daycares are regulated to establish certain minimum conduct. That floor is quite below what most people would want for their own child. Daycare workers are not punished merely for being inattentive, unaffectionate, etc. While there is a floor, parents shop around on many dimensions: teacher quality, activities, facilities, etc. And somehow, profit-seeking corporations deliver on those things. (The daycare my son attends is run by a big corporation with 24,000 employees. It’s much better than the government-run daycare in Virginia my daughter used to attend, though not as good as the big-name franchise daycare my daughter used to attend.) It’s easy to be a knee-jerk cynic, but big organizations deliver great products and services all the time. Apple, for example, doesn’t build insane brand loyalty on the back of nickel and dimeing customers. You’re probably very happy with your car, your HVAC unit, your toothbrush, your bicycle, your dish soap, your mattress, stove, fridge, etc. People love Costco, Whole Foods, ALDI, Target, Trader Joe’s, etc. They love their mass-market beer, movies, cereal, burgers, etc. Even companies that people love to hate, for the most part, satisfy their customers. Nearly 3/4 of people report being “happy” with their cellular service: https://qtxasset.com/styles/breakpoint_xl_880px_w/s3/fiercewireless/1532704960/cowen-survey.jpg?3VGfVM61mmH3JtB1wiLcEV41FR5nKQE7&itok=CZ50cgMP https://qtxasset.com/styles/breakpoint_xl_880px_w/s3/fiercew....

simonebrunozzi 7y ago

100% agree. Latest example that irritated me: "Thanks for being part of the T-Mobile family". Family, really?

analog31 7y ago

Perhaps there's an alternative to trust, which is to accept and plan for a finite risk of betrayal.