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> It’s part of the structural inequality in our society, where we’re building businesses that are optimized for their financial return rather than their return

> It’s part of the structural inequality in our society, where we’re building businesses that are optimized for their financial return rather than their return to society. Isn't this the whole problem? If people cared about society more than money it wouldn't be a problem to invest or take investment money, because you'd all be working toward the same goal of maximizing returns to "society". The problem is greed and selfish pursuit of wealth by certain kinds of people who see that as a worthwhile purpose for their life.

ashtonkem 6y ago
I’m not even sure if a lot of these businesses do that. Some of them seem more like a mechanism to shovel VC money around than an actual plan on how to make a product or service that’ll make money.
luckylion 6y ago
> If people cared about society more than money it wouldn't be a problem to invest or take investment money, because you'd all be working toward the same goal of maximizing returns to "society". We have a hard time deciding what is best for "society" and how to achieve it. Using money as votes is working pretty well: people get to choose what they prefer from multiple offers, they clearly say what they care about the most (by spending most of their disposable income on it), which then incentivizes more people to look at solving problems in that area. Sure, we could have lots of large meetings, or 100 levels of small elections etc pp, but this works pretty efficiently and without too much coordination. Yes, it also creates some issues, but in general I think the issues are by far outweighed by the benefits.
- minerjoe 6y ago
  A fish doesn't understand the water it swims in. Have you truly thought about what the "some issues" of money in todays society truly are. What are the true costs? What did we, as a society, lose? Here's an example. Just a few hundred years ago, many (most?) transactions were not via money, but via person to person interactions. These interactions were the binding connection points in the society. The people you would interact with , depend apon, and be depended apon, etc. These have been ripped away and we've been given a very poor substitute. It's a drug. A quick fix and a substitute for true wealth. Need a shirt, go buy a shirt with no idea how, where, when, or why it was made and no connection to the ecological damage that it most probably contributed. Acquiring a shirt, back in the day, could involve many local interactions and could help further strengthen your local economy and society.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    > These interactions were the binding connection points in the society. They were also terribly inefficient. If you had apples, I wanted apples and had chickens but you didn't need chickens, but would love some potatoes, we'd now have to go and find somebody that would complete the chain at the right time, for the right amount. That quickly gets annoying, so we might say "ah, whatever, you're going to need chickens some day in the future, how about I just give you a paper that guarantees to you that I will give you three chickens when you bring back that paper to me?" and that's just fine. Now, next week you want some honey, and the bee keeper will trade for chickens, but you really don't want to keep running back and forth and transport the chickens around town, so you just give him the note and he will come to me and get the chickens. We've now created a currency, albeit a simple one, backed by chickens. Money is such a currency, it just makes trading more efficient. I'm all with you that local economies and intricate webs of relationships are important, but I disagree that they're so important that it makes sense to run after a shirt for days. Yes, sure, you'll meet plenty of interesting people, talk to old friends etc etc, but at some point you have to raise your chickens and fix your roof, you can't spend all of your time doing side quests for barter items.
    - minerjoe 6y ago
      > They were also terribly inefficient. "They" -- we would have to nail down what you are referring to as I doubt that you or I know about all the previous economic systems or if it is even fair to lump them all together. And we'd have to figure out what "inefficient" means here and if it is even a bad thing. I'd love some "inefficiency" in todays chasing after god money -- clear-cutting old growth forests, fracking massive expanses of untouched land, fast fast fast FAST. Better get out of the way or we'll call in TigerSwan and the like because you're getting in the way of "efficiency". Your story about the apples is nice, but it is a story that probably has little resemblance to some of these systems. Many of the systems did not operate like the mythical barter system that is told to young aspiring economists. At all. Tribal gift economies. Not chasing after shirts for days, but playing your role in the small society and having all of your needs met.
      - 6y ago
forgot_user1234 6y ago
Money is the worst proxy for optimising returns for the society. Lemme know if you have anything better. Greed and selfish pursuit leads to wealth creation
- neltnerb 6y ago
  Our representatives are theoretically responsible for balancing different social interests, including social welfare and money. I think that is better. I'd rather fix the thing where elected officials don't seem to do that job rather than just throwing up my hands and saying the market knows best... seems like a pretty extreme position to just say that money and pricing is the only tool in the toolbox.
  - forgot_user1234 6y ago
    > balancing different social interests okay. how can you measure social welfare? > seems like a pretty extreme position to just say that money and pricing is the only tool in the toolbox. I never said that. You said it. You countered it.
- amelius 6y ago
  > Greed and selfish pursuit leads to wealth creation Yeah, but for the people doing the actual work or not?
  - forgot_user1234 6y ago
    If you create value for others and they show there happiness with money. Congrats you are rich
    - amelius 6y ago
      People in sweatshops create a lot of value for others ...
- Barrin92 6y ago
  >Lemme know if you have anything better. I think there are some pretty obvious things. Improvement of the environment, health, safety, educational attainment, military prowess and so on. As Michael Sandel put it, since the 80s we've moved from a market economy to a market society. Markets aren't used as tools any more to further social ends, they've become ends in themselves. We don't measure success in human flourishing, we measure it in dollars. Ironically this has made much long-term wealth creation impossible. Many companies in Silicon Valley were sustained by the government pursuing strategic goals, in particular the military. Industrial ecosystems don't spring out of the ground because of selfishness and greed, they're created by institutions.
robertlagrant 6y ago
> If people cared about society more than money Money is only a way to measure relative value of one thing vs another to people who have things (or time) want things (or time). Money is the wrong thing to focus on. It's like blaming air for carrying bad words.
- meheleventyone 6y ago
  Doesn’t the parent mean “acquiring money” rather than money as a concept? It’s people’s relationship to money that is being criticised rather than money itself. To rephrase what I believe the intent was “if people cared about improving society more than acquiring money”.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    But "acquiring money" from others means, if you follow the idea of money as a placeholder for value, "producing value" for others. That's absolutely what we want. That is: if you care about society, you will want to produce something of value for your fellow beings in that society. Them giving you money is them saying "I like what you do", essentially. Of course it's not that simple, and of course every system gets gamed and you have irrational actors everywhere and customers get lured with false promises etc, but does it matter at the scale of the economy itself? For example, if you look at the US with a GDP of 20 trillion dollars and you believe that celebrities getting huge amounts of money is stupid and they don't actually add value ... How much do they "misdirect", 10bn per year? That seems like a small price to pay compared to the big picture. Like taking a life-saving medication but having to deal with a rash or occasional constipation as a side effect, not using the medication because of this undesired side-effect seems foolish.
    - sukilot 6y ago
      "Celebrities" are misdirection. They generally he tmoney for value. Money siphoned by bankers and defense contractors and predatory advertisers are the real waste.
      - 6y ago
fsckboy 6y ago
according to standard economics, and all economists from right to left agree on this: money is the measure of value to society. (I changed the word "return" to "money" because return essentially means profit and when you make a selling or purchasing decision, you receive or pay the full price, not just the profit so your decision is a money decision, not a return decision.) That doesn't mean the rest of the argument he's making (and you are believing) fails, it means you are getting confused by stuff that economists clarified a long long time ago. There are many effects that distort people's decisions such that the wrong people benefit vs the wrong people who pay, but try to fix that and then just never never let it be said that we should not pursue returns, that's pure nonsense.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  Money is a measure of value, but the standard for assigning value is mostly emotional. Buy anything at retail, then try to sell it. You'll always take a bath, because the retail (whether a store or Amazon) experience adds value. The same thing happens in business.
- tasty_freeze 6y ago
  > money is the measure of value to society The internalization of this leads rich people to conclude they are rich because the provided even more value to the world than they kept to themselves, otherwise they wouldn't have paid them so well. The richer they are the more they think they think they are benefactors and any complaints about how they acquired their wealth is just jealousy or, uh, socialism or something. Sometimes it is the case that the wealthy have contributed something of such value that the world is better off, sometimes not. A drug company taking a 40 year old out of patent drug that has a stable but fixed market can increase shareholder returns by increasing the price 5-fold if they've cornered the market on this niche drug. Did they really do anything good for society? It sure doesn't seem that way, even if they are "creating value" by jacking up the price. The kneejerk reaction of many is to say I should start a company to compete with that predatory pricing model. But that is naive because (a) there are lots of moats to cross to get there and (b) even if stuck it out, I know that the predatory company can drop the price in an instant and use their scale and place as the market leader to crush my nascent company. So nobody does it.
sacred_numbers 6y ago
A related problem is the compounding nature of wealth. Let's say there are 100 investors with a million dollars each. 90% of the investors pursue socially beneficial projects and make a respectable 10% average annual return. The remaining 10% of investors pursue profit maximizing ventures and make 20% per year. Within about 25 years the profit maximizing investors have more wealth. Within about 50 years the profit maximizing group has 90% of the wealth. Chastising the profit maximizing group doesn't really change anything. Not because they don't deserve to be chastised, but because even if the vast majority of them defect to the social good group it only delays the outcome where the profit maximizers own everything. I think the solution is to incentivize socially valuable businesses and de-incentivize less socially valuable businesses. One example of this would be a carbon tax. Another example would be for Medicare to only pay hospitals that charged the same price to both insurance companies and individuals. There are major concerns about companies gaming these incentives, but companies are taking advantage of the lack of disincentives right now anyways, so I don't think the outcome would be any worse.
- sukilot 6y ago
  Corporations used to have to justify their charter by showing how their enterprise helped society. And charters were temporary. Now corporations have more rights than humans and people who have corporations are nigh untouchable by law for their crimes and civil torts. There's no justification for this. A sufficiently ethical government could rein in corporations tomorrow.
  - closeparen 6y ago
    In general, the problem with "all actions are banned unless they benefit society" is that people who have different opinions about society's best interests need to coexist.
  - mjcohen 6y ago
    I like that - "sufficiently ethical government" - funny without being vulgar.
dgudkov 6y ago
>The problem is greed and selfish pursuit of wealth by certain kinds of people who see that as a worthwhile purpose for their life. Well, isn't it the essence of capitalism and free markets? Isn't it how the deeply individualist Western democracies work - let people follow their greed and ambition, but surround them with legal fences, milk them for taxes, and use the collected taxes for the common good. It's like operating a nuclear reactor. Give it too much freedom and it will blow up and poison everything around. Restrain it too much, and it's output will quickly drop. The current social model isn't perfect, but no better social model has been invented so far.
- minerjoe 6y ago
  I would argue that, depending on your value sytem, many better social models have been invented and flourished for thousands of years. They didn't value property or money nor care to commit genocide to further expansion and hence were basically wiped out. Just because the psycopathic murderers won does not make their world view a "better social model".
  - dgudkov 6y ago
    Not going to argue, just curious what social models of the past you consider as better ones?
    - minerjoe 6y ago
      I would consider the tribal gift economies of many of the American Indian tribes as "better". Moraly, ecologically, and spiritually. Minimal ecological damage and some would argue, me included, that they operated more as stewards improving much of the land they lived on. They cherished and took care of their elders. They worked a hell of a lot less hours than we do. And here's the kicker, they valued listening, honesty and respect. Can you even imagine living in such a society?
- baddox 6y ago
  > let people follow their greed and ambition, but surround them with legal fences It’s a shame they didn’t think of the obvious loophole that some people get so wealthy that they can use their wealth to influence those “fences.”
nickik 6y ago
The old doing things for money is inherently evil philosophy coming out again? If everybody could just live in love and harmony and to work towards a common goal. > The problem is greed and selfish pursuit of wealth by certain kinds of people who see that as a worthwhile purpose for their life. No. The problem is not pursuit of wealth but when that pursuit leads to breaking of the law or focus on changing political outcomes. To be successful society needs to have good laws and enforcement and a stable political system. The problem is when those things are not correct, not 'greed and selfishness'. Trying to change human greed and selfishness or setting changing that as a necessary goal to improve the world will always fail. In fact people who wanted to earn money for themselves and their families have overall done a huge mount of good in the world.

ashtonkem 6y ago

I’m not even sure if a lot of these businesses do that. Some of them seem more like a mechanism to shovel VC money around than an actual plan on how to make a product or service that’ll make money.

luckylion 6y ago

> If people cared about society more than money it wouldn't be a problem to invest or take investment money, because you'd all be working toward the same goal of maximizing returns to "society". We have a hard time deciding what is best for "society" and how to achieve it. Using money as votes is working pretty well: people get to choose what they prefer from multiple offers, they clearly say what they care about the most (by spending most of their disposable income on it), which then incentivizes more people to look at solving problems in that area. Sure, we could have lots of large meetings, or 100 levels of small elections etc pp, but this works pretty efficiently and without too much coordination. Yes, it also creates some issues, but in general I think the issues are by far outweighed by the benefits.

minerjoe 6y ago
A fish doesn't understand the water it swims in. Have you truly thought about what the "some issues" of money in todays society truly are. What are the true costs? What did we, as a society, lose? Here's an example. Just a few hundred years ago, many (most?) transactions were not via money, but via person to person interactions. These interactions were the binding connection points in the society. The people you would interact with , depend apon, and be depended apon, etc. These have been ripped away and we've been given a very poor substitute. It's a drug. A quick fix and a substitute for true wealth. Need a shirt, go buy a shirt with no idea how, where, when, or why it was made and no connection to the ecological damage that it most probably contributed. Acquiring a shirt, back in the day, could involve many local interactions and could help further strengthen your local economy and society.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > These interactions were the binding connection points in the society. They were also terribly inefficient. If you had apples, I wanted apples and had chickens but you didn't need chickens, but would love some potatoes, we'd now have to go and find somebody that would complete the chain at the right time, for the right amount. That quickly gets annoying, so we might say "ah, whatever, you're going to need chickens some day in the future, how about I just give you a paper that guarantees to you that I will give you three chickens when you bring back that paper to me?" and that's just fine. Now, next week you want some honey, and the bee keeper will trade for chickens, but you really don't want to keep running back and forth and transport the chickens around town, so you just give him the note and he will come to me and get the chickens. We've now created a currency, albeit a simple one, backed by chickens. Money is such a currency, it just makes trading more efficient. I'm all with you that local economies and intricate webs of relationships are important, but I disagree that they're so important that it makes sense to run after a shirt for days. Yes, sure, you'll meet plenty of interesting people, talk to old friends etc etc, but at some point you have to raise your chickens and fix your roof, you can't spend all of your time doing side quests for barter items.
  - minerjoe 6y ago
    > They were also terribly inefficient. "They" -- we would have to nail down what you are referring to as I doubt that you or I know about all the previous economic systems or if it is even fair to lump them all together. And we'd have to figure out what "inefficient" means here and if it is even a bad thing. I'd love some "inefficiency" in todays chasing after god money -- clear-cutting old growth forests, fracking massive expanses of untouched land, fast fast fast FAST. Better get out of the way or we'll call in TigerSwan and the like because you're getting in the way of "efficiency". Your story about the apples is nice, but it is a story that probably has little resemblance to some of these systems. Many of the systems did not operate like the mythical barter system that is told to young aspiring economists. At all. Tribal gift economies. Not chasing after shirts for days, but playing your role in the small society and having all of your needs met.
    - 6y ago

forgot_user1234 6y ago

Money is the worst proxy for optimising returns for the society. Lemme know if you have anything better. Greed and selfish pursuit leads to wealth creation

neltnerb 6y ago
Our representatives are theoretically responsible for balancing different social interests, including social welfare and money. I think that is better. I'd rather fix the thing where elected officials don't seem to do that job rather than just throwing up my hands and saying the market knows best... seems like a pretty extreme position to just say that money and pricing is the only tool in the toolbox.
- forgot_user1234 6y ago
  > balancing different social interests okay. how can you measure social welfare? > seems like a pretty extreme position to just say that money and pricing is the only tool in the toolbox. I never said that. You said it. You countered it.
amelius 6y ago
> Greed and selfish pursuit leads to wealth creation Yeah, but for the people doing the actual work or not?
- forgot_user1234 6y ago
  If you create value for others and they show there happiness with money. Congrats you are rich
  - amelius 6y ago
    People in sweatshops create a lot of value for others ...
Barrin92 6y ago
>Lemme know if you have anything better. I think there are some pretty obvious things. Improvement of the environment, health, safety, educational attainment, military prowess and so on. As Michael Sandel put it, since the 80s we've moved from a market economy to a market society. Markets aren't used as tools any more to further social ends, they've become ends in themselves. We don't measure success in human flourishing, we measure it in dollars. Ironically this has made much long-term wealth creation impossible. Many companies in Silicon Valley were sustained by the government pursuing strategic goals, in particular the military. Industrial ecosystems don't spring out of the ground because of selfishness and greed, they're created by institutions.

robertlagrant 6y ago

> If people cared about society more than money Money is only a way to measure relative value of one thing vs another to people who have things (or time) want things (or time). Money is the wrong thing to focus on. It's like blaming air for carrying bad words.

meheleventyone 6y ago
Doesn’t the parent mean “acquiring money” rather than money as a concept? It’s people’s relationship to money that is being criticised rather than money itself. To rephrase what I believe the intent was “if people cared about improving society more than acquiring money”.
- luckylion 6y ago
  But "acquiring money" from others means, if you follow the idea of money as a placeholder for value, "producing value" for others. That's absolutely what we want. That is: if you care about society, you will want to produce something of value for your fellow beings in that society. Them giving you money is them saying "I like what you do", essentially. Of course it's not that simple, and of course every system gets gamed and you have irrational actors everywhere and customers get lured with false promises etc, but does it matter at the scale of the economy itself? For example, if you look at the US with a GDP of 20 trillion dollars and you believe that celebrities getting huge amounts of money is stupid and they don't actually add value ... How much do they "misdirect", 10bn per year? That seems like a small price to pay compared to the big picture. Like taking a life-saving medication but having to deal with a rash or occasional constipation as a side effect, not using the medication because of this undesired side-effect seems foolish.
  - sukilot 6y ago
    "Celebrities" are misdirection. They generally he tmoney for value. Money siphoned by bankers and defense contractors and predatory advertisers are the real waste.
    - 6y ago

fsckboy 6y ago

according to standard economics, and all economists from right to left agree on this: money is the measure of value to society. (I changed the word "return" to "money" because return essentially means profit and when you make a selling or purchasing decision, you receive or pay the full price, not just the profit so your decision is a money decision, not a return decision.) That doesn't mean the rest of the argument he's making (and you are believing) fails, it means you are getting confused by stuff that economists clarified a long long time ago. There are many effects that distort people's decisions such that the wrong people benefit vs the wrong people who pay, but try to fix that and then just never never let it be said that we should not pursue returns, that's pure nonsense.

Spooky23 6y ago
Money is a measure of value, but the standard for assigning value is mostly emotional. Buy anything at retail, then try to sell it. You'll always take a bath, because the retail (whether a store or Amazon) experience adds value. The same thing happens in business.
tasty_freeze 6y ago
> money is the measure of value to society The internalization of this leads rich people to conclude they are rich because the provided even more value to the world than they kept to themselves, otherwise they wouldn't have paid them so well. The richer they are the more they think they think they are benefactors and any complaints about how they acquired their wealth is just jealousy or, uh, socialism or something. Sometimes it is the case that the wealthy have contributed something of such value that the world is better off, sometimes not. A drug company taking a 40 year old out of patent drug that has a stable but fixed market can increase shareholder returns by increasing the price 5-fold if they've cornered the market on this niche drug. Did they really do anything good for society? It sure doesn't seem that way, even if they are "creating value" by jacking up the price. The kneejerk reaction of many is to say I should start a company to compete with that predatory pricing model. But that is naive because (a) there are lots of moats to cross to get there and (b) even if stuck it out, I know that the predatory company can drop the price in an instant and use their scale and place as the market leader to crush my nascent company. So nobody does it.

sacred_numbers 6y ago

A related problem is the compounding nature of wealth. Let's say there are 100 investors with a million dollars each. 90% of the investors pursue socially beneficial projects and make a respectable 10% average annual return. The remaining 10% of investors pursue profit maximizing ventures and make 20% per year. Within about 25 years the profit maximizing investors have more wealth. Within about 50 years the profit maximizing group has 90% of the wealth. Chastising the profit maximizing group doesn't really change anything. Not because they don't deserve to be chastised, but because even if the vast majority of them defect to the social good group it only delays the outcome where the profit maximizers own everything. I think the solution is to incentivize socially valuable businesses and de-incentivize less socially valuable businesses. One example of this would be a carbon tax. Another example would be for Medicare to only pay hospitals that charged the same price to both insurance companies and individuals. There are major concerns about companies gaming these incentives, but companies are taking advantage of the lack of disincentives right now anyways, so I don't think the outcome would be any worse.

sukilot 6y ago
Corporations used to have to justify their charter by showing how their enterprise helped society. And charters were temporary. Now corporations have more rights than humans and people who have corporations are nigh untouchable by law for their crimes and civil torts. There's no justification for this. A sufficiently ethical government could rein in corporations tomorrow.
- closeparen 6y ago
  In general, the problem with "all actions are banned unless they benefit society" is that people who have different opinions about society's best interests need to coexist.
- mjcohen 6y ago
  I like that - "sufficiently ethical government" - funny without being vulgar.

dgudkov 6y ago

>The problem is greed and selfish pursuit of wealth by certain kinds of people who see that as a worthwhile purpose for their life. Well, isn't it the essence of capitalism and free markets? Isn't it how the deeply individualist Western democracies work - let people follow their greed and ambition, but surround them with legal fences, milk them for taxes, and use the collected taxes for the common good. It's like operating a nuclear reactor. Give it too much freedom and it will blow up and poison everything around. Restrain it too much, and it's output will quickly drop. The current social model isn't perfect, but no better social model has been invented so far.

minerjoe 6y ago
I would argue that, depending on your value sytem, many better social models have been invented and flourished for thousands of years. They didn't value property or money nor care to commit genocide to further expansion and hence were basically wiped out. Just because the psycopathic murderers won does not make their world view a "better social model".
- dgudkov 6y ago
  Not going to argue, just curious what social models of the past you consider as better ones?
  - minerjoe 6y ago
    I would consider the tribal gift economies of many of the American Indian tribes as "better". Moraly, ecologically, and spiritually. Minimal ecological damage and some would argue, me included, that they operated more as stewards improving much of the land they lived on. They cherished and took care of their elders. They worked a hell of a lot less hours than we do. And here's the kicker, they valued listening, honesty and respect. Can you even imagine living in such a society?
baddox 6y ago
> let people follow their greed and ambition, but surround them with legal fences It’s a shame they didn’t think of the obvious loophole that some people get so wealthy that they can use their wealth to influence those “fences.”

nickik 6y ago

The old doing things for money is inherently evil philosophy coming out again? If everybody could just live in love and harmony and to work towards a common goal. > The problem is greed and selfish pursuit of wealth by certain kinds of people who see that as a worthwhile purpose for their life. No. The problem is not pursuit of wealth but when that pursuit leads to breaking of the law or focus on changing political outcomes. To be successful society needs to have good laws and enforcement and a stable political system. The problem is when those things are not correct, not 'greed and selfishness'. Trying to change human greed and selfishness or setting changing that as a necessary goal to improve the world will always fail. In fact people who wanted to earn money for themselves and their families have overall done a huge mount of good in the world.