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can you explain to me this attitude, which i see a lot? Obviously the entire reason for a companys' existence is to make money why should we expect anything els

can you explain to me this attitude, which i see a lot? Obviously the entire reason for a companys' existence is to make money why should we expect anything else? Also this is true for every company in history. Of course we must demand companies meet minimum moral standards such as not using slaves (which would be unthinkable today in 2021 cough) but those must be imposed on them by law. This is a genuine question please feel free to enthusiastically disagree with me and explain why i'm wrong. [Edit: I should clarify that i meant that a company needs no other reason to exist, not that a ethical company is impossible]

howinteresting 5y ago
Companies are legal fictions of the state, with privileges like limited liability. Therefore the state can impose requirements on how the same companies behave as well. For example, a company could be made to serve the interests of employees rather than just shareholders. This can be done by, for example, requiring a certain percentage of the board of directors to be employee representatives.
- pokot0 5y ago
  This! I see so many people who seem to have forgotten that companies exist only to serve the people. When society is run to protect companies over the well being of the people, thay have lost their reason to exist in the first place. On the flip side, I see numerous posts and comments on HN that blame companies for not behaving more ethical. This is complete nonsense to me; you can't expect companies to autoregulate when they are designed to follow only 2 things: laws and market. Since as we know now we have little control over what the market wants, the real control is through regulation. But the US has done a very poor job at selecting their politician leadership for a long time now.... that's where people who wants to do something needs to look at..
  - FridayoLeary 5y ago
    > When society is run to protect companies over the well being of the people, thay have lost their reason to exist in the first place. According to you, seeing as almost every country in history was run exclusively for the benefit of the ruling class, none of them had a reason to exist? > But the US has done a very poor job at selecting their politician leadership for a long time now. Agreed. But i think it's a problem in the system itself. The us have a binary choice between hilary/biden and trump with no middle ground.
    - pokot0 5y ago
      > According to you, seeing as almost every country in history was run exclusively for the benefit of the ruling class, none of them had a reason to exist? Hmm... with "reason to exist" I meant the reason why they were "created" in the first place. This is an interesting article that expands on how corporation "rights" have changed since foundation (take the historical data points more than the underlying political bias): https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/we-the-people/we-the-people-corporations/ https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_r... > Agreed. But i think it's a problem in the system itself. The us have a binary choice between hilary/biden and trump with no middle ground. Indeed! I believe the problem in the system is even deeper. Regardless of your values or your preferred policies, I really feel hilary/biden/trump is a very poor display for the United States. The selection process that brought them there is not working. Smart people avoid going into politics in the first place because of this selection process. People don't want to spend their days arguing with a guy with bogus claim that is only trying to bring them down.
  - foerbert 5y ago
    I think it's both reasonable and important to criticize companies for behaving unethically even when it's not illegal. At the end of the day the "company" itself is incapable of doing anything. Humans are the ones actually making these decisions and then actually carrying them out. Unfortunately we don't and likely won't ever know who exactly did what. The best we can do is point at the company as a whole and say that some people over there decided to do bad things, nobody else in that group stopped them, and then some of those people went and did the bad thing. I don't see why that's not a reasonable critique when we cannot be more specific. I think that it is also important to do so. The more we perpetuate the idea that companies can't be blamed for bad-but-not-illegal behavior the more we help enable people to make those sorts of decisions as part of a company. They can't be blamed personally - it was the best decision for the company and that's what companies do, you know? We also help reduce negative feelings towards the companies when they do behave unethically. You can't actually blame them - they're a company after all, right? But this actually helps enable companies to get away with it. Negative public perceptions can impact the ability of a company to make money. I don't see why we should be trying to reduce this kind of influence.
    - pokot0 5y ago
      I agree with you. I think it is perfectly healthy to criticize companies and even boycott their products if we don't share their values. This is what I referred to by "controlling the market". Unfortunately this has historically provided very little results imo. What I was referring to is the expectation that this criticism can make the difference; I don't think it can, for mostly one single reason: if you happen to make progress and magically turn 99% of the people running companies ethical, you have created a huge incentive for being evil. Someone acting unethical will reap the benefit without competitor. I tend to see these dynamics as balances and movement from balances when something changes. I think changing laws changes the balance point and after a shake, the system will settle somewhere else. Trying to persuade managers to be ethical it's just a fight against the balance that you will eventually lose.
      - foerbert 5y ago
        Public criticism does not change things only via boycott. I agree with you about boycotts and their at-best questionable usefulness. The more meaningful aspects are the fact it creates a negative reputation, and that reputation impacts all interactions with the company. A bad reputation adds an additional cost to interacting with you (be it customers, workers, or business partners), and that needs to be constantly paid for somehow. Additionally, there's some level of 'acceptableness' for the individuals of a company to do unethical things, which also plays a role. You addressed this in your 99% hypothetical, which I would agree with if it was done in a vacuum. However it's not. In practice if 1% of businesses were behaving in some way the rest refused on ethical grounds, lawmakers would be be falling over themselves to address it. Obviously such an example is unlikely to appear, but I hope you get my point. Moving the needle on acceptable behavior also moves the needle on what acceptable regulations of behavior. I also largely agree on many of these factors being a dynamic balance. It's just that public criticism is already a factor in the current balance. Some level of criticism is required to maintain it, lest we move towards a balance that sees even more bad behavior.
reaperducer 5y ago
the entire reason for a companys' existence is to make money This is incorrect. There are many reasons a company can exist other than to make money. The company I work for, for example, does not have making money as its primary goal. There's nothing wrong with a company making money. The problem is people who believe that companies should only make money, or make all the money they can at whatever cost. There are actually people on HN who think companies have some legal obligation (usually under the cliché of "shareholder maximization") to do anything to make money. This is false. Companies are created by and for humans. They should work for humans.
tauwauwau 5y ago
Money corrupts everything, it replaces the original motivation. If companies didn't have to maximize x% of the profit made on the investor's money per quarter/year, they will be able to focus on product/service, customer and employees more. It may result in less profit but it will be better for the society as a whole. We can see this happening when some company is acquired solely for sucking money out of it. Sometimes it leads to worsening of the service/product made by original company, y% of employees get fired because new owners don't care about the product or the employees. Money saved by using cheaper but worse raw material and firing employees shows up as profit. Because money is sole motivator, we end up over optimizing a company's operations around it. This could be seen everywhere when Covid started. Hospitals didn't have have back up PPEs. Auto makers didn't have parts/chips in inventory for emergencies. They're optimized to order the amount they need in immediate future, without any serious thought to contingency. When an Amazon worker is asked to self x products across the warehouse in y minutes, like a machine without a thought to the well being of the worker, its because Amazon has to show profit to the investors. We don't have product making companies anymore, we have stock making companies. They don't sell goods, services, they sell stocks.
- betterunix2 5y ago
  "Money corrupts everything" BS. One of the only things Ayn Rand got right was her view of money: it is one of the greatest forces for good humans have ever invented. Money allows us to settle our disputes without violence; money is what enables peaceful trade; money is how we moved beyond palace economies. Sure, money can corrupt some things, but on the whole money has likely saved many lives and in all likelihood the free societies we have today could never have existed without a monetary system.
  - spacedcowboy 5y ago
    Money is nothing but a sophisticated barter system. Instead of “I will give you 3 apples from my tree for a dozen eggs from your hens”, there is an indirection through a standardized property - money. Now we can say my apples are worth 4 shekels each and your eggs are worth 1 shekel each, and we can still agree on the same transaction. The difference (some would argue, improvement) is that shekels have a worth of their own, so can be stored against harder times, which may not have been possible with the goods they bought. Of course, that shekel value being variable over time, can equally lead to riches or ruin, and requires a more sophisticated treatment by perhaps insufficiently sophisticated participants; snakes and ladders. In any event, societies existed well before this “money” thing came along, even free ones. High technology societies do need a money system, I think; for automated transactions to take place, there needs to be a standardized good-exchange valuation, but not all high-tech societies are free, and not all free societies are high-tech. Freedom seems orthogonal to money.
betterunix2 5y ago
"Obviously the entire reason for a companys' existence is to make money" That is not actually true. Corporations are a tradeoff for society: a corporation fulfills some societal need in exchange for investors receiving limited liability and a chance to profit. We have every right to question whether or not this arrangement is beneficial or harmful to society, and every so often a corporation will be broken up when society's needs are not being met. Don't think that profit, limited liability, or anything about the current arrangement is a given or a natural right or anything like that. It is a system we use to accomplish certain shared goals, nothing more.
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
> Obviously the entire reason for a companys' existence is to make money why should we expect anything else? The way this is supposed to work is that you make flour and I want flour so I give you money and you give me flour. Then you make more money by automating the production of flour so you can sell it to me for a lower price even though you now have higher margins. And try to take market share from competitors who are doing the same thing. The profit motive increases efficiency. This is growing the pie. The nefarious way to make money is to swipe somebody else's piece. This is rent seeking. It causes prices to increase with no increase in value. It is to be destroyed.
pfortuny 5y ago
“Making money” is not a humane endeavour. Just that. Helping people, raising a family, being virtuous… “Making money” is just so void of content. Companies either exist for human beings or are just despicable. But this is just my opinion obviously.
rahoulb 5y ago
> Obviously the entire reason for a companys' existence is to make money why should we expect anything else? Also this is true for every company in history. In Elizabethan times, company charters (and the subsequent right to create and hoard profit) was granted by the queen as a reward for the company doing the work required by the state. Money was a secondary reason for a company's existence, their primary reason was to further the interests of the monarchy and by extension the country.
bmitc 5y ago
In my view, it's bad because there's no end to the growth of a company's wealth, and thus power. Companies are treated as individuals when it's convenient for them, and not so when it's inconvenient. As companies gain more and more money, it becomes much easier to commit crimes and abuse their power to gain even more money and even more power, and yet, the likelihood of them being held accountable decreases. Comapnies can commit crimes that would land an individual in prison, and yet companies are usually at most fined in amounts much lower than the money they earned committing crimes. This creates serious problems in society, where companies are able and enabled to essentially act as sociopaths with limitless power.
zaptheimpaler 5y ago
None of this is written on a tablet handed down to us by God. Companies exist to serve society, not make money, and when the two are in conflict we have to do something. The government should step in to regulate when things go wrong, but go look at any recent tech hearing from US senators (seriously do it) - they are incredibly clueless. One of them was questioning Sundar Pichai about iPhones. So if companies are happy to maximize profit with the only barrier being law, and the lawmakers are too clueless/slow to make effective laws quickly, what are we supposed to do?

howinteresting 5y ago

Companies are legal fictions of the state, with privileges like limited liability. Therefore the state can impose requirements on how the same companies behave as well. For example, a company could be made to serve the interests of employees rather than just shareholders. This can be done by, for example, requiring a certain percentage of the board of directors to be employee representatives.

pokot0 5y ago
This! I see so many people who seem to have forgotten that companies exist only to serve the people. When society is run to protect companies over the well being of the people, thay have lost their reason to exist in the first place. On the flip side, I see numerous posts and comments on HN that blame companies for not behaving more ethical. This is complete nonsense to me; you can't expect companies to autoregulate when they are designed to follow only 2 things: laws and market. Since as we know now we have little control over what the market wants, the real control is through regulation. But the US has done a very poor job at selecting their politician leadership for a long time now.... that's where people who wants to do something needs to look at..
- FridayoLeary 5y ago
  > When society is run to protect companies over the well being of the people, thay have lost their reason to exist in the first place. According to you, seeing as almost every country in history was run exclusively for the benefit of the ruling class, none of them had a reason to exist? > But the US has done a very poor job at selecting their politician leadership for a long time now. Agreed. But i think it's a problem in the system itself. The us have a binary choice between hilary/biden and trump with no middle ground.
  - pokot0 5y ago
    > According to you, seeing as almost every country in history was run exclusively for the benefit of the ruling class, none of them had a reason to exist? Hmm... with "reason to exist" I meant the reason why they were "created" in the first place. This is an interesting article that expands on how corporation "rights" have changed since foundation (take the historical data points more than the underlying political bias): https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/we-the-people/we-the-people-corporations/ https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_r... > Agreed. But i think it's a problem in the system itself. The us have a binary choice between hilary/biden and trump with no middle ground. Indeed! I believe the problem in the system is even deeper. Regardless of your values or your preferred policies, I really feel hilary/biden/trump is a very poor display for the United States. The selection process that brought them there is not working. Smart people avoid going into politics in the first place because of this selection process. People don't want to spend their days arguing with a guy with bogus claim that is only trying to bring them down.
- foerbert 5y ago
  I think it's both reasonable and important to criticize companies for behaving unethically even when it's not illegal. At the end of the day the "company" itself is incapable of doing anything. Humans are the ones actually making these decisions and then actually carrying them out. Unfortunately we don't and likely won't ever know who exactly did what. The best we can do is point at the company as a whole and say that some people over there decided to do bad things, nobody else in that group stopped them, and then some of those people went and did the bad thing. I don't see why that's not a reasonable critique when we cannot be more specific. I think that it is also important to do so. The more we perpetuate the idea that companies can't be blamed for bad-but-not-illegal behavior the more we help enable people to make those sorts of decisions as part of a company. They can't be blamed personally - it was the best decision for the company and that's what companies do, you know? We also help reduce negative feelings towards the companies when they do behave unethically. You can't actually blame them - they're a company after all, right? But this actually helps enable companies to get away with it. Negative public perceptions can impact the ability of a company to make money. I don't see why we should be trying to reduce this kind of influence.
  - pokot0 5y ago
    I agree with you. I think it is perfectly healthy to criticize companies and even boycott their products if we don't share their values. This is what I referred to by "controlling the market". Unfortunately this has historically provided very little results imo. What I was referring to is the expectation that this criticism can make the difference; I don't think it can, for mostly one single reason: if you happen to make progress and magically turn 99% of the people running companies ethical, you have created a huge incentive for being evil. Someone acting unethical will reap the benefit without competitor. I tend to see these dynamics as balances and movement from balances when something changes. I think changing laws changes the balance point and after a shake, the system will settle somewhere else. Trying to persuade managers to be ethical it's just a fight against the balance that you will eventually lose.
    - foerbert 5y ago
      Public criticism does not change things only via boycott. I agree with you about boycotts and their at-best questionable usefulness. The more meaningful aspects are the fact it creates a negative reputation, and that reputation impacts all interactions with the company. A bad reputation adds an additional cost to interacting with you (be it customers, workers, or business partners), and that needs to be constantly paid for somehow. Additionally, there's some level of 'acceptableness' for the individuals of a company to do unethical things, which also plays a role. You addressed this in your 99% hypothetical, which I would agree with if it was done in a vacuum. However it's not. In practice if 1% of businesses were behaving in some way the rest refused on ethical grounds, lawmakers would be be falling over themselves to address it. Obviously such an example is unlikely to appear, but I hope you get my point. Moving the needle on acceptable behavior also moves the needle on what acceptable regulations of behavior. I also largely agree on many of these factors being a dynamic balance. It's just that public criticism is already a factor in the current balance. Some level of criticism is required to maintain it, lest we move towards a balance that sees even more bad behavior.

reaperducer 5y ago

the entire reason for a companys' existence is to make money This is incorrect. There are many reasons a company can exist other than to make money. The company I work for, for example, does not have making money as its primary goal. There's nothing wrong with a company making money. The problem is people who believe that companies should only make money, or make all the money they can at whatever cost. There are actually people on HN who think companies have some legal obligation (usually under the cliché of "shareholder maximization") to do anything to make money. This is false. Companies are created by and for humans. They should work for humans.

tauwauwau 5y ago

Money corrupts everything, it replaces the original motivation. If companies didn't have to maximize x% of the profit made on the investor's money per quarter/year, they will be able to focus on product/service, customer and employees more. It may result in less profit but it will be better for the society as a whole. We can see this happening when some company is acquired solely for sucking money out of it. Sometimes it leads to worsening of the service/product made by original company, y% of employees get fired because new owners don't care about the product or the employees. Money saved by using cheaper but worse raw material and firing employees shows up as profit. Because money is sole motivator, we end up over optimizing a company's operations around it. This could be seen everywhere when Covid started. Hospitals didn't have have back up PPEs. Auto makers didn't have parts/chips in inventory for emergencies. They're optimized to order the amount they need in immediate future, without any serious thought to contingency. When an Amazon worker is asked to self x products across the warehouse in y minutes, like a machine without a thought to the well being of the worker, its because Amazon has to show profit to the investors. We don't have product making companies anymore, we have stock making companies. They don't sell goods, services, they sell stocks.

betterunix2 5y ago
"Money corrupts everything" BS. One of the only things Ayn Rand got right was her view of money: it is one of the greatest forces for good humans have ever invented. Money allows us to settle our disputes without violence; money is what enables peaceful trade; money is how we moved beyond palace economies. Sure, money can corrupt some things, but on the whole money has likely saved many lives and in all likelihood the free societies we have today could never have existed without a monetary system.
- spacedcowboy 5y ago
  Money is nothing but a sophisticated barter system. Instead of “I will give you 3 apples from my tree for a dozen eggs from your hens”, there is an indirection through a standardized property - money. Now we can say my apples are worth 4 shekels each and your eggs are worth 1 shekel each, and we can still agree on the same transaction. The difference (some would argue, improvement) is that shekels have a worth of their own, so can be stored against harder times, which may not have been possible with the goods they bought. Of course, that shekel value being variable over time, can equally lead to riches or ruin, and requires a more sophisticated treatment by perhaps insufficiently sophisticated participants; snakes and ladders. In any event, societies existed well before this “money” thing came along, even free ones. High technology societies do need a money system, I think; for automated transactions to take place, there needs to be a standardized good-exchange valuation, but not all high-tech societies are free, and not all free societies are high-tech. Freedom seems orthogonal to money.

betterunix2 5y ago

"Obviously the entire reason for a companys' existence is to make money" That is not actually true. Corporations are a tradeoff for society: a corporation fulfills some societal need in exchange for investors receiving limited liability and a chance to profit. We have every right to question whether or not this arrangement is beneficial or harmful to society, and every so often a corporation will be broken up when society's needs are not being met. Don't think that profit, limited liability, or anything about the current arrangement is a given or a natural right or anything like that. It is a system we use to accomplish certain shared goals, nothing more.

AnthonyMouse 5y ago

> Obviously the entire reason for a companys' existence is to make money why should we expect anything else? The way this is supposed to work is that you make flour and I want flour so I give you money and you give me flour. Then you make more money by automating the production of flour so you can sell it to me for a lower price even though you now have higher margins. And try to take market share from competitors who are doing the same thing. The profit motive increases efficiency. This is growing the pie. The nefarious way to make money is to swipe somebody else's piece. This is rent seeking. It causes prices to increase with no increase in value. It is to be destroyed.

pfortuny 5y ago

“Making money” is not a humane endeavour. Just that. Helping people, raising a family, being virtuous… “Making money” is just so void of content. Companies either exist for human beings or are just despicable. But this is just my opinion obviously.

rahoulb 5y ago

> Obviously the entire reason for a companys' existence is to make money why should we expect anything else? Also this is true for every company in history. In Elizabethan times, company charters (and the subsequent right to create and hoard profit) was granted by the queen as a reward for the company doing the work required by the state. Money was a secondary reason for a company's existence, their primary reason was to further the interests of the monarchy and by extension the country.

bmitc 5y ago

In my view, it's bad because there's no end to the growth of a company's wealth, and thus power. Companies are treated as individuals when it's convenient for them, and not so when it's inconvenient. As companies gain more and more money, it becomes much easier to commit crimes and abuse their power to gain even more money and even more power, and yet, the likelihood of them being held accountable decreases. Comapnies can commit crimes that would land an individual in prison, and yet companies are usually at most fined in amounts much lower than the money they earned committing crimes. This creates serious problems in society, where companies are able and enabled to essentially act as sociopaths with limitless power.

zaptheimpaler 5y ago

None of this is written on a tablet handed down to us by God. Companies exist to serve society, not make money, and when the two are in conflict we have to do something. The government should step in to regulate when things go wrong, but go look at any recent tech hearing from US senators (seriously do it) - they are incredibly clueless. One of them was questioning Sundar Pichai about iPhones. So if companies are happy to maximize profit with the only barrier being law, and the lawmakers are too clueless/slow to make effective laws quickly, what are we supposed to do?