RE: People or Profit
December 1, 2011 at 7:16 pm
(This post was last modified: December 1, 2011 at 7:22 pm by Mister Agenda.)
It's more like profits are often compatible with people: If I open a hotdog stand and I make a profit on what people are willing to give me for my hotdogs in excess of what it costs me to provide them, it's a win-win: They got hot dogs they wanted more than the money they gave me and I got money I wanted more than the hot dogs I had.
There's nothing inherent in profit that makes it detrimental to people. When profit is an incentive to harm people, the problem is with the way the incentives are set up. Profit can get psychopaths to do something that benefits humanity, or saints to commit crimes. When profit is leading people to do something wrong, I think rather than condemn profit as a motivator, you address the skewed incentives that reward someone for hurting people.
And yeah, I abstained. If I wanted to find a better way to protect women and children in Mali from malaria mosquitoes using netting, I would hire a company to find out what works, and pay them based on the effectiveness of the solution they came up with. Or I could use the profit from my hotdog stand to pay for cataract surgery in developing countries. I can see too many ways to use profit to help people to see it as either profit or people. I see someone who is in conflict about that as lacking the imagination to find a way to have both.
There's nothing inherent in profit that makes it detrimental to people. When profit is an incentive to harm people, the problem is with the way the incentives are set up. Profit can get psychopaths to do something that benefits humanity, or saints to commit crimes. When profit is leading people to do something wrong, I think rather than condemn profit as a motivator, you address the skewed incentives that reward someone for hurting people.
And yeah, I abstained. If I wanted to find a better way to protect women and children in Mali from malaria mosquitoes using netting, I would hire a company to find out what works, and pay them based on the effectiveness of the solution they came up with. Or I could use the profit from my hotdog stand to pay for cataract surgery in developing countries. I can see too many ways to use profit to help people to see it as either profit or people. I see someone who is in conflict about that as lacking the imagination to find a way to have both.
