The regulation of our lives by large organizations is necessary for the functioning of industrial-technological society. The result is a sense of powerlessness on the part of the average person. Unabomber
It is a very interesting question as to to the role of empathy in human affairs; how ordinary human empathy manifests (or doesn't) in large institutional structures, etc. I've contemplated writing a book on the subject.
We call "low-empathy humans" sociopaths and often end up putting them in jail. Corporations are quite often set up to encourage sociopathic behavior, partly because they are free from the constraints of empathy. But not always. Corporations are made up of humans and the well-behaved ones have ways of letting humanity influence their actions and governance; evil ones don't.
MTraven, I'm skeptical how sticky empathy is even just with individual human agents. Then there's the illusion of control problem, like if humans even have the power to get rid of low-empathy humans (a paradoxical problem?), corporations, or hypothetical alien invaders.
Strip-mining is bad by definition (substitute, say, extracting oil from the Gulf of Mexico while destroying it if you want a more current example). The point was that having allowing powerful, intelligent, and inhuman agents free reign over your environment is probably a bad idea -- their interests will not coincide with human ones. Human agents at least have some empathy to work with.
We preserve the rights of humans for the good of the individual humans themselves against the collective. Corps and Orgs are "fictitious" people composed of real people. The real people within the corps and orgs have rights protected.
It is not at all obvious that all "real" rights should be given to "fictitious" people. We give rights to real people to preserve their individuality and regulate real people at a pragmatic level to ease living together and avoid extremely negative externalities. We preserve a much smaller set of rights of animals and recognize the futility of imposing regulations on them, a futility not because they are bad but because they are dumb.
I don't believe an organization has a separate consciousness that must have separate rights of privacy and preservation of its "life." We have found pragmatically that we get a lot of good from these fictitious persons. In my opinion, providing these fictitious persons with one right or another should come from a utilitarian consideration: does this make them more or less useful to us? Trampling the rights of what are almost certainly unconscious fictitious people seems way more morally justified than trampling the rights of people and animals, whom we control and eat, respectively.
Maybe it will turn out that the grand sweep of history will include corporations, first we gave rights to blacks, then women, then gays, then animals, then the corporations, and finally the CPUs. But perhaps it won't, perhaps a trend just keeps going until it stops, and it will stop before we are able to feel empathy for corporate entities as opposed to the real people who participate in them and whose benefit from them causes their existence in the first place.
So bigger firms are preferable because they are more easily regulated? An unusual combination of (explicitly avowed) views. Although I think something like that was going on with the cartelization efforts in the 30s.
I agree with H.A on "as much an art as a science".
mtraven, is your objection to strip-mining generally or the fact that aliens are doing it?
Jeff, the estimated coefficient on log firm size in those crime logit regressions is about 2/3 - the chance of a crime goes roughly as firm size raised to the 2/3 power. So larger firms have proportionally less crime!
big firms obey laws moreAccording toAlexander, C. R. and Cohen, M. A. (1996), New evidence on the origins of corporate crime. Managerial and Decision Economics, 17: 421–435. doi: 10.1002/(SICI)1099-1468(199607)17:43.0.CO;2-U
Finally, larger firms are found significantly more likely to have engaged in crime than smaller firms, in contrast to recent suggestions in the literature.
My comment ended up being a virtual rough draft for an essay thirty words less than this post. My final drafts that don’t contain references turn out no less than 50% longer than the rough and often double it. Link to my nym is to the rough draft. I’m not trying to get traffic or attention to my own blog, I really think there are elements to this post that deserve analysis. Largely about the writing style used. Though perhaps it was written to illustrate the mind set the corporate media is pushing. I will give the author that much credence.
This post reads like a middle school “Why My Country is Great” essay and likewise offers no distinct lines between the relevant subjects it is comparing. Since there are firms of every size between small and large, the distinction becomes unapproachably subjective. Whether or not the “firm” is a corporation that can defer losses to share holders at any given time is really a key point that would be relevant to both small and large firms. Most large firms are incorporated, while this holds true less as the size of the subject firm gets smaller.
As to the “corporation is a person too” argument, there are many reasons why this doesn’t hold up. Everything from mob mentality to the fact that corporations are bound to an ethos of profit makes the corporation into a sociopath if it is any kind of person as the excellent documentary “The Corporation” outlines in delicious detail. It’s free online.
My partial list of counter points-
1. “big orgs” are overwhelmingly the progenitors of the waste that ends up in the environment and receive the most benefit from it’s production.
2. “big orgs” are more likely to produce hazardous waste in amounts sufficient enough to cause large scale harm.
3. Regulations are only rarely created out of whole cloth in anticipation of potential wrong doing. Regulations are almost exclusively enacted as remedies to problems that occur. Which should speak volumes to why in a scenario of big firms verses small firms creating hazardous waste, small firms have less regulation
4. For several reasons small firms are tied closely to the communities where they are likely to produce waste.
5. A large enough firm employs and has at their immediate disposal a lawyer or a team of lawyers making the prospect of legal proceedings less of a cost deterrent.
6. And finally, the barb that I was going to throw- “Yet on the whole big orgs are a big reason we are rich and peaceful.” Really? As compared to what? There is no control group or country or world to compare this to, so it is a totally baseless statement. In fact, on average peoples are lives worse off economically, environmentally and in terms of peace. This is compared to a real data set of years previous.
Thank you and good night. Damn, it’s morning already.
Shorter: "Please, won't somebody think of the corporations!"
Big organizations are the new aliens among us, strange and suspicious to both forager and farmer eyes. We can’t look them in the eyes and feel their warmth of their empathy ...Big orgs display deep beyond-human intelligence we only dimly understand, and potential vast longevity. So we suspect the worst.
Um...yes, I agree with this. What's your point? That we shouldn't be suspicious of large, powerful, inhuman intelligences operating among us? That's fucking insane.
I suppose if actual aliens should visit earth and start strip-mining it, you'd be in favor of letting them operate unimpeded as well, as long as they provide a few shiny trinkets in exchange?
Agreed. To put it another way: There are many unofficial, typically social, sanctions that work on individuals that do not work on large companies. Shaming doesn't work, shunning doesn't work,...
Hmm, given the amount of damage some companies have done, I wonder if "with depraved indifference to human life" is part of their executive training...
I think the prejudice against big companies is a combination of a fear of power and the inability of corporations to project compassion. People perceive corporations as powerful because they're omnipresent. I see around me now: Nikon, Samsung, Apple, Sony, Penguin and many other brands, here with me, in my room. Since they're everywhere, they seem power (most people are mistaken and don't have an accurate understanding of how beholden large companies are to customers and shareholders, and how much arbitrary power politicians and even minor government functionaries wield relative to corporations). Also, those politicians have the capacity of projecting compassion, making speeches about how concerned they are about x problem, as they pose for pictures of them shaking hands with one of the victims. Corporations simply can't do that. The closest they can do is send some spokesperson to give a face to the company, but that doesn't work as well.
People don't stop being human when they join a large org.
Individual homes are just as likely to dispose of hazmat as large orgs; it's not a more apt to or less apt to situation.
But as Robin said it is much easier to police the relatively small number of large orgs than it is to police the entire population for such things. It is also politically expedient to police the easily villain-ized big orgs, and leave the individuals alone. Coming after the individual homes would have a disastrous affect on the politicians attempting such policing. Just imagine all of the campaign ads currently running also including such damning evidence of the incumbents rooting through America's trash to prosecute Joe Sixpack. "Win America Back this Nov. Get Washington out of our Trash!"
This analysis doesn't fly because it fixates only on the harms from big orgs and ignores the benefits. Yes, big orgs enable people to collectively engage in harmful activities they wouldn't have done individually. However, the same cultural effects allow big orgs to motivate/convince their employees to do useful things they otherwise wouldn't have done. For instance the feeling of distance from the effects of corporate deciscions lets people contribute to things they would personally find immoral but it also lets them undertake risky projects they would find too scary/intimidating without the distance membership in a large org offers. Not to mention the other benefits that accrue to economies of scale and the like. Thus it would be simply incorrect to conclude that it's clear that we would be better off with less big orgs rather than more.
Whether or not it would make sense to regulate big orgs more than small orgs isn't a matter of whether they can do more harm but whether the net benefits of greater regs on big orgs exceed the costs. That can't be determined just by considering moral outrage at these orgs or their overall potential for harm.
I'm not sure what you mean by "sticky".
It is a very interesting question as to to the role of empathy in human affairs; how ordinary human empathy manifests (or doesn't) in large institutional structures, etc. I've contemplated writing a book on the subject.
We call "low-empathy humans" sociopaths and often end up putting them in jail. Corporations are quite often set up to encourage sociopathic behavior, partly because they are free from the constraints of empathy. But not always. Corporations are made up of humans and the well-behaved ones have ways of letting humanity influence their actions and governance; evil ones don't.
Of course not, it's TGGP snark.
MTraven, I'm skeptical how sticky empathy is even just with individual human agents. Then there's the illusion of control problem, like if humans even have the power to get rid of low-empathy humans (a paradoxical problem?), corporations, or hypothetical alien invaders.
Was my meaning really that obscure?
Strip-mining is bad by definition (substitute, say, extracting oil from the Gulf of Mexico while destroying it if you want a more current example). The point was that having allowing powerful, intelligent, and inhuman agents free reign over your environment is probably a bad idea -- their interests will not coincide with human ones. Human agents at least have some empathy to work with.
We preserve the rights of humans for the good of the individual humans themselves against the collective. Corps and Orgs are "fictitious" people composed of real people. The real people within the corps and orgs have rights protected.
It is not at all obvious that all "real" rights should be given to "fictitious" people. We give rights to real people to preserve their individuality and regulate real people at a pragmatic level to ease living together and avoid extremely negative externalities. We preserve a much smaller set of rights of animals and recognize the futility of imposing regulations on them, a futility not because they are bad but because they are dumb.
I don't believe an organization has a separate consciousness that must have separate rights of privacy and preservation of its "life." We have found pragmatically that we get a lot of good from these fictitious persons. In my opinion, providing these fictitious persons with one right or another should come from a utilitarian consideration: does this make them more or less useful to us? Trampling the rights of what are almost certainly unconscious fictitious people seems way more morally justified than trampling the rights of people and animals, whom we control and eat, respectively.
Maybe it will turn out that the grand sweep of history will include corporations, first we gave rights to blacks, then women, then gays, then animals, then the corporations, and finally the CPUs. But perhaps it won't, perhaps a trend just keeps going until it stops, and it will stop before we are able to feel empathy for corporate entities as opposed to the real people who participate in them and whose benefit from them causes their existence in the first place.
Robin has already mentioned the benefits of big organizations while completely ignoring the problems, that's why I concentrated on those.
And where did I advocate less big organizations? I merely gave a reason why regulation them more strongly is probably justified.
So bigger firms are preferable because they are more easily regulated? An unusual combination of (explicitly avowed) views. Although I think something like that was going on with the cartelization efforts in the 30s.
I agree with H.A on "as much an art as a science".
mtraven, is your objection to strip-mining generally or the fact that aliens are doing it?
Good point, is this including the scale of the crime in the regression fit as well?
Jeff, the estimated coefficient on log firm size in those crime logit regressions is about 2/3 - the chance of a crime goes roughly as firm size raised to the 2/3 power. So larger firms have proportionally less crime!
big firms obey laws moreAccording toAlexander, C. R. and Cohen, M. A. (1996), New evidence on the origins of corporate crime. Managerial and Decision Economics, 17: 421–435. doi: 10.1002/(SICI)1099-1468(199607)17:43.0.CO;2-U
Finally, larger firms are found significantly more likely to have engaged in crime than smaller firms, in contrast to recent suggestions in the literature.
This post was outlined a here on Econ Log.
My comment ended up being a virtual rough draft for an essay thirty words less than this post. My final drafts that don’t contain references turn out no less than 50% longer than the rough and often double it. Link to my nym is to the rough draft. I’m not trying to get traffic or attention to my own blog, I really think there are elements to this post that deserve analysis. Largely about the writing style used. Though perhaps it was written to illustrate the mind set the corporate media is pushing. I will give the author that much credence.
This post reads like a middle school “Why My Country is Great” essay and likewise offers no distinct lines between the relevant subjects it is comparing. Since there are firms of every size between small and large, the distinction becomes unapproachably subjective. Whether or not the “firm” is a corporation that can defer losses to share holders at any given time is really a key point that would be relevant to both small and large firms. Most large firms are incorporated, while this holds true less as the size of the subject firm gets smaller.
As to the “corporation is a person too” argument, there are many reasons why this doesn’t hold up. Everything from mob mentality to the fact that corporations are bound to an ethos of profit makes the corporation into a sociopath if it is any kind of person as the excellent documentary “The Corporation” outlines in delicious detail. It’s free online.
My partial list of counter points-
1. “big orgs” are overwhelmingly the progenitors of the waste that ends up in the environment and receive the most benefit from it’s production.
2. “big orgs” are more likely to produce hazardous waste in amounts sufficient enough to cause large scale harm.
3. Regulations are only rarely created out of whole cloth in anticipation of potential wrong doing. Regulations are almost exclusively enacted as remedies to problems that occur. Which should speak volumes to why in a scenario of big firms verses small firms creating hazardous waste, small firms have less regulation
4. For several reasons small firms are tied closely to the communities where they are likely to produce waste.
5. A large enough firm employs and has at their immediate disposal a lawyer or a team of lawyers making the prospect of legal proceedings less of a cost deterrent.
6. And finally, the barb that I was going to throw- “Yet on the whole big orgs are a big reason we are rich and peaceful.” Really? As compared to what? There is no control group or country or world to compare this to, so it is a totally baseless statement. In fact, on average peoples are lives worse off economically, environmentally and in terms of peace. This is compared to a real data set of years previous.
Thank you and good night. Damn, it’s morning already.
Shorter: "Please, won't somebody think of the corporations!"
Big organizations are the new aliens among us, strange and suspicious to both forager and farmer eyes. We can’t look them in the eyes and feel their warmth of their empathy ...Big orgs display deep beyond-human intelligence we only dimly understand, and potential vast longevity. So we suspect the worst.
Um...yes, I agree with this. What's your point? That we shouldn't be suspicious of large, powerful, inhuman intelligences operating among us? That's fucking insane.
I suppose if actual aliens should visit earth and start strip-mining it, you'd be in favor of letting them operate unimpeded as well, as long as they provide a few shiny trinkets in exchange?
Agreed. To put it another way: There are many unofficial, typically social, sanctions that work on individuals that do not work on large companies. Shaming doesn't work, shunning doesn't work,...
Hmm, given the amount of damage some companies have done, I wonder if "with depraved indifference to human life" is part of their executive training...
I think the prejudice against big companies is a combination of a fear of power and the inability of corporations to project compassion. People perceive corporations as powerful because they're omnipresent. I see around me now: Nikon, Samsung, Apple, Sony, Penguin and many other brands, here with me, in my room. Since they're everywhere, they seem power (most people are mistaken and don't have an accurate understanding of how beholden large companies are to customers and shareholders, and how much arbitrary power politicians and even minor government functionaries wield relative to corporations). Also, those politicians have the capacity of projecting compassion, making speeches about how concerned they are about x problem, as they pose for pictures of them shaking hands with one of the victims. Corporations simply can't do that. The closest they can do is send some spokesperson to give a face to the company, but that doesn't work as well.
People don't stop being human when they join a large org.
Individual homes are just as likely to dispose of hazmat as large orgs; it's not a more apt to or less apt to situation.
But as Robin said it is much easier to police the relatively small number of large orgs than it is to police the entire population for such things. It is also politically expedient to police the easily villain-ized big orgs, and leave the individuals alone. Coming after the individual homes would have a disastrous affect on the politicians attempting such policing. Just imagine all of the campaign ads currently running also including such damning evidence of the incumbents rooting through America's trash to prosecute Joe Sixpack. "Win America Back this Nov. Get Washington out of our Trash!"
This analysis doesn't fly because it fixates only on the harms from big orgs and ignores the benefits. Yes, big orgs enable people to collectively engage in harmful activities they wouldn't have done individually. However, the same cultural effects allow big orgs to motivate/convince their employees to do useful things they otherwise wouldn't have done. For instance the feeling of distance from the effects of corporate deciscions lets people contribute to things they would personally find immoral but it also lets them undertake risky projects they would find too scary/intimidating without the distance membership in a large org offers. Not to mention the other benefits that accrue to economies of scale and the like. Thus it would be simply incorrect to conclude that it's clear that we would be better off with less big orgs rather than more.
Whether or not it would make sense to regulate big orgs more than small orgs isn't a matter of whether they can do more harm but whether the net benefits of greater regs on big orgs exceed the costs. That can't be determined just by considering moral outrage at these orgs or their overall potential for harm.