That’s a bit of an oversimplification. There are numerous factors and motives at work; some may really enjoy their work or want to see their company knock out rivals, etc.
I’ll take the reporting of The New York Times over the anecdotes of an anonymous poster on a message board anytime.
Yes and no. I think there is just a larger range of quality to choose from, but if you pay bottom dollar you get cheap junk.
Anecdote: many years ago my grandfather gave me a 4-drawer filing cabinet. The thing was extremely solid and extremely heavy. He had owned it for decades but was downsizing. I was just starting graduate school (in the somewhat pre-digital age of the early 90’s; digital copies of papers and books weren’t so common then) and used it to store all my papers. It was as solid as a house.
When I graduated I left for my first job by packing the most important stuff I had into my rather small car and getting rid of the rest. The filing cabinet got left behind. Several years later when I need a filing cabinet the only ones I could find were flimsy pieces of crap. Of course I didn’t want to pay a lot, but shopping around I could find filing cabinets for $79 and filing cabinets for $500+.
I think the problem is that people want to pay $79 dollars for the quality of a $500 cabinet. The cheap crap has always been with us. It never lasted long enough for people to develop nostalgia for how crappy stuff used to be. Likewise, high quality stuff is still made, it just costs more than the crap (like it always has).
I think the very fact that modern cars are much more reliable actually makes them *less *reliable in the long term - because most people no longer know how to fix cars, or even perform basic maintenance. In the past, cars would start breaking down at 10,000 miles and never stop, so owners would be forced to learn how they worked just to keep them running. Today, an owner can buy a new car, drive it for 5 years and sell it without anything major ever going wrong with it, which means they have no idea what to do with a 20-year-old car that actually needs to be taken care of.
It’s the very essence of 1st world problems.
I find it incredible the thread would even proceed without pointing out that these statements are ludicrously false.
A capitalist is, by definition, a person who owns means of production. How those means of production are put to use will depend on the capitalist and her/his personal assessment of how to derive utility from the means of production. “The greatest profit for the least risk” is inherently nonsensical, because some capitalist will deliberately take on greater risk for greater profit, and some will take on less risk for less profit.
A worker is, by definition, someone who works. Nothing else. Workers and capitalists can be the same people. How much they choose to work is wholly dependent on their personal utility decisions. I find it mind boggling that an adult human being would assume all workers seek to work less and maximize income when **they must personally know all kinds of people who don’t do that. ** I mean, I’m assuming, LinusK, that you’re not actually a hermit living in the middle of the Gobi Desert who somehow got Internet access. You MUST know people who have chosen jobs that pay less, or jobs that require more work for the same pay, for any number of reasons - they like/dislike a given job, they prefer to be home more, or travel more, or like working for charity, or any number of things.
Who is going to maintain the reactor not out off desire for money “but out of a need for a safe reactor?” I am sure as heckfire am not going to maintain a nuclear reactor out of the goodness of my heart. Are you? In this world without profit motive, who volunteers to maintain nuclear reactors instead of volunteering to be a musician or athlete or other fun job? There are three ways to motivate someone to do something, love, reward, or punishment. Profits are rewards people get for doing something difficult like maintaining nuclear reactors or researching new drugs. If love were enough motivation to do good things, then good things would already have been done. If love of the planet could clean up the plastic in the oceans it would already have been cleaned up. If there was profit in it people would be cleaning up the plastic just as fast as they can. That tells you all you need to know about how people are motivated.
What the world would be like if scientists were devoted to eradication instead shareholder value is a world where precious few diseases get eradicated and very few new drugs get discovered. Who is going to work in a lab all day for no money? Who is going to buy all the equipment for no return, who is going to set up the trials which cost a billion dollars per drug? Take away profits and you take away motivation and you make everyone poor.
Let me tell you the story of the telephone. During the time of the Bell System telephones were incredibly reliable, because they were owned by AT&T and leased to the customer, thus AT&T through self-interest made phones that could be kept forever. When phones went on the open market, people rushed to buy really cheap phones. Because they wanted cheap junk? No, because they had learned that phones never broke, and so assumed that the cheapest phone was the best deal.
Such it is today with everything. It is very hard for consumers to evaluate quality. Some will go with junk because of affordability, and some will overpay because expensive stuff has the perception of quality. Sometimes true, sometimes not.
Why are cars better now? Some of it is technology, but some of it is that the Japanese, who were fanatical about quality, kicked Detroit’s ass on quality. No ethics involved. Ditto for integrated circuits, by the way.
The quality versus price tradeoff is all about market niches and perception. Over the long run selling junk at high prices might not work, but in the short term you make money.
Small quibble. Not the least risk, the least risk for a desired return, understanding that greater returns involve greater risk.
None of the things in your link have much to do with the sense I have of work ethic, which is working hard instead of slacking off. I’d call them more ethical working.
Every company says out loud that employees should be ethical. Their actions may say something else. I’ve worked at companies which were really ethical and others which talked the talk but had no problem bending the rules.
The traditional work ethic is an attempt by employers to get the most work out of employees for the least pay. They’ll yell “don’t slack off!” but when raise time comes they’ll plead poverty.
Not even conservatives believe in the work ethic. Remember all the threads that mention how if you raise taxes on CEOs they will immediately stop working so hard?
To answer the question, pure capitalist ethics exactly says that it is wrong to do the things you can’t get away with. If you can, and it makes money, it is okay. Very few pure capitalists around, of course.
My memory of the Ma Bell monopoly days is considerably less rosy.
I don’t recall a problem with phones breaking down (before or after the AT&T monopoly ended). What I do remember with the monopoly system is a horrible pain in the ass returning phones whenever you had to move, paying exorbitantly for extensions or anything beyond the simplest setup, and artificially high rates. The moment you could legally go out and buy competitors’ phones, AT&T issued dire warnings about catastrophes due to incompatibility, the new phones blowing up or god knows what, but remarkably, none of these disasters occurred, at least not to the vast majority of consumers.
To this day I loathe AT&T.
We have a saying that you can’t test quality into a product. You also can’t repair quality into one. In the good old days you didn’t see many 20 year old cars (or even 10 year old cars) because they fell apart. Trust me, I owned some. My Prius is five years old and over 50 k miles, and the extent of my issues was a firmware upgrade and them attaching the floormat to the floor to not hit the accelerator by accident. That was unprecedented when I started driving.
Not to mention that with progress 20 year old cars are not as safe as current ones, and so in a sense are lower quality even if all their parts work.
Fixing cars should be a hobby, not a necessity. I remember tune-ups, and not fondly.
I wasn’t talking about customer experience, just phone quality. I worked for AT&T and long after divestiture I was in a meeting with some people who used to deal with business phone systems. I assure you, you had it good compared to their customers. Like I said, the goal of high quality phones was the profitability of AT&T, not the benefit of the customer.
After phones went on sale, I went to a technical presentation on how to make consumer phones less reliable.
Last I heard, the reactor had just gone through an inspection and was cleared for another decade or so of use.
The problem with Fukushima was that it was well engineered. People looked back through history, ran some numbers, and determined what all scenarios a reactor needed to be proof against. And they built it that strong.
They neglected to build it tough enough to withstand a blow stronger than anything in recorded history. You may as well complain that New York would be flattened in the instance of a 9.0 earthquake. It’s a true statement, but also (we are gambling) completely irrelevant.
Sounds like capitalism doing what capitalism does best. 
The problem with Fukushima was that Tokyo Electric skimped on all manner of safety procedures and then engaged in institutionalized lying to try to cover it up.
Look, here’s my basic view on the OP. There is no such thing as “capitalist ethics”. There may be “ethical businesses”, there may be corporations that genuinely adhere to ethical codes of conduct, but those are tangible organizations that may choose to follow ethical practices or choose not to. Capitalism itself is an abstraction of an economic system that neither requires nor precludes ethical behaviors.
That said, I would argue that capitalism’s goals of making the most possible money for its controlling interests tends to reward and encourage unethical behavior unless sufficiently and responsibly regulated. Transferring the most possible money from your pocket to theirs is the reason they exist – the only reason, regardless of the blather of corporate “mission statements”. A few of them even manage to do it ethically.
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The problem with Fukushima was that Tokyo Electric skimped on all manner of safety procedures and then engaged in institutionalized lying to try to cover it up.
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So says an un-named ‘local government official who holds an effective veto over the utility’s revival plan’ in the wake of one of the worst natural disasters in Japanese history coupled with the worst nuclear reactor disaster in it’s history. Yeah, you really nailed that one!
None of this had anything to do with whether the reactor could have survived what it got. I don’t think anyone is saying that Tepco was a bunch of angels who did nothing wrong…they had a history of shady dealings and practices before and after the disaster. But it wouldn’t have mattered, because the facility was built to spec and the disaster they got was a lot bigger than anyone predicted when the reactor was being designed and built or even through most of it’s operation. This was a very low probability event and a perfect storm of disaster that resulted in a huge loss of life (not from the nuclear radiation but from that tsunami thingy) and has cost Japan a huge amount of money in cleaning up the earth quake damage, the tsunami damage and, yes, the nuclear damage from the Fukushima plant. It’s failure, however, had little or nothing to do with ‘Capitalism’, which was what was being responded too.
Which is why we have governments and regulations and such.
Yes, and it’s also why we have immensely powerful lobbyists and PR groups working to reduce governments to insignificant minimalism and regulations to complete non-existence. I tell you, the capitalist ethics at work here is just breathtaking!
And we have powerful lobbyist and PR groups working in the opposite direction as well, plus other groups working for myriad other interests and vertical (or even horizontal) goals. This is less about capitalism (or ethics) than it is about politics and how a democracy works.
I’ve never in my life had a land line phone break. Is there really a reliability problem with them?
And if there is, why is that necessarily bad? Something being of less quality but cheaper may in fact be the utility-maximizing choice. BMWs are better cars than Hyundais but I still bought a Hyundai, and rationally so given my needs. In the mid 1950s you could buy a presumably invincible home phone for about $20, which is $175 in today’s money. I am not convinced that is a superior choice to buy a phone with more features for $15 in today’s money that might break in two years. For $175 I could cheerily buy a new phone every four years.
It seems that my argument was hasty and didn’t gather many supporters, so I’ll have to step down from this one for now. But I’ll throw a few more ideas into the mix first:
There’s no doubt that the (developed) world is a better place than it was a few hundred years ago, in terms of wealth distribution and living standards. Some of this can be contributed to capitalism, surely, seeking profits will incentivize innovators to develop better technology, better medicine, etc…
However, capitalism is not without its faults – and I agree that this may have more to do with money in politics and deregulation – pollution is undoubtedly a concern, and has a long history of walking hand-in-hand with industry; the state of agriculture and monoculture crops, the use of pesticides instead of diversifying cultures – and an estimated 40% of the American population will be diagnosed with a form of cancer in their life, due to the amount of chemicals we are exposed to. These things are a concern. Do we continue to get cancer, but hope the capitalist system incentivizes the cures? Meanwhile a percentage of the workforce is taken down due to needing treatments (or dying), which would seem to hurt the capitalist way of life. Or do we do more to not get cancer in the first place? You all seem well informed, let me hear your thoughts.
The current system may have worked well in the 20th century, with giant leaps in medicine and technology, but I submit that serious ground needs to be made if 7.3 billion people are to continue living on this planet, consumption cannot last forever until we develop better sources of energy (which is coming, Costa Rica is going on 75 days of powering itself on renewable energy alone, Germany almost 75% of its energy is coming from renewable sources), and more abundant resources, maybe asteroid mining?
Sort of meandering thoughts, but I find them important. Perhaps less about ethics and more about regulation. Is regulation supposed to reflect ethics?
The reason so many people are diagnosed with cancer is that they’re healthier than they used to be.
I realize that sounds weird but a moment’s reflection should reveal how obvious it is; you have to die of SOMETHING. As people age, the likelihood they will get cancer increases. A population that has a median age of 35 won’t see much cancer. A population with a median age of 80 will see tons. The older we get, the more cancer there will be.
If cancer is cured, then more people will die of something else, be it heart failure, kidney disease, or what have you. The total at the bottom of the Cause of Death summary MUST add up to 100%. When you eliminate causes of death that are not cancer, of course cancer will go up.
I think the central problem with this debate is people are looking for morals in capitalism. It isn’t there. Capitalism is just an economic system. You should no more go looking for moral guidance in economics than you should in chemistry or algebra. Some people say capitalism is inherently good and some people say capitalism is inherently bad - and both views are nonsense.