Now I really think MBA / todays managerial wisdom is slowly destroying the world. The business climate in most corporations is plain awful and most people don't even realize because they don't know what a healthy business environment looks like.
It seems that these days that as long as your numbers on your spreadsheet match up, it doesn't matter how you got them to match just as long as they match up somehow. Lying is just one of the many unethical techniques that are now common tools to deliver shareholders "value".
i've seen some outrageous misrepresentations made by startups/founders. not talking about random guys off the street either- these have been funded by well-known VC's and accelerators. as an investor, i've learned to be very wary..
This isn't about spreadsheet crunching, or even shareholder value. It's about personal incentives - unlimited upside, limited downside, and no concern on the ethics involved.
Indeed. It's the same with all incentives that don't line up 100% with what you actually want. All the time, I see people surprised that their incentive programs don't get the results they thought and they're surprised that people pervert the system to get their bonus. And then they think they can just make more rules until people do it their way after all.
It never works. If you want to incentivize something, you need to be measuring that actual thing and giving incentives for that measurement. If you can't measure it, your incentives are doomed.
Don't worry, in the "long run" the laissez-faire approach to corporate regulation will "end up" minimizing malfeasance and maximizing freedom. Liberty just needs more time. Like, say, another year. Two, max.
I'm not sure that providing subsidies to large banks and refusing to enforce the law when they commit crimes is a laissez-faire approach to corporate regulation.
What is laissez-faire about the major industries (banking, defense, oil, agriculture and many more) being the biggest lobbyists? They pay politicians to write laws favorable to them. Their PR industry tells you its laissez-faire, but think through what you say.
Take it a step further: if there weren't any government intervention, then they wouldn't have to pay any lobbyists. The companies wouldn't even need any laws enacted. They would - as the phrase implies - do whatever they wanted. The lobbying is the process by which they are able to enact their will, despite, in theory, being a regulatory mechanism.
If anything it's member's only laissez-faire, where only those with enough money to buy lobbying influence are given carte blanche.
> "if there weren't any government intervention, then they wouldn't have to pay any lobbyists."
That thought experiment doesn't help though, since at the level of abstractions we are talking on, just having courts to enforce normal contract law can be construed as "intervention" of a kind. Wolves of various kinds typically decry shepherds for not allowing them the liberty to eat of the flock. The whole point of this civilization thing is to pull us a bit above/out of the state of nature. So "no government intervention" isn't a viable setting for a civilization.
I guess I didn't do a good job of expression my thought. I completely agree on your point, and I wasn't try to endorse or espouse a lack of government.
I suppose I could have stated it better by saying that the regulation that's in place is merely a puppet for the lobbyist, providing the facade of regulation, when it's 'laissez-faire' since those paying the lobbyists are allowed to do what they wish.
What happens when there are substantial barriers to entry _and_ there is collusion; how would "laissez-faire" economics deal with it, in timeliness which would make it tenable for actual people.
The title of the linked piece is "Lie More, as a Business Model", and serves just fine as a headline for Hacker News. Not sure why the headline was turned into a linkbait question instead.
What is probably unsurprising, but should have been expected, is that banks and major business interests got seriously upset when they found that they were lying to each other.
Clearly the earlier financial upsets, which were caused by them lying to the public, were not really their fault.
Hasn't it always been a fairly well established business model? If anything the success of this model means we're seeing it more and more in ever more gigantic failures. Whereas before it seemed confined to snake oil salesmen and politics...
"... Today’s banks represent the incarnation of profit-seeking behavior taken to its logical limits, in which the only question asked by senior staff is not what is their duty or their responsibility, but what can they get away with. ..." Martin Wolf, FT.
No, as long as the money kept rolling in, a blind eye was turned to the kind of behaviour described. Hard times has changed what is acceptable practice.
Lying is a business model for too many businesses; I'm reminded of Go Daddy's wholly-owned subsidiary, Standard Tactics, and how the latter would register expired domains, while Go Daddy would volunteer to "negotiate" with itself (see the whole account here: http://domainnamewire.com/2008/12/03/standard-tactics-llc-ho... ).
It's very hard to fight this sort of thing, as an individual, much like it's hard to avoid Barclay's (or its larger competitors, like Bank of America or Chase).
Unfortunately the press has been gutted and all the old white men with years and years of experience have left being replaced by people like Catherine Rampell (attractive, young, and only 5 years out of Princeton).
This is not a rant against woman (I've seen this pattern with both young men and young woman) and it's not a rant against young people (there are some areas where you want a young person personally I don't feel that economics (while not brain surgery) is one of them).
I'm really confused by your rant on a story that is not about journalism and is being reported by Simon Johnson who is one of the "old white men" you seem to prefer. You use the weak link of "The press is the watchdog" and then pivot into an ad-hominem attack against a reporter that has nothing to do with this story and that you apparently know a lot about for some reason. It's kind of weird.
The press is also highly compromised when it consists of and is driven by business interests: Disney/ABC, Time-Warner (CNN), GE (NBC), Murdoch, ClearChannel. Even PBS and PRI see major funding from the Koch brothers, WalMart, Comcast, and other major corporations.
Or oppressive states (curious how RT and XinHua are growing at present).
I've been searching for a business co-founder for a while, and this is one of the things that turn me off about some business people. They seem to believe that a business is built with Hype and not a real product. Sure, that is how you might get some funding, but its not how you build a sustainable business.
It's been a business practice, certainly. And it's been part of law and lore since the dawn of history. The code of Hammurabi includes punishment for false witness:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3153879?origin=JSTOR-pdf
In Dante's Inferno, the penultimate (8th) circle of hell is for the fraudulent (the 9th and innermost is for traitors -- another form of fraud, if you like):
http://www.wolfram.demon.co.uk/rp_dante_hell.html
The liars tend to win, because they make the superior claims. And for whatever reason, the customers can't give up on the idea that maybe this ONE outrageous promise, this ONE time, is actually for real.
It's like playing the lottery: Statistically you're better off running outside and screaming "THROW MONEY AT ME". But people still play.
Obviously the author of this article is a socialist... The financial industry is driving innovation by applying the principles of capitalism.
The only reason the bankers are lying is that government meddling is making their capitalistic process illegal. Of you want bankers to be 100% truthful, don't tie their hands behind their backs with quaint concepts like usury, proper underwriting of loans, etc.
Now I really think MBA / todays managerial wisdom is slowly destroying the world. The business climate in most corporations is plain awful and most people don't even realize because they don't know what a healthy business environment looks like.
It seems that these days that as long as your numbers on your spreadsheet match up, it doesn't matter how you got them to match just as long as they match up somehow. Lying is just one of the many unethical techniques that are now common tools to deliver shareholders "value".