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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums"Capitalism might be making us evil"
Capitalism might be making us evilBy Jason Notte at MSN Money
http://money.msn.com/now/post.aspx?post=0dac2ad2-529a-4d16-bb59-5a886487f45c
"SNIP............................
It's just some non-MBA's quack theory that the market strips away all humanity and transforms people into commodities and resources rather than sentient beings whose welfare must be taken into account. There's no quantitative truth to that, right?
Well, maybe just the research of a couple of German economists.
According to a release from the universities of Bamberg and Bonn, a study by economists Armin Falk and Nora Szech released in the journal Science found that markets erode people's morality and help them make decisions that look outright awful without the thin veil of commerce. In short, capitalism makes us do some not-so-nice things.
Of course, shoppers who went out and bought clothes at retailers tied to the deaths of more than 1,100 textile workers in Bangladesh and who buy jeans that CNN says have caused whole rivers in China to turn blue already know this. But the study's key question -- would you let a mouse be killed in exchange for 10 euros? -- presented the theory in far starker terms.
...........................SNIP"
Sekhmets Daughter
(7,515 posts)We are currently paying the price for ignoring our instincts.
Initech
(99,914 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)A Qualitative Analysis of Integrity.
Zorra
(27,670 posts)Rex
(65,616 posts)Capitalism is only as good or evil as the PTB and Owners let it be.
Starry Messenger
(32,342 posts)marmar
(76,982 posts)....... you more or less have to demonstrate that you have no conscience.
Cirque du So-What
(25,812 posts)but I believe it's made societies more sociopathic. 'Evil' implies malice and bad intentions, whereas 'sociopathy' is just doin' bidness.
truebluegreen
(9,033 posts)without any regard for anything except profit for oneself.
Cirque du So-What
(25,812 posts)After all, it's just business.
truebluegreen
(9,033 posts)truebluegreen
(9,033 posts)reformist2
(9,841 posts)MNBrewer
(8,462 posts)if you need more proof.
Cirque du So-What
(25,812 posts)a charming euphemism for ensuring corporate interests are satisfied. No one should *ever* make the mistake of thinking that HR is looking out for *your* interests.
woo me with science
(32,139 posts)Corporate ethics are not human ethics.
Corporations exist to make a profit so that they can sustain and strengthen and grow themselves. That is their purpose in existing, and all other concerns become secondary to the corporate bottom line.
Remember the recent scandal with bird seed sales, in which a company knowingly sold poisoned seed, because they calculated that any fines incurred for doing so would cause less of a financial blow than the sales they would lose if they withheld the tainted product.
This is exactly the type of decision-making we invite into our lives and the lives of our children, when we cede governmental power to corporate rule and corporate ethics.
As you rightly point out, human beings become nothing more than "human resources," entries on a ledger to be manipulated so as to yield the greatest possible profit, or to be crossed out when they are no longer profitable. This is the type of morality that justifies slashing social safety nets for the elderly, or selling out our school systems or our prisons or our health care systems to the most ruthless money-grubbing enterprises.
We are just beginning to wake up to the horrific consequences of ceding government control over our lives and the lives of our children to corporate ethics and morality.
limpyhobbler
(8,244 posts)Honeycombe8
(37,648 posts)If someone is starving, what will he do to get a meal? Not money. A meal. Is that capitalism? Not unless he traded something on the open market for the meal. If they just give it to him, that's socialism, right?
People are people. There are weak people, evil people, good people, upstanding moral people. If we learned anything, we learned that during WWII. The people who risked their lives helping the Jews or others the Nazis were sending to concentration camps...and those who didn't help.
A person's nature is what it is, I think. Being mega wealthy hasn't turned Buffet into Genghis Khan. Or Soros. Or Angelina Jolie. Or Richard Branson.
There was plenty of evil goin' on when the socialists took over Russia.
raouldukelives
(5,178 posts)Which is why we need major regulations, major reforms and a major focus on what kind of a world we are leaving.
I find it hard to blame consumers. They buy what is available, what they are conditioned to buy with stress addled minds no match for the forces of the market and non-stop advertising.
But the ones in the markets, the ones pushing for ever cheaper wages, the ones willing to trade their time on this earth in the pursuit of assisiting those corporations knowingly making things worse and those who would gladly share in the profits with them, they are the real problem.
Sadly, it appears to be unable to change or allow itself to be changed. They hold all the cards. The entire world is now being Enron'd.
applegrove
(118,017 posts)to go. Regulated for safety,the environment, the worst excesses and market failure amongst others.
moondust
(19,917 posts)the worst of the soulless creatures have come to own and operate most everything, for their own benefit, and in a general sense decide how things are going to be...for everybody.
TheKentuckian
(24,943 posts)Control-Z
(15,681 posts)It took a study to figure this out? Wow.
socialist_n_TN
(11,481 posts)DUH!