Off Topic — HabitableZone

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Robert — (archived)

(Why waste a good subject line?)

As ER writes, business has evolved from individual sellers and businesses run by individuals, to fictional abstract "persons" in the form of corporations. A publicly-traded corporation may have a CEO who talks a good game about various sorts of values, toward employees as well as customers, but at the end of the day every such corporation answers only to another fictional abstract entity, "Wall Street" (the archetypical name for any stock exchange). Wall Street is an anthropomorphic personification of greed, pure and simple. While individual investors may have more or less judgment and may apply some values to their investing decisions, in the mass all of that is stripped away and what is left is simply a voracious hunger for money.

In other words, to the degree that all business is conducted by anthropomorphic personifications and not real people, business in fact has become "soulless".

I think that's why I have such a disconnect when I argue with Tom about the "goodness" of business. He seems to have this romantic and antiquated notion that businesses nowadays are still run by people. Sure, if that were true, he might get some mileage, because I have the typically Liberal sunny view of human nature. But when business decisions are made not by humans but by "processes" and in response to autonomic forces like Wall Street, the results will inevitably be inhuman and damaging to real humans. We've turned business into a machine, and now we have to live with the constant danger of being crushed or devoured by our creation.

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