Corporations and Public Health

[Dan.Linehan]

Just wanted to post this video for discussion.

The Corporation - Case Histories

[Dan.Linehan]

Is there some sort of international oversight committee that ensures minimum fair trade standards?

[cdn2wheeler]

Originally Posted by Dan.Linehan

Is there some sort of international oversight committee that ensures minimum fair trade standards?

Closest thing is the World Trade Organization, though it's basically a mouthpiece for international corporations. There are also bi-lateral and multi-lateral trade arrangements - like the Canada/US/Mexico NAFTA deal - but it's pretty ineffectual as well. Canada has repeatedly taken the US to court over softwood lumber tariffs and has won every single time, but the US administration simply refuses to pay the fines levied by their justice system. Last I heard, the fines were reaching something like $500 million that the US gov't simply refused to pay.

[Jason S]

This movie mixes issues a bit, showing the results of theivery, narrow-mindedness, and regrettable ignorance as if each was born from the same sinister place.

Are there those who seek to arbitrage imbalances in economic systems? Absolutely. And I won't argue that rooting them out can be incredibly difficult. But some of the outcomes discussed were/are rather predictable, and are generally less the result of sinister motives than they are the result of misaligned incentives.

In thirty years, I think it's likely that our children will have the opportunity to watch a documentary that shows all of us sitting in our traffic jams, while a voice over quips, "How amazing, despite having all that time to sit in traffic, they couldn't figure out the problems until it was too late." Our kids will rally behind such wit, but we'll know that the real issue defied one-liners: as of today, we've known the problem for some time, we've known the solution for some time, but the incentives haven't yet aligned such that we could motivate ourselves to change. (Though they're starting to.)

BTW, the incentives I'm talking about here aren't tax credits for hybrids or anythying like that. The incentives I'm referring to are ones like the social norm that makes intentional waste a sign of success. For instance, driving a Lamborghini is prestigious partly because of the power of the car... and also because it signals to the world that you can afford to drive a car that is totally impractical and gets ~8 mpg! We do the same thing with our homes: having a big home is impractical and wasteful, and its prestigious for exactly that reason. Only now is that mentality starting to change.

To me, the criminal issues and even the psychology of the corporation are less interesting questions than the question, "What do you do when everyone in the system is behaving well, and you *still* get a bad outcome?"

What do we do when we turn around and realize there is no boogeyman... there is only us? When we discover that it was not some evil cabal that did most of the damage, but a confederacy of dunces, made up of ourselves?!