This doesn't seem like a mystery to me. In my experience the more you climb up through management the more you leave the realm of clear-cut choices and enter a world of nasty trade-offs. Do that enough times, and get your head spun around enough by trade-offs you don't know how to navigate but have to deal with immediately, and you'll get a kind of "trade off numbness".

I wonder if this could explain why corporations grow into slow behemoths, as a kind of subconscious moral cover. Most people think the causal arrow happens one way, ie. corporations grow due to efficiencies or other factors and moral rot is a side-effect, but maybe it's actually the other way around in some cases. Since everyone tries to see themselves as basically good, but they still want to make money and be profitable, they migrate towards structures with extra layers that provide extra plausible deniability and obfuscation of questionable moral decisions.

Culture and incentives are just extremely hard to get right and align with the morals, and it's a continuous struggle for any business. And this applies even to solo companies.

That all being said I think for many people the ability to have a bright line is because the abstractions involved in deeply understanding these types of trade offs are not a common part of life. We are (nearly) universally worse at the types of reasoning (especially reasoning with abstractions) that we don't do frequently.

Good watch, thanks!

Greed doesn't have anything to do with how much money you have, it's about how much do you want "more" and what are you willing to do to get it. You can be content with nothing and greedy with nothing; content as a billionaire or greedy as a billionaire.

Do you change a requirement for a BS degree to only require 6 instead of 9 credits of research?

Upside - students might graduate faster (this is one of many constraints on graduation) which saves them money and time.

downsides - faculty may have less students to help with research (which helps faculty succeed via research productivity)

complicating - students might do the research anyways, they can still get credit it just doesn't officially count for anything.

context: the department is responsible to both...the actual impact of both the upside and downside are functionally impossible to predict because they are part of a broader complex partially social system that will anneal itself in ways you don't expect, metrics of success for students and faculty are important to everyone, albeit through different arms of an org chart which results in them each advocating for their metric at the expense of all others, because their success is partially evaluated on that metric.

solution (this is sarcasm): remove a math course as 'required' that most students get transfer credit for and have to have as a pre-requisite for other classes. Only effect is on the 2% of students who actually have to take the course.

result: everyone sees change, which they want, without perceiving a risk of harmful side effects, and with no actual change to the status quo.

In corporations, as you climb up, you get rewarded for unethical more and more. Ethical people get kicked out of the ladder.

SBF fit amusingly well. His fraud had all of these, with Effective Altruism providing an extreme example of how goodness in some areas atones for evil in others.

Stanford's president Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned after his reputation was found to be based on fraudulent research. Descriptions that I've read from those in his lab showed most of these.

Enron is too canonical an example to ignore. Yes, it had all of these.

CEO being higher profile and a generation older than [some of] the people sounds like a pretty normal company tbh, and probably only a major issue if the ethical issues are caused by the CEO (it technically doesn't apply to SBF, although his reports were even less experienced and in awe of him)

CSR and diversity initiatives and other corporate do-good messaging? Most companies do that to some extent, and it's not like the ones who don't even attempt to launder their reputations tend to be squeaky clean rather than too cynical to even try to look like they care.

And sure, KPIs and stretchy sales targets can definitely cause bad behaviour and lying, but they're also extremely common, and can be beneficial when companies actually get them right.

Might as well add an 8th point, "Companies that sell a good or service", and really bring that false negative rate all the way down to zero.

Evil is the corporate norm, or at least psychopathy. It's even enshrined in law ever since Dodge v. Ford Motor Co.

WeWork had every single one of these, and governance ultimately was too little too late to save the company.

AirBnb, Stripe had a few of these, but turned out OK.

It seems like the common variable that spares startups from ethical collapse is good board governance and having a reasonable / willing to evolve CEO.

FB is an interesting case, because they check most of these boxes (maybe not fear/silence?), yet are fairly "successful". Governance isn't the explanatory variable, since Zuck has 90% of voting shares. The explanatory variable seems to be Zuck's willingness to listen to and learn from a board and his execs.

AirBnb has managed to shake off some pretty bad ethical issues. Facebook was credibly implicated in a genocide, and Instagram in particular (and social media in general) has been causally linked to increased rates of juvenile suicide.

That they've managed to be successful financially in spite of that fact (so far!) is pretty singular. That's a rare group. Not saying it's one to emulate, though, far from it.

The point of that sign is that the CEO's direct underlings can't even question the CEO's choices.

For the model to be useful we have to show it can be used to consistently predict scandals and wrongdoing before they happen and before others notice

Eg. Can we confidently use this model to short corporate stock

But on the other hand, the implications of the moral failure for the moral status of the company and its employees is pushed far away into the corner:

- "These are great companies, great organizations, good people"

- "misguided companies"

- "good people at great companies"

The list that follows is something you can retroactively apply to numerous instances of corporate wrongdoing, but also provides an enormous amount of false positives and a false negatives.

Thousands of businesses don't meet these criteria and yet are morally compromised (e.g. Cargill). Thousands of businesses do meet these criteria and yet aren't going to be called out as "ethically collapsed" by the author before they've been outed and widely accepted as failed.

1. Pressure to maintain numbers 2. Fear and silence 3. Young ‘uns and a bigger-than-life CEO 4. Weak board of directors 5. Conflicts of interest overlooked or unaddressed 6. Innovation like no other company 7. Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others

Umberto Eco's 14 signs of fascism:

1. The cult of tradition. 2. The rejection of modernism. 3. The cult of action for action's sake. 4. Disagreement is treason. 5. Fear of difference. 6. Appeal to social frustration. 7. The obsession with a plot. 8. The humiliation by the wealth and force of their enemies. 9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. 10. Contempt for the weak. 11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. 12. Machismo and weaponry. 13. Selective populism. 14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak.

Each list contains symptoms of some degenerating organisation. However, I can easily find counterexamples of successful organisations which demonstrate one or more of these qualities. In fact, these organisations may be successful because they exhibit one or more of these qualities. This way of understanding the world is entirely juvenile and unfit as an evaluative framework.

Social systems are very complex, you cannot write an algorithm of evaluation in terms of "measure this and that, then use this formula". It never works. You need to understand how the system works and it takes some research.

To do the research these 7 signs can be very helpful at first. They allow you to form you hypotheses fast on a data that not completely irrelevant. Just one more thing: these 7 signs are not just a measure procedure giving you one number, each one is a facet of an organisation that should be studied.

To be sure you'd better find some another evaluation framework, and study facets of an organization that it deems to be the most important.

It is like psychological tests: they do not diagnose the problems, but they allow to see a client from different perspectives. Tests are relatively cheap and they give you some threads to unravel.

> I can easily find counterexamples of successful organisations which demonstrate one or more of these qualities

1. No one said that these signs are signs of an unsuccessful organisations. You can be completely unethical and pretty successful at the same time. To my mind, the question does ethics correlate with a success or not is an ideological one. Theoretically speaking you can study it in a relatively objective way, but ideologies will win at the end. Either your indoctrination will take the upper hand, or indoctrination of others will force you to argue in a favor of "our sin will be punished inevitable" or something like. It is hard to find thinkers who are immune to that, there is a lot of wishful thinking goes on.

2. 1-2 signs is not a verdict, but an invitation to look deeper at the matters. Likewise 0 signs is not a verdict but very suspicious situation: how so? I will be very surprised if I find no these signs in any mildly successful organisation.

You may think your company has is transparent and has a wonderful process for handling conflicts of interest. Then only when things collapse do people come out of the woodwork and start dishing drama.

If they have a fear and suppression program that works, you would never hear about it!

It is not easy for an single employee to change deeply embedded negative organizational behaviors, and therefore it is better for the employee to work with the goal of reward maximization (through a focus on total compensation and hitting numbers) and feigning ignorance or not bothering to report issues that cross ethical lines, which may backfire and cause trouble for the employee (constructive dismissal, smear campaigns, lawsuits etc.)

Sounds too much like astrology where 10/12 different horoscopes would apply to most people anyways.

Before subscribing to something like this, I'd want to see hard data around how common each of these signals is in a random sample of companies(possibly even with a breakdown by industry)

> Weak boards tend to have inexperienced members, often ones who are too young to have experienced a complete business cycle, which was often the case with companies in the dot-com boom.

> Often they have ethical conflicts of interest as well, in terms of consulting arrangements, related party transactions, …

Sound familiar?

3. Young ‘uns and a bigger-than-life CEO

6. Innovation like no other company

7. Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others

2. Fear and silence

3. Young ‘uns and a bigger-than-life CEO

4. Weak board of directors

5. Conflicts of interest overlooked or unaddressed

6. Innovation like no other company

7. Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others

good book about that - https://www.amazon.com/Reckoning-Financial-Accountability-Ri... tldr thesis is that the invention of double entry bookkeeping is the thing that has caused modern prosperity, not capitalism. we can only cooperate to the extent that we can detect cheating. Consider a 1600s merchant – without the ability to detect fraud, how can you give your goods to a shipping company? Capitalism is only possible if you can count your capital! a memorable example was a French king (Louis XV?) who bankrupted the realm because he didn’t know how much money he had.

On Monday, capital-C-Capitalism is celebrated as being the most efficient and economist-approved system (i.e. the bestest) when--if--there is somehow perfect price/deal information available to all actors.

On Tuesday, no-True-Capitalism is lauded as immune to cartels and collusion, because any actor will quickly undercut the others with secret prices and deals and hidden identities and wash-trading.

On Wednesday, Virtuous Capitalism needs no oversight because nasty behavior will be seen and detected by consumers who will vote with their wallets.

On Thursday, Property-Respecting Capitalism refuses to infringe on the owners' essential freedom... to construct impenetrable webs of shifting corporate ownership to obfuscate all controlling relationships.

My last job was at a company where the CEO had the vision and the personality to lead the company through a necessary transformation (it was in a long-tail business).

The individual contributors were smart, experienced, and good people.

But between the top and the bottom there was a complete disconnect, as people were driven by incentives that rewarded individuals and teams for things that did not serve the company as a whole.

Not an unusual scenario in any large organization, but it was beyond frustrating.

A more-prosaic example: I worked at a company where their internal enterprise software was sometimes the battleground between different groups, in particular Operations kept trying to put in guardrails to prevent commission-driven Sales from closing unprofitable deals.

in the end, though, our customers benefitted from the better internal ops tooling, and the customer experience improved. some deals were unprofitable from an ops perspective, but in my opinion the ops perspective misses the forest for the trees. sometimes a short term loss is a longer term win, and thats literally what a sales team is for. if ops doesnt trust sales, the org suffers.

This is the Homo sapiens version of the Alignment Problem.

How did you know? I ask because most people in a position to know would also be part of the middle that you are blaming for the company's dysfunction.

You can find numerous examples across institutions and industry that meet all these criteria.

1. Pressure to maintain numbers… line must go up economy.

2. Fear and silence… quiet quitting, workers keep going in while expressing fear in private

3. Young uns and bigger than life CEO… see tech, finance, academia, politics exploitation of naive grads

4. Weak board of directors… voters and workers are subservient to 1%

5. Conflicts of interest overlooked… why do so few have so much reach into all our lives?

6. Innovation like no other… US capitalism is unsurpassed! World cannot do without it!! Resell yesterday with faster chips and flatter design!! … metrics hacks line up!!

7. Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others… we are burning up the planet for the next generation but how about that iPhone 15, dick rockets into space, and those massive F350s!

This is not what that point means. “Goodness” isn’t referring to cool shit. It’s referring to doing good things.

Someone buys an F350 but then “offsets it” by donating money to a climate activist charity.

I was hoping for something, but sadly feel these all apply to our majority government in many world countries today, don't they?

1. Pressure to maintain numbers

2. Fear and silence

3. Young ‘uns and a bigger-than-life CEO

4. Weak board of directors

5. Conflicts of interest overlooked or unaddressed

6. Innovation like no other company

7. Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others

    - Pressure to maintain numbers
    - Fear and silence
    - Conflicts of interest overlooked or unaddressed
    - Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others

> “I hire them just like me: smart, poor, and want to be rich,” she quoted former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski as saying.

Some time later... "Ex-Tyco CEO Kozlowski says he stole out of pure greed"

( https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tyco-kozlowski-release-id... )

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35DSdw7dHjs&t=1m11s

And yet, in the US, we have congressmen/women who regularly engage in insider trading and accept bribes in the form of lobbying and cushy jobs after they leave office, we have multiple sitting Supreme Court justices accepting bribes, and we have a former president who isn't even held to the same standard we hold our children.

I'd be hard-pressed to come up with any examples of a high-status individual being held to a higher standard than the rest of us. Sure, there's a lot of belly-aching on social media from time to time, but in most (all?) cases, it's for falling short of a standard we're all expected to satisfy, and there's almost never any real consequences.

When you use the word “bribe” to describe something that isn’t, it dilutes your point significantly.

This is a thread about ethics, you can use precise words and still talk about how they are unethical.

You can indeed question the research of less ethical behaviour by richer people however you need to bring some evidence. This [1] article for example talks about a study which didn't replicate the behaviour. It's actually a well balanced discussion of the overall evidence.

[1] https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/are_rich_peopl...

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-42204-z

By handwavy I meant that one can easily come up with "logical" arguments around behaviour that dont reflect reality, so it needs to be backed up by evidence.

Thanks for posting the article I was not aware of this research (while I was aware of the research showing the opposite).

2 things to note: 1. How is it possible that the two don't cite each other?! I have to call out the scientific report paper in particular. Piff's work is more than 10 years old and well known. Instead the authors only cite work that supports their premise. I would have thrown it out as a reviewer just based on this. That said the article I linked should have mentioned some of the work cited in the scientific reports article as well.

2. It seems studies are done quite differently, the article you linked seems to largely rely on surveys (sidenote I really dislike the use of mechanical turk for these things, way too unreliable) of assessment others or their own ethical behaviour. Piff's work was more experimental (thus lower numbers and less reliable in that sense)

I think the Piff study is just really flawed because they were trying to use a quantifiable proxy.

"we used observers’ codes of vehicle status (make, age, and appearance) to index drivers’ social class."

IMO they chose a really bad proxy, and they never validated it. It's completely based on an assumption, and one that we can all probably point to personal examples that violate it. To me, that's "hand-wavy" science. To your point, I could probably come up with a handful of different explanations that correlate car make/model to seemingly aggressive driving behavior. Some of them probably correlate with wealth and others not so much.

I do think there's a danger of confirmation bias. Just like the nature study demonstrates that there is a normative belief that wealthy people act less ethically, it's really easy for our status-obscessed ape minds to latch onto studies that support it. Even when they aren't the greatest.

Regarding your thoughts on the car study I broadly agree it is not a very good proxy for wealth (also areas with many company cars likely skew results as well). However I do think that it's trying to independently verify peoples self-evaluation using similar experiments what gives us much better insights and there were a number of other studies with similar results.

Confirmation bias is always a danger and the paper that was described in the article which could not reproduce the correlation between car cost and behavior tried to follow best practices to minimise it, so probably should be given more weight. I actually wondered if there is a difference also according to culture, i.e. Piff's results were obtained in the US, while the other article was in the Netherlands.

They are missing the intermediate step that shows the model measures what it's supposed to. In this case, they never validate that car make/model is a good proxy for wealth. The entire premise is based on a book titled "Luxury Fever"[1] and not on peer-reviewed research. They never actually explain this model, either. What cars are mapped to their 1-5 scale? Is a Lincoln a 5 or a Ferrari? No idea. There's contradictory evidence that many wealthy people drive Hondas and Fords and that less-wealthy people buy luxury cars as a pseudo-status symbol. That's why symbols of wealth (clothes, cars, etc.) are a bad model for actual wealth, especially in a society with a large debt burden and when the models go unvalidated. There are other questions I would have, like small-ish sample sizing, to basing the entire study in Berkeley, to only doing the traffic study between 2-5pm. I would question how well that study can be extrapolated. If you do a quick Bayesian statistical significance test on their vehicle data, it doesn't appear statistically significant. But they report correlations instead.

All that to say, there's a lot of contradictory evidence on both sides. Social science is hard, and I was trying to make the main point that we need to be very careful about making strong and broad claims from limited evidence. And I say this as someone who drives a bargain-basement hatchback with mechanical windows :-)

Individually, no. But we have a remarkable ability to adapt group ethical systems when resource needs demand it. The conflict arises when these adaptations occur in too-small a group, e.g. at the company level within a country, or a country level within an integrated continent.

There's a gray area, usually referred to as "dark patterns" that aren't yet proven to be illegal, but likely are, if the regulators ever had the free time to care.

But yeah. Unethical people might find they have a hard time actually getting past a certain point in relationships (business or friendly), though sometimes it's good to have a few shrewd people in your back pocket to call on.

many of those "rich" people could be supporting many other "poor" people via jobs that you just wiped out for a small personal gain.

The reverse would be true where poor people could be ruined, unless the value provided is worth significantly more than the debt created, which seems doubtful.

To be in $10k debt, it means you have more debt than assets.

Either way, wealth distribution is wrong. Stealing is stealing.

It's the difference between a short term and a long term view.

  "Man — every man — is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others.
    He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor
    sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-
    interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life."

That's the seed of evil: the idea of isolated existence. The strong just pull it out. The weak passively watch how it grows and wait until it's rotten down in envy, experiencing all sorts of sufferings on the way there.

It's a luxury to live in a society where most people have ethics. I really enjoy having that luxury; I suspect you do, too.

So if you want to not have them yourself until you get ahead of everyone else, that sounds kind of like a sociopath.