| | Sanctioned. Thank you for that nice catch. You said well what I have said often in my own social context. I believe that one of the reasons that dishonest people come to business is because they were socialized to that anti-capitalist point of view prevalent.
Entrepreneurship offers opportunities to fraudulent persons, but management paves more roads to perdition. University business schools train managers, and about 10 million people today have bachelor's degrees in business. Obviously, all but a marginal percentage are honest. However, as I point out to my own clients, if 99% of us are trustworthy, then the business world has 100,000 criminals. In point of fact, the actual size of the problem is likely much greater, based on results from common public opinion surveys. The level of deceit might be mere pilfering of office supplies or it might be as large as Enron.
With that as a basis, it is commendable that the problem is not many times worse. In point of fact, commerce at any level would be impossible without a solid basis of trust. About fifteen years ago, before Travelocity and Expedia, Newt Gingrich made the point that you pick up the phone, call a number, talk to someone you do not know, give them your credit card information; and a few days later, you show up at the airport actually expecting a ticket... and there it is!
Not being a New York Times reader, I had no idea who Eleanor Randolph is. When I started the article, I thought she was perhaps an Op/Ed writer. Accessing her biography at the New York Times website (a bit more on Wikipedia), I found that she certainly can be taken as a cultural barometer. She truly seems to be statistically normal, and therefore, prejudiced against business.
Nevertheless, of course, most people, when they act on the basis of their personal common sense, show that prudence about their money is a decent, praiseworthy thing. They know well and good that seeking out good financial advice and acting on it are a wise course for them to take. They often stress such prudence as they raise their children. They frown upon recklessness in the market place by friends and neighbors.
That may be statistically unlikely. When I grant that 99% of people are "honest" I mean only by common standards, not by the Objectivist metrics. By our expectations, most people are about 50% honest -- again, as common opinon polls from Harris and others show.
Robert K. Merton's structural functionalist typology of deviance is easy to validate. Most people show up to work routinely, do as little as necessary and leave as soon as possible specifically because they accept the institutionalized means of commerce (showing up; getting paid; buying what they need or want) but they reject the cultural goals of commerce (McCloskey's "bourgerois virtues"). My best case in point is the millions of former auto workers. They were not emotionally invested in the production of cars. Consequently, their overwhelming performace modality was one of occupational dishonesty.
True enough, many were different from this. I have been enriched socially and psychologically by knowing them and working with them. The exceptions are outstanding, by definition.
Soldiering your way through work can be seen in all fields. Few people want to live their jobs. It is a cliche that on your deathbed, you are not going to say that you wish you had spent more time at the office. I ask: Why not? That disdain for productive effort stems from a lack of self-esteem, which is also deeply reinforced by the common culture. The consequence is that most people actually do not honor their money or take good care of it. Most people want "buy and hold" investment strategies that require no work. Most people would not know "good financial advice" because they have no standard -- no metaphysical standard -- for evaluation. They "buy on the news" and then "sell into their misery." They are mindless consumers who buy whatever their television sets program them to want. (Not only do I not read the New York Times, we have also have no television into the home.) Another consequence of their low self-esteem is the blame they place on those who "take advantage" of them, thus the anti-business prejudice.
Never mind that it is such trade, carried out by those in the world of business that creates the jobs that keeps people off the unemployment lines, that makes it possible for them to provide for their needs and wants and dreams!
Actually, I believe that for most people, money for nothing would be the actualization of their dreams. No one worked in the Garden of Eden. In fact, it is a cogent though refracted criticism of both capitalism and socialism that they alike create armies of mindless robots to run the machineries of their own destruction. I assure you that in the post-modernist university, such criticism from the left of old-style socialism is an easy brownie point. The reason that this image is "refracted" is that the mindlessness and robotization take place internally: you do it to yourself. Granted, that under socialism, there are fewer (if any) external rewards for intelligence and creativity, non-conformity and progress. The laissez faire society is metastable because it admits to the unknown and unforeseen: we call it risk. Socialism seeks to negate risk. Capitalism thrives on it. In the words of the insurer Chubb: "if there were no losses, there would be no premiums." Most people dream of a world without losses... without risk... without work... without effort... Most people dream of death.
Business is the opposite of that.
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