Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Dear Googlefolk;
Recently, you have decided to take sides in a scientific debate. That in itself is very foolish. Why would Google want to take either side when there is a disagreement between scientists? I thought your motto was “Do No Evil.” For the 900-pound gorilla to take sides in any tempestuous politically charged scientific discussion is an extremely stupid thing to do, and in this case definitely verges on the E-word.
In fact, that’s why up until now I trusted Google, because I always felt that I was being given the unvarnished truth. I always felt that Google could be trusted, because you didn’t have a dog in the fight. I believed you weren’t trying to slant your results, that you were neutral, because you had nothing to prove.
So what did you guys do? You’re now providing money to 21 supporters of the CO2 hypothesis, funding them as “Google Fellows” to go and flog their scientific claims in the marketplace of ideas. Is this the new face of Google, advocating for a partisan idea?
You have chosen to fund policy people as Google Fellows. You have a specialist in “strategic communication in policymaking and public affairs” among them. You have a bunch of scientists whose careers depend on the validity of the CO2 hypothesis. And you are paying them all to push your ideas. In other words, Google has put into place a public relations campaign for the CO2 hypothesis … and people in your organization actually consider this a good idea?
I mean people other than Al Gore, who sits on your Board and who stands to make big money if the CO2 hypothesis can be sold to the public. It doesn’t matter if it’s true. If it can be sold to the public, Al makes big money, even if it’s later shown to be false. So sure, he’s in favor of your cockamamie scheme … but the rest of you guys have truly decided to hitch your wagon to Mr. Gore’s dying star? Really?
Man, Google doing PR work shilling for the CO2 hypothesis. I thought I’d never see the day.
It’s not even disguised as a scientific effort. It’s a sales job, a public relations push from start to finish, no substance, just improved communication. I’m surprised that you haven’t brought in one of the big advertising agencies. Those mad men sell cigarettes, surely they could advise you on how to sell an unpalatable product.
The problem is, now Google has a dog in the fight. You’ve clearly declared that you’re not waiting until the null climate hypothesis gets falsified. You’re not waiting for a climate anomaly to appear, something that’s unlike the historical climate. You have made up your mind and picked your side in the discussion. Here’s what that does. Next time I look up something that is climate science related, I will no longer trust that you are impartial. No way.
Let me make it very clear what I object to in this:
GOOGLE IS TAKING SIDES IN A MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR POLITICAL/SCIENTIFIC STRUGGLE
Don’t mistake this for a partisan entreaty. This is not because of the side you’ve chosen, despite the fact that I’m on the other side. I don’t care which side Google takes – it’s wrong and stupid for Google to be in any scientific fight at all, on either side. I’d be screaming just as loudly if you had picked scientists who were on my side of the debate. In fact, I’d scream even louder, because I don’t want Google Follows doing a big PR dog-and-pony-show for skeptical science. Unlike you, I think that’s bad tactics. Your presence, and the desperation that it reeks of, can only damage whichever side you support, so I’m glad it’s not my side.
But sides are not the point. Supporting either side in the debate involves Google in a high-stakes, multi-billion dollar, long-festering, dog-ugly political/scientific battle, with passions running high on both sides, accusations thrown, reputations attacked … and putting your head in this buzz-saw, jumping into this decades-old scientific Balkan war, this is a good idea for Google exactly how?
Truly, are you off your collective meds or something? You don’t want the good name of Google involved in this, there is no upside. All it is going to do is get your name abused in many quarters. I’ve read dozens of people already who said they were switching to Bing or Alta Vista. You’ve lost my trust, it’ll be trust but verify from here on out for me.
And all for what? Guys, you are so far out of touch with the issues that you appear to be truly convinced that it is a communications problem. So you’ve hired all these scientist/communicators to fix that problem. Let me put it in real simple terms.
People don’t believe AGW scientists because they have been lied to by some of the leading lights of the CO2 hypothesis. They’ve seen a number of the best, most noted AGW scientists cheat and game the system to advance their own views, and then lie and deny and destroy emails when the sunlight hit them.
That, dear friends, is not a failure to communicate. Your problem is not the lack of getting your message across. You’ve gotten it across, no problem. The message was obvious – many of the best AGW scientists are willing to lie, cheat, and steal to push their personal AGW agenda … the same agenda that your Google Fellows are now pushing. That was the message, and by gosh, we got it loud and clear.
The only cure for that kind of bad science is good science. It will not be cured by communication. We’ve already gotten the message that your side contains a number of crooks among its most admired and respected members. We’ve gotten the message that most of the decent climate scientists won’t protest against anything. They’ll stay quiet no matter what egregious excesses their leaders commit. They’ll pretend that everything is just fine. Indeed, a number of them even find excuses for the malfeasance of their leaders, that it’s just boys will be boys and the like. No recognition of the gravity of the actions, or how they have destroyed the public’s trust in climate scientists.
If you think the cure for that widespread scientific rot is a clearer explanation of how thunderstorms form or how the greenhouse effect works, I fear you are in for a rude shock. Communications will not fix it, no matter how smart your Google Fellows are … and they are wicked smart, I looked at the bios of every single one, very impressive, but that doesn’t matter. That’s not the issue.
The issue is that the side you’ve picked conned the public, and afterwards refused to admit it. Until they and climate science face up to that, your side will not be believed. There’s no reason to concern yourself with hiring scientists to analyze why your message isn’t getting across. It’s because people hate to be conned. They’d rather be wrong than be conned. And once you’ve conned them, and the Climategate emails show beyond question that your side conned the public, that’s it. After that, all the honeyed words and the communications specialists and the Google Fellows with expertise in “strategic communication in policymaking and public affairs” are useless. Clearer scientific explanations won’t cure broken trust.
And yes, perhaps I’m being paranoid about whether you will skew your search results against skeptics … but then I look at what happened in 2009/10 with “Climategate” as a search term, when for a couple weeks Google wouldn’t suggest it in the Auto Suggest feature. People claimed back then that it was deliberate, you did it on purpose, and I accused them of being paranoid, I didn’t believe it. Looks like instead of them being paranoid, I may have been being naïve.
Anyhow, you can be sure that I won’t defend you again.
So I entreat you and implore you, for your own sake and ours, stop taking sides in political/scientific debates. That is a guaranteed way to lose people’s trust. I’m using Bing for climate searches now, and I’m wondering just if and where you’ve got your thumb on the information scales.
Perhaps nowhere … but I’m a long-time Google user and Google advocate and Google defender. For me to be even wondering about that is an indication of just how badly you screwed up on this one.
Since you seem to have forgotten about your “Do No Evil” motto, I have a new one for you:
You are not wanted there. You are not needed there. You have no business there. Get out, and get out now, before the damage worsens.
Because the core issue is this – you can either be gatekeeper of the world’s knowledge, storing gigabytes of private information about me and my interests and likes and dislikes and my secret after-midnight searches for okapi porn and whale-squashing videos … or you can be a political/scientific advocate.
BUT YOU CAN’T BE BOTH.
You can’t both be in politics and be hiring scientific experts to push a trillion-dollar political/scientific agenda, and at the same time be the holder of everyone’s secret searches. That’s so creepy and underhanded and unfair and wrong in so many ways I can’t even start to list them. I can’t even think of a word strong enough to describe how far off the reservation you are except to say that it is truly Gore-worthy.
Your pimping for the CO2 hypothesis is unseemly and unpleasant. Your clumsy attempt to influence the politics of climate science, on the other hand, is very frightening and way out of line. You hold my secrets, and you held my trust. If you want it again, go back to your core business. Your actions in this matter are scary and reprehensible and truly bizarre. It’s as bizarre as if J. Edgar Hoover was hiring shills to flack for the Tea Party … you are the holder of the secrets. As such, you have absolutely no business involving yourself in anything partisan. It is a serious breach of our trust, and you knew it when you started Google. That’s why your motto is Do No Evil. Get back to that, because with this venture into advocacy you have seriously lost the plot.
My best to you all, and seriously, what you are doing is really scary, I implore and beg you to stop it. Your business is information and secrets, and ethically you can’t be anything else. You hold too much dangerous knowledge to be a player in any political/scientific dogfight, or any other fight. You not only need to be neutral. You need to seem to be neutral.
w.
It is depressing that one has to write these sorts of letters in the first place. Even more depressing is the sugar coated condescending non-sequitor of a reply that is likely to follow, extolling how 97% of the worlds scientists believe AGW and then proceeding to rub salt in the wound by quoting the IPCC – a red rag to a bull.
Such replies are more infuriating than the original injury.
Willis Eschenbach says:
March 20, 2011 at 11:29 am
Re: narrow view of the duties of a corporation.
thanks for responding Willis – yes there are different schools of thought on this and my post expressed one side without qualifications (frankly my post was long enough already). Obviously my view is informed by this famous essay by Milton Friedman:
http://www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/libertarians/issues/friedman-soc-resp-business.html
It is also informed by other principles:
1. Concentration of power is bad
2. Separation of powers and segregation of duties are good
3. Capital (i.e. the stored surplus from labour) is the building block of civilization and therefore the destruction of capital is wrong
4. CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility – for those who might not know, yes it has its own acronym) can sometimes be consistent with building capital (some charitable work can be included here for sure), but importantly it can also be an alternative to creating capital, an excuse for poor performance. Furthermore CSR is also not required to prevent evil. Laws and PR will do that.
When people complain vaguely about a corporatist state, what I think they sense is the insidious encroachment of corporations into areas of society where they don’t belong. CSR – when done wrong like in the Google example is a good example.
I prefer to see corporations stick to their knitting. Let societies other institutions perform these other roles.
We may ultimately choose to disagree on this point, but I did want to provide some additional perspective on this part of my earlier post.
I thought most people knew Google is a lefty outfit. Kate over at Small Dead Animals has been pointing this out for years.
I read a couple of years ago that Google had invested heavily in green technology and they were skewing search results on Climategate ie they were reducing the number if hits. It was a dramatic difference. I decided to protest by removing Google as my search engine and got an e-mail from them asking for my reason. I told them it was because they had taken sides. As CAGW continues to crater I suspect they are attempting to protect their massive investment.
Protest by removing Google as your search engine.
Willis, At this time there has been no response from Google to the open letter. Has it actually been delivered to them? Perhaps it should be delivered as a registered letter to their legal department. Until then, I anticipate that they would be happy to say that Google’s position is supported by official statements from well reputed scientific bodies such as the AMS, the APS, the AAAS, and UK’s Royal Society.
And Google would be right.
It leaves some of us feeling quite disturbed, since you seem so correct and sincere in your writings.
Have you thought of putting your skills and energy into trying to get the official statements from these scientific bodies modified?
Richard Hill says:
March 20, 2011 at 5:26 pm (Edit)
Thanks for the reply, Richard.
As to whether Google has responded, they have not, nor did I expect them to.
However, I’m given to understand that my open letter is being discussed internally at Google, which is what I had intended. I’ve written a number of open letters, and have no reply to any of them … so it’s good I hadn’t expected a reply when I wrote it.
Regarding the statements claiming to be from the various societies, I know of no society of scientists that has actually polled their members before letting us know, in no uncertain terms, what all of those scientists think … that process sounds kinda, well, unscientific to me, but I’m a reformed cowboy, what do I know?
As a result, I do not treat them as any kind of official statement, since it is in fact the views of only a few people in power, a tiny minority, and we don’t have a clue about the views of the members.
Unfortunately, I don’t have much leverage in that regard. I am an independent climate researcher, with no credentials and no membership in the Societies. My feeling is that they will have to be reformed from within, and I can’t do that.
So I put my efforts where I think they’ll do the most good. Might not be right about my choices, but I pick the places where it seems like I can make a difference.
All the best,
w.
I Googled “okapi porn” and noticed Willis’s Open Letter To Google was the 5th listing on page one. Excellent use of key words Willis to get such a good ranking and also how ironic!
dkkraft says:
March 20, 2011 at 1:50 pm
Both you and Friedman make a critical mistake. You assume that the issue is the corporate social responsibility to do something. Of course this costs money, and is subject to your and Friedman’s complaint. Me, I’m asking Google to do nothing, which won’t cost money, and so is free from Friedman’s issues.
Friedman’s conclusion is that Google is not acting correctly, because they are spending the corporations money and thereby reducing profit.
My conclusion is that it has nothing to do with the money. For example, a corporation may have two completely legal choices, both of which will make the same profit. Suppose one of them is completely legal, and the other is legal but highly unethical.
I say that the corporation in that situation has an obligation to act ethically. You say the opposite. Under Friedman’s (and your) analysis, a corporate executive has an obligation to act unethically if it will make them more money, as long as it’s legal.
I want you to think about that last line. The highest duty for Friedman is making more money, regardless of the ethics, regardless of the morals, regardless of who might get hurt in the process, regardless of anything.
Now, I hold that that is a child’s view of business, and that Friedman would squeal like a stuck pig if some corporation hurt him in the process of their take-no-prisoners pursuit of money, money, and more money. He’d be standing up for his individual rights, or some other Friedman claim.
If you truly believe that as a corporate executive your job is to make money no matter what ethical boundaries are transgressed and no matter who you hurt, then I sincerely hope that you will never be given that power. Friedman’s view is that money lust should over-ride everything but the law, that grasping for the last dollar is the true and noble pursuit of the real authentic businessman.
Me, I have what I think is a more adult and less grasping view of business. Friedman wants corporations to only be “persons” when it suits him, and businesses when it suits him. He wants them to be free of morality and ethics and just make money however they can and devil take the hindmost and it doesn’t matter who gets hurt, because THE CORPORATION MADE AN EXTRA DOLLAR. Friedman says that extra dollar should over-ride every other consideration.
But he wants them to be “people” the rest of the time with all of the benefits and privileges that accords. I say pick one or the other. If we are to accord corporation the privilege of personhood, that privilege comes with responsibilities. One of them is to act morally and ethically, not just see how close to the edge of the law you can play funny games.
w.
James Allison says:
March 20, 2011 at 6:48 pm
Dang, who beat me? And what about the whale squash videos, where some woman in high heels stomps on a whale? How did I rate on those?
w.
Sold my stock in Goog back in 2007. Put the profits in property and those shiny metals. 🙂 Suggest all do the same. With co- founder Larry Page back in charge as chief executive officer in April, does that mean the mission statement will change? Seens “get the money” regardless of ethics 101, is ok with some folks here (R. Gates?). Gaining trust becomes a difficult task to redo after sliding down the snakey slope of Al-Gorification. Stock holders start looking around as dividends become more desperate a lure.
Goog sympathizers…sinking with your ship; a Titanic feeling?
Willis Eschenbach says:
March 20, 2011 at 6:59 pm
Re: narrow view of the duties of a corporation. cont.
you say:
I say that the corporation in that situation has an obligation to act ethically. You say the opposite. Under Friedman’s (and your) analysis, a corporate executive has an obligation to act unethically if it will make them more money, as long as it’s legal.
I want you to think about that last line. The highest duty for Friedman is making more money, regardless of the ethics, regardless of the morals, regardless of who might get hurt in the process, regardless of anything.
My response now:
I don’t get that at all from reading Friedmans essay or my post for that matter, Friedman says explicitly “there is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” The rules of the game include ethics. Avoiding deception and fraud includes ethics. I would add that in my experience, which is considerable, unethical behavior is bad business, at least if you depend on things like retaining employees and customers :-).
I admit in my original post I used “obey the law” as a soundbite for obey the rules of the game. In an attempt to be concise I was imprecise.
Now my complaint with Google is also that I want them to do nothing. I agree with your reasons and I add another. Specifically the agency problem.
The people making the decision to use Google assets to fund the Google fellows are agents. They are not principals. They are using other peoples (stockholders) money, without permission, to support a pet project that is peripheral to their core business.
Now if this could be demonstrated to be an activity that somehow helped, say, attract and retain better employees or more plausibly, enhanced their brand image and therefore had a viable fit in their overall marketing mix that would be one thing I suppose. Although as your post points out, correctly, there are significant ethical/trust issues with this particular activity that would override any possible sound business justification for the activity. Maybe they should re-direct this money to cancer research or something (I would have somewhat more sympathy for that than would Friedman – although as stated in his essay he doesn’t object too strongly if it is a business fit).
Anyway, the Google Fellows project is not going to enhance their brand and it involves innapropriate risk to their brand. It is not being done for business reasons and is a mis-use of business assets. If the principals want to support this they should do so out of their own private accounts.
Once again, my complaints about Google Fellows funding are in addition to yours, not contradicting yours.
So there we go, hopefully there is some common ground there.
Thanks Willis!
I have been noticing this bias and how Google has been sadly loosing value for me, as an user.
Joe Romm is upset with Bill Gates (co-founder of Microsoft).
“Annual Letter from Bill Gates silent on climate change”
http://climateprogress.org/2011/03/01/annual-letter-bill-gates-climate-change/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+climateprogress%2FlCrX+%28Climate+Progress%29
My admiration for Bill Gates has gone from negative, to positive after reading Joe’s rant.
dkkraft says:
March 20, 2011 at 8:45 pm
Thanks, dkk. I agree with you that our positions are not all that far apart. However, I still read Friedman as saying:
“there is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”
You say “The rules of the game include ethics. Avoiding deception and fraud includes ethics.”
Not true. Avoiding deception and fraud are a part of ethics, but a small part. For example, let’s look at a business choosing two different paths. One involves a lot of people being thrown out of work, the other doesn’t, but throwing people out of work might increase the profits by a quarter of a percent. Now, throwing people out of work is neither deception or fraud … but I would argue that a business should try to avoid throwing people out of work for ethical reasons, despite the fact that they might make a bit more profit by doing so..
So no, Friedman is not saying that the company has to act ethically, merely that they must avoid the crimes of “deception and fraud”, which is a very, very different thing.
I don’t understand why you and Friedman think that individual humans should act ethically, but that humans working together (corporations) are under absolutely no obligation to do so.
Indeed, Friedmans claim is that as long as it is legal, that is to say there is no fraud or deception involved, money should be the highest god and ethics is immaterial. Makes no sense to me, that individual humans should be ethical and moral and groups of humans (corporations) have no obligations other than legal ones.
But hey, I’m not an economist, so I probably don’t understand the inner logic of saying it’s the duty of corporations to harm people, as long as it is legal to do so and there’s money to be made by harming them. After all, there’s no fraud or deception (illegality) involved … only pain and suffering.
You’ll have to explain that one to me again, dkk. You and I agree on a lot, but that one I just don’t understand.
w.
A personal ancedote…
I was typing ‘climategate’ into google on and around the 20th November 2009..
and the hits were going up at enormous rate, even higher that the ‘Tiger Woods’ scandal at the same time.
Initially I received about 100,000 hits for climategate (or climate gate), it auto completed and I received results like climate control, automatic gate generators, etc .
Over the next few days this hit count went into the several hundred thousand and then millions.
Then autocomplete DID stop working, lots of comment in various blogs about how odd thgis was..
After a few weeks, auto complete started working again..
Why, How, only google knows….
At the time here was one article- Christopher Booker (Sunday Telegraph, UK) The greates scientific Scandal of this generation’ that was number one result on google..
then it dropped off the rankings…
Google was suspected, but if I recall correctly it disappeared because at the Telegraph website itself, someone (internally) made some changes so it dropped off. I think James Delingpole wrote about that in his column, I’ll try to get hold of the exact reference.
Found it…
James Delingpole (telegraph journalist) noticicing that the ONLY UK MSM article about climategate for week, had disappeared from Google…
Christopher Booker’s (Telegraph)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6679082/Climate-change-this-is-the-worst-scientific-scandal-of-our-generation.html
Delingpole 29th November 2009
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100018263/climategate-googlegate/
“What is going on at Google? I only ask because last night when I typed “Global Warming” into Google News the top item was Christopher Booker’s superb analysis of the Climategate scandal.
It’s still the most-read article of the Telegraph’s entire online operation – 430 comments and counting – yet mysteriously when you try the same search now it doesn’t even feature.”
But the suspect according to Richard North was most likley to be closer to home..
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2009/11/googlegate.html
If you look at the Telegraph comments on this article, a number of commentors have also noticed that climategate had stopped auto completeing, and that hit counts were fluctuating…
One of the comments on James Delingpole’s Telegraph article..
alongwayfromkansas
12/07/2009 09:10 AM
just done a quick search of some search engines for climategate/climate gate
Alta Vista give autosuggestion and 43 million hits
Bing gives autosuggestion (which had disappeared but now is back) and 50.1 million hits
Yahoo gives autosuggestion and 48.5 million hits
the above three give the results for both ‘climategate’ and ‘climate gate’ whichever term you type in
GOOGLE – NO AUTOSUGGESTION AND EACH TERM IS REPORTED SEPARATELY
‘Climategate’ 31.2 million hits
‘Climate Gate’ 12.9 million hits
Interestingly, if you type in ‘climate g’ you get an autosuggestion for ‘Climate Gas Totton’ – 4,830 hits
Google claim they have not interfered with the autosuggestion program – Yeah Right!
Also,
if you type ‘water gate’ into google
you also get hits for ‘watergate’
anything to reduce the amount of information on climategate eh? ”
——————————————–
A few days later, it was back…
It’s not as one-sided as that. The points and counterpoints go many layers deep. The CACA Cult makes out that it has the last word on the topic, but it’s really more like a gigantic muddle. And “mainstream” opinion isn’t–for that very reason–trustworthy. Here’s an amusing quote I came across today.
I think so too. But I don’t believe that it’s catastrophic.
The “consensus” among experts-in-the-field (at least the ones most quoted in the media) on that one was wrong–remember them saying “we are all at risk,” which was a quarter-truth, and even “we are all equally at risk,” which one heard from time to time? It was a political issue–one intended to scare the majority into believing they were at risk so that they’d cough up more funding for research in the field. (I’m not saying that wasn’t somewhat justified (maybe)–just that it wasn’t nonpartisan.)
I stopped using Google years ago because of their slanting of politically related searches.
So is Google biased or not when it comes to who it thinks should be listed to when it comes to the man-caused climate change debate?
For, what I hope, is a light-hearted analysis of my attempt to answer that question why not pop over to my latest thread on DITC?
http://diggingintheclay.wordpress.com/2011/03/21/does-google-do-evil/
[mods – apologies for my blatant astro-turfing well in advance!]
Post Script to my earlier comment (here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/19/an-open-letter-to-google/#comment-624798): YouTube is an exception – hard to get away from using that one.
Google lost it for me when they were unable to cooperate with the FBI in catching kiddy-porn filth, but were able (for a while anyway) to get along with the Peoples Republic of China in catching people googling freedom and liberty.
Thanks Willis for posting this. It would be nice to wait for a response from Google, not that I expect too much but still one never knows. For Americans it might be possible to change to Bing (because they copy Google results in their own results as has been shown some weeks ago) in the rest of the World their implementation is so bad that in my language when looking for Climate blog the first page of results is filled with the WWF and Realclimate and WUWT is on page 12… How bad is that…
Outstanding post. Like many wealthy liberals the Google owners are pure hypocrites. For example Larry Page recently bought a 194 foot yacht, with twin 1600 hp diesels engines. They share ownership in a private jet. Their data centres consume power like nothing else. The Prius cars they drive to work are purely for show.
I’m sick to death of these sorts of people. Their single objective is to make sure that only they and their wealthy pals enjoy a comfortable life, while the rest of society is kept far down the ladder. Never forget that class separation is the ultimate objective of the big players in the green movement.
Willis Eschenbach says:
March 20, 2011 at 11:46 pm
thanks for the response Willis. Re your example below:
One involves a lot of people being thrown out of work, the other doesn’t, but throwing people out of work might increase the profits by a quarter of a percent. Now, throwing people out of work is neither deception or fraud … but I would argue that a business should try to avoid throwing people out of work for ethical reasons, despite the fact that they might make a bit more profit by doing so..
I hear you, but even on this one the Friedman essay helps, not with respect to the profit motive, but with respect to the agency problem.
Indulge me and fair warning, I am going to take the quantitative part of your hypothetical example way too literally here. But here goes…
If someone, an agent, came to me with 2 proposals that rely on uncertain future outcomes and the only difference between the one that threw a bunch of our people out of work and the other option was a quarter of a point…. what are we talking about? return on assets? Google as we saw yesterday was at 13.19%, so a quarter of a point makes 13.44%, that is a rounding error…. these proposals are a wash and yet the person recommends throwing a bunch people out of work! Well, that tells me that this person has another agenda and it has nothing to do sound business.
Some irony follows. Now far be it for me to speak for Friedman, but I do think that there may be a criteria were he would advocate layoffs. Specifically this criteria would be when the marginal cost of the labour is clearly and significantly larger than the marginal revenue that labour can provide. A good current example of this might be a certain company that has just hired 21 “fellows” to engage in activities that have nothing whatsoever to do with the business. This labour probably should be released back into marketplace where it can be re-allocated more efficiently (that’s cold, no wonder they call economics the dismal science). OK Irony done, but at least it brings us back to the header topic 🙂
In my experience high ethical conduct and strong financial performance reenforce one another. It is the profitable company that adds value, that invests in people and the community and charities where their employees and supliers and customers live. It is the profitable company that invests in technology and value added innovation that delights its customers. It is the unprofitable, financially undisciplined company that cuts ethical corners.
Friedman is a theorist. But for the practioner his essay provides 2 useful things. It is a warning of the potential hazards of agency. It is also a recognition that business ethics and profit are not antithetical. Friedman reminds us that profit is an integral component of business ethics.
dkkraft says:
March 21, 2011 at 6:23 pm
Unprofitable companies are the ones that cut corners? You mean like the incredibly profitable Google is doing, cutting ethical corners with the 21 shills for global warming?
You’ll have to think a bit harder about that one. Enron got very profitable specifically by cutting ethical corners. The idea that only unprofitable companies cut ethical corners is a non-starter in a business environment where being unethical can lead to huge profits.
Yes, it does do that, he shows that profit is a valid goal … but that’s not even half of the story he tells. In the other half of the story, he says that if profit and ethics collide, people in charge of corporations are obliged to make a profit even if it is unethical, as long as it is legal (i.e., no deception or fraud, both of which are illegal).
And that is an extremely dangerous idea to me. I don’t want corporations using all legal means to make money, as Friedman advises. I want them using all ethical means to make money, which is very, very different.
w.