From: Wei Dai (weidai@eskimo.com)
Date: Mon Sep 04 2000 - 03:56:08 MDT
On Sun, Sep 03, 2000 at 10:37:26PM -0700, hal@finney.org wrote:
> Yes, that makes sense; organizing in a group amplifies your power, for
> good or evil. However corporations and other groups are not inherently
> evil or wrong, any more than are other power amplification systems like
> science and technology.
These power amplification systems aren't neutral. They amplify different
powers differently and some people's power more than others. So I think
there are two cases that can be made for the corporation (or science and
technology for that matter) being inherently evil. First, one can argue
that it amplifies the powers for doing evil more than the powers for
doing good. And second, they can increase inequality, which some
consider an evil.
> > A lot of evil contributed to big corporations seem to consist of
^^^^^^^^^^^
Of course I meant to write "attributed" here.
> > situations where two parties voluntarily cooporate on some effort, but
> > because one of the parties is in a significantly weaker bargaining
> > position (because of market conditions, lack of information, or
> > whatever), most of the benefit deriving from the effort goes to the other
> > party (i.e. shareholders of the corporation). Is it evil to take
> > advantage of other people, even though they would prefer that you did?
>
> IMO it is not evil to engage in interactions which are voluntary for
> all parties. As I understand these situations, the "victim" actually
> has his situation improved, but just not as much as the victimizer.
> However I know that many people have a different intuition.
>
> There was an article in the 3/28/98 issue of Science News about
> experiments in a game where there is a sum of money which will be
> divided between two people. The first person makes an offer to the
> second person of how the money should be split, and the second person
> agrees or not. If he agrees they both get the money and it is split
> according to the offer. If he disagrees, neither gets the money.
>
> The first person has all the leverage in this game; he can keep almost
> all the money and offer a pittance to the second player, and it is to
> the second player's advantage to accept. However in practice, if he
> offers too little, the second player will refuse. Most people offer
> a substantial fraction to the second player, 30% or more, which is
> usually accepted.
>
> It seems that most people have instinctive beliefs about fair behavior
> in situations of unequal power. Applied to the case of corporations,
> they consider it wrong for corporations to use their market power to
> help themselves, even when they do so only by offering lesser advantages
> to others. Microsoft is a good current example.
I agree that people have instinctive beliefs about fair behavior in
situations of unequal power, but I'm not sure this experiment reveals
much about them. I'll have to get the actual article from my
library. A lot depends on the exact setup of the experiment. How much
money was involved, whether it's completely anonymous, etc. An
explanation not involving fairness may be that the second player is
trying to maintain his reputation for not being a pushover or has a
behavior pattern that's primarily used for that purpose. In which case I
would predict that the percentage offered to the second player would
decrease as the total amount of money increased.
It's a good thing that these kinds of studies are being done though.
It would be interesting to know where people's instincts about fairness
come from.
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