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Jan. 20, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:21
62 Capitalism and Profit - Common Misperceptions
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Time Text
Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
It's Friday, January the 20th, 2006, and it is seven minutes before five.
Look at that.
I'm out of work early today.
So I hope you're doing well.
I got a couple of interesting emails today.
Not that I was checking them at work, of course, because that would just be like stealing from the company.
But I thought that it might be worth having a chat about it, because I think that there was a very sort of common misperception in The emails that I got, which I've sort of seen before, and I'm sure that you've also seen before, and maybe you share it yourself, and it is sort of a fundamental misperception about the free market.
And it came in response to my podcast about the problems of poverty.
And in it, a gentleman was saying that, you know, basically the problem is that corporations work to maximize profit, or the free market works to maximize profit, and therefore, you know, charity will never occur within a free market situation.
And this is one of the standard responses that you will get as you start to talk about You know, how freedom and the problem of poverty intersect.
And, you know, basically it's that, well, in the free market, the most efficient use of capital, it's a very sort of mechanistic view, a little cold-blooded, and I'll sort of get into why I think that's the case.
But it says, well, If you're the most efficient at increasing capital, you will end up with the most capital.
If you are the most efficient at keeping workers' wages down, then you will end up as the richest business owner.
And therefore, there is this tendency within capitalism for any sort of charity to be squeezed out as economically inefficient.
And therefore, that's just not going to be a possibility for capitalism.
You know, people would rather accumulate capital and give it away, and those who do give it away are going to end up with just much less capital than those who are sort of ruthlessly efficient, and therefore capital is going to tend to accumulate to the most selfish among us, and you know, this, that and the other.
You've probably heard all this stuff before.
And I think that it's actually a... Okay, I won't be gentle.
And I know that this gentleman who writes me is a smart guy and so on, and so I apologize in advance for any offense I may give him.
But I find this view slightly, and I'm not saying this guy is one, but I find this view slightly sociopathic.
And the reason that I find this view slightly sociopathic is because it does not I want to take into account all of the complex motivations of human beings.
And so I want to take a sort of swing at this idea that if you're into economics, you're into economic efficiency.
I mean, absolutely not true.
It's just not true.
An economist will tell you, I guess a competent economist will tell you exactly the same thing.
There is nothing in economics and nothing in the free market that says that you have to ruthlessly be efficient and accumulate capital and this and that and the other.
Adam, I can understand why people sort of believe this.
I can understand why people believe that An economist will tell you cold-bloodedly that giving to charity is bad because it dilutes your capital and this and that and the other.
Maybe there are economists who say this, but they're bad economists.
An economist does not care if the market is efficient.
A good economist doesn't care whatsoever if a business runs well or it runs badly.
You know, there's an example in... I can't remember.
Landsberg, I think, is the name of the economist, and I honestly can't, for the life of me, remember the book.
And the example he gives is something like this.
He says, if the shareholders in GM make a billion dollars, economists are perfectly happy.
If the shareholders in General Motors decide to sell all of their shares and invest in backrubs, or transcendental meditation I think is his example, an economist is perfectly happy.
Right?
I mean, there are causes and effects within the free market, which is, you know, I mean, that people will generally price something that's cheaper, all other things being equal, and that, you know, if you make bad decisions, you lose money, your company can go out of business, and so on.
So there are consequences, of course, but the choices that people make are in no way solely determined by economic value.
I mean, it would be insane to imagine that it was the case.
Because human beings are very complicated creatures.
Everybody's different.
Everybody has different desires.
And, you know, the fact that I might want to become the CEO of a large software company and make a million dollars a quarter is one option of how to live.
And another choice, which is, I want to buy a little cottage in the middle of nowhere and grow my own food and be self-sustaining, is another way to live.
And there is no decent economist alive who will tell you that one decision is better than another.
That's something very important to understand about the free market.
I mean, it's great to understand how the free market tends to find the optimal use of capital and this and that and the other.
And that's all perfectly valid.
But the free market is as complicated as a human being.
In fact, it's complicated as millions of human beings.
So if you're going to talk about things like charity or community or economic efficiency and so on, you have to recognize that the free market is simply the freedom to do these things.
It is not a compulsion to do these things.
I mean, if you look at something like, and this is a pretty obvious example, you probably thought of it yourself, but if you look at the, what was it, like 10 billion dollars was given to the aid agencies working with the tsunami victims.
I guess it was last year.
I mean, you tell me exactly how the free market tells people that it's economically optimal to dilute their capital by giving to people that they'll never see.
And, you know, a staggering amount of money.
I mean, this is the largest outpouring of generosity as far as I can... private generosity in human history.
And this is when people are being taxed at 40 or 50 percent.
You know, of course, imagine how generous they're going to be if they're not taxed at 40 or 50 percent.
And so it's very important to understand that economic man is much, much, much broader and deeper and richer than capital.
than the aggregation of material possessions, than the maximizing of this, that, or the other.
That what it is that makes people want to make decisions is very complex.
As I've mentioned in another podcast, of course, having children is ridiculously economically not efficient.
You know, it costs like, what, $150,000 a year?
$150,000 a year, sorry, it costs $150,000 in aggregate to take a child just through to pre-college or pre-university.
I mean, you don't get that money back even if your kid supports you for, you know, a decade in your old age relative to just having invested that money.
You know, people buy model airplanes.
I mean, think about that!
I mean, that's amazing!
People buy video games.
What is economically efficient about playing a video game?
What is economically efficient about flying a model airplane or playing ping-pong?
Or ceramics?
Or those, you know, Lewis Craft girly, girly things that people... that a friend of mine's wife, like, really likes to buy and make and sort of doodads for the home and so on.
What's economically efficient about painting a room in your house?
I mean, there's just so many examples where, you know, human life is really not centered around economic efficiency at all.
I mean, if it were, just let's sort of put on our imagination, let's sort of take the train to Imagination Station, get off and have a look around at a world where everybody is only interested in economic efficiency.
Well, of course, they don't eat nice food, right?
They'll just take protein pills and fat supplements because all they'll need is enough energy to do their work.
They're not going to do anything as wasteful as invest in food that really tastes good.
So, you know, basically all restaurants go out of business.
And, you know, the stores have like three items, the grocery stores.
And they don't furnish their homes and they don't live in nice homes because that would interfere with the accumulation of their capital.
So they'll live, you know, ten to a room and they'll all stick their money in a bank and they're going to just save and save and save because they're all about the maximization of capital.
And what else are they going to do?
Well, they're going to try and sleep as little as possible.
They're going to hold down three jobs.
They're going to, you know, bathe only the recommended minimum.
They're never going to have children.
They're never going to get married, or if they do, they're only going to get married because maybe it's advantageous from a tax standpoint, and they're certainly not going to spend any money on their wedding, and so on.
I mean, none of this sounds like a ridiculous example, but really this is where this philosophy of the accumulation of capital and the sort of absolute law for the accumulation of capital takes us.
It takes us to a ridiculous world wherein everybody is working all the time to maximize their capital, And the interesting thing is, of course, they're putting their money in a bank.
And what is the bank going to do with it?
I mean, there's no business.
There's no restaurants.
There's no nice house construction.
There's no vacation places.
There's no video games or table tennis companies or any of those sorts of things.
So, you know, there's really nothing to buy.
Like, why would you work?
You know, just to accumulate capital.
You know, the important thing is that, you know, if you really want to get the hang of what economics is all about, you know, people don't do things like accumulate capital as an end in itself.
I mean, unless you're maybe crazy Howard Hughes and shuffling around in Kleenex boxes on your feet and nails three feet long, you're not interested in accumulating capital, right?
You're interested in pleasure.
You're interested in happiness.
And, you know, we all make those calculations, those rational calculations about what it is that's going to make us happy.
And so, for instance, I mean, I get up in the morning and I kiss my wife goodbye, and then I go to work.
And I don't dislike my job.
I mean, I think as far as ways to make a living go, it's pretty interesting.
You know, I learn a lot.
You know, I would never do it if I wasn't paid to do it, which I think is true of most people, right?
I mean, unless you're like a movie actor or a rock star or something.
Most people do their jobs and they don't, you know, hate them or anything, and I don't hate my job.
And it can be interesting at times and there's lots of, you know, really enjoyable times, you know, where you close a deal or your code works for the first time or something.
Or I mean the first time you run it.
My code, 20 years in the business, it works for the first time.
But, you know, it's not something that I would do if I was, you know, if somebody gave me five million dollars, well, you know, I'd write libertarian books and do podcasts.
I wouldn't go to work in the software industry for, you know, eight, ten hours a day and travel on Sundays to do presentations at conferences or anything.
So, you know, as far as things go, I think I've got a pretty sweet economic deal that I make good money and I have a job that is interesting and absorbing and, you know, it is not terribly demanding in terms of, like, having been an entrepreneur and knowing what demanding jobs really look like.
It's, you know, it's a pretty sweet deal.
So I have no real complaints about my job or my career.
But I go to work in order to come home and be with my wife and do these podcasts and I have a car, not because I enjoy having a car, but because I want to get somewhere.
Everything that we have in life that we buy, we buy in order to do something.
We don't buy a cake.
We buy taste.
We buy satisfaction.
The cake is just a means to that end.
It can be vain.
We may not buy a top-line BMW because it's the best car for our purposes, but because we get You know, that special feeling of second-hand prestige and vanity when we take it out on the road or because, you know, we're a single guy and, you know, we have a small peepee or something.
So, you know, there's lots of... You don't buy the thing itself.
You buy happiness, right?
I don't buy a Rio.
I buy the pleasure of listening to music.
So that's something that's sort of very important to understand about, you know, capitalism and the free market.
That the aggregation of capital is not what people are after.
Profit is not what people are after.
I know that's what they get, but that's not what they're after.
And the reason why that's so important to recognize is because then you open up the free market to an enormous variety of, I guess you could call it, the satisfaction of pleasure centers.
Or, you know, an enormous variety of hedonistic triggers for enjoyment.
So, you know, there's sort of this well-known sequence that happens to people who make a lot of money, right?
You know, they start off with something, you know.
Who knows, right?
You're Bill Gates.
You start off with the fact that your dad's a crack lawyer and your mother's, you know, whatever.
And you have lots of money and advice and, you know, your parents' friends are talking business from day one.
And, of course, you're a business genius yourself.
So, you know, we put all those things into the mix and you get some pretty nice stuff coming out of it.
But, so Bill Gates, you know, he works his 80 hours a week and he makes his fortune.
And then what happens?
Well, you know, he kind of gets too big for his britches or you take the Steve Jobs thing.
So, you know, Bill Gates starts mouthing off to the DOJ about the antitrust suit and Steve Jobs starts making sort of pretty random hiring decisions and, you know, generating a culture of contempt and bullying that's not too good for creativity.
So the company outgrows them and they sort of have to lie fallow for a while and then they come back either chagrined and more productive as Steve Jobs did or they sort of floated off to some R&D farm and come in for an hour or two to code and then go surfing like Bill Gates does.
But what they do once they have their money is they start to become philanthropic.
I mean this is a very, very common situation.
The Carnegie Mellons did it, the Rockefellers did it, the Gates have done it.
Trump does it.
I mean, everybody gets into these philanthropic endeavors.
And why?
Why do they do that?
I mean, surely that's not about the maximization of capital.
And that's because human beings are very complex.
And human beings have lots of, almost an infinity of things that they want to do that are going to bring them pleasure.
And so, once you understand that, you know, economics is studying the satisfaction of wants and desires, and the variety of wants and desires are just enormous, Then you really do start to get an understanding of the complexity and depth and richness of the free market, which is identical to the depth and richness of human beings as a species.
You know, human beings are wonderful in terms of how complex and rich and deep the desires and emotional experiences are, and they change!
You know, they change pretty continually.
And everybody sort of, to some degree, to a large degree I would say, the choices that people make are kind of equal.
And that's sort of important to understand, right?
So, the choices that people make are, you know, with some exceptions, but they're kind of equal.
So, for instance, I mean, to take an obvious example, right?
I mean, I spent a whole bunch of time in school before I got into the workforce.
I really didn't start working full-time with a career in mind until I was in my... I was 27 or 28 or something like that.
So, you know, at a high school I kind of would work for a bit and then I'd go back to school and then I'd work while I was at school and sort of limping my way through this low-rent student existence because I wanted to get my degrees.
And, you know, so from the age of 18 when I got out of high school to the age of, let's just say, 28, you know, I gave up 10 years of income.
And let's say that I would have had an average of income of say 30 or 35 K, this is Canadian, during that time, then, you know, right off the bat, I gave up $300,000 to $350,000 worth of income.
And yes, I did make a little bit of money to get through school, but that was sort of offset by the fact that I could have invested part of the money that I was making in real estate or whatever and would have ended up just that much further ahead.
So, you know, right there I'm giving up an enormous, like the price of a, you know, I guess a small house in Toronto.
Okay, maybe not right in Toronto, but, you know, a small house not too far from Toronto.
I gave that up in order to be able to make more money later.
And so, you know, it does work out, of course, that you end up making more money later than if you didn't.
Like, so you go to high school for, sorry, you go to university for like eight or ten years or whatever, or seven years, six years.
I think I was Two years, two years, five years for me.
I spent two years in theatre school, just in case anybody's concerned about the math, and then I took a year off.
I took a year off after high school to work up north as a gold panner, and then I took a year off to gather money together for my master's.
So, you know, you end up making more If you decide to go to university, over your life you'll make more.
I can't remember what it is, like 20% or 25% more, but that's not a net gain, right?
I mean, that's just a trade-off.
Because you're not guaranteed of that, right?
You might live this sort of dog-like student existence for 10 years and then get hit by a bus.
You might train in IT and then graduate right when the tech bust is going on.
You might decide to become a carriage maker and spend, you know, 10 years getting your PhD in carriage making right before the car gets invented.
For instance, if we get our way and the free market is applied to medicine, then of course such things as centralized, unionized, state-regulated doctor certification will be a thing of the past.
And for somebody who's just gone through their whole program, they're going to be kind of cheesed at that, right?
Because they've just spent two years on no sleep doing their internship, and now they're going to not even gain the sort of significant economic benefits of having their state-sanctioned monopoly.
So, you know, there's no guarantee that you're going to get the benefits, which is why they have to be higher, right?
Because it's a dice roll, right?
Whenever you accept risk into the future, you have to be compensated for that risk, which is why you make more when you go through school and live and get a job in your field, and that job stays lucrative and that field stays productive.
Then, yes, you do make more, but, you know, a bird in the hand sometimes is worth two in the bush.
And, of course, those people who went right out of high school, I mean, they could have paid off their house by the time they're 30 or 35, and I'm sort of 39, and I'm like, what, I'm in my second year of paying off a 20-year mortgage.
So, there are lots of trade-offs in each particular kind of situation.
And, you know, one of the things that economics just is really sort of fundamentally opposed to, and is a science because of, is that human beings have a terrible tendency to look at You know, the benefits of one situation and not the drawbacks.
And it's sort of teasing out and understanding those hidden drawbacks that is really at the essence of the science of the discipline of economics.
So, you know, the question of, you know, what do you want to do?
Do you want to get out of high school and take a trades job?
Or do you want to work in a factory or whatever?
Or do you want to start your own company?
I mean, Bill Gates didn't finish Stanford, I think it was.
Or do you want to go, you know, the traditional Petty Bourgeois route and go and get yourself a degree and then, you know, aim for a higher paying job or whatever?
Well, who can tell you what the right answer is?
There's absolutely no right answer to that.
What you don't want to do, though, if you do the trades route, is to sit there and say, oh man, that guy's making $150,000 a year, and he's like $42,000, and that's just not fair, because I'm making like $65,000 a year, so he's making more, blah, blah, blah.
I mean, that's just stupid, right?
This is economic illiteracy.
Similarly, I don't want to look at the guy who's, you know, cruising along and sort of paying off his mortgage, He's paid off his mortgage by the time he's like 32 or something, and I'm sitting there grumbling about my mortgage.
It's like, no, that's just ridiculous, right?
I mean, there's costs and benefits to every decision that people make.
I'll sort of give you another example.
There's absolutely nothing in the free market that says you shouldn't be a beggar.
There's absolutely nothing in the free market that says you shouldn't be a beggar.
It's another thing to understand.
A beggar could be called one of the worst people in the world for accumulating capital, right?
His capital is like a spanking new cardboard box to live in.
I'm fully aware that there's lots of mental illness involved in people who are sort of street people or beggars and so on.
But the issue is that there are benefits to that kind of lifestyle, right?
You don't have to worry about education, you don't have to pay taxes, you don't have any bosses.
I mean, there's lots of things that are... And I'm not saying people choose it because it's a rational choice or whatever.
You know, every single situation has its choices and its drawbacks and its benefits.
So, you know, you may look at, you know, I don't know, Brad Pitt, right, or Angelina Jolie, and you might say, wow, those guys have great bodies!
You know, I want those washboard abs, I want that, you know, yoga butt or whatever, right?
One for the gentlemen, one for the ladies, just in case you think I'm mixing my genders.
But I won't say which one.
But of course, why do they have these bodies?
Because they're paid to have those bodies, right?
I mean, I once spent an enjoyable evening chatting with an Armani model.
Unfortunately, a male Armani model.
And he was telling me, oh man, you know, I gotta do an underwear ad.
It's killer!
I have to do like 600 sit-ups a day for like two months.
And then for like two weeks before or a week before I have the photo shoot, I can't drink any water.
I am so dehydrated.
It is ridiculous.
I am so hungry and so dehydrated.
So, of course, you look at this guy who is on this ad, and you go like, man, nice abs, that looks great.
And, of course, he's paid for that, right?
And it's quite a bit of suffering to sort of get that appearance.
So, we want the abs, we don't want the work or whatever, right?
We want to lose weight, but we don't want to cut back on our food.
We want to be healthy, but we don't want to exercise.
I mean, everything is a cost-benefit.
And there's no real objective.
This is not ethics, right?
I'm not talking about murder or theft or anything like that, but, you know, there's no external standard which can say, good choice, bad choice, right?
So, to become the CEO of a large corporation, I think...
I was listening to one of Jack Welch's audiobooks.
I mean, the band burned through... he was on his third marriage, right?
And why?
Because nobody wants to be around somebody who's never home, and who, if they are home, they're exhausted, they're beat up, they're depressed, or they're angry, or they're upset, you know, because so much is resting on them, and their business responsibilities are sort of heavy, right?
There was a woman who worked at Pepsi.
I can't remember if she's CEO, but some CXO-level position.
And, you know, she quit.
And she quit because she just got sick and tired of never being home for her kids' birthdays, and never having any of those options, and always having to be available, and all those red-eye flights.
I mean, it's exhausting, and it's debilitating, and it's not really that much fun.
There's this curse, like if you win an Oscar, your marriage is likely to go bust, right?
Because you're so much on the publicity gamut, and you've got a cash in your career.
You know, there's some actresses who don't have children until they're in their late 30s because they know that if they have a kid, or they feel that if they have a kid, they're going to be less in demand, right?
And, you know, so maybe they can have kids, maybe they can't, maybe they've left it too late, who knows?
But all of these are just choices.
I mean, there's no one to say what's right or wrong, what's good or bad, and, you know, not a whole lot of them have to do with the maximization of capital.
So, to return to the point where we started, and I know it could be seen as a tangent, but I'm really trying to wrestle those to the ground, and I wanted to go on that particular bent, just so we could sort of tidy off some of this idea about sort of charity and helping people and so on.
Well, you know, the facts of the matter is that people take a great deal of pleasure out of helping others.
You know, I can speak from personal experience.
Why do you think I do these podcasts?
Because I love the sound of my own voice?
Okay, well, I'm not going to answer that one right now because that might incriminate me.
But also because I think that, you know, I have some things of value to say that some people find interesting or helpful in their own thinking as I've been helped by those who have, you know, gone before me and those who will come after me.
And, you know, we all do our bit to try and add as much truth and integrity to the world as possible.
Why?
Because we care about people.
I'm working on this article at the moment called Ten Myths About Libertarians, and of course one of them is like, well, we don't care about the poor.
Another one is, we don't care about the sick, we don't care about the old.
Man, I mean, to want to help people through ideas is probably the most thankless job in the history of humanity, right?
You get nothing but negativity and abuse, and even those who agree with you turn on you quite a bit, as I can tell you from my inbox from time to time.
So, you know, it's a pretty thankless position, right?
I mean, you do it for free, you're in opposition to people all the time, everybody disagrees with you, and they view you as, you know, kind of crazy at best, and, you know, possibly a bad guy at worst.
But we do it because we want to help people, we want to help the world become a better place, or at least to avoid some of the sort of fiscal and social disasters that we see looming under the current system.
So, I love helping people.
I mean, my wife loves helping people.
She went into a helping people kind of profession.
And she doesn't just do it when she's paid.
I mean, she'll do it with me whenever I disagree with her.
She'll, you know, slap me with some medication and, you know, suddenly everything just feels better, you know, more relaxed.
So, you know, people do love to help others.
And there's absolutely, you know, scads of statistical evidence that what people buy through charity is pleasure, right?
What people buy when they send, you know, money to, you know, some kid in the third world, is they buy the pleasure of feeling like they're making a difference to somebody's life.
And, you know, you can sort of email me if you think that's not the case about whether they're making a difference or not.
I'd certainly be interested in that.
But, you know, you can't help but understand that they're buying pleasure through charity.
So some people really do get off on giving money to charity.
I'm not one of them.
I prefer to do other things to help the poor.
I like starting companies.
I like hiring people.
I like being a good boss.
I like making sure that people who work for me are well taken care of and feel comfortable and happy to come to work as happy as possible.
I mean, they're coders, so they're a pretty dour bunch.
You know, that they are free to express themselves, that they can disagree with me, that we can have a good laugh.
You know, that's the way that I like to help people.
I am very suspicious of, as you can probably tell from my last couple of podcasts on poverty, of the idea that giving money to people really helps.
I'm not sure that it does, and I'm sure it does in some situations.
I'm just not particularly aware of them.
And I didn't give money to the tsunami victims because sending money to the third world, all you're doing is arming the governments.
I mean, There's lots of people out there who was like 8 months, 10 months, 12 months later, out in Indonesia, they have nothing, right?
They have nothing.
You know, they're still living in tin huts with no air conditioning and barely enough water to survive.
Because, you know, you send money to the third world, You might as well just send it directly to Khashoggi or other arms dealers, or, you know, send it directly to the thugs who enforce state policies, because that's where the money's gonna go, and you can't set up a situation where you can help people in foreign countries until they are free.
I mean, and then, of course, they don't need your help, right?
So it's one of these catch-22s, right?
And, I mean, that's a topic for another podcast, and that's just my opinion.
I don't, I mean, I have some proof, but, you know, I wouldn't say that that's absolute.
But I prefer to help people through podcasts.
I prefer to help people through conversation and through my capacities as an entrepreneur and a business manager and so on.
And, you know, that gives me pleasure, right?
That makes me feel good.
I like to be a good guy.
I like to do the right thing.
Other people will get pleasure out of helping the homeless.
Other people get pleasure out of reading audiobooks to old people, or reading books to old people.
I mean, there's lots of ways in which people get pleasure.
Not everyone gets pleasure from that, and not everyone gets pleasure from the same thing, but that's great, because there's lots of different ways in which people can help each other.
So, you know, when people say to me, well, you know, corporations won't be charitable because, you know, they have to maximize capital and people won't, you know, it's just not true, right?
I mean, the CEOs who run corporations and the boards who run corporations, even if all they were interested in doing is maximizing capital, you don't do that by underpaying your workers, right?
I know this.
I've been a business entrepreneur.
I've hired, you know, probably a hundred people in my career.
I've interviewed, you know, many hundreds of people and I've You know, grown businesses, significantly, you simply can't win by treating people badly.
You can win in the short run, to some degree, but you can't win in the long run, right?
It's like if you have an argument with your wife and you just scream at her, she might stop arguing back, but it's not like you've won, right?
I mean, all you've done is, you know, sown a whole bunch of tacks in your bed.
The important thing to understand is that in the free market you have to treat people well because they have options.
The best thing that you can do to make people be civil to each other and to make people be as kind to each other as possible is to give them as many options as possible.
You want to help the poor by giving them as many options as you can, which means lowering the barriers to entry and all that as we talked about in the last podcast.
You want to make sure that corporate executives remain as honest and generous and kind and nice as possible by making sure that there's a lot of demand for their workers, right?
Because then they have to treat them well or other people will go elsewhere.
And so, even if we just look at the maximization of capital aspect, there is a generosity aspect that is required for that, right?
I mean, if somebody does a good job and you give them a nice present or, you know, here's tickets to a show and to dinner out, take your wife with our compliments.
I mean, things like that.
It makes people happy.
It makes them loyal.
It makes them want to do a great job next time.
And corporate welfare, I don't mean from the state to the corporation, but You know, there's lots of times in which corporations do very well out of being associated with positive causes.
Right?
They get publicity.
They get, you know, people feel like it's a good thing.
Like the Ben & Jerry's gave some money to charities and, you know, the Body Shop has lots of charitable things and so on.
And, you know, people like that.
They like feeling good about the companies that they're doing business with.
They like to feel that the right things are being done.
And if they find out that the people that they're doing business with are sort of unethical and, you know, starving kids to death in sweatshops, then they're not going to want to do business with that.
I mean, there will be a small minority of people who will because they're kind of sociopathic.
You know, the vast majority of people do want to feel good, and that's what the economics is about.
It's trying to figure out how people trade, you know, time, energy and intelligence for pleasure.
And, you know, given that there's a certain finite number of things that can give pleasure in certain areas, like a house in a cold climate, Which are kind of necessary.
Then figuring out how people are going to optimize those things is a fascinating intellectual pursuit.
But it really is monodimensional and kind of cold and I think a little inhumane to simply look at the marketplace and say, well, all people are going to do is robotically maximize capital because that's really not how any of us live.
You know, we're very complex and sophisticated, deep and rich human beings who can make many, many different choices, all of which shift throughout time.
And human beings sort of basically have a very strong capacity and desire to take pleasure out of helping others.
Because, you know, your heart goes out to people who are in need.
So, you know, people will absolutely buy that.
And some people will maximize capital in order to give it away in those situations.
And that's what I mean when I say that it's kind of a little sociopathic to just look at one dimension of human activity and say that that's all the people are ever going to do and that's all that drives everyone.
It's sort of monochromatic.
Actually, it's monochromatic in that it's really only one color.
And I just sort of invite people out there who may believe that.
Widen out your spectrum a little.
Look around you and look within your own heart and you'll find that your motivations are as complex and rich and deep as everything that you think and dream and work for.
And that's quite a lot if you're like anybody else in the world.
So, thanks so much for listening.
I hope this has been enjoyable for you and I will sign off till tomorrow.
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