From this article I found out that not only was Friedman a racist, he was also a dumb racist? For a supposedly brilliant economist, this passage is strikingly stupid and illogical:
> When the owner of the store hires white clerks in preference to [Black clerks] in the absence of the law, he may not be expressing any preference or prejudice, or taste of his own. He may simply be transmitting the tastes of the community. He is, as it were, producing the services for the consumers that the consumers are willing to pay for. Nonetheless, he is harmed, and indeed may be the only one harmed appreciably, by a law which prohibits him from engaging in this activity,
The whole point of anti-discrimination laws is to ensure anyone practicing non-discrimination is not at a disadvantage.
If just that one owner practices race-blind hiring out of their own personal beliefs they would definitely be harmed. If the law requires every store to practice race-blind hiring and the law is strictly enforced, racist customers will just have to get over themselves or stop buying groceries.
ch4s3 · 5h ago
This quote is taken totally out of context from the chapter of the book it's from and is clipped to make it appear in the worst light.
Earlier in the chapter he says:
> On the contrary, I believe strongly that the color of a man's skin or the religion of his parents is, by itself, no reason to treat him differently; that a man should be judged by what he is and what he does and not by these external characteristics. I deplore what seem to me the prejudice and narrowness of outlook of those whose tastes differ from mine in this respect and I think the less of them for it
The chapter is discussing the appropriateness of government regulating negative versus positive harms and he makes the case that regulating negative harms is a short-sighted and ineffective means of achieving the policy aim of protecting minorities and that "fair employment" as imposed by the majority is not "free employment". In the same chapter he argues that "right to work" laws interfere with the freedom to engage in contracts. The arguments are far more subtle than Edward Zitron is making them out to be.
Importantly Friedman here and elsewhere refers to people who discriminate on the basis of skin as ignorant racists.
Throughout the book he makes the argument that if you remove the legal frameworks that enforced segregation, that people would over time choose to integrate as they found mutual advantage in doing so. Reasonable people can disagree with this assessment.
He finishes the chapter with this quote:
> On the other side of the picture, we should not be so naive as to suppose that deep-seated values and beliefs can be uprooted in short measure by law.
If anyone thinks that Friedman was a racist, they haven't honestly engaged with his writing.
alexisread · 4h ago
>>>Throughout the book he makes the argument that if you remove the legal frameworks that enforced segregation, that people would over time choose to integrate as they found mutual advantage in doing so. Reasonable people can disagree with this assessment.
Not to weigh in on the quote, but as to this opinion statistics might disagree, and is kinda the basis for positive discrimination:
https://ncase.me/polygons/
ch4s3 · 4h ago
This is a rather thin and 1 dimensional take on economic preferences, particularly something as complicate as housing. What we actually know from history is that poorer neighborhoods integrated rather freely at the turn of the last centruy because they were cheap and that segregating them required active and ongoing government intervention at all levels of government.
triceratops · 5h ago
I haven't read much Friedman but his logic behind
> regulating negative harms is a short-sighted and ineffective means of achieving the policy aim of protecting minorities
still makes no goddamn sense. I take back the racism accusation until I've read more of his work but
> people would over time choose to integrate as they found mutual advantage
is still some dumb shit. If letting minorities shop or work in your store drives away the majority there's no "mutual advantage". There never will be. You're counting on, or rather praying, for hearts and minds at large to change in order to get voluntary integration. That could take generations, or it may never happen.
If people can't be nice on their own, maybe they need the stick (government regulation) until they learn.
ch4s3 · 5h ago
He makes the argument that if your freedom depends on the largess of the majority then it is loosely held and precarious.
> is some dumb shit. If letting minorities shop or work in your store drives away the majority there's no "mutual advantage"
That's not the argument he's making. He argues that it is always more expensive to be a racist, and that absent the legal framework of segregation then people will by financial necessity begin to do business across the color line which will change their preferences over time. He points out that historically there was a time when people would refuse to do business with Quakers, but that over time the free market won out and that discrimination or affect of taste no longer exists.
Again, I think you can reasonably disagree but it isn't obviously stupid to observed that racism incurs an extra cost and markets reward you for not being irrational in that way.
triceratops · 4h ago
> people will by financial necessity begin to do business across the color line
If the majority remains anti-integration then people will, by financial necessity, be forced to keep businesses segregated. A hotel owner who wants to let black guests stay will lose most of their white clientele. It's basic logic. Friedman says so himself in his example of the shop owner who would like to hire black clerks.
> He argues that it is always more expensive to be a racist
But then in the passage I originally quoted he says it also harms the business owner to not be a racist. Isn't that contradictory?
In the Quaker thing, did the free market win out? Or did communities become larger and more anonymous, and fashions changed so that telling Quakers and non-Quakers apart merely by appearance became impossible? That can't happen with minorities of a different skin color.
ch4s3 · 4h ago
He's arguing that an integrated hotel absent government force will be cheaper to stay in than the non-integrated one and price conscious potential guests will choose it.
> But then in the passage I originally quoted he says it also harms the business owner to not be a racist. Isn't that contradictory?
It isn't contradictory if you read the whole chapter, its a single thought experiment and not his whole argument.
> In the Quaker thing, did the free market win out? Or did communities become larger and more anonymous, and fashions changed that telling Quakers and non-Quakers apart by appearance became impossible? That can't happen with minorities of a different skin color.
He's arguing that all of these prejudices are simply irrational preferences and will necessarily change over time. In fact today you find that preference have indeed largely changed in society.
triceratops · 4h ago
> price conscious potential guests will choose
And we all know that everyone chooses the cheapest option for everything to the exclusion of all other factors.
He also ignores that prices for minority consumers go up because there are fewer businesses that cater to them.
> He's arguing that all of these prejudices are simply irrational preferences and will necessarily change over time
And there honestly isn't much evidence for this.
> In fact today you find that preference have indeed largely changed in society.
I'm arguing that preferences have changed because people were forced to interact across race barriers and found that, actually, it was fine. Absent that forcing factor, there's zero guarantee that anything would have changed.
He also ignores the harms done to the minority as a result of discrimination. All this talk about "freedom" - what about the freedoms of the minority?
ch4s3 · 4h ago
> He also ignores that prices for minority consumers go up because there are fewer businesses that cater to them.
That's not what was observed in real life. There were form many decades black owned businesses serving clients at competitive price points and integrated businesses where allowed by law serving customers at price points lower than segregated businesses. Integrated Jazz clubs in the 50s served cheap drinks and had good music so white kids patronized them in droves. These interactions changed their preferences.
> And there honestly isn't much evidence for this.
Do you really believe that white Americans only interact economically with black Americans because the law forces them to? Because it looks to me like people's preferences changed. No one forced white kids in the suburbs to buy NWA albums, they were just good albums and no one stopped them.
> He also ignores the harms done to the minority as a result of discrimination. All this talk about "freedom" - what about the freedoms of the minority?
He literally does address this in the chapter. It isn't long, just go read it. You've said yourself that you haven't read much Friedman, you may find yourself surprised.
triceratops · 2h ago
> Do you really believe that white Americans only interact economically with black Americans because the law forces them to?
In 2025? Of course not. In 1965, in the American South, yes. Where "interact economically" is defined as selling or renting houses to, educating, employing, or offering services at all businesses to black Americans on an equal basis.
And I believe the law greatly accelerated this change.
ch4s3 · 2h ago
Plenty of people happily did business with black Americans in 1965 in the American South. Segregation was enforced by law by the state. Regular people often had a broad range of views. My own grandfather regularly did business with black neighbors in North Carolina in the 1950s and 60s as did most members of his farming community.
triceratops · 2h ago
> Segregation was enforced by law by the state
Which also means there was enough broad popular support to pass such abhorrent laws. They didn't come out of nowhere. They weren't imposed by force by an outsider. It's great that your grandfather was not bigoted. The problem is not enough people were. Not enough people cared strongly enough to have these laws repealed in the state.
ch4s3 · 1h ago
> Which also means there was enough broad popular support to pass such abhorrent laws.
Not necessarily. Plenty of bad laws stay in force because people are ambivalent or politicians are cowards. The most radical people on a given issue are often effective at driving policy, we see this today all of the time.
My point is that lots of people weren't personally invested in segregation, but the state and police literally imposed it.
Friedman is arguing against that sort of government heavy-handedness. He makes the comparison of freedom of contract to freedom of speech, where the limits define the right. I'm not trying to say that things would have worked out perfectly if his ideas had carried the day, we obviously can't know that. What I'm saying is that he makes a compelling argument about freedom and that doesn't make him a racist or obviously wrong out of hand. He correctly points out that giving the federal government this kind of power doesn't have a good limiting principle and creates opportunities for abuse. He was making this argument when Nixon was establishing wage and price controls, so its important to understand the context.
Its not as though he was celebrating a right to discriminate, which the author of the article seems to believe.
pixl97 · 4h ago
>He argues that it is always more expensive to be a racist
Of course this rather misses a lot of the effects that cause racism to stay in place like redlining and actual acts of violence.
>"the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"
Can also be supplanted by
>Ignorant racists can hang around longer than your lifespan.
Or are we going to forget shit like the Tulsa race massacre where black and integrated businesses were burned to the ground? There is quite an advantage to be segregated if the other option is having your shit burned. Things like integration laws are just one piece in a legal framework to ensure criminal acts don't occur.
ch4s3 · 4h ago
Well redlining was government policy, and he actually addresses the perverse effects of government policy that enforce discrimination in the chapter.
He also specifically addresses violence as positive harm that the government has a duty to prevent.
I'd really encourage you to spend the 15 minutes to track down this chapter of Friedman's book and read it because it addresses most of what you're talking about.
unnamed76ri · 5h ago
This sounds like you are in favor of the government regulating that people must shop in a certain store in order to achieve some arbitrary color integration number.
triceratops · 5h ago
I don't know why it sounds like that to you. It sounds like that's what you want to hear because then it's an easy strawman to tear down.
unnamed76ri · 4h ago
Well I suggest writing with more clarity in the future then. Perhaps Copilot can assist you.
triceratops · 2h ago
Many responded to my comment and no one else had your interpretation. I suggest reading better. I didn't say anything about the government telling people where to shop.
prasadjoglekar · 5h ago
> If people can't be nice on their own, maybe they need the stick (government regulation) until they learn.
Careful now. Governments change, and along with it priorities for enformcement.
triceratops · 4h ago
This is a lazy argument. You can say that about any law or any government. We should just stop banning anything bad because the government could accuse you of doing it and throw you in jail.
jack_h · 4h ago
This isn’t a lazy argument at all. It’s based off of millennia of humans questioning the proper role of government and their failure modes. The US in specific took a lot of inspiration from people such as Polybius and John Locke.
It’s not that there is no proper role for government, it’s that some paths end up being a Faustian bargain.
triceratops · 2h ago
> it’s that some paths end up being a Faustian bargain
If enforcing equality of treatment and access in housing, employment, and education is one of those paths, then the government has gone to a very bad place. And literally everything has turned to shit.
delusional · 3h ago
Yeah? That's what I would want. If I was needlessly harming others by being sexist, racist, or just generally hateful I'd want the government to limit that harm. That's also why I advocate for reasonable punishments that aim to rehabilitate, because I don't believe the people that commit those crimes are really all that different from me.
mvdtnz · 2h ago
> This quote is taken totally out of context from the chapter of the book it's from and is clipped to make it appear in the worst light.
It's also important to understand that this is a huge amount of what Zitron does. He is a rage-baiter who does not engage in argument in good faith.
Dracophoenix · 4h ago
If we replaced the grocery store in the example with a Hooters and we replaced white and black grocers with female and male servers, it's easier to see the point being made. This is not to say that it is economically (or morally) sensible in the long term (e.g. Hooters), but it is certainly rational to appeal to a customer's discriminatory preferences for so long as it generates recurring revenue or until some other more profitable avenue opens up. A similar strategy is at play with "Made in USA" marketing (whether or not such claims are true) over the past two decades in its appeal to discrimination/patriotism over financial soundness. In many cases it works.
> If just that one owner practices race-blind hiring out of their own personal beliefs they would definitely be harmed. If the law requires every store to practice race-blind hiring and the law is strictly enforced, racist customers will just have to get over themselves or stop buying groceries.
The harm is to the agency of the owners. The entire point of a free market is voluntary terms of entry, association, and exit notwithstanding contractual obligations to the contrary. There is no harm to a grocery owner who voluntarily chooses to defy the trend set by his competitors except economic self-harm should he suffer a net loss of customers over the decision. It's the freedom of the consumer to consciously or unconsciously boycott a store that doesn't appeal to his preferences (whether for or against racial discrimination), however petty such preferences are or irrelevant to his purpose (i.e. buying food). It is also the consumer's freedom to patronize a store that does. Conversely, the owner may find new consumers and thus a new of source revenue that outperforms that of his competitors through the practice of race-blind hiring.
> If the law requires every store to practice race-blind hiring and the law is strictly enforced, racist customers will just have to get over themselves or stop buying groceries.
Or the customers can move out to the countryside, a suburb, or a small town where they can only find white grocers. They can also look for farmers' cooperatives or food clubs unlikely to be staffed by any other race.
triceratops · 4h ago
> The harm is to the agency of the owners
The status quo of discrimination caused harm to the agency of minority employees and shoppers. Why are "owners" more important than them?
> There is no harm to a grocery owner... except economic self-harm
So then there is harm. Economic harm is kinda the important kind of harm to a business owner. Every other "harm" is surmountable.
> Or the customers can move out to the countryside, a suburb, or a small town where they can only find white grocers
So what's the problem? They've added transaction costs for themselves to express their preferences.
lenerdenator · 5h ago
> brilliant economist
There's the problem. Economics is the science of explaining tomorrow why the predictions you made yesterday didn't come true today.
We don't call people who successfully predict things "economists", we call them planners.
gruez · 5h ago
>There's the problem. Economics is the science of explaining tomorrow why the predictions you made yesterday didn't come true today.
Plenty of economists' predictions hold up. Turkey's unorthodox economic theory that higher interest causes inflation did not pan out, and when they hiked interest rates inflation duely dropped. Most prices drop with increased supply and increase with decreased supply. There are some goods that buck this trend, but that's incorporated into economic theory. Moreover your comment implies that economists shouldn't try to explain when their theories don't match up. This seems entirely antithetical to science? Astronomers used to be believe in geocentrism. Is it bad for them to explain why their geocentrist predictions not hold?
>We don't call people who successfully predict things "economists", we call them planners.
I can't tell whether this is satire. For me, "planners" invoke either bureaucrats of command economies, which have a pretty lousy economic history, or people on zoning boards. Neither are "people who successfully predict things".
turnsout · 5h ago
Exactly. Economists don't even have good theories for why something happened, let alone what might happen in the future. The entire field is vibe-based, which they try to cover up with a lot of crackpot math.
zeroCalories · 5h ago
Maybe people would just stop shopping as much if everyone was forced to participate? Is the solution to force everyone to engage in mandatory diversity shopping? Or is that what taxes are for?
triceratops · 5h ago
> people would just stop shopping as much if everyone was forced to participate
They'd be out-competed on being able to eat by the people who continued buying groceries without letting their personal biases affect their shopping. Then it's just Darwin at work.
zeroCalories · 5h ago
You think you need 100% shopping or 0% shopping? More like when the vibe is off at the cafe you'll decide to just order some beans off Amazon instead.
triceratops · 4h ago
I guess just wait from 1964, when the Civil Rights Act passed, till the 90s when Amazon was founded? And Amazon would still employ minorities to comply with the law so what's the difference? You've just cheated yourself out of a nice time at the cafe.
zeroCalories · 4h ago
Amazon got money, but they got less than the cafe would have. Overall economic activity is down. The Amazon slave labor sustains, the cafe continues to raise prices to keep milking guilty liberals, and the customer sits at home dreaming of a better time. At least they saved some money instead of subjecting themselves to the bad attitude of modern baristas. And in the end, Milton stayed winning.
lenerdenator · 5h ago
I like the cut of Zitron's jib, but have to disagree with this point here:
> We live in the era of the symbolic executive, when "being good at stuff" matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff, where "what's useful" is dictated not by outputs or metrics that one can measure but rather the vibes passed between managers and executives that have worked their entire careers to escape the world of work.
We have redefined competence, but we haven't redefined it to be measured in nebulous ways. Far from it. Nadella does one thing and he does it well: he makes number go up. And that's all that matters.
Number gotta go up. If you don't make number go up, then how Grugg Ugug, MBA, to figure out how company doing? You no seriously expect Grugg to approach enterprise of measuring benefit of a business to society without one simple number.
We used to measure the worth of investment and expenditures of capital by their holistic benefit to society. That was way more thinking than business school graduates in this country wanted to do, so we distilled it down to the quarterly profit. At the very least, these people could understand addition, subtraction, and which number was bigger than the other. The "nebulous" way was what we got away from as a result.
h2zizzle · 5h ago
>Nadella does one thing and he does it well: he makes number go up.
I'm unconvinced that it's him so much as MS' entrenched position as a contractor, and ZIRP. There are a lot of companies whose number go up for whom number should no no go up, but it did, because they had first dibs at the money printer trough.
johnea · 3h ago
> We have redefined competence
Thanks for that! I'll definitely use that one...
delusional · 3h ago
> > We live in the era of the symbolic executive, when "being good at stuff" matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff, where "what's useful" is dictated not by outputs or metrics that one can measure but rather the vibes passed between managers and executives that have worked their entire careers to escape the world of work.
> We have redefined competence, but we haven't redefined it to be measured in nebulous ways. Far from it. Nadella does one thing and he does it well: he makes number go up. And that's all that matters.
I think Ziton would argue that this statement was supposed to be one level below "number going up". His argument seems to be not that number shouldn't go up, but that the number that goes up used to be based on "being good at stuff" but now isn't.
His argument isn't that executives shouldn't focus on the money, but rather that the money has last track of what they were supposed to track. It's not the executive themselves, it's the economy. The executives would then be the outcome of skewed incentives by an economy that has disconnected from "useful stuff".
This also happens to be my favorite take. So I may just be confirmation biased.
surgical_fire · 2h ago
While I agree with your post, I don't really think that goes counter to the original meaning of the argument as a whole. He even mentions some paragraphs later that CEOs are only fired when line does not go up:
> While CEOs do get fired when things go badly, it's often after a prolonged period of decline and stagnancy, and almost always comes with some sort of payoff — and when I say "badly," I mean that growth has slowed to the point that even firing masses of people doesn't make things better.
And I think that's what he was gesturing at in the beginning when ranting about Satya. He knows Satya is not an imbecile, he would not survive the cutthroat sociopathic business environment if he was.
The logical conclusion is that Satya is just bullshitting on a softball interview to prop up Microsoft's copilot thing. That is a marketing piece, not a proper interview.
And on bullshit, it is always important to keep something in mind:
"bullshit is speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care whether what they say is true or false."
listenallyall · 4h ago
> measure the worth of investment and expenditures of capital by their holistic benefit to society.
This seems specious, I mean, when? And how?
The article seems to contradict you, given that it is mostly focused on tech companies that do in fact spend billions in product development and tend to delay huge profits. Amazon, famously, was universally praised for its various innovations in e-commerce (i.e. benefit to society) while not making a profit for what, 25 years? The current business press gushes over "big data", the metaverse, AI, whatever, despite many such projects actually losing billions of dollars before being shut down or vastly reduced.
I'm not claiming these companies do actually benefit society, but Wall Street and the press is often willing to overlook immediate profit for the promise of long-term dominance (and the rewards that come with that) and in the meantime, they will at least promote the possibility of future societal benefit to justify their position.
neom · 5h ago
We have to carefully select the yardstick by which progress and success are measured. If we don't, we inevitably drift towards meaningless, short-term, and ultimately destructive forms of growth instead of progress. Incentive failures are more nuanced than “Friedman = root of all evil.” Venture capital structure, indexing, and monetary policy also drive the short termism. It's part of why I'm skeptical the next wave of amazing technology companies will come out of America.
tim333 · 4h ago
Zitron is such a moaner. Just page after page on how everything is crap.
>The Business Idiot is the manager that doesn't seem to do anything but keeps being promoted, and the chief executive officer of a public company that says boring, specious nonsense about AI
The CEO being Aaron Levie who dropped out of college to start Box, now worth a few billion. I wonder how much the brilliant Zitron has achieved with the moanathons.
dttze · 4h ago
Oh wow, what an amazingly skilled businessman for getting money during the era of ZIRP. For a shitty file hosting service, nonetheless. How dare Ed besmirch him.
mvdtnz · 2h ago
How many billions did you make during ZIRP?
dttze · 1h ago
None, you?
VOIPThrowaway · 5h ago
Nitpick:
Maximizing shareholder values can include treating your workers well if you think happy workers are more productive and therefore help with profits.
Same with good customer service, environmental regulation following, and other things.
surgical_fire · 2h ago
> Maximizing shareholder values can include treating your workers well if you think happy workers are more productive and therefore help with profits.
The capital class finds it very icky when peasants are fairly treated. They typically punish ir by making like go down.
You don't need to have red skin and horns to take great pleasure in making those less powerful suffer.
disqard · 29m ago
Indeed, witness the recent RTO drive across the industry for knowledge workers.
mikestew · 5h ago
TFA is a lengthy slog, but it seemed to be mostly worth it. If nothing else, TFA ties together a lot of the business folk wisdom with its origins, repeatedly pointing out that this one is based on the thoughts of a blatant racist, this other one used as the basis for RTO came from someone talking about factory workers, not office workers, etc.
ddejohn · 5h ago
Ed writes a lot of good stuff, but yeah, they're usually a slog. His diatribes seem to be getting longer lately too.
ch4s3 · 5h ago
This is the first thing I've read by him and it is full of errors and out of context quotes.
ch4s3 · 5h ago
Except Friedman wasn't a racist, and the quote is cut specifically to make it appear that way. In the very same chapter Friedman argues that discrimination based on skin color is irrational and wrong. Edward Zitron is lying in his framing.
In the same chapter Friedman literally says:
> On the contrary, I believe strongly that the color of a man's skin or the religion of his parents is, by itself, no reason to treat him differently; that a man should be judged by what he is and what he does and not by these external characteristics. I deplore what seem to me the prejudice and narrowness of outlook of those whose tastes differ from mine in this respect and I think the less of them for it.
> Except Friedman wasn't a racist, and the quote is cut specifically to make it appear that way.
He doesn't say that Friedman was racist, you made that up.
He says that Friedman was a fundamentalist and that people should be allowed to discriminate on the basis of race, and the quote illustrates that well and the context doesn't change anything to that point.
ch4s3 · 3h ago
I'm saying he clipped the quote to give that impression.
> He says that Friedman was a fundamentalist and that people should be allowed to discriminate on the basis of race, and the quote illustrates that well and the context doesn't change anything to that point.
No, Firedman says that government force isn't the best way to address discrimination. Again the quote is clipped to mislead.
surgical_fire · 2h ago
> No, Firedman says that government force isn't the best way to address discrimination. Again the quote is clipped to mislead.
Instead he advocated that the absence of regulation would somehow, magically make racists who control capital be not racist anymore.
There's nothing misleading in that quote.
ch4s3 · 2h ago
No he doesn't make that argument at all. He argues that volunteerism over time is a better basis for mutual acceptance than government fiat.
He also wasn't against all regulations, and specifically supports regulating positive harms.
You could read the chapter yourself in 15 minutes.
surgical_fire · 2h ago
> No he doesn't make that argument at all. He argues that volunteerism over time is a better basis for mutual acceptance than government fiat.
I know, I just think it is much like believing that fairies exist. Except that believing in fairies causes no harm to society. His beliefs did.
> You could read the chapter yourself in 15 minutes.
You just presume others didn't read it, when in fact you dislike their interpretations and conclusions after reading it.
ch4s3 · 1h ago
Anyone claiming that Friedman supported segregation or racism necessarily did not read the chapter. He's quite clear on those points.
> Except that believing in fairies causes no harm to society. His beliefs did.
I don't agree, and such a banal analogy is not exactly convincing.
surgical_fire · 1h ago
Yeah. You may have a point.
Perhaps believing in fairies does cause harm to society.
ch4s3 · 1h ago
Very substantive. Thank you.
jxjnskkzxxhx · 3h ago
My point is the author did not say Friedman was racist, you invented that the author said that. Address that, instead of talking about what Friedman say.
ch4s3 · 2h ago
I’m saying the author frames it that way, and other people here clearly drew that conclusion. The author also took out some of context the clip from the 1970 article.
jxjnskkzxxhx · 10m ago
No, you're framing it that way. The author couldve said he's racist, but didnt. Instead made a factually accurate statement.
Page 93 (as numbered on the pages, IDK which PDF "page" [edit: nb the table of contents gets it wrong, one supposes the pages were re-numbered in the digitization process, or something]) or just search "Capitalism and Discrimination" and it'll get you there fast, for anyone who's interested. The chapter is... well, I found a real howler, but then I have odd taste in entertainment, sometimes, and my enjoyment was almost certainly not by a route the author intended. I'd recommend it just on that basis, regardless of its role in this thread but, uh, only for my fellow weirdos.
ch4s3 · 3h ago
Yeah, I've read it and I suspect most people commenting here have not and that Edward Zitron did not either.
alabastervlog · 3h ago
I figured you had, and posted it for others. Should have made that clearer.
FWIW I didn't find Zitron's framing of it misleading, having now read it (I'd read excerpts of that book before, and maybe even that chapter, but couldn't recall for sure, so re-read it just now)
ch4s3 · 2h ago
Makes sense, and that’s a better quality pdf than the one I had.
surgical_fire · 2h ago
He was making an argument that owners should be allowed to discriminate against black people.
Prefacing that with "I am personally against discrimination" is pretty much meaningless. His awful economic doctrine and beliefs will result in discrimination anyway.
Let's not pretend Friedman needs to be presented in a bad light to make it clear he was an awfully evil person.
ch4s3 · 2h ago
If you read the whole chapter it’s clear that he’s not saying that. He’s arguing the government shouldn’t legislate against negative harm. He’s using this for framing.
I absolutely think it’s ridiculous to call him an evil person, it’s a totally unfair characterization.
surgical_fire · 2h ago
> If you read the whole chapter it’s clear that he’s not saying that. He’s arguing the government shouldn’t legislate against negative harm. He’s using this for framing.
He is arguing against the only thing that could meaningfully reduce discrimination and increase equality. As I refuse to believe Friedman was an imbecile, the only possibility left is malice. He knows that his free market fundamentalism will result in more discrimination, but he doesn't care because government is icky.
> I absolutely think it’s ridiculous to call him an evil person, it’s a totally unfair characterization.
He was evil because he advocated for policies and doctrines that meaningfully make the lives of people worse. It's likely impossible to measure the harm he caused to the world.
ch4s3 · 1h ago
I think you’re plainly wrong. Segregation was an invention of the state. In northern states where it was not the law of the land people freely mixed or didn’t in some cases. People in New York in 1950 were no less racist, they just didn’t have legally mandated segregation.
Surely we can agree the freer market in New York was superior to the government control of contracts in North Carolina.
Free markets have demonstrably lifted billions of people out of abject poverty in the last 50 years.
surgical_fire · 1h ago
This conversation is never going to get anywhere, because we have fundamentally irreconcilable views of the world.
In my view what lifted people from abject poverty was a measure of technological progress and industrialization. The places where people were mostly lifted out of poverty do not embrace the completely unregulated free market fantasy of Friedman.
I believe in government as a strong regulator to rein in corporations, because corporations are optimized to generate profits even when they cause harm to society in their profit-seeking mandate. Obviously you will disagree with this, because government icky, and you seem to embrace the fantasy that once free of the shackles of icky government, the benevolent capital holders will benefit the world somehow.
You advocate for something very extreme, and it is clear we won't find middle ground at this point.
Have a great evening, and feel free to have the last word.
ch4s3 · 24m ago
It’s pretty clear that when governments open markets and relax market controls the population grows in wealth. Certainly, technology drives efficiency and grows the pie I wouldn’t argue otherwise. However the closed economies with price controls and lots of government intervention can’t easily make use of technological innovations. China started growing when private businesses were first allowed, for example. The Nordics took off after liberalizing their economies. You can look across South America and see that the most open economies have the highest standards of living.
I don’t disagree that governments have a role in regulating harms, and neither did Friedman. He did believe that taxing pollution was more effective than setting particular targets, but that’s a difference of approach not of aims.
I think we probably have more overlap than you imagine.
evil-olive · 1h ago
> Segregation was an invention of the state. In northern states where it was not the law of the land people freely mixed or didn’t in some cases. People in New York in 1950 were no less racist, they just didn’t have legally mandated segregation.
you are choosing to define segregation very narrowly - as in a government law requiring individuals to be segregated (attend separate schools, or use separate bathrooms, etc)
that is an absurd definition to use in this context, because the original example from Friedman's quote is a different type of segregation - a business owner hanging out a sign that says "we're hiring, but only white people".
redlining [0] created segregated neighborhoods, but not via government mandate, just from banks and mortgage lenders "voluntarily" deciding that certain neighborhoods should be whites-only. there were also housing covenants [1, 2] that enforced segregation via contract law.
if your definition of segregation does not include those practices, your definition is worthless.
The original quote as I’ve said is taken out of context, the chapter is about freedom of contracts and does talk about legally mandated segregation. Friedman just says that further interference in contracts is in his opinion not the remedy.
The Federal Housing Authority created in 1933 and the Home Owners' Loan Corporation created in 1934 created the zones and directed the banks where to make loans. I’d suggest you read a bit either. I’d suggest The Color of Law.
pnutjam · 3h ago
The classic, I'm not a "whatever terrible thing", but those terrible people are ok and it's fine for them to be terrible.
Guess what that makes you?
ch4s3 · 3h ago
It really isn't that at all, he argues that it's wrong to discriminate but that government interference in the freedom to make contracts isn't the best solution. He goes on to elaborate an make a case for how else it might be better addressed. The article intentionally misleads by clipping the quote out of context.
pnutjam · 2h ago
But it is.
This the the same argument against minimum wage. It's just wrong.
The government should absolutely set a floor on wages and discrimination.
There must be a standard to minimize friction. It's just not something that anyone can do by themselves.
ch4s3 · 2h ago
Discrimination was the actually historical basis for the US introducing a minimum wage. There’s available testimony from congress that show that the intention was to push women, blacks, and immigrants out of the workforce.
I think it is totally within the bounds of reasonable discourse to discuss if minimum wage laws achieve their stated goals.
baggy_trough · 2h ago
There shouldn't be a minimum wage. It's essentially enforced unemployment for the low skilled.
dvt · 5h ago
> pointing out that this one is based on the thoughts of a blatant racist
Actually this is a pretty weak point. We have plenty of historical examples where a terrible person came up with a brilliant idea. So Friedman being racist or not (he was categorically not, Zitron is being unfair here) is kind of a non-issue. The philosophical problem is that favoring shareholder value above moral value or social value (or whatever you want to call it: the betterment of society; or Socrates' "flourishing" [εὐδαιμονία]) just doesn't seem to have any positive externalities.
"Line go up," sure, but what does that actually do? "Line go up" teleology is trivially a dead end moral philosophy. In fact, if history is much of a teacher, any economic teleology seems to be pretty morally bankrupt—from concrete jungle capitalism to Bolshevik communism to bartering. I'm extrapolating, but here, I do agree with Ed.
lazide · 5h ago
If you were trying to plan for retirement; and had a specific number you were trying to hit, who are you going to give your money to?
The person who is good at consistently making the value/number go up and to the right on your money; or the one that gives vague ‘social good’ reasons why they aren’t?
Especially if the ‘social good’ stuff is often vague and non-concrete?
The world is a much different place from when Socrates was around.
dvt · 5h ago
> If you were trying to plan for retirement; and had a specific number you were trying to hit, who are you going to give your money to?
This has nothing to do with the broader point of drafting policies that further social flourishing (there's disagreements as to what this means, of course) as opposed to drafting policies that further "line go up." In fact, I'd argue that the latter is meaningless without a foundational underpinning (we see this in imploding hyper-inflated economies).
In other words, who cares if I have a zillion Funbucks if the country is falling apart?
ch4s3 · 4h ago
Friedman is arguing that it isn't the job of professional manager to use other peoples' money to set social goals. He argues that society broadly should establish social norms and that government should regulate negative externalizes like pollution.
He was never saying just do what the fuck ever you can to flip a buck. The article quoted by Edward Zitron is Friedman responding to Nixon trying to shame companies into not raising prices during an inflationary period.
drcongo · 5h ago
I invest on social impact, so option b?
drcongo · 5h ago
He may not be racist racist, but he's most definitely an absolute piece of shit - Ed should maybe have focussed more on all his other shitty attributes.
jxjnskkzxxhx · 4h ago
> "being good at stuff" matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff
I've recently figured this out a out the company where I work, after an embarrassingly large number of years. My manager pays lip service to "high quality code" to justify his endless torrent of nitpicks, but when it comes to his own stuff he hides some times serious problems. Like, seriously, I've found undeniable evidence that he was aware of the malfunctioning of a data collection system and instead of reporting/fixing, he made sure to make it harder for anyone else to find it.
He's very well respected, however, and has this incredible aura of professionalism.
This realization also explains why everything is done so poorly in my company. Hitting the ill defined requirements in letter but not in principle, and then blaming a different team when problems are uncovered, is more than enough.
beloch · 5h ago
It's an ironic choice to choose longform as the vehicle for this message. This is the one form of blog-post/journalism for which it is worth using a bot to generate an abstract, just to decide if you'll read it. I've been burned by a link-bait title and an author who veers off the promised road into a ditch or an entirely different alleyway one too many times.
reverendsteveii · 6h ago
I didn't sign up for the newsletter because OP listens to El-P, but that would have been enough on its own. I signed up for the Milton Friedman hate.
therobot24 · 5h ago
optimizing business value in the manner perpetuated by Friedman assumes you know more than you do and can adapt to things because of that knowledge, ultimately no one can actually do this because the world is chaotic and difficult to anything and everything that tries to master that chaos
ch4s3 · 5h ago
On the contrary. Friedman argued that if as an executive you try to steer a business towards your particular personal aims that you are presuming to know more than you do about what is best for your shareholders who actually own the company. He is arguing that political whim is not a way to allocate the scarce resources of a company/society.
In particular the article linked in this blog post is Friedman arguing against Nixon's price controls and Nixon's insistence that it was "socially responsible" to not raise prices as you own costs went up. Stripping the article of this consequence is either dishonest, or stupid.
therobot24 · 5h ago
So my interpretation of how Friedman drew his theories of market (and granted I'm no expert, just a layman reading things online) are about every business should optimize as much as utterly possible even if this results in exploitation, because the market will accept exploitation until it can't and correct. I think you and i are aligned in this belief. Where i think we're separated, likely cause i just didn't explain it very well, was that to me, this means you as a CEO are accepting exploitation under the guise that you have the ability to react to the market forces to correct for it. That you 'know the market' and can adapt as needed. Such as described in the Friedman quote within the article which expresses an extremely libertarian view of how companies should be able to hire and fire workers:
> “...consider a situation in which there are grocery stores serving a neighborhood inhabited by people who have a strong aversion to being waited on by Negro clerks. Suppose one of the grocery stores has a vacancy for a clerk and the first applicant qualified in other respects happens to be a Negro. Let us suppose that as a result of the law the store is required to hire him. The effect of this action will be to reduce the business done by this store and to impose losses on the owner. If the preference of the community is strong enough, it may even cause the store to close. When the owner of the store hires white clerks in preference to Negroes in the absence of the law, he may not be expressing any preference or prejudice, or taste of his own. He may simply be transmitting the tastes of the community. He is, as it were, producing the services for the consumers that the consumers are willing to pay for. Nonetheless, he is harmed, and indeed may be the only one harmed appreciably, by a law which prohibits him from engaging in this activity, that is, prohibits him from pandering to the tastes of the community for having a white rather than a Negro clerk. The consumers, whose preferences the law is intended to curb, will be affected substantially only to the extent that the number of stores is limited and hence they must pay higher prices because one store has gone out of business.”
In my view, the scenario and reasoning by Friedman in how he applies market forces applying to business decisions is a view where you have an assumption of 'knowing the result' of any decision and using that 'knowledge' as justification for reasoning. When in reality, you don't know the result, you can estimate, but that's about it. So when an exec is applying Friedman principles they're trying to 'know the market' and that's a fundamental error in my mind due to the chaos of the world how it can manifest across all avenues of life.
ch4s3 · 5h ago
> every business should optimize as much as utterly possible even if this results in exploitation, because the market will accept exploitation until it can't and correct.
I don't thing that's a correct assessment. He talks a lot about the need to follow laws an cultural norms and the importance of society setting normative guardrails for behavior. Moreover he point our I believe correctly that a lot of the worst behavior of businesses stem from monopoly power.
> In my view, the scenario and reasoning by Friedman in how he applies market forces applying to business decisions is a view where you have an assumption of 'knowing the result'
I think it only appears that way if you take small quotations like this out of context.
therobot24 · 5h ago
>> In my view, the scenario and reasoning by Friedman in how he applies market forces applying to business decisions is a view where you have an assumption of 'knowing the result'
> I think it only appears that way if you take small quotations like this out of context.
Can you help me understand this. Like the purpose of using logic to deduce decision making is because there's a fundamental structure in assuring the result from those deductions is accurate (or enough to continue manipulation of the problem data). When you try to predict market reaction to a decision and ascribe harm or success based on the decision you're creating causation out of correlation, often incorrectly. Again, not an expert in economics, but when i view theories of free market forces and how they're part of the logic of business decisions i can't help but think the people using this information are assuming their knowledge and logic aren't fundamentally flawed and as a result are essentially just guessing without thinking they are.
ch4s3 · 4h ago
Yeah, Friedman would clearly agree that you can't have perfect knowledge but he argues that bad business decisions are punished with losses and firms' owners will fire bad managers or they'll lose their investments.
You're actually touching on why he argues against efforts to regulate negative harms, because the government has an imperfect ability to predict the outcomes and there isn't a great feedback mechanism.
therobot24 · 4h ago
ok i think i'm starting to get it a bit, the double edged sword is essentially the reason for focusing on emergent results which (i'm guessing in Friedman's mind) have more options for mechanisms for good results than a constrained market might.
ch4s3 · 4h ago
I think that's a fair summary.
AnimalMuppet · 4h ago
So businesses have faster/better/more accurate feedback than government? That's probably true.
But history has shown that business feedback sometimes takes us to undesirable places, and government regulation is sometimes necessary.
ch4s3 · 3h ago
Friedman doesn't argue against all kinds of government regulation, specifically he approves of regulating positive harms.
janalsncm · 2h ago
As they say, it takes two to tango. For every business idiot charming investors with vapid promises, there is a swarm of investors either fooled by the charm or hoping to sell to a greater fool. If investors won’t punish companies for lying about e.g. self driving being “very easy” then why shouldn’t CEOs commit blatant fraud in between Twitter flame wars? (Law be damned!)
jxjnskkzxxhx · 4h ago
> What do you mean by "other tasks"? Why are these questions never asked?
To anyone else who, like me, has noticed this, the answer is: these interviews happen so that the interviewee can put out the message they want, and so that the interviewer can charge advertisers. Asking questions that could derail the theatre is not in the interest of the people involved.
This also creates an environment where the interviewers are self selected. Interviewers who derail the interviewee's exposition don't land important interviewees.
janalsncm · 4h ago
I imagine that an interviewer who suddenly put out an “emperor has no clothes” interview could short the stock and do quite well. It would also be a public service.
jxjnskkzxxhx · 4h ago
Blatant market manipulation. Thanks for the public service, enjoy prison.
evanjrowley · 5h ago
>Preparing for meetings isn't something that requires AI, nor is research, unless, of course, you don't really give a shit about the actual content of what you're reading or the message of what you're saying, just that you are "saying the right thing."
Is that not the function of the CEO? Pep talking the board of investors while everyone else does the work?
jahsome · 4h ago
> I’d argue that a well-written email is one that doesn’t require a summary.
I don't even know what this article is about but I'm so irritated by the insinuation people write and receive well-written emails I am too irritated to finish the article.
Communication is (beyond frustratingly) not a highly valued skill in most of corporate America.
floydnoel · 4h ago
> Famed Chicago School economist (and dweller of Hell) Milton Friedman
wow. i've met his son David and interacted a small amount with a couple of his grandchildren. this was in very poor taste. and i really hate some of the things he was responsible for!
janalsncm · 3h ago
It sounds like you are saying they were nice people in person despite their public personas. To me, one’s actions in the real world matter a lot more than being friendly at an interpersonal level.
How that translates in the spiritual realm is another question. A lot of religious texts focus on interpersonal behavior, so maybe friendly people with disastrous public policies would be judged accordingly.
surgical_fire · 2h ago
If an awful person has children it is of poor taste to say they were awful?
alabastervlog · 1h ago
Especially if one of the children's David Friedman. Yeesh.
abetusk · 4h ago
> You can read your messages on Outlook and Teams without having them summarized ...
At the cost of 10x in time cost? The argument is against the notion of summary?
> ... — and I’d argue that a well-written email is one that doesn’t require a summary.
And yet the world's population probably creates loads of important yet not well-written emails. Different contexts will also require different information to be extracted, so no matter how well-written an email is, the context might determine what the relevant information is.
> Podcasts are not there "to be chatted about" with an AI.
Really? Are written articles not meant to be "spoken aloud"? Are plays not meant to be "turned into a movie"? Who cares cares if someone can get information about media that they want to consume with a new method?
> Preparing for meetings isn't something that requires AI, nor is research, unless, of course, you don't really give a shit about the actual content of what you're reading or the message of what you're saying, just that you are "saying the right thing."
There was no statement about requiring AI. It was about leveraging AI as a benefit.
I use email instead of snail mail. I often watch technical talk videos at 2x speed to shoot past the filler. I read books in digital format instead of their physical counterparts because of convenience and access. I read online newspaper articles, rather than holding a physical newspaper, for the same reason.
None of these require technology, they're enhanced by them.
What a piece of shit article. I stopped reading after the first paragraph. This should read "The Era of the Technical Moron".
patrickmay · 5h ago
> I’d argue that a well-written email is one that doesn’t require a summary.
If someone doesn't care enough about my time to compose a well-written email, with a tl;dr at the top if necessary, then I see no reason to care about what they've generated.
jhanschoo · 4h ago
Really, the format of your email is dictated by the business norms of communication that you operate in. If your norms dictate that your emails must, say, be written in an extremely overwrought and formal manner that massages egos, then LLMs to generate and summarize might be the technology that brings efficiency while upholding these norms.
Speaking to the performative importance of cultural norms, many workplaces would not look kindly on certain white-collar roles if they wore a T-shirt to the office; even if it is more efficient, or comfortable to wear the T-shirt.
VT-Business · 18m ago
- Well, you don't expect people to read this TLTR article? Do ya?
- Anyway, to Ed Zitron: stellar article! But it seems like you just woke up. It's been always like that.
- We agree pretty much with most of your points; we do it the hard innovating way. But absolutely nobody supports innovation; not even you. What did you do "except writing an article" that everyone already knows? Which innovative companies did you work for, for years? What did you invent? But, we’re with you on most of your points. We’ve been grinding on actual innovation — the kind that doesn’t get applause or funding. Truth is, no one backs real innovation. Not even you. Which bold, disruptive companies have had you in the trenches?
History repeats!
Welcome to the real world!
But thanks anyway!
Summary by AI:
*Key Takeaways from "The Era of the Business Idiot" by Ed Zitron*([Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At][1])
1. Modern executives prioritize the *appearance of productivity* over genuine results, often relying on AI tools for superficial tasks. 
2. Satya Nadella's use of AI for basic tasks exemplifies the *symbolic executive* who delegates real work to maintain an illusion of efficiency.
3. The *tech industry's focus on shareholder value* has led to the degradation of core products, prioritizing short-term gains over long-term quality.([Podcast World][2])
4. Executives often *escape the realities* of the products they oversee, resulting in decisions disconnected from user needs.
5. The *media's reluctance* to question tech leaders perpetuates a cycle of unaccountability and unchecked power.([Podcast World][2])
6. A *"Rot Economy"* has emerged, where companies sacrifice product integrity for stock price growth.
7. The *definition of a "good business"* has shifted from delivering quality products to maximizing shareholder returns.
8. Executives' *overreliance on AI* tools reflects a detachment from meaningful engagement with their work.([Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At][1])
9. The *corporate world's embrace of AI* often serves more as a marketing strategy than a functional improvement.
10. There's a growing *disconnect between corporate leadership* and the actual value delivered to consumers.
11. The *illusion of innovation* is maintained through strategic communication rather than substantive advancements.
12. Executives' *focus on optics* undermines the authenticity and effectiveness of their leadership.
13. The *lack of accountability* in tech leadership allows for the perpetuation of ineffective practices.
14. The *commodification of labor* and overreliance on automation devalue human contribution and creativity.([Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At][1])
15. The *corporate emphasis on growth* at all costs leads to unsustainable business practices.
16. Executives often *lack a clear understanding* of the products and services their companies provide.
17. The *media's complicity* in promoting corporate narratives hinders critical examination of business practices.([Simon & Schuster][3])
18. The *symbolic nature of executive roles* detracts from the substantive leadership needed for meaningful progress.
19. The *overvaluation of tech companies* is driven by hype rather than actual performance or innovation.
20. The *current corporate landscape* rewards style over substance, leading to a decline in genuine business acumen.
bambax · 5h ago
> For example, in his book, Capitalism and Friedman, he argued...
That's pretty funny, but the book is actually called "Capitalism and Freedom".
surgical_fire · 2h ago
Wooosh
ninininino · 4h ago
> Podcasts are not there "to be chatted about" with an AI.
I stopped reading here. The author seems to fail to understand the new conceptual model that is interactive consumption. A conversation is a higher bandwidth form of communication and a two-way means of communication, it has features that a recorded piece of audio does not.
If you get confused 10% of the way through a podcast, you can't have the podcast change and suddenly spend an extra two minutes explaining a concept it mentioned. But you can ask a conversational AI to explain something you didn't understand.
If you find that the podcast is telling you something you already know, you need to skip around and figure out where it stops doing so and becomes useful again in a painful process. Within a conversation if you're the CEO of one of the world's most valuable corporations, you just cut the person off and say "I know".
The author also fails to understand that people can personalize content by expressing preferences to an AI agent and having it interpolate the content to some new form, or style transfer it. Change its language into one's native tongue. Change the tone to suit one's current mood. Be more concise or funnier.
I can only assume the author is letting their personal preferences for mediums of communication blind them to very real technological and communication advances happening.
> When the owner of the store hires white clerks in preference to [Black clerks] in the absence of the law, he may not be expressing any preference or prejudice, or taste of his own. He may simply be transmitting the tastes of the community. He is, as it were, producing the services for the consumers that the consumers are willing to pay for. Nonetheless, he is harmed, and indeed may be the only one harmed appreciably, by a law which prohibits him from engaging in this activity,
The whole point of anti-discrimination laws is to ensure anyone practicing non-discrimination is not at a disadvantage.
If just that one owner practices race-blind hiring out of their own personal beliefs they would definitely be harmed. If the law requires every store to practice race-blind hiring and the law is strictly enforced, racist customers will just have to get over themselves or stop buying groceries.
Earlier in the chapter he says:
> On the contrary, I believe strongly that the color of a man's skin or the religion of his parents is, by itself, no reason to treat him differently; that a man should be judged by what he is and what he does and not by these external characteristics. I deplore what seem to me the prejudice and narrowness of outlook of those whose tastes differ from mine in this respect and I think the less of them for it
The chapter is discussing the appropriateness of government regulating negative versus positive harms and he makes the case that regulating negative harms is a short-sighted and ineffective means of achieving the policy aim of protecting minorities and that "fair employment" as imposed by the majority is not "free employment". In the same chapter he argues that "right to work" laws interfere with the freedom to engage in contracts. The arguments are far more subtle than Edward Zitron is making them out to be.
Importantly Friedman here and elsewhere refers to people who discriminate on the basis of skin as ignorant racists.
Throughout the book he makes the argument that if you remove the legal frameworks that enforced segregation, that people would over time choose to integrate as they found mutual advantage in doing so. Reasonable people can disagree with this assessment.
He finishes the chapter with this quote:
> On the other side of the picture, we should not be so naive as to suppose that deep-seated values and beliefs can be uprooted in short measure by law.
If anyone thinks that Friedman was a racist, they haven't honestly engaged with his writing.
Not to weigh in on the quote, but as to this opinion statistics might disagree, and is kinda the basis for positive discrimination: https://ncase.me/polygons/
> regulating negative harms is a short-sighted and ineffective means of achieving the policy aim of protecting minorities
still makes no goddamn sense. I take back the racism accusation until I've read more of his work but
> people would over time choose to integrate as they found mutual advantage
is still some dumb shit. If letting minorities shop or work in your store drives away the majority there's no "mutual advantage". There never will be. You're counting on, or rather praying, for hearts and minds at large to change in order to get voluntary integration. That could take generations, or it may never happen.
If people can't be nice on their own, maybe they need the stick (government regulation) until they learn.
> is some dumb shit. If letting minorities shop or work in your store drives away the majority there's no "mutual advantage"
That's not the argument he's making. He argues that it is always more expensive to be a racist, and that absent the legal framework of segregation then people will by financial necessity begin to do business across the color line which will change their preferences over time. He points out that historically there was a time when people would refuse to do business with Quakers, but that over time the free market won out and that discrimination or affect of taste no longer exists.
Again, I think you can reasonably disagree but it isn't obviously stupid to observed that racism incurs an extra cost and markets reward you for not being irrational in that way.
If the majority remains anti-integration then people will, by financial necessity, be forced to keep businesses segregated. A hotel owner who wants to let black guests stay will lose most of their white clientele. It's basic logic. Friedman says so himself in his example of the shop owner who would like to hire black clerks.
> He argues that it is always more expensive to be a racist
But then in the passage I originally quoted he says it also harms the business owner to not be a racist. Isn't that contradictory?
In the Quaker thing, did the free market win out? Or did communities become larger and more anonymous, and fashions changed so that telling Quakers and non-Quakers apart merely by appearance became impossible? That can't happen with minorities of a different skin color.
> But then in the passage I originally quoted he says it also harms the business owner to not be a racist. Isn't that contradictory?
It isn't contradictory if you read the whole chapter, its a single thought experiment and not his whole argument.
> In the Quaker thing, did the free market win out? Or did communities become larger and more anonymous, and fashions changed that telling Quakers and non-Quakers apart by appearance became impossible? That can't happen with minorities of a different skin color.
He's arguing that all of these prejudices are simply irrational preferences and will necessarily change over time. In fact today you find that preference have indeed largely changed in society.
And we all know that everyone chooses the cheapest option for everything to the exclusion of all other factors.
He also ignores that prices for minority consumers go up because there are fewer businesses that cater to them.
> He's arguing that all of these prejudices are simply irrational preferences and will necessarily change over time
And there honestly isn't much evidence for this.
> In fact today you find that preference have indeed largely changed in society.
I'm arguing that preferences have changed because people were forced to interact across race barriers and found that, actually, it was fine. Absent that forcing factor, there's zero guarantee that anything would have changed.
He also ignores the harms done to the minority as a result of discrimination. All this talk about "freedom" - what about the freedoms of the minority?
That's not what was observed in real life. There were form many decades black owned businesses serving clients at competitive price points and integrated businesses where allowed by law serving customers at price points lower than segregated businesses. Integrated Jazz clubs in the 50s served cheap drinks and had good music so white kids patronized them in droves. These interactions changed their preferences.
> And there honestly isn't much evidence for this.
Do you really believe that white Americans only interact economically with black Americans because the law forces them to? Because it looks to me like people's preferences changed. No one forced white kids in the suburbs to buy NWA albums, they were just good albums and no one stopped them.
> He also ignores the harms done to the minority as a result of discrimination. All this talk about "freedom" - what about the freedoms of the minority?
He literally does address this in the chapter. It isn't long, just go read it. You've said yourself that you haven't read much Friedman, you may find yourself surprised.
In 2025? Of course not. In 1965, in the American South, yes. Where "interact economically" is defined as selling or renting houses to, educating, employing, or offering services at all businesses to black Americans on an equal basis.
And I believe the law greatly accelerated this change.
Which also means there was enough broad popular support to pass such abhorrent laws. They didn't come out of nowhere. They weren't imposed by force by an outsider. It's great that your grandfather was not bigoted. The problem is not enough people were. Not enough people cared strongly enough to have these laws repealed in the state.
Not necessarily. Plenty of bad laws stay in force because people are ambivalent or politicians are cowards. The most radical people on a given issue are often effective at driving policy, we see this today all of the time.
My point is that lots of people weren't personally invested in segregation, but the state and police literally imposed it.
Friedman is arguing against that sort of government heavy-handedness. He makes the comparison of freedom of contract to freedom of speech, where the limits define the right. I'm not trying to say that things would have worked out perfectly if his ideas had carried the day, we obviously can't know that. What I'm saying is that he makes a compelling argument about freedom and that doesn't make him a racist or obviously wrong out of hand. He correctly points out that giving the federal government this kind of power doesn't have a good limiting principle and creates opportunities for abuse. He was making this argument when Nixon was establishing wage and price controls, so its important to understand the context.
Its not as though he was celebrating a right to discriminate, which the author of the article seems to believe.
Of course this rather misses a lot of the effects that cause racism to stay in place like redlining and actual acts of violence.
>"the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"
Can also be supplanted by
>Ignorant racists can hang around longer than your lifespan.
Or are we going to forget shit like the Tulsa race massacre where black and integrated businesses were burned to the ground? There is quite an advantage to be segregated if the other option is having your shit burned. Things like integration laws are just one piece in a legal framework to ensure criminal acts don't occur.
He also specifically addresses violence as positive harm that the government has a duty to prevent.
I'd really encourage you to spend the 15 minutes to track down this chapter of Friedman's book and read it because it addresses most of what you're talking about.
Careful now. Governments change, and along with it priorities for enformcement.
It’s not that there is no proper role for government, it’s that some paths end up being a Faustian bargain.
If enforcing equality of treatment and access in housing, employment, and education is one of those paths, then the government has gone to a very bad place. And literally everything has turned to shit.
It's also important to understand that this is a huge amount of what Zitron does. He is a rage-baiter who does not engage in argument in good faith.
> If just that one owner practices race-blind hiring out of their own personal beliefs they would definitely be harmed. If the law requires every store to practice race-blind hiring and the law is strictly enforced, racist customers will just have to get over themselves or stop buying groceries.
The harm is to the agency of the owners. The entire point of a free market is voluntary terms of entry, association, and exit notwithstanding contractual obligations to the contrary. There is no harm to a grocery owner who voluntarily chooses to defy the trend set by his competitors except economic self-harm should he suffer a net loss of customers over the decision. It's the freedom of the consumer to consciously or unconsciously boycott a store that doesn't appeal to his preferences (whether for or against racial discrimination), however petty such preferences are or irrelevant to his purpose (i.e. buying food). It is also the consumer's freedom to patronize a store that does. Conversely, the owner may find new consumers and thus a new of source revenue that outperforms that of his competitors through the practice of race-blind hiring.
> If the law requires every store to practice race-blind hiring and the law is strictly enforced, racist customers will just have to get over themselves or stop buying groceries.
Or the customers can move out to the countryside, a suburb, or a small town where they can only find white grocers. They can also look for farmers' cooperatives or food clubs unlikely to be staffed by any other race.
The status quo of discrimination caused harm to the agency of minority employees and shoppers. Why are "owners" more important than them?
> There is no harm to a grocery owner... except economic self-harm
So then there is harm. Economic harm is kinda the important kind of harm to a business owner. Every other "harm" is surmountable.
> Or the customers can move out to the countryside, a suburb, or a small town where they can only find white grocers
So what's the problem? They've added transaction costs for themselves to express their preferences.
There's the problem. Economics is the science of explaining tomorrow why the predictions you made yesterday didn't come true today.
We don't call people who successfully predict things "economists", we call them planners.
Plenty of economists' predictions hold up. Turkey's unorthodox economic theory that higher interest causes inflation did not pan out, and when they hiked interest rates inflation duely dropped. Most prices drop with increased supply and increase with decreased supply. There are some goods that buck this trend, but that's incorporated into economic theory. Moreover your comment implies that economists shouldn't try to explain when their theories don't match up. This seems entirely antithetical to science? Astronomers used to be believe in geocentrism. Is it bad for them to explain why their geocentrist predictions not hold?
>We don't call people who successfully predict things "economists", we call them planners.
I can't tell whether this is satire. For me, "planners" invoke either bureaucrats of command economies, which have a pretty lousy economic history, or people on zoning boards. Neither are "people who successfully predict things".
They'd be out-competed on being able to eat by the people who continued buying groceries without letting their personal biases affect their shopping. Then it's just Darwin at work.
> We live in the era of the symbolic executive, when "being good at stuff" matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff, where "what's useful" is dictated not by outputs or metrics that one can measure but rather the vibes passed between managers and executives that have worked their entire careers to escape the world of work.
We have redefined competence, but we haven't redefined it to be measured in nebulous ways. Far from it. Nadella does one thing and he does it well: he makes number go up. And that's all that matters.
Number gotta go up. If you don't make number go up, then how Grugg Ugug, MBA, to figure out how company doing? You no seriously expect Grugg to approach enterprise of measuring benefit of a business to society without one simple number.
We used to measure the worth of investment and expenditures of capital by their holistic benefit to society. That was way more thinking than business school graduates in this country wanted to do, so we distilled it down to the quarterly profit. At the very least, these people could understand addition, subtraction, and which number was bigger than the other. The "nebulous" way was what we got away from as a result.
I'm unconvinced that it's him so much as MS' entrenched position as a contractor, and ZIRP. There are a lot of companies whose number go up for whom number should no no go up, but it did, because they had first dibs at the money printer trough.
Thanks for that! I'll definitely use that one...
> We have redefined competence, but we haven't redefined it to be measured in nebulous ways. Far from it. Nadella does one thing and he does it well: he makes number go up. And that's all that matters.
I think Ziton would argue that this statement was supposed to be one level below "number going up". His argument seems to be not that number shouldn't go up, but that the number that goes up used to be based on "being good at stuff" but now isn't.
His argument isn't that executives shouldn't focus on the money, but rather that the money has last track of what they were supposed to track. It's not the executive themselves, it's the economy. The executives would then be the outcome of skewed incentives by an economy that has disconnected from "useful stuff".
This also happens to be my favorite take. So I may just be confirmation biased.
> While CEOs do get fired when things go badly, it's often after a prolonged period of decline and stagnancy, and almost always comes with some sort of payoff — and when I say "badly," I mean that growth has slowed to the point that even firing masses of people doesn't make things better.
And I think that's what he was gesturing at in the beginning when ranting about Satya. He knows Satya is not an imbecile, he would not survive the cutthroat sociopathic business environment if he was.
The logical conclusion is that Satya is just bullshitting on a softball interview to prop up Microsoft's copilot thing. That is a marketing piece, not a proper interview.
And on bullshit, it is always important to keep something in mind:
"bullshit is speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care whether what they say is true or false."
This seems specious, I mean, when? And how?
The article seems to contradict you, given that it is mostly focused on tech companies that do in fact spend billions in product development and tend to delay huge profits. Amazon, famously, was universally praised for its various innovations in e-commerce (i.e. benefit to society) while not making a profit for what, 25 years? The current business press gushes over "big data", the metaverse, AI, whatever, despite many such projects actually losing billions of dollars before being shut down or vastly reduced.
I'm not claiming these companies do actually benefit society, but Wall Street and the press is often willing to overlook immediate profit for the promise of long-term dominance (and the rewards that come with that) and in the meantime, they will at least promote the possibility of future societal benefit to justify their position.
>The Business Idiot is the manager that doesn't seem to do anything but keeps being promoted, and the chief executive officer of a public company that says boring, specious nonsense about AI
The CEO being Aaron Levie who dropped out of college to start Box, now worth a few billion. I wonder how much the brilliant Zitron has achieved with the moanathons.
Maximizing shareholder values can include treating your workers well if you think happy workers are more productive and therefore help with profits.
Same with good customer service, environmental regulation following, and other things.
The capital class finds it very icky when peasants are fairly treated. They typically punish ir by making like go down.
You don't need to have red skin and horns to take great pleasure in making those less powerful suffer.
In the same chapter Friedman literally says:
> On the contrary, I believe strongly that the color of a man's skin or the religion of his parents is, by itself, no reason to treat him differently; that a man should be judged by what he is and what he does and not by these external characteristics. I deplore what seem to me the prejudice and narrowness of outlook of those whose tastes differ from mine in this respect and I think the less of them for it.
> Except Friedman wasn't a racist, and the quote is cut specifically to make it appear that way.
He doesn't say that Friedman was racist, you made that up.
He says that Friedman was a fundamentalist and that people should be allowed to discriminate on the basis of race, and the quote illustrates that well and the context doesn't change anything to that point.
> He says that Friedman was a fundamentalist and that people should be allowed to discriminate on the basis of race, and the quote illustrates that well and the context doesn't change anything to that point.
No, Firedman says that government force isn't the best way to address discrimination. Again the quote is clipped to mislead.
Instead he advocated that the absence of regulation would somehow, magically make racists who control capital be not racist anymore.
There's nothing misleading in that quote.
He also wasn't against all regulations, and specifically supports regulating positive harms.
You could read the chapter yourself in 15 minutes.
I know, I just think it is much like believing that fairies exist. Except that believing in fairies causes no harm to society. His beliefs did.
> You could read the chapter yourself in 15 minutes.
You just presume others didn't read it, when in fact you dislike their interpretations and conclusions after reading it.
> Except that believing in fairies causes no harm to society. His beliefs did.
I don't agree, and such a banal analogy is not exactly convincing.
Perhaps believing in fairies does cause harm to society.
Page 93 (as numbered on the pages, IDK which PDF "page" [edit: nb the table of contents gets it wrong, one supposes the pages were re-numbered in the digitization process, or something]) or just search "Capitalism and Discrimination" and it'll get you there fast, for anyone who's interested. The chapter is... well, I found a real howler, but then I have odd taste in entertainment, sometimes, and my enjoyment was almost certainly not by a route the author intended. I'd recommend it just on that basis, regardless of its role in this thread but, uh, only for my fellow weirdos.
FWIW I didn't find Zitron's framing of it misleading, having now read it (I'd read excerpts of that book before, and maybe even that chapter, but couldn't recall for sure, so re-read it just now)
Prefacing that with "I am personally against discrimination" is pretty much meaningless. His awful economic doctrine and beliefs will result in discrimination anyway.
Let's not pretend Friedman needs to be presented in a bad light to make it clear he was an awfully evil person.
I absolutely think it’s ridiculous to call him an evil person, it’s a totally unfair characterization.
He is arguing against the only thing that could meaningfully reduce discrimination and increase equality. As I refuse to believe Friedman was an imbecile, the only possibility left is malice. He knows that his free market fundamentalism will result in more discrimination, but he doesn't care because government is icky.
> I absolutely think it’s ridiculous to call him an evil person, it’s a totally unfair characterization.
He was evil because he advocated for policies and doctrines that meaningfully make the lives of people worse. It's likely impossible to measure the harm he caused to the world.
Surely we can agree the freer market in New York was superior to the government control of contracts in North Carolina.
Free markets have demonstrably lifted billions of people out of abject poverty in the last 50 years.
In my view what lifted people from abject poverty was a measure of technological progress and industrialization. The places where people were mostly lifted out of poverty do not embrace the completely unregulated free market fantasy of Friedman.
I believe in government as a strong regulator to rein in corporations, because corporations are optimized to generate profits even when they cause harm to society in their profit-seeking mandate. Obviously you will disagree with this, because government icky, and you seem to embrace the fantasy that once free of the shackles of icky government, the benevolent capital holders will benefit the world somehow.
You advocate for something very extreme, and it is clear we won't find middle ground at this point.
Have a great evening, and feel free to have the last word.
I don’t disagree that governments have a role in regulating harms, and neither did Friedman. He did believe that taxing pollution was more effective than setting particular targets, but that’s a difference of approach not of aims.
I think we probably have more overlap than you imagine.
you are choosing to define segregation very narrowly - as in a government law requiring individuals to be segregated (attend separate schools, or use separate bathrooms, etc)
that is an absurd definition to use in this context, because the original example from Friedman's quote is a different type of segregation - a business owner hanging out a sign that says "we're hiring, but only white people".
redlining [0] created segregated neighborhoods, but not via government mandate, just from banks and mortgage lenders "voluntarily" deciding that certain neighborhoods should be whites-only. there were also housing covenants [1, 2] that enforced segregation via contract law.
if your definition of segregation does not include those practices, your definition is worthless.
0: https://www.brickunderground.com/blog/2015/10/history_of_red...
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/realestate/racism-home-de...
2: https://archive.is/T4eHk
The Federal Housing Authority created in 1933 and the Home Owners' Loan Corporation created in 1934 created the zones and directed the banks where to make loans. I’d suggest you read a bit either. I’d suggest The Color of Law.
Guess what that makes you?
I think it is totally within the bounds of reasonable discourse to discuss if minimum wage laws achieve their stated goals.
Actually this is a pretty weak point. We have plenty of historical examples where a terrible person came up with a brilliant idea. So Friedman being racist or not (he was categorically not, Zitron is being unfair here) is kind of a non-issue. The philosophical problem is that favoring shareholder value above moral value or social value (or whatever you want to call it: the betterment of society; or Socrates' "flourishing" [εὐδαιμονία]) just doesn't seem to have any positive externalities.
"Line go up," sure, but what does that actually do? "Line go up" teleology is trivially a dead end moral philosophy. In fact, if history is much of a teacher, any economic teleology seems to be pretty morally bankrupt—from concrete jungle capitalism to Bolshevik communism to bartering. I'm extrapolating, but here, I do agree with Ed.
The person who is good at consistently making the value/number go up and to the right on your money; or the one that gives vague ‘social good’ reasons why they aren’t?
Especially if the ‘social good’ stuff is often vague and non-concrete?
The world is a much different place from when Socrates was around.
This has nothing to do with the broader point of drafting policies that further social flourishing (there's disagreements as to what this means, of course) as opposed to drafting policies that further "line go up." In fact, I'd argue that the latter is meaningless without a foundational underpinning (we see this in imploding hyper-inflated economies).
In other words, who cares if I have a zillion Funbucks if the country is falling apart?
He was never saying just do what the fuck ever you can to flip a buck. The article quoted by Edward Zitron is Friedman responding to Nixon trying to shame companies into not raising prices during an inflationary period.
I've recently figured this out a out the company where I work, after an embarrassingly large number of years. My manager pays lip service to "high quality code" to justify his endless torrent of nitpicks, but when it comes to his own stuff he hides some times serious problems. Like, seriously, I've found undeniable evidence that he was aware of the malfunctioning of a data collection system and instead of reporting/fixing, he made sure to make it harder for anyone else to find it.
He's very well respected, however, and has this incredible aura of professionalism.
This realization also explains why everything is done so poorly in my company. Hitting the ill defined requirements in letter but not in principle, and then blaming a different team when problems are uncovered, is more than enough.
In particular the article linked in this blog post is Friedman arguing against Nixon's price controls and Nixon's insistence that it was "socially responsible" to not raise prices as you own costs went up. Stripping the article of this consequence is either dishonest, or stupid.
> “...consider a situation in which there are grocery stores serving a neighborhood inhabited by people who have a strong aversion to being waited on by Negro clerks. Suppose one of the grocery stores has a vacancy for a clerk and the first applicant qualified in other respects happens to be a Negro. Let us suppose that as a result of the law the store is required to hire him. The effect of this action will be to reduce the business done by this store and to impose losses on the owner. If the preference of the community is strong enough, it may even cause the store to close. When the owner of the store hires white clerks in preference to Negroes in the absence of the law, he may not be expressing any preference or prejudice, or taste of his own. He may simply be transmitting the tastes of the community. He is, as it were, producing the services for the consumers that the consumers are willing to pay for. Nonetheless, he is harmed, and indeed may be the only one harmed appreciably, by a law which prohibits him from engaging in this activity, that is, prohibits him from pandering to the tastes of the community for having a white rather than a Negro clerk. The consumers, whose preferences the law is intended to curb, will be affected substantially only to the extent that the number of stores is limited and hence they must pay higher prices because one store has gone out of business.”
In my view, the scenario and reasoning by Friedman in how he applies market forces applying to business decisions is a view where you have an assumption of 'knowing the result' of any decision and using that 'knowledge' as justification for reasoning. When in reality, you don't know the result, you can estimate, but that's about it. So when an exec is applying Friedman principles they're trying to 'know the market' and that's a fundamental error in my mind due to the chaos of the world how it can manifest across all avenues of life.
I don't thing that's a correct assessment. He talks a lot about the need to follow laws an cultural norms and the importance of society setting normative guardrails for behavior. Moreover he point our I believe correctly that a lot of the worst behavior of businesses stem from monopoly power.
> In my view, the scenario and reasoning by Friedman in how he applies market forces applying to business decisions is a view where you have an assumption of 'knowing the result'
I think it only appears that way if you take small quotations like this out of context.
> I think it only appears that way if you take small quotations like this out of context.
Can you help me understand this. Like the purpose of using logic to deduce decision making is because there's a fundamental structure in assuring the result from those deductions is accurate (or enough to continue manipulation of the problem data). When you try to predict market reaction to a decision and ascribe harm or success based on the decision you're creating causation out of correlation, often incorrectly. Again, not an expert in economics, but when i view theories of free market forces and how they're part of the logic of business decisions i can't help but think the people using this information are assuming their knowledge and logic aren't fundamentally flawed and as a result are essentially just guessing without thinking they are.
You're actually touching on why he argues against efforts to regulate negative harms, because the government has an imperfect ability to predict the outcomes and there isn't a great feedback mechanism.
But history has shown that business feedback sometimes takes us to undesirable places, and government regulation is sometimes necessary.
To anyone else who, like me, has noticed this, the answer is: these interviews happen so that the interviewee can put out the message they want, and so that the interviewer can charge advertisers. Asking questions that could derail the theatre is not in the interest of the people involved.
This also creates an environment where the interviewers are self selected. Interviewers who derail the interviewee's exposition don't land important interviewees.
Is that not the function of the CEO? Pep talking the board of investors while everyone else does the work?
I don't even know what this article is about but I'm so irritated by the insinuation people write and receive well-written emails I am too irritated to finish the article.
Communication is (beyond frustratingly) not a highly valued skill in most of corporate America.
wow. i've met his son David and interacted a small amount with a couple of his grandchildren. this was in very poor taste. and i really hate some of the things he was responsible for!
How that translates in the spiritual realm is another question. A lot of religious texts focus on interpersonal behavior, so maybe friendly people with disastrous public policies would be judged accordingly.
At the cost of 10x in time cost? The argument is against the notion of summary?
> ... — and I’d argue that a well-written email is one that doesn’t require a summary.
And yet the world's population probably creates loads of important yet not well-written emails. Different contexts will also require different information to be extracted, so no matter how well-written an email is, the context might determine what the relevant information is.
> Podcasts are not there "to be chatted about" with an AI.
Really? Are written articles not meant to be "spoken aloud"? Are plays not meant to be "turned into a movie"? Who cares cares if someone can get information about media that they want to consume with a new method?
> Preparing for meetings isn't something that requires AI, nor is research, unless, of course, you don't really give a shit about the actual content of what you're reading or the message of what you're saying, just that you are "saying the right thing."
There was no statement about requiring AI. It was about leveraging AI as a benefit.
I use email instead of snail mail. I often watch technical talk videos at 2x speed to shoot past the filler. I read books in digital format instead of their physical counterparts because of convenience and access. I read online newspaper articles, rather than holding a physical newspaper, for the same reason.
None of these require technology, they're enhanced by them.
What a piece of shit article. I stopped reading after the first paragraph. This should read "The Era of the Technical Moron".
I strongly agree. This echoes the cartoon about using LLMs to write and then summarize emails (https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html).
If someone doesn't care enough about my time to compose a well-written email, with a tl;dr at the top if necessary, then I see no reason to care about what they've generated.
Speaking to the performative importance of cultural norms, many workplaces would not look kindly on certain white-collar roles if they wore a T-shirt to the office; even if it is more efficient, or comfortable to wear the T-shirt.
History repeats! Welcome to the real world! But thanks anyway!
Summary by AI:
*Key Takeaways from "The Era of the Business Idiot" by Ed Zitron*([Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At][1])
1. Modern executives prioritize the *appearance of productivity* over genuine results, often relying on AI tools for superficial tasks. 
2. Satya Nadella's use of AI for basic tasks exemplifies the *symbolic executive* who delegates real work to maintain an illusion of efficiency.
3. The *tech industry's focus on shareholder value* has led to the degradation of core products, prioritizing short-term gains over long-term quality.([Podcast World][2])
4. Executives often *escape the realities* of the products they oversee, resulting in decisions disconnected from user needs.
5. The *media's reluctance* to question tech leaders perpetuates a cycle of unaccountability and unchecked power.([Podcast World][2])
6. A *"Rot Economy"* has emerged, where companies sacrifice product integrity for stock price growth.
7. The *definition of a "good business"* has shifted from delivering quality products to maximizing shareholder returns.
8. Executives' *overreliance on AI* tools reflects a detachment from meaningful engagement with their work.([Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At][1])
9. The *corporate world's embrace of AI* often serves more as a marketing strategy than a functional improvement.
10. There's a growing *disconnect between corporate leadership* and the actual value delivered to consumers.
11. The *illusion of innovation* is maintained through strategic communication rather than substantive advancements.
12. Executives' *focus on optics* undermines the authenticity and effectiveness of their leadership.
13. The *lack of accountability* in tech leadership allows for the perpetuation of ineffective practices.
14. The *commodification of labor* and overreliance on automation devalue human contribution and creativity.([Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At][1])
15. The *corporate emphasis on growth* at all costs leads to unsustainable business practices.
16. Executives often *lack a clear understanding* of the products and services their companies provide.
17. The *media's complicity* in promoting corporate narratives hinders critical examination of business practices.([Simon & Schuster][3])
18. The *symbolic nature of executive roles* detracts from the substantive leadership needed for meaningful progress.
19. The *overvaluation of tech companies* is driven by hype rather than actual performance or innovation.
20. The *current corporate landscape* rewards style over substance, leading to a decline in genuine business acumen.
That's pretty funny, but the book is actually called "Capitalism and Freedom".
I stopped reading here. The author seems to fail to understand the new conceptual model that is interactive consumption. A conversation is a higher bandwidth form of communication and a two-way means of communication, it has features that a recorded piece of audio does not.
If you get confused 10% of the way through a podcast, you can't have the podcast change and suddenly spend an extra two minutes explaining a concept it mentioned. But you can ask a conversational AI to explain something you didn't understand.
If you find that the podcast is telling you something you already know, you need to skip around and figure out where it stops doing so and becomes useful again in a painful process. Within a conversation if you're the CEO of one of the world's most valuable corporations, you just cut the person off and say "I know".
The author also fails to understand that people can personalize content by expressing preferences to an AI agent and having it interpolate the content to some new form, or style transfer it. Change its language into one's native tongue. Change the tone to suit one's current mood. Be more concise or funnier.
I can only assume the author is letting their personal preferences for mediums of communication blind them to very real technological and communication advances happening.