profit motive

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future
by Ben Tarnoff
Published 13 Jun 2022

On the one hand, the inequalities they generate are inseparable from the pursuit of profit. The privatization of the upper floors of the internet is their basic prerequisite. But the profit motive does not always point in one direction. As the case of Facebook makes clear, sometimes what’s best for the business isn’t entirely obvious; there are competing motivations and constraints. In capitalism, the imperative to accumulate is absolute, but there is typically more than one way to satisfy this imperative. The supremacy of the profit motive, then, does not alone determine the present shape of the internet. There are other privatized possibilities. And it is in these possibilities that a new wave of reformers, eager to mitigate a host of harms that have grown too large to ignore, place their hopes.

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In the 1980s, it grew into a government-owned computer network used primarily by academics. Then, in the 1990s, privatization began. The privatization of the internet was a process, not an event. It did not involve a simple transfer of ownership from the public sector to the private but rather a more complex movement whereby corporations programmed the profit motive into every level of the network. A system built by scientists was renovated for the purpose of profit maximization. This took hardware, software, legislation, entrepreneurship. It took decades. And it touched all of the internet’s many pieces. The internet’s pieces don’t fit together in an especially obvious way.

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The real money didn’t lie in monetizing access, but in monetizing activity—that is, in what people did once they got online. So privatization ascended to the upper floors, to the layer where the internet is experienced. Here, in the 2000s and 2010s, the so-called platforms arose: Google, Amazon, Uber, and the rest. These empires finished what the 1990s had started. They pushed privatization up the stack. The profit motive came to organize not only the low-level plumbing of the network but every aspect of online life. New Directions This book is not a manifesto in the traditional sense. It is not particularly programmatic, though it does contain some proposals. Rather, it is a manifesto in the sense that it tries to make something manifest, something that so far has not been very visible: the story of the internet’s privatization.

Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners
by Larry Harris
Published 2 Jan 2003

Gamblers trade instruments that excite them. 8.2 PROFIT-MOTIVATED TRADERS Profit-motivated traders trade only because they expect to profit. Like all traders, they profit if they buy low and sell high. The key to trading profitably is to trade only when you have reason to believe that you will profit. Profit-motivated traders therefore must understand why they profit in order to predict when they will profit. This section introduces the various types of profit-motivated traders. We discuss them in detail in later chapters. The two main classes of profit-motivated traders are speculators and dealers. Speculators attempt to profit by predicting how prices will change in the future.

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Block facilitators generally provide liquidity only to clients whom they choose. 8.2.3 Profit-motivated Trader Summary Profit-motivated traders trade because they expect to profit from their trading. Successful profit-motivated traders must have some advantage that allows them to trade profitably. Their various advantages usually involve information they have that others do not have. Table 8-4 presents a summary of the various profit-motivated trading strategies. TABLE 8-4. Summary of Profit-motivated Trading Strategies and the Proprietary Information upon Which They Are Based Informed traders understand fundamental instrument values better than other traders do.

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By considering stylized traders, we simplify our discussions and ultimately make it easier for you to identify the different reasons why people trade. Our stylized traders are profit-motivated traders, utilitarian traders, or futile traders. Profit-motivated traders trade only because they rationally expect to profit from their trades. Speculators and dealers are profit-motivated traders. Utilitarian traders trade because they expect to obtain some benefit from trading besides trading profits. Investors, borrowers, asset exchangers, hedgers, and gamblers are utilitarian traders. Futile traders believe that they are profit-motivated traders. Although they expect to trade profitably, their expectations are not rational.

The New Prophets of Capital
by Nicole Aschoff
Published 10 Mar 2015

Chapter 2 examines eco-capitalism and the growing trend of “sustainable” production and consumption by looking at Whole Foods CEO John Mackey’s model of conscious capitalism. Mackey’s narrative highlights key problems with the rapid spread of global capitalism and its devastating impact on the environment, but his model fails to challenge the underlying contradictions and imperatives of for-profit production. Human needs can be satiated, but the profit motive cannot—even “sustainable” production in a capitalist system cannot protect the environment from overuse and potentially irreversible damage. Chapter 3 peels back the layers of media mogul Oprah Winfrey’s model of self-help, spiritual capitalism. At a time when the American Dream seems more out of reach than ever, Oprah’s message resonates and replicates through all avenues of life.

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Sexism and racism are part of the company toolkit, enabling firms to pay women less—particularly women of color—discriminate against them, steal their wages, and treat them badly. But even if we root out sexism and racism, the inherent contradictions of capitalism will persist. Putting women in charge will not change the power of the profit motive and the compulsion of companies to give workers as little as economic, social, and cultural norms will allow. The goal of feminism is justice and equality for all women, not simply equal opportunity for women or equal participation by women. By aligning the goals of feminism with the goals of capitalism, Sandberg’s model of emancipation functions as ideology, accepting and undergirding the dominant structures of power in society.

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They were the work of institutions: CERN and the Department of Defense created the internet, while Bell Labs—a subdivision of AT&T, freed from market competition by federally granted monopoly rights—generated transistors, radar, information theory, “quality control,” and dozens of other innovations central to our epoch.25 Nearly every advance in science, technology, and mathematics emerged from people working together at universities supported by government funding. Creativity and innovation come from many places. Companies produce influential innovations, but so do other institutions that operate outside the confines of the profit motive, competitive markets, and the bottom line. As Cambridge professor of economics Ha-Joon Chang argues, this is neither theoretical quibbling nor simply a quest for historical “truth.” Instead, getting the historical narrative right is important because the stories we tell “deeply affect the very way in which we understand the nature and the development of the market, as well as its interrelationship with the state and other institutions.”26 In the neoliberal narrative states are interlopers, under the thumb of rent-seeking politicians and bureaucrats, whose field of action should be restricted.

Mending the Net: Toward Universal Basic Incomes
by Chris Oestereich
Published 20 Oct 2016

Given that, it’s time to consider what we might do to change the system, and to start, we need to question our fundamental assumptions about how to organize the economy and society in general. The belief that the profit motive is the optimal incentive for driving progress is often treated as a given. But a preponderance of belief is a poor substitute for proof. We know there are people who are driven by the profit motive (evidence of that is in no short supply), and maybe we all are to some degree, but there are plenty of other factors driving human behavior. Why should we believe that one takes complete precedence over the rest when we know that some of us are also pulled by things like the need to foster a sense of community, the desire to support family and friends, or even a compulsion to work on the wicked problems faced by humanity?

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Why should we believe that one takes complete precedence over the rest when we know that some of us are also pulled by things like the need to foster a sense of community, the desire to support family and friends, or even a compulsion to work on the wicked problems faced by humanity?[16] Each of us has a mix of forces pulling us in different directions. At best, the profit motive is an oversimplification. At worst, it’s a destructive force without equal. Regardless of the reality of our motivations, our economic system remains centered on the profit motive. If I want a roof over my head, and something to eat, I better do something that affords me the necessary income. If I want to spend all my time helping others, but no one is willing to pay me enough to cover my needs, I’d better have deep enough pockets to live off of.

In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays
by Bertrand Russell
Published 1 Jan 1935

For this reason, the problems of married women are bound up with the problem of unemployment, which is probably insoluble without a very considerable degree of Socialism. In any case, however, the construction of “co-operative parallelograms” such as I have been advocating could only come, on a large scale, as part of a large Socialistic movement, since the profit motive alone could never bring it about. The health and character of children, and the nerves of wives, must therefore continue to suffer so long as the desire for profit regulates economic activities. Some things can be achieved 60 by this motive, and some cannot ; among those that cannot is the well-being of wives and children in the wage-earning class, and—what may seem even more Utopian—giving beauty to suburbs.

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I presuppose, therefore, as a condition for successful Socialism, the peaceful persuasion of a majority to acceptance of its doctrines. I shall adduce nine arguments in favour of Socialism, none of them new, and not all of equal importance. The list could be indefinitely lengthened, but I think these nine should suffice to show that it is not a gospel for one class only. 1. The Breakdown of the Profit Motive Profit, as a separate economic category, only becomes clear at a certain stage of industrial development. The germ of it, however, might be seen in the relations of Robinson Crusoe and his Man Friday. Let us suppose that, in the autumn, Robinson Crusoe, by means of his gun, has acquired control of the whole food-supply of his island.

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There was less demand for Australian and Argentine meat, because the unemployed had to be content with a spare diet. There was, as a result, less demand for the manufactures which Australia and the Argentine had taken in exchange for their meat. And so on indefinitely. There is one further very important reason for the failure of the profit motive in the present day, and that is the failure of scarcity. It often happens that goods of certain kinds can be produced in enormous quantities at a cheaper rate than on a more modest scale. In that case, it may be that the most economical mode of production would be to have only one factory for each of these kinds of goods in the whole world.

Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry
by Peter Warren Singer
Published 1 Jan 2003

Even today, mercenaries are present in contemporary warfare even though they have met with limited success. The simple reason for the persistence of mercenary activity is that in many areas governance and legal systems have broken down, giving enterprising ex-soldiers both room to maneuver and demand opportunities for their skills. The profit motive predominates for most, and the rewards are quite lucrative. In the Kosovo war, for example, the going rate for professional soldiers to help the rebel KIA group was a reported $4,000 per month, while private fighters on the Serb side were given a free license to pillage and loot the countryside; many left with truck- loads of stolen consumer goods.

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At the same time, in the majority' of conflicts carried out in the developing world, it has become messier and criminalized. What is interesting is that both involve the monopoly of war being taken away from public professionals. In many of the ongoing wars around the globe, the traditional rationales behind the initiation, maintenance, and continuation of war are under siege. The profit motive has become a central motivator, equal or greater to that of political, ideological, or religious inspirations.100 Or, as one military analyst puts it, "With enough monev anyone can equip a powerful military force. With a willingness to use crime, nearlv anvone can generate enough *» 1 () 1 money.

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For example, rebel forces in such wars tend not to attack military installations or strategic chokepoints, such as airports and harbors, but rather hit targets that they can loot.im The combination of these criminal goals and increasingly less professional, "soldier- less" forces also leads to a variation in strategies toward civilians. Unlike Mao's traditional insurgency strategy, these new or reconstructed groups THE RISK aim at terrorizing and pillaging the population, rather than winning hearts and minds. All of these factors make criminalized war messier and more intractable. They are also more amenable for other profit-motivated entities, such as PMFs, to become involved. As these wars have become more and more prevalent, the role of a private firm in warfare is also harder to dispute, particularly when their professionalism stands in sharp contrast to local irregular forces, who are motivated by profit just the same.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma
by Mustafa Suleyman
Published 4 Sep 2023

See vehicles Cartwright, Edmund, 282 Cas9, 81 catastrophe, 205–14 containment and, 211–12, 214 scenarios for, 207–9 skepticism about, 206–7 stagnation as, 217–21 surveillance dystopia as, 215–17 Caulobacter ethensis-2.0, 84 Cello, 109 CFCs, 45, 46, 263 Charles Martel, 183–84 Charpentier, Emmanuelle, 81, 265 chatbots, 64, 68, 70, 113–14 ChatGPT, 62, 65 chemical weapons, 46, 110 chemistry, 98–99 Chernobyl, 45 chess, 53 China geopolitics and, 120–24 historical containment attempts by, 39–40 international cooperation and, 265–66 Maoism, 192 regulation and, 231 silk and, 41 surveillance, 193–95 U.S. export controls and, 249–50 Chinchilla, 68 chips choke points and, 249–51 hyper-evolution and, 32–33, 57, 81, 108 size of, 67 See also semiconductors chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), 35 CICERO, 167 climate change containment attempts, 45, 46, 263 as global challenge, 137–39 popular understanding of, 236 unintended consequences of technology and, 35 clocks, 157 cloud computing, 251 CloudWalk, 194 Cohen, Stanley N., 80 Cold War containment and, 37 international cooperation and, 263, 264 nuclear weapons and, 42 Sputnik and, 119–20, 126 coming wave AI on, 3–4 AI-synthetic biology interactivity and, 88–91 autonomy and, 105, 113–15 avoidance of, 12–14 benefits of, 10, 11, 16, 283 defined, vii, 7 ego as driver of, 139–41 global challenges and, 137–40 idealism and, 150–51 inevitability of, 142–43, 214, 225 interrelated nature of, 56–57 popular understanding of, 234–36 possible responses, 11 power and, 102, 163–64 profit motive and, 131–36 research unpredictability and, 129–30 skepticism about, 57–58, 72, 102, 179, 206–7 technology penumbra of, 92–93 See also accessibility of new technology; coming wave incentives; omni-use technology coming wave incentives, 119, 141 containment and, 250 geopolitics, 119–27 global challenges, 137–40, 219 openness imperative, 127–29 profit motive, 131–36, 254–58 regulation and, 231–32 coming wave technology characteristics asymmetrical impact, 105–7, 234 autonomy, 105, 113–15, 166, 234 containment and, 234–35 See also hyper-evolution; omni-use technology computer vision, 58–60 computing, 32–34 dematerialization and, 55, 190 hyper-evolution of, 108 manufacturing processes and, 84 quantum computing, 97–99, 109, 114, 122 U.S. export controls and, 249–50 Consortium, 84 containment audits and, 245–48, 267 beginnings of, 272–73 catastrophe and, 211–12, 214 choke points and, 249–51 coherence and, 275 critics and, 252–54 defined, vii, 37–38 elements of, 232–33 gorilla problem and, 115–16 government roles, 258–63 historical attempts, 38–41, 42–43, 119 Industrial Revolution and, 39, 40, 281–82 integrated approach to, 228–29 international cooperation and, 263–67 makers’ responsibility for, 252 as narrow corridor, 276–78 need for, 16, 18–19, 46, 48, 285–86 off switches and, 244–45 omni-use technology and, 111 organizational limitations and, 228 overview, 274–75 pathogens and, 273–74 popular movements and, 271–72 possibility of, 278–79 profit motive and, 254–58 quantum computing and, 98 risks in, 43–45 safety and, 239–43 self-critical culture and, 267–70 stagnation as method for, 217–21 surveillance as method for, 206, 215–17 technology characteristics and, 233–35 See also regulation as method for containment containment problem, vii See also containment Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, 263 Copilot, 69 corporations British East India Company, 186, 189 concentrated power and, 187–88, 190–91 containment and, 255, 258 dematerialization and, 189–90 intelligence and, 186–87 public benefit, 258 role in coming wave, 134–35 taxation and, 262 Cortical Labs, 91 costs.

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A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A Aadhaar, 126 academia, 128 accessibility of new technology AI, 69 decentralization and, 198 dematerialization and, 190 genetic engineering, 82–83 military applications and, 106, 126 power and, 163–64, 198, 199 Acemoglu, Daron, 179, 276, 278 Acheson-Lilienthal Report, 42 additive manufacturing. See 3-D printing Aerorozvidka, 103–4 agriculture challenges of, 136–37 climate change and, 138 as general-purpose technology, 27 profit motive and, 133 robotics and, 93–94 as technology wave, 28 AI Act (EU), 229, 260 AI Incidents Database, 246 air gaps, 241 airlines, 267–68 AlexNet, 58–59 algorithms, 63, 114, 247 Alibaba, 66 Allison, Graham, 123 Alphabet, 128, 256, 257 AlphaFold, 89–90, 109 AlphaGo, 53–54, 113, 117–19, 120 AlphaZero, 54 alternatives, 234 Altos Labs, 85 Amazon, 94–95, 189 Anduril, 166 anthrax, 174 anti-aging technologies.

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Brian, 56 artificial capable intelligence (ACI), vii, 77–78, 115, 164, 210 artificial general intelligence (AGI) catastrophe scenarios and, 209, 210 chatbots and, 114 DeepMind founding and, 8 defined, vii, 51 gorilla problem and, 115–16 gradual nature of, 75 superintelligence and, 75, 77, 78, 115 yet to come, 73–74 artificial intelligence (AI) aspirations for, 7–8 autonomy and, 114, 115 as basis of coming wave, 55 benefits of, 10–11 catastrophe scenarios and, 208, 209–11 chatbots, 64, 68, 70, 113–14 Chinese development of, 120–21 choke points in, 251 climate change and, 139 consciousness and, 74, 75 contradictions and, 202 costs of, 64, 68 current applications, 61–62 current capabilities of, 8–9 cyberattacks and, 162–63, 166–67 defined, vii early experiments in, 51–54 efficiency of, 68–69 ego and, 140 ethics and, 254 explanation and, 243 future of, 78 future ubiquity of, 284–85 global reach of, 9–10 hallucination problem and, 243 human brain as fixed target, 67–68 hyper-evolution and, 109 invisibility of, 73 limitations of, 73 medical applications, 110 military applications, 104, 165 Modern Turing Test, 76–77, 78, 115, 190, 210 narrow nature of, 73–74 near-term capabilities, 77 omni-use technology and, 111, 130 openness imperative and, 128–29 potential of, 56, 70, 135 as priority, 60 profit motive and, 134, 135, 136 proliferation of, 68–69 protein structure and, 88–89 red teaming and, 246 regulation attempts, 229, 260–61 research unpredictability and, 130 robotics and, 95, 96, 98 safety and, 241, 243–44 scaling hypothesis, 67–68, 74 self-critical culture and, 270 sentience claims, 72, 75 skepticism about, 72, 179 surveillance and, 193–94, 195, 196 synthetic biology and, 89–90, 109 technological unemployment and, 177–81 Turing test, 75 See also coming wave; deep learning; machine learning arXiv, 129 Asilomar principles, 269–70, 272–73 ASML, 251 asymmetrical impact, 105–7, 234 Atlantis, 5 Atmanirbhar Bharat program (India), 125–26 attention, 63 attention maps, 63 audits, 245–48, 267 Aum Shinrikyo, 212–13, 214 authoritarianism, 153, 158–59, 191–96, 216–17 autocomplete, 63 automated drug discovery, 110 automation, 177–81 autonomy, 105, 113–15, 166, 234 Autor, David, 179 al-Awlaki, Anwar, 171 B backpropagation, 59 bad actor empowerment, 165–66, 208, 266 See also terrorism B corps, 258 Bell, Alexander Graham, 31 Benz, Carl, 24, 285 Berg, Paul, 269–70 BGI Group, 122 bias, 69–70, 239–40 Bioforge, 86 Biological Weapons Convention, 241, 263 biotech.

Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology From Capitalism
by Wendy Liu
Published 22 Mar 2020

We were taught the corporate motto: organising the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful, which I liked because it reminded me of my ill-fated attempt at creating a database for media information. But the sensibleness of this motto made the cloak-and-dagger stuff seem a little absurd. What’s more, it wasn’t clear to me that organising the world’s information should be the provenance of a for-profit company, rather than a democratic effort outside the purview of the profit motive. Still, it was nice to get paid so well, so I couldn’t really complain. The week capped off with an internal town hall-style event called TGIF2. Every Thursday at 4:30pm, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin would get up on stage in an auditorium in Mountain View to share company news, answer employee questions, and welcome new hires.

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Nick proposed some sort of data dividend, with truck drivers being paid for any driving they’d done that contributed to the algorithm. I vetoed that instantly — if there was anything I learned from our prior business model, it was that data attribution was nearly impossible. Not only would it be technically inefficient, but it would erode the profit motive for the company doing the automating. In any case, there was no neutral way to assess the share of income that should go to drivers; it would be entirely dependent on their negotiating power. I didn’t know the right way to solve this problem — a basic income? collectively-owned technology? — but the typical Silicon Valley approach didn’t seem apt here.

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Your idea could be outlandish. You could have a delightful product that people loved without a revenue model. You could even give a chunk of stock to the artist who painted a mural. You were allowed to put fiscal considerations on the back burner. What happened when you got bigger? Eventually, the profit motive kicked in; shareholders — public or increasingly private — needed you to think about their needs. Labour costs would be the first thing up for review. Stock options for non-essential personnel? Expensive perks? Health insurance and sick pay for roles where market research determined them unnecessary?

Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment
by David F. Swensen
Published 8 Aug 2005

Mutual-Fund Industry Failure Unconventional Success concludes that the mutual-fund industry fails America’s individual investors. Compelling data show that nearly certain disappointment awaits the mutual-fund shareholder who hopes to generate market-beating returns. The root of the problem lies in the competition between a mutual-fund management company’s fiduciary responsibility and its profit motive. The contest almost inevitably resolves in favor of the bottom line. Individual investors lose. Mutual-fund managers win. Evidence points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that active management of assets fails to produce satisfactory results for individual investors. Two factors explain the individual’s predicament.

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As part of the rationale for closing the fund, the portfolio managers observed that further increases in assets under management will produce “proportionately much less benefit” to the expense ratio, once again illustrating Southeastern’s focus on shareholder interests. The reduction in the expense ratio represents another example of Southeastern placing investor interests above the profit motive. Instead of allowing economies of scale to drive down expenses, the managers could have quietly maintained the percentage-of-assets charges, generated greater cash flow, and garnered greater profits for themselves. Instead, Southeastern transferred a significant portion of the benefits of increasing scale to its customers.

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As the ETF market matures, investors face an increasingly unappealing set of alternatives. AFTERWORD 12 Failure of For-Profit Mutual Funds Overwhelming evidence proves the failure of the for-profit mutual-fund industry. When the fiduciary responsibility to produce high risk-adjusted returns for investors inevitably comes into conflict with the profit motivation to provide substantial revenues for funds management companies, investor returns lose and company profits win. Mutual-fund investors consistently fail to achieve investment objectives, because the balance of power in the investment management world skews dramatically in favor of the profit-seeking investment manager.

The Economics Anti-Textbook: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Microeconomics
by Rod Hill and Anthony Myatt
Published 15 Mar 2010

Question for your professor: If externalities are really pervasive and important, why doesn’t the textbook integrate them throughout the book, rather than leaving them to a chapter towards the end? 2.2 Externalities and the profit motive ‘We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics.’ Franklin Delano Roosevelt, second inaugural address, 1937 166 [Marx’s] perception that the profit motive was ruinous for the human race ­remains, I think, a great insight. We see that the drive of corporations for profit is done at the expense of human beings all over the world … the pursuit of money has led chemical companies to pollute the air and water, has led arms manufacturers to create monstrous weapons of destruction without regard to how they will be used or against whom they will be used. (2002: 97–8) If we take the ubiquity of important externalities seriously, and if we recognize the realities of power and information that hinder effective responses to them, we can see how the profit motive can work in practice.

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As we’ve tried to show, it’s perfectly compatible with very serious problems of pollution (of which we have given only a few examples), misuse of resources, and even with long-term catastrophe. 167 7  |  Externalities Many critics of the current economic system deplore the profit motive, seeing it as destructive. From the viewpoint of the textbooks, where the profit motive guides resources to their most valued uses and produces material abundance, it appears that these critics are economic illiterates. Consider this comment by the American historian Howard Zinn: In fact, this does not contradict what is in the texts themselves, if they are read carefully and completely by those willing to draw their own conclusions.

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We see that the drive of corporations for profit is done at the expense of human beings all over the world … the pursuit of money has led chemical companies to pollute the air and water, has led arms manufacturers to create monstrous weapons of destruction without regard to how they will be used or against whom they will be used. (2002: 97–8) If we take the ubiquity of important externalities seriously, and if we recognize the realities of power and information that hinder effective responses to them, we can see how the profit motive can work in practice. The texts put the externality problem in the background, while assuming away the problems of asymmetric information, corporate power and citizen disorganization that so often tend to give disproportionate power to the kind of narrow interests that Zinn identifies. Many critics, including Zinn, would argue that only a deep democratization of society can overcome the concentrations of power that inhibit effective collective action to deal with the external costs that the existing economic system generates.

Philanthrocapitalism
by Matthew Bishop , Michael Green and Bill Clinton
Published 29 Sep 2008

As entrepreneurial “philanthropreneurs,” they love to back social entrepreneurs who offer innovative solutions to society’s problems. (Inevitably, some charity traditionalists dismiss all this as empty jargon.) As well as seeking better ways to work with charitable nonprofit, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), philanthrocapitalists are increasingly trying to find ways of harnessing the profit motive to achieve social good. This is controversial, to say the least: isn’t philanthropy supposed to be about giving away money, not making more of it? But as the philanthrocapitalists see it, if they can use their donations to create a profitable solution to a social problem, it will attract far more capital, far faster, and thus achieve a far bigger impact, far sooner, than would a solution based entirely on giving money away.

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But as the philanthrocapitalists see it, if they can use their donations to create a profitable solution to a social problem, it will attract far more capital, far faster, and thus achieve a far bigger impact, far sooner, than would a solution based entirely on giving money away. Thus, their money can lever, in a good cause, some of the trillions of dollars in the for-profit business world. At the same time as individual philanthropists are embracing the profit motive, a growing number of big for-profit businesses are catching the philanthrocapitalism bug and getting into giving—or at least trying to do good. Gates sees this as potentially the start of a “system innovation” in how business operates, which he calls “creative capitalism.” This is very different from traditional corporate philanthropy, which has often been ineffective: giving away small sums of money typically to generate positive publicity rather than change the world.

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Omidyar’s interest in profit is not a mark of a lack of generosity—he has pledged to give away most of his fortune. Instead, it reflects his view that the entrepreneurship of the business world needs to be applied to social problems and that often, but not always, this should involve harnessing the profit motive. This belief is shared by the other man behind the success of eBay, fellow billionaire Jeff Skoll, who is now probably the leading philanthropist promoter of the social entrepreneurship movement. The fact that Yunus is admired by many as the world’s leading social entrepreneur shows how controversial it is to apply entrepreneurial approaches from business to the social sectors.

Brazillionaires: The Godfathers of Modern Brazil
by Alex Cuadros
Published 1 Jun 2016

William Grossman) Contents PROLOGUE: THE CRASH PART ONE: ROOTS OF WEALTH CHAPTER 1: GOD IS BRAZILIAN CHAPTER 2: THE PRICE OF PROGRESS CHAPTER 3: MANIFEST DESTINY CHAPTER 4: NATION BUILDING CHAPTER 5: PROSPERITY GOSPEL PART TWO: THE BRAZILIAN DREAM CHAPTER 6: VISIONARY CHAPTER 7: HELPING HANDS CHAPTER 8: THE PROFIT MOTIVE CHAPTER 9: THE BACKLASH CHAPTER 10: TOO BIG TO FAIL EPILOGUE: AFTER THE CRASH ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES GLOSSARY INDEX PROLOGUE THE CRASH ON A STRETCH OF HIGHWAY NOT FAR FROM RIO DE JANEIRO, a silver SLR McLaren idled on the shoulder, its futuristic door hinged open at the top like a wing extended toward the evening sky.

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In typical fashion, Eike called it a future Brazilian Intel. He had another important ally. Lula, even as ex-president, remained a power broker. And lately he’d been visiting Eike at the Serrador building. I started hearing whispers that, if things got bad enough, the government would bail Eike out. CHAPTER 8 THE PROFIT MOTIVE A NEW RICHEST MAN, MERITOCRACY, AND THE VALUE OF MONEY “Money in and of itself isn’t what fascinates me.” —JORGE PAULO LEMANN ($20 BILLION) “Jorge created a whole management culture in Brazil that is extraordinary.” —EIKE BATISTA ($13 BILLION) DESPITE HIS EFFORTS TO STANCH THE BLEEDING, EIKE’S WEALTH continued to shrink.

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Despite his love of risk, this was a risk he wasn’t willing to take. Eike belonged to the Lemann camp. Like most of his fellows in the business world, he saw profit as a simple force of nature. It was immutable, something to be harnessed: galvanizer of wills. Even on its own terms, though, the profit motive can backfire. Eike’s story is proof of this. “Jorge Paulo created a whole management culture in Brazil that is extraordinary,” Eike said once, praising Lemann. And he followed a similar model of remuneration. To lure the best people in oil and mining, he offered stock incentives that dwarfed the salaries they earned at Petrobras or Vale.

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism
by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski
Published 5 Mar 2019

Just as capitalist markets run on profit—the difference between how much it costs to produce something, including wages paid to workers, and how much the product can then be sold for—under market socialism, use of the price signal would also generate excess revenues for the more efficient firms (even if transformed into worker cooperatives) and losses for the unlucky ones. Market socialists, then, have to explain how this system would redistribute “profits” equitably among the population. More importantly, how would their solution ensure that the profit motive—one that squeezes more work out of workers and creates incentives to overproduce—does not reemerge? Scaled up, the market and the profit motive create economy-wide cycles of boom and bust that hurt people and waste resources. By their very nature, markets produce inequalities—inequalities that, so long as a market exists, are only ameliorable, not eradicable. And it has consistently been inequality that has driven extra-economic conflict throughout history.

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The Khrushchev Thaw, however, also permitted a sudden freedom of discussion and critique, and thus a revival of economic debate. Many planners and economists were aware of the problem: fundamentally insufficient, poor-quality data, and the inability to process what they had. There emerged two main responses. The first sought to increase the role of the profit motive and freedom of different enterprises to contract with each other; in other words, a restoration, to greater or lesser degree, of market relations, even if firms would still be owned by the state. The second is personified by mathematician Leonid Kantorovich, the sole Soviet citizen to ever win the Swedish National Bank’s Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

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As we have seen, no matter how beneficial new classes of antibiotic may be, they are insufficiently profitable, so they will not be produced. Meanwhile, many other commodities, such as fossil fuels, that undermine human flourishing or even threaten our existence, remain profitable, and so without regulatory intervention, companies will continue to be produce them. The market’s profit motive—not growth or industrial civilization, as some environmentalists have argued—caused our climate calamity and the larger bio-crisis. The market is amoral, not immoral. It is directionless, with its own internal logic that is independent of human command. It would be very useful to wind down our species’ combustion of fossil fuels, responsible as it is for roughly two-thirds of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Small Change: Why Business Won't Save the World
by Michael Edwards
Published 4 Jan 2010

Remember the old joke about the European Union that puts the British in charge of the food instead of the French, the Germans in charge of the entertainment instead of the Italians, and the Italians in charge of the administration instead of the Germans? It’s politically incorrect, I know, but (speaking as a Brit) still pretty accurate. Expecting price competition, the profit motive, short-term deliverables, and supply-chain control to bring about a world of compassion and solidarity is, to say the least, a little strange. You wouldn’t preface xi use a typewriter to plow a field or a tractor to write a book, so why use markets where different principles apply? Business can certainly help to extend access to useful goods and services, and for that we should be grateful, but claims that business will save the world are a dangerous case of hubris.

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It has been nicknamed philanthrocapitalism by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green1, and its followers believe that business thinking and market methods will save the world — and make some of us a fortune along the way. Bobby Shriver, Bono’s partner in the Red brand of products, hopes that sales will help “buy a house in the Hamptons” while simultaneously swelling the coffers of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.2 Larry Ellison, who founded Oracle, thinks that “the profit motive could be the best tool for solving the world’s problems, more effective than any government”3 — until government has to bail you out, of course, as it did for large swaths of American finance and industry in the aftermath of the financial crash in September 2008. “If you put a gun to my head and asked which one has done more good for the world, the Ford Foundation or Exxon,” says Charles Munger, vice chair of Berkshire Hathaway, “I’d have no hesitation in saying Exxon,”4 though I can’t think of any oil spills that my old employers have dumped into the Pacific.

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Economic efficiency is not the same as human fulfillment, and market norms do not properly express the valuations of a democratic society for all sorts of well-known reasons: They don’t price real assets such as the environment and social cohesion, they can’t represent the needs of the future in the present, and they are full of imperfections that lead to problems like monopoly. That is why we need alternative allocation mechanisms through government and civil society for things like public spaces or access to the Internet, which markets would distribute unequally, if at all. The profit motive is not a dirty word, but it is a different word from solidarity and caring with no expectation of return. These differences cannot be wished away. They are rooted, often unconsciously, in different worldviews and cultures. But market values and human values are not just different; they pull in opposite directions in many important ways, and the risks involved in mixing them together are apparent in the evidence reviewed in chapter 3.

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow
by Tim Jackson
Published 8 Dec 2016

And since efficiency is one of the things that modern economies are supposed to be good at, decoupling has a familiar logic and a clear appeal as a solution to the dilemma of growth. Resource inputs represent a cost to producers. So the profit motive should stimulate a continuing search for efficiency improvement in industry to reduce input costs. This seems clear enough at the level of the individual enterprise, particularly in a capitalist economy. But from a global perspective the critical question is whether or not this profit motive translates into an overall decline in resource intensity. There is some evidence that it might do. The amount of primary energy needed to produce each unit of the world’s economic output has fallen more or less continuously over most of the last half-century.

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And yet, the idea of running faster and faster to escape the damage we’re already causing is itself a strategy that smacks of panic. So, before we settle for it, a little reflection may be in order. Accordingly, this chapter confronts the structure of modern capitalist economies head on. In particular, it explores two interrelated features of economic life that are central to the growth dynamic. On the one hand, the profit motive stimulates newer, better or cheaper products and services through a continual process of innovation and ‘creative destruction’. At the same time, the market for these goods relies on an expanding consumer demand, driven by a complex social logic. These two factors combine to drive ‘the engine of growth’ on which modern economies depend and lock us in to an ‘iron cage’ of consumerism.3 It’s essential to get a better handle on this twin dynamic, not least so that we can identify the potential to escape from it.

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Varieties of capitalism Capitalism is an elusive concept. It isn’t a simple, homogeneous entity. And it certainly thrives or survives in numerous varieties. The most widely used formulation defines capitalism in terms of the private ownership of the ‘means of production’. Common definitions also stress the importance of a ‘profit motive’ as a defining motive within the economic system.4 What does this mean in practice? Broadly, it means that private individuals (capitalists) invest their money (their ‘capital’) in the factories, the farms, the mines, the supply chains and the distribution networks (also the ‘capital’) that allow society to produce goods and services.

Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages
by Carlota Pérez
Published 1 Jan 2002

This means that a painful and difficult process of learning and adaptation must take place, involving creative destruction across all spheres. It also explains why the fruits of that new growth potential cannot be fully reaped in the The Propagation of Paradigms: Times of Installation, Times of Deployment 43 first decades, when the accommodation and mutual shaping of society and the new economy occur, pushed by the profit motive in spite of institutional inertia and human resistance. Hence, increasing polarization and decoupling both inside the economy and between the new economy and the old social framework characterize the initial diffusion of a technological revolution. So, the installation period is one of tense coexistence of two paradigms, one declining and the other occupying more and more space on the ground, in the market and in the minds of people.

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That is why, when the potential of one revolution is spent, there is a pool of radical innovations capable of coming together to form the Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital 156 Figure14.2 The dynamics of the system: three spheres of change in constant reciprocal action INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE ECONOMIC CHANGE Production capital Financial capital Socio-political ideas and behavior TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE Socio-institutional frameworks Technological revolutions Techno-economic paradigms next. Hence, a certain degree of scientific and academic freedom is an essential component of the dynamics of the system. The economic sphere is the scene of the growth process, where production and financial capital interact. More than merely interdependent, these two functional forms of the profit motive are indispensable to each other: real production supports paper wealth; borrowed money supports innovation and real investment. But it is not a simple, tranquil relationship, but rather a very turbulent one. The tensions and distensions of financial and production capital, their couplings and recouplings, will determine the rhythm and the direction of economic growth in each phase.

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So, as in most processes of advance, development in the capitalist system occurs through combining the forces of conservation with the forces of transformation. C. The Difficult Balance Between Private and Social Interest The model proposed takes into account the fundamental structure of the capitalist system, which is in constant tension, managing the balance between private and social interests. The profit motive acts as the basic engine of private interest, moving both finance and production capital. The social interests, incarnate in government and the various organizations of civil society, are constantly trying to shape the conditions of growth and the distribution of its toils and of its fruits. The actual social benefits, in each particular phase, will depend on the extent to which there is a positive or negative sum game between individual and collective interests and on whether the social and political forces leaning to one or the other side are capable of recognizing these – rationally or intuitively – and act effectively to attain their aims.

The Sport and Prey of Capitalists
by Linda McQuaig
Published 30 Aug 2019

We’ll return to these missed opportunities later in the book. For now, it’s worth noting that the anti-government dogma that infects our politics prevents us from appreciating — or even being aware of — what has been accomplished in Canada over our history through what can best be described as public enterprise. Unlike the profit motive that has stirred the loins of capitalist entrepreneurs, those who built our public enterprises responded to a different set of motivations. It seems fair to say that they were driven, at least in part, by the goal of advancing the collective interests of Canadians, and that this served as a potent incentive.

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It apparently didn’t occur to him that Canadian taxpayers are not simply business owners but also, for the most part, citizens with an interest in their own health and that of others. Surely, Connaught’s tax-free status could be easily justified, given its enormous contribution to treating deadly diseases and promoting initiatives that improved the public’s overall health. For that matter, Connaught’s lack of a profit motive made it a highly unusual — and useful — player in the health business, focused on health benefits, not on gaining market advantage or pushing up its stock price. While private firms manoeuvred to corner the market on a lucrative drug, Connaught shared its advances with other producers in order to make needed treatments more widely available.

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(Ontario also had a public bank, the Province of Ontario Savings Office, established in 1922, but it was privatized by the Conservative provincial government in 2003.) Bob Ascah and Mark Anielski, two Alberta-based public policy researchers, note that public banks weathered the 2008 financial crisis better than private banks. “Public banks have an inherent competitive advantage over private banks in that they can operate with a no-profit motive,” they write in Alberta’s Public Bank, a report they prepared for the Parkland Institute at the University of Alberta.15 (Ascah formerly worked for the ATB as a strategic planner.) The authors argue that, in addition to providing basic financial services to Albertans, the ATB can perform key functions advancing the public interest.

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next
by Andrew McAfee
Published 30 Sep 2019

One of the most quoted passages from his 1776 masterpiece, The Wealth of Nations,I is “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” The profit motive is an extremely powerful incentive for people and companies to create goods and services others will want to buy. Self-interest is not a flaw in capitalism, it’s a central feature. In most societies and religious traditions selfishness is held to be a vice, so the notion that the profit motive is beneficial fights against long traditions and deeply ingrained assumptions. The New Testament, for example, holds that “the love of money is the root of all evil.”II This view is persistent. For example, after conducting seven studies of Americans’ views of the profit motive, researchers Amit Bhattacharjee, Jason Dana, and Jonathan Baron concluded in 2017, “Even in one of the most market-oriented societies in history, people doubt the contributions of profit-seeking industry to societal progress.”

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That goal proved far too modest, not least because chemical companies soon saw that a phaseout of existing chemicals gave them a great chance to profit from patents on new ones. At post-Montreal meetings signatories agreed to reduce use of the chemicals by 75 percent, then 100 percent, and to reduce the time to do so to ten years. In addition to the profit motive, the fact that CFCs were produced by a relatively small group of companies and industries helped in accomplishing these milestones. While the chemicals themselves spread around the world, their sources were easy to pinpoint and ultimately amenable to persuasion. UN secretary-general Kofi Annan said, “Perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date has been the Montreal Protocol.”

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
by Naomi Klein
Published 15 Sep 2014

It shaped the model of export-led development that dotted the developing world with free trade zones. It was written into countless trade agreements. Not everyone was convinced by these arguments, not by a long shot. But too many tacitly accepted Thatcher’s dictum that there is no alternative. Meanwhile, denigration of collective action and veneration of the profit motive have infiltrated virtually every government on the planet, every major media organization, every university, our very souls. As that American Geophysical Union survey indicated, somewhere inside each of us dwells a belief in their central lie—that we are nothing but selfish, greedy, self-gratification machines.

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And it means coming up with new, nonprofit disaster insurance programs so that people who have lost everything to a hurricane or a forest fire are not left at the mercy of a private insurance industry that is already adapting to climate change by avoiding payouts and slapping victims with massive rate increases. According to Amy Bach, cofounder of the San Francisco–based advocacy group United Policyholders, disaster insurance is becoming “very much like health insurance. We’re going to have to increasingly take the profit motive out of the system so that it operates efficiently and effectively, but without generating obscene executive salaries and bonuses and shareholder returns. Because it’s not going to be a sustainable model. A publicly traded insurance company in the face of climate change is not a sustainable business model for the end user, the consumer.”38 It’s that or a disaster capitalism free-for-all; those are the choices.

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As recently as the early 1970s, a Republican president—Richard Nixon—was willing to impose wage and price controls to rescue the U.S. economy from crisis, popularizing the notion that “We are all Keynesians now.”8 But by the 1980s, the battle of ideas waged out of the same Washington think tanks that now deny climate change had successfully managed to equate the very idea of industrial planning with Stalin’s five-year plans. Real capitalists don’t plan, these ideological warriors insisted—they unleash the power of the profit motive and let the market, in its infinite wisdom, create the best possible society for all. Obama, obviously, does not share this extreme vision: as his health care and other social policies suggest, he believes government should nudge business in the right direction. And yet he is still sufficiently a product of his anti-planning era that when he had the banks, the auto companies, and the stimulus in his hands, he saw them as burdens to be rid of as soon as possible, rather than as a rare chance to build an exciting new future.

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order
by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
Published 27 Jan 2015

For one, power consumption must be measured against the value of validating transactions in a payment system, a social service that gold mining has never provided. Second, the costs must be weighed against the high energy costs of the alternative, traditional payment system, with its bank branches, armored cars, and security systems. And finally, there’s the overriding incentive for efficiency that the profit motive delivers to innovators, which is why we’ve seen such giant reductions in power consumption for the new mining machines. If power costs make mining unprofitable, it will stop. Bitcoin’s environmental doomsday is not, therefore, just around the corner. Even so, it would be irresponsible to ignore energy usage as a concern.

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There’s a genesis problem here, though: Who will put up the initial capital to create this not-for-profit entity if its founder can’t earn a return from investing in it? Clearly, the assets of these autonomous agents need to be thought of as public goods. The societal profit we all share from having more services abundantly available at low prices should be self-evident, but what incentive is there for profit-motivated individuals to invest in providing them? One option is to have governments direct this effort, applying taxpayer money. Another is to hope that philanthropists pick up the challenge. Ideally, though, the investment would come as a community effort. Perhaps residents of a particular neighborhood could invest in a driverless car and be rewarded with free or discounted rides for a prescribed period, and to achieve that kind of broad-based funding objective, Hearn offers up another solution: cryptocurrency assurance contracts, a blockchain-based version of the popular crowdfunding model in which organizers pledge a certain amount when others’ donations reach target levels.

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In part because the Ripple network is run by a private, for-profit company, rather than taking on an ownerless and decentralized structure like bitcoin’s, it draws suspicion from cryptocurrency purists, who often wrongly define it as a centralized system. Despite the company’s elaborate efforts to create transparent, arm’s-length rules for issuing and disseminating its XRP currency, it inevitably comes in for flak on Reddit and other forums favored by the crypto mob. The issue of Ripple’s profit motives came to a head in May 2014, when McCaleb made the stunning announcement that he would sell all of his XRP holdings. In a short message posted on Reddit, the cofounder said that after giving away some of his 9 billion XRP to charity, he now planned to sell the remainder over two weeks. That represented about 9 percent of the initial 100 billion XRP money supply, which unlike the drawn-out, 130-year issuance of bitcoins, was created in one batch in 2012.

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets
by John McMillan
Published 1 Jan 2002

Research has brought a host of other medical marvels, as pointed out by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), an alliance of U.S. drug manufacturers.12 Antibiotics and vaccines have almost eliminated diphtheria, syphilis, whooping cough, measles, and polio from the developed world. Deaths from influenza and pneumonia have been greatly reduced, as have deaths from heart disease, strokes, and ulcers. Millions live longer, more productively, and more comfortably. Market incentives are what prompted the invention of these miracle drugs. Were it not for the profit motive, many of them would not exist. Adam Smith said self-interest can lead to beneficent outcomes: there is no more striking instance of this than the aggressive pursuit of profit giving rise to life-preserving medicines. No economic system that has ever been implemented, other than the market, has succeeded in consistently spawning major pharmaceutical innovations.

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The Linux open-source software is an example; Linux developed as it did because users, unhindered by patents, shared their ideas and built on each others’. Writing code is not the same, though, as writing poetry. Some programmers want to change the world; many just want to make a living. The writing of much of the software we use every day was driven by the profit motive. If software were free, less of it would be produced. The evidence on the effects of the patenting of software is inconclusive. There are examples of patented software that probably would not have been written were it not for the prospect of patents. Following the various court rulings in the early 1980s allowing the patenting (rather than just copyrighting) of software, research-and-development spending by software-related firms increased steadily but unspectacularly.

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If you tried to describe this process to a Rip van Winkle, awakened after sleeping through the last hundred years of history, you would be hard-pressed to convince him you weren’t just making it up. “Give me your money and I’ll multiply it for you” is the spiel of every con man. Why are we able to trust corporations presenting the same pitch? Whereas markets are driven by the profit motive, corporations are based on the presumption that managers are not seeking profits for themselves: instead, they follow their fiduciary duty and seek profits for the shareholders. Managers are no more altruistic than the rest of us. To ensure they will act in their shareholders’ interests, they must be given incentives to do so.

Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy
by Robert A. Sirico
Published 20 May 2012

Where a socialist organization of economic life has held sway, the result has not been the rise of social cooperation but its opposite—the decline of civil society and an increase in alienation. This phenomenon was on display in the Soviet Union and its East European bloc, where fascinating and disturbing information concerning life under the totalitarian state has gradually come to light over the two decades since communism fell. The elimination of the profit motive did not diminish selfishness; it removed the brakes on selfishness that a capitalist system provides. Without incentives to care about whether their customers were satisfied, store clerks and managers of state-run enterprises were notoriously indifferent to the needs of consumers. In a free economy, greed isn’t necessary to the functioning of the market but, at the same time, a greedy person has all manner of socially beneficial ways to try to sate his avarice.

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Experience shows us that the denial of this right, or its limitation in the name of an alleged ‘equality’ of everyone in society, diminishes, or in practice absolutely destroys the spirit of initiative, that is to say the creative subjectivity of the citizen.”4 Unfortunately, many contemporary proponents of social justice miss the importance of economic freedom and are quick to denounce the profit motive and commercialism. They then compound their error with incoherence, since they seem to think the key to happiness is giving people more stuff—by enlisting the coercive power of government. Their exclusive focus on income and wealth as the sources and markers of equality is, ironically, merely another variety of the greed and consumerism that they are quick to excoriate.

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Although the general public assumes that the US Forest Service acts with the best interests of the environment in mind, the reality is far different. The incentive for forestry personnel is to maximize their budget, not to protect forests or even to maximize general revenue. Thus there is a greater emphasis on lumber harvests than would be expected under either an environmental ethic or a profit motive, because lumber harvesting means road building, and road building means big budgets for the Forest Service and lots of work for its employees—even though the service usually loses money on its timber harvest operations. In essence, timber companies’ cutting of trees in our national forests is subsidized by taxpayers.8 No private owner would tolerate such waste.

J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax
by J K Lasser Institute
Published 30 Oct 2012

- - - - - - - - - - Court Decision Allocation of Taxes and Interest The IRS position on allocating mortgage interest and real estate taxes to rental income is not as favorable as the position adopted by the Tax Court and several appeals courts. - - - - - - - - - - 9.10 Rentals Lacking Profit Motive If you rent a residential unit for 15 days or more and a loss is not barred under the personal-use limitation (9.7), the IRS may attempt to disallow a loss by claiming that you had no profit motive in placing the unit up for rent. If the IRS makes such an argument, you must try to prove a profit motive (40.10). Any loss disallowed on these grounds may not be carried over to a later year. - - - - - - - - - - Planning Reminder Profit Motive A profit motive is presumed if you can show a profit for at least three of the last five years you engaged in rental activities.

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However, the IRS has disallowed loss deductions for rentals preceding a sale on the ground that there was no “profit motive” for the rental (40.10). Courts have allowed loss deductions in certain cases. EXAMPLES 1. The IRS and Tax Court disallowed a loss deduction for rental expenses under the “profit-motive rules” (40.10) where a principal residence was rented for 10 months until it could be sold. According to the Tax Court, the temporary rental did not convert the residence to rental property. Since the sales effort was primary, there was no profit motive for the rental. Thus, no loss could be claimed; rental expenses were deductible only to the extent of rental income.

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8.18 SIMPLE IRA Contributions and Distributions 8.19 Roth IRA Advantages 8.20 Annual Contributions to a Roth IRA 8.21 Converting a Traditional IRA to a Roth IRA 8.22 Recharacterizations and Reconversions 8.23 Distributions From a Roth IRA 8.24 Distributions to Roth IRA Beneficiaries Chapter 9: Income From Real Estate Rentals and Royalties 9.1 Reporting Rental Real Estate Income and Expenses 9.2 Checklist of Rental Deductions 9.3 Distinguishing Between a Repair and an Improvement 9.4 Reporting Rents From a Multi-Unit Residence 9.5 Depreciation on Converting a Home to Rental Property 9.6 Renting a Residence to a Relative 9.7 Personal Use and Rental of a Residence During the Year 9.8 Counting Personal-Use Days and Rental Days for a Residence 9.9 Allocating Expenses of a Residence to Rental Days 9.10 Rentals Lacking Profit Motive 9.11 Reporting Royalty Income 9.12 Production Costs of Books and Creative Properties 9.13 Deducting the Cost of Patents or Copyrights 9.14 Intangible Drilling Costs 9.15 Depletion Deduction 9.16 Oil and Gas Percentage Depletion Chapter 10: Loss Restrictions: Passive Activities and At-Risk Limits 10.1 Rental Activities 10.2 Rental Real Estate Loss Allowance of up to $25,000 10.3 Real Estate Professionals 10.4 Participation May Avoid Passive Loss Restrictions 10.5 Classifying Business Activities as One or Several 10.6 Material Participation Tests for Business 10.7 Tax Credits of Passive Activities Limited 10.8 Determining Passive or Nonpassive Income and Loss 10.9 Passive Income Recharacterized as Nonpassive Income 10.10 Working Interests in Oil and Gas Wells 10.11 Partners and Members of LLCs and LLPs 10.12 Form 8582 10.13 Suspended Losses Allowed on Disposition of Your Interest 10.14 Suspended Tax Credits 10.15 Personal Service and Closely Held Corporations 10.16 Sales of Property and of Passive Activity Interests 10.17 At-Risk Limits 10.18 What Is At Risk?

J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2014
by J. K. Lasser
Published 5 Oct 2013

- - - - - - - - - - Court Decision Allocation of Taxes and Interest The IRS position on allocating mortgage interest and real estate taxes to rental income is not as favorable as the position adopted by the Tax Court and several appeals courts. - - - - - - - - - - 9.10 Rentals Lacking Profit Motive If you rent a residential unit for 15 days or more and a loss is not barred under the personal-use limitation (9.7), the IRS may attempt to disallow a loss by claiming that you had no profit motive in placing the unit up for rent. If the IRS makes such an argument, you must try to prove a profit motive (40.10). Any loss disallowed on these grounds may not be carried over to a later year. - - - - - - - - - - Planning Reminder Profit Motive A profit motive is presumed if you can show a profit for at least three of the last five years you engaged in rental activities.

…

However, the IRS has disallowed loss deductions for rentals preceding a sale on the ground that there was no “profit motive” for the rental (40.10). Courts have allowed loss deductions in certain cases. EXAMPLES 1. The IRS and Tax Court disallowed a loss deduction for rental expenses under the “profit-motive rules” (40.10) where a principal residence was rented for 10 months until it could be sold. According to the Tax Court, the temporary rental did not convert the residence to rental property. Since the sales effort was primary, there was no profit motive for the rental. Thus, no loss could be claimed; rental expenses were deductible only to the extent of rental income.

…

8.18 SIMPLE IRA Contributions and Distributions 8.19 Roth IRA Advantages 8.20 Annual Contributions to a Roth IRA 8.21 Converting a Traditional IRA to a Roth IRA 8.22 Recharacterizations and Reconversions 8.23 Distributions From a Roth IRA 8.24 Distributions to Roth IRA Beneficiaries Chapter 9: Income From Real Estate Rentals and Royalties 9.1 Reporting Rental Real Estate Income and Expenses 9.2 Checklist of Rental Deductions 9.3 Distinguishing Between a Repair and an Improvement 9.4 Reporting Rents From a Multi-Unit Residence 9.5 Depreciation on Converting a Home to Rental Property 9.6 Renting a Residence to a Relative 9.7 Personal Use and Rental of a Residence During the Year 9.8 Counting Personal-Use Days and Rental Days for a Residence 9.9 Allocating Expenses of a Residence to Rental Days 9.10 Rentals Lacking Profit Motive 9.11 Reporting Royalty Income 9.12 Production Costs of Books and Creative Properties 9.13 Deducting the Cost of Patents or Copyrights 9.14 Intangible Drilling Costs 9.15 Depletion Deduction 9.16 Oil and Gas Percentage Depletion Chapter 10: Loss Restrictions: Passive Activities and At-Risk Limits 10.1 Rental Activities 10.2 Rental Real Estate Loss Allowance of up to $25,000 10.3 Real Estate Professionals 10.4 Participation May Avoid Passive Loss Restrictions 10.5 Classifying Business Activities as One or Several 10.6 Material Participation Tests for Business 10.7 Tax Credits of Passive Activities Limited 10.8 Determining Passive or Nonpassive Income and Loss 10.9 Passive Income Recharacterized as Nonpassive Income 10.10 Working Interests in Oil and Gas Wells 10.11 Partners and Members of LLCs and LLPs 10.12 Form 8582 10.13 Suspended Losses Allowed on Disposition of Your Interest 10.14 Suspended Tax Credits 10.15 Personal Service and Closely Held Corporations 10.16 Sales of Property and of Passive Activity Interests 10.17 At-Risk Limits 10.18 What Is At Risk?

Virus of the Mind
by Richard Brodie
Published 4 Jun 2009

We will see computer programs doing sophisticated memetic modeling to fine-tune the memes before launching. What kinds of designer mind viruses will we see in the future? It depends upon the intentions and the skill of their creators—and on the memes those creators are infected with! I would expect to see many profit-motivated viruses, many power-motivated ones, and perhaps a few motivated by someone’s vision of a better future for humanity. Profit Viruses Profit-motivated designer viruses, many of which are completely legal and aboveboard today, have their shady origins in the crooked Ponzi scheme.* Charles Ponzi was an Italian immigrant who opened a business in Boston in 1919 called the Securities Exchange Company.

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See basic drives Frankl, Victor, 216 gambling, psychology of, 117–19 blackjack and, 119 cheap insurance and, 118, 121, 122 overvaluing a long shot and, 118 playing hunches and, 119 playing the streaks and, 118, 121 stinginess, generosity and, 118–19 Gandhi, Mohandas, 181 Gates, Bill, xv, 205 Get Smart, 211 Getting Past OK (Brodie), xix, 122, 216, 223 golden handcuffs, 203 guns, danger and, 164–65 gut feelings, 212 Hamilton, William D., 51 Heisenberg, Werner, 13–14 241 virus of the mind Henry Weinhard’s beer, 155 Hofstadter, Douglas: Gödel, Escher, Bach, 35 Hugo, Victor, 65 Hunger Project, 208–9 initiation ordeals, 122–23, 143, 203–4 instincts, 18 journalism, 159–61, 164–67 bias and, 160–61 King, Larry, 162 Kusnick, Greg, 1–4, 121–22 learning pyramid, 220–22 Limbaugh, Rush, 159 making sense of senseless things, 81, 162, 188 Manchurian Candidate movie, 125 marriage, programming and, 139 Maslow, Abraham, 216 MCI telephone company, 200–201 memes, 71–72 biological definition of, 5–6 bundling of, 132–33 classes of, 19–25, 70–71 cognitive definition of, 8–11 cognitive dissonance and, 126–27, 130–31 concept of, xvi conditioning and, 126, 127–30 danger and, 111–12, 117 embedding of, 133–35 evangelism and, 80 evolution of, 65–66, 212–13 fitness and, 71–74 language and, 71 242 Index laws and customs and, 26–27 metamemes and, 12–14 origins of, 4–5, 72–74 peer pressure and, 27–28 primary drives and, 71–74, 79 programming and, 18–19 psychological definition of, 6–8 replication and, 68–69 secondary drives and, 79 self-fulfilling prophesy and, 28–29 selfish-gene theory and, 66–68 sexual evolution and, 96–98 spoked wheels as, 9–10 success and, 14–15 television and, 70 tradition and, 80 Trojan horses and, 127, 132–34 truth and, 12–14, 16 vehicles and, 9, 11 working definition of, 11–12 See also button-pushing memes; memes, spreading of; specific meme types memes, spreading of, 80–82, 222–23 evangelism and, 80 faith and, 81 familiarity and, 81 making sense and, 81 skepticism and, 81 tradition and, 80 memetics, xiii–xv concepts and, xv–xvii definition of, 5 instinct and programming and, 34 paradigm shifts and, xv–xvii quality of life and, xix–xxi Truth and, 16 243 virus of the mind Mensa, 67 Microsoft, 1, 28, 205–6 mind viruses, 15–16 cognitive dissonance and, 143 concept of, xvi cultural institutions and, 34 cultural viruses and, 45–46 definition of, 16 designer viruses and, 45–46, 195–96 evangelism and, 146 faithful reproduction and, 144–45 the future and, 196–97 penetration and, 142–44 profit motive and, 197 quality of life and, xix–xxi, 207–9 repetition and, 143 spreading of, 145–46 as threat to humanity, xvii–xix Trojan horses and, 143–44 mirroring, rapport and, 139–40 mission meme, 73 mission statements, 203 Morris, Robert, Jr., 36 multilevel marketing (MLM), 199, 206 mutation, 39 natural selection, xiii, xvii, 48–49, 58, 71–72, 79 sex drives and, 100, 109 Nazism, 15 Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), 133–34 New York Times Magazine, xxi NFL instant replay, 214–15 niche strategies, 101–2 obeying authority drive, 78 operant conditioning, 129–30 244 Index opportunity meme, 73 Oprah, 156 O’Rourke, P.

Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge
by Cass R. Sunstein
Published 23 Aug 2006

It is quite another thing to emphasize the use of bazaars to create computer code. From the standpoint of conventional economists, the success of open source software remains a bit of a puzzle. The problem is that some contributors appear to have no incentive to make improvements. In most markets, those who create or improve a product are likely to make money; the profit motive is the great impetus for innovation. Or so it is 172 / Infotopia thought. But for open source software, some of those who make changes receive no economic reward. Tens of thousands of people, from all over the world, have been willing to contribute to open source software, and they have done so without gaining a dollar.

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The answer is both yes and no. Yes, in the sense that open source software benefits from the inclusion of countless bits of information from widely dispersed people with diverse knowledge and tastes. No, in the sense that financial incentives are not always responsible for people’s behavior. But when the profit motive is absent, why do people contribute? Some people act out of a simple commitment to the enterprise of innovation. Others are devoted to the idea of open source as such, connecting it with freedom and democracy; they participate for that very reason. Some contributors greatly enjoy spending their time writing code.

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For this Many Working Minds / 195 reason, they provide an exciting model, one that might well be adapted to many domains. It is true that one cannot say, in the abstract, whether open source methods will work better than proprietary ones. For many commodities, internal labor and deliberation, with a direct profit motive, will be best. The success of open source software does, however, give reason to explore the use of the same approach in many other arenas, through a system that includes significant deliberation and numerous contributors. With respect to the blogosphere, the picture is mixed, notwithstanding Posner’s enthuasiastic invocation of Hayek.

How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement
by Fredrik Deboer
Published 4 Sep 2023

A nonprofit organization can be a great example of Michels’s law at work: while ostensibly dedicated to a specific charitable mission, over time the interests of those in power within the organization will crowd out that mission in favor of protecting leadership. It’s hardly unusual for workers within a given institution to put too much of a premium on keeping the bosses happy. But without the organizing force of the profit motive, the temptation to do what satisfies the ruling oligarchy of a given nonprofit is even greater than in a for-profit institution. In a similar vein, in 2007, the blogger Jon Schwarz developed “the iron law of institutions,” which holds that “the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself.”

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My issue is that, while most of these organizations may have progressive sympathies and progressive staffers, their effects in the world are often contrary to the left’s goals. Let’s begin with the money. Far too many institutions are fixated on accumulating funds in a way that obscures their actual goals—ironically nonprofits become too invested in the profit motive. For example, a Fast Company article from 2018 detailed multiple complaints that the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a nonprofit beloved of many in the tech sector, was sitting on billions. Though I’m not really talking about colleges and universities in this chapter, such institutions are a perfect example of entities that receive special tax status thanks to their supposedly not-for-profit status and then greedily hoard money.

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.: identity politics Portman, Natalie, 122 post-racial America, 72–73 poverty rate, 47 power, 10, 76 from news cycle, 126 in nonprofits, 104–106 “progressive stack” indicating, 156 of unions, 180 power dynamics, 22, 24–25 presidential elections 2008, 14–15 2012, 26 2016, 27–31, 165–168, 186, 197 2020, 5–6, 11, 12, 40–41 prison abolition, 51–52 privilege, 71–72, 140, 156 professional-managerial class (PMC), 64–68 profit motive, 70–72, 108–109 progressive movements change resulting from, 7–8, 168, 195 failures of, 8 inconsequential targets of, 5 and presidential election of 2020, 5–6 progressives acceptable opinion developed among, 37 American, analyses of, 134–135 and crimes against Black people, 62 language games of, 155–156 legislation from, 79 lessons from #MeToo for, 130 liberals’ identification with, 138 material security of, 196 nonprofits biased toward, 107–108 segregation reinstituted by, 191–192 self-accusation by, 154–155 social benefits of programs of, 203–204 “progressive stack,” 156–157 Progressive Student Alliance (PSA), 22–24 protest(s) critical engagement with, 44 need for, 4, 208 opportunists at, 82 purposes of, 94–95 violent and nonviolent, 35, 81–82 and violent resistance to the state, 90 see also specific topics of protests “Protesters Debate What Demands, if Any, to Make” (New York Times), 19–20, 172 Proud Boys, 88 Psychology Today, 139 public debate, 25 publicity, 42 “put us first” politics, 178–179 qualified immunity, 50, 54 race in deference politics, 155–163 of Democratic Party members, 136 framing demands in messages about, 181–182 as leftist locus of political debate, 165 Race2 Dinner, 71–72 race (racial) politics, 45 Black people’s view of, 74–76 inconsequential issues in, 8–9 lack of progress in, 73–74 language and symbols in, 67–70, 75 liberals’ fixation on, 74, 75 profiteering from, 70–72 racial bias, among police, 57–58 racial inequality fixing, 75–76 in labor unions, 195 in liberal project, 151 nature of, 55 and racial dialogue, 73 racial justice achieving, 69–70 cultural passion for, 68 and defunding police, 51 and Floyd’s murder, 6–7 goals for, 75–76 lack of progress toward, 75 those who speak for, 53–64 white people’s support for, 62–63 racial violence anti-Asian, 33–34 against Black people, 45–51, 55–57 racism, 76 and Black upper class, 65 broader issue for, 172–173 class reductionist view of, 168–169 Clinton’s loss attributed to, 31 day-to-day realities of, 47–48 as leftist locus of political debate, 165 media discussion of, 65–66 “moral clarity” about, 36–37 moral necessity to confront, 45–46 in police departments, 38 and post-racial America, 72–73 power vs. attitude in, 76 prioritizing combating of, 176–177 proving that one is not racist, 155–163 realities influenced by, 68 right-wing authoritarian, 34 systemic, 14 as 2016 Democratic primary issue, 165–167 and white privilege, 72 and white supremacy, 72 radical left, 25, 26 D’Arcy on, 69 deliverance scenarios of, 212 demand for political violence by, 78–79 and nonprofits, 115 self-interest in, 176 and violent resistance, 90 Rao, Saira, 71–72 reality, recognizing, 212–215 Reason magazine, 167 Reed, Adolph, 169–170 Reeves, Richard, 150–151 Republican Party identity politics in, 184 political positions of, 189 power of, 50, 51 racial groups in, 188 reactionaries in, 162 Trump’s position as leader of, 30, 31 Republicans congressional, Obama dogged by, 17, 26–27 ensuring dominance of, 10 political positions of, 136, 189, 190, 214 see also the right revolutionary spirit, 42, 43 revolutions, 88–92, 193, 209–212, 215 Rice, Tamir, 46 the right conspiracy theories in, 204 elites voting for, 145 identity politics in, 183–187 power of, 10 stereotypes of, 145 riots and rioting efficacy of, 80–85 as false flag operations, 82 following Floyd murder, 82–84, 94–95 of January 6 at Capitol building, 41 justifications of, 83, 87–88 as language of the unheard, 81, 84–85 over Floyd murder, 33, 82–84 results of nonviolent protest vs., 35 and violent resistance to the state, 90 Romney, Mitt, 26 Rove, Karl, 214 Russian Revolution (1917), 92 Ryan, Paul, 190 Salon, 169 Sanders, Bernie candidacies of, 11, 172 economic populism of, 190 on labor movement, 194 movement sparked by, 14 supporters of, 152 in 2016 Democratic primaries, 6, 27–29, 165–68 in 2020 election, 40 “sanewashing,” 53 Savio, Mario, 80 Schumer, Chuck, 148 Schwarz, Jon, 104–105 Scott, Tim, 39 Seacrest, Ryan, 125 sexism broader issue for, 172–173 class reductionist view of, 168–169 in politics, 27 prioritizing combating of, 176–177 as 2016 Democratic primary issue, 165, 166 sexual misconduct amplifying accusations of, 123 growing public attention to, 32 Trump on, 31–32 in the workplace, 14 see also #MeToo movement sexual orientation, 173, 188, 198–199 Shor, David, 34–35 Silicon Valley Community Foundation, 108 Slate, Jenny, 68 Snowden, Edward, 89 social benefits of beliefs, 203–204 social dynamics, 22–23, 67 socialism and socialists centrists derided by, 134–135 messaging for, 178 and police and prison abolition, 52 return to relevance of, 29–30 and theory of class, 178 in 2008, 25 social issues, 10, 105–106, 189–191 see also specific issues social media Ansari story on, 127–128 class-reductionist rhetoric on, 172 Floyd murder conversations on, 33 “moral clarity” argument on, 37 new spirit of social control on, 43 pro-Depp movement on, 121 self-critical dominant groups on, 157–158 sexual misconduct accusations on, 32 trial by public relations on, 123–124 video of Floyd’s murder on, 6 vocabulary on, 201 social movements, 8–9, 125 socioeconomic inequality, 14 see also class-first leftism solidarity, 191–192, 196, 198–200 Spacey, Kevin, 120, 126 spirit of 2020, 11, 13–44 decline of, 39–44 explosion triggered by Floyd’s murder, 33–37 fear characterizing, 35 and Occupy Wall Street, 18–26 and police reform demands, 38–39 political history leading to, 15–33 spirit of 1960s, 44 Steele, Shelby, 160 Stewart, Jon, 26 Stop Asian Hate movement, 33, 34 Strassel, Kimberley A., 107 street protests, 46–47, 116 structurelessness, 21–24, 42–43, 112–113 Sullivan, Andrew, 17 symbols Confederate statues as, 81 fixation on, 173 left actions demands as, 20 material change vs., 7, 8 in race politics, 67–70, 75 tactics, 93–94 Táíwò, Olúfmi, 67, 155, 170, 177 taking up “space” in discourse, 159–160 taxes, 97, 109–110, 135 Taylor, Breonna, 46 Tea Party movement, 26 technocratic liberals, 25 Teixeira, Ruy, 184–185 tenant’s rights movement, 208–209 “Think Tank Diversity Action Statement,” 151 Thompson, Hunter S., 44 Till, Emmett, 33 Time’s Up, 122–123, 128, 132 transparency, 99–103 Trump, Donald, 5–6, 10 Black men voting for, 184 chaos brought by, 14 country enflamed by, 13 economic populism of, 189–190 handling of Covid-19 crisis by, 13, 32–33 persona of, 31–32 presidency of, 30, 31 as racist, 36 refusal to concede election by, 41 scandals in administration of, 32 2016 election of, 30–31 2020 election campaign, 40, 41 “Tyranny of Structureless, The” (Freeman), 21–22 Tyson, Neil deGrasse, 124–125 Umbrella Man, 82 unemployment, 18, 47 United States economic and political systems changes needed in, 93 economic insecurity in, 189 nonprofits in, 97–99 political and cultural systems of, 91 racial diversity in, 184–185 tactics for change in, 93–94 unchanging layer of government employees in, 114–115 unpopularity of political violence in, 94 United Way, 106 universities and colleges as breeding grounds of left-wing thought, 145–148 diversity czars in, 2 and education polarization, 144–151 humanities departments at, 45 language codes for, 67 money hoarding by, 108 and nonsensical language, 206–207 during Obama administration, 18 race differences in graduation, 47 and racial justice movement, 6–7 University of California, 206 University of Rhode Island (URI), 1–2, 4–5 USA Today, 84 US Crisis Monitor, 81 US intelligence agencies, 89 Vance, J.

The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice
by Fredrik Deboer
Published 3 Aug 2020

The larger the number of patients covered in a plan, the greater the leverage the insurer has to negotiate low prices with providers. Medicare is able to secure treatment for its patients fairly cheaply because the pool of Medicare patients is so large. And no potential pool of those covered is larger than “everyone in the United States.” For-profit companies build in the additional burden of a profit motive. It’s not sufficient for them to distribute medical resources while keeping prices low. They must emerge from these interactions with extra money to build profit and placate shareholders. A government agency playing the role of insurer has no such need, which would potentially mean tens of billions of dollars in savings.

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As you might expect, universal basic income supporters have criticisms of jobs guarantee programs, just as jobs guarantee people criticize the UBI. Matt Bruenig, founder of the left-wing think tank People’s Policy Project, has been particularly consistent in pointing out problems with a jobs guarantee. As he observes, it’s hard to see how there will always naturally be work that needs doing that simultaneously does not satisfy the profit motive. Jobs guarantee jobs must satisfy some intrinsic need, but that need must not be sufficient for someone to set up a for-profit operation to do it; this is a thin needle to thread. It’s also important to note that, by their universal nature, most jobs guarantee jobs need to not require special skills or abilities, limiting the range of work that can be done.

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To socialize housing, for example, would not mean the government would cut checks to landlords who only house the poor at a healthy profit, as happens in many housing programs. To socialize housing means that the people would take community control of the housing stock themselves and distribute it based on need rather than on the profit motive. The goal is not to transform the distribution of power and wealth within an economy but to bring about the disintegration of the concept of an economy, to achieve a society governed by the dictates of human need rather than the dictates of the accumulation of wealth. Some will of course say that this is impossible, that socialism is contrary to “human nature” (a construct whose boundaries are defined by whatever is convenient at the moment) or that society lacks the productive capacity to provide material security for all of its members.

Bookkeeping the Easy Way
by Wallace W. Kravitz
Published 30 Apr 1990

Rhodes, MD. b) Paid $65, the amount owed, to Ace Electricians. c) Bought $75 worth of supplies, paying cash. d) Invested $500 cash in the business. e) Received $25 on account from Mary Turner, MD. (3) Prove that Assets = Liabilities + Owner's Equity. Think It Over Select any service-type business and consider the many different kinds of transactions that are carried on in any typical day. Think about the reason(s) why the owner is in business. What is his/her goal? What is the ''profit motive" that keeps the owner going? < previous page page_29 next page > < previous page page_31 next page > Page 31 Chapter 5 Owner's Equity Accounts WORDS TO REMEMBER Drawing Account the owner's special account for recording any withdrawals for personal use Expenses payments made in connection with earning income or operating one's business Net Income amount by which revenue exceeds expenses, when income earned is greater than expenses; a profit Net Loss amount by which expenses exceed revenue, when expenses are greater than income earned Revenue money or money equivalent earned during the fiscal period.

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No Assets Example Decrease (1) No change (2) Increase (3) Increase (4) Increase 4-5 (1) and (2) Cash 437.50 (a) 50.00 (d) 500.00 (e) 25.00 (b) 65.00 (c) 75.00 Liabilities Owner's Equity Decrease Increase Increase Increase T.W.Vine DDS 35.00 State Telephone Co. 215.00 H.L.Rhodes MD 50.00 (a) 50.00 Equipment 2,650.00 Ace Electricians (b) 65.00 65.00 Mary Turner MD 50.00 (e) 25.00 Supplies 25.00 (c) 75.00 Lori Luing, Capital 2,967.50 (d) 500.00 < previous page page_236 next page > < previous page page_237 next page > Page 237 4-5 (3) Total Assets $3,247.50 Total Liabilities, $ 280.00 2,967.50 Capital $3,247.50 Total Liab. + OE Think It Over Reasons for being in business: 1) to be successful 2) to make a profit 3) to serve a useful purpose The profit motive combines 1) and 2) above. Chapter 5 Questions 1. (a) shorten trousers, waist adjustments (b) hair setting, manicure (c) plans for new or rebuilding homes (d) drawing up legal documents, defending a client (e) tooth extraction, cleaning teeth (f) preparing financial statements, tax returns 2. (a) heat, light, supplies (b) equipment, salaries (c) architect's tables and tools (d) salaries, legal forms (e) salaries, supplies (f) supplies, auto expense < previous page page_237 next page > < previous page page_238 next page > Page 238 Problems 5-1 (1) and (2) Cash 562 (b) 100 (a) 250 (c) 200 (e) 325 (d) 300 (f) 45 (g) 75 (h) 40 Supplies 150 Wilson Garage (g) 75 Frank Puccio, Drawing (d) 300 75 Gas & Oil Expense (f) 45 Salary Expense (c) 200 Taxis 28000 Landia National Bank (b) 100 6400 Frank Puccio, Cap. 22237 Fare Income (a) (e) 250 325 Repairs Expense (h) 40 < previous page page_238 next page > < previous page page_239 next page > Page 239 5-1(3) Cash 377.00 Taxis 28,000.00 Supplies 150.00 Salary Expense 200.00 Gas and Oil Expense Puccio, Drawing 300.00 Repair Expense 40.00 Total Debits Landia Puccio, Capital Fare Income Total Credits 5-2(1) 45.00 29,112.00 6,300.00 22,237.00 575.00 29,112.00 Cash 902.00 Accounts Receivable 425.00 Delivery Equipment 12,000.00 Supplies 160.00 Tucker, Drawing 600.00 Advertising Expense 95.00 Telephone Expense 140.00 Trucking Expense 150.00 14,472.00 Total Accounts payable 1075.00 Tucker, Capital 12,297.00 Delivery Income 1,100.00 14,472.00 Total 5-2 (2) Total Assets, $13,487 $ 1,075 Total Liabilities, Capital Total Liab. + OE 12,412 $13,487 Think It Over Separate each store's bookkeeping records to determine how profitable each one is.

The Fugitive Game: Online With Kevin Mitnick
by Jonathan Littman
Published 1 Jan 1996

In other words, the source code, or base software, would enable a hacker to hijack the serial number and other identifying information of other people's cellular phones, thereby sticking them with the bills. "Why do you think Mitnick's doing it?" Markoff doesn't seem to know, and admits he's "never found a profit motive" behind Mitnick's hacking. Markoff has a copy of the Janet Reno letter claiming FBI misconduct and tells me he's heard Agent Steal pursued Mitnick and "he [Eric] was dirty." He plans to fly down to visit De Payne's attorney in Los Angeles soon, but he isn't impressed by the government's wayward undercover operative.

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Markoff never calls Mitnick a hacker. He uses phrases like "computer programmer run amok" and derogatory terms like "grifter," and "criminal." He's right in a sense. Mitnick definitely has the skills of a grifter. But Markoff himself acknowleges in his article that Mitnick doesn't appear to have a profit motive. Why then does he call him a grifter? Grifting is about conning people out of money. And what about Justin Petersen (aka Eric Heinz)? The government's informant isn't even mentioned. Why is Markoff ignoring Petersen's role in entrapping Mitnick and sending him on the run? Several paragraphs recount decade-old Mitnick myths, yet Petersen's involvement is timely and newsworthy.

…

The CBS Evening News segment provides a snapshot of the increasingly notorious Mitnick reputation — billions of dollars of stolen trade secrets, thousands of swiped credit card numbers, the biggest, baddest hacker of all time. But the network adds its own spin. CBS neatly sidesteps Mitnick's lack of a profit motive by quoting a Justice Department spokesman who, without ever mentioning Mitnick, insists hackers are more profit-oriented and malicious than ever before. And CBS flatly states, "Mitnick was working the phones even as agents pounded on the door." Does the network really know Mitnick's last phone calls were malicious or criminal?

System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
by Rob Reich , Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein
Published 6 Sep 2021

These by-products are not accidental but a reflection of the choices technologists make when they design and launch new products. Most of these choices are invisible to us, even though they directly impact our democracy and the well-being of our fellow citizens. The technologists have some powerful enablers. When you marry the engineers’ mindset to the venture capitalists’ profit motive, you get an obsession with scale. Great companies are those that, in the words of a cofounder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, “scale from zero to a gazillion”—even though scale is what can quickly turn manageable consequences into unmanageable, toxic messes. And if you add into the mix the government’s failure to regulate much of anything related to new technologies, it’s easy to see why we now find ourselves in an increasingly dangerous and strikingly unequal world.

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In a world marked by this profound sense of insecurity, Hoffman suggested, the threat of government regulation is an afterthought. Any CEO’s goal, he explained, is to be constantly innovating. Although Hoffman believes in the important role that government can play, a surprising number of his compatriots in the tech sector do not. The marriage of the optimization mindset and the profit motive often leads to a libertarian approach to politics and the role of government in the marketplace. Unbridled innovation can make it difficult for governments, focused on writing rules to address the needs and priorities of their citizens, to keep up. In his typically contrarian way, Peter Thiel has said, “One of the things that’s striking about talking to people who are politically working in D.C. is, it’s so hard to tell what any of them actually do.”

…

Technologists have no unique skill in governing, weighing competing values, or assessing evidence. Their expertise is in building and designing technology. What they bring to expert rule is actually a set of values masquerading as expertise—values that emerge from the marriage of the optimization mindset and the profit motive. The second problem is one of legitimacy. For government to work, people must accept the decisions of those who rule. And legitimacy isn’t earned only as a function of how effectively a government works. People want to involve themselves in the decision-making process. They want visibility into how decisions are made.

The Enlightened Capitalists
by James O'Toole
Published 29 Dec 2018

Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight. Hence, until universal prosperity is achieved, Keynes argued, greed is good and the road to heaven is paved with bad intentions, because the profit motive creates the wealth of nations and civilizations. That is a major reason why leaders of companies who have sought to engage in social activities not directly intended to produce profit have been viewed, at best, as overly idealistic or misguided. The accepted wisdom has been that business leaders who take their eyes off the singular goal of profit will ultimately fail at the hands of competitors who stay focused on serving their customers.

…

The discretion of directors is to be exercised in the choice of means to attain that end, and does not extend to a change in the end itself, to the reduction of profits, or to the non-distribution of profits among stockholders in order to devote them to other purposes.”24 James Lincoln was outraged by the Michigan court’s decision. Although an out-and-out capitalist, a staunch political conservative, and a firm believer in the profit motive, Lincoln couldn’t accept the conclusion that the sole and higher purpose of a corporation was to maximize shareholder profits. Even while he railed against Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and warned of threats to the American system from creeping socialism, he was equally a vocal critic of Wall Street and the short-term dictates of the stock market.

…

In the eyes of most American corporate managers and investors, worker-owned companies don’t fit into their perception of capitalist enterprises and, thus, are viewed as irrelevant. Among other things, that means worker-owned firms have problems raising start-up capital and obtaining operating loans. Worse, they are widely perceived as inefficient, resistant to change, and insufficiently imbued with the profit motive to be truly successful financially. Yet, to the extent that is true, it is due primarily to mismanagement and poor governance. The sad end to the SAIC employee-ownership story is a case in point. The Governance Challenge In 1969 physicist Robert Beyster and a handful of his colleagues founded Science Applications International, a technology-based consulting and research firm headquartered in San Diego, California.

Confronting Capitalism: How the World Works and How to Change It
by Vivek Chibber
Published 30 Aug 2022

In the twentieth century, when the working day was mandated to have a definite limit of eight hours, the most common way of getting more work out of their employees was by this method—by getting them to work harder and faster, since the option of getting them to work longer was substantially curtailed. Indeed, whenever there has been any success in shortening the length of the working day, the response by capitalists has been to compensate by trying to increase the intensity of work. Underwork: But the harm that the profit motive does to workers doesn’t just come from overwork. It also comes from underwork. We often think of employers as deciding between two courses of action: hiring workers and then keeping them on the job, or firing them if they are not needed. But there is also an in-between status: keeping workers hired but working them irregularly.

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This is evident in the fact that even in countries where state capture has been partially neutralized—as in the social democratic countries on the European continent—the basic prioritization of capitalist interests has not been shaken. Policy makers still have to respect the basic integrity of private property and the social priority of the profit motive. This is because there is a deeper, more powerful force that keeps the state tethered to the interests of the capitalist class, even when the other sources of influence are weakened. And it is effective because it is the one constraint that can’t be neutralized or overturned as long as we remain in a capitalist system.

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us
by Nicholas Carr
Published 28 Sep 2014

By offering to reduce the amount of work we have to do, by promising to imbue our lives with greater ease, comfort, and convenience, computers and other labor-saving technologies appeal to our eager but misguided desire for release from what we perceive as toil. In the workplace, automation’s focus on enhancing speed and efficiency—a focus determined by the profit motive rather than by any particular concern for people’s well-being—often has the effect of removing complexity from jobs, diminishing the challenge they present and hence the engagement they promote. Automation can narrow people’s responsibilities to the point that their jobs consist largely of monitoring a computer screen or entering data into prescribed fields.

…

A few years before his death in 2006, the ergonomics pioneer David Meister, recalling his own career, wrote that he and his colleagues “always worked against the odds so that anything that was accomplished was almost unexpected.” The course of technological progress, he wistfully concluded, “is tied to the profit motive; consequently, it has little appreciation of the human.”14 It wasn’t always so. People first began thinking about technological progress as a force in history in the latter half of the eighteenth century, when the scientific discoveries of the Enlightenment began to be translated into the practical machinery of the Industrial Revolution.

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J., 146–47, 229–30 meaning, 123, 220 medical diagnosis, 10, 12, 70–71, 105, 113–15, 120, 123, 154, 155 Medicare, 97 Mehta, Mayank, 219–20 Meinz, Elizabeth, 83 Meister, David, 159 memory, 72–75, 77–80, 84, 151 drawing and, 143 navigation and, 129–30, 133–37 Men and Machines, 26 mental models, 57 Mercedes-Benz, 8, 136–37, 183 Mercury astronauts, 58 Merholz, Peter, 180 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 216, 217–18, 220 metalworkers, 111 mice, dancing, 87–92 microchips, 8, 114 microlocation tracking, 136 Microsoft, 195 military, 35–37, 47, 49, 158, 159, 166, 174 robots and, 187–93 mind, 63, 121–24, 201, 213–14, 216 body vs., 48–51, 215, 216 computer as metaphor and model for, 119 drawing and, 143, 144 imaginative work of, 25 unconscious, 83–84 Mindell, David, 60, 61 Missionaries and Cannibals, 75, 180 miswanting, 15, 228 MIT, 174, 175 Mitchell, William J., 138 mobile phones, 132–33 Moore’s Law, 40 Morozov, Evgeny, 205, 225 Moser, Edvard, 134–35 Moser, May-Britt, 134 motivation, 14, 17, 124 “Mowing” (Frost), 211–16, 218, 221–22 Murnane, Richard, 9, 10 Musk, Elon, 8 Nadin, Mihai, 80 NASA, 50, 55, 58 National Safety Council, 208 National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), 44 natural language processing, 113 nature, 217, 220 Nature, 155 Nature Neuroscience, 134–35 navigation systems, 59, 68–71, 217 see also GPS Navy, U.S., 189 Nazi Germany, 35, 157 nervous system, 9–10, 36, 220–21 Networks of Power (Hughes), 196 neural networks, 113–14 neural processing, 119n neuroergonomic systems, 165 neurological studies, 9 neuromorphic microchips, 114, 119n neurons, 57, 133–34, 150, 219 neuroscience, neuroscientists, 74, 133–37, 140, 149 New Division of Labor, The (Levy and Murnane), 9 Nimwegen, Christof van, 75–76, 180 Noble, David, 173–74 Norman, Donald, 161 Noyes, Jan, 54–55 NSA, 120, 198 numerical control, 174–75 Oakeshott, Michael, 124 Obama, Barack, 94 Observer, 78–79 Oculus Rift, 201 Office of the Inspector General, 99 offices, 28, 108–9, 112, 222 automation complacency and, 69 Ofri, Danielle, 102 O’Keefe, John, 133–34 Old Dominion University, 91 “On Things Relating to the Surgery” (Hippocrates), 158 oracle machine, 119–20 “Outsourced Brain, The” (Brooks), 128 Pallasmaa, Juhani, 145 Parameswaran, Ashwin, 115 Parameters, 191 parametric design, 140–41 parametricism, 140–41 “Parametricism Manifesto” (Schumacher), 141 Parasuraman, Raja, 54, 67, 71, 166, 176 Parry, William Edward, 125 pattern recognition, 57, 58, 81, 83, 113 Pavlov, Ivan, 88 Pebble, 201 Pediatrics, 97 perception, 8, 121, 130, 131, 132, 133, 144, 148–51, 201, 214–18, 220, 226, 230 performance, Yerkes-Dodson law and, 96 Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty), 216 philosophers, 119, 143, 144, 148–51, 186, 224 photography, film vs. digital, 230 Piano, Renzo, 138, 141–42 pilots, 1, 2, 32, 43–63, 91, 153 attentional tunneling and, 200–201 capability of the plane vs., 60–61, 154 death of, 53 erosion of expertise of, 54–58, 62–63 human- vs. technology-centered automation and, 168–70, 172–73 income of, 59–60 see also autopilot place, 131–34, 137, 251n place cells, 133–34, 136, 219 Plato, 148 Player Piano (Vonnegut), 39 poetry, 211–16, 218, 221–22 Poirier, Richard, 214, 215 Politics (Aristotle), 224 Popular Science, 48 Post, Wiley, 48, 50, 53, 57, 62, 82, 169 power, 21, 37, 65, 151, 175, 204, 217 practice, 82–83 Predator drone, 188 premature fixation, 145 presence, power of, 200 Priestley, Joseph, 160 Prius, 6, 13, 154–55 privacy, 206 probability, 113–24 procedural (tacit) knowledge, 9–11, 83, 105, 113, 144 productivity, 18, 22, 29, 30, 37, 106, 160, 173, 175, 181, 218 professional work, incursion of computers into, 115 profit motive, 17 profits, 18, 22, 28, 30, 33, 95, 159, 171, 172–73, 175 progress, 21, 26, 29, 37, 40, 65, 196, 214 acceleration of, 26 scientific, 31, 123 social, 159–60, 228 progress (continued) technological, 29, 31, 34, 35, 48–49, 108–9, 159, 160, 161, 173, 174, 222, 223–24, 226, 228, 230 utopian vision of, 25, 26 prosperity, 20, 21, 107 proximal cues, 219–20 psychologists, psychology, 9, 11, 15, 54, 103, 119, 149, 158–59 animal studies, 87–92 cognitive, 72–76, 81, 129–30 psychomotor skills, 56, 57–58, 81, 120 quality of experience, 14–15 Race against the Machine (Brynjolfsson and McAfee), 28–29 RAND Corporation, 93–98 “Rationalism in Politics” (Oakeshott), 124 Rattner, Justin, 203 reading, learning of, 82 Reaper drone, 188 reasoning, reason, 120, 121, 124, 151 recession, 27, 28, 30, 32 Red Dead Redemption, 177–78 “Relation of Strength of Stimulus to Rapidity of Habit-Formation, The” (Yerkes and Dodson), 89 Renslow, Marvin, 43–44 Revit, 146, 147 Rifkin, Jeremy, 28 Robert, David, 45, 169–70 Robert Frost (Poirier), 214 Roberts, J.

Green Economics: An Introduction to Theory, Policy and Practice
by Molly Scott Cato
Published 16 Dec 2008

Bearing this in mind, a green economist might argue for a form of community business, 68 GREEN ECONOMICS recognizing that every business is in reality a collective endeavour and that profits made by businesses with the support of the community do not belong to the business alone but rather to the whole community. In such a business system risks could be shared along with profits; there would be a much stronger commitment to the locality; and a vocation to serve would predominate over the profit motive, leading to a different, more rounded, type of satisfaction. Considerations about standards of service and quality of goods would re-enter economic life. We might see evidence for the emergence of such business forms in some green sectors, such as renewable energy and organic foods, where there is a preponderance of community-owned and cooperatively organized businesses.

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It is important to put this understanding of trade as a natural way to exchange virtually identical goods across the globe in its historical context, which is contemporaneous with a particular economic system and the massive abundance of fossil fuels over the past 200 years: A fashionable defence of economic globalisation is to point out that markets, the profit motive and international trade are as old as human civilisation. The claim could not be more misleading. 130 GREEN ECONOMICS For much of human history, the long distance exchange of fancy goods and luxuries was a relatively marginal activity compared to the routine, and more local, day-to-day meeting of human needs.

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Velcro Contraction and Convergence: a proposed system of reducing global greenhouse gas emissions on the basis of an equal share for every global citizen a scheme for allocating the right to produce CO2 between citizens of a nation state a system allowing countries or organizations to exchange the right to produce CO2 so that those who can more efficiently reduce emissions reduce more and are paid money in compensation 216 GREEN ECONOMICS carrying capacity CI CLT community currencies CSA CSR Defra ecological footprint ecological rucksack ecological modernization ecotaxes embodied energy ETS Gaia hypothesis GAST GDP Green Industrial Revolution greenwash IMF intermediate technology ISEW Kyoto Protocol LDCs LVT NEF Passivhaus peak oil the size of population of species that an ecosystem can support within its natural resource limits and without degrading natural capital for future generations Citizens’ Income: a payment made to every citizen of a state as a right and without reciprocal demands or duties Community Land Trust: a system of mutual land ownership by the community alternative forms of money issued by local communities to help strengthen their local economies community-supported agriculture corporate social responsibility Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (UK) a way of measuring human demand on the planet in terms of productive land the total weight of material flow carried by an item of consumption in the course of its life cycle academic and policy discourse which suggests that sustainability is possible without systemic social and environmental changes taxes designed to achieve environmental benefits the amount of fossil-fuel energy required to make a product that is directly related to the climate change impact of that product Emissions Trading System: EU system of carbon trading the perception of planet Earth as a single, self-regulating living organism General Agreement on Sustainable Trade: a proposed sustainable alternative to the present world trading system Gross Domestic Product: a key measure of a country’s economic activity within the conventional economic paradigm the idea that moving to a sustainable economy will require an upsurge of ingenuity and activity analogous that which occurred at the dawn of industrialism attempt by a company, generally a large corporation with a significant PR budget, to paint its activities as greener than they are International Monetary Fund a means of transferring sophisticated technologies to poorer countries using resources available there Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare: a proposed alternative to GDP as a measure of economic activity an international agreement adopted in 1997 with the aim of reducing the signatories’ greenhouse gas emissions less-developed countries Land Value Taxation New Economics Foundation home designed so that it can be naturally warmed and ventilated without the need for energy inputs the idea that oil production will reach a peak and then decline, with a severe impact on global economic activity FURTHER RESOURCES permaculture 217 a system for designing human settlements so that they mimic the interrelated structure of natural systems reskilling the idea that to make possible the sustainable self-reliant communities of the future we will need to learn more practical skills Right Livelihood Award the alternative green version of the Nobel Prize, awarded annually by the Swedish Parliament self-provisioning providing for more individual or community needs oneself and without resorting to the market social economy the part of the economy that is outside the market and the state and responds to human needs rather than the profit motive – a new way of describing ‘mutual aid’ solidarity economy an approach to the global economy that foregrounds social justice in economic relationships TEQs a system for rationing the right to produce CO2 on an individual basis TNCs transnational corporations triple-bottom-line a way of measuring a company or organization that includes accounting consideration of social and environmental consequences rather than focusing exclusively on the economic UNCTAD United Nations Conference on Trade and Development UNFPA United Nations Population Fund UNSNA United Nations System of National Accounts: the international standard for measuring economic activity within the conventional economic paradigm WTO World Trade Organization zero-carbon house a home that is neutral in terms of its CO2 emissions because its fossil-fuel use is offset by the energy it generates via renewable technologies Index absolute poverty 173 advertising 174 agriculture 197–202 alienation 59, 183–184 alternative currencies see local currencies alternative food economy 95 anarchism 179 Anderson, V. 117 Aquinas, St Thomas 65 Argentina 65, 84–85 Aristotle 18 Association of Heterodox Economists 31 Australia 192 balanced economy see steady-state economy Barnier, M. 143 Barry, J. 174, 179 BAU (business-as-usual) 90, 91, 107 Bhumibol Adulyadej 149 Bhutan 119 biofuels 48 bioregionalism 5, 20, 150–153 borrowing 182–183 Boulding, K.

The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder
by Sean McFate
Published 22 Jan 2019

Hailing from Latin American countries like Colombia, Panama, El Salvador, and Chile, these men were all tough veterans of the drug wars who brought new tactics and toughness to the Middle East conflict. They were a bargain, too, costing a fraction of what an American or British mercenary would charge, so the Emirates hired 1,800 of them, paying each of them two to four times his old salary. Turning the profit motive into a war strategy, Syria rewards mercenaries who seize territory from terrorists with oil and mining rights. At least two Russian companies have received contracts under this policy: Evro Polis and Stroytransgaz. These oil and mining firms then hired mercenaries to do the dirty work. For example, Evro Polis employed the Wagner Group to capture oil fields from ISIS in central Syria, which it did.

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They battle each other for control of land, the resources on that land, and the people who can harvest those resources. It’s pure exploitation, just as was done in the age of European colonial empires. Material wealth and martial conquest have long been a theme of war, from the Spanish conquistadors to the British East India Company. Merging the profit motive and war is nothing new, and cartels are one more example. In the case of Acapulco, the cartels fight for a strategic transit point. To defeat a cartel, we must use strategies of empire denial, such as containment, deterrence, coercive diplomacy, and military punishment. The Nazi empire was not defeated with a law enforcement mentality.

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The World Bank’s World Development Report 2011 found that never-ending violence is on the rise, despite all the peace efforts around the world. Social science research confirms this, showing that half of all negotiated peace settlements fail within five years. “War termination” is already an oxymoron. Expect this trend to grow. Mercenaries will once again roam battlefields, breeding war as their profit motive dictates. International law cannot stop them, while the demand for their services rises each year. Things once thought to be inherently governmental are now available in the marketplace, from special forces teams to attack helicopters. This is one of the most dangerous trends of our time, yet it’s invisible to most observers.

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero
by Tyler Cowen
Published 8 Apr 2019

There are also plenty of recent headline cases of fraud, including Volkswagen’s blatant circumvention of emissions controls, Theranos lying about its blood-testing products, and Wells Fargo employees creating phony accounts for millions of unaware and presumably unwilling customers. The conclusion often drawn from these appalling examples is that there is something inherently dishonest about corporations. It is widely understood that the profit motive can lead people to take bad actions, including within corporations. It is less commonly recognized that the incentives for honest dealing within business also can be strong, and indeed very often dominant. In this chapter, I’m going to consider what the evidence tells us about the net result of these two very different effects.

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For instance, after one set of hospitals switched to for-profit status, their mortality rates did not change, nor did their proportion of Medicaid patients or black or Hispanic patients. An older study, from 2000, shows that if anything, the for-profit hospitals provide better care. A study from 2007 found that the for-profits neither have worse health outcomes nor make less effort to treat sicker patients.19 Again, this is all suggesting that the profit motive just doesn’t corrupt behavior very much. There is one area where the for-profits appear to be considerably more fraudulent than the nonprofits, and that is higher education. It has become increasingly clear that a lot of educational for-profits charge high fees and encourage students to run up debt without improving the job prospects of those students at all, or perhaps only by a small amount.

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He offered various arguments, perhaps correct ones, as to why drug companies should never keep trial results secret. He didn’t have any defense as to why he called the book Bad Pharma; that was likely because his Bad Publishing Company wanted to sell more copies of it and thus needed a catchy title. Might Goldacre, like the pharmaceutical companies he criticizes, be a do-gooder but have a profit motive too? The media, too, can share this lack of balance when reporting on business. A recent study indicates that CEOs and other senior executives are more likely to exhibit psychopathic traits than the population at large. According to an article published by researchers Nathan Brooks and Katarina Fritzon, rates of psychopathy among business leaders may range from 4 to 20 percent compared with a possible estimate of about 1 percent for the population as a whole.

Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets
by Brett Scott
Published 4 Jul 2022

Take an oligopolistic sector of tech giants, whose platforms are fused into the life of billions, and glue them via fintech infrastructure to an oligopolistic sector of financial giants, whose digital money is fused into the life of billions. Then glue both to everything else (cities, machines, our bodies), and present this situation – in which our entire environment is possessed by the profit motives of distant oligopolies – as an inevitable and welcome revolution driven by us all. Finally, cast anyone who rebels as an irrelevant and out-of-touch Luddite stuck in the past, who need to be cajoled along, or rescued. The crypto wildcard Perhaps, however, there are other ways to create a global matrix.

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Mainstream investment funds began to see crypto-tokens as one more thing to be placed into a portfolio, alongside stock market shares, bonds, real estate, rare art and gold. This attention from mainstream players created ideological instability within crypto circles. In the early years, crypto entrepreneurs had presented themselves as enemies of big corporates, but – given that the profit motive is a political ideal in free-market thought – those same entrepreneurs later struggled to determine whether they were ‘selling out’ if those corporations offered them profitable collaboration opportunities. I got my first glimpse into this when I took part in a blockchain brainstorming session at a major UK bank.

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It is the war on cash that is partly responsible for inspiring this idea: in Sweden, for example, the Swedish authorities are worried about the resilience of their hyper-digitalised money system, so have begun investigating whether to issue a CBDC called the e-Krona. They realise that if cash were to disappear, a lot of people would be at risk because the commercial banking sector – with its profit-motive guiding its actions – cannot be trusted to serve less profitable members of society. Furthermore, they are aware that the decline of the physical cash system implies the rise of the digital bank system, alongside media-grabbing initiatives like Libra and mega-platforms like Amazon that rely upon that digital money infrastructure.

How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy
by Mehrsa Baradaran
Published 5 Oct 2015

The poor and middle class (before such terms even existed) put their savings under their mattresses and, should they need credit, were left to the mercy of loan sharks. Eventually, alternative movements began to fill the void, and in time, the state blessed each. Banks with specific missions to help the poor overcame economic obstacles to challenge and ultimately reject the profit-motivated culture of mainstream banks.1 They were movements aimed at wage-workers, small farmers, and the unbanked—and their innovative structures would revolutionize the banking sector. But over time, and largely because of deregulation, these missions changed. Today, those banks once established for the purpose of helping the lower classes are practically indistinguishable from mainstream banks.

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(The relationship did solidify over time, leading to legislation that allowed federal post office buildings to house credit unions.)27 The second round of federal support came in 1932 when President Hoover signed a house bill, referred to as “the poor man’s bill,” to authorize credit unions in the District of Columbia. Filene and Bergengren sold the bill to President Hoover as a remedy to the problem of loan sharks. The suffering endured during the Great Depression had contributed to a Populist fervor that made cooperative banking a preferred alternative to profit-motivated commercial banks.28 But the major animating force legitimizing the credit union came when President Franklin D. Roosevelt, already familiar with the movement, included credit unions in his expansive New Deal reforms. Roosevelt said of the credit union: “I have sort of a hunch that we owe a duty to our fellow citizens not to violate the biblical injunction against usury.”29 He urged Congress to pass the Federal Credit Union Act (FCUA) in 1934 to address the “great national problem” of addressing the credit needs of the “poorer and working classes.”30 The FCUA facilitated the establishment of credit unions in all states to “make more available to people of small means credit for provident purposes through a national system of cooperative credit, thereby helping to stabilize the credit structure of the United States.”

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Du Bois said of the bank failure that “not even ten additional years of slavery could have done so much to throttle the thrift of the freedmen as the mismanagement and bankruptcy of the series of savings banks chartered by the Nation for their special aid.”112 If the government and the philanthropists purported to teach the freed slaves thrift and responsibility, the lesson they actually learned was to distrust the government and philanthropists. The Freedman’s Savings Bank serves as a cautionary tale for government support of banking for the poor when that support is just a façade. Draping a flag over a building and then installing private profit-motivated management inside is the most dangerous sort of government support. It induces trust in a vulnerable customer base that not only suffers from financial loss, but also loses all faith in public institutions. It poisons true government efforts to help. A similar phenomenon was at the heart of the failure of the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac during the recent financial crisis.

The End of Work: Why Your Passion Can Become Your Job
by John Tamny
Published 6 May 2018

As Arthur Brooks explains, “Without prosperity, large-scale charity is impossible.”33 And without prosperity, those who wanted to do that compassionate work wouldn’t have a chance. The 2016 Paralympics, held in financially distressed Brazil, suffered serious cutbacks because the host country couldn’t afford the necessary workers and facilities.34 This is what slow growth gets us. But when the profit motive is encouraged, what used to be costly and obscure becomes cheap and common. Profits and prosperity allow us to be compassionate. CHAPTER SIX The Millennial Generation Will Be the Richest Yet—Until the Next One “Do you ever get tired of making love?”1 —Tony Bennett, when asked if he ever gets tired of singing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” The 1994 cult hit Reality Bites follows Lelaina (Winona Ryder), Troy (Ethan Hawke), and Vickie (Janeane Garofalo) as they navigate post-collegiate life in Houston.

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The federal government made use of private-sector technological advances to craft a primitive version of the Internet, but the Internet’s commercial potential went undetected by its creators. The military developed GPS with combat in mind, but without private-sector risk-takers, no one would have heard of Uber.19 Politicians talk about running the government like a business, but the government isn’t a business and can’t act like one. Unlimited funds and the absence of a profit-motive make it difficult to kill what’s not working. The money keeps flowing in no matter what. The situation of a private business is quite different. As Ludwig von Mises explains, “the wealth of successful business men is always the result of a consumers’ plebiscite, and, once acquired, this wealth can be retained only if it is employed in the way regarded by consumers as most beneficial to them.”20 Consumers and businesses make mistakes all the time, but they correct those mistakes or find themselves corrected.

Automation and the Future of Work
by Aaron Benanav
Published 3 Nov 2020

Yet UBI proposals say little about how to reduce capital’s sway over production.45 While UBI has the laudable goal of separating the income people earn from the amount of work they do, it would do nothing to alter the relation between income and assets, keeping us tethered to a system in which a sizable fraction of total income derives from interest (from extending credit), rent (from leasing land or homes), and profit (from running businesses). In other words, UBI would empower workers without disempowering capital, providing people more autonomy in the fulfillment of their “animal functions” but no greater role in shaping the wider social conditions under which they do so.46 The profit motive would therefore remain the driving force of the economy, since large asset-owners would retain their power over investment decisions, which would continue to determine whether the economy grows or shrinks. Here, radical advocates of UBI would confront the same impasse as the radical Keynesians.

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For most people, this would be the first time in their lives that they could enter truly voluntary agreements—without the gun to their heads of a pervasive material insecurity. Under these conditions, “creative minds and scientific aptitudes” would no longer be “wasted due to accidents of birthplace, the bad luck of challenging circumstances, or the necessity to survive.”33 Funding for research or art would also no longer be determined by the profit motive, or dictated by the interests of the wealthy. What we call “capital” in the society of scarcity would, in post-scarcity, be recognized for what it is: our common social inheritance.34 Built up over generations, belonging to no one and to everyone, it is that without which no one could achieve their larger goals, or even imagine them.

Capitalism: the unknown ideal
by Ayn Rand
Published 15 Aug 1966

But it was not the Federal Reserve, it was not government intervention that took the blame for the 1929 depression—it was capitalism. Freedom—cried statists of every breed and sect—had had its chance and had failed. The voices of the few thinkers who pointed to the real cause of the evil were drowned out in the denunciations of businessmen, of the profit motive, of capitalism. Had men chosen to understand the cause of the crash, the country would have been spared much of the agony that followed. The depression was prolonged for tragically unnecessary years by the same evil that had caused it: government controls and regulations. Contrary to popular misconception, controls and regulations began long before the New Deal; in the 1920’s, the mixed economy was already an established fact of American life.

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That the underlying motive is the desire to be taken care of, the desire to be spared the responsibility of independence, is revealed explicitly in Fromm’s socio-political “solution” to the problem of alienation. In order that man may be enabled to conquer his feeling of aloneness and alienation, to practice love and to achieve a full sense of personal identity, a new social system must be established, Fromm declares. Private ownership of the means of production must be abolished. The profit motive must be forbidden. Industry must be decentralized. Society should be divided into self-governing industrial guilds; factories should be owned and run by all those who work in them. Why—according to Fromm’s social philosophy—should a janitor in an industrial plant not have the same right to determine its management as the man who happened to create the plant?

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Since the encyclical is concerned with history and with fundamental political principles, yet does not discuss or condemn any social system other than capitalism, one must conclude that all other systems are compatible with the encyclical’s political philosophy. This is supported by the fact that capitalism is condemned, not for some lesser characteristics, but for its essentials, which are not the base of any other system: the profit motive, competition, and private ownership of the means of production. By what moral standard does the encyclical judge a social system? Its most specific accusation directed at capitalism reads as follows: “The desire for necessities is legitimate, and work undertaken to obtain them is a duty: ‘If any man will not work, neither let him eat.’

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis
by Anatole Kaletsky
Published 22 Jun 2010

A deeper cause of the shrinkage of the public sector in Capitalism 4.0 will be the inability of bureaucratically inflexible big government to meet society’s ever-changing demands. These complex demands, ranging from universal health care and energy independence to stable mortgage financing and rising wages, can be satisfied only by the profit motive acting through competitive capitalist markets. What will change, however, is the role played by government in managing these markets and creating incentives for profit-seeking businesses to achieve politically favored objectives. Clearly financial regulations will be tightened, but Capitalism 4.0 will mean a host of other reforms and shifts in the boundaries between the market and the state.

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And one consistent theme ran through all the politico-economic variations of the nineteenth century and justifies, at least for this discussion, the single label of Capitalism 1. This entire epoch had in common a clear and unquestionable ideology: a belief that the capitalist system based on private property and the profit motive was an elemental force of nature, governed by iron laws of economics that were as immune to human manipulation as a hurricane or a tidal wave. The general philosophy of laissez-faire6—a belief that economics and politics are two distinct spheres of human activity and emotion that must remain as distinct as possible in the interests of both economic and political progress—was dominant throughout this 150-year period.

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Even more important than the physical break-up of the Soviet bloc was the ideological collapse of Marxism as a political doctrine and of central planning as an idea for organizing economic activity without markets. From 1989 onward, all nations, regardless of their political institutions, their stage of development, or their local traditions, were forced to acknowledge private property, the profit motive, and the voluntary exchange of goods and services through competitive markets as the only plausible basis for economic life. As revealed by the epigraphs to this chapter, the aftershocks from this sudden and unexpected implosion spread far beyond the Soviet bloc—to India, China, South Africa, and every country and political movement that had been beguiled by the deceptive logic of socialist delusions.

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World
by Niall Ferguson
Published 1 Jan 2002

But in America, where attracting settlers was the objective, there could be no such monopolies. In short, the economics of British America were precarious; and by economics alone British America could not have been built. Something more was needed – an additional inducement to cross the Atlantic over and above the profit motive. That something turned out to be religious fundamentalism. After breaking with Rome under her father, wholeheartedly embracing the Reformation under her half-brother, then repudiating it under her half-sister, England finally settled on a moderately Protestant ‘middle way’ at the accession of Queen Elizabeth I.

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By this time the fishing industry was well established, exporting hundreds of thousands of barrels of cod every year. The Pilgrims might have come to the New World to escape from Popery. But the ‘main end’ of the men of Marblehead ‘was to catch fish’. This, then, was the combination that made New England flourish: Puritanism plus the profit motive. It was a combination institutionalized by the Massachusetts Bay Company, founded in 1629, whose Governor John Winthrop cheerfully united in his person Congregationalism and capitalism. By 1640 Massachusetts was booming, thanks not just to fish but also to fur and farming. Already some 20,000 people had settled there, far more than were living by that time around the Chesapeake Bay.

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In much the same way, it was to settle a debt of £16,000 to one of his supporters – William Penn, the admiral who had captured Jamaica – that Charles II granted Penn’s son ownership of what became Pennsylvania. Overnight, this made William Penn junior the largest individual landowner in British history, with an estate well over the size of Ireland. It also gave him the opportunity to show what the combination of religious fervour and the profit motive could achieve. Like the Pilgrim Fathers, Penn was a member of a radical religious sect: since 1667 he had been a Quaker, and had even been imprisoned in the Tower of London on account of his faith. But unlike the Plymouth colonists, Penn’s ‘Holy Experiment’ was to create a ‘tolerance settlement’ not just for Quakers but for any religious sect (provided it was monotheistic).

Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition
by Charles Eisenstein
Published 11 Jul 2011

Money depersonalizes a relationship, turning two people into mere “parties to an exchange” driven by the universal goal of maximizing self-interest. If I seek to maximize self-interest, perhaps at your expense, how can we be friends? And when in our highly monetized society we meet nearly all our needs with money, what personal gifts remain from which to build friendship? That the profit motive is antithetical to any benignant personal motive is nearly axiomatic—hence the phrase, “Don’t take it personally; it’s just business.” Today, an ethical business movement and ethical investment movement seek to heal the opposition between love and profit, but however sincere the motives, such efforts often mutate into public relations, “green-washing,” or self-righteousness.

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It seems irrational, even miraculous, that someone would actually give without contrivance of return. As Lewis Hyde puts it, “In the empires of usury the sentimentality of the man with the soft heart calls to us because it speaks of what has been lost.”11 The near-universality of the suspicion of an ulterior profit motive reflects money as a universal aim. Imagine yourself back in school, speaking to the career counselor, discussing what your gifts are and how you might use them to make a living (i.e., to convert them into money). This habit of thought runs deep: when my teenage son Jimi shows me the computer games he makes, I sometimes find myself thinking about how he might commercialize them and about which programming skills he could develop next to be more marketable.

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But if we are to choose a backed currency, let us be clear about the reasons. It is not to make the money “real” in a way that unbacked currencies are not. It is to imbue money with the story of value that we want to create. The story of backing can be used to limit and guide the creation of money. Today, we limit that right to banks and guide it by the profit motive—money goes to those who will make more of it. Properly and historically speaking, though, the issue of money is a special, sacred function, not to be relinquished lightly. Money bears the magical power of the sign and embodies the agreement of an entire society. Part of a society’s soul lives within it, and the power to create it should be guarded as jealously as a shaman guards his medicine pouch.

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism
by Arun Sundararajan
Published 12 May 2016

OuiShare tries to embody the phenomenon of the dialog it facilitates, making a genuine attempt to create a collaborative organization with a cooperative decision-making process that values consensus over speed.4 As OuiShare Fest co-chair Francesca Pick explains in a 2015 blog post, “That’s why rather than calling it a think tank, a non-profit or anything else, I like to think of OuiShare as an incubator of people: a shared platform for experimentation that gives Connectors and members access to a commons of knowledge, tools and an international network of people they can learn and draw inspiration from.”5 I’m chatting with Léonard and Tincq about the tension I sense at the Fest between the profit-motivated and purpose-driven sides of the sharing economy, between people who see the sharing economy as a market economy and those who envision it more as a “gift economy.” “I think the confusion comes from all the hope people had in those platforms, to really change the world. And because there was so much hope, the ones that were once so hopeful are now so disappointed, in a way,” says Léonard.

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Similarly, you might be comfortable letting your kids ride the roller coasters at Six Flags, but you might hesitate to let them enjoy the same ride at an unbranded theme park on the side of the highway, even though the government regulations are the same in both situations. This combination of government regulatory agencies and the brands that, pursuing a long-run profit motive, comply with these regulations and also invest in providing a consistently high quality and safe experience, are the foundation of trust in most Western economies today. And the importance of brand cannot be underestimated in today’s sharing economy. We are still a population that places its faith in brand names: platforms like Airbnb, Lyft, and Uber understand this; eBay understood this when they created Power Sellers; and BlaBlaCar understands this when they place an explicit certification of trust derived from platform activity on a driver.

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The trick is to identify those dimensions of risk where the incentives of the platform and the incentives of society (or of consumer protection) don’t diverge, and those where the risk of divergence exists. For example, ensuring that hosts advertise their quality accurately seems well aligned with Airbnb’s profit motive, while ensuring that guests do not make too much noise when staying in an Airbnb might be less aligned. Moving to the next point, peer-to-peer platforms often offer a greater variety of transactions than traditional industrial-economy providers. This stems from the blurring of personal and professional practices and, as I discuss in chapter 7 on the future of work, the rise of the new generalists.

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets
by John Plender
Published 27 Jul 2015

Impressive though the economic and industrial achievements of the Victorians were, it has to be acknowledged that those of the Americans were even greater. In the twentieth century, the United States emerged as the ultimate capitalist economy, combining strong religious roots with a greater commitment to the profit motive than any other country. The intensity of this potent combination no doubt explains what the historian Simon Schama has called ‘a pulsing vein of American insecurity about the moral character of money’. Yet the country also had the lowest quotient of anti-business snobbery. This found expression most famously, or notoriously, in President Calvin Coolidge’s declaration in 1925 that ‘the chief business of the American people is business’.

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And there is, I feel, a delightful irony in a President named Calvin presiding over an era of licence known as the Roaring Twenties.16 That said, the verdicts on Coolidge often overlook his more reflective side. In his Memorial Day address shortly before becoming President in 1923, he gave a notably more measured view of the conflict between Christian values and the profit motive: There are two fundamental motives that inspire human action. The first and most important, to which all else is subordinate, is that of righteousness. There is that in mankind, stronger than all else, which requires them to do right. When that requirement is satisfied, the next motive is that of gain.

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This is an important lesson of 1929–32, when a collapse of trade acted as a spur to German and Japanese imperialism, which was directed, among other things, at improved access to food and raw materials. The verdict on the kind of thinking exemplified by Montesquieu and other liberal-minded intellectuals must nonetheless be that while it was an interesting attempt to legitimise what we now call market capitalism and to make the profit motive respectable, its claims to be able to restrain human passions were overstated. The astonishing thing is that this essentially romantic idea has such enduring appeal despite its manifest failure to prevent a world war at a time in the early twentieth century when international trade links had never been more intense.

Start It Up: Why Running Your Own Business Is Easier Than You Think
by Luke Johnson
Published 31 Aug 2011

Yet the private sector pays all the taxes, provides all the wealth-generating jobs, and keeps the entire system going. Industry needs to invest more in its public image. Without business everything we rely on would collapse. Too many opinion formers have a naive view that the public sector is somehow morally superior to the private sector – that the profit motive is a grubby urge. After all, companies have to justify themselves every day in the marketplace. They rely on repeat purchases. If customers feel ripped off or lied to, they stop buying – and the company goes bust. If private equity houses, drugs companies, television stations and food manufacturers were so terrible, then eventually the public would shun them all, because in a free market there is always a choice.

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Entrepreneurs often have few qualifications and would have been unable to enter more ‘noble’ professions such as politics, law or academia. Perhaps that is why so many of the intellectual elite have always looked down on those in trade and industry. They resent the fact that in the capitalist system, uneducated but energetic individuals can reach positions of power and wealth through sheer effort. Perhaps it is the profit motive that offends the spiritual. But profit is the essential lubricant that enables mankind to advance. Inefficient and loss-making firms die, and can cause havoc for owners, staff and customers. But productive firms tend to create a virtuous circle: they do well, attract talent, pay more, make investors good returns, and can afford to launch better products.

J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2022: For Preparing Your 2021 Tax Return
by J. K. Lasser Institute
Published 21 Dec 2021

. §1.162-1(c) Subcontractor's legal kickback not deductible Car-Ron Asphalt Paving Co., Inc., 758 F.2d 1132 (6th Cir. 1985), aff'g 46 TCM 1314 (1983) Contributions to campaigns IRC §162(e) Expenses from illegal medical marijuana dispensary not deductible due to Code Sec. 280E Martin Olive, 139 TC No. 2 (2012) Northern California Small Business Assistants Inc., 154 TC No. 4 (2019) Standing Akimro, LLC, S.Ct.. 6/28/21) 40.9 HOW AUTHORS AND ARTISTS MAY WRITE OFF EXPENSES IRC §263A(h) Notice 89-67, 1988-1 CB 55 *IRS Publication 538 40.10 DEDUCTING EXPENSES OF A SIDELINE BUSINESS OR HOBBY IRC §183 *IRS Publication 535 Expenses of hobby activity not deductible for 2018 through 2025 (Tax Cuts and Jobs Act) IRC §67(g), as added by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (P.L. 115-97, 12/22/2017) (suspension of miscellaneous itemized deductions for 2018 through 2025) Horse business denied deduction for lack of a horse Denise Celeste McMillan, TC Memo 2019-108 Hobby loss rule doesn't apply to C corporations Jeff M Potter and Marsha R. Potter, TC Memo 2018-153 Model airplane supply store meets profit motive for loss deduction Cheryl R. Savello, TC Memo 2015-24 Investigating father's death does not result in hobby/sideline business loss deduction Herb Vest, TC Memo 2016-187 Horse breeder had profit motive in some years Merrill C. Roberts, TC Memo 2014-74 Writer's Travel deductions disallowed and penalty imposed *Sal A. Westrich, TC Summary Opinion 2013-35 Coach's profit motive upheld despite steady losses *John Dalton Parks III, TC Summary Opinion 2012-105 Order of claiming hobby deductions Reg. §1.183-1(b) Election to postpone determination of profit presumption Temp.

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This way you may be able to deduct maintenance expenses and depreciation on the unit even if it remains vacant. However, the IRS has disallowed loss deductions for some rentals preceding a sale on the ground that there was no “profit motive” for the rental (40.10). For example, where minimal efforts are made to rent out a vacation home in anticipation of an eventual sale, the IRS may claim, as in Example 1 below, that the home was not converted to rental property held for the production of income. Where the IRS determines that you lacked a profit motive for renting the property, it will limit your deduction for rental expenses to the amount of the rental income, and the expenses in excess of rental income cannot be carried forward to a later year.

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Thus, “rental” expenses are not allowed, and the loss on the sale was a nondeductible personal loss. The IRS and Tax Court disallowed a loss deduction for rental expenses under the “profit-motive rules” (40.10) where a principal residence was rented for 10 months until it could be sold. According to the Tax Court, the temporary rental did not convert the residence to rental property. Since the sales effort was primary, there was no profit motive for the rental. Thus, no loss could be claimed; rental expenses were deductible only to the extent of rental income. The favorable side of the Tax Court position: Since the residence was not converted to rental property, the owners could under prior law rules defer tax on the gain from the sale by buying a new home.

People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil
by M Scott Peck
Published 1 Jan 1983

There is no word adequate to describe the urgency of this task. The military-industrial complex that played such a large role in Vietnam, and continues to be a primary creator of the grotesqueness of the arms race, is submitted to nothing but the profit motive. This is no submission at all. It is pure self-interest. I am not an enemy of capitalism per se. I believe it is possible for the profit motive to be operative and at the same time submitted to higher values of truth and love. Difficult, but possible. If we cannot somehow engineer this submission and “Christianize” our capitalism, we are doomed as a capitalist society.

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Consider the large corporation. Even the president or chairman of the board will say, “My actions may not seem entirely ethical, but after all, they’re not really a matter of my prerogative. I must be responsive to the stockholders, you know. On their account I cannot help but be directed by the profit motive.” Who is it, then, that determines the corporation’s behavior? The small investor who does not even begin to understand the operations involved? The mutual fund on the other side of the nation? Which mutual fund? Which brokerage house? Which banker? So, as they become larger and larger, our institutions become absolutely faceless.

Free Money for All: A Basic Income Guarantee Solution for the Twenty-First Century
by Mark Walker
Published 29 Nov 2015

In other words, the freedom argument faces the same “failed socialism” objection. Revolutionaries in the twentieth century thought that socialism would make places like the USSR and China better for the masses, but they only made things worse (at least according to this line of objection). Without the profit motive to get people to work, and without the profit motive to allocate effort in an economy, everyone suffers. Despite the rhetoric of the socialists, workers in the United States were much better off than their counterparts in the USSR. They were not better off because they had a chance to become rich capitalists, but simply because the working conditions and material rewards for US workers in the twentieth century were, on average, much better than the conditions in the former Soviet Union.

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In his magisterial A Theory of Justice and other works, Rawls provides a defense of many aspects of the current welfare state.15 Like Marx, Rawls sees that capitalism has helped increase the material prosperity of society as a whole. However, according to Rawls, a laissez-faire capitalism is not justified. Rather, a conditional form of capitalism is justified. Private ownership and the profit motive are justified to the extent that they improve the material well-being of the most economically disadvantaged. This is Rawls’s famous “difference principle”: “social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged.”16 We will postpone examining whether Rawls is justified on this point.

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
by Daniel H. Pink
Published 1 Jan 2008

Those staggering levels of worker disengagement I described in the previous chapter have a companion trend that companies are only starting to recognize: an equally sharp rise in volunteerism, especially in the United States. These diverging lines compensated engagement going down, uncompensated effort going up suggest that volunteer work is nourishing people in ways that paid work simply is not. We're learning that the profit motive, potent though it is, can be an insufficient impetus for both individuals and organizations. An equally powerful source of energy, one we've often neglected or dismissed as unrealistic, is what we might call the purpose motive. This is the final big distinction between the two operating systems.

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They're busy making money and attending to themselves and that means that there's less room in their lives for love and attention and caring and empathy and the things that truly count, Ryan added. And if the broad contours of these findings are true for individuals, why shouldn't they also be true for organizations which, of course, are collections of individuals? I don't mean to say that profit doesn't matter. It does. The profit motive has been an important fuel for achievement. But it's not the only motive. And it's not the most important one. Indeed, if we were to look at history's greatest achievements from the printing press to constitutional democracy to cures for deadly diseases the spark that kept the creators working deep into the night was purpose at least as much as profit.

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead
by David Callahan
Published 1 Jan 2004

Braunstein pushed supplements to Cummiskey in which he had a clear financial stake, and while the AMAs guidelines do not explicitly prohibit in-office sales of health products, they clearly prohibit such conflicts of interest in other areas, such as the sale of medical equipment. These rules arose after the medical profession agreed that too many conflicts of interest occurred when doctors tried to both objectively advise patients and act as salesmen. For obvious reasons caregiving responsibilities and the profit motive don't mix well together. "Having a financial interest in a product, however indirect, sets up an inherent bias," commented one eminent doctor, Wallace Simpson. "It's just human nature; you want the product or approach to work out, and that affects your judgment."19 Many in the AMA have pushed for an outright ban on in-office sales of health products, but the doctors who benefit from such sales have blocked this move during ferocious battles at AMA meetings.

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Neither outside regulation nor internal ethics programs can force the private sector to abandon the extreme bottom-line thinking that it has embraced over the past two decades. However, both types of reform can curb the worst abuses associated with this shift and push companies to not measure performance by earnings alone. Despite the laissez-faire revolution of the '80s and '90s, the profit motive has never achieved total dominance in the business world and midcentury notions of responsibility to multiple stakeholders have not been extinguished entirely. Many of the reform challenges that face the private sector boil down to the task of reinventing these notions for a new era—and, here again, putting market values back in their proper place.

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Cummiskey's story is related in Patrick Kiger, "What's Your Doctor Selling?" Good Housekeeping, 1 January 2001, 53. Cummiskey's husband also wrote a detailed complaint to AMA president Thomas Reardon in October 1999. [back] 18. Benedict Carey, "A Supplemental Pitch," Los Angeles Times, 26 August 2002, A1. [back] 19. Bradford H. Gray, The Profit Motive and Patient Care (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). See also Marc A. Rodwin, Medicine, Money, and Morals: Physicians Conflict of Interest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Wallace Simpson quoted in Carey, "A Supplemental Pitch," A1. [back] 20. "Sale of Health-Related Products from Physicians' Offices," Code of Ethics, American Medical Association.

Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception
by George A. Akerlof , Robert J. Shiller and Stanley B Resor Professor Of Economics Robert J Shiller
Published 21 Sep 2015

In the video, as a squad from the casino defibrillates the heart arrest of a fellow player, the surrounding players play on, their trance unperturbed, even though the victim is literally at their feet.9 What Markets Do for Us The history of the slot-machine-good/slot-machine-bad from the 1890s to the present illustrates our dual view of our market economy. Most fundamentally, we applaud markets. Free markets are products of peace and freedom, flourishing in stable times when people do not live in fear. But the same profit motive that produced those boxes that opened and gave us something we wanted has also produced slot machines with an addictive turn of the wheel that takes your money for the privilege. Almost all of this book will be figuratively about slot-machines-bad, rather than about slot-machines-good: because as reformers both of economic thought and of the economy we seek to change not what is right with the world, but rather what is wrong.

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We have already put our finger on a simple reason why they were so ignored: economists’ understanding of markets systematically excludes them. The pathology, as our friend made clear, is viewed as mainly due to “externalities.” But that fails to see that competitive markets by their very nature spawn deception and trickery, as a result of the same profit motives that give us our prosperity. Had we economists appropriately seen free markets as a two-edged sword, we would all but surely have delved into the ways in which financial derivatives and mortgage-backed securities, and also sovereign debt, would turn out badly. More than a handful of us would have sounded the alarm.

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Xavier Gabaix and David Laibson have produced another way in which sellers take advantage of buyers, in this case because some attributes of the product are hard to see.8 In their terminology those attributes are “shrouded.” Implicitly they ask: what rice would restaurants serve if their customers could not tell the difference between Basmati and Uncle Ben’s? The profit motive says the restaurants will choose the cheaper. Gabaix and Laibson’s leading example of shrouded attributes concerns inkjet printers. The buyers focus on the price of the printers. But the subsequent cost of the ink cartridges is significant relative to the initial cost of the printer (on average something like two-thirds).9 The relevant cost does not just come then from the initial layout for the printer: it is the total cost of printing a page.

Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman
by Ken Auletta
Published 28 Sep 2015

What may be different today is the preoccupation even many on the left have with money. Wall Street is in; the Great Society is out. The New York Review of Books now publishes the economic wisdom of Peter G. Peterson and Felix Rohatyn. Around the globe, from China’s Communist rulers to Socialist President François Mitterand of France, the profit motive is in the ascendancy. The grim economic experience of most centralized Communist regimes has helped convince intellectuals that social freedom is not possible without economic freedom. Of course, moods—and election results—change. But today, says Jeffrey Lane, forty-two, the force of history imperils most private investment banks.

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Glucksman), 15, 46, 124 Glucksman, Lewis L., 4, 9 at American Express, 229 Board and, 81, 100, 115–120, 171–176 as CEO, 59, 70, 73, 75, 116, 118, 171 Cohen’s meetings with, 198–201 commercial paper and, 14 contract of, 200 cost-cutting by, 66, 123 divorce of, 124 emotional nature of, 13, 16, 51–52, 125, 161 five-point program, 134 Fortune leak and, 185 Glanville and, 55–56, 58 Gordon and, 71 life-style of, 51, 123–124 management strategy, 26, 60, 78–79, 117–120, 125–126, 132, 164 partners and, 105–106, 133, 198 personal characteristics, 15, 69 personal history, 10–13, 33, 45–46, 82 Peterson and, 5, 7, 12, 16, 21–22, 40, 48–49, 68–69, 85–86, 90–91, 95, 100 promotion of, 59–60, 75–76 recruitments by, 126 Rubin and, 20, 64 sale of company and, 171, 182, 210, 220, 236 Shearson and, 198–199, 229 Solomon and, 199 trading and, 11–13, 17, 46 Glynn, Lenny, 86, 126 Goldman, Marcus, 28, 44 Goldman, Sachs & Company, 28–29, 46–47, 70, 74, 108, 120, 124, 230 possible sale of, 233 Goldsmith, Sir James, 237 Goodman, Jerome, 99 Goodman, Sally, 99 Gordon, Sheldon, 9, 23, 65, 71, 106, 113, 117, 127, 146 Board’s respect for, 166, 173 Lewis and, 206 resignation of, 222 sellout and, 172, 187, 203–204, 206 Solomon and, 174 Graham, Katharine, 38, 50 “Gray books”, 137, 165, 178 recall of, 216 Greed accusations of, 138–139 bonuses and, 132–133 Boshart on, 175 Glucksman on, 138 profit motive and, 234 sellout and, 167 Greenmail, 233, 237 Gutfreund, John H., 40, 114, 137, 236 merger and, 203, 205 salary of, 127 Gutman, Monroe, 33 Hajim, Edmund A., 25, 65, 77, 101, 120 departure of, 78–79, 122 Peterson and, 105 Harper, Charles M., 154, 157, 177 Harriman, Averell, 83 Hellman, Warren, 30, 34, 39–42, 49, 84, 125 Hendrickson, Robert M., 9 Herbert, Hilary A., 28 Hertz, John, 32–33 Hill, J.

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Peterson), 37, 58, 85 Petropoulos, George, 35 Petropoulos, Peter See Peterson, Peter G. Philadelphia Life Insurance Company, 71 Phibro/Salomon, 114, 137–138, 178, 233 Phillips, Michael, 204 Pickens, T. Boone, 184, 238 Political action committee (PAC), 119 Pope, Generoso, 36 Press coverage, 183–186 Lehman sale, 210 Peterson ouster, 115–116, 121–122 Pritzker, Jay, 179 Profit motive, 234 Proops, William S., 224 Prout, Parker, 223 Prudential/Bache, 232–233 Prudential Insurance Corporation, 179, 182 Rattner, Steven, 122–123, 146, 212, 225 resignation of, 225 Reagan Administration, 73, 233 Reich, Cary, 125 Reich, Robert B., 241 Reiss, Rick, 191 Rifkind, Simon, 58 Robert, Steve, 191 Robinson, James D., III, 190, 192–194, 198, 200, 229 Rockefeller, David, 17 Rohatyn, Felix, 22, 31, 234, 239 on banking, 239–240 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 148 Rose, Billy, 34 Rosenthal, Mitchell, 59 Rubin, Robert S., 19, 20, 23, 26–27, 43, 49, 52, 55, 64, 68, 78, 101, 113, 127 on capital adequacy, 145 as chief operating officer, 118 ConAgra offer and, 153–154 enemies of, 203 Glucksman and, 90–91 on mergers, 151, 209, 230 promotion of, 116, 147–152 resignation of, 226 Solomon and, 106 Sacks, David G., 57 Sage, Andrew G.C., II, 32–33, 39 Salary, structures, 127 Salinger, Inez.

The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling
by Arlie Russell Hochschild
Published 1 Nov 1983

I mean to expose the relation between the private act of trying to dampen liking for a person-which overcommitted lovers sometimes attempt-and the public act of a bill collector who suppresses empathy for a debtor. By the grand phrase "transmutation of an emotional system" I mean to convey what it is that we do privately, often unconsciously, to feelings that nowadays often fall under the sway of large organizations, social engineering, and the profit motive. Trying to feel what one wants, expects, or thinks one 20 Private Life ought to feel is probably no newer than emotion itself. Conforming to or deviating from feeling rules is also hardly new. In organized society, rules have probably never been applied only to observable behavior. "Crimes of the heart" have long been recognized because proscriptions have long guarded the "preactions" of the heart; the Bible says not to covet your neighbor'S wife, not simply to avoid acting on that feeling.

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Third, social exchange is forced into narrow channels; there may be hiding places along shore, but there is much less room for individual navigation of the emotional waters. The whole system of emotional exchange in private life has as its ostensible purpose the welfare and pleasure of the people involved. When this emotional system is thrust into a commercial setting, it is transmuted. A profit motive "is slipped in under acts of emotion management, under the rules that govern them, under the gift exchange. Who benefits now, and who pays? The transmutation is a delicate achievement and potentially an important and beneficial one. But even when it works-when "service ratings" are high and customers are writing "orchid" letters-there is a cost to be paid: the worker must give up control over how the work is to be done.

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Thus the relation between private emotion work and public emotional labor is a link between non* Similarly, the social guardians of the positional control system are found not only in working-class families but in the traditional churches to which they go, and to some extent in the schools, where they learn to manage their behavior in ways that will be useful on the job. 161 commercial and commercial spheres. The home is no longer a sanctuary from abuses of the profit motive. Yet the marketplace is not without images of the home. The atmosphere of the private living room, which a young flight attendant is asked to recall as she works in the airplane cabin, has already borrowed some of the elements of that cabin. The principles of commerce that govern exchanges in the cabin are supposed to be softened by the analogy to a private home, a home remote from commerce.

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism
by Joyce Appleby
Published 22 Dec 2009

Their oversupply brought about a spectacular crash, and the Mississippi Company became the Mississippi Bubble, a new term to describe the sudden inflation and equally sudden deflation of an object of value, be it a certain kind of investment, tulips, or real estate. Law knew how to dazzle people with the prospect of future riches. Successes like his in the 1720s appear repeatedly in the history of capitalism, pointing up the psychological component of the profit motive. In France what might have been a cautionary tale became a hypercautionary one. The government wouldn’t tolerate paper money for another seventy years. Even in England it soured people on paper money and its use as an economic stimulant. A new orthodoxy congealed. The supply of money, the philosopher David Hume maintained, had nothing to do with prosperity, which depended upon real things in the economy, like shops, stores, and factories.

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A total of 11 million men and women came from Africa to the New World colonies in comparison with the 2.6 million Europeans who crossed the Atlantic in the same period. Over one hundred thousand separate voyages brought this human cargo, 70 percent of them owned by either British or Portuguese traders.2 Sugar was one of capitalism’s first great bonanzas; its successes also revealed the power of the profit motive to override any cultural inhibitions to gross exploitation. Slavery was old. Egyptian slaves had built pyramids; Roman ones, bridges and aqueducts. What capitalism introduced was sustained and systematic brutality in the making of goods on a scale never seen before. It’s not size alone that distinguishes modern slavery from its ancient lineage in Greece and biblical times; it’s also race.

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Integral to Smith’s theorizing was the law of unintended consequences, an arresting insight of the Scottish philosophers that explained how acts could be willed by self-interested individuals but still turn out to be beneficial to a larger group. The most famous example of course was the invisible hand of the market that used competition to convert the profit motive into a force for good. As Smith explained, it is “not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regards to their own interest.”51 Here was a concept that contributed to the strong impression that reality was often obscured by appearances.

Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Politics and Society in Modern America)
by Louis Hyman
Published 3 Jan 2011

This history of the infrastructure and practices of American debt will both help us to understand the financial history of the postwar period and, more generally, to come to grips with the choices that have created our contemporary indebted society. No single cause can explain the entire history of borrowing and lending: profit motive, government policy, INTRODUCTION 9 technological progress, and even chance all played necessary but not sufficiently all-encompassing roles. Though to be sure there were hucksters who gamed the system, the choices responsible for today’s economic crisis were not hidden, but done in the open, and often with the best of intentions.

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In his words: “the future financial stability of many of our urban centers depends upon the prompt reclamation of their slum areas.”35 In Ickes’s view, slums were a sort of cancer. Without checking their growth, slums and blight would spread into the industrial and commercial areas, choking off any possibility of economic recovery. Moreover, slums consumed more taxes every year than they paid, inhibiting other uses of local tax dollars.36 In the absence of private profit motive, Ickes believed the federal government had a need and a right to intercede in the housing sector. By November of 1933, 14.7 percent, or $485,100,000 of the total PWA project budget had been designated for “low-cost housing and slum clearance.”37 Creating a subsidiary, “Public Works Emergency Housing Corporation,” Ickes planned “to build low-cost apartment houses as slum clearance projects throughout the country.”38 PWA’s creators viewed the housing division as a way to solve both the problem of slums and the larger economic problem at the same time.

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Title I loans, like their Title II counterparts, were meant to be affordable so as to stimulate as much demand as possible in the hard-hit economy of the Depression.26 For home owners needing repairs and modernizations, these loans presented an affordable and easy way to improve their standard of living. BA N K E R S D I S C OV E R C R E D I T 79 For bankers, the loans guaranteed profits. As discussed in chapter 2, the FHA did not lend any money directly to consumers, but relied on the profit motive of private capital to supply the financing. The government created an insurance program for lenders, so that in case of default bankers would always get back the principal of the loan, allowing them to take on more risk than they ordinarily would. The interest rates would be low, but through the government insurance program the profits would be risk free.

The Billion-Dollar Molecule
by Barry Werth

Johnsbury Trucking Company depot, until the early 1980s a hub of grinding gears and hissing airbrakes, now produces X-ray telescopes in sleekly refurbished anonymity. Despite its new association with Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the presence of so many exceptional scientists, the restless incubation of so much profit motive, and the influx of so many Saabs and Acuras, the area remains dolefully nondescript, a temporary address for the new companies and a final one for the old. Vertex started leasing 10,000 square feet in a former construction company warehouse at the corner of Sidney and Allston streets in April 1989, six months before Boger’s outing at the Vista.

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His father, mother, and both of his father’s siblings had gone there, and his father and uncle had graduated from Harvard Law School. They had attended in the years around World War II, when Harvard was in the final throes of transforming itself from a Brahmin redoubt to an academic superpower and its highmindedness was unencumbered by profit motive or self-doubt. It was a time—extending ultimately into the early 1970s, when the younger Aldrich was in high school—marked by steeply ascending federal support for the sciences and an attendant virtuosity about the goals and consequences of research. For years Harvard’s patent policy was simply, “No patents primarily concerned with therapeutics or public health may be taken out . . . except for dedication to the public,” and there was little reason to suggest that it be otherwise.

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He later would attempt to raise capital to compete privately with the government’s effort to map the human genome, a plan that, if successful, would have given Gilbert and his cohorts the patent to the human blueprint. In Gilbert, Aldrich saw the prototype of the new, big-name academic scientist: brilliant, yet “mercilessly egotistical” (to use Jeremy Knowles’s phrase) and driven by a profit motive to equal anything on Wall Street. Aldrich greatly admired their ability to create value—Gilbert’s, especially—but found them as a rule “cutthroat pirates” when it came to appropriating their share. “I have no qualms about throwing any of these guys overboard,” he said. As for Harvard, he resented that the moral certitude of his father’s era—when the school knew what it was and what it stood for—had given way to ambivalence and rank greed.

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians
by Joe Quirk and Patri Friedman
Published 21 Mar 2017

We’re destroying the environment. We’re running out of fresh water. We’re fighting over dwindling fossil fuels. We can’t figure out how we’re going to feed growing populations. We’ve eroded most of the topsoil, chopped down much of the forests, and devoured 90 percent of the large fish stock since 1950. The profit motive overpowers the stewardship motive. Everybody blames the oil companies, but we really enjoy our cars, bottled drinks, and computers, which require oil to produce, so we might as well point the finger at everybody except the Amish and Jain monks. The human race is faced with eight of what futurist Peter Diamandis, founder of the XPRIZE Foundation and Singularity University, calls “humanity’s grand challenges.”

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The wild ocean is treated as a giant commons, where each fisher-gatherer is incentivized to get as much out as he can. What abundance could be unleashed if fisher-farmers developed floating fish farms? The economic incentive to cultivate and care for the surrounding ocean would be overpowering. The profit motive and the stewardship motive would align. Neil says that people have to stop romanticizing the practice of fish hunting. The story of human migration is a story of extermination. “We can’t rely on hunting wild stocks anymore. We proved that with mastodons. We proved it with bison. We proved it with deer and ducks.

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He says the only way to confront the three Is while simultaneously creating the four Fs—“food, feed, fuel, and fertilizer”—is to move beyond the four types of fish that are commonly cultured, which Sims calls the four Ms: “mahimahi, milkfish, mullet, and moi.” But these fish have been shown to be the most profitable! Why do we have to stop farming them? “We need to bring together the environmental motive, the humanitarian motive, and the profit motive, so they are not at odds with each other, but aligned with each other,” says Neil. “It’s an economic incentive plus an ecological imperative.” Only by culturing a very unlikely fish can you feed the world while reducing the amount of carbonic acid in the ocean. Wait, increasing our fish consumption while reducing carbonic acid in the ocean?

Pity the Billionaire: The Unexpected Resurgence of the American Right
by Thomas Frank
Published 16 Aug 2011

On the contrary; opportunism is one of the factors that has made conservatism so fantastically successful. Still, the appearances can be off-putting, and the resurgent Right often struggles to reconcile such naked enthusiasm for gain with its self-image as the simon-pure voice of the common people. Yes, the movement loves capitalism, but even prophets of the profit motive do not like to think of themselves as exploiters or corruptionists. Markets must triumph everywhere, they tell us, but spondulics must never mix with statesmanship. This is why a Tea Party coffee-table book that includes dozens of pictures of protest signs praising capitalism also begins with a foreword (written by the action star Chuck Norris) complaining that “the Constitution has been ousted by cash” and that “the Bill of Rights has been bartered for corporate bonuses.”7 It is another undecidable muddle, and the movement resolves it by simply having it both ways.

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* “Window of opportunity,” “seize power,” and “fundamentally transform” are trademark Beck characterizations of liberal thinking. * In truth, however, NASA circa 1969 was far more directly run by government than were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac circa 2007. (It was also unionized.) While there was no profitable reason to send men to the moon, there were all sorts of profit motives at work at Fannie and Freddie. In fact, economists who have studied the two mortgage companies believe their failures arose not from their government-ness but from their leaders’ desire to emulate the profits and bonuses of the private sector. “Fannie and Freddie caused such horrific losses because they were private institutions run by officers who obtained a ‘sure thing,’” writes Bill Black, a professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, in his Benzinga column for January 10, 2011—“great wealth through booking high yield in the near term without establishing meaningful loss reserves

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy
by Tom Slee
Published 18 Nov 2015

Commercial use was forbidden on early government-funded precursors to the Internet, but the 1992 Scientific and Advanced-Technology Act allowed the US National Science Foundation to interconnect with commercial networks, and the mixture of commerce and non-commercial activity started. There was vociferous argument over the ethics of pursuing profit over the Internet, but digital commerce exploded. Digital openness, which was initially a norm of the non-commercial world of researchers and enthusiasts cut off from the world of private property, was exposed to the profit motive. Inevitably, things would change. The Internet is often seen as a natural place for openness because files and documents can be copied: I can give you a copy of a song, and still keep a copy for myself, I can upload a video to YouTube and everyone can watch it. If software or songs are made “open” they are no longer commodities that can be privately owned: they are made free for others to use as they wish, and so are taken out of the normal commercial realm of buying and of selling.

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What was once an initiative focused on the release of data for civic use—a contribution to government transparency—becomes instead a handover of civic resources to the data brokers and insurance companies who can use it to optimize their business models. In 2012 Change.org, a web site that hosts petitions and that made its name thanks to the actions of many progressive organizations that ran campaigns on the site, joined Couchsurfing as a “.org” site with a for-profit motive—a misleading presentation of the organization’s nature. In May 2013 it took venture capital from the Omidyar Network and started allowing “corporate advertising, Republican Party solicitations, astroturf campaigns, anti-abortion or anti-union ads and other controversial sponsorships.” 48 The change in mission was described by Lindsay Beyerstein in In These Times and Ryan Grim of the Huffington Post.49,50 The Omidyar/Change.org press release uses the standard language of social entrepreneurs: blandly inspirational and content-free.

The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street
by Robert Scheer
Published 14 Apr 2010

Government regulation of the market economy arose during the New Deal out of a desire to save capitalism rather than destroy it. Whether it was child labor in dark coal mines, the exploitation of racially segregated human beings to pick cotton, or the unfathomable devastation of the Great Depression, the brutal creativity of the pure profit motive has always posed a stark challenge to our belief that we are moral creatures. The modern bureaucratic governments of the developed world were built, unconsciously, as a bulwark, something big enough to occasionally stand up to the power of uncontrolled market forces, much as a referee must show the yellow card to a young headstrong athlete.

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They don’t believe in intervening in the market to help housing and homeownership. And so, I think this is an effort to make the case that Fannie Mae shouldn’t exist.” Unfortunately, this was just a smokescreen. Fannie Mae actually was receiving pressure not from liberal politicians to become more heavily involved in riskier mortgages but from—what else?—the profit motive. With giants like Citi moving heavily into mortgage-based securities—a sector pioneered by Fannie itself—and increasingly betting on riskier and riskier loans, the GSEs were actually playing catch-up. And when they decided to push their chips deep into the hottest, yet most unpredictable, Alt-A and subprime mortgages, it was not at the behest of the Barney Franks of this world but rather in pursuit of Wall Street profits.

The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design
by Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth
Published 3 Oct 2019

Strangelove (film), 100 drug use data, 51–52 Dwork, Cynthia, 26, 36 dynamic effects, 194 echo chamber equilibrium, 123–26 economics applied to dating apps, 94–96 economic scarcity and dating apps, 94 and scope of topics covered, 19–20 The Economist, 145–46 email scams, 137–41, 154 embarrassing polls, 40–45 emergent phenomena, 10 empirical machine learning, 76 employment decisions, 15 encryption, 31–34, 37 Equifax, 32 equilibrium states and dating apps, 95–96 echo chamber equilibrium, 123–25 and game theory, 97–101 and navigation problems, 103 and two-route navigation problems, 107 and user preferences, 97 error rates in algorithms and differential privacy, 42–43 error-minimization, 70, 75, 78–79 and facial recognition, 15–16 and fairness vs. accuracy, 78–84 and image recognition competition, 165–66 and scientific research, 136 ethical principles and accuracy vs. fairness balance, 82–84, 192–93 and adaptive data analysis, 159–60 and algorithmic morality, 176–78 and algorithms as regulatory measure, 16–17 and concerns about algorithm use, 3–4 current state of ethics research, 169–70 design of ethical algorithms, 189–90, 193–95 ethics boards, 179 infancy of ethical algorithm field, 21 and machine vs. human learning, 6–7 and scope of topics covered, 19–21 and threat of optimization gone awry, 179 and unique challenges of algorithms, 7 European Union, 15 existential threat of machine learning, 179–82, 189–90 exploitation, 71–72 exploration period, 70–72, 93 exponential intelligence explosion, 185–88 Facebook advertising, 14–15 and design of algorithms, 4–5 and differential privacy, 51–52 and echo chamber equilibrium, 124–25 and image recognition algorithms, 145–46 News Feed, 8, 19–20 profit motive, 191–92 and promotion of diversity, 125 facial recognition, 15–16 fairness accuracy/fairness trade-off, 63, 69, 74–84, 87, 192–93 and algorithmic morality, 175–76 and algorithms as regulatory measure, 16–18 and biases, 57–63 and concerns about algorithm use, 3 and current state of ethics research, 169–70 and data collection bias, 90–93 and dating apps, 96–97 definitions of, 69–72 design of ethical algorithms, 190 differing notions of, 84–86 and dynamic effects of algorithms, 193–94 “fairness gerrymandering,” 86–90, 134–35 and forbidden inputs, 66–69 and goals of ethics research, 171 and “merit,” 72–74 and scope of topics covered, 18–21 and statistical parity, 69–72 and supervised machine learning, 63–64 and theoretical computer science field, 13 and threat of optimization gone awry, 184–85 and vectors, 65–66 “fake news,” 124–25 false negatives, 73–74, 84–85 false positives, 84–85, 189–90, 193 false rejections, 73, 91, 171 family data, 54–56 “fast takeoff” scenario, 185–88 FATE—fairness, accuracy, transparency, and ethics, 16–17 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 49–50 feedback loops, 19–20, 92, 95–96, 184–85 Felten, Ed, 187–88 filter bubble, 124 financial status data, 65–66 Fitbits, 50–51 fitness tracking data, 50–51 food science, 143–45, 158–59 forbidden inputs, 66–69 foreign policy, 15 forensic evidence, 54–56 formalization of goals, 194.

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See also genetics data General Data Protection Regulation, 15 generative adversarial network (GAN), 133–35 Generator/Discriminator game, 135 genetics data, 12, 30–31, 54–56, 86–87 genome wide association study (GWAS), 30–31 gerrymandering, 86–90 Go (game), 132, 180 Gödel Prize, 36 Golden State Killer case, 54–56 Good, I. J., 180, 187–88 Google bias in search results, 14–15 and commercial deployment of differential privacy, 47–50 Google Brain, 185 Google Maps, 104–6, 109, 123–24, 179 Google search, 8, 14–15 and image recognition algorithms, 145–46, 148–51 and navigation problems, 111–13 profit motive, 191–92 and supervised machine learning, 64 word embedding model, 57–58, 61 GPA scores, 8, 65 GPS data and correlated equilibrium solutions, 114 and limitations of differential privacy, 50 and navigation problems, 104 and scope of topics covered, 19–20 gradient descent problems, 110 Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon), 117–18, 120 greed, 177 Group Insurance Commission (GIC), 22–23 harms causes by algorithms, 14–15 Hawking, Stephen, 179 health records, 36 health risk assessment, 8 hedge funds, 140–41 Hellman, Deborah, 193–94 Helmand Province, Afghanistan, 50–51 heuristics, 122 high-dimensional problems, 110 Hill, Austin Bradford, 34 Hinton, Geoffrey, 133 hiring practices, 61–62 historical data, 91, 173–74 Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP), 27 human judgment and oversight, 82–84, 190–92.

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy
by Robert W. McChesney
Published 5 Mar 2013

To the extent that both celebrants and skeptics consider capitalism, they often do so in almost mythical form. It is high time to recognize the elephant in the room. Political economy should be the organizing principle for evaluating the digital revolution for numerous reasons. The ways capitalism works and does not work determine the role the Internet might play in society. The profit motive, commercialism, public relations, marketing, and advertising—all defining features of contemporary corporate capitalism—are foundational to any assessment of how the Internet has developed and is likely to develop. Any attempt to make sense of democracy divorced from its relationship to capitalism is dubious.

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“Information about users is what really matters.”186 Turow concludes, “The emerging trajectory suggests that apart from a relatively few elite-oriented publishers (New York Times, Atlantic, and the like), the pressure to bring personalization synced to marketing goals will be difficult for companies to avoid if they want to survive.”187 This should not really be a surprise; advertisers always supported media for opportunistic reasons, because they had no better options. Now they have better options, and consequently much of the media can get thrown overboard. The profit motive pushes this process into new and dangerous frontiers quickly. Increasingly, research—“persuasion profiling”—determines what types of sales pitches are most effective with each individual, and ads are tailored accordingly. Moreover, researchers are now working on “sentiment analysis,” to see what mood a person is in at a particular moment and what products and sales pitches would be most effective.188 Advertisers are at work developing emotional analysis software so webcams can monitor how one’s face responds to what is on the screen.

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Two matters are beyond debate: First, journalism in the manner I described it in chapter 3 is mandatory, not only so people can participate in the central political and communication policy issues outlined in this book, but also so there can be a democratic society wherein individual liberties are meaningful. Second, current journalism is in decline and disarray. If there are any doubts about the second point, the evidence presented below should eliminate them. We are in a political crisis of existential dimensions. Two outstanding questions arise. First, will the Internet, the profit motive, citizens, and assorted nonprofit groups combine in some manner to generate a higher grade of journalism sufficient to empower self-government? I argue herein, drawing from the foundation I provided in chapter 3, that the celebrants have either greatly undervalued the importance of having independent competing institutions and resources to do journalism—especially living wages for reporters—or they have overestimated the capacity of the market to produce such a system, or both.

Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe
by Antony Loewenstein
Published 1 Sep 2015

The role in those countries of privatized militaries and intelligence gatherers, both foreign and domestic, prompted me to visit them. This is a murky world, far away from the slick rhetoric deployed in London, Washington, and Canberra, where I met muscled contractors making a packet in the pursuit of a profit motive that has nothing to do with democracy or freedom. These forces partly explain the successful insurgencies against Westerners in these states and Iraq. Greece has suffered under harsh economic policies more than most Western countries. The rise of the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn is a logical outcome of this failed economic model.

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He had few bad words to say about Karzai and his rule, dismissing the persistent corruption allegations. (He told me after we finished the interview that it was his “responsibility to not talk down Afghanistan when it’s in need of much help.”) Moradian was more forthcoming when I asked him about the presence of PMCs and intelligence-gathering companies in the country. He said that when the “profit motive is supreme,” there would inevitably be negative outcomes. He blamed people in Washington for allowing this system to thrive after 9/11, and said the companies that benefited from it should not be operating in Afghanistan. Again, he steadfastly refused to blame Karzai or his relatives for this trend.

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On the last day of the conference, I took an ACA-organized tour of Utah’s oldest prison, the Wasatch County Jail. It housed murderers, rapists, and fraudsters. The setting of the center was spectacular, with soaring mountains on the horizon, though the facility’s buildings were mostly old and forbidding. Wasatch was a public prison but was nevertheless governed by the profit motive. Utah Correctional Industries (UCI) was based here—a business employing prisoners at low wages to produce furniture, printing services, and license plates for the people of Utah. Its stated aim was to teach prisoners the vital skills they would need upon release, but the labor overseen in the prison had more to do with profit than rehabilitation.

Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium
by Carl Sagan
Published 11 May 1998

These consequences seem so unpleasant and so expensive to fix that naturally there has been a serious effort to find something wrong with the story. Some of the efforts are motivated by nothing more than the standard scientific skepti- 136 • Billions and Billions cism about all new ideas; others are motivated by the profit motive in the affected industries. One key issue is feedback. There are both positive and negative feedbacks possible in the global climate system. Positive feedbacks are the dangerous kind. Here's an example of a positive feedback: The temperature increases a little bit because of the greenhouse effect and so some polar ice melts.

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Along with progress in literacy such trends are the allies of JefFersonian democracy. On the other hand what passes for literacy in America in the late twentieth century is a very rudimentary knowledge of the English language, and television in particular tends to seduce the mass population away from reading. In pursuit of the profit motive, it has dumbed itself down to lowest-common-denominator programming—instead of rising up to teach and inspire. From paper clips, rubber bands, hair dryers, ballpoint pens, computers, dictating and copying machines, electric mixers, microwave ovens, vacuum cleaners, dish and clothes washers and driers, widespread interior and street lights, to automobiles, aviation, machine tools, hydroelectric power plants, assembly line manufacturing, and enormous construction equipment, the technology of our century has eliminated drudgery, created more leisure time, and enhanced the lives of many.

Who Needs the Fed?: What Taylor Swift, Uber, and Robots Tell Us About Money, Credit, and Why We Should Abolish America's Central Bank
by John Tamny
Published 30 Apr 2016

Oh, well, one can dream. Until then, readers will see that credit is not money but actual resources. Those resources are created in the private sector exclusively, and that’s why economically free societies almost as a rule have credit in abundance. They are rich in credit because private actors, disciplined by the profit motive, are actively producing what the markets desire. Those businesses that don’t satisfy market demands are starved of the resources they’re attempting to deploy so that someone more skilled can replace them. Government cannot create credit, but it can destroy it, as the descriptions of government spending reveal.

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As this chapter has hopefully made rather plain, savings vehicles and innovative sources of credit continue to appear well outside of a banking system that is no longer allowed to innovate. If the bank branches some of us still rely on vanish, entrepreneurs will eagerly fill the void. We don’t spend evenings worried about where the shoes, computers, and cars we rely on will come from. In a profit-motivated capitalist society, they simply reach us in varying brands, sizes, and price points in return for our own production. Savings and borrowing vehicles are no different from shoes, and they’ll always be there. They will be because in a largely free society we’ll continue to create credit. That’s why we get up in the morning.

Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs
by Ken Kocienda
Published 3 Sep 2018

This seemingly paradoxical corporate strategy had its roots with Richard Stallman, a renowned programmer and technology activist, a man who believed all software should be free. Stallman railed against companies like Microsoft and Apple, which sold software for money, but kept the source code, the software instructions written by programmers, as a proprietary trade secret. In Stallman’s idiosyncratic belief system, mixing computer code and the profit motive formed a toxic brew whose ill effects compelled companies to hoard the intellectual effort required to write programs and turned software development into a zero-sum game that impeded the advance of technology to the detriment of the human race. If you’re not a programmer, free software might echo with sixties-style hippie idealism.

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Nothing worked smoothly. Our software update feature was riddled with bugs that often broke programs while trying to update them. Our code to connect Nautilus to our cloud services didn’t work at all. The Nautilus team had persistent problems coordinating with GNOME—the loose structure and lack of profit motive of the free software community meant that they did not share our money-making goals or care to coordinate with us so we could meet our delivery schedules. All these setbacks caused delay after delay. Several months into my stint at the company, these problems were becoming unavoidable, and our management went looking for help to whip our software into shape.

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
by Safiya Umoja Noble
Published 8 Jan 2018

The MegaTech example is an illustration of the fact that social media companies and platforms make active decisions about what kinds of racist, sexist, and hateful imagery and content they will host and to what extent they will host it. These decisions may revolve around issues of “free speech” and “free expression” for the user base, but on commercial social media sites and platforms, these principles are always counterbalanced by a profit motive; if a platform were to become notorious for being too restrictive in the eyes of the majority of its users, it would run the risk of losing participants to offer to its advertisers. So MegaTech erred on the side of allowing more, rather than less, racist content, in spite of the fact that one of its own CCM team members argued vociferously against it and, by his own description, experienced emotional distress (“meltdowns”) around it.80 This research by Roberts, particularly in the wake of leaked reports from Facebook workers who perform content moderation, suggests that people and policies are put in place to navigate and moderate content on the web.

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INDEX Figures are indicated by italics. Adelsohn Liljeroth, Lena, 95, 97 advertising: impact on society, 105–6; before the internet, 173–75; role in search results, 11, 16, 24, 36, 38, 54. See also commercial interests; search engine optimization advertising companies, 5, 50, 123; bias, 89, 105–6, 116; profit motive, 36, 124; role in search results, 24, 38, 40–41, 56. See also Google Search affirmative action, 12, 174 African-American community, hair salon, 173–74 African sexuality, 94–95 Airbnb rental discrimination, 163 algorithmic oppression, 1–2, 4, 10, 80, 84, 173 algorithms: big data bias, 29, 31, 36; conceptualizations, 24; democratic practices online debunked, 49; discriminatory effect, 6, 13, 28, 85, 173, 175–76; perception of neutrality, 37, 44, 56, 171; “racist algorithms,” 9; reflection of programmers, 1, 26.

The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future
by Gretchen Bakke
Published 25 Jul 2016

And, because it’s America, the whole shebang needs to convey a profit into somebody’s pocket. Almost all the big utilities are investor-owned, which means they have shareholders who have been promised at least the occasional dividend. Corners get cut in order to ensure that this flow of cash continues apace, and decisions get made with profit motives in mind that brook little concern for the particular capacities, and incapacities, of the grid. We may imagine the grid as primarily a machine to make and move electricity, but integral from the very start was that it also make and move vast quantities of money. A lot of people are still happy with this way of doing things.

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Renewables have just made these entanglements impossible to ignore; they stress the existing system just enough that all the delicate balances reached over the passage of a century are thrown off-kilter. As all of these diverse bits of what make our grid work interlock and entangle, there just isn’t a lot of room for quick action. Once people with politics and profit motives get their fingers into the briar patch, it seems at times like there is no room to act at all. This was the situation into which the equivalent output of two nuclear power plants was suddenly poured that mid-May day back in 2010. The only real option was to shut down the wind turbines. Switch the beasts off.

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The problem with the Swiss cheese model, which is otherwise remarkably robust (we have it to thank for the past thirty years in which flying has been consistently safer than driving; even frequent fliers are more likely to be killed in a lawn mower accident than an airplane crash), is that the grid, like any complex mechanical system, is not just a machine but also the regulatory, business, cultural, and natural environments within which this machine functions. The grid is the physics, mechanics, engineering, construction, management, upkeep, and use internal to itself. It is also the storms, earthquakes, laws, hatreds (and other personal opinions), and profit motives that surround the mechanism, that change over time, and that can differ drastically between one state, one city, one climactic zone and the next. In the case of the grid these “external to the cheese” circumstances are not necessarily conducive to the machine’s capacity to function well and strongly.

Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible
by William N. Goetzmann
Published 11 Apr 2016

Guanzi identified money as the fundamental medium of the equilibration between supply and demand for goods. It recognized it as a tool to achieve the goals of the state. It proposed—and perhaps even implemented—monetarist policies. More subtly, Guanzi highlighted the role that profit-seeking incentives play in society. The invisible hand of the market functions because of the profit motive. Most of Guanzi’s “subtle” devices make use of this natural human desire. 9 UNITY AND BUREAUCRACY Paper banknote from the Ming dynasty, ca. 1375–1425 CE. Printed on mulberry bark paper with a copper plate, the note depicts the equivalent value in strings of coins. Fiat money that has value by government decree was invented in China.

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The tools and financial concepts important to the development of Chinese civilization are different from those that were most useful in the West. The scale and scope of China led, early on, to theories about management based on an understanding of economic incentives and oversight. Among these are, on the one hand, the profit motive and on the other hand the control of corruption by oversight, annual accounting, and reporting. The early Chinese mathematical text discussed in Chapter 8 considered many problems of how to measure and account for labor production, as well as problems of how to calculate wastage that occurs in construction and manufacturing.

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See also bonds; equity investments; interest; return on investment; stock markets Investment: An Exact Science (Lowenfeld), 414–16 investment bankers: eighteenth-century Dutch, 399; financial crisis of 2008 and, 285; world’s first, 399 Investment Company Act of 1940, 501, 502 investment trusts, 473–74, 482, 499–502; Fisher’s recommendation for, 506; overvalued in 1920s, 484. See also mutual funds Investors Management Company, 501–2 invisible hand: Athenian grain trade and, 102; failures of World Bank and, 460; financial mathematics and, 283, 288; Guanzi’s use of profit motive and, 166, 171. See also market system iron industry, in eighteenth-century France, 381 iron mining: Chinese, 196; near Frobisher Bay, 314, 315 iron money, of Sichuan, 183–84 iron monopoly of Chinese state, 174 Irrational Exuberance (Shiller), 331–32 Ismail Pasha, 419–21 James II of England, 322 James River Company, 394 Jefferson, Peter, 389 Jiang Shang, 153, 154 Jiangsu Dasheng Group Company, 434 jiaozi, 184–85, 186 Jixia Academy, 155–57, 160–61 joint-stock companies: Age of Discovery and, 307; Bubble Act and, 380; in eighteenth-century England, 328, 338, 366, 380; Honor del Bazacle as, 300, 307; Muscovy company as, 309; in nineteenth-century China, 431–32, 437; Rotterdam insurance company as, 366.

Suburban Nation
by Andres Duany , Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck
Published 14 Sep 2010

A pro-community panelist at the NAHB convention can’t help but feel like a flower child at boot camp. Homebuilders, land developers, and marketing advisers are all constituencies that must be won over if the campaign against suburban sprawl is to succeed. Their participation will be meaningful in the long run only if it is driven by the profit motive, because in America at the millennium, ideas live or die based upon their performance in the marketplace. While there are ways in which government intervention is necessary—most obviously in rolling back the federal, state, and municipal policies that continue to promote sprawl—sprawl will not become obsolete by changing laws alone.

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Now that citizens have earned a position in the planning process, it is their duty to become experts in good design, and to demand the same from those in charge. In this regard, it is worth repeating the five truths most often misconstrued by citizens and government alike: • Growth cannot be stopped; it never has been. The only hope is to shape it into a more benevolent form, the neighborhood. • The profit motive is not the problem with development. The best neighborhoods in America were built for profit. • Most issues are interrelated. Traffic, housing, schools, crime, and the environment can be successfully addressed only if taken together, within the context of the neighborhood. • Planners and other professionals are specialists who, when left to themselves, distort the issues.

The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger
by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
Published 1 Jan 2009

As wartime leaders knew, if a society has to pull together, policies must be seen to be fair and income differences have to be reduced. Figure 15.4 More equal countries recycle a higher proportion of their waste. 16 Building the future Turning corporations loose and letting the profit motive run amok is not a prescription for a more liveable world. Tom Scholz, Interview with the Sierra Club Before discussing what should be done to make our societies more equal, it is worth pointing out that focusing attention on the inequalities within them does not mean ignoring the international inequalities between rich and poor countries.

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There are others which continue to destroy ecosystems, land and water supplies, to exploit mineral resources where governments are too weak or corrupt to stand up to them, and still others use their patents to prevent life-saving drugs being sold at affordable prices in poorer countries. There are reasons to think that employee-owned companies might maintain higher standards of morality even with the profit motive. In conventional employment people are specifically hired to work for purposes which are not their own. They are paid to use their expertise to whatever purpose their employer chooses. You might disagree with the purpose to which your work is being put, you might not even know what the purpose is, but you are not employed to have opinions about such things and certainly not to express them.

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization
by Alexander R. Galloway
Published 1 Apr 2004

“When computers become available to everybody,” wrote Stewart Brand in 1972, “the hackers take over: We are all Computer Bums, all more empowered as individuals and as cooperators.”53 Or as McKenzie Wark writes, “Whatever code we hack, be it programming language, poetic language, math or music, curves or colourings, we create the possibility of new things entering the world.”54 Thus, I suggest that the hacker’s unique connection to the realm of the possible, via protocol that structures itself on precisely that threshold of possibility, gives the hacker special insight into the nature of utopia—what he or she wants out of computers. Once of the most important signs of this utopian instinct is the hacking community’s anti-commercial bent. Software products have long been developed and released into the public domain, with seemingly no profit motive on the side of the authors, simply for the higher glory of the code itself. “Spacewar was not sold,” Steven Levy writes, referring to the early video game developed by several early computer enthusiasts at MIT. “Like any other 51. Another is the delightfully schizophrenic Ted Nelson, inventor of hypertext.

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“In its basic assembly structure,” writes Andrew Ross, “information technology involves processing, copying, replication, and simulation, and therefore does not recognize the concept of private information property.”57 Commercial ownership of software is the primary impediment hated by all hackers because it means that code is limited—limited by intellectual property laws, limited by the profit motive, limited by corporate “lamers.” Even Kevin Mitnick, a hacker maligned by some for his often unsavory motivations, admits that the code itself has a higher priority than any commercial motivation: You get a better understanding of the cyberspace, the computer systems, the operating systems, how the computer systems interact with one another, that basically, was my motivation behind my hacking activity in the past, it was just from the gain of knowledge and the thrill of adventure, nothing that was well and truly sinister such as trying to get any type of monetary gain or anything.58 55.

The New Economics: A Bigger Picture
by David Boyle and Andrew Simms
Published 14 Jun 2009

Energy consumption is profitable under this narrow interpretation of economics, but energy conservation is more problematic, so we consume. Health care consumption is profitable in the short term for providers, preventative health is not, so we become consumers of health ‘solutions’. The pre-eminent profit motive also makes companies grow to increase their profits and grow yet more. This is facilitated by financial institutions, which have themselves grown to an enormous scale, but which also profit from arranging mergers and acquisitions in the business world. In the public sector, cost considerations, and the desire to centralize control, fosters a culture where bigger is better, and narrow economic efficiency considerations preclude holistic approaches and local participation in the delivery of public services.

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Other books to read David Boyle (1999) Funny Money, HarperCollins, London David Boyle, Sherry Clark and Sarah Burns (2006) Hidden Work, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, London Colin Hines (2000) Localization: A Global Manifesto, Earthscan, London Alison Ravetz (2008) ‘Is the government trying to abolish illness?’, New Statesman, 5 May James Robertson and Joseph Huber (2000) Creating New Money, New Economics Foundation, London Shann Turnbull (1975) New Money Sources and Profit Motives for Democratising the Wealth of Nations, Company Directors Association, Sydney Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Tim Jackson, Nic Marks, Jon Ralls and S. Strymne (1997) An Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare for the UK 1950–1996, Centre for Environmental Strategy, University of Surrey, Guildford. Robert Lacey and Dabby Danziger (1999) The Year 1000: What Life was Like at the Turn of the Last Millennium, Little, Brown, London.

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation
by Grace Blakeley
Published 9 Sep 2019

Socialising ownership would ensure that economic growth and development benefit everyone — if everyone has a stake in the economy, then when the economy grows, we all get better off. But it is the democratic aspect of democratic socialism that is truly revolutionary. Rather than organising production based on the profit motive, working people would come together to determine their collective goals and how best to achieve them. Rather than working purely to maximise profits, we would be working to maximise our collective prosperity, which includes the health and happiness of people and planet. Building the Future Visions of the future abound.

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Capitalist political and economic institutions attempt to contain complexity by subjecting capitalist societies to rigid hierarchies, in which owners have all the wealth and power. But, as Marx has shown us, such institutional configurations — whatever their nature, from socially democratic to free-market libertarian — cannot contain the chaos unleashed by the profit motive. When these institutions can no longer control the contradictions they were designed to accommodate, they strain, and even break. Such periods are marked by political, legal, and social upheaval, frequent transitions of power, and even revolutions. The decade since the financial crisis has been one such period.

How to Kill a City: The Real Story of Gentrification
by Peter Moskowitz
Published 7 Mar 2017

So to answer the question of why gentrification happens, we have to answer the question of how the city became profitable to gentrify. Cities do not gentrify unless the process is profitable for real estate developers. Yes, hipsters and yuppies can move into a neighborhood and inflate local real estate values, but it is developers’ profit motive that causes massive, citywide change. The city wasn’t always profitable. Up until the 1960s, developers could make much more money in the suburbs—buying land cheaply, constructing single-family houses, and taking advantage of a burgeoning mortgage industry to sell to the (mostly white) middle and upper classes.

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Dan Gilbert’s favorite business phrase—“Do well by doing good”—seems to be the official slogan of the new Detroit, embraced by hundreds of young white entrepreneurs who believe they’re not only making money but helping rescue an entire city. That’s why speaking with Midtown Inc.’s Sue Mosey was refreshing. She can talk about the profit motive of the new Detroit without resorting to euphemisms for trickle-down economics. The biggest problem, Mosey told me, is that there is practically no city government left in Detroit. Midtown Inc., which has no accountability to anyone except those who fund it (developers and nonprofits such as the Kresge Foundation), has become the de facto department of planning for its section of the city.

Mastering the Market Cycle: Getting the Odds on Your Side
by Howard Marks
Published 30 Sep 2018

The number of hours worked by each person with a job likewise varies with economic conditions—businesses shorten work weeks when demand for goods is low, and they authorize overtime when demand is high (until demand is strong enough to call for more hiring or another shift). Aspiration—The profit motive and the desire to live better are among the forces that drive workers (and thus societies) to work harder and to produce more. It might be tempting to think of these things as universal, but they aren’t. For example, the profit motive was pretty much excluded from the economic system under the Soviets, and the willingness to work more is constrained in other economies (to wit, I’ve watched workers clock out at European banks—not to prove that they had worked until 5:00 as in the U.S., but rather that they had left by 5:00 and thus hadn’t exceeded the 35-hour work week).

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work
by Richard Baldwin
Published 10 Jan 2019

Babson College professor Tom Davenport says, “The pay of the average managing director at Goldman will probably get even bigger, as there are fewer lower-level people to share the profits with.”34 The examples are endless and growing since many jobs in finance involve doing things that white-collar robots are really good at, namely—making fast decisions based on tons of data. And this job displacement could go much further. Marty Chavez, Goldman’s deputy chief financial officer notes that investment banking is in for the globot treatment. Investment bankers involved in mergers and acquisitions earn, on average, $700,000 a year, so the profit motive for slimming the numbers is clear. While many of the skills—like selling ideas and building relationships—will stay with humans, the company has identified over a hundred specific tasks that could be automated. In 2018, former Deutsche Bank chief executive John Cryan guessed that that up to half of the German bank’s workforce could be replaced by technology.

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The main point to keep in mind here is that the geniuses at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Infosys, IBM, and so on are not working to create new jobs. They are working to displace them. When it comes to the other type of globot—telemigrants—the mistmatched speed point is less clear as yet. Freelancing is booming but so far it mostly involves domestic workers, not telemigrants. The intentionality is also less clear. Profit motives are surely behind employers’ ramping up their use of freelancers, but to date much of this has been creating jobs for domestic workers. For example, the online payment company, Paychex, studied over 400,000 freelancers’ resumes that were posted on Indeed.com (a job matching website). What they found was that “for the majority of the 1970s, ’80s, and even ’90s, working generally meant heading off to a typical 9-to-5 job.

The Capitalist Manifesto
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Jun 2023

17 What, then, is the secret and ingenious power that governs this complicated system that everybody seems to have such trust in even if they barely give a thought to its existence (except for that one time when what they are looking for is not on the shelf)? That power is nothing but prices and the profit motive. All information is local and it is not even always available to ourselves. I do not know how much coffee I want next week, or how important it is for me to drink the coffee from a cardboard cup that allows the drink’s aroma to float out while I drink. The steel industry does not know if their products are currently best needed for frames for glasses, refrigerators or cars.

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If the planners thought that a certain form of production was a priority, it received the material and energy it needed. In the socialist system, the factories faced no pressure to constantly streamline production in order to cope with competition from others who were better at managing materials and energy. It is very different in a capitalist economy with competition, profit motives and free pricing. The company that comes up with methods to reduce the thickness of a soda can by just a tenth of a millimetre can earn millions in material costs (something that has reduced its weight from 85 to 13 grams in a century). This means that production is constantly being revolutionized.

The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey
by Michael Huemer
Published 29 Oct 2012

Just as none of Milgram’s subjects would have decided on their own to go out and electrocute anyone, very few Germans would have decided, on their own, to go out murdering Jews. Respect for authority was Hitler’s key weapon. The same is true of all of the greatest man-made evils. No one has ever managed, working alone, to kill over a million people. Nor has anyone ever arranged such an evil by appealing to the profit motive, pure self-interest, or moral suasion to secure the cooperation of others – except by relying on institutions of political authority. With the help of such institutions, many such crimes have been carried out, accounting for tens of millions of deaths, along with many more ruined lives. It is possible that such institutions also serve crucial social functions and forestall other enormous evils.

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Therefore, a government has less cause to wish to eliminate rival governments than a protection agency has to wish to eliminate rival agencies. These are valid considerations. On the other hand, there seem to be several reasons for expecting the problem of intergovernmental warfare to be more serious than that of interagency warfare: i) Business leaders tend to be driven chiefly by the profit motive. Government leaders are more likely to be driven by ideology or the desire for power. Because of the enormous costs of armed conflict, the latter motivations are much more likely motives for armed conflict than the desire for financial gain. ii) Due to their monopolistic positions, governments can afford to make extremely large and costly errors without fear of being supplanted.

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Just as citizens of a democratic state believe that public officials should promote justice, the members of an anarchy may hold that protection agencies and arbitration firms should promote justice. However much efficacy that kind of social norm has in policing human behavior, the anarchist may harness it just as well as the statist. 10.6 Security for the poor Another concern is that security agencies, driven by the profit motive, will cater solely to the rich, leaving the poor defenseless against criminals. 10.6.1 Do businesses serve the poor? Unfortunately, there are no actual societies with a free market in security. We can, however, examine societies with relatively free markets in a variety of other goods and services.

The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet
by Brett Christophers
Published 12 Mar 2024

But a study carried out by experts suggested that even this was too optimistic in the case specifically of the Dogger Bank project, calculating the expected IRR to be just 3.6 per cent, and equating to a payback period of a minimum of seventeen years.56 No wonder that when, the following year, Equinor approached BP – another European oil company that had said in the recent past that it would move into lower-emissions activities but which has found such ambition to be fundamentally incompatible with the profit motive – about joining it in competing for new wind power rights off the coast of California, the response was negative. BP, reported Jenny Strasburg in early 2023, had increasingly become ‘disappointed in the returns from some of [its own] renewable investments’, and was therefore planning to ‘dial back elements of [its] high-profile push into renewable energy’.

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Reporting in late 2022, China’s electricity regulator said that the power supply situation in the aforementioned parts of the country was ‘severe’ and that across the first nine months of the year, the fuel costs of China’s coal-fired plants were around $40 billion higher than 2021’s already inflated levels.21 Another important way in which China foreshadowed subsequent experiences elsewhere in the world was in how the profit motive, and generators’ understandable compulsion to prioritize it, tended to worsen matters. One research organization estimated that, in September 2021, on account of the dynamics identified in the previous paragraphs, Chinese coal-fired plants were on average operating at a loss of around $0.02 per kWh of output.22 Indeed, the authorities themselves later conceded that making a loss had become more or less endemic in the sector: as of October 2022, more than half of the country’s state-owned coal power companies, by Beijing’s own admission, remained in the red.23 Unsurprisingly, many generators, and especially those in the private sector, were highly reluctant to continue to generate if doing so meant continuing to incur losses.

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In the face of all the evidence to the contrary, Germany’s finance minister, Christian Lindner, for instance, was shameless enough to write in the Financial Times in early 2023 that the European and global energy crisis had served to ‘confirm the effectiveness of a market-based approach’ to energy supply – and served, for good measure, to ‘show that we should also rely on price signals when it comes to reducing CO2 emissions’.68 In New York state, the BPRA was up against not only relatively robust such faith in markets and the profit motive, but also determined organizational lobbying.69 This decisive combination of factors had, of course, been enough already in the US to see off the prospect nationally of a meaningful Green New Deal. President Biden’s climate-focused Inflation Reduction Act of August 2022 was, in reality, a pale imitation of the vision on which Sanders had campaigned two years previously – a ‘dwarf GND’, as one commentator has felicitously put it.70 Meanwhile, across the world, renewables continue to substitute for conventional generating sources far, far too slowly.

Oil Panic and the Global Crisis: Predictions and Myths
by Steven M. Gorelick
Published 9 Dec 2009

The Stone Age came to an end, not because we had a lack of stones, and the oil age will come to an end not because we have a lack of oil.”8 The Energy Information Administration (EIA), which is part of the US Department of Energy, says that only 4–7 percent of the world’s original in-place liquid petroleum has been recovered.9 Individuals ranging from oil company executives to energy consultants to academic economists firmly believe that any concerns about global depletion in the foreseeable future are premature for several reasons – oil is abundant, we have only consumed a fraction of the global oil endowment, technology to discover and extract new oil has consistently proven out, and the profit motive combined with the law of supply and demand will prevail.10–13 Why is our oil future so uncertain? What are the underlying data, analyses, and philosophies that lead to predictions of global oil depletion by some End of the Oil Era 3 versus the conviction by others that the current state of alarm is unjustified and just crying wolf?

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As one study of California gasoline prices put it, “After crude oil and wholesale gasoline prices peak and start to decline, retail prices may still be “digesting” the effects of the previous increase, even while starting to reflect the decrease as well.”77 However, there is another and perhaps more fundamental reason for the higher price of gasoline even after the oil price has declined: the profit motive of the outlet. An outlet owner can continue to sell gasoline at the higher price, since consumers have become used to paying it. What stops the outlet owner? The Global Oil Landscape 49 At some point, competing stations lower their prices, forcing other stations to lower theirs. From a market standpoint, such pricing behavior is not gouging because the station owner is not trying to extract a price and profit higher than the market will bear.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
Published 1 Oct 2015

In this repression, what has been lost is that ambition to produce ‘a world that exceeds – existentially, aesthetically, as well as politically – the miserable confines of bourgeois culture’.54 But as an apparently universal and irrepressible characteristic of human cultures, utopian thinking can surge forth under even the most repressive conditions.55 Utopian inclinations play out across the human spectrum of feelings and affects – embodied in popular culture, high culture, fashion, city planning, and even quotidian daydreaming.56 The popular desire for space exploration, for instance, points to a curiosity and ambition that lies beyond the profit motive.57 The like-minded trend of afro-futurism offers not only a highly stylised image of a better future, but also ties it to a radical critique of existing structures of oppression and a remembrance of past struggles. The post-work imaginary also contains numerous historical precedents in utopian writing, pointing to a constant striving to move beyond the constraints of wage labour.

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See Weeks, Problem with Work, pp. 213–18. 50.Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), p. 15. 51.Patricia Reed, ‘Seven Prescriptions for Accelerationism’, in Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, eds, #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014), pp. 528–31. 52.Wendy Brown, ‘Resisting Left Melancholy’, Boundary 2 26: 3 (1999). 53.Paul Mason, Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions (London: Verso, 2012), pp. 66–73. 54.Mark Fisher, ‘Going Overground’, K-Punk, 5 January 2014, at k-punk.org. 55.Bloch, Principle of Hope. 56.Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), p. 37; Weeks, Problem with Work, pp. 190–3; Geoghegan, Utopianism and Marxism, p. 20. 57.Curiously, this lack of a profit motive has led some on the left to see space exploration perversely as a ‘capitalist utopia’. George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici, ‘Mormons in Space’, in George Caffentzis, In Letters of Blood and Fire (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), p. 65. 58.Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus (Notes Towards an Investigation)’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review, 2001), pp. 88–9. 59.Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 10. 60.Mary Morgan and Malcolm Rutherford, ‘American Economics: The Character of the Transformation’, History of Political Economy 30 (1998). 61.G.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
by Clay Shirky
Published 28 Feb 2008

Instead, they would have to send messages out to many more people than would actually attend, in hopes of reaching the right audience, advertising to photographers, hipsters, New Yorkers, and so on, in hope of getting the tiny fraction of those groups who would actually go. Most such ads would be seen by people who weren’t going to the parade, while most of the people who were going wouldn’t see (or pay attention to) the ads. Given those obstacles, no business in the world would take on the job. The profit motive is little help; no one could sell enough pictures, even the skull-bikini ones, to be able to pay the photographers, much less leave any profit afterward. Likewise, no nonprofit or government agency would touch the problem; even the porkiest of pork-barrel projects isn’t going to cover publicity for hula-hooping mermaids.

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The cost of all kinds of group activity—sharing, cooperation, and collective action—have fallen so far so fast that activities previously hidden beneath that floor are now coming to light. We didn’t notice how many things were under that floor because, prior to the current era, the alternative to institutional action was usually no action. Social tools provide a third alternative: action by loosely structured groups, operating without managerial direction and outside the profit motive. From Sharing to Cooperation to Collective Action For the last hundred years the big organizational question has been whether any given task was best taken on by the state, directing the effort in a planned way, or by businesses competing in a market. This debate was based on the universal and unspoken supposition that people couldn’t simply self-assemble; the choice between markets and managed effort assumed that there was no third alternative.

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality
by Don Watkins and Yaron Brook
Published 28 Mar 2016

Even in countries whose educational systems are comparatively successful (when judged by test scores, anyway), such as Finland or Japan, turning schools into state monopolies has rendered the entire field of education disturbingly stagnant. Nowhere do we see the diversity, choice, and innovation that define the high-tech industry. In the U.S., however, things are much worse. By almost every measure we are falling behind the rest of the world, yet because there is no competition or profit motive to punish poor performers and reward great achievers, there is no reason to expect things will get better any time soon. There are few innovators devoting their efforts to creating the educational equivalent of an Apple or a Google, and the innovators who do try to change the field are highly constrained by the government.

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–Peter Boettke, University Professor of Economics and Philosophy, George Mason University “Arguing the unarguable, Watkins and Brook blow the top off established wisdom on the evil of income inequality and the culpability of the 1%. Today’s one-sided debate on income inequality amounts to envy politics, not logic or fact, as these authors demonstrate in their explosive and entertaining book, Equal Is Unfair: America’s Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality. This book shows why the profit motive is noble and shows that government intervention in all areas of our lives—not income inequality—is what’s really threatening the American Dream. A must read for those who desire prosperity for more of the world’s people.” –Mallory Factor, New York Times bestselling author of Shadowbosses and Big Tent, FoxNews contributor and professor at The Citadel, Oxford University and Buckingham University Thank you for buying this St.

No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy
by Linsey McGoey
Published 14 Apr 2015

, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 149, no. 2 (2005), 126; see also Paul Schervish, ‘The Spiritual Horizons of Philanthropy: New Directions for Money and Motives,’ New Directions for Philanthropic Fundraising, vol. 29 (2000), 17–32. 26Edwards is one of the rare few who have pointed out the relevance of Smith to Bishop and Green’s notion. See Edwards, Small Change. 27Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Books 1–3 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982 [1776]), 292. 28Felix Salmon, ‘Philanthropy Can’t be Outsourced to the Profit Motive’, Reuters, 16 June 2011, at blogs.reuters.com. 29Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Liberal Communists of Porto Davos’, In These Times, 11 April 2006. 30Ray Madoff, ‘5 Myths About Payout Rules for Donor-Advised Funds,’ The Chronicle of Philanthropy, 13 January 2014. 31David Moore and Douglas Rutzen, ‘Legal Framework for Global Philanthropy: Barriers and Opportunities’, The International Journal of Not-for-Profit Law, vol. 13, no. 1–2 (2011), icnl.org. 32Emmanuel Saez, ‘Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States’ (2012), at eml.berkeley.edu.

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US Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, ‘Identifying and Implementing Educational Practices Supported by Rigorous Evidence: A User-Friendly Guide’ (December 2003). 26Michael Powell, ‘A Mayor Sure of Himself, if Nothing Else’, New York Times, 5 December 2011. 27Paul Tough, ‘Teachers Aren’t the Problem’, Slate, 5 September 2011. 28Michael Winerup, ‘Teachers Get Little Say in a Book About Them’, New York Times, 28 August 2011. 29Stephanie Saul, ‘Profits and Questions at Online Charter Schools’, New York Times, 12 December 2011. 30Ibid. 31On the prison industry, see in particular Cindy Chang, ‘Louisiana Incarcerated: How We Built the World’s Prison Capital: An Eight-Ppart Series’, Times-Picayune (May 2012). 32Stephanie Mencimer, ‘Jeb Bush’s Cyber Attack on Public Schools’, Mother Jones (November/December 2011). 33Mike McIntire, ‘Conservative Nonprofit Acts as a Stealth Business Lobbyist’, New York Times, 21 April 2012. 34Colin Woodward, ‘The Profit Motive Behind Virtual Schools in Maine’, Portland Press Herald, 2 September 2012. 35Stephanie Simon, ‘Private Firms Eyeing Profits From US Public Schools’, Reuters, 2 August 2012. 36See Valerie Strauss, ‘Privacy Concerns Grow Over Gates-funded Student Database’, Washington Post, 9 June 2013. 37Joanne Barkan, ‘Got Dough?

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity
by Byron Reese
Published 23 Apr 2018

This is a daunting amount, to be sure, but a possible one when compared with the potential of some of the sources we just discussed. We can expect major breakthroughs because the financial incentives are all there. We have seen the price of solar and other clean energies fall so dramatically because of the profit motive and the wealth that even small improvements in energy production bring about. There is no reason to believe that will change. No More War What about war in the Fourth Age? Are we going to enter an era in which AI weapons, such as those we discussed in chapter 12, cause a proliferation of war?

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We are building the opposite of that, so how is that not a force for peace? We are still a long way from ending war. The armament industry is still one of the three largest businesses on the planet. Ironically, the other two are food and medicine. In the United States, we got exactly what President Eisenhower warned us about, a permanent arms industry driven by the profit motive. Henry Ford once said, “Show me who makes a profit from war, and I’ll show you how to stop the war.” So it is likely that in the Fourth Age, spending on armaments won’t decline, and we will continue to make new and better weapons, including killer robots with AI. For a long time to come, nations will continue to expend vast storehouses of wealth to have lethal arsenals.

There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years
by Mike Berners-Lee
Published 27 Feb 2019

By now, the next sentence may be too obvious to be worth writing, but just to be clear: In the twenty-first century it is totally unhelpful to have organisations that exist primarily in order to make profit. That is different from saying that they mustn’t under any circumstance do so, but as a reason for existence, it is simply unfit for today’s world. The profit motive has to be yesterday’s thinking. If you work for an organisation like this, please challenge it and/or leave. If you feel you can’t do either then you are a bonded labourer. 160 7 BUSINESS AND TECHNOLOGY How can a business think systemically? There are lots of ways of doing this. There are also many thousands of consultants eager to help if you don’t want to do it all in-house.

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(Berners-Lee) 32, 147–48, 227 hydrocarbons/hydrogen 72 hydroelectric power 75 hydro storage 72 ice 228 ICT (information and communication technology), impacts 84–85, 113–14 imperial units 242–44 income tax see tax system India, global distribution of fossil fuel reserves 89–90 individual actions see personal actions and effects individualism 119, 225–26, 228 indoor farming 45–46, 67–68 inequality 228 and citizen’s wage 154 energy use 60, 90–91, 131 food distribution 15–16 global deals 210 population growth 150–51 prisons/prisoners 156 tax system 142–45, 144 trickledown of wealth 130–31, 130 and values 169–71 wealth distribution 130–35, 131–40, 132, 134 insecurity 172–73 interdependencies, global/societal 189–90 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 229 interstellar travel, impracticality of 117–18, 195, 237 interventionist economies 127–30 intrinsic motivation and values 143–44, 170–73 investment 140–42, 228–29 renewable energy sources 73, 87 sustainable farming 48–50 Index iodine, malnutrition 15 IPCC see Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Iraq, global distribution of fossil fuel reserves 89–90 Ireland, tax system 145 iron animal sources of food 19–20 malnutrition and inequalities of distribution 15 irrigation technology 45–46 Italy, wealth distribution 130–35, 133 Japan nuclear energy 76 sunlight/radiant energy 70, 70–71 Jevons paradox, energy efficiency 82–83 jobs see work/employment joined up perspectives 189–92, 221 journalists see media roles Kennedy, Bobby: speech on GNP 124 Keys to Performance (O’Connor) 180 kids 6–8, 187, 191, 229 kilocalories 12, 242–43 kinetic energy in a gas analogy 136–39 laboratory grown meat 45–46, 67–68 lag times, climate change 204–5 land requirements, sustainable travel 101–3, 102–3, 103–4 leadership 229–30 life expectancy, benefits of growth 123 life-minutes per person lost, diesel vehicles 109 lifestyles 4–5; see also personal actions and effects 283 limits to growth 221 big picture perspective 195 energy use 67–69, 68, 94–95, 208 21st century thinking skills 187–88 and values 170 local activities, appreciation of 123, 187–88, 191 local food, pros and cons 30–32, 230 luxury cruises 115–16 Maldives 210, 230 malnutrition 15–16 Marine Stewardship Council 33 market economies 127–30 materialistic values 174; see also consumption/consumerism maturity, need for 93, 121 Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution 136–38, 230, 265 measurement see metrics meat eating see animal sources of food media roles 231 promoting culture of truth 179–80 trust 182 messages, societal 172–74; see also values methane 79–81, 208–9, 231 metric units 242–44 metrics healthy economic growth 124–27 prisons/prisoners 156 and values 174 work/employment 151 micro-nutrients animal sources of food 19–20 malnutrition 15 Microsoft, carbon pricing scheme 147 mindfulness 174–75, 191, 193 284 misinformation 222 and trust 182, 184 and truth 175 and values 170 mitigation strategies, businesses 163–64 models, climate change 200–1, 204–5 molecular analogy of wealth distribution 136–39 Monbiot, George 236 motivation extrinsic/intrinsic 143–44, 172–73 and trust 181, 184 Musk, Elon 167 natural gas 224; see also fracking; methane neoliberalism 45, 129, 131, 172, 228, 232; see also free market Netherlands 70, 70–71, 149–50 neuroscience 232 nitrogen dioxide 108, 208–9 Norway 130–35, 138, 155–56 nuclear fusion 77, 232 nuclear power (fusion) 75–77, 231–32 obesity 16 ocean acidification 54–55, 232 O’Connor, Tim: Keys to Performance 180 oil 233; see also fossil fuels One Planet principles 160–62, 162 open-mindedness neuroscience 232 respect for 180 spirituality/belief systems 192 and trust 181–82, 184 optimism bias 233 over-simplification 182; see also complexity overeating 16 INDEX parental responsibility 233 Paris climate agreement 165–66 particulate air pollution 107–9 Patagonian Toothfish 33–34 pay rates 173; see also wealth distribution personal actions and effects 198–99, 233–34 air travel 112–13 antibiotics resistance 21 climate change 55 energy 97 feelings of insignificance in global systems 5–6 food/agricultural issues 30, 34–35, 40, 43, 50 population growth 150–51 promoting culture of truth 178–79 technological changes 168 values 174–75 wealth distribution 139 work/employment 153 ‘personal truths’ 176–77 perspectives big picture 186, 191, 195–97 businesses 159 joined up 189–92, 221 photocopying metaphor 219 photovoltaic technology 63–64, 66–67; see also solar energy physical growth mind-set 120 Planet B, lack of 117–18, 195, 237 planned economies 127–30 planning ahead, future scenarios 204–5 planning, urban 104 plastics 55–58, 56–57, 234 politicians see governmental roles; voting pollution, chicken farming 25–26; see also air pollution Index population growth 149–50, 234 feeding growing populations 46–47 investment in control measures 141, 150–51 personal actions and effects 150–51 risks of further growth 122 positive feedback mechanisms, climate change 200–1, 239 power, units of 242–43 prisons/prisoners 154–57, 157, 174, 234 problem-solving methods 5 profit-motive 159, 174 protein animal sources 17–18, 18 carbon footprints 23–25, 24 psychology 227–28 public service 174 questions and answers, reader contributions 194 reader contributions 9–10, 194 ready meals 238 rebalancing, evolutionary 6, 221 rebound effects 213, 235, 272 business strategies 163 climate change 52, 128, 165–66, 206–7, 206 energy efficiency 84, 207 virtual meetings 113–14 reductionism 189–90, 193 refugees 234–35 relatedness/belonging 266 religion 192–93 renewable energy sources 64, 208, 235 hydroelectric power 75 investment 141 limitations relative to fossil fuels 73–86, 85–87 285 using instead of/as well as fossil fuels 81–82 wind energy 73–74 see also biofuels; carbon capture and storage; solar energy respect 171, 180, 197 responsibility corporate 219 parents 233 super-rich 134–35 restaurants role food wastage 40 vegetarianism/veganism 28 retailing, food see food retailers revenge, prisoners 155–56 rice farming 29–30, 45–46, 235 rock weathering, carbon capture and storage 92 Rogers, Carl 172 Russia 210, 235 global distribution of fossil fuel reserves 89–90 sunlight/radiant energy 69–70, 70 Rwanda 70, 70–71, 172 salaries 173; see also wealth distribution Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) 164–66 scientific facts see facts scientific fundamentalism 176 scientific reductionism 189–90, 193 seabass, rebadging Patagonian toothfish as 33–34 sea travel 114–16, 235–36 self-awareness of simple/small/local 123, 187–88, 191 and trust 181, 184 self-reflection, 21st century thinking skills 188 286 sentient animals, treating decently 11, 17 shared-use vehicles 105–6 shareholder profits 159, 174 sharing 146 shifting baseline syndrome 236 shipping 114–16, 235–36 shock 236 simple things, appreciation of 123, 187–88, 191 simplistic thinking 182; see also complexity slavery and citizen’s wage 154 and employment 151 fishing industry 32, 34–35 slowing down 187–88, 196 small scale, appreciation of 123, 187–88, 191 Smith, Adam: The Wealth of Nations 129 social support structures, and values 173–74 solar energy 236 amount falling on earth 66 coping with intermittent sunlight 71–73 countries with highest radiant energy 69–71 countries with least radiant energy 70–71 relative to fossil fuel reserves 89 global distribution of radiant energy 69–71, 70 harnessing 66–67 South Korea, sunlight/radiant energy 70, 70–71 soya beans 21, 22, 236–37 space tourism 94, 100 spaceflight, impracticality of interstellar travel 117–18, 195, 237 INDEX Spain, wealth distribution 130–35, 133 spending practices, ethical consumerism 147–48, 168 spirituality/belief systems 192–93, 237 status symbols 173 sticking plasters (band aids) 237–38 storage of renewable energy 71–73 sunlight see solar energy supermarkets see food retailers super-rich responsibilities 134–35 taxation 145 wealth distribution 137 supply chains ethical consumerism 147–48 food and agriculture 48 science-based targets 165–66 systems approaches big picture perspective 196 businesses 159–62, 161 One Planet Living principles 160–62, 162 Taiwan, tax system 145 takeaways 238 tax system 238 carbon taxes 142–43 wealth distribution 138, 142–45 technological changes 239 agricultural 45–46 big picture perspective 195–96 business strategies 166–68 and economic growth 122–23 thinking skills big picture perspective 197 twenty-first century 185–92, 190–91 tipping points see trigger points town planning 104 transmission of renewable energy 73 Index travel and transport 99 air travel 110–14 autonomous cars 109–10 commuting 217 current rates 99–100, 100 cycling 116 diesel vehicles 107–9, 109 e-cars 106 food miles 30–32 future demands 100–1, 109–10 land needed for sustainable 101–3, 102–3, 103–4 sea travel 114–16 shared-use vehicles 105–6 spaceflight 117–18 urban 104–6 trickledown of wealth 130–31, 130, 239 trigger points, step changes in climate 2, 200–2 trust 180–84 truth 175–76, 239 big picture perspective 197 importance of seeking 177 media roles 179–80 ‘personal truths’ 176–77 promoting culture of 177–79 respect for 171 and trust 180–84 tsunami, December 2004 2 twenty-first century thinking skills 185–92, 190–91, 197 2-degree ‘safe limit’ for temperature rise 52, 200–1, 204–5, 239 unconditional positive regard 172 United Kingdom energy by end use 62, 62 gambling industry 139–40 nuclear energy 76 population growth 149–50 prisons/prisoners 155 287 sunlight/radiant energy 70, 70–71 wealth distribution 136–37 United States global distribution of fossil fuel reserves 89–90 prisons/prisoners 155–56 sunlight/radiant energy 69–70, 70 tax system 145 wealth distribution 130–35, 132–35 units, metric/imperial 242–44 urban planning 104 urban transport 104–6 value of human life 240 values 6–8, 169 big picture perspective 197 businesses 159, 174 changing for the better 172–75 and economics 119 evidence base for values choices 169–71 extrinsic/intrinsic 170–73 global cultural norms 171–72, 197 prisons/prisoners 156 technological changes 168 wealth distribution 132–33 work/employment 152–53 see also ethical consumerism vegetarianism/veganism 26–29 Venezuela, global distribution of fossil fuels 89–90 violent deaths 240 virtual travel 113–14 visions of future 8–9 businesses 159 vitamin A 15, 19–20, 247 voting, power of 240–41 climate change policies 51–53, 200–11 288 voting, power of (cont.) energy policies 59, 97 promoting culture of truth 178–80 see also democracy waking up 241 Wallis, Stewart 145 waste food 36–43, 241 mitigation 42–44, 43, 43 as proportion of food grown 12–15, 14 by region/type/processing stage 37, 38–39, 39 water use technology, in agriculture 45–46 watts 12, 242–43 wealth distribution economics 130–35, 131–40, 132, 134 tax system 138, 142–45, 144 see also inequality The Wealth of Nations (Smith) 129 INDEX weapons industry 152 weight, units of 244 wellbeing 241 benefits of growth 123 businesses, role of 158–59 and citizen’s wage 154 metrics of healthy growth 126 work/employment 151–52 Wellbeing Economy 267 wind energy 73–74 wisdom, need for 93, 121 work/employment 229 agricultural work 44–45, 222 and citizen’s wage 153–54 investment in sustainability 49–50 personal actions and effects 153 useful/beneficial 151–52 values 152–53 zinc 15, 19–20 

How Medicine Works and When It Doesn't: Learning Who to Trust to Get and Stay Healthy
by F. Perry Wilson
Published 24 Jan 2023

Scandals from the repressing of information about harms linked to Vioxx (a drug that was supposed to relieve pain), to the effects of thalidomide in pregnancy (which was designed to reduce nausea but led to severe birth defects), to the devastating heart problems caused by the diet pill fen-phen remind us that the profit motive can corrupt the best science. Alleged frauds like the linking of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism diagnoses pollute the waters of inquiry, launch billion-dollar businesses, and leave the public unsure of what to really believe. Why would I, a physician and researcher, highlight the failures of medical research?

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Measles, which was declared eradicated from the United States in the year 2000, has returned. And the narrative that Wakefield and his followers refined—fearmongering linking vaccines to devastating downstream outcomes—has become a hallmark of the resistance to vaccination against COVID-19, prolonging the deadly pandemic. To this day, Wakefield denies that there was a profit motive or fraud in the conduct of the Lancet study. Seeing the Red Flags Earlier chapters of this book explore how the careful application of logic and a few general rules of thumb can reveal whether the results of a study are worth trusting and acting upon. In the case of outright fraud, though, these techniques often fail.

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy
by David Gelles
Published 30 May 2022

It began as a backlash to European socialism during the Cold War, as scholars including Friedrich A. Hayek, an Austrian economist, began to advance the theory that free markets alone were the best way to address society’s needs. Only when businesses were allowed to compete unencumbered by regulation would the best ideas rise to the top, their thinking went. The profit motive, they believed, was the perfect sorting mechanism, capable of distinguishing the good ideas from the bad, and giving rise to the products, services, and systems that would benefit society at large. Competition was the paramount way to organize human activity, they stressed, and it was imperative that people stopped relying on the government—or worse, their employers—to ensure their well-being.

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“What does it mean to say that ‘business’ has responsibilities? Only people can have responsibilities,” he wrote. “Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.” It was a capitalistic cri de coeur, imploring executives to embrace the profit motive and governments to stay out of the way, and it would endure as the most influential piece of economic writing for generations. The same year that Friedman published his essay in the Times, a corporate attorney named Lewis Powell delivered a speech to an audience of Southern businessmen that set the stage for a new era of corporate meddling in politics.

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson
Published 20 Mar 2012

This is exactly what Spanish conquistadors had done, and what Santa Ana did in their footsteps. The reason that the United States had a banking industry that was radically better for the economic prosperity of the country had nothing to do with differences in the motivation of those who owned the banks. Indeed, the profit motive, which underpinned the monopolistic nature of the banking industry in Mexico, was present in the United States, too. But this profit motive was channeled differently because of the radically different U.S. institutions. The bankers faced different economic institutions, institutions that subjected them to much greater competition. And this was largely because the politicians who wrote the rules for the bankers faced very different incentives themselves, forged by different political institutions.

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By the 1940s, the leaders of the Soviet Union, even if not their admirers in the West, were well aware of these perverse incentives. The Soviet leaders acted as if they were due to technical problems, which could be fixed. For example, they moved away from paying bonuses based on output targets to allowing firms to set aside portions of profits to pay bonuses. But a “profit motive” was no more encouraging to innovation than one based on output targets. The system of prices used to calculate profits was almost completely unconnected to the value of new innovations or technology. Unlike in a market economy, prices in the Soviet Union were set by the government, and thus bore little relation to value.

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights
by Adam Winkler
Published 27 Feb 2018

Yet because the Supreme Court has rarely differentiated among the various types of corporations, even these cases resulted in greater constitutional protections for business.* Corporations have a straightforward motivation to seek constitutional rights: to fight laws and regulations that restrict business autonomy and interfere with the pursuit of profit. The profit motive has long made corporations formidable political actors who exert a strong influence on lawmaking, and indeed the vast majority of lobbyists in Washington work for companies and business-oriented trade associations. Yet as the story of corporate constitutional rights reminds us, business influence is not restricted to the elected branches.

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That was the year James ascended to the throne and, in an effort to reconcile with Spain, he put an end to the practice. Nonetheless, the experience provided a model for how England could compete with the other colonial powers, especially Spain, without significant government spending: have private citizens, driven by the profit motive, do it instead. That lesson would help inspire the formation of the Virginia Company, which was also funded by private citizens and promised to generate revenue for the Crown. To raise the funds necessary to organize an expedition, the Virginia Company did exactly what corporations do today: turn to the capital markets.

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On the ties between regulated industry and business political activity, see Kevin Grier et al., “The Determinants of Industrial Political Activity, 1978–1986,” 88 American Political Science Review 911 (1994); Amy J. Hillman and Michael A. Hitt, “Corporate Political Strategy Formation: A Model of Approach, Participation, and Strategy Decisions,” 24 Academy of Management Review 825 (1999). On the profit motive in motivating corporate political activity, see Neil J. Mitchell et al., “The Determinants of Domestic and Foreign Corporate Political Activity,” 59 Journal of Politics 1096 (1997). See also Amy J. Hillman et al., “Corporate Political Activity: A Review and Research Agenda,” 30 Journal of Management 837 (2004). 10.

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything
by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
Published 27 Feb 2018

In a Wired article about where this idea could go, Cade Metz speculated that it could incentivize verifiers with rep-denominated skin in the game to either stand up or shoot down the statements of politicians, providing a service that news organizations could pay for. If it can actually be built, a system that aligns profit motives with truth-telling would be pretty helpful. Toward a Token Economy While we’re thinking of all these ways in which tokens might get people and communities to act honestly and preserve public goods, it would be amiss not to consider whether tokens might address the greatest tragedy facing the biggest commons of them all.

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In essence, the car would be programmed via smart contracts and interactions with all sorts of other devices, online marketplaces, and systems to run at the most optimal value for all, filling itself up on gas at the best price and deciding when, based on the market, to make itself available and when not. The reason why a community would put such a thing into existence is that, as with The DAO–like cooperatives we discussed in chapter eight, there would be no profit motive to distract it from maximizing benefits for all. This is the kind of contemporary vision of public infrastructure that could be possible when the efficiencies of IoT connectivity are combined with the automated governance of distributed trust systems like blockchains. It paints a much more benign notion of technology as being designed to free human beings from work while improving the experience of life for all with the lowest drain on resources.

Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another
by Matt Taibbi
Published 7 Oct 2019

It was obvious that Obama had deeply held feelings about the subject. This made sense given Trump’s role in pushing the vicious birther campaign. Trump was one of the few figures capable of inspiring Obama to break character. Obama, like Kristof, touched on the profit motive. He went much deeper than Kristof in his assessment of the media’s structural problems, however, essentially saying that it was our intentional, profit-motivated indulgence of stupidity and mindless conflict that had brought us to this dark place. I personally was surprised he didn’t lead with a diatribe about how Washington reporters are so dumb, you can get them to call you a “regular guy” just by publishing a beer recipe on the White House website.

The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite
by Ann Finkbeiner
Published 26 Mar 2007

They decided to call their company Theoretical Physics, Incorporated—“a lousy name,” said Watson—and hired an attorney to draw up articles of incorporation. “All physicists all knew each other so we were in an excellent position to get a supergood staff,” said Watson. “Essentially our idea was to get a lot of smart people together but to do it in a private company.” Lest anyone be disturbed by physicists operating on the profit motive, let me point out that Theoretical Physics, Incorporated never happened anyway. Goldberger, Watson, and Brueckner dropped the idea of Theoretical Physics, Incorporated after talking to the second subgroup, Marvin Stern and Charles Townes. During the war Townes had worked on radar, then had gone to Columbia.

…

And Hans Bethe was a little more liberal but very highly respected in the government and an outstanding scientist. I think, for the Pentagon and the White House, feeling that the senior advisers could straighten us out if we did something wrong was probably pretty important.” If anyone is to be considered the father of Jason, I’d vote for Townes. He talked Theoretical Physics, Incorporated out of the profit motive, talked a willing York into funding an independent group, talked IDA into backing it, talked the Defense Department out of controlling it and into giving it broad access, and made it politically palatable. Townes’s understanding of what Jason could be and therefore how it must be set up was hard-headed and clear-sighted and in the end assured its independence.

J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2016: For Preparing Your 2015 Tax Return
by J. K. Lasser Institute
Published 19 Oct 2015

This way you may be able to deduct maintenance expenses and depreciation on the unit even if it remains vacant. However, the IRS has disallowed loss deductions for some rentals preceding a sale on the ground that there was no “profit motive” for the rental (40.10). For example, where minimal efforts are made to rent out a vacation home in anticipation of an eventual sale, the IRS may claim, as in Example 1 below, that the home was not converted to rental property held for the production of income. Where the IRS determines that you lacked a profit motive for renting the property, it will limit your deduction for rental expenses to the amount of the rental income, and the expenses in excess of rental income cannot be carried forward to a later year.

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Thus, “rental” expenses are not allowed, and the loss on the sale was a nondeductible personal loss. The IRS and Tax Court disallowed a loss deduction for rental expenses under the “profit-motive rules” (40.10) where a principal residence was rented for 10 months until it could be sold. According to the Tax Court, the temporary rental did not convert the residence to rental property. Since the sales effort was primary, there was no profit motive for the rental. Thus, no loss could be claimed; rental expenses were deductible only to the extent of rental income. The favorable side of the Tax Court position: Since the residence was not converted to rental property, the owners could under prior law rules defer tax on the gain from the sale by buying a new home.

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The taxpayers claimed rental expenses on their 2009 and 2010 returns and claimed that the loss on the 2010 sale was a fully deductible ordinary loss. The IRS disallowed deductions for the rental expenses and disallowed any loss deduction on the sale. The Tax Court agreed with the IRS. Although the couple clearly abandoned personal use of the condo in 2008, they did not convert it to a profit-motivated rental property. The realty company’s efforts were limited to featuring the condo in an office portfolio and telling prospective buyers that it was available for rent. The taxpayers did change realtors, but beyond putting it on a multiple listing service, there is no evidence that the second agent did anything to rent out the condo.

The Lessons of History
by Will Durant and Ariel Durant
Published 1 Jan 1968

Perhaps it is one secret of their power that, having studied the fluctuations of prices, they know that history is inflationary, and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard. The experience of the past leaves little doubt that every economic system must sooner or later rely upon some form of the profit motive to stir individuals and groups to productivity. Substitutes like slavery, police supervision, or ideological enthusiasm prove too unproductive, too expensive, or too transient. Normally and generally men are judged by their ability to produce—except in war, when they are ranked according to their ability to destroy.

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure
by Tim Harford
Published 1 Jun 2011

Most notably, that heating element was exposed, making it a potential source of household fires, burns and electrocutions. It took several decades for the practical and familiar pop-up toaster design to emerge, by which time many manufacturers had quit the business or gone bankrupt. The market has solved the problem of generating material wealth, but its secret has little to do with the profit motive or the superior savvy of the boardroom over the cabinet office. Few company bosses would care to admit it, but the market fumbles its way to success, as successful ideas take off and less successful ones die out. When we see the survivors of this process – such as Exxon, General Electric and Procter & Gamble – we shouldn’t merely see success.

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He defended small projects that, according to his own painstaking research, were often more efficient than gigantic ones. He defended workers’ rights throughout. It is easy to forget just how successful the Soviet economy was … for a time. We tend to assume that the planned economy fell apart because it lacked the galvanising force of the profit motive and the creativity of private-sector entrepreneurs. But this does not really make sense: there were many creative people in the Soviet Union, including Palchinsky. It is not immediately obvious why they would lose their creativity merely because they worked for state-owned enterprises. Nor did the Soviet Union lackational techniques: in fact, it possessed as great a range of incentives, positive and horrifyingly negative, as any civilisation in history, and deployed them ruthlessly.

Black Fire: The True Story of the Original Tom Sawyer--And of the Mysterious Fires That Baptized Gold Rush-Era San Francisco
by Robert Graysmith
Published 30 Oct 2012

Why, there were more saloons than boardinghouses in town; more gambling dens than hotels. He stalked across to Delmonico’s for a steak and sliced tomatoes. As he ate, he jotted down ideas for an editorial: “Systematic pillaging by organized gangs during the confusion of each fire suggests the presence of profit-motivated arsonists such as merchants.” “Yes,” he vowed, “someone should do something.” He heard the crackle of flames in the distance—“My God!” he thought. “The Ducks are quacking!” In the heat and tumult, the cry “Quack! Quack! Quack!” went up everywhere. It was not a complete city-destroying conflagration this time, but the volunteers, Sawyer, and the torch boys ran as if it were.

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It was no coincidence that the fifth all-encompassing fire had broken out on May 4, 1851, the anniversary of the second city-destroying fire and the same day as the Firemen’s Parade. Systematic pillaging by organized gangs of army deserters and ex-convicts during the confusion and in every one of the devastating fires so far suggested the presence of a profit-motivated Lightkeeper. The gangs had been waiting. “The conflagration had to be the work of an incendiary,” citizens said. There is no doubt now. Their fury mounted against the arsonist’s “brazen chaos.” An investigation pinpointed the genesis of the blaze to the Clay Street upholstery shop. The space above Bryant’s Hotel was occupied by Baker & Meserve’s shop and should have been fireproof.

The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet
by Justin Peters
Published 11 Feb 2013

“The inexorable question arises—what will happen in the long run if authors’ income is cut down and down by increasing free uses by photocopy and information storage and retrieval? Will the authors continue writing? Will the publishers continue publishing if their markets are diluted, eroded, and eventually, the profit motive and incentive completely destroyed? To pose this question is to answer it.”60 * * * IN her interesting book, Who Owns Academic Work?, Corynne McSherry made a distinction between a fact and an artifact.61 A fact is one of “nature’s creations,” an ownerless piece of knowledge or data that belongs to the public.

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Not only did the DMCA prohibit the circumvention of copy-protection technology—for example, the mechanisms that require you to activate an expensive computer program before using it—the law also forbade people from using the Internet to explain how to evade copy-protection, or even linking to those explanations.11 The year before, in December 1997, President Clinton had signed a kindred bill, the No Electronic Theft Act (NET Act), which stipulated felony criminal penalties for people charged with the unauthorized online distribution of copyrighted material, even in cases where the distributor had no profit motive. The NET Act was intended to close the so-called LaMacchia loophole.12 In 1994, federal prosecutors indicted an MIT undergraduate named David LaMacchia for allegedly operating an online bulletin board that people used to freely trade copyrighted computer software. While it appeared to prosecutors that LaMacchia had helped facilitate software piracy, his actions were not considered criminal under the terms of the Copyright Act, since he had not acted for any clear commercial purpose.

Modernising Money: Why Our Monetary System Is Broken and How It Can Be Fixed
by Andrew Jackson (economist) and Ben Dyson (economist)
Published 15 Nov 2012

The demand for money is also discussed, as is the effect on the economy of any attempt to pay down debts in aggregate. Second, we will look at the incentives facing banks: given the high demand for credit, why do banks not simply lend to every individual or business that applies for a loan? We will see that due to the profit motive, financial innovations and some other institutional quirks, banks will attempt to lend as much as they can as long as it is profitable for them to do so. Third, we will look at the reaction of the regulators. Faced with a banking sector that has a huge number of willing borrowers and an incentive to lend to them, in the current institutional structure, is it possible to temper banks’ natural desire to create credit?

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Likewise, when a loan is collateralised with an asset that is not expected to fall in value (such as a house), the bank can make the loan safe in the knowledge that if a default does occur it may take control of the asset, sell it, and so still make a profit.13 Freed from the downside of default, the profit motive causes banks to maximise their lending, increasing the money supply and debt in the process. fig. 3.4 - UK resident monetary financial institutions’ lending Source: Bank of England Statistical Database So how much money has been created by banks? The chart of “Cash vs Bank-Issued Money” from the Introduction shows the effect on the money supply of a high demand for credit combined with a lack of regulation.

Free Market Missionaries: The Corporate Manipulation of Community Values
by Sharon Beder
Published 30 Sep 2006

Keavney repeatedly toured the US, giving progress reports to the N.A.M. and the US Chamber of Commerce, among others.’44 In 1979, EA brought Barton Cummins, a key architect of the Advertising Council’s free enterprise campaign, to Australia to describe that campaign so it could serve as a model in Australia. Cummins told a business audience: In Australia – as in America – there are people who want to destroy the free enterprise system. They believe in government control of the lives of all of us, particularly the business community. They do not believe in competition. They do not believe in the profit motive. They do not believe in freedom for businessmen like you and me . . . More regulation by government is their answer . . . It is important to remember that economic freedom and personal freedom go hand in hand . . . In short, you’ve got to educate the Australian people about your economic system.

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They would be less bolshie and more understanding of what management and owners are trying to achieve, as they would all be rewarded along similar lines.52 In its submission, BHP told the same inquiry that employees owned shares or options worth 7.6 per cent of the company’s capital and that its motivation in providing this opportunity was to help wage earners to understand and experience private enterprise; to justify ‘the profit motive in terms of risk return for investors’; and to encourage ‘employees to take a more active interest as co-owners of the company and for them to look beyond their local domain’. 53 Rob Donkersley, Employee Relations Director for Coca-Cola Amatil, told the inquiry about his company’s employee share ownership plan: We feel we have captured the minds of our employees through this plan.

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future
by Alec Ross
Published 13 Sep 2021

The drastic contrast is representative of a broader change that swept through the entire business world in the last half century. The power and size of companies have skyrocketed since the mid-20th century, as has their influence on our everyday lives. This is true within the United States and the world as a whole. The world’s major companies have grown larger, more concentrated, and more profit-motivated, while governments and individuals have seen their power fade. The balance has been shaken so thoroughly that in recent years even business leaders, who are benefiting massively from the state of affairs, lament the power they have rapidly gained. The last fifty years have witnessed a quiet reimagining of what companies are for and how they operate.

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I don’t believe every billionaire is a policy failure. But I do believe that Loeb’s critique of stakeholder capitalism has to be placed in the context of an economy that has become comically unequal and, in turn, is producing the rage all around us. “In some companies’ minds, there is a tug-of-war between the profit motive and social responsibility,” Mohamed El-Erian, the legendary asset manager and president of Queens’ College, Cambridge, told me. “These companies will slowly be reminded that you cannot be a good house if you don’t care about the neighborhood.… But left on their own, they’re not gonna move fast enough.”

The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking
by Saifedean Ammous
Published 23 Mar 2018

In practice, however, the economic incentives are heavily against owners of hashpower utilizing their investments in this avenue, and as a result, there have been no successful 51% attacks on node members that have waited for at least one confirmation. A 51% attack would likely not be successful if done for a profit motive, but such an attack could also be carried out with no profit motive, but with the intention of destroying Bitcoin. A government or private entity could decide to acquire Bitcoin mining capacity to commandeer a majority of the Bitcoin network and then proceed to use that hashrate to launch continuous double‐spend attacks, defrauding many users and destroying confidence in the safety of the network.

Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers
by Andy Greenberg
Published 5 Nov 2019

They did not get their one-million-bitcoin jackpot. Instead, in the first twenty-four hours of their auction, they received a grand total of $937.15, according to the Bitcoin blockchain’s public record of transactions. But the auction nonetheless served to create buzz around the NSA’s security breach. Experts largely agreed the profit motive was likely a cover story, that the Shadow Brokers were probably state-sponsored hackers, not cybercriminals, and they were seeking above all to embarrass the NSA. Jake Williams, for his part, immediately suspected Russia. “There’s only one government capable of doing this,” he said flatly. Another, less expected former NSA figure offered a similar suggestion.

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Cisco, for instance: “Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance SNMP Remote Code Execution Vulnerability,” Cisco Security Advisories and Alerts, Aug. 17, 2018, www.tools.cisco.com, archived at bit.ly/2CnkJAv. Instead, in the first twenty-four hours: Andy Greenberg, “No One Wants to Buy Those Stolen NSA-Linked Cyberweapons,” Wired, Aug. 16, 2016, www.wired.com. Experts largely agreed the profit motive: Ibid. “Circumstantial evidence and conventional wisdom”: Edward Snowden, Twitter post, Aug. 16, 2016, twitter.com, archived at bit.ly/2RdZGwc. This time they offered up: Shadow Brokers, “Message#5—Trick or Treat?” Medium, Oct. 30, 2016, Medium.com, archived at bit.ly/2MvthQW. “We’re sending a message”: William M.

A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth
by Chris Smaje
Published 14 Aug 2020

Though farming and food production has never been as industrialisable as manufacturing, much the same occurred: corporate plantation agriculture in tropical colonised countries and agribusiness models of the kind pioneered in Chicago, where cowboys and small-scale prairie farmers were the initial feedstock for an increasingly mechanised global distribution system of meat and grain that ultimately dispensed with them in the Global North.116 A common image we still have of capitalism is the innovative entrepreneur opening up a new and lucrative market niche (the alternative farming sector has its own versions of this) with the invisible hand of the market delivering public benefit (supply matching demand) out of private vice (profit-motivated self-interest).117 The idea is still routinely invoked as a justification of modern capitalism, but it’s out of date. A more apposite image nowadays for financialised, corporate capital is the visible – though sometimes velveted – fist, aimed at anyone who contests its logic, and many of those who don’t.

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But I’ll readily admit they amount to something vaguer than a confident and fully specified political programme. Maybe this is a failing of my analysis. Or maybe not. Confident programmes are a tic of modernist politics in its taste for single keys that explain the forward march of history, whether it’s the profit motive, democratic freedom, the inevitable march of science and Enlightenment ideals, or class struggle. Since I don’t subscribe to single keys, forward marches or inevitability, the politics I’ve outlined is vaguer and less certain of success. Still, focusing on how people will have to make a living from the local ecological base, create local autonomies and build local commons to make that possible without succumbing to the inequities that have bedevilled both premodern agrarian societies and modern capitalist ones has led me to highlight forms of republican and agrarian politics that may be equal to the task.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century
by Rodrigo Aguilera
Published 10 Mar 2020

Mostly because our day-to-day engagement with productive economic units (firms), would be largely unchanged from how they are now: doing your groceries in an employee-owned shop would be no different from a capitalist one, and the same shop would be no less mindful of its own need to compete against other employee-owned rivals and to make profits. The only difference would be how those profits are shared. The individual profit motive becomes replaced by a collective, societal one, which in turn is dispersed among the thousands of workers that the firm employs. This makes it less likely that these firms would engage in the more unscrupulous behavior to which capitalist firms are prone. Will this put a definitive end to all corporate wrongdoing?

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Unfortunately, the complete mismatch of where global capitalism’s trillions of investable wealth ends up (unproductive but lucrative housing markets, risky third-world corporate debt, safe first-world public debt, or simply stashed away in tropical island tax havens) and where it should (clean energy, green infrastructure, social investments) is possibly the most serious indication of how modern capitalism is unfit for the challenge of climate change, or any challenge that requires prioritizing environmental and social needs rather than treating them as consequential to interest rates being in equilibrium with the profit motive of each individual firm. But even in the event that the invisible hand guided private capital towards climate mitigating investment, this comes up against yet another well-known quandary in environmental economics: the Jevons Paradox. Named after a mid-nineteenth-century English economist, William Stanley Jevons, the paradox is one that appears to be endemic to resource markets; the tendency for efficiency gains in any industry to result in increased demand.

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought
by Andrew W. Lo
Published 3 Apr 2017

If you were a true believer in the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, you might argue that other investors would take advantage of this investor’s suboptimal behavior. But how can these other investors rationally know whether they’re taking successful advantage of the failure when this might involve a sixth-order theory of mind? While arbitrage and the profit motive can exploit a misjudgment, they still rely on the ability of investors to recognize when a mistake has taken place. In many cases, this expectation is simply unrealistic. The history of markets is filled with “rational” investors going wrong with utter confidence in the soundness of their judgment—until brought down by information just beyond their range of consideration or understanding.

…

For this narrative to be more than a compelling story, we need to know more about how top-level executives are compensated. Executive compensation in the United States has been on the rise for decades. Wall Street has taken this now common business practice and made it even more sensitive to the profit motive. Professional employees of a typical Wall Street firm are given a low base salary (“pity pay”) and additional bonuses according to their profitability to the firm. It’s the broker-dealers—financial firms which function as brokers, trading on behalf of customers, and as dealers, trading for themselves—that are notorious for extremely high bonuses.

…

To reduce the possibility of a financial meltdown, the risks and rewards of these securities will have to be made clear to potential investors. (Would the subprime crisis still have occurred had every party in the chain been aware of the true risks?) Managers with the social objective of curing cancer will find themselves at odds with the profit motive of investors, while managers with the financial objective of making a profit will find themselves at odds with the ultimate medical goal of the project. The potential for abuse will increase as more money pours into the fund, from fraudulent research at the level of the individual drug program, to malfeasance in governing the fund at the very top.

Heaven's Command (Pax Britannica)
by Jan Morris
Published 22 Dec 2010

When, eight days later, the company dispersed, back to the Athabaska and the Mackenzie, English River and Lac la Pluie, north to the Bay or over the Rockies to the Pacific slopes, when the Governor’s bugle sounded for the last time across the lake, and Norway House returned to its ledgers and routine, no doubt it seemed that these Arrangements would survive more or less for ever. And in a way they would: the merchant venturers might disappear from the conduct of empire, but the profit motive never did.1 1 She bore him two sons and three daughters, all the same, before dying aged 41 in 1853. Other ladies gave him at least three sons and three daughters. 1 Which was supplemented by illicit whiskey from across the American frontier, commonly made of one part of raw alcohol to three parts of water, coloured with tea or plug tobacco, and flavoured with ginger, red pepper and black molasses. 1 Who are said to inhabit the Canadian north in an incidence of 5 million to the acre: a naked man would be sucked dry of all his blood in 3½ hours, and even the caribou, some theorists believe, are driven to their migrations by the insect bites. 1 The alphabet is still used, but poor Mr Evans was wrongly accused of living immorally among his Crees, and disappeared ignominiously from the imperial annals, failing even to find a place among the 167 Evanses listed in the Dictionary of Welsh Biography. 1 Such firm friends of the Honourable Company that their trading agreement operated without problems throughout the Crimean War. 2 Besides being a landowner over the frontier in the United States.

…

It enumerated law and order, schools, canals, roads and bridges, railways, telegraphs and public health, but made no reference to the ending of evil custom, the reform of society, or the benefits of Christian example. The British had no doubts about the merits of their own civilization, or qualms about their mission to distribute it across the world: but they had come to suppose that not all aspects of it were transplantable. The profit motive, too, had subtly shifted its emphasis. It was still potent, of course, perhaps preeminent among the imperial urges, but now it had undertones of disquiet. Great Britain was still the supreme industrial, financial and commercial Power of the world, but only just. Rivals were catching up. Economically the 1870s were difficult years for the British, and the financiers of the City of London, the industrialists of the north, began to feel that their preeminence might not last for ever.

…

The aim was brasher. The means were more dishonest. There were hints of falsehood in high places which would have repelled Disraeli as much as they would have horrified Gladstone. Big business of a distasteful kind was concerned with the adventure. The evangelical instinct of Empire played no part in it, and the profit motive was blatant. They were not even imperial forces which were camped at Pitsani that December, but were a scratch company of colonial policemen, supplemented by miscellaneous freebooters and led by not very intelligent English gentry. There was no dignity to this gamble. If it succeeded, it would be a triumph of a vulgar kind: if it failed it would be ignominy.

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson
Published 15 May 2023

In response, the British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen summarized what many thought was the problem: “This is about giving people, including some of the most reprehensible people on earth, the biggest platform in history to reach a third of the planet.” The Antidemocratic Turn We cannot understand the political mess that social media has created without recognizing the profit motive based on targeted ads, which makes these companies prioritize maximizing user engagement and sometimes rage. Targeted advertisements, in turn, would not have been possible without the collection and processing of massive amounts of data. The profit motive is not the only factor that has pushed the tech industry in this antidemocratic direction. These companies’ founding vision, which we dubbed the AI illusion, has played an equally important role.

…

Sure, that might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you can’t ban it.” The truth is more nuanced. Imposing massive surveillance and data collection is not the only path of technological advance, and limiting it does not mean banning technology. What we are experiencing instead is an antidemocratic trajectory charted by the profit motive and the AI illusion, which involves authoritarian governments and tech companies foisting their vision on everybody else. Radio Days Perhaps all of these issues are not specific to digital technologies and AI. Every great new communication technology contains the potential for abuse. Consider another one of the transformative communication technologies of the twentieth century: radio.

Confidence Game: How a Hedge Fund Manager Called Wall Street's Bluff
by Christine S. Richard
Published 26 Apr 2010

You know, where there’s public policy on my side instead of against me,” Ackman had told the investigators. But the SEC attorneys had been skeptical. Wasn’t he really interested in Farmer Mac because he was seeking to profit from the company’s collapse? “I’m a bit idealistic so it isn’t only a profit motive, but there was a profit motive, absolutely,” Ackman had responded. Now Ackman asked the packed auditorium of investors to believe that he had devised a plan that would both hasten the collapse of a company he was betting against and do some public good in the process. Not many people would try to pull that off, but Ackman had his unrepentant idealism.

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge
by Matt Ridley

The son of the prominent pre-war eugenicist Henry Fairfield Osborn, also named Henry Fairfield Osborn, published a book in 1948 entitled Our Plundered Planet, which revived Malthusian concerns about the rapid growth of the human population, the depletion of resources, the exhaustion of soil, the overuse of DDT, an excessive reliance on technology and a rush to consumerism. ‘The profit motive, if carried to the extreme,’ wrote the wealthy Osborn, ‘has one certain result – the ultimate death of the land.’ Osborn’s book was reprinted eight times in the year it was published, and translated into thirteen languages. At almost the same time William Vogt, a biologist driven by a passion for wildlife conservation, published a very similar book, Road to Survival, in which the ideas of the ‘clear-sighted clergyman’ Malthus were even more explicitly endorsed.

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Stephen Davies, Institute of Economic Affairs lectures. Einstein quote from Einstein, A. 1991. Autobiographical Notes. Open Court. Albert Shanker quote from Kahlenberg, R.D. 2007. Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race and Democracy. Columbia University Press. On Swedish schools, Stanfield, James B. 2012. The Profit Motive in Education: Continuing the Revolution. Institute of Economic Affairs. On MOOCs, Brynjolfsson, E. and McAfee, A. 2014. The Second Machine Age. Norton. On Minerva College, Wood, Graeme. The future of college?. The Atlantic September 2014. Sugata Mitra’s TED talks are available at TED.com. His short book is Beyond the Hole in the Wall: Discover the Power of Self-Organized Learning.

The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics
by Ben Buchanan
Published 25 Feb 2020

The unknown group’s other targets included the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the University of Science and Technology, and the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran. The hacking did not fit the profile of any threat actor the Canadians had seen before. Based on its behavior, the analysts concluded the people involved were likely another state’s signals intelligence agency, not profit-motivated criminals. The Canadians wanted to learn more about these unknown spies. Analysts began to develop signatures for the hackers and to track their activities across the internet. To do this, they married the indicators of the group’s activity with the broad net of the Five Eyes’ passive collection apparatus.

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Additional sanctions, such as those levied by the Obama administration after the Sony hack, seemed to do little to slow its hacking campaigns.20 The North Koreans then raised the stakes. For their next trick, they took another old-fashioned crime online: taking hostages for ransom. The hostages were not people, though, but pieces of data. While traditionally spies would have sought to copy the data stored within big organizations, like many modern profit-motivated criminals, the North Koreans were not after secrets. They instead deployed a technique known as ransomware, in which hackers encrypt the hard drive of their target computer and delete any backups. The decryption key remains unknown to the target. If the target does not have a surviving backup of the data, the only way to recover the information is to pay the hackers a ransom in return for the decryption key.

Financial Statement Analysis: A Practitioner's Guide
by Martin S. Fridson and Fernando Alvarez
Published 31 May 2011

Part Three A Closer Look at Profits Chapter 5 What Is Profit? Profits hold an exalted place in the business world and in economic theory. The necessity of producing profits imposes order and discipline on business organizations. It fosters cost-reducing innovations, which in turn promote the efficient use of scarce resources. The profit motive also encourages savings and risk taking, two indispensable elements of economic development. Finally, profitability is a yardstick by which businesspeople can measure their achievements and justify their claims to compensation. In view of all these essential economic functions, one might suppose that users of financial statements would have long since devised a universally agreed-upon definition of profit.

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On the other hand, nonprofits sometimes strive to make themselves appear less flush than they really are, to impress on donors the urgency of their appeal for funds. Governmental units sometimes resort to disingenuous reporting to avoid political fallout from the consequences of unsound fiscal policies. Anticapitalist ideologues cannot truthfully contend that the profit motive alone leads to devious financial reporting. 3. Stuart Elliott, “Advertising,” New York Times, November 11, 2002, C10. 4. Vanessa O’Connell and Suzanne Vranica, “Interpublic Says SEC Seeks Data Related to Its Bookkeeping Errors,” Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2002, A3. 5. Nick Wingfield and Paul Beckett, “MicroStrategy, Results Restated, Is MacroLoser,” Wall Street Journal, March 21, 2000, B1, B4. 6.

After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made
by Ben Rhodes
Published 1 Jun 2021

It was no secret that as this process unfolded, the Chinese were also stealing American technologies and intellectual property—using them first to catch up with us and then to pull ahead of us in the new frontiers of Artificial Intelligence that will increasingly shape life on earth. At every turn, the profit motive and economic interdependence between our countries ensured that concerns over democratic values would be subordinate to other interests. The U.S. government always had higher priorities. The American moguls who served as thought leaders on China and gatekeepers to the Chinese market—men like Henry Kissinger, Hank Paulson, Steve Schwartzman, and Mike Bloomberg—really had only one idea to offer: Do what the Chinese want, and you can make money there.

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Sure, I understood the allure of tax cuts and deregulation to a group like that. But these were also people who clearly understood the dangers that Trump posed to American democracy and international order. The experience suggested that even that ambiguous term “Pax Americana” was subordinate to the profit motive that informed seemingly every aspect of the American machinery. I’d come to know the term as a shorthand for America’s sprawling global influence, and how—on balance—the Pax Americana offered some stability amid political upheavals, some scaffolding around the private dramas of billions of individual lives.

Hacking Capitalism
by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

In other words, the penalty for violating intellectual property must be set much higher than is called for by the nature of the crime in order to compensate for the small likelihood of getting caught. At the time of writing, copyright infringers are being fined and sued; however, judging by the current trends, they might soon find themselves behind bars. The distinction which courts traditionally have upheld between for-profit and non-profit motives, corresponding with the separation between civil and criminal offences, is being erased from both European and American copyright law. The reason is that if any safety vaults are left in the statute book, whereby some conditions must be met to merit a harsher sentence, hackers will quickly reorganise information flows beneath that minimum criteria.

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When productivity rose, usually assumed to have followed with the introduction of agriculture, enough social surplus was created to sustain a ruling class, together with ranks of people who worked with other things than providing for immediate subsistence, such as priests, scientists and philosophers. As was mentioned above, quite a few socialists have predicted that as productivity continues to swell, spurred on by the profit motive, the material conditions for transcending capitalism are being established. The same people tend to argue that the conquest of scarcity is a precondition for re-establishing communism proper. The conservative futurist Daniel Bell was so unsettled by this implication of his own writings that he felt compelled to denounce any likelihood of communism due to an end of scarcity in his post-industrial kingdom-come.

Ellul, Jacques-The Technological Society-Vintage Books (1964)
by Unknown
Published 7 Jun 2012

But it is the technical elements which are reciprocally dependent, welded together by a common neces­ sity and expressed in certain new techniques. What holds for the private accountant is even more true for the public accountant who works on a nationwide scale. There are certain differences between the two insofar as enterprise has pri­ vate profit as its end. As a consequence of the profit motive, the pri­ vate accountant must comply with the rules of capitalist manage­ ment. The public accountant (who becomes an accountant of initiative) draws up balance sheets and future revenue potentials for a complex organism whose reactions are slow and of great am- The TechnobgicalSociety (167 plitude when referred to the impulses at their origin.

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But even taking into consideration such partial ex­ ceptions, it remains true that conflict between technique and the liberal economy is inevitable because the liberal economy is essen­ tially based on profit. It does not exist without profit. To a planned economy, however, profit is not the highest value. Certainly, the planned economy does not neglect the profit motive completely, but profit represents only one element in its calculations. The prin­ cipal criterion of the planned economy is rationality (or effi­ ciency): in a word, technique. In the conflict between technique and the liberal economy, tech­ nique, then, is victorious over the liberal economy and bends it to its laws.

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In any case, the private persons who had developed these techniques gradually ceased to be able to utilize them because they came to exceed the possibilities of any individual. When ap­ peal was not made to the state, it was necessary, for their exploita­ tion, to set up organisms as vast and powerful as the state itself. Thus, trusts and corporations were rendered necessary by the technical apparatus. This occurred even in the absence of the profit motive, after wealth had become incommensurable with the individual and therefore abstract. The prime purpose of state or corporation might even be to rob and despoil the individual by the exploitation of these techniques. I repeat that it could not have been otherwise. From a certain degree of development onward, every technique concerns the collectivity of men.

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World
by Timothy Garton Ash
Published 23 May 2016

But when a few companies have such a dominant market position, their policies—their private censorship, if you will—can be almost as limiting as state censorship. Tim Wu argues persuasively in his book The Master Switch that the structure of our information industries is a key determinant of our effective freedom of expression.152 These corporations’ choices are shaped by the profit motive but also by the character of their founders. The influence of a Steve Jobs or a Mark Zuckerberg on their respective empires has been more like that of an idiosyncratic absolute ruler in some mediaeval principate than that of the head of government in a modern liberal democracy. Apple’s tethered perfectionism has everything to do with Jobs’s personality.

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The former certainly collected far more data, but they did not publish it. The latter collected less, but ravaged lives by publishing it. If politicians and security chiefs have a motive for keeping more information secret than is truly in the public interest, commercial media also have a motive for publishing more than is truly in the public interest: the profit motive. With both newspapers and online media searching for a business model, there is a powerful temptation to confuse the public interest with what interests the public, thus selling more copies and bringing advertisement-ready eyeballs to your site or app. If it is naïve to think that security officials will all be Platonic guardians armed with invincible virtue, why should we believe that of journalists?

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61 Again and again, through successive chapters of this book, we have bumped up against this power of money: from corporate lobbyists in Washington and Brussels, media ownership almost everywhere, only the rich being able to afford the lawyers to defend their reputations in court, wealthy individuals and corporations using that disparity of financial-legal power to deter critical comment that is in the public interest, all the way to the profit motive of information giants determining algorithmically what we see online. The problem is by no means confined to the United States, but it is especially salient there, not least because other constraints still painfully apparent in much of the world play a lesser role in the United States. While the American constitutional and legal tradition has been superb when it comes to restraining public power, it has been much less good at restraining private power.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters
Published 15 Sep 2014

The cleantech bubble was the biggest phenomenon—and the biggest flop—in the history of “social entrepreneurship.” This philanthropic approach to business starts with the idea that corporations and nonprofits have until now been polar opposites: corporations have great power, but they’re shackled to the profit motive; nonprofits pursue the public interest, but they’re weak players in the wider economy. Social entrepreneurs aim to combine the best of both worlds and “do well by doing good.” Usually they end up doing neither. The ambiguity between social and financial goals doesn’t help. But the ambiguity in the word “social” is even more of a problem: if something is “socially good,” is it good for society, or merely seen as good by society?

The End of Wall Street
by Roger Lowenstein
Published 15 Jan 2010

Fannie and Freddie were close to insolvent; to use them as agents for curing the market’s illness risked infecting the twins even more. Rodriguez, the investor, considered it a desperate measure that could lead to a taxpayer bailout. “They were not in a position to address this mortgage crisis, for which they had originally been created, because their balance sheets had become impaired by unsound profit motivated activities,” he noted. If the latest plan failed, Washington would be forced to socialize Fannie’s and Freddie’s losses.19 The regulators were widely criticized for their two interventions, especially in the case of Bear. To critics, the Bear rescue seemed to promise a helping hand to the next financial firm, no matter how reckless, that came running for help.

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Minutes after the Bear rescue, the Fed announced another precedent-shattering step. It would open the discount window—where, since 1913, only banks had been welcome—to overnight borrowings by investment banks and other Wall Street firms. Just as stunningly, the central bank said it would accept less-than-triple-A securities—even mortgage securities—as collateral. Since profit-motivated bankers were unwilling to lend against deflating collateral, the Fed was doing so itself. 21 Not only had the Fed become the bank to Wall Street, it was willing to take the Street’s paper. To further buoy markets, the Fed cut interest rates. These actions did not, as some argued, entice firms to fail, but they did sustain their ability to take the sort of risks that might lead to failure.

Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know
by P. W. Singer and Allan Friedman
Published 3 Jan 2014

The US National Science Foundation then connected the existing supercomputering centers around the country into the NSFnet, which grew so rapidly that the expansion required commercial management. Each upgrade brought greater demand, the need for more capacity, and independently organized infrastructure. The architecture of a “backbone” that managed traffic between the different regional networks emerged as the efficient solution. This period also saw the introduction of the profit motive in Internet expansion. For instance, by this point Vint Cerf had joined the telecommunications firm MCI. In 1983, he led efforts to start MCI mail, the first commercial e-mail service on the Internet. By the late 1980s, it became obvious that managing the nascent Internet was not the business of the research community.

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Ultimately, while attacks against Russia’s foes occurred in cyberspace and a parliamentary leader spoke of his office’s own role in it, a Russian ambassador could retort, “If you are implying [the attacks] came from Russia or the Russian government, it’s a serious allegation that has to be substantiated. Cyber-space is everywhere.” Patriotic hackers, though, aren’t limited to youth groups. An interesting nexus actually exists with criminal organizations. They usually operate for their own profit motives but can also be mobilized by a state for political purposes. Many of the very same tools, platforms, and tactics used in the 2008 Georgia attacks, for instance, were also utilized by the Russian Business Network, one of the larger cybercriminal organizations. This leads many to believe that agreements have occasionally been struck in the patriotic hacker world.

The Limits of the Market: The Pendulum Between Government and Market
by Paul de Grauwe and Anna Asbury
Published 12 Mar 2017

They choose nothing in preference to one pound because this is the only way they can punish the other player, satisfying their sense of fairness. The many experiments with the ultimatum game suggest that the acceptable distribution is around /. There is some variation, but the results indicate that a sense of fairness wins out over pure profit motive. System I dominates System II.  THE L IMI TS OF TH E MAR KET So people like to punish unfairness, even if they pay a financial price for it. Our sense of fairness is deep-rooted. It is often affronted by the free market, which is indifferent to the question of whether the distribution of income is fair.

Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis
by Benjamin Kunkel
Published 11 Mar 2014

Expanded to its proper dimensions, the concept of the avant-garde includes Stalinist “total art” as its next and, so far, final embodiment. The Soviet Union, as a new kind of society chartered not only to “provide greater economic security” but also “in perhaps even greater measure meant to be beautiful,” could answer to aesthetic criteria in a way that chaotic capitalist societies in thrall to the profit motive could not. Groys summarizes, apparently with approval, a critic writing in 1949 in the “ultraofficious” journal Iskusstvo (Art): “In different forms adequate to the age, Soviet socialist realism preserved the vital modernist life-building impulses that [Western] modernism itself lost long ago, when it entered the academies and prostituted itself to its arch-enemy, the philistine consumer.”

Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World
by Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell
Published 29 Jul 2019

But the truth is, not only had prices fallen, so had Venezuela’s oil production. Despite sitting on the world’s largest known oil reserves, oil production was at a twenty-three-year low, because of socialism. Nationalized oil companies hadn’t maintained their pipelines and refineries, because they had no profit motive to do so. Kevin Grier, an economist colleague of mine at Texas Tech, co-authored a cool, empirical study that compared the performance of Venezuela’s economy during the oil boom against the economies of similar, but non-socialist, countries. Guess what? Venezuela’s economy had improved, but by less than that of the other countries; in fact, Kevin says that if Venezuela had not followed socialist policies, Venezuelan incomes would have been 20 to 30 percent higher.

The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth Behind the World's Favorite Soft Drink
by Michael Blanding
Published 14 Jun 2010

“The corporation’s legally defined mandate is to pursue, relentlessly and without exception, its own self-interest re­ gardless of the often harmful consequences it might cause to others,” he writes. That’s not to say that corporations can’t do good, however, so long as their efforts align with their profit motive. The second wave of corporate social responsibility began in the 1970s, when, faced with challenges from consumer advocates like Ralph Nader (and CSPI’s Michael Jacobson), corporations realized that investing in social causes could serve as a kind of insurance against criticism. It was in this era that Coke’s Paul Austin pursued his “halo effect” with hydroponic shrimp farms, desalinization plants, and soybean beverages that he argued could help earn goodwill in the developing world at the same time they helped make Coke’s vision of global harmony a reality.

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Com­ pany officials justified their forceful entry into Europe in the name of the free market, in contrast to the totalitarian control by communists. “My guess is that the commies don’t dislike us so intensely just because we’re American,” mused one Coke executive. “It’s because Coke is a cham­ pion of the profit motive. . . . Everyone who has anything to do with the drink makes money.” Coke had good reason to resent communists, who had nationalized bottling plants in Cuba and China after World War II. 1 50 THE COKE MACHINE For years, Coke steered clear of the communist world, even as Pepsi broke into the Soviet Union with the help of former Pepsi counsel Richard Nixon in the 1960s.

The Market for Force: The Consequences of Privatizing Security
by Deborah D. Avant
Published 17 Oct 2010

The implication of Silverstein’s argument is that the institutions that contain violence in the US are undermined by privatization. Violence becomes a private commodity rather than a public good – and the result, Silverstein argues, is a defense policy that ignores the real issues and threats only to be shaped by “the profit motives and egos of a small group of hardliners.”12 In Africa, according to Musah and Fayemi, the consequences are even more severe. Though contemporary mercenaries attempt to distinguish themselves from the lawless “guns for hire” that ran riot over Africa during the Cold War, their consortium with arms manufacturers, mineral exploiters, and Africa’s authoritarian governments and warlords sustains the militarization of Africa.13 This poses “a mortal danger to 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Oliver Williamson, “Public and Private Bureaucracies: a Transaction Cost Economic Perspective,” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization Vol. 15, No. 1 (1999), p. 320.

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Included among those fighting were sympathetic foreigners – whether there for profit or ideology – whom, some have argued, had an easier time committing atrocities given their lack of connection to the local population. Ibid. The breakdown of order in the Croatian territory as it seceded also opened opportunities for purely profit-motivated violence. Operation Group “Rashic” would fire on the Serbs from a Croatian village, provoking a harsh Serb reaction that would cause the villagers to flee in panic. Profiteers would then loot and plunder the empty village. They operated in the Kupa River region. Ibid., p. 15. Mary Kaldor’s analysis of Bosnia points to similar profiteering.

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Jun 2009

The immense cost then helps justify long patent terms and high prices. But it also maintains the Big Pharma monopoly. When a known substance without a patent shows promise—such as the Alzheimer’s treatment vasopressin or the antiaging red-wine ingredient resveratrol—no one has the funds or the profit motive to test it for FDA approval. Instead, pharmaceutical companies attempt to create and patent analogs—molecules close to the promising substances—and then test them in their place. While we’re waiting for something similar but more expensive to be developed and patented, the substances that actually work remain unprescribed by doctors afraid to take liability for “off-label” or unconventional therapies.

…

It’s a striking return to the outsourced war practices of the early colonial empires, which has more to do with promoting the profits of the chartered corporations than the long-term success or influence of the nations in their thrall. In today’s version of outsourced war, the blind obedience to the profit motive makes for an incompetent military force. Early chartered corporations actually wanted to win the territories they were fighting for in order to exploit their resources. Most of today’s chartered military operatives have a bigger stake in keeping the war going; they simply want to make money through their no-bid contracts.

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
by Tim Wu
Published 2 Nov 2010

The arrival of mass broadcasting inspired, in the United States and around the world, an extraordinary faith in its potential as the benefactor, perhaps even a savior, of mankind. And while the reason may not be readily apparent, such belief is crucial to understanding the long cycles in the development of information media. For it is not just the profit motive that drives the opening up of a medium—there is typically a potent mix of both entrepreneurial and humanitarian motives. Those who grew up in the late twentieth century have known the latter sort of idealism mainly as it manifests itself on the Internet in grand collaborative projects such as the blogosphere or Wikipedia and also in such controversial undertakings as Google’s digitization of great libraries.

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It is, frankly, just the kind of phenomenon that makes one side with Theodore Vail about the blessings of a monopoly. For while AT&T was never formally required to run Bell Labs as a research laboratory, it did so out of exactly the sort of noblesse oblige that Vail espoused. AT&T ran Bell Labs not just for its corporate good but for the greater good as well. This is not to be naïve about the corporate profit motive: Bell Labs contributed to AT&T’s bottom line far more than plastic wire insulation. Nevertheless, it’s hard to see how funding theoretical quantum physics research would be of any immediate benefit to shareholder value. More to the point, it is hard to imagine a phone company today hiring someone to be their quantum physicist, with no rules and no boss.

Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs
by Lauren A. Rivera
Published 3 May 2015

See management consulting firms contest system of social mobility, 29–30 core and target schools, 31–41, 271–74, 322n14; allocation of EPS firm recruitment resources to, 33–34, 36, 40, 56; attitudes toward EPS jobs at, 26, 41, 327n25; the best and brightest at, 36–37, 63, 87–90, 186, 271, 277; career-services offices of, 76–78, 280, 322n13; coaching in interviewing skills at, 201–3, 202–3, 337n10; costs of education at, 57; diversity at, 43, 248–49; domination of EPS firm recruitment at, 76–78, 272; educational prestige of, 87–92, 271–74, 329n11; EPS firm marketing pitches at, 54–88, 280–81; extravagant lifestyles at, 61–62; hiring quotas at, 31, 87, 221, 232, 244, 275; homogeneous student bodies of, 273–74; job pressures at, 63–65; nontraditional hires from, 254–66, 276, 341nn3–4; prestige brought by new hires from, 37–40, 44, 47, 78, 87–92, 110, 271–72, 279, 323n19, 329n11; profit motive of, 271–72; selectivity rankings of, 62–63, 78, 254, 323n19; student debt for, 57–58. See also higher education courtesy interviews, 111 cover letters, 84, 108, 328n6 cultural capital, 6–12, 268–69, 342nn4–5; definition of, 316n31; embodied forms of, 7, 172, 316–17n31; extracurricular activities and, 92–101, 269; fit and, 135–45, 332nn4–5; insider coaching in, 259–61; institutionalized forms of, 39–40, 53–54, 109–10, 330n29, 330n32; merit and, 8–10, 86–87, 148, 181–82, 275–76, 318nn44–46; nontraditional acquisition of, 259–66; objectified forms of, 316–17n31; parenting strategies and, 10–12, 318n55; in personalities of firms, 94, 136–37, 329nn14–15, 330n17; polish and, 172, 335n21; resonance with interviewers and, 148–49, 155–56, 165–66, 182, 257–58, 335n11, 342nn8–9; screening of résumés and, 109–10, 332n4; subjective impressions of, 8, 136, 317n40.

…

See also class; cultural capital; elite reproduction; social capital education, 2–14, 24, 268, 271–74, 294; changing definitions of merit in, 8–10, 318nn44–46; choosing resource-rich schools for, 4–5, 316n23; college admissions advantages and, 5–6, 12–13, 277, 318n56, 318–19nn60–63; concerted cultivation approach to, 10–11, 109–10, 143; cultural capital and, 6–12, 26; economic capital and, 4–6, 316nn22–23; economic inquality and, 3–4, 13–14; extracurricular enrichment and, 10, 12; informal tracking systems in, 29–30; natural growth approach to, 10–11; parental levels of, 294, 316n15; parenting strategies for, 10–12, 318n55; SAT prep courses and, 12–13, 318–19nn60–61. See also core and target schools; listed schools; unlisted schools educational elites, 290 educational prestige, 87–92, 271–74, 329n11; association with the best and brightest and, 36–37, 63, 87–90, 186, 271, 277; evaluators’ backgrounds and, 90–92; polish and, 90; profit motive and, 271–72; résumé exclusion and, 92, 112, 329n9. See also core and target schools; higher education efficacy of the interview process, 278–85 eligibility criteria for jobs, 26 elite (as term), 287–90, 345nn17–18 elite professional service (EPS) firms, 2–3, 15–19, 267–68, 278–85, 320n86; applicant pool for, 16–17, 319n83; brand-building and creation of goodwill by, 114, 121, 279, 285; diversity programs at, 41–42, 70, 139, 281, 324n36; domination of core institution recruitment by, 76–78, 272; elite-institution graduates’ attitudes toward, 26, 41, 327n25; full-time hiring of interns in, 320–21nn86–88, 326n17; hiring ratios at, 36, 323n18; hiring responsibilities at, 25, 126, 131–33, 280, 284–85, 338n2, 338nn4–6; impact on future careers of employment by, 243n20; individual sponsorship and connections at, 35, 47–53, 325nn39–41; internships at, 104, 106–7; low status of HR professionals in, 25, 114, 122, 131–32, 219–20; online résumé submission at, 35–36, 48; on-the-job performance at, 40, 192, 278, 284, 323n23, 343nn31–32, 344n47; opinions on hiring process in, 283–84; organizational cultures of, 122, 136, 176, 336n25; prestige brought by new hires to, 37–40, 44, 47, 78, 87–92, 110, 279, 323n19, 329n11; proposed changes in hiring practices for, 282–85; rates of Harvard graduates in, 55–56; school ambassadors of, 34; shared characteristics of, 17; sponsored hiring selection in, 30–41; starting salaries at, 16, 57–58, 163–65, 326n15, 335n17; status and high living offered by, 58–62; stepping-stone-role of jobs at, 62–65, 162, 340n21; training of new hires at, 40, 138, 246, 280, 323n24, 344n36; turnover rates at, 40–41, 139, 280–81, 333n13.

The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought
by Ayn Rand , Leonard Peikoff and Peter Schwartz
Published 1 Jan 1989

Some of you may wonder here: “But if the bishops are concerned with the poor, why don’t they praise and recommend capitalism, the great historical engine of productivity, which makes everyone richer?” If you think about it, however, you will see that, valid as this point may be, the bishops cannot accept it. Can they praise the profit motive—while extolling selflessness? Can they commend the passion to own material property—while declaring that worldly possessions are not important? Can they urge men to practice the virtues of productiveness and long-range planning—while upholding as the human model the lilies of the field? Can they celebrate the self-assertive risk taking of the entrepreneur—while teaching that the meek shall inherit the earth?

…

This is a matter of world ideological concern as well as strategic balances because too many democracies are sick.... Now a new vibrancy creeps into the picture.” Mr. Sulzberger explains: The internationally renowned ‘American tempo’ and productivity still lag and the work ethic with its emphasis on speed and efficiency—whether prompted by puritanism or by the capitalistic profit motive—has certainly undergone visible and withering change. In this uncertain age American flabbiness is ... harmful to the United States. In the absence of American leadership, Mr. Sulzberger concludes, many Western countries were left adrift. “Now Gerald Ford seems to have put an end to that sad phase.

Howard Rheingold
by The Virtual Community Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier-Perseus Books (1993)
Published 26 Apr 2012

Again, changes in the way computers were designed and used led to the expansion of the computer-using population from a priesthood in the 1950s, to an elite in the 1960s, to a subculture in the 1970s, and to a significant, stillgrowing part of the population in the 1990s. Again, it wasn't the mainstream of the existing computer industry that created affordable personal computing, but teenagers in garages. And it was neither national defense nor the profit motive but the desire to make a tool for changing the world that motivated the young entrepreneurs who built the PC industry. When enough people brought sufficiently powerful computers into their homes, it was inevitable that somebody would figure out a way to plug PCs into telephones. All the off-the-shelf devices that you could plug together to make that work, the "enabling technologies" for personal telecommunications, were available and the price was dropping.

…

In the early 1980s, some of the people who had been finding each other through computer conferencing began to embrace the idea of networking as a social movement as well as a way of using computers to communicate. Although the late 1980s turned the idea of networking into a new name for an old form of using social relationships to advance one's professional ambitions, the early promoters were driven far more by revolutionary zeal than profit motive. Izumi Aizu was influenced by CMC evangelists, Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps, who were known in the online world as "J. and J." Lipnack and Stamps published a book about their ideas, Networking, People Connecting with People, Linking Ideas and Resources , in 1982. "They could have been writing it about me," Izumi Aizu exclaimed when he recalled their early influence.

Virtual Competition
by Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice E. Stucke
Published 30 Nov 2016

The belief is that, apart from issues of merit or athletic scholarships, families with similar financial situations whose children attend the same school will contribute roughly the same amount. If these factors no longer applied, and universities simply price discriminated to maximize revenues and increase compensation for the university administrators, coaches, and perhaps even professors, then trust would break down and parents would likely rebel. The introduction of a profit motive changes the framework of assessment and leads many people to perceive price discrimination as unfair. This attitude intensifies where behavioral discrimination is exposed and people perceive themselves as victims of manipulation. Economic and Social Perspectives 123 (Lack of) Fairness and Equality In contrast to the above, other markets dominated by for-profit firms have less exceptional characteristics.

…

In fact, some of them use similar tactics to gather information about users. They may amend their offering based on one’s location or shopping history and engage in a range of tactics, from the use of decoys and price steering to drip pricing. So the promise of transparency and undistorted information may give way to profit motive, once the comparison intermediates gain relative power. In addition, some comparison platforms or meta-search engines, which also provide related ser vices downstream, may favor their own ser vices over those of competitors and display them more prominently in their The Comparison Intermediaries 139 search results.

The Profiteers
by Sally Denton

Hundreds of career employees were fired in the labs’ transition from public to private—“massive layoffs executed with the finesse of Donald Trump,” as one account described them. Bechtel’s elimination of the jobs—and high salaries—of older physicists generated more income for the LLCs, while also resulting in what industry observers described as a “brain drain” of the country’s best nuclear scientists. Union members and scientists argued that the profit motive driving the brain drain was not only bad public policy but also set a dangerous precedent that endangered the safety of the American public. A National Academy of Sciences investigation of the impact of privatizing the labs found that peer-reviewed articles—articles written by experts and reviewed by other experts in the same field as an indicator of accurate scholarship—dropped almost by half.

…

Immediately after what one of Bechtel’s own executives described as the corporate takeover of the labs, Mello saw the manifestation of the quintessential Bechtel culture. “Los Alamos lost all of its public character and became a classic private corporation,” he observed. Many of the longtime scientists were uncomfortable with the new corporate management and dominant profit motive, and quit or retired early. “A new mentality took hold,” Mello said, “with the corporate idea that ‘we work for our company, not for the taxpayer,’ ” as he described the pervasive attitude. “There were now private incentives all based around how well corporate goals could be met.” Still, Mello remained optimistic about an emergence of “an antinuclear complex that could challenge the nuclear complex,” the Santa Fe New Mexican reported.

The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain
by Brett Christophers
Published 6 Nov 2018

Figure 5.3 Capacity of disposed land vs. unimplemented permissions Source: Local Government Association; National Audit Office Market efficiency In Chapter 3 I showed that arguments relating to efficiency in the allocation and use of land have been central to the government’s case for privatizing British land. The state, simply stated, is assumed to be inefficient; private-sector actors, disciplined at once by the profit motive, competition, and market forces, are assumed to be efficient. As John Krutilla and colleagues have noted of the parallel case for land privatization in the United States, ‘The proposal to transfer federal lands to private ownership rests on the fundamental premise that private property and free markets assure an efficient allocation of society’s resources.’1 Hence, the question to be asked is: Has the large-scale privatization of land in post-1970s Britain in fact improved efficiency of allocation and use, both in relation to the particular parcels of land that have been sold and, therefore, British land more generally?

…

And although Polanyi was keenly aware of the economic implications of making land a commodity and subjecting it to market forces, he was more interested in the social implications. Dis-embed land from its social integument by making a market in it, Polanyi claimed, and trouble is never far away. Because private owners tend to exploit land according to profit motives rather than with a view to sustaining the communities that depend upon it, all manner of social ills arise. In the case of the privatization of public land in modern Britain, Polanyian social dystopia is as plain to see as Smithian economic rentierism. There are countless examples of society suffering explicitly as a result of the state selling land to the private sector – thus making a commodity of something that is not, in Polanyian terms, a commodity – and of the private sector following its true nature, by trying to maximize profit from commercialization of that commodity.

Open: The Story of Human Progress
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Sep 2020

This misunderstanding was based on the fact that official documents were better preserved than receipts between merchants. Temples, palaces and pyramids survived the wear and tear of time, whereas commercial structures of wood and clay perished. In 1944 the economic historian Karl Polanyi wrote The Great Transformation, arguing that markets based on supply and demand and the profit motive are new and alien to the human experience. However, just two years later, the American scholar Samuel Noah Kramer started to publish his translations of ancient clay tablets, which would transform our view of the earliest civilization in Mesopotamia, the rich agricultural land between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris (the name Mesopotamia is Greek for ‘between rivers’).

…

The humanitarian revolution Other countries also started growing rapidly as they picked up open values and institutions similar to those in Britain and the US, and the technologies and business management practices these had made possible. This was the start of the Great Enrichment. It did much more than make us rich and save us from early deaths. It started a revolution in our moral sentiments, for the better. Many assume that the defining feature of the free market is the profit motive but, as Max Weber wrote, the impulse to acquisition has in itself nothing to do with capitalism, it: has existed among waiters, physicians, coachmen, artists, prostitutes, dishonest officials, soldiers, nobles, crusaders, gamblers, and beggars. One may say that it has been common to all sorts and conditions of men at all times and in all countries of the earth.60 What makes the free market different is that you can only make money by giving someone something they value more than the money it costs them.

The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community
by Ray Oldenburg
Published 17 Aug 1999

Snooker tables couldn’t hold up under the neglect; they must be carefully maintained. The game would be all but impossible on tables in the condition one finds them in the average pool hall or tavern today. The game of pool is deteriorating as the size, condition, and no-retrieval-of-balls features all represent the dominance of the profit motive over the finer possibilities of the game. For most, there is nothing left but versions of eight ball as dictated by the no-retrieval feature of the coin-op table. These tables do “give back” the cue ball, of course, and it is with mixed feelings that we hear of a recent poolroom problem. It seems customers are taking the cue balls along with them as souvenirs.

…

Planners and developers, 18 Poker, 243 Politics, 66–72 Polya Club, 272–275 Pomeroy’s Wine Bar, 50 Pool, 225 amateur, 31 pool halls, 242–243 Poor Man’s Club, 97 Porno shops, 220–221 Post offices, social function of, 116–117 Poverty, 11 Primitive societies, men’s houses in, 238–239 Problems, personal, 25–26 Profit motive, 220–222 Proximity to customers’ homes, importance of, 181 Pryor, Richard, 77 Public domain, control of, 83–84 Public life, Bavarian, 219 core settings, 15 decline of, 9–13, 284 modern structures and, 204–205 neglect of public environment, 213 signs of, 14 see also Daily life. Pubs. See English pubs.

The Little Book of Hedge Funds
by Anthony Scaramucci
Published 30 Apr 2012

Chapter Two The Parlor Cars of the Gravy Train The Long and the Short of It Hedge funds were the parlor cars of the new gravy train. It was fitting that their key figure was a man who had taken up stock investing as a sideline, an elegant amateur of the market who liked to think of himself as an intellectual, above and beyond the profit motive. —John Brooks, The Go-Go Years Think about it: If it didn’t exist somebody would have invented it. A system of money management that allows the manager and the capital to have an efficient, symbiotic, and symmetrical relationship. Here’s the deal. There are boring ways to run money, the blunt instruments of asset management—long-only mutual funds and their arch nemeses, the exchange-traded fund (ETF) and the index fund.

The Rich and the Rest of Us
by Tavis Smiley
Published 15 Feb 2012

With cities and states suffering budget woes, privatization of public schools—via the charter school movement—hospitals, and mental health institutions is a welcomed option. We’re not saying that private ownership or privatizing services to public institutions are across-the-board evil, we’re saying that the profit motive of privatization can lead to dangerous outcomes. These institutions serve or house the poor; and, as the recession has taught us, profits outweigh the concerns of the people. We must reverse the trend. Public financing of public services must remain a priority. FUNDAMENTAL FAIRNESS LOBBY “The unemployed are politically invisible.

Ayn Rand and the World She Made
by Anne C. Heller
Published 27 Oct 2009

A clue may be found in the dazzling speech she would later write for Francisco d’Anconia, one of three capitalist heroes in Atlas Shrugged. “Money is the root of all good,” Francisco famously announces to a group of hypocritical politicians and professional humanitarians assembled at a wedding party. “Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue.” Francisco goes on to deliver a virtuoso defense of the profit motive; in all of history, he tells his listeners, the free exchange of money has been the only nonviolent, orderly, and socially transparent means of calibrating the value men place upon one another’s work. Without money, and particularly money backed by gold, force decides, Rand argued.* Perhaps it was natural, then, that after many disappointing encounters with politicians, businessmen, theatrical producers, and literary rainmakers, money pleased her more resoundingly than praise.

…

That winter, Rand and the executive board met as often as three times a week, selecting emissaries and discussing tactics for the spring preliminary hearings. As Rand’s special contribution, she composed the “Screen Guide for Americans,” addressed to movie producers and executives who wanted to avoid the appearance of left-wing influence. She warned them not to “smear” success, the profit motive, or wealth, and not to “glorify” the common man. “Don’t spit into your own face,” she added, “or, worse, pay miserable little [Communist screenwriter] rats to do it.” As for Communists’ right to free speech, she argued, rather persuasively, that the principle of free speech requires “that we do not [pass laws or] use a police force to forbid the Communists the expression of their ideas.”

…

“What is it you want to discuss?” she asked on the phone. The book she had submitted was far too long, he replied. He wanted to mention sections that might be trimmed or cut, including, she later learned, to her horror, Francisco d’Anconia’s masterful fivepage speech about the benefits of a money economy and the profit motive, ending with a paean to America: “To the glory of mankind,” he tells the guests at James Taggart’s wedding reception, “there was for the first and only time a country of money, and I have no higher or more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. … Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created,” and thus they invented the felicitous phrase “to make money.”

Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload
by Mark Hurst
Published 15 Jun 2007

It hasn’t gotten a lot of press, and no one got rich from inventing it, yet the ASCII format has become one of the most useful and widespread digital technologies ever created. The two text formats are near-opposites, in fact: ASCII is small, elegant, and compatible with everything; Word is heavy, slow, and proprietary. Much like the DRM-enabled AAC audio format, the Word format is designed with the profit motive in mind. Microsoft is the sole owner of the Word format, so no software application is supposed to read or write the Word format unless Microsoft authorizes it. (Other tools like Google Docs can do so only because their engineers have “reverse-engineered” the format to make their software compatible.)

Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Prosperity
by Kwasi Kwarteng , Priti Patel , Dominic Raab , Chris Skidmore and Elizabeth Truss
Published 12 Sep 2012

Yet, in the emerging economies of Asia, South America and Africa, economic progress continued unabated. In these countries individual initiative and free enterprise continued to drive progress. Millions of people are 4 Britannia Unchained being pulled out of poverty across the world by the simple processes of capitalism. Britannia Unchained is unembarrassed about its support for business, the profit motive and the individual drive of the wealth creator. The term ‘globalisation’ is a cliché. However, it is certain that, for the first time in centuries, the world economy is being driven by what happens outside Europe and North America. At the same time, many parts of the old world are fighting back.

On Anarchism
by Noam Chomsky
Published 4 Nov 2013

Anarchists in this country now insist on grappling with challenges of sexual identity and ingrained oppression that mainstream society gingerly prefers not to recognize. They are at the forefront of movements to protect animal rights and the environment that future generations will be grateful for. As industrial agriculture becomes more and more poisoned by profit motives, anarchists are growing their own food. Anarchist hackers understand better than most of us the power of information and the lengths that those in power will go to control it; proof is in the years- and decades-long prison sentences now being doled out for online civil disobedience. These mighty insights, along with so much else, risk being lost to amnesia if they’re not passed on in memory and habit, if they’re not treated as part of a legacy rather than as just passing reactions against the latest brand of crisis.

Marxian Economic Theory
by Meghnad Desai
Published 20 May 2013

The tendency of the rate of profit to fall illustrated the second contradiction of capitalism. The first contradiction is the emergence of free labour and the class 103 monopoly of means of production. The second contradicition is the growing disparity between the productive capacity of the system - the productive potential and the actual output as dictated by the profit motive. Reproduction in a capitalist system for Marx is not the production of use values - not production for the sake of eventual consumption. Production is the production of capital in such a way that expansion of capital occurs - production for profit and for increased accumulation. The falling rate of profit comes about because of the tendency of the system to concentrate on surplus value and to replace variable capital by constant capital.

Game Over Press Start to Continue
by David Sheff and Andy Eddy
Published 1 Jan 1993

As long as they were communicating, the system operated; if they weren’t, the system froze up. The engineers then tried but failed in their efforts to replicate the technology. Atari engineer Pat McCarthey concluded, “Unless there is a specific profit motivation … I recommend that the investigation end here.” There was, the court would later find, a profit motivation, and Atari did not discontinue the project. Atari had outside engineers try to reverse-engineer the chip—that is, “deprocess” it. Engineer Donald Paauw was assigned the task of analyzing “peeled” or dissected chips in an effort to understand the program embedded within, but he did not succeed.

India's Long Road
by Vijay Joshi
Published 21 Feb 2017

In contrast, in the public sector, managerial incentives are blunted because all profits belong to the state. This is the rationale behind regulated privatization and the whole range of arrangements that go by the name of ‘public-​private partnerships’. They are all ways of harnessing the private profit motive for public purposes. Of course, it does not follow that private production is always superior to public production. In a public-​private contract, there is a danger that in the pursuit of profit the private partner will cut costs by reducing quality (particularly if competition is absent or weak and there is no fear of losing customers).

…

But it should pay for and produce public goods, in either of the above categories, only when it is likely to be more efficient than the private sector in production.27 This could be so when it is impossible or very complicated to contract production out to the private sector, or when contracting would involve the private sector in a very severe conflict between profit maximization and fulfilling the terms of the contract (in which case the profit motive is likely to win). Are there then goods and services that the public sector, and only the public sector, should finance as well as produce, through civil servants and government employees? Yes, certainly. The list would surely include the following items among others: law and order; administration of justice; protection of contracts and property rights; external defence;28 macroeconomic stability, including financial and banking stability; indicative planning and coordination, where justified; maintenance of competition and other ‘rules of the road’ for market functioning; administration of taxes and subsidies; income redistribution, including identification of the poor; environmental regulation; and the vast area of regulation of private sector activities, more generally.29 Note that the above list does not include public goods and services, conventionally so called, such as health care, education, transport, and electricity.

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right
by Jennifer Burns
Published 18 Oct 2009

After this assertion, however, she backed away from sweeping statements, keeping most of her suggestions specific and practical. She opposed any formal movie code but listed thirteen ways to keep movies free of Communist undertones. Rand told moviemakers to avoid smearing the free enterprise system, industrialists, wealth, or the profit motive. They should celebrate success and avoid glorifying failure or the common man. Movies should also be careful about using current events or criticizing American political institutions. Rand’s “Screen Guide” caught the eye of a congressional committee, the House Un-American Activities Commission (HUAC), which was investigating Communist penetration of the movie industry.

…

Evans, an activist since his student days and then an editor at the Indianapolis News, was to draw the line.40 But the message had shifted, and Evans’s prominent cover story revealed how many of Rand’s beliefs had become conventional conservative wisdom even as she remained, officially, persona non grata. Unlike Chambers, Evans was untroubled by her defense of capitalism and her attack on government regulation. She had, Evans wrote, “an excellent grasp of the way capitalism is supposed to work, the efficiencies of free enterprise, the central role of private property and the profit motive, the social and political costs of welfare schemes which seek to compel a false benevolence.”41 He also admired her polemical fire and consistency, and defended her against Chambers’s accusation that she was an unconscious Nazi. Evans went on to argue that despite these features, Rand remained a dangerous figure for conservatives because she mixed her good qualities with the bad, namely, atheism.

On the Wrong Line: How Ideology and Incompetence Wrecked Britain's Railways
by Christian Wolmar
Published 29 May 2005

Railtrack felt it was being burdened with a role for which it was not suited; the other companies feared that Railtrack could exercise control over them by masking commercial considerations under the guise of safety considerations. Nevertheless, the government adopted the HSE’s suggestion, partly allaying fears over the profit motive by ensuring that part of Railtrack’s licence condition was to fund SSD adequately and that it was to be independent of Railtrack’s commercial business. It was an arrangement that failed to recognise that perceptions about the management of safety were almost as important as the reality itself.

…

Grayling argued that ‘a not-for-profit company or trust would have advantages over a traditional state owned industry in terms of access to private finance and the accountability of its board to stakeholders, including passengers and the industry’.² As there were to be no shareholders, there would be no potential conflict between profit and safety. Any profits would be reinvested to improve the network and instead of the profit motive, the new company’s objectives ‘could include maximising the use of the railways by passengers and freight and high standards of safety’.³ It was a solution that had been used for another capital-intensive industry, water, with the creation in Wales of Glas Cymru, also a company limited by guarantee.

How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Liberalism and the Fight for Its Life
by Ian Dunt
Published 15 Oct 2020

But if few customers wanted a product, the price would fall. People would stop producing it, because it didn’t make much profit, until there was a reduction in supply and the price would eventually rise. This price mechanism gave people all sorts of vital data about scarcity and desire. And it meant that production suddenly became efficient. The profit motive encouraged cheaper production, driving down costs and maximising national output. Importantly, this was not achieved by planning. It flowed naturally from people’s self-interest. Each individual, Smith said, in the single most famous metaphor in all of economics, was ‘led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.’

…

He argued against state restrictions on the market, both because of the impact on individual property rights and also because property increased the material benefits of society at large. He was followed by Friedrich von Hayek, who considered any state interference to be the start of a slippery slope that led to tyranny. Mill took a different approach. He emphasised areas where the market did not succeed, where the profit motive failed, or private monopolies developed. He resisted the idea that there would ever be a solution to the question of state versus market. Instead, cases should be dealt with individually, with an assessment of whether they were improving conditions for most people. The state and the market were both a potential source of progress and a potential threat to freedom.

If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future
by Jill Lepore
Published 14 Sep 2020

But the study of the human condition is not the same as the study of the spread of viruses and the density of clouds and the movement of the stars.4 Human nature does not follow laws like the law of gravity, and to believe that it does is to take an oath to a new religion.5 Predestination can be a dangerous gospel. The profit-motivated collection and use of data about human behavior, unregulated by any governmental body, has wreaked havoc on human societies, especially on the spheres in which Simulmatics engaged: politics, advertising, journalism, counterinsurgency, and race relations. Its rise also marked the near abandonment of humanistic knowledge.

…

Abelson, Robert, 118, 130, 133, 310 “Abraham ’58: A Nuclear Fantasy” (Wheeler), 174 advertising    — computer models from advertising agencies, 152–54, 360n    — by Eisenhower campaign, 18, 20, 21–22    — “Great Computer Hoax” of 1962, 154    — growth after World War II, 15    — presidential election of 1952, 14, 15, 20, 21–23    — presidential election of 1956, 43–44    — Simulmatics marketing to advertising agencies, 138–39, 152–53, 322, 356n    — Stevenson opposition to political advertising, 15, 20, 21, 22, 43, 65    — targeted advertising by Simulmatics, 5 Age of Jackson, The (Schlesinger), 94 Albee, Edward, 85, 146 Alsop, Stewart, 23 American Freedom of Residence Fund, 14 American National Election Study, 34 American Power and the New Mandarins (Chomsky), 291 American Voting Behavior (Burdick, Brodbeck), 37 antiwar movement    — at Harvard, 297–98    — march on the Pentagon, 251–53, 286    — National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, 235, 251, 286    — New York protests in 1967, 233–34, 235    — overview, 234–35    — protests against Project Cambridge, 292–93, 295–98, 315, 385–86n    — San Francisco protests in 1967, 235    — Science Action Coordinating Committee (SACC), 291–92    — student attacks on Pool and Simulmatics, 285, 292–93, 295–96, 298–300, 303, 315, 385n    — student protest pamphlets and posters, 49, 255, 276, 293, 299, 386n    — student protests against ARPANET, 296    — Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 199, 242, 276, 286, 292, 295, 296–97, 299    — surveillance of, 305, 307, 315    — teach-ins, 199–200, 225, 234, 251, 292, 294    — see also Vietnam War Apollo 11, 78 Apple Macintosh, 317 Aquaman, 30, 109 Arbuckle, Mrs., 155, 164 Arendt, Hannah, 78 Armies of the Night, The (Mailer), 233, 252 Arnold, William, 243–44 ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency)    — ARPANET, 284, 296, 310–11, 312, 313–15, 316, 318    — complaints about Simulmatics, 221, 224, 236–37, 240–41, 244, 245–48, 254, 265, 290    — counterinsurgency, 200, 213, 216    — dynamic modeling, 200, 213–14, 216–17    — Eisenhower creation of, 77–78    — Licklider and, 284, 296, 310, 370n ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) (continued)    — network building, 152    — offices in Saigon, 207    — Pool’s presentation to, 169–70, 363n    — Project Agile, 213    — Project Cambridge, 283, 284–85, 296    — reaction to Hoc’s projects, 251, 267    — Simulmatics contracts, 221, 231, 240, 243, 254, 267, 284    — “TV Hamlets” study, 246–47, 248    — Vietnamese spoken by Americans, investigation, 220 artificial intelligence    — Alex Bernstein playing chess with an IBM 704, 67, 68, 70, 73, 74–75    — Artificial Intelligence Lab at Stanford, 312    — Artificial Intelligence Project at MIT, 76, 170, 311    — automation and simulation related to, 71–72    — Dartmouth conference in 1956, 73, 74–75, 87, 89    — defined, 5    — history of man vs. machine chess match, 72–73    — origin of term, 71    — see also computer revolution Aspin, Les, 303 Atlas Shrugged (Rand), 127 atomized society, 277, 312, 316, 322 Attwood, William, 103 automation and unemployment fears, 69–70, 99, 129–30 Bagdikian, Ben, 191 Ballantine Ale, 27, 173 Ball, George    — on precision of McNamara’s predictions, 208    — Stevenson 1952 campaign, 20, 22, 23, 62–63    — Stevenson’s death and, 370n    — warnings about Vietnam escalation, 163–64, 194, 213 Baran, Paul, 282, 284, 337n Barlow, John Perry, 319 Baudrillard, Jean, 4 Baxter, Leone, 16, 17, 273 Bay of Pigs invasion, 141, 156 BBDO (Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn), 20, 152, 153, 321, 359nn behavioral sciences    — “Behavioral Science and National Security” congressional hearings, 211    — conservative opposition to, 57    — data science and, 324–25, 326–27, 389n    — defined, 36–37    — laws of nature compared to, 324, 389n    — predictive analytics, 5, 327    — profit motive and money for universities, 324–25, 326    — proper public role of, 172–73    — psychoanalysis and, 58 Belknap, George, 117 Bellevue Hospital, 90–91 Bellow, Saul, 56, 58–59, 186, 344n Berelson, Bernard, 34 Berkeley protests in 1964, 196–98 Bernstein, Alex    — counterinsurgency research proposal, 216, 370n    — Dartmouth artificial intelligence conference, 73, 74–75, 87    — early life and career, 68    — election simulation, 78–79    — Greenfield and, 79    — marketing for Simulmatics, 136, 152    — marriage, 74    — Media-Mix simulation, 138, 359–60n    — Moynihan and, 260    — playing chess with an IBM 704, 67, 68, 70, 73, 74–75, 100    — preparation for 1962 Times election coverage, 154–55, 166, 362n    — Project Macroscope, 92    — as psychoanalyst, 303    — Simulmatics stock offering and, 139    — on Turing’s machine, 73    — in Venezuela, 209, 210 Bernstein, Carl, 309, 310 Bernstein, June Atlas, 74 Best Man, The (Vidal), 11, 63–64 big data, 279, 282, 325 Billion-Dollar Brain, The (Deighton), 125 Bork, Robert, 308 Boulding, Kenneth, 36–37, 38 Bowles, Chester, 112 brainwashing, 20–21, 93 Brain-Washing in Red China (Hunter), 20 Brando, Marlon, 27, 40, 101, 173 Brand, Stewart, 310, 311–12, 314, 317–18 Brinkley, David, 192 Brin, Sergey, 6, 55 Brown, Claude, 256–57, 258, 287 Brown v.

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech
by Brian Merchant
Published 25 Sep 2023

They are the factories run by Arkwright and Horsfall, followed into the future, the Frankenstein’s monsters updated in the advanced age of cultural reproduction. The root of the evil, in all of these films, the seeds of our demise, are expressed through technological automation, and through those elites harnessing its power to wipe us away. This is a fear, even today—that the profit motive, put on autopilot by elites who relish its disruptive power, will destroy not only our way of life but our very humanity.1 In the first famous Frankenstein film (1931), which cemented the monster’s foundation in modern pop culture, Boris Karloff’s monster is a simp, a baby in a monster’s frame who does not understand the world he is unleashed upon and cannot help but cause violence against it.

…

The biggest reason that the last two hundred years have seen a series of conflicts between the employers who deploy technology and workers forced to navigate that technology is that we are still subject to what is, ultimately, a profoundly undemocratic means of developing, introducing, and integrating technology into society. Individual entrepreneurs and large corporations and next-wave Frankensteins are allowed, even encouraged, to dictate the terms of that deployment, with the profit motive as their guide. Venture capital may be the radical apotheosis of this mode of technological development, capable as it is of funneling enormous sums of money into tech companies that can decide how they would like to build and unleash the products and services that shape society. Take the rise of generative AI.

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite
by Duff McDonald
Published 24 Apr 2017

By 1980, the starting salary for an elite MBA student was almost double the U.S. median pay level. 43 Managerialism Was Already Dead Lawrence Fouraker was prone to philosophical flights of fancy in his annual reports to the president of Harvard when he was dean of HBS, and his 1973–74 report was a prime example of such. In it, he compared what he called the three primary economic systems of the United States: capitalism, managerialism, and socialism. Capitalism was the profit motive, its primary mechanism the market, and its sovereign the consumer. Managerialism was the response to capitalism’s success, which had resulted in two kinds of markets—external (that is, consumers) and internal (the “economy” within a firm itself). The manager was supposed to have some sort of exclusive technical ability required to mediate between the two.

…

(Piper et al), 403, 437 Capital Cities/ABC, 163, 169, 171 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 281, 540 capitalism, 2, 4, 5, 6, 10, 17, 184, 384; belief system, 59; communist threat, 143, 184; creative destruction, 243, 348; efficient-market hypothesis, 411; ethics and, 261, 432; free market and, 43, 57; HBS as the West Point of Capitalism, 135–39; investor capitalism, 366–67, 387; laissez-faire, 131; managerial capitalism, 132, 144, 247, 250; morality of, 566; power equals money in, 369; profit motive, 432; Research Center in Entrepreneurial History and, 243; shareholder capitalism, 6, 298, 315, 360–64, 366, 576; trade-offs, 281; trans-national capitalist class, 8 Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (Schumpeter), 348 Carnegie, Andrew, 23, 28 Carnegie, Rod, 209 Carnegie’s Graduate School of Industrial Administration (GSIA), 214, 215, 220, 221, 225, 226, 228, 260, 297, 343, 451; Kaplan at, 443 Caro, Robert, 480–81 Carr, Nick, 303, 304, 305–6 Carroll, Thomas, 106, 220, 231, 289 Carter, Edward, 96 Carter, Graydon, 472 Carter, Jimmy, 354 Carter, John, 468 Case, Everett Needham, 234 case method, 3, 5, 6, 11, 27, 45, 46–53, 91, 92, 211, 212, 221–22, 225, 226, 277–84, 455; Associates funding, 104, 195; Bales and, 6; benefits, 52–53, 202–3, 277–78, 394, 470; bias for action, 51–52, 291; Bok’s criticism, 336, 338, 339; Bower’s defense, 206, 338–39; businesses asking to be studied, 58; Butcher Polish case, 333; casebooks, 99; casebooks, revenues from, 278, 279, 283; cases for SCMP, 326; case study hero, 107, 171, 280, 312, 436, 527; choices for study, Associates and, 106; Christensen and, 279; class section system and, 394; computerizing of cases, 155–56; Copeland-Cherington experiment and, 48–49; corporate sponsors and, 284, 520–21, 522; costs, 58, 63, 278; departure from (2010), 565–66; Dimon and Murphy on, 51; Elberse’s bestselling studies, 556; Enron cases, 281, 519, 522; ethics cases, 436; faculty development and, 46; failure to link actions to societal concerns, 51; Ford Foundation and, 278; Gay and, 27, 30, 47–48, 52; HBS vs. other schools, 397; international companies, 255; invention of, 47–53; JetBlue Airways study, 284; Johnson & Johnson cases, 527; judgment-based theory and, 5; Krasnow case, 333; Marine Basic School compared to, 50; Marriott case, 402; National Cranberry Cooperative case, 283; McNair on, 48–49; Merck, Vioxx scandal, and, 106–7; Mintzberg as critic, 483–89; negatives, 195, 280–82, 286–87; number of cases taught, 53; other schools using, 228–29, 279, 283; Raiffa and, 215–17; rationale for vs. reality of, 396–99; research and, 355, 455; SASB study, 562; skills taught by, 176–77; social aspect of, 394–98; Socratic method and, 49, 64, 394; Staples cases, 333; teaching ethics and, 429; teaching strategy and, 260; translations, 231, 255; weakness of, 51; World War II and, 137 Case Method at the Harvard Business School, The (McNair and Hersum, eds.), 279 Case Method of Teaching Human Relations and Administration, The (Andrews), 279 Cash, James, 409–10 Castle, John, 322, 468 Catchings, Waddill, 122 Caufield, Frank, 120, 127, 322 Caust, Len, 344 Caves, Richard, 412 Celler-Kefauver Act of 1950, 193 Central and Eastern European Teachers Program, 232 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 162, 187, 230, 231, 254 “CEO Incentives” (Jensen and Murphy), 371 C.

…

See also specific people “Corporate Malfeasance and the Myth of Shareholder Value” (Dobbin and Zorn), 462–63 “Corporate Power in the 21st Century” (Davis), 369 Corporate Strategy (Ansoff), 257–58 Corporation, The (Bakan), 362, 505 corporations, 8, 10, 14, 31, 95, 131, 182–87, 422; anthropomorphic fallacy and, 418; Balanced Scorecard and, 442–52; boards, constitution of, 388; cash hoarding, 349, 367; Citizens United decision and, 492; corporate elite, 313, 387–88; DCF adopted by, 118–19; disturbing trends, 285; diversification, 193; downsizing, 212, 301, 368, 371, 387, 431; Drucker and, 243; environmental issues, 7; federal regulation, 184, 200, 357, 358, 367; HBS and, 8, 9, 62, 105–7, 142, 153–55, 190, 336, 460, 530; HBS’s executive education and, 147–49, 151–52, 197–98; Hollywood portrayals, 183–84, 186; hostile takeovers and leveraged buyouts, 362, 367, 369, 370–71, 380, 430, 463; income inequality and, 56, 165–66, 463, 539, 544; inversions and tax avoidance, 529; investors as custodians, 366–67, 387, 388 (see also shareholder value); job turnover, 291, 383; under Kennedy, 28; labor unions and, 161; layoffs, 387, 492–93; Levitt’s redefining of identity, 261–62; MBAs in, 289, 290–92, 345, 383; megacorporations, 14, 31, 182–83, 193, 358; mergers and acquisitions, 349, 371; M-form structure, 245, 250, 251–52, 266; morality and, 114, 566; need for managers, 14–15, 132; network of interlocking directorships, 189, 191, 211, 289; Organization Man and, 183–87; as people, 509; percentage of Americans employed by, 144; power elite and, 188–93; power of, 249, 288, 342, 385; price fixing, 285; profit motive and, 10, 367; Progressive containment of, 62; recruiters for, 151, 178, 186–87, 199, 207–8, 209, 460; shareholder value and, 10, 36, 360–64, 369, 418, 442, 462, 469, 491, 550, 567; shares in, 363, 375; short-term thinking, 247, 345, 443, 469, 551; social problems and, 385; social responsibility, 145, 314–15, 360–64, 366, 382, 384–91, 427, 434, 436, 472, 525–29, 560–62; stakeholder model, 6, 367; strategy, 258–61; systems approach, 89, 112–13, 114, 217; theory of the firm and, 366; top-down power, 32; workers’ benefits lost, 462.

The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market
by Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane
Published 11 Apr 2004

Growing proportions of the nation’s labor force are engaged in jobs that emphasize expert thinking or complex communication—tasks that computers cannot do. If the set of products and services produced in the economy did not change, there would be less and less good work for humans to do as advances in computerization increased the possibilities for substitution. Such a trend, however, would run directly counter to the profit motive. A task, once computerized, is potentially easy to replicate and so invites intense competition. The response to the competition is a constant drive to use advances in computer technology to develop new products and services—cell phones, DVDs, broad-band Internet, computer-assisted surgery, financial derivatives, sensors in cars—the list is endless.

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don't Talk About It)
by Elizabeth S. Anderson
Published 22 May 2017

They still retain an interest in having a say over their working conditions.33 Here I stress a different point: I doubt whether Cowen’s model applies across the entire spectrum of wage labor. For the most part, lower-paid workers suffer from higher levels of disrespect, harassment, terrible working conditions, and offensive restraints on autonomy than higher-paid workers. Moreover, heightening the profit motive makes things worse all-around for these workers. For example, when prisons are converted from public to private, for-profit enterprises, guards simultaneously suffer huge wage cuts and large increases in violent assaults by prisoners, because their employers also cut staffing levels so low that not enough guards are available to control the prisoners.34 Inmate attacks on staff in federal prisons increase by 260 percent.35 Cowen’s confidence that workers are somehow compensated with higher wages for putting up with gross insults to their dignity, standing, and autonomy is belied by the staggering scale of wage theft in America.

Willful: How We Choose What We Do
by Richard Robb
Published 12 Nov 2019

A survey of 830 American menus posted online found an average of 114 items offered at each restaurant. Although voluminous menus aren’t new (an 1899 Delmonico’s menu listed thirty-five dishes in the vegetable category alone), it is sometimes criticized as a curse of modern life, a pathology of free markets.11 But if the average consumer dislikes excessive variety, why does it exist? The profit motive should drive it out, since the market has every incentive to meet our needs subject to cost. Consumers who find lengthy menus overwhelming should be willing to pay for a simpler experience, allowing restaurateurs to earn an above-market profit by limiting options. A half-dozen items on a menu should satisfy customers’ appetites and food tolerances, and shrinking the menu would allow a restaurant to increase turnover and hence freshness while holding down costs.

Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence
by Kristen R. Ghodsee
Published 20 Nov 2018

Yet government funds provide substantial financial aid for students at these universities, thus subsidizing profits for investors when those funds could be used to strengthen the quality of public education instead. Citizens in other societies, even our close allies in Canada and the United Kingdom, understand that the profit motive sometimes undermines the public good.14 Of course, some might argue that instead of expanding public employment, the government could legislate pay equality and enforce provisions to ensure that private sector firms pay women fairly, a step the Icelandic government took beginning in early 2018 and the state of Massachusetts took after July 1, 2018.

And Finally
by Henry Marsh

I had imagined all sorts of sinister reasons for the silence, but it turned out to be the simple bureaucratic inertia that is so typical of the NHS and is one of the downsides of what Americans call socialised healthcare, where we often have to queue for results and treatment. Although I deplore the application of market economics to healthcare, the profit motive, alas, does seem to make doctors and hospitals respond more quickly– at least, for those who can afford private medical care. The oncologist rang me two days later. ‘I’m very sorry about the delay,’ he said. ‘My team never told me that you had had the scans. It was a good thing you got in touch to tell me.

Numbers Rule Your World: The Hidden Influence of Probability and Statistics on Everything You Do
by Kaiser Fung
Published 25 Jan 2010

From the industry’s perspective, the 2004–2005 disasters exposed the inadequacy of the prevailing insurance rates, which relied on wayward projections of the frequency of storms and the intensity of losses. The insurers also discovered that their customers could not bear the full cost of the insurance, so they could see no profit motive, and thus the insurance market failed. ~###~ Statisticians have something else to add to this story: Natural-disaster insurers, unlike automotive insurers, have no choice but to accept risks that are concentrated in vulnerable geographies. This agglomeration of risk became more and more severe as the existing risk pools disintegrated after the 2004–2005 seasons.

American Made: Why Making Things Will Return Us to Greatness
by Dan Dimicco
Published 3 Mar 2015

He wanted to buy a controlling stake in Hunan Valin Steel, one of the major Chinese steel manufacturers. He couldn’t do it. Beijing will not allow foreign ownership of key industries. China’s economic practices seem strange to us because we believe so strongly in the free market. We believe in fair play. Most of us still believe in a good, old-fashioned profit motive. Yet we see China rising fast, on the brink of replacing the United States as the world’s largest economy and profiting in almost every business it touches, even though they’re not free and don’t play fair. Let’s face it, most of the world doesn’t really believe in an open-market philosophy like we do.

Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Popular Culture Is Making Us Smarter
by Steven Johnson
Published 5 Apr 2006

As we've seen, the Sleeper Curve isn't the result of media ti­ tans doing charitable work ; there 's an economic incentive in producing more challenging cultu re , thanks to the tech­ nologies of repetition and meta-commentary. But the end re­ sult is the same: left to its own devices, following its own profit motives, the media eco system has been churning out popular culture that has grown steadily more complex over time. Imagi ne a version of Brave New World where soma and the feelies make you smarter, and you get the idea. If the Sleeper Curve turns the conventional wisdom about 180 STEVEN JOHNSON mass culture o n its head, i t does something comparable to our own heads-and the truisms we like to spread about them.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem
by Joan Didion
Published 1 Jan 1968

The instinct is socially suicidal, and because we recognize that this is so we have developed workable ways of saying one thing and believing quite another. A long time ago, Lionel Trilling pointed out what he called “the fatal separation” between “the ideas of our educated liberal class and the deep places of the imagination.” “I mean only,” he wrote, “that our educated class has a ready if mild suspiciousness of the profit motive, a belief in progress, science, social legislation, planning and international cooperation....Those beliefs do great credit to those who hold them. Yet it is a comment, if not on our beliefs then on our way of holding them, that not a single first-rate writer has emerged to deal with these ideas, and the emotions that are consonant with them, in a great literary way.”

The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa
by Irene Yuan Sun
Published 16 Oct 2017

We surveyed nearly 200 manufacturing firms, and their average annual revenues was $21 million—far exceeding the cutoff defining small and medium enterprises in most African countries. And nearly all those firms are privately owned as opposed to being Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs), suggesting that these investments are driven by profit motives rather than by government directives. This may surprise readers familiar with reports that emphasize links between the Chinese government and Chinese business in Africa. But China is a vast place, and large sections of the economy are privately run. After all, most factory bosses in China work for themselves.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 7 Sep 2022

Bill Gates enjoyed no personal financial stake in the Covid vaccines his nonprofit foundation helped develop. Yet while he encouraged cooperation between the companies racing to develop a vaccine, he also steadfastly defended their intellectual property rights. He convinced Oxford’s researchers to do an exclusive deal with AstraZeneca, for example, arguing that if Big Pharma were not given a profit motive, we were at risk of “civilizational collapse .” As tech writer Cory Doctorow put it at the time, “despite his cuddly reputation as a philanthropist, Gates has always pursued the ideology that the world should be guarded over by monopolist-kings, dependent on their largesse (guided by their superhuman judgment) for progress.”

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas
by Natasha Dow Schüll
Published 15 Jan 2012

34 To convince patrons that it is better to be known than anonymous, casinos present player tracking as a convenient service and a means for acquiring the rewards to which they are entitled. “Loyalty programs are about giving your customers a reason to give you data, so that data can be used to earn you money,” said an industry member in 2008, laying bare the profit motives behind the language of “relationship.”35 “Interactivity,” notes Andrejevic, “is not necessarily a two-way street; more often than not, it amounts to the offer of convenience in exchange for willing or unwitting submission to increasingly detailed forms of information gathering.”36 A striking example of “unwitting submission” is found in Bally’s method for tracking players regardless of their participation in a loyalty club.

…

Previous chapters have paid close attention to how the material and computational design features of machine gambling format and modulate its flow so as to facilitate “continuous gaming productivity.” Although Csikszentmihalyi allows that certain activities “may provide a reward structure” more likely to produce flow, and that “an understanding of flow is relevant to the design of leisure products and services,” he neither elaborates on the profit motives behind the design of user flow nor reflects on how these motives might lead to products and services whose configuration risks drawing users’ escape motivations in a “backward” direction, such that they lose themselves without self-actualizing gain.8 This chapter—the sixth stop on the circuit of this book and the last before we turn to the person who sits in front of the machine—builds on the foregoing analysis by focusing in on one particular aspect of flow and its role in the addictive experience of machine gambling: the element of player control.

Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media
by Peter Warren Singer and Emerson T. Brooking
Published 15 Mar 2018

Although Twitter had served as Trump’s treasured microphone, it was Facebook in which Americans had been at their most politically vulnerable, trapped in networks of people who thought just like them and who accorded hundreds of millions of “shares” to stories that were obvious hoaxes. Indeed, the whispers were already beginning that Facebook had been saturated not just with profit-motivated misinformation and “fake news” spun by Macedonian teenagers, but also with a pro-Trump disinformation campaign orchestrated by the Russian government. As stupefied liberals searched for someone or something to blame, Mark Zuckerberg could see the tidal wave coming. What followed was essentially a corporate version of psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

…

To remove the post would cost Facebook conservative users—and valuable business. It was exactly as observed by writer Upton Sinclair a century earlier: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Today, the role of social media firms in public life is one that evades easy description. They are profit-motivated, mostly U.S.-based businesses that manage themselves like global governments. They are charmingly earnest, preaching inclusivity even as they play host to the world’s most divisive forces. They are powerful entities that pretend to be powerless, inescapable political forces that insist they have no interest at all in politics.

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas
by Natasha Dow Schüll
Published 19 Aug 2012

34 To convince patrons that it is better to be known than anonymous, casinos present player tracking as a convenient service and a means for acquiring the rewards to which they are entitled. “Loyalty programs are about giving your customers a reason to give you data, so that data can be used to earn you money,” said an industry member in 2008, laying bare the profit motives behind the language of “relationship.”35 “Interactivity,” notes Andrejevic, “is not necessarily a two-way street; more often than not, it amounts to the offer of convenience in exchange for willing or unwitting submission to increasingly detailed forms of information gathering.”36 A striking example of “unwitting submission” is found in Bally’s method for tracking players regardless of their participation in a loyalty club.

…

Previous chapters have paid close attention to how the material and computational design features of machine gambling format and modulate its flow so as to facilitate “continuous gaming productivity.” Although Csikszentmihalyi allows that certain activities “may provide a reward structure” more likely to produce flow, and that “an understanding of flow is relevant to the design of leisure products and services,” he neither elaborates on the profit motives behind the design of user flow nor reflects on how these motives might lead to products and services whose configuration risks drawing users’ escape motivations in a “backward” direction, such that they lose themselves without self-actualizing gain.8 This chapter—the sixth stop on the circuit of this book and the last before we turn to the person who sits in front of the machine—builds on the foregoing analysis by focusing in on one particular aspect of flow and its role in the addictive experience of machine gambling: the element of player control.

Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing
by Adam Greenfield
Published 14 Sep 2006

For one thing, it leaves entirely too much unspoken as to what constitutes harm, as to who is at risk, as to what the likely consequences of failure would be. It assumes that everyone developing everyware will do so in complete good faith and will always esteem the abstract-seeming needs of users more highly than market share, the profit motive, or the prerogatives of total information awareness. And, even where developers can be relied upon to act in good faith, it's simply not specific enough to constitute practically useful guidance. The next best thing, then, is to develop a strategy for ethical development that does take these factors into account—something that spells out the issues in sufficient detail to be of use to developers, that strikes a balance between their needs and those of users, and that incentivizes compliance rather than punish noncompliance.

The Oil Factor: Protect Yourself-and Profit-from the Coming Energy Crisis
by Stephen Leeb and Donna Leeb
Published 12 Feb 2004

Our system can’t survive without affordable energy, and once oil doesn’t fit that bill, we’ll need to find something else that does. We’ll all have to come together on this. Rising oil prices will force the issue. But even then we can’t take for granted that we will get on the right path. We can’t rely on good old-fashioned capitalism and the profit motive to produce solutions, to generate the best technology or create the necessary infrastructure. Private enterprise will play a big role, but it can’t do it all on its own. America’s signal accomplishments during the twentieth century—whether winning wars, building the interstate highway system, or landing a man on the moon—required efforts well beyond the reach of private enterprise.

The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels
by Alex Epstein
Published 13 Nov 2014

There are filters like ceramics or fabric filtration systems to prevent undesirable substances from getting into the air; there are ingenious processes that use certain chemical agents, such as limestone, to bind pollutants and prevent them from escaping; there are mechanical devices like wet or dry scrubbers to separate out unwanted constituents; and there are many others. Over time, these technological advances, as they became economical, became mandated by law. There is a whole controversial literature about which laws (federal or state) get credit, how much was industry’s profit-motivated pursuit of efficiency, and to what extent the laws overregulated pollution at the expense of access to energy. For our purposes the important thing is this: It’s clearly possible to increase fossil fuel use while decreasing pollution. And what applies to the most challenging fossil fuel, coal, also applies to oil and natural gas.

The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance
by Jim Whitehurst
Published 1 Jun 2015

It is what makes people willing to do the hard tasks of innovation together and work through the inevitable conflict and tension.”6 More and more, executives and entrepreneurs are beginning to understand the importance of having a purpose in business—you need to have a goal in mind that transcends the profit motive. That’s the only way you’ll be able to attract the best and brightest talent. Think about the success that Tony Hsieh and his company, Zappos, have had, for example, by focusing on delivering happiness to their customers. But what’s less clear is that to truly perform at a peak level, simply defining a purpose is not enough.

How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets
by Andy Kessler
Published 13 Jun 2005

By 1719, Blunt noted that Parliament was struggling under about 30 million pounds of debt. Blunt offered to exchange debt for shares again. But this time, it would not be at par or its original value or true net worth, but at the value that South Sea shares were trading. This made it ripe for manipulation. In fact, the only true profit motive for the South Sea Company would soon become CAPTIAL MARKETS AND BUBBLES 69 driving its stock price up over par and then exchanging it for debt, the profit being the difference between the stock’s value and par. These profits would then be “reported” to investors, which would drive the stock higher.

Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs
by Andy Kessler
Published 1 Feb 2011

Wikipedia, which as a free service has mainly a societal profit, defines it as “the making of gain in business activity for the benefit of the owners of the business.” But while the owner of the business makes a gain, so does the buyer, or else they wouldn’t have bought the damn product in the first place. Digging further, profit is derived from the Latin profectus: advance, progress, increase, growth. Hmm. Or proficere: to go forward, be useful. The profit motive has been a giant carrot for centuries and is what drives innovation and productivity, which (you should know by now!) creates increased living standards and wealth. I spent pages and pages of my book How We Got Here on James Watt, a University of Glasgow flunky who studied latent heat and tinkered for years until he came up with a more efficient steam engine, selling off two thirds of his future invention to venture capitalist Matthew Boulton in exchange for capital to fund his work.

Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centres
by Jamie Woodcock
Published 20 Nov 2016

What takes its place is ‘the need to produce limited amounts of differentiated goods’, targeted ‘according to the changing “taste” of consumers that we will need to know as well as possible in order to better reach them, while at the same time trying to find the best ways to realize gains in productivity’.29 The increased pressure to realise the surplus value embedded in commodities has created new and innovative ways to reach customers and convince them to buy. This has also combined with the introduction of the profit motive further into new areas and subsequently commodifying goods and services that were previously produced or consumed in different ways. The result is an increased emphasis on affective and emotional labour, the drive to convince consumers stemming from the impulse to realise profit in ever more moments.

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
by Oliver Burkeman
Published 9 Aug 2021

Factories and mills required the coordinated labor of hundreds of people, paid by the hour, and the result was that leisure became sharply delineated from work. Implicitly, workers were offered a deal: you could do whatever you liked with your time off, so long as it didn’t damage—and preferably enhanced—your usefulness on the job. (So there was a profit motive at play when the upper classes expressed horror at the lower classes’ enthusiasm for drinking gin: coming to work with a hangover, because you’d spent your leisure time getting wasted, was a violation of the deal.) In one narrow sense, this new situation left working people freer than before, since their leisure was more truly their own than when church and community had dictated almost everything they did with it.

The Metric Society: On the Quantification of the Social
by Steffen Mau
Published 12 Jun 2017

In the language of an alternative theory, we are seeing alloreferential influences on areas hitherto relatively safe from economic considerations, such as public authorities, the health sector or the education system, whose performance is now measured according to these new criteria as a basis for resource allocation (Schimank & Volkmann 2008). In the absence of markets structured via price signals and the profit motive, attempts are made to promote cost-consciousness and efficiency orientation by creating quasi-markets (Le Grand 1991; Weiß 2001). Key to this endeavour is the instigation of competitive relations; competition is, after all, not a fundamental condition, but something that has to be nurtured and established.

The Creative Curve: How to Develop the Right Idea, at the Right Time
by Allen Gannett
Published 11 Jun 2018

Density is useful not only for finding teachers and mentors, but also collaborators. Says Florida, “In a great urban area, there are lots of talented people competing and collaborating, combining and recombining, forming and reforming with one another. Out of that very Darwinian process, out of that Darwinian profit motive, you begin to get great successes.” For these spillovers to happen, face-to-face relationships are also critical. It’s not enough for people to know each other. Close physical proximity means that you and I bump into each other at the corner coffee shop, or while we’re waiting for the bus, which gives us ample opportunities for impromptu meetings.

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown
by Philip Mirowski
Published 24 Jun 2013

[It] must make him into a sort of permanent and multiple enterprise.8 B) An entrepreneurial regimen for the self will eventually extend the purview of its calculus to every conceivable social activity, and not just those narrowly oriented to pecuniary profit. This happens because it renders persons more susceptible to control, and not simply due to the profit motive. As Foucault put it, one extends the “grid, the schema, and the model of Homo economicus to not only every economic actor, but to every social actor in general inasmuch as he or she gets married, for example, or commits a crime, or raises children, gives affection and spends time with the kids . . .

…

Legal systems have sought to draw bright lines where identity begins and ends, although this has come under increasing pressure in the last three decades. The universe is conventionally divided up into three big categories: items and bodies that are prohibited in every instance; items and bodies that are deemed inalienable; and items and bodies that are both legal and alienable, but where exchange under the profit motive is banned or limited. The Thirteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits both slavery and sale of military conscription, moving these phenomena into the second category from prior full commodity status. Sale and commercial possession of babies was subsequently presumed to occupy the first category, although we shall observe that this is rapidly eroding.

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance
by Eswar S. Prasad
Published 27 Sep 2021

Even hedge funds and other such rapacious-sounding financial institutions provide valuable services. They make some of their money by searching for and exploiting inefficiencies in financial markets, sometimes taking on considerable risk in the process. While such actions are hardly noble and are driven purely by the profit motive, they can prod other institutions and government regulators to try to fix those inefficiencies. Similarly, when exporters and importers want to hedge foreign exchange risks, there need to be investors on the other side who are willing to take bets on exchange rate movements that allow for such hedging operations.

…

Big Brother Can Be Benevolent The emergence of cryptocurrencies and the prospect of CBDCs raise important questions about the right level of government involvement in financial markets, whether it is impinging on areas that are preferably left to the private sector, and whether there are identifiable market failures where it can fill in gaps left open by market forces. This is not to fetishize the free market but to acknowledge that competition and the profit motive are powerful forces that drive innovation even if they do not solve all problems. Indeed, leaving market forces untrammeled is not a recipe for a fair and efficient financial system. Even benevolent and well-meaning governments—perhaps an Orwellian phrase in itself—have their work cut out for them in striking the right balance.

Sex, Lies, and Pharmaceuticals: How Drug Companies Plan to Profit From Female Sexual Dysfunction
by Ray Moynihan and Barbara Mintzes
Published 1 Oct 2010

(documentary), 17, 221 pain, 1, 12, 28, 64, 111, 165 everyday, as medical disorder, 18 as female sexual ‘dysfunction,’ 2, 19, 40, 47, 52, 81, 84, 178, 190–1, 197 and Kinsey Institute, 54 and non-drug therapies, 175, 217 and Viagra, 158 Parry, Vince, 17 Pfizer, 3, 115, 121, 125 and disclosure of funding of medical education activities, 214 and ‘educating’ medical practitioners, 91–7, 100, 104–5, 110, 114 and funding research and conferences, 37, 49–50, 60–1, 85 has no current plans to develop FSD medicines, 175 and healthcare fraud case, 118–20 and inducements and kickbacks, 38, 119 and ‘key opinion leaders,’ 112 and new ‘corporate integrity agreement,’ 120 and US AIDS HealthCare Foundation lawsuit, 143 and the US Department of Justice, 92, 113 and US Food and Drug Administration, 142 and Viagra, 31, 33–4, 102–3, 124, 126–7, 131–3, 135 and Viagra for women, 3, 158–60 Pfizer Foundation Hall for Humanism in Medicine, 100 pharmaceutical industry. see also Boehringer; Pfizer; Procter & Gamble; relationships between pharmaceutical industry and medical community attempting to shape sexual concerns, 187 blurs lines between promotion and education, 93, 97 and ‘disease development,’ 17 and drug testing, 11 and financial support for medical journals, 114 fosters creation of medical disorders (see medicalisation of common sexual difficulties) and funding of scientific surveys, 62 funding supports the science of sexual medicine, 116–7 and ghost writing, 189 hungry for new markets, 2 and inflated estimates of female sexual ‘dysfunction’ (see claims of the prevalence of female sexual ‘dysfunction’) and ‘lifestyle’ market, 39 marketing machines, 90 and marketing sexual disorders, 12 and maximising markets for drug solutions, 194 primary aim is to expand markets for medicines, 112 and problems with placebo-controlled tests, 11 and role in defining disease, 15–7 sees the placebo effect as an enemy, 175 selling sickness and disease, 2 and the sponsored creation of a disease, 40 and use of statistics, 153 Pharmacia (pharmaceutical company), 119 Physicians Payment Sunshine Act, 214–5 placebo effect, 11, 86, 150–2, 158–76, 217 an obstacle to be overcome, 169 and Dr Anita Clayton’s plan to resolve, 169–75 and Dr Cindy Meston, 167–9 drugs unable to beat the placebo, 167 and flibanserin, 204–5 a regulatory problem not a failure of medicine, 170–2, 174 seen as an enemy by the pharmaceutical industry, 175 premature ejaculation, 207 prevalence, claimed, of female sexual ‘dysfunction.’ see claims of the prevalence of female sexual ‘dysfunction’ Procter & Gamble (P&G), 3 and ‘education of medical practitioners, 105–14 global survey, 61–2 marketing campaign for testosterone patch for women, 149 sells out of pharmaceutical business, 166 and testosterone patches for women, 85–6, 100, 147–66, 197 professional medical accreditation and sponsorship by pharmaceutical industry, 98–106 Profile of Female Sexual Function, 86 psychometrics. see questionnaires to diagnose ‘dysfunction’ Public Citizen (consumer watchdog), 155 questionnaires to diagnose ‘dysfunction,’ 79–90 and concern they oversimplify complex problems, 89–90 and ‘reliability’ and ‘validity,’ 82 testing pharmaceutical agents a driver of, 83 reform of financial relationships between pharmaceutical industry and medical community and, 211–5 relationships between pharmaceutical industry and medical community, 7, 9–10, 13, 17, 186 can unduly influence practitioners, 13–4 and Cape Cod meeting, 32–6, 42 dangers of mixing marketing and science, 59 the development of ‘sexual medicine,’ 32, 37–9 and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 19 emerging unease with, 13 financial, 32–8, 91–121, 210–5 and Physicians Payment Sunshine Act, 214–5 and public concern with, 116–7 as ‘public-private’ partnerships, 117–8 and reform of financial links, 211–5 and sponsored seminars, 9 Renewing Sexual Desire: Understanding HSDD in Postmenopausal Women (P &G accredited program), 105–6 Richters, Dr Juliet, University of New South Wales, 65 Robert Wood, Johnson Medical School, 33 Rosen, Dr Ray, 105, 173, 194, 196, 202 and approaches to treating sexual problems, 33 author of article in Journal of he American Medical Association, 49–50 and ‘Cape Cod’ meeting, 33–6, 42 and diagnostic questionnaires, 80–5 gives evidence at FDA hearings into testosterone patch, 155–6 and online education of medical practitioners, 106–7 and Procter and Gamble global survey, 62 and Procter and Gamble medical education program, 105–6 as ‘thought leader,’ 167 and wellness approach, 209–10 Sauers, Joan, 217 science of FSD. see sexual medicine ‘scientific’ surveys. see also questionnaires to diagnose ‘dysfunction’ confuse self-reported problems with medical disorder, 66 and funding by pharmaceutical industry, 62 The Second Sex. see de Beauvoir, Simone selling sickness, 2 Selling Sickness: How drug companies are turning us all into patients, ix serotonin, 180 Sex and the City, 5 sexual ‘dysfunction’ in women. see female sexual ‘dysfunction’ Sexual Function Questionnaire, 85 sexualisation of girl children, 5 sexual medicine. see also labelling of disorders; medicalisation of common sexual difficulties and ‘Cape Cod’ meeting, 36 driven by pharmaceutical industry profit motive, 9 emergence of, 8–9, 31–2 entangled in a web of financial relationships, 9 and female sexual ‘dysfunction,’ 7–9 and focus on sexual difficulties as ‘dysfunction’, 38 funded by pharmaceutical industry, 116–7 often ignores patient, 10 patient surveys, 7 and technology, 68–78 sexual performance, 1, 25, 31, 114, 141, 143 and anxiety due to marketing, 144 sexual problems. see also female sexual ‘dysfunction’ (FSD); female sexuality and the flawed medical model; medicalisation of common sexual difficulties are they ‘dysfunctions’?

Free as in Freedom
by Sam Williams
Published 16 Nov 2015

Stallman branded Ousterhout a "parasite" on the free software community for marketing a proprietary version of Tcl via Ousterhout's startup company, Scriptics. "I don't think Scriptics is necessary for the continued existence of Tcl," Stallman said to hisses from the fellow audience members.See Malcolm Maclachlan, "Profit Motive Splits Open Source Movement," TechWeb News (August 26, 1998). "It was a pretty ugly scene," recalls Prime Time Freeware's Rich Morin. "John's done some pretty respectable things: Tcl, Tk, Sprite. He's a real contributor." Despite his sympathies for Stallman and Stallman's position, Morin felt empathy for those troubled by Stallman's discordant behavior.

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us
by Tim Sullivan
Published 6 Jun 2016

Besides, it was concerns about overpayment that led to the crisis in the posting system in the first place: if the auction system breaks down completely, it isn’t good for anyone.7 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Amateur Auction Theorist It turned out that stamp collectors weren’t even the first to beat economists to the Vickrey auction. They were already anticipated, at least in spirit, by the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe forty years before the Penny Black appeared. Like many a temperamental and idealistic artist, Goethe had an uneasy relationship with money. He was on the one hand disdainful of the profit motive (he once wrote to a publisher, “I look odd to myself when I pronounce the word Profit”), while at the same time anxious that his worth be recognized. And no one likes to be taken advantage of; he wanted to ensure that he got his fair share from the fruits of his labors. Goethe employed various ruses and strategies to ensure that his more materialistically minded publishers didn’t exploit him.

Broken Markets: A User's Guide to the Post-Finance Economy
by Kevin Mellyn
Published 18 Jun 2012

In other words, the miracle of scientific financial engineering produced housing credit for all, and fat profits for everyone in the housing food chain, plus the political advantages of increasing home ownership among the less well-to-do, something that political conservatives embraced as “the ownership society.” The CRA might have been the catalyst, but the profit motive and political calculation produced the chain reaction that drove the bubble. The expansion of two other key aspects of financial inclusion also reflected innovation by banks rather than government mandates. The most important was the development of highly sophisticated predictive models that allowed credit card issuers to profitably expand into the subprime, or non-creditworthy, segments.

In Defense of Global Capitalism
by Johan Norberg
Published 1 Jan 2001

Because car companies needed the wealthy California market, manufacturers all over the United States were forced to develop new techniques for reducing emissions. Having done so, they could more easily comply with the exacting requirements of other states, whereupon those states again ratcheted up their requirements. Anti-globalists usually claim that the profit motive and free trade together cause businesses to entrap politicians in a race for the bottom. The California effect implies the opposite: free trade enables politicians to pull profit-hungry corporations along with them in a race to the top. This phenomenon occurs because compliance with environmental rules accounts for a very small proportion of most companies’ expenditures.

Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America
by Tamara Draut
Published 4 Apr 2016

Much of the home care industry is dominated by big for-profit agencies, who recruit and hire out home health aides, personal care assistants, and nursing assistants. The agencies exist thanks to state and federal Medicaid and Medicare contracts, which pay the lion’s share (two-thirds) of costs related to home care. But given the profit motive and the right to pay less than minimum wage and no overtime (at least up until January 2015), these agencies could divert most of the money from the contracts for executive compensation and pay the women doing the actual work little more than an allowance (and no benefits, either). The number of home care industry jobs has more than tripled since the 1970s, and will continue to be one of the largest sources of new jobs for the foreseeable future.

Silk Road
by Eileen Ormsby
Published 1 Nov 2014

‘Having a mission statement – really spelling out the philosophy behind the venture – allows people to see it as a movement, a political action, rather than just a place to buy drugs,’ Barratt said. ‘However, the cynic in me wonders whether in fact this is simply a clever marketing ploy which really just masks the 100 per cent profit motive. It’s hard to know what is truly happening behind the scenes.’ Although careful not to champion the site, Barratt did subscribe to DPR’s belief that Silk Road was probably safer than an illegal face-to-face deal. ‘Assuming they’re buying from a reputable seller and it’s someone who doesn’t want to risk their rating by selling something that wasn’t what they said it was, then you’ve got a system where the seller has a really strong imperative to do the right thing by the buyer.’

The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation
by Cathy O'Neil
Published 15 Mar 2022

*2 I learned a lot. For example, you compliment a chef by savoring his or her rice. It is the purest expression of their mastery. And to drown rice in soy sauce is a desecration and an insult to the chef. *3 You might notice that this is the only chapter that doesn’t point, at least primarily, to a profit motive, at least beyond the plastic surgeons, the hikidashiya, and thought leaders such as Jordan Peterson. People who are essentially removed from society represent less of a commercial opportunity than those who are willing to spend anything to fit in. PART III HEALTHY SHAME Chapter 8 THE COMMON GOOD Giddy with excitement, a small crowd streamed into a Target store in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for an act of civil disobedience.

Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain
by James Bloodworth
Published 1 Mar 2018

To paraphrase George Orwell’s description of working-class interiors, you breathe a warm, decent, deeply human atmosphere that it is difficult to find elsewhere. It is the socialism of leisure time: the elites had their private members’ clubs and so working men wanted their own private spaces too. Fittingly, there was a ‘do it yourself’ feel about most working men’s clubs and the profit motive was largely absent. Unlike a pub, where you get a pint and perhaps a bite to eat before being ushered out onto the street after last orders, twentieth-century working men’s clubs offered various self-improvement opportunities to members, such as lectures and keep-fit classes. Today, however, clubland is in its death throes.

Divided: Why We're Living in an Age of Walls
by Tim Marshall
Published 8 Mar 2018

It would make sense for the two countries to work together on this issue, not just to control movement of people and illegal goods and substances, but to encourage trade and economic prosperity in the region. Mexico and the USA are very different places in terms of language, skin tone, religion, climate and history, but they are increasingly tied through economics, and if anything can move through, under, around and over barriers it is the profit motive. And while there are many ways to prevent unwanted immigration, one thing is certain: a vibrant, booming economy south of the Rio Grande would do more to reduce the inward flow than a wall, as far fewer jobseekers would bother to cross. Take the car industry in the area, which has become known as the Texas–Mexico Automotive SuperCluster Region.

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations
by David Pilling
Published 30 Jan 2018

That compared with $1.53 billion spent by the defense and aerospace industries and $1.3 billion spent by oil and gas interests over the same period. In other words, the “health-care-industrial complex spends more than three times what the military-industrial complex spends in Washington.”8 The profit motive is a big factor, both in inflating costs and in encouraging practitioners to overtest, overprescribe, and overoperate. In cities up and down America hospitals are among the most profitable enterprises, employing administrators whose salaries frequently run into millions of dollars. Fear of litigation also drives costs higher.

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death
by Mark O'Connell
Published 28 Feb 2017

The play is itself a strange, viscous concoction of sci-fi fable, political allegory, and social satire, whose polemical intentions rest uneasily between a critique of capitalist greed and an anticommunist fear of the organized mob. Čapek’s robots are “artificial people” created for the purpose of increased industrial productivity, and represent, through the prism of the profit motive, an oppressively reductive view of human meaning. In the play’s first scene, a man named Domin, the manager of the robot production plant in which the action is set, is afforded a monologue, as flagrantly didactic as his own name, on how the inventor of these machines (the eponymous Rossum) created “a worker with the smallest number of needs, but to do so he had to simplify him.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism
by Aaron Bastani
Published 10 Jun 2019

Similarly, in healthcare, the rise of ultra-low-cost technologies in the areas of gene sequencing, therapies and editing will mean that a few decades from now public healthcare will be cheaper to administer with each passing year. But this will only be of collective benefit if we reject the notion that edited genes are the same as pharmaceutical drugs and must be subject to patent and the profit motive. Instead, the gains of healthcare becoming a true information technology should be socialised as we eliminate genetically inherited conditions like Parkinson’s, Huntington’s and sickle cell disease – much like we did with smallpox in the twentieth century. Even such breakthroughs, tremendous and unprecedented as they would be, would represent just the first step, as the arrival of virtually free gene sequencing – which would allow us to all but eliminate early-years mortality and locate cancers at ‘Stage 0’ – moves medicine from responsive to preventative.

Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital
by Kimberly Clausing
Published 4 Mar 2019

The aim of these measures is to encourage companies to treat the empowerment and satisfaction of their workers as another objective of their business. This is only a reporting requirement, not a regulation that would, for example, limit CEO pay or require particular changes in labor representation. The aim is to harness a company’s own profit motive to guide it toward valuable social ends. Since customers, investors, potential new hires, and the media would pay attention, these annual “sunshine” reports would create an incentive for companies to consider these factors in their management decisions. Costco’s Success and Sanity Costco and Walmart have similar businesses, but they provide a stark contrast in modern labor practices.

Your Life in My Hands: A Junior Doctor's Story
by Rachel Clarke
Published 14 Sep 2017

But in an era of austerity, where every pound of Treasury expenditure must be rigorously justified, perhaps concepts as fluffy as wonder and goodwill are – just like kindness – entirely superfluous. After all, none can be counted. We cannot price up any of them. Yet the truth is, though these values cannot be bought and sold, they inspire the staff who drive the NHS more than any profit motive. And that – in an era of haemorrhaging staff, dwindling motivation, burnout and sickness at record highs – makes them priceless. If we wish to maintain a first-class health service, we squander them at our peril. CHAPTER 13 CANDOUR ‘H ey. Any chance I could come round on my way home from work?’

Open for Business Harnessing the Power of Platform Ecosystems
by Lauren Turner Claire , Laure Claire Reillier and Benoit Reillier
Published 14 Oct 2017

We illustrated the complexity and range of pricing models available to platforms in Chapter 11, and showed that offering free entry to women in night clubs – or dating platforms – in order to attract paying men is a rational pricing strategy. Some judges and lawyers seem to still be assuming that platforms offering services for free are necessarily behaving in a predatory manner. Since it is perfectly legitimate for platforms to price below cost on one side of the market Platforms, regulation and competition 177 for profit motives, rather than anticompetitive ones, traditional predation tests are not fit for purpose in the context of platforms. Who do platform participants work for? While this chapter focuses on competition issues, it is also important to mention the tension between labour laws in many countries and many platforms’ use of self-employed or independent contractors.

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right
by George R. Tyler
Published 15 Jul 2013

Managerial incentives, such as stock options, redefined managerial self-interest from fallibility to a virtue.”26 The business community reverted to the Roaring Twenties and nineteenth-century practice of regulatory capture, in which the executives of Adam Smith’s era had viewed government as “an appendix to that of the merchant, as something which ought to be made subservient to it …”27 New York Times reporter Joe Nocera highlighted the obsessive new focus of executives this way: “To ask them to put aside the profit motive, even temporarily, for the good of the country—it’s not even in the frame of reference.”28 Advocating for this robber baron philosophy became a lifelong crusade for acolytes such as Friedman. Of course, the golden age management philosophy Friedman demonized had powered America out of the Great Depression, was vital to winning World War II, created the largest middle class in world history, and produced the greatest age ever of American research and development (R&D), investment, and prosperity.

…

In too many instances, it forces families to go mano a mano with front-running investment firms, as explained by economist Ghilarducci at the New School for Social Research in New York: “It is now more than 30 years since the 401(k) Individual Retirement Account model appeared on the scene…. It has failed because it expects individuals without investment expertise to reap the same results as professional investors and money managers. What results would you expect if you were asked to pull your own teeth or do your own electrical wiring?”6 The profit-motivated private system is skewed against those most in need. While 76 percent of white-collar employees enjoy private pension plans at work, over half of employees earning $27,000 or less lack access to any pension plan at work, their golden years destined to be spent working under the golden arches of McDonald’s or living in penury.7 These employees are more likely to work part time or have a broken work history, with absences that prevent steady participation in whatever pension programs might have existed at their various jobs.

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room
by David Weinberger
Published 14 Jul 2011

Eventually, he started a wiki and called what he was doing “open-notebook science.” His first open notebook, “UsefulChem,” was designed primarily to record his lab’s work trying to find chemical compounds useful in the fight against malaria.42 “Most of the people who are sick with malaria don’t have a lot of money, so the drug companies aren’t attracted by the profit motive,” Bradley explains. His lab started testing as many compounds as they could, recording the results in an open notebook that contained no heroic narrative, just daily results. He then started another open notebook that crowdsources the nearly endless question of which chemicals are soluble in which other chemicals.

Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle
by Dan Senor and Saul Singer
Published 3 Nov 2009

In the case of Dubai, one of the emirates in the UAE, most of the entrepreneurs that come from elsewhere are motivated by profit—which is important—but they are not also motivated by building the fabric of community in Dubai. And as we have seen in examining Michael Porter’s cluster theory, a profit motive alone will get a national economy only so far. When economic times are difficult, as has been the case in Dubai since late 2008, or security becomes dicey, those not committed to building a home, a community, and a state are often the first to flee. In the other GCC economies, the problem is somewhat different.

Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents
by Lisa Gitelman
Published 26 Mar 2014

Ultimately the film was arranged a bit differently than the stc, but stc numbers were used to identify images on the film. Power describes how this happened in “Report of Progress on Filming English Books before 1550,” winter 1938, reproduced on reel 1, Power, Eugene Barnum, Papers, 1937–70, University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor, MI (hereafter Power Papers). 73. Power comments on the profit motive in Eugene B. Power, Edition of One: The Autobiography of Eugene B. Power, Founder of University Microfilms (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1990), 249, 315. On dissertations, see ibid., 165–68. For an overview of scholarly microfilms in this period, see Meckler, Micropublishing, chapters 2–3. 74.

Admissions: A Life in Brain Surgery
by Henry Marsh
Published 3 May 2017

So health care is becoming ever more expensive, but most governments fear that putting up taxes or insurance premiums will lose them the next election. So instead, in the West, a small fortune is spent on management consultants who subscribe to the ideology that marketization, computers and the profit motive will somehow solve the problem. The talk is all of greater efficiency, reconfiguring, downsizing, outsourcing and better management. It is a game of musical chairs where, in England at least, the music is constantly being changed but not the number of chairs, and yet there are more and more of us running around the chairs.

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World
by Scott Galloway
Published 2 Oct 2017

By 2050, one in three Americans will likely have diabetes.13 Our hunger for more stuff hasn’t adjusted to our limited closets and wallets, either. Many have a difficult time putting food on the table and affording the basics. Yet millions end up on anticholesterol drugs like Lipitor and with high-interest credit cards, because they can’t maintain command over their powerful instinct to collect. Instinct, coupled with a profit motive, makes for excess. And the worst economic system, except for all the rest—capitalism—is specifically designed to maximize that equation. Our economy and prosperity are largely predicated on others’ consumption. Fundamental to business is the notion that in a capitalist society the consumer reigns supreme, and consumption is the most noble of activities.

The Locavore's Dilemma
by Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu
Published 29 May 2012

More optimistic analysts emphasize instead “the increased acreage and output of the average farm,” the “sustained growth of agricultural productivity,” and the “substantial improvements in income and wealth of commercial farmers, the predominant role of the United States in world commodity markets, and American leadership in supplying both technological innovation and food aid for the developing world.”6 In the international development arena, a similarly bitter divide exists between individuals who advocate large-scale commercial agriculture and the phasing out of smallholder farming as the only practical way to escape the poverty trap in which many countries are mired, and the anti-globalization activists who view all large-scale agriculture as a source of social inequality, a threat to the peasant way of life, and subordinating human needs to the profit motive. Because our emphasis is on long-term trends rather than current difficulties and imperfect practices, our overall stance on most controversial issues is typically of the “glass half-full” type. We do not deny the severity of many agricultural and social problems, most importantly that, according to official statistics, around one billion individuals are still malnourished and therefore less productive and more prone to disease, poor health, stunting, and wasting than they would otherwise be.7 This being said, the available evidence convincingly demonstrates that long distance trade and modern technologies have resulted in much greater food availability, lower prices, improved health, and reduced environmental damage than if they had never materialized.

How Much Is Enough?: Money and the Good Life
by Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky
Published 18 Jun 2012

However, once the commonly accepted language became one of efficiency, the moral reformers were vulnerable to the charge that their reforms had created inefficiency by lessening the incentives to work and save, and by stealing resources from the productive sector. The social liberalism of the 1950s and 1960s had nothing left to put in place of the profit motive, only qualifications that applied to particular examples of “market failure.” So when the social liberal states ran into fiscal crisis in the 1970s, they had no intellectually cogent defenses to offer against the restatement of the philosophy of untrammelled self-interest. Tax rates tumbled, the welfare state was reined in, state industries were privatized, the financial sector was set free.

The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care
by T. R. Reid
Published 15 Aug 2009

Some compete by promising to pay all claims within five days; some offer benefits beyond the basic package, like exotic Asian therapies or free neonatal nursing care in the home after a baby is born or longer stays in those health spas. Among health care economists, the consumer’s free choice of any insurance plan, and the resulting competition among the insurers, is one of the most admired features of the German system. “Americans tend to think that the profit motive is the only driver of competition,” Karl Lauterbach, a German economist who won a seat in the Bundestag, the national parliament, told me. “But our Krankenkassen compete because the executives earn more money, and higher prestige, if they have a larger pool of insured members. So we have universal coverage, and nobody can be turned down because of a preexisting illness.You have the required package of benefits, so the insurer can’t deny a claim for any covered treatment.

Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down the Internet
by Joseph Menn
Published 26 Jan 2010

In contrast to the Russian experience, where profit predated patriotism, almost all of the early cyberattacks from within China expressed nationalistic sentiments. Numerous assaults on sites in Taiwan, Indonesia, and Japan followed some perceived insult against China. Such groups as the Red Hacker Alliance said they put patriotism first. Only after several years of pro-China activities did a profit motive emerge to such an extent that it splintered some of the most important organizations. Again like the Russians, the Chinese have used cyberattacks to harass and silence civilian foes based outside the country’s borders. Proponents of the Falun Gang and Tibetan independence movements have been targeted, and at least one small Tibetan alliance disbanded rather than risk further electronic communications.

The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business Is Small
by Steve Sammartino
Published 25 Jun 2014

Each stage of progression is more accelerated than the previous one. Each phase has a shorter life expectancy than the previous phase. It took us about forty years to build and connect machines. It took us only a little more than 15 years for people to be plugged into the system. The phase of the web of things will be shorter again. When the profit motive and significant personal benefits conspire, the world changes quickly. This shouldn’t be very surprising given that everything we’ve witnessed in the dawn of the technology age has arrived much more quickly than we would have expected. From an historical perspective, technology and its impact on our species is now evolving at warp speed.

Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives
by Michael Specter
Published 14 Apr 2009

.: Autism’s False Prophets and Poling case on vaccine safety omega-3 fatty acids Organic Consumers Association (OCA) organic foods: aims of artificially ripened and availability of arable land costs of distribution of and environmental issues and genetic engineering, see genetically modified food and the Green Revolution locally produced and “natural” food and population growth and poverty- preparation of and radiation research studies on and small-scale farming and social class and starvation total reliance on USDA guidelines for and Whole Foods wider market for organic soil, chemicals in Ornish, Dean Oz, Mehmet Paarlberg, Robert, Starved for Science pasteurization Pauling, Linus Peet, Amanda Personal Genome Project pertussis Pfizer Corporation pharmaceutical industry: direct-to-consumer advertising by greed in profit motive in and public trust regulation of research and development in unrealistic expectations for and vaccine court see also specific companies Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America pharmacogenetics placebo effect Poling, Hannah Poling, Jon polio vaccines polio virus, reconstruction of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) population growth precautionary principle progress: and hope scientific Prohibition Promethease prostacyclin public health: and economic effects and herd immunity and prevention of disease and public expectations and vaccinations Public Health Service qi gong quackery questioning authority quinine Quinlan, Karen Ann race: and discrimination and eugenics and genetics and human brain and medicine as social construct vs. scientific classification Rath, Matthias raw milk Reagan, Nancy Reagan, Ronald recombinant DNA technology Reiki religion, and science research: accidents occurring during double-blind studies funding of on middle-aged white men motivation behind open-source opposition to Rettberg, Randy Reuben, Scott S.

How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, From the Pilgrims to the Present
by Thomas J. Dilorenzo
Published 9 Aug 2004

Their society is a more Christian one than ours.”19 John Dewey, one of the founders of the American public school movement, concurred, gushing that Soviet communism was “intrinsically religious” and had “the moving spirit and force of primitive Christianity.”20 Another clergyman, Hewlett Johnson, returned from Russia to write of how American capitalism supposedly “lacks moral basis,” creates a “divergence between principles and practice of Christian people, which is so damning to religion,” and is responsible for an “irrational wastage of wealth, the artificially induced shortage, the poverty amidst plenty.”21 In contrast, Soviet communism was supposedly a society in which “co-operation replaces competitive chaos and a Plan succeeds the rot of disorder. . . . The elimination of the profit-motive makes room for the higher motive of service.”22 Such economic nonsense is repeated literally verbatim by many of today’s American religious leaders. Their ignorance is even more egregious than Johnson’s, however, since they have the benefit of hindsight: socialism was a colossal economic and social failure, as has been amply documented.

Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself
by Peter Fleming
Published 14 Jun 2015

A recent example of such an analysis is Lordon’s (2014) Willing Slaves of Capital. As we saw earlier, he argues that managerialism aims to enlist the desires of the workforce through tactics of mobilization, in which the agents of capitalist accumulation cultivate wilful identification with the firm’s profit motive. While money is important for partially and temporally co-aligning the activities of capital and labour, recent management systems (such as HRM) have sought to enrol the desires of employees too, so that they genuinely and wholeheartedly want what capital wants. This invariably makes self-exploitation the key objective of management.

SuperFreakonomics
by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Published 19 Oct 2009

Some oncologists argue that the benefits of chemotherapy aren’t necessarily captured in the mortality data, and that while chemotherapy may not help nine out of ten patients, it may do wonders for the tenth. Still, considering its expense, its frequent lack of efficacy, and its toxicity—nearly 30 percent of the lung-cancer patients on one protocol stopped treatment rather than live with its brutal side effects—why is chemotherapy so widely administered? The profit motive is certainly a factor. Doctors are, after all, human beings who respond to incentives. Oncologists are among the highest-paid doctors, their salaries increasing faster than any other specialists’, and they typically derive more than half of their income from selling and administering chemotherapy drugs.

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age
by Astra Taylor
Published 4 Mar 2014

“SOPA’s opponents came together in a kumbaya moment, with almost anybody who cares about the Internet—as user, activist, or profiteer—lining up against the bill.” This opposition, Segal observed, was self-interested: SOPA’s “passage would have hurt Facebook’s bottom line—and probably forced it to alter basic business practices—by forcing it to aggressively police alleged piracy. And now the profit motive is causing Facebook to support CISPA, at the expense of its users, because it would relieve certain regulatory burdens and provide attractive immunities for the company.”16 The piracy and the copyright wars might seem cutting edge—with all the talk of DNS (domain name system) blocking, streaming, and infinite storage—but what we are witnessing is actually the latest incarnation of a centuries-old debate, one reignited every time publishing technologies take a forward leap.

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It)
by Salim Ismail and Yuri van Geest
Published 17 Oct 2014

PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel poses the following question as an effective way to test if a startup has an MTP that will attract not only friends, but also employees beyond your personal network who share your motivation: “Why would the 20th employee join your startup without the perks, [such as] a co-founder title or stock [options]?” Accordingly, you should gauge your MTP against each of the acronym’s letters. Is it Massive? Is it Transformative? Is it Purposeful? A profit motive alone is insufficient to build an ExO—or, frankly, any startup. Rather, it’s the burning passion to solve an obsessive, complex problem that keeps an entrepreneur pushing along the rollercoaster ride of ebullience and despair that is the story of every startup. Chip Conley, an expert at building purpose-driven companies such as Airbnb, frequently references Kahlil Gibran: “Work is love made visible.

Lurking: How a Person Became a User
by Joanne McNeil
Published 25 Feb 2020

Of course, the line between amoral and immoral is a fine one, a question philosophers have pondered through the ages. And to be sure, recognizing scarce resources as a condition exacerbating hate and racism is not the same as absolving someone of them. It is important to point this out because—believe it or not—bad things on the internet are often somewhat less bad when there’s no profit motive for badness. Decentralizing the internet, alone, is not enough to rid the internet of its worst users (take, for example, Gab, the social network just for Pepe Nazis); it only decenters the problem. As it stands, platforms like Twitter, YouTube, and others tend to capitalize on viral content, which means something super-vicious can go super-viral, while posts are promoted to trending topics and ranked lists of what is popular.

The Buddha and the Badass: The Secret Spiritual Art of Succeeding at Work
by Vishen Lakhiani
Published 14 Sep 2020

But real entrepreneurs do it to push the human race forward. Are You Humanity Plus or Humanity Minus? This is the question to ask ourselves about our jobs and the companies we serve: Is my product or service Humanity Plus or Humanity Minus? Humanity Minus companies are businesses that exist solely for a profit motive, without adding value to the world. They sell harmful products like junk food or unsustainable practices like fossil fuels. Many Humanity Minus companies are founded on artificial demand—that is, they sell products we don’t truly need and that might even be potentially harmful. But they are marketed as necessities for well-being or happiness.

The Ages of Globalization
by Jeffrey D. Sachs
Published 2 Jun 2020

Subsidiarity and the Public Sphere A key to good policy making is the distinction between private goods and public goods. Private goods are goods that the marketplace efficiently provides under the incentives of profit maximization. Public goods are those that the marketplace underprovides because the profit motive will send the wrong signals. Public goods include quality education and healthcare for all, new scientific knowledge, access to new technologies, protection of the environment, and infrastructure such as highways and long-distance transmission lines for electric power. Private goods (such as housing, furnishings, automobiles, personal appliances, tourism, etc.) operate mostly on a market basis, with households generally spending their own incomes to purchase goods from profit-oriented businesses.

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 1 Jan 2010

Here I will only outline some principles – eight of them – that I think we need to have in mind in redesigning our economic system. * To begin with: paraphrasing what Winston Churchill once said about democracy, let me restate my earlier position that capitalism is the worst economic system except for all the others. My criticism is of free-market capitalism, and not all kinds of capitalism. The profit motive is still the most powerful and effective fuel to power our economy and we should exploit it to the full. But we must remember that letting it loose without any restraint is not the best way to make the most of it, as we have learned at great cost over the last three decades. Likewise, the market is an exceptionally effective mechanism for coordinating complex economic activities across numerous economic agents, but it is no more than that – a mechanism, a machine.

The Strange Order of Things: The Biological Roots of Culture
by Antonio Damasio
Published 6 Feb 2018

No reader will have failed to notice how visits to the dentist and surgical procedures have changed for the better in our own lifetime. The primary motive behind improvements such as efficient anesthetics and precise instrumentation is the management of feelings of discomfort. The activity of engineers and scientists plays a commendable role in this endeavor, but it is a motivated role. The profit motive of the drug and instrumentation industries also plays a significant part because the public does need to reduce its suffering and industries respond to that need. The pursuit of profit is fueled by varied yearnings, a desire for advancement, prestige, even greed, which are none other than feelings.

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?
by Thomas Frank
Published 15 Mar 2016

I myself have seen a Populist-inspired sculpture garden in western Kansas in which a figure labeled “Labor” is crucified by statues representing the professions: “Doctor,” “Preacher,” “Lawyer,” “Banker.”12 Amid the enormous strikes and the sudden, catastrophic recessions of the Gilded Age, however, a group of reformers who came to be known as “progressives” came to see professionalization as a positive thing—indeed, as the only hope for a society being torn apart in the war between capital and labor. Professionals, recast now as an enlightened managerial class, were supposed to bring about an industrial peace that would be impossible under the profit motive alone. The progressives of this period could be frankly and openly elitist on the subject: Herbert Croly, the author of the seminal work The Promise of American Life and later a founder of the New Republic, openly advocated for a sort of neo-aristocratic order led by “exceptional” citizens, and left-wing critics ranging from Thorstein Veblen to R.

The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work
by David Frayne
Published 15 Nov 2015

What is apparent, however, is that there are still strong continuities with alienating forms of mechanical labour in terms of the way the labour process itself is organised and experienced. Taylorism lives on in the age of computerisation, as workers continue to be timed, micro-managed, and forced by a profit-motivated system of production to work on small, repetitive tasks. On top of these more traditional controls we have also seen the emergence of a new form of alienation, consisting in the corporation’s attempt to enrol and exploit the worker’s selfhood. The rise of service work has also seen a rise in attempts to micro-manage the employee’s emotional conduct.

How Did We Get Into This Mess?: Politics, Equality, Nature
by George Monbiot
Published 14 Apr 2016

Neoliberalism claims that we are best served by maximum market freedom and minimum intervention by the state. The role of government should be confined to creating and defending markets, protecting private property and defending the realm. All other functions are better discharged by private enterprise, which will be prompted by the profit motive to supply essential services. By this means, enterprise is liberated, rational decisions are made and citizens are freed from the dehumanising hand of the state. This, at any rate, is the theory. But as David Harvey proposes in his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, wherever the neoliberal programme has been implemented, it has caused a massive shift of wealth not just to the top one per cent, but to the top tenth of the top one per cent.4 In the United States, for example, the upper 0.1 per cent has already regained the position it held at the beginning of the 1920s.5 The conditions that neoliberalism demands in order to free human beings from the slavery of the state – minimal taxes, the dismantling of public services and social security, deregulation, the breaking of the unions – just happen to be the conditions required to make the elite even richer, while leaving everyone else to sink or swim.

The Virtue of Nationalism
by Yoram Hazony
Published 3 Sep 2018

It is invoked time and again by those who imagine that the state can exist in the absence of national or tribal cohesion—when in reality it is only national or tribal cohesion that permits an independent state to be established and maintained without unceasing political repression. The picture of the neutral state is utopian in the same way that socialist descriptions of the economy are utopian: The socialist wishes to have the prosperity that is possible under a market economy, but he wishes to have it without the profit motive that makes this prosperity possible in reality. In the same way, advocates of the neutral state wish for the vigorous physical defense of the population, obedience before the laws, and guarantees of individual freedoms that are possible in the national state, but they wish to have these things without the mutual bonds of national or tribal loyalty that make them possible in reality.

Finding Alphas: A Quantitative Approach to Building Trading Strategies
by Igor Tulchinsky
Published 30 Sep 2019

Empirical studies may have had mixed results in aiming to disprove the EMH, but if no investors made any 12 Finding Alphas effort to acquire and analyze information, then prices would not reflect all available information and the market would not be efficient. But that in turn would attract profit-motivated investors to tackle the problem of analyzing the information and trading based on it. Thus, over time, some investors must profit from analyzing information. Even if we can make an argument in favor of the existence of alphas under various stylized assumptions, the details of prediction in the real world are complex.

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back
by Juliet Schor , William Attwood-Charles and Mehmet Cansoy
Published 15 Mar 2020

“A cooperative of people investing in a fleet of cars so that we all own it, we all take responsibility in the car, how it’s maintained, and how clean they are, filling up the gas tank—all those little details. As the owners, we decide we want to add another car to the fleet. We can vote on it, we can decide we’re going to take on this additional expense. And it wouldn’t be a profit motive. It would be more meeting the need of the residents.” One issue he had with Turo was its 25 percent fee. “I don’t know where it’s going. But with a cooperative I feel that there’s more transparency. People would be able to see where the expenses are going.” While few of our respondents volunteered these kinds of ideas about co-ops, much of what they did say they wanted is addressed by the structure Tim outlined.

Built on a Lie: The Rise and Fall of Neil Woodford and the Fate of Middle England’s Money
by Owen Walker
Published 4 Mar 2021

They were concerned about the fees BlackRock and PJT would extract from the fund for their role in winding it up. ‘I would much prefer Woodford to sort things out as he has skin in the fund both financially and in terms of saving his reputation,’ said Julian Thornett, another investor in the fund. ‘In the case of a third party selling the lot and lining their pockets in the process, only their profit motivates them – crystallizing other people’s losses does not hurt.’ Just over a week after Woodford resigned as manager of Patient Capital, the trust’s board announced it had lined up Schroders, the blue-blood City fund manager, to replace him. Shareholders reacted with glee, pushing the stock price up 30 per cent – though it was still less than half its value at the start of the year, and a third down on when Woodford had cashed out in July.

Vassal State
by Angus Hanton
Published 25 Mar 2024

It is fair to ask whose interests are served by this and whether it allows for adequate funding of the things that matter most to British people – chief among them the NHS. 8 The NHS Cash Cow The reason we have the vaccine success is because of capitalism, because of greed, my friends. – Boris Johnson, March 20211 The Covid-19 pandemic of 2020–22 was an era of risk and fear, of human losses and business profits. Speaking with MPs one spring evening in 2021, UK prime minister Boris Johnson credited the profit motive with helping to deliver Britain safely through the crisis by prompting the effective development and distribution of vaccines. His comment in defence of ‘greed’, Downing Street later clarified, was just a joke. Nonetheless, Covid-19 made the rich richer. The wealth of the world’s billionaires increased more in the first 24 months of Covid-19 than in any two-year period over the previous 23 years.

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism
by Bhu Srinivasan
Published 25 Sep 2017

Numerous military technologies, including advances in television, jets, and computing, rose from the research-and-development laboratory that was World War II; efforts intended to help destroy would be repurposed in the future by the private sector for more humane uses. Indeed, the expensive science that often yielded transformation would increasingly come from government-funded research, which ironically could be conducted without regard to its commercial prospects. The notion that only the profit motive could lead to invention or maximize production was contradicted by the performance of America during wartime. But after victory, the paramount American ideology that emerged again was its steely pragmatism: one that could contract the principles of both democracy and capitalism in times of crisis but was rooted in its ability to revert to its traditional conceits when threats dissipated—a Darwinian mode of internal and external statecraft that adapted to shifting conditions.

…

Capitalism in America was not arms-length ideology; it was an endlessly calibrated balance between state subsidies, social programs, government contracts, regulation, free will, entrepreneurship, and free markets. The Chinese looked to do the same thing, albeit with one less political party than the Americans had. Since capitalism seemed a pragmatic system where profit-motivated entrepreneurs could execute broad government directives, the Chinese communists became devoted practitioners. In so doing, this sparked the early momentum of Chinese growth, making it the great overlooked story of the last two decades of the twentieth century. By the first decade of the 2000s, China had arrived.

Hard Landing
by Thomas Petzinger and Thomas Petzinger Jr.
Published 1 Jan 1995

The second generation knew better than to overextend. The notion of critical mass had been discredited. The second upstart revolution caused many to question whether Bob Crandall really knew what he was doing after all. The pilots’ union at American hired a consulting firm that accused Crandall of overmanaging American Airlines. “The normal profit motive,” the consultants’ report said, “gave way to the notions that if two hubs are good then six must be better, and if ‘bigger is better’ then ‘biggest must be best.’ ” Hubs, the consultants said, forced flight crews to sit and wait for airplanes. Hubs required the company to maintain a massive infrastructure.

…

Amster was in Europe: Amster 4/29/92 interview. 47. handled a record: AT&T 1992 Annual Report. 48. drove to the airport: “Flying Low: Simplifying Their Fares Proves More Difficult Than Airlines Expected,” by Bridget O’Brian and James S. Hirsch, WSJ, June 4, 1992. 49. help Washington understand: Kelleher 6/14/94 interview. 50. 100 city pairs: Michael Gunn, presentation to managers, American Airlines, Oct. 5, 1993. 51. “normal profit motive”: Simat, Helliesen & Eichner, Inc., Review of AMR Transition Plan, July 27, 1993. 52. “never see me”: Crandall, videotaped presentation to new captains, Facing Crucial Issues, Feb. 22, 1994. 53. “less than a mail carrier”: Pamphlet by Association of Professional Flight Attendants, Euless, Texas, Aug. 1993. 54. abusive husband: “Coffee, Tea, and Solidarity,” by Judy Mann, Washington Post, Nov. 26, 1993. 55.

City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco
by Chester W. Hartman and Sarah Carnochan
Published 15 Feb 2002

The SFRA will assist ongoing efforts of other City agencies and community-based and other non-profit affordable housing producers in increasing the supply of housing targeted for lower-income households. Using its financial powers and funding sources available only to the SFRA, the agency will, in consultation with affordable housing producers, both non-profit and profit motivated, develop funding mechanisms for the increased production of permanently affordable housing.149 City Hall / 279 Additionally, the mission statement outlined the agency’s economic development policy, designed to “support and enhance community initiatives for new neighborhood serving economic opportunities.”

…

The 1979 law was rooted in an analysis of the city’s housing problem that acknowledged a need to protect not the housing stock as a whole, but only individual sitting tenants, in a view that the city’s housing problem was a temporary aberration rather than a relatively permanent structural feature. Landlords’ profit motivations were to be interfered with as minimally as possible. But vacancy decontrol led to increased evictions because it put a big-time money premium on tenant turnover—and rents on vacant 346 / Chapter 13 units, raised as high as landlords desired, zoomed beyond the reach of growing numbers of San Franciscans.

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
by Yochai Benkler
Published 14 May 2006

Information, knowledge, and culture are now produced by sources that respond to a myriad of motivations, rather than primarily the motivation to sell into mass markets. Production is organized in any one of a myriad of productive organizational forms, rather than solely the for-profit business firm. The supplementation of the profit motive and the business organization by other motivations and organizational forms--ranging from individual play to large-scale peer-production projects--provides not only a discontinuously dramatic increase in the number of available information sources but, more significantly, an increase in available information sources that are qualitatively different from others. 306 Imagine three storytelling societies: the Reds, the Blues, and the Greens.

…

PIPRA was launched as an effort of public-sector universities to cooperate in achieving two core goals that would respond to this type of barrier--preserving the right to pursue applications to subsistence crops and other developing-world-related crops, and preserving their own freedom to operate vis-a-vis each other's patent portfolios. 600 The basic insight of PIPRA, which can serve as a model for university alliances in the context of the development of medicines as well as agriculture, is that universities are not profit-seeking enterprises, and university scientists are not primarily driven by a profit motive. In a system that offers opportunities for academic and business tracks for people with similar basic skills, academia tends to attract those who are more driven by nonmonetary motivations. While universities have invested a good deal of time and money since the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 permitted and indeed encouraged them to patent innovations developed with public funding, patent and other exclusive-rights-based revenues have not generally emerged as an important part of the revenue scheme of universities.

Americana
by Bhu Srinivasan

Numerous military technologies, including advances in television, jets, and computing, rose from the research-and-development laboratory that was World War II; efforts intended to help destroy would be repurposed in the future by the private sector for more humane uses. Indeed, the expensive science that often yielded transformation would increasingly come from government-funded research, which ironically could be conducted without regard to its commercial prospects. The notion that only the profit motive could lead to invention or maximize production was contradicted by the performance of America during wartime. But after victory, the paramount American ideology that emerged again was its steely pragmatism: one that could contract the principles of both democracy and capitalism in times of crisis but was rooted in its ability to revert to its traditional conceits when threats dissipated—a Darwinian mode of internal and external statecraft that adapted to shifting conditions.

…

Capitalism in America was not arms-length ideology; it was an endlessly calibrated balance between state subsidies, social programs, government contracts, regulation, free will, entrepreneurship, and free markets. The Chinese looked to do the same thing, albeit with one less political party than the Americans had. Since capitalism seemed a pragmatic system where profit-motivated entrepreneurs could execute broad government directives, the Chinese communists became devoted practitioners. In so doing, this sparked the early momentum of Chinese growth, making it the great overlooked story of the last two decades of the twentieth century. By the first decade of the 2000s, China had arrived.

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion
by John Hagel Iii and John Seely Brown
Published 12 Apr 2010

If you’re going to do something, choose something that really makes a difference—a project, an endeavor, or an organization that addresses what people find meaningful and valuable. Something that stimulates their passionate desire to make the world a better place. It may be the drive to produce some social good, but it can be as simple as the profit motive—improving standards of living through increased business productivity. The key is for it to have shared meaning among a group of participants. Meaning is the opposite of boredom. It’s present in many of the institutions that have changed the world. The point is not to find one vision, one meaning, one mission that fits every purpose, but simply to find one big enough to help mobilize a great number of people behind it.

Stealth of Nations
by Robert Neuwirth
Published 18 Oct 2011

N., 10.1, 10.2 Azam, Jean-Paul, 5.1 Balogun, Tunji, 3.1 Baltimore, Md., System D income in, 8.1 women in business in, 8.1 banks, System D’s relations with, 3.1, 7.1–7.2, 11.1, 12.1, 12.2–12.3 Barakat, Assad Ahmad, 12.1 Barros Nock, Magdalena, 8.1, 8.2 Bartholomew Fair (Jonson), 12.1 Basel Action Network (BAN), 12.1 Bauer, Peter, 9.1, 10.1 Bazaaristan, 2.1–2.2 BBC, 12.1 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 5.1–5.2 Beijing Olympics, 5.1, 12.1 Bell Microproducts, 11.1 Berlusconi, Silvio, 8.1 Better Life Water, 3.1 Bierce, Ambrose, 5.1 Bike Basket Pies, 8.1 Bispo dos Santos, Sérgio, 12.1–12.2 Bolivia, System D in, 12.1 Book of Vagabonds and Beggars, The, 8.1 bookselling piracy and, 5.1–5.2, 5.3–5.4 sale of uncorrected proofs, 8.1 Braithwaite, Richard, 8.1 Braudel, Fernand, 4.1, 7.1 Brazil business tax breaks in, 11.1 cooperatives in, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3 economy of, 1.1 Lebanese population in, 12.1, 12.2 minimum wage in, 1.1 population of, 6.1 recycling industry in, 12.1–12.2 smuggling crackdown in, 6.1 smuggling into, 1.1, 6.1–6.2, 6.3–6.4, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3, 11.4 taxation in, 6.1–6.2 see also Rua 25 de Março; specific cities Brecht, Bertolt, 6.1 Breitkopf, 5.1 BRIAN Integrated Systems, 3.1 bribery in Nigeria, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1 in global business, 12.1 Bromo-Seltzer, 12.1 Bronfman family, 6.1 B. Schott’s Sons, 5.1 Budweiser, 6.1 Buffett, Warren, 9.1 bus system, Lagos, 3.1–3.2 description of CMS station of, 10.1–10.2 business child labor in, 12.1 credit-based, 2.1 crime in, 12.1–12.2 growth in, 10.1 labor issues in, 10.1–10.2, 12.1–12.2 profit motive in, 5.1–5.2, 5.3, 9.1 regulation of, 12.1, 12.2 software piracy in, 5.1 System D–generated profit for, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 7.5, 7.6 System D interaction with, 1.1, 1.2–1.3, 1.4, 2.1–2.2, 2.3, 4.1, 5.1, 7.1–7.2, 8.1–8.2, 11.1–11.2, 12.1–12.2 tax deals for, 10.1–10.2, 11.1, 11.2–11.3 Western model of, 7.1, 9.1, 9.2, 10.1, 11.1–11.2 see also economics Business Day (Lagos), 3.1 Business Software Alliance, 5.1 Canton Fair, 4.1, 5.1 CAPDAN, 10.1 capitalism, 5.1–5.2 Carcopino, Jérôme, 3.1 Caribbean Discourse (Glissant), 9.1 cassava, 3.1–3.2, 12.1 catadores, 1.1, 12.1–12.2 Caveat or Warning for Common Cursitors, A (Harmon), 8.1–8.2 CDs, pirated, 1.1, 6.1 charlatans, 12.1–12.2 Chayanov, Alexander, 12.1 Chemonics, 11.1 Chen, Linda, 4.1–4.2, 4.3, 5.1, 5.2, 10.1, 12.1 Chen, Martha, 11.1, 11.2 Chicago, Ill., street market in, 8.1–8.2 children, 2.1, 8.1, 12.1–12.2, 12.3 China African smuggling from, 4.1, 10.1–10.2 African trade with, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3–4.4, 4.5, 4.6, 4.7, 5.1, 10.1–10.2, 12.1–12.2 child labor in, 12.1 consumerism in, 4.1, 5.1, 6.1 corporate crime in, 12.1 dominant business model in, 5.1–5.2 economic policy in, 5.1, 5.2 employment in, 2.1 factory work in, 4.1 high-end brand production in, 5.1 language in, 6.1 mobile phone exports from, 5.1 Nigerian trade with, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1–4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5, 4.6–4.7, 4.8, 5.1–5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 10.1–10.2 piracy in, 5.1, 5.2–5.3, 5.4–5.5, 5.6, 5.7, 5.8 public health system in, 4.1 recycling industry in, 12.1 Rua 25 de Março merchants from, 1.1–1.2 smuggling from, 6.1–6.2 smuggling into, 6.1–6.2 System D’s role in, 2.1 tax paying in, 4.1, 4.2–4.3, 4.4, 5.1 technology retailing in, 6.1, 6.2 toxic dumping in, 12.1 2008/2009 financial crisis effects in, 5.1, 5.2 U.S. trade with, 4.1 see also specific cities China Plaza, 5.1, 5.2 China Southern Airlines, 4.1 Chinee Water, 3.1 Chinese University of Hong Kong, 6.1 Chintan, 12.1 cigarettes, smuggling of, 6.1 Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, 6.1–6.2, 6.3–6.4 business formalization in, 11.1, 11.2–11.3, 11.4 computer and electronic trade in, 6.1, 11.1–11.2, 11.3–11.4, 12.1 crime in, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3 currency trading in, 6.1–6.2 economic activity in, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3–6.4, 11.1, 12.1 Lebanese community in, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3, 12.4 money transfers in, 12.1 policing in, 6.1–6.2, 6.3 street market in, 6.1 System D in, 2.1 taxation in, 6.1, 11.1–11.2 terrorism allegations against, 12.1–12.2 Clinton, Hillary, 12.1 Computer and Allied Products Dealers Association of Nigeria, 3.1 computer industry Chinese trade in, 6.1–6.2 falling prices in, 6.1, 11.1 illegal dumping in, 12.1–12.2 Nigerian trade in, 3.1–3.2, 10.1 Paraguayan trade in, 6.1–6.2, 11.1–11.2, 11.3–11.4 poor workmanship in, 4.1 smuggling in, 6.1–6.2, 6.3, 6.4–6.5, 11.1–11.2, 11.3, 11.4, 11.5 see also Ikeja Computer Village computer software, piracy of, 5.1–5.2 conflict resolution, 12.1–12.2 Connecticut Courant, 12.1 construction industry, 8.1 cooperative development, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3–12.4 limits of, 12.1 criticism of, 9.1 Cooper-Glicério, 12.1–12.2 copyrights, 8.1 Correct Technologies, 3.1, 3.2 Cotonou, Republic of Benin, 3.1, 4.1, 5.1, 10.1, 10.2, 11.1 courts, as an institution in street markets, 12.1–12.2 crime, 2.1, 2.2, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3, 12.4, 12.5, 12.6, 12.7, 12.8–12.9 Cross, John, 9.1–9.2 Crusades, 4.1 currency, see exchange rate Dairo, Ogun, 3.1–3.2 danfo, see bus system, Lagos Dattora, Édison Ramos, 1.1–1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 7.1 Davidson, Basil, 3.1–3.2 débrouillards, 2.1 Deleuze, Gilles, 11.1 de Soto, Hernando, 11.1–11.2, 11.3, 11.4, 11.5, 11.6 Deutsche Bank, 2.1 developed world economic inequality in, 9.1 economic model in, 3.1, 7.1, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 9.4, 11.1–11.2 developing world business model in, 7.1–7.2, 10.1, 10.2, 11.1 economic growth of, 9.1–9.2, 9.3, 9.4, 11.1, 12.1–12.2 infrastructure in, 9.1, 12.1 System D growth in, 2.1, 2.2 water shortage in, 7.1 wealth gap in, 9.1–9.2, 9.3, 12.1 see also Africa; Asia; Latin America; specific countries Devil’s Dictionary, The (Bierce), 5.1–5.2 Diamond Bank, 7.1 Dias, Sonia Maria, 12.1 Diggers, 9.1 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 8.1 dollar, as global currency, 4.1–4.2 Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, 12.1–12.2 Donizetti, Gaetano, 12.1 Downy, 7.1–7.2 Drake, Francis, 5.1, 5.2 drugs discount, 6.1–6.2 illegal, 12.1 DVDs, pirated, 1.1–1.2, 1.3–1.4, 1.5, 6.1 eBay, 8.1 Ebeyenoku, John, 12.1, 12.2 economic development, 2.1, 2.2 as a human right, 12.1 redefinition of, 9.1–9.2 economics Aristotle’s definition of, 5.1 efficiency in, 9.1, 9.2 80/20 conundrum in, 5.1 modern definition of, 2.1 wealth gap in, 9.1–9.2, 9.3, 12.1 see also business; free market system Economic Times, 12.1 economists, System D’s assessment by, 1.1, 2.1–2.2, 3.1, 7.1, 9.1, 9.2, 10.1, 11.1, 12.1 education, 10.1, 12.1, 12.2 “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The” (Marx), 9.1 Eleazars, Ugochukwu, 3.1 electricity, 4.1, 4.2, 12.1–12.2 electronics industry gray-market, 8.1 Nigerian trade in, 3.1–3.2, 3.3–3.4 smuggling in, 6.1, 11.1–11.2, 11.3, 11.4, 12.1 see also computer industry; mobile phone industry Eleshin, Omotola, 3.1–3.2, 7.1 Emirates, 4.1 employment business tax breaks and, 10.1 System D’s provision of, 2.1, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 12.1–12.2, 12.3 21st century, 2.1 Encore Technical Sales, 11.1 Encyclopedia Britannica, 5.1 entrepreneurialism, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 12.1 environmental issues, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 12.1, 12.2–12.3 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 5.1 Ethiopian Airlines, 4.1 Europe literacy growth in, 5.1 Nigerian trade with, 3.1 post–World War II economic development in, 11.1–11.2 16th-century economic transition in, 8.1, 8.2–8.3 smuggling into, 6.1 System D in, 2.1, 3.1, 8.1–8.2 2008/2009 financial crisis effects in, 2.1–2.2 see also specific cities and countries EVGA, 11.1 e-waste, 12.1–12.2 exchange rate importance to System D trade, 4.1–4.2, 12.1 Eze, Sunday, 3.1 Ezeagu, Charles, 2.1 Ezeifeoma, James, 4.1, 4.2, 7.1, 9.1–9.2, 9.3, 12.1 Fable of the Bees, The (Mandeville), 5.1, 5.2 Fanon, Frantz, 9.1 fashion industry, 4.1–4.2, 4.3–4.4 labor issues in, 7.1, 12.1–12.2 piracy in, 5.1, 5.2–5.3, 7.1–7.2 Fashola, Babatunde, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, 10.7 Feiyang, 5.1–5.2 Festac Town, Lagos, Nigeria, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 Festac United Okada Riders, 3.1 feudalism, 8.1 financial crisis of 2008/2009 in China, 5.1, 5.2 System D resilience to, 2.1–2.2 in United States, 8.1, 8.2 Financial Mail, 12.1 flea market, 8.1, 12.1 Fontaine, Laurence, 6.1 food industry formalization in, 8.1, 8.2–8.3, 8.4, 8.5, 12.1 street peddling in, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 3.1, 3.2, 8.1–8.2, 8.3–8.4, 12.1 System D producers in, 8.1–8.2, 8.3–8.4 formal businesses, relationship with informal firms, 1.1–1.2, 7.1–7.2, 7.3–7.4 formalization bureaucracy in, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 11.1 in computer industry, 11.1, 11.2–11.3 costs and benefits of, 11.1–11.2, 11.3, 11.4, 11.5 degrees of, 12.1–12.2, 12.3 effects of, 11.1–11.2 in food industry, 8.1, 8.2–8.3, 8.4, 8.5, 12.1 obstacles to, 11.1, 11.2 419 Advance Fee Fraud, 3.1, 10.1 Fox, Paul, 7.1 Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 12.1 France, System D in, 8.1 “Fraternity of Vagabonds, The” (Awdeley), 8.1 free market system, 2.1–2.2, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 12.1, 12.2 Gafunk Nigeria Limited, 3.1 Gala sausage roll, 7.1 Galatzer, Natalie, 8.1 Galeria Pagé (Ciudad del Este), 12.1–12.2 Galeria Pagé (São Paulo), 1.1, 1.2, 10.1 garage sales, 8.1 garbage recycling, in Brazil, 12.1–12.2 in China, 9.1–9.2 in Nigeria, 3.1, 3.2–3.3 gasoline, smuggling of, 6.1 Gates, Bill, 5.1, 9.1 General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, The (Keynes), 9.1 generators, 4.1 George II, King of England, 9.1 Germany, System D in, 8.1 Gesell, Silvio, 9.1 Glissant, Edouard, 9.1 globalization, 4.1–4.2, 12.1 peddlers as agents of, 4.1–4.2 see also System D, global trade in Gomorrah (Saviano), 5.1 Gonçalves, Reginaldo, 1.1 Goodluck, Akinwale, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4 Gould, Jay, 9.1 government economic regulation by, 2.1 privatization in, 2.1 System D interaction with, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 4.1–4.2, 4.3–4.4, 5.1–5.2, 6.1, 6.2, 10.1–10.2, 11.1, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3, 12.4, 12.5, 12.6, 12.7, 12.8, 12.9–12.10, 12.11–12.12, 12.13–12.14 use of pirated software in, 5.1 Gramsci, Antonio, 2.1 Granta, 5.1 gray market, 2.1 Great Britain historical conflict resolution in, 12.1–12.2 historical wealth gap in, 9.1–9.2 System D criticism in, 8.1–8.2 see also London, England Great Transformation, The (Polanyi), 2.1–2.2 Greece, ancient, conflict resolution in, 12.1 Grimmelshausen, Hans Jakob Christoffel von, 5.1–5.2 growth, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 9.1–9.2, 10.1–10.2 Grumbling Hive, The (Mandeville), 5.1, 5.2 Guangzhou, China, 2.1 African traders in, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3–4.4, 4.5–4.6, 4.7, 4.8, 5.1–5.2, 5.3, 12.1–12.2 business regulations in, 4.1, 4.2 international population in, 4.1 policing of, 5.1, 9.1, 12.1, 12.2 recycling in, 9.1–9.2 smuggled computers in, 6.1 Guangzhou Dashatou Second Hand Trade Center, 5.1, 5.2–5.3 Guarda Municipal, 1.1, 1.2 guarda-roupas, 6.1–6.2 Guattari, Félix, 11.1 Gudeman, Stephen, 9.1–9.2 gun running, 2.1 Guys and Dolls, 8.1 Gypsies, 8.1 Hammoud family, 12.1, 12.2 Hancock, John, 12.1 Harare, Zimbabwe, 12.1 Harlem, N.Y.

Let them eat junk: how capitalism creates hunger and obesity
by Robert Albritton
Published 31 Mar 2009

The company would be driven to insist on rapid approval because it cannot withstand a long period of testing before its huge investment begins to bring in profits. But this is very problematic in the case of transgenic seeds that may have enormous, dangerous and irreversible consequences. Can we really afford to have things like transgenic seeds be managed primarily by a private sector driven by the profit motive? In the case of GM seeds, they were approved by the US government based entirely on research funded by the corporations who wanted to market the seeds. There was no independent government testing.38 Recently newspaper articles have been appearing with titles such as “Whither the revered scientist?”

The Gospel of Food: Everything You Think You Know About Food Is Wrong
by Barry Glassner
Published 15 Feb 2007

Ulcers, now understood to be caused by a bacterium, are an example, and pathogens have been implicated in heart disease as well.33 America’s Number Two Killer? The deeper I burrowed through the theories of obesity, the more of them I found. I also found myself entertaining an irreverent thought. How much does it really matter that Americans are getting fatter? To the diet industry, it matters a great deal, but the profit motive aside, does plumpness really deserve all the attention and resources we devote to it? Many of the theories of obesity are fascinating, to be sure, but with nearly two-thirds of Americans overweight or obese, their body types are now the norm, and medical science does not usually concern itself with trying to understand and prevent what has become the norm.

Immigration and Ethnic Formation in a Deeply Divided Society: The Case of the 1990s Immigrants From the Former Soviet Union in Israel
by Majid Al Haj
Published 20 Nov 2003

The first approach is found in the periodicals established and financed by veteran Israeli parties and political organization, notably Nasha strana, which served to promote the Labour Party, and Alef, which performed a similar service for the right wing (1995: 15). The integration-oriented periodicals are chiefly those established with the profit motive foremost, including by Russian entrepreneurs who have no political affiliation. These publications are an arena for Soviet immigrant leaders from the 1970s wave and the leadership of immigrant organizations who have been integrated into the Israeli establishment (ibid.: 18). The dominant stream consists of the segregation-oriented papers—local and national newspapers, operated by immigrant entrepreneurs from the FSU who are affiliated neither with the Israeli establishment nor with the Russian-Israeli establishment (the Zionist Forum).

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Mar 2016

The corporation’s charter can be recoded. For example, many are toying with the “benefit corporation” as a way of tempering the emphasis on short-term and extractive profit suffered by traditional corporations goosed up on digital systems. A benefit corporation is expected to pursue profits, but that profit motive must be secondary to a stated social or environmental mission. By law, share price must take a backseat to something else, something decidedly beneficial. These corporations must develop metrics to measure social and environmental benefit based on third-party standards and then submit an annual report to government authorities confirming their compliance.70 Baby-food manufacturer Plum Organics is the largest certified B corp on the Inc. magazine list of the top 5,000 fastest-growing companies in America, coming in at number 253.71 Launched in 2007, Plum did not register as a benefit corporation until it was about to be acquired by Campbell Soup Company in 2013.

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson
Published 15 Nov 2016

When we look back at that process, we tend to talk about it in terms of the money and markets or the vanity of the ruling elite driving the new ideas. But the money has its own masters, and in many cases the dominant one is the human appetite for surprise and novelty and beauty. If you dig past the archeological layers of technological invention, profit motive, conquest, and status-seeking, you will often find an unlikely stratum that lies beneath the more familiar layers: the simple pleasure of a new experience—in this case, the red and blue cones of our retinas registering a strange hybrid shade almost never found in nature. Somehow the story gets cast in the retelling as a tale of heroic inventors or efficient capital markets or brutal exploitation.

Emergence
by Steven Johnson

If you think that Clinton’s remarks on Gennifer Flowers should never have been a story, then who are the culprits? Whom do we blame in such a setting? The traditional critiques don’t apply here: there’s no oak-paneled, cigar-smoke-filled back room where the puppeteers pull their invisible strings; it’s not that the television medium is particularly “hot” or “cold”; there was a profit motive behind CNN’s decision to share more footage, but we certainly can’t write off the Flowers episode as just another tribute to the greed of the network execs. Once again, we return to the fundamental laws of emergence: the behavior of individual agents is less important than the overall system. In earlier times, the channels that connected politicians, journalists, and ordinary citizens were one-way and hierarchical; they lacked the connections to generate true feedback; and too few agents were interacting to create any higher-level order.

The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good
by Robert H. Frank
Published 3 Sep 2011

See also tax(es), on harmful activities political barriers: to action on climate change, 3–4, 181–82, 214–15; to efficient public policy, 111–18; to progressive consumption tax, 81–83 political careers, luck in success of, 142 political donations, in support of governmentas-problem message, 4–5 political system, U.S., paralysis in, 2, 3, 195 pollution: from cars, 113; differences in cost of reducing, 14, 79–80, 174–77; inefficiency of traditional regulation of, 175; optimal level of, 174–75 pollution taxes, 172–83; on carbon dioxide, 4, 179–82; cleanup costs with, 175–77; and climate change, 4, 179–82; congestion fees as, 113–14, 182–83; critics of, 177–80; differences in cost of avoiding, 14, 79–80, 175–77; efficiency of, 175–77; pace of implementation of, 4, 180–81; permits as form of, 176–77, 178; and price of goods, 178, 180; versus regulation of pollution, 14, 175; on sulfur dioxide, 172–79 poor, the: effect of congestion fees on, 183; income transfers to, 104, 111–16; role of luck in lives of, 142–43; willingness to pay among, 102–4, 108–10 population density: and degree of government regulation, 84; and task specialization, 204 237 positional arms races: in military, 65; in sports, 67; in workplace safety, 212 positional consumption beast, 63 positional externalities: definition of, 68; in rank, 127; taxation to limit, 79 positional goods: context in evaluation of, 70–72; Darwinian perspective on, 72–74; definition of, 70; taxes on, 76 practice time, in development of expertise, 147–48 Princeton University, 162 private sector: negotiation of efficient contracts in, 86–91, 124–25, 178, 196, 210; willingness to pay in, 102, 104–6, 197–98 private-sector waste: expenditure cascades in, 61–62; versus government waste, 59–61, 62, 63; ways of cutting, 63 “Problem of Social Cost, The” (Coase), 89–90 productivity: in labor-managed firms, 31–32; and rank, 127–33; in society-formation example, 127–31, 200–201; and task specialization, 43, 203–4; and wages, 132–35 professors, productivity of, 133–35 profit motive, in invisible-hand theory, 6, 17–18 progressive consumption surtax, 82–83 progressive consumption tax. See consumption tax, progressive progressive income tax. See income tax, progressive progressives, flaws in understanding of markets, 11 Project on Military Procurement, 47 property rights, government role in maintenance of, 120 property taxes, in California, 48–49 Proposition 13 (California), 48–49 Prozac, 26–27 public discourse, libertarian influence on, 4–5 public goods: dependence of property rights on, 120; differences in valuation of, 123–26; efficient provision of, 123–26; as nonpositional goods, 74; under progressive consumption tax, 80–81; under progressive income tax, 124–26; willingness to pay for, 123 public policy: cost-benefit analysis in, 102–4, 116–18, 209; income differences in decisions in, 102–4, 111–12; income transfers in, 104, 238 INDEX public policy (continued) 111–18, 123–26; willingness to pay in, 102–4, 106–11, 118.

The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis
by Ruth Defries
Published 8 Sep 2014

The list of events, people, and motives that contributed along the way is long and varied: spies who spread the secret of the Haber-Bosch process; the chemist who rescued DDT from obscurity; the expeditions to find new seeds and to unearth geologic oddities; the intellectual curiosity to painstakingly brush pollen on thousands of pea plants; competition for prestige; conquest; trade; good ideas spread from one person to another; pushes from those with political power; flukes like the locust extinction in North America; and, of course, the profit motive, which grew strong in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries once chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and high-yielding seeds could be controlled in the hands of the few. All of these contributed to the spread of humanity’s collective ability to experiment with nature. No new way to manipulate nature, from ancient animal power to modern machinery, ever occurred without trial and error.

Death of the Liberal Class
by Chris Hedges
Published 14 May 2010

They handed out twenty-five hundred copies in Union Square for a penny a copy. The price remains unchanged. Two Catholic Worker houses of hospitality in the Lower East Side soon followed. Day and Maurin preached a radical ethic that included an unwavering pacifism. They condemned private and state capitalism for its unfair distribution of wealth. They branded the profit motive as immoral. They were fervent supporters of the labor movement, the civil-rights movement, and all antiwar movements. They called on followers to take up lives of voluntary poverty. And when the old Communist Party came under fierce attack in the 1950s during the anticommunist purges, Day, although not a communist, was one of the only activists to denounce the repression and attend communist demonstrations.

The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization
by Richard Baldwin
Published 14 Nov 2016

The ICT revolution in the twenty-first century is quick and chaotic by comparison. Importantly, very little of this technology development is controlled by governments. This was not tariff cutting, whose pace was set by diplomats in Geneva. Most of the technical advances derived from private, profit-motivated R&D. And while governments could have stifled expansion of the Internet and telecoms, almost none did. To put it differently, governments controlled the sluicegates for the Old Globalization. By contrast, no one in particular controls the New Globalization’s sluicegates. BOX 8: SUMMARY OF WHAT’S NEW ABOUT THE NEW GLOBALIZATION Firms in G7 nations are fragmenting the production process and sending some stages of production to nearby low-wage nations.

Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent
by Robert F. Barsky
Published 2 Feb 1997

It's probably the least known of Orwell's major political books. (Chronicles 21) The issue of ruling-class or corporate control of public access to information is a divisive one for many of Chomsky's critics. Some are convinced that works are, for the most part, printed and distributed according to capitalist profit motives. For example, another Orwell novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, was not distributed in the United States until many years after its publication in 1936 because it was deeply rooted in English life, and therefore considered by distributors to be of little interest to American readers. Yet other critics endorse Chomsky's belief that a type of elite control does exist: Chomsky himself has had his own work suppressed by publishers, and some media outlets have refused to print his letters and interviews with him.

Ugly Americans: The True Story of the Ivy League Cowboys Who Raided the Asian Markets for Millions
by Ben Mezrich
Published 3 May 2004

I knew he had graduated top of his class, that he had spent three years at Merrill Lynch before business school, and that he had a wife, four kids, and a mansion the size of Grand Central Station out on Long Island. I also knew what he was worth. Or what the newspapers thought he was worth. Nobody really knew for sure. “Sometimes the newspapers paint us as the bad guys, but in a lot of ways, the truth is quite the opposite. We’re profit motivated, to be sure, just like any mutual fund or investment bank, but in many cases we are also doing things that help out the economy as a whole and save people a lot of money.” He bit the head off his pickle and gave it a chew. He was quite a Ugly Americans | 185 character, to be sure. I wondered how I was going to capture his essence in words, while still keeping to the agreement we had made before setting up the interview.

Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing
by John Boughton
Published 14 May 2018

Readers should come to their own judgement about New Labour’s record in office but housing policy and achievement does offer an excellent yardstick. Even as it pursued its generally progressive social ends, New Labour undoubtedly pursued a broadly neoliberal agenda, one that gave economic primacy to the market and its disciplines, one which privileged private finance and the profit motive over public investment. Its social housing policies which rested in essence in a diffuse but pervasive belief in competitiveness – personal and institutional – afford one of the clearest illustrations of this overarching belief-system and, to many, will suggest its limitations. In terms of council housing – I mean social housing now, of course – New Labour and its chosen agents improved both its fabric and management, but in a way which perpetuated the prejudices against it and undermined the values which sustained it.

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy
by Nathan Schneider
Published 10 Sep 2018

They can incline us toward trusting each other more, rather than giving up on trust and entrusting our economic lives to markets alone. Hughes’s involvement in alternative finance brought her into the twilight zone of trying to develop community-oriented institutions around existing financial regulations. “All the rules are written assuming a profit motive is what drives everything.” And there’s consistently a bias, she says, “for the benefit of the lender, not the borrower.” The cooperative tradition has tried to play by different rules, to preserve democracy by making sure lenders remain lenders, rather than becoming bosses. “Our model has been to rent capital from the outside and give it no control,” says Rink Dickinson, a founder of the fair-trade worker cooperative Equal Exchange.

Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth
by Sarah Smarsh
Published 17 Sep 2018

But the late nineteenth century marked the devastation of the Plains tribes as the federal government strategically and violently “removed” their people and annihilated the bison herds they followed for sustenance. Meanwhile, 1.6 million people, many of whom were poor whites, were welcomed west with the promise of land ownership. That was profit-motivated propaganda; the United States had given massive swaths of land to private railroad companies with the idea that the development they promoted and enabled would commercially invigorate the country from one coast to the other. The concern was never about the people being summoned to farm the land.

The Fields Beneath: The History of One London Village
by Gillian Tindall
Published 1 Oct 2002

The English ideal home, then as now, was a detached villa, but only a landlord or builder without an eye to the main chance, or else with a very definite expectation of being able to let or sell the finished villas for high amounts, could afford to use land in such a prodigal way. Parts of St John’s Wood and Nash’s Park Villages are the classic surviving examples of building to fulfil an ideal rather than for the immediate profit motive, though no doubt profits were made. Another such area – now almost all rebuilt – was The Grove at Kentish Town Green (opposite Grove Terrace): a solitary double-fronted house of the period remains, shorn of its garden, surrounded by cliffs of flats of both ‘mansion’ and council variety. There is a pleasant early nineteenth-century villa with decorative eves still standing at the corner of Prince of Wales Road opposite the Mother Shipton, and a few more, semi-derelict and spectral, at the junction of Kentish Town and Hawley Road.

Infonomics: How to Monetize, Manage, and Measure Information as an Asset for Competitive Advantage
by Douglas B. Laney
Published 4 Sep 2017

The city receives $1,200 per year in rent for each “SmartPole” and nets nearly $9 million per year in energy savings alone. The poles can also capture information on outages, nearby accidents, and traffic patterns—saving on maintenance and saving lives.37 Assessing the economics of information in the public sector can be a bit trickier than with commercial organizations. Rather than a profit motive, government organizations are driven more by the economic and other benefits to citizens and businesses. Still, the opportunities to deploy information in measurably improving economic opportunity, safety, and well-being are endless, and just starting to be realized by national and local governments.

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI
by John Brockman
Published 19 Feb 2019

Second, Homo sapiens is by nature curious, which will motivate the scientific quest for understanding intelligence and developing AGI even without economic incentives. Although curiosity is one of the most celebrated human attributes, it can cause problems when it fosters technology we haven’t yet learned how to manage wisely. Sheer scientific curiosity without profit motive contributed to the discovery of nuclear weapons and tools for engineering pandemics, so it’s not unthinkable that the old adage “Curiosity killed the cat” will turn out to apply to the human species as well. Third, we’re mortal. This explains the near unanimous support for developing new technologies that help us live longer, healthier lives, which strongly motivates current AI research.

Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization
by Branko Milanovic
Published 10 Apr 2016

“Deglobalization” with a return to the “local” is impossible because it would do away with the division of labor, a key factor of economic growth. Surely, those who argue for localism do not wish to propose a major drop in living standards or a Khmer Rouge solution to inequality. Forms of state capitalism, as in Russia and China, do exist, but this is capitalism nevertheless: the private profit motive and private companies are dominant. It is often stated that Islam is the only remaining ideological competitor to Western liberal capitalism. This is, I think, true in many respects as far as liberal society is concerned but not in the one that we address here, namely, the effects of inequality on capitalism.

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors
by Spencer Jakab
Published 1 Feb 2022

In the case of Enron, Fortune reporter Bethany McLean spoke with Chanos, started digging, and prepared a cover story with the in-retrospect understated headline is enron overpriced? Enron boss Jeffrey Skilling, who would later go to prison, called her unethical. Enron executives flew from Houston to New York to try to convince her editors to drop the story, and Kenneth Lay, Enron’s chairman, told her editor that McLean was relying on a source with a profit motive in seeing Enron’s shares fall. Of course she was—in much the way that dozens of business articles every day quote executives with stock options or seek out the opinions of fund managers who happen to own a stock. A more alarming episode came more recently when two journalists at the Financial Times were not only pressured by the German financial technology company Wirecard and reportedly spied on but also became the target of a criminal complaint for stock manipulation for allegedly colluding with short sellers.

How to Prevent the Next Pandemic
by Bill Gates
Published 2 May 2022

And since transmission of the flu virus essentially came to a halt during the first year of COVID, researchers now know that it’s possible to stop influenza, which bodes well for future outbreaks of flu and other diseases. COVID also highlights an inescapable fact about innovation: Most of the world’s greatest talent for translating research into commercial products is in the private sector. Not everyone likes that arrangement, but the profit motive is often the most powerful force in the world for getting new products created quickly. It’s the government’s role to invest in the basic research that leads to major innovations, adopt policies that let new ideas flourish, and create markets and incentives (the way the United States accelerated vaccine work with Operation Warp Speed).

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
by Steven Pinker
Published 1 Jan 2002

Those with some confidence in the human species will hope this is not so and will try to determine the intrinsic characteristics that provide the framework for intellectual development, the growth of moral consciousness, cultural achievement, and participation in a free community.48 He describes his political vision as “libertarian socialist” and “anarcho-syndicalist,” the kind of anarchism that values spontaneous cooperation (as opposed to anarcho-capitalism, the kind that values individualism).49 This vision, he suggests, lies in a Cartesian tradition that includes “Rousseau’s opposition to tyranny, oppression, and established authority,…Kant’s defense of freedom, Humboldt’s precapitalist liberalism with its emphasis on the basic human need for free creation under conditions of voluntary association, and Marx’s critique of alienated fragmented labor that turns men into machines, depriving them of their ‘species character’ of ‘free conscious activity’ and ‘productive life’ in association with their fellows.”50 Chomsky’s political beliefs, then, resonate with his scientific belief that humans are innately endowed with a desire for community and a drive for creative free expression, language being the paradigm example. That holds out the hope for a society organized by cooperation and natural productivity rather than by hierarchical control and the profit motive. Chomsky’s theory of human nature, though strongly innatist, is innocent of modern evolutionary biology, with its demonstration of ubiquitous conflicts of genetic interest. These conflicts lead to a darker view of human nature, one that has always been a headache for those with anarchist dreams.

…

One response from the doomsayers is that the current frenzy of consumption involves past classics and current mediocrities but that few new works of quality are coming into the world. That is doubtful.19 As historians of the arts repeatedly tell us, all the supposed sins of contemporary culture—mass appeal, the profit motive, themes of sex and violence, and adaptations to popular formats (such as serialization in newspapers)—may be found in the great artists of past centuries. Even in recent decades, many artists were seen in their time as commercial hacks and only later attained artistic respectability. Examples include the Marx Brothers, Alfred Hitchcock, the Beatles, and, if we are to judge by recent museum shows and critical appreciations, even Norman Rockwell.

The Zenith Angle
by Bruce Sterling
Published 27 Apr 2004

The wives cycled through his bedrooms, and his kids grew up and left. The Space Age gently faded into the yellowing pages of Life magazine. By the 1990s, aerospace jobs were fading away by double-digit percentages, while the Cyberspace Age exploded in the NASDAQ and a million Web sites. Business and the profit motive ruled the heavens and the earth. But now, breaking his thoughts, here came the ugly racket of a trail bike. It was, of course, the Dot-Commie. The Dot-Commie was making a beeline for DeFanti’s hidden cabin. He must have ridden the motorbike straight down his jet’s embarkation stairs. The Dot-Commie waved cheerfully as his bike veered wildly up the stony, darkening slope.

Free culture: how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 15 Nov 2004

[198] International Intellectual Property Institute (IIPI), Patent Protection and Access to HIV/AIDS Pharmaceuticals in Sub-Saharan Africa, a Report Prepared for the World Intellectual Property Organization (Washington, D.C., 2000), 15. [199] See Sabin Russell, "New Crusade to Lower AIDS Drug Costs: Africa's Needs at Odds with Firms' Profit Motive," San Francisco Chronicle, 24 May 1999, A1, available at link #57 ("compulsory licenses and gray markets pose a threat to the entire system of intellectual property protection"); Robert Weissman, "AIDS and Developing Countries: Democratizing Access to Essential Medicines," Foreign Policy in Focus 4:23 (August 1999), available at link #58 (describing U.S. policy); John A.

Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State
by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin
Published 5 Sep 2011

“It just hits you like a ton of bricks when you think about it,” fumed a senior officer who has been in the military for nearly thirty years and was in Afghanistan when he had this revelation. “The Department of Defense is no longer a war fighting organization, it’s a business enterprise. Afghanistan is a great example of it. There’s so much money being made off this place.” The profit motive has a tremendous impact on policy and budgets. “The incentive for the contractor is to get more money for the contractor,” said Rostker, the former Pentagon adviser. “When would you ever think of cutting back?” The money to be made, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, isn’t lost on the people at the top.

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
by Carl Sagan
Published 8 Sep 1997

If we could move these asteroids into orbit around the Earth, perhaps we could conveniently mine them. But at least for the foreseeable future this seems dangerously imprudent, as I describe later in this book. In his classic science fiction novel The Man Who Sold the Moon, Robert Heinlein imagined the profit motive as the key to space travel. He hadn't foreseen that the Cold War would sell the Moon. But he did recognize that an honest profit argument would be difficult to come by. Heinlein envisioned, therefore, a scam in which the lunar surface was salted with diamonds so later explorers could breathlessly discover them and initiate a diamond rush.

Portfolios of the poor: how the world's poor live on $2 a day
by Daryl Collins , Jonathan Morduch and Stuart Rutherford
Published 15 Jan 2009

It is important to remember that moneylenders are often as much part of the community as their clients, which makes forgiveness and rescheduling even more likely.9 Moneylenders who feature in the South African diaries are often simply better-off people in the neighborhood. In Bangladesh also, there are very few professional moneylenders who lend for a livelihood. Most so-called mahajans, the Bengali word most often translated as “moneylender,” are simply “big persons,” wealthier people who lend as much out of obligation as out of profit-motivation; this may often be why they are willing to have interest rates negotiated downwards. Indeed because the governmentowned commercial banks rarely lend to the poor, professional lending to poor people for profit in Bangladesh is done best and most often by microfinance institutions. 141 CHAPTER FIVE In India, professional moneylenders are more prevalent and, like Mohammed Laiq’s creditor, are regularly forced to reschedule problem loans.

The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership
by Richard Branson
Published 8 Sep 2014

At the risk of making this sound like an Oscar acceptance speech where I don’t have time to list all the people involved, let me just show you our very short and precise mission statement: ‘Our mission is to deliver a “Plan B” that puts people and planet alongside profit. Plan A – where companies have been driven by the profit motive alone – is no longer acceptable.’ Plan B is off to a good start, with plenty of great ideas and a growing community of like-minded colleagues, but we have a long road ahead us. The encouraging news is that so many of the young entrepreneurs we meet are already very much attuned to the B Team’s call for a new way of doing business.

Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
by William Blum
Published 31 Mar 2002

Even members of Congress don't seem to quite trust the workings of the system. They regularly consider measures to contain soaring drug and health-care costs and the possible regulation of the ticket distribution industry because of alleged price abuses.2 Why don't our legislators simply allow "the magic of the marketplace" to do its magic? The profit motive President Calvin Coolidge left Americans these stirring words to ponder: "Civilization and profits go hand in hand." When First Lady, Hillary Clinton, however, lashed out at the medical and insurance industries for putting their profits ahead of the public's health. "The market," she declared, "knows the price of everything but the value of nothing."3 The unions regularly attack companies for skimping on worker health and safety in their pursuit of higher profit.

Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
by Jerry Mander
Published 1 Jan 1977

When I turned off the set and closed my eyes, laying my head back against the pillows of the sofa, the images that came to mind were of this Wattenberg person, his graveyard of dead corporations, the Gillette research labs . . . and I heard an internal record- ing of his voice: ' Planners say it would be nice if we all lived in apartments, but most people prefer to live in their own single-family houses. And American business, sparked by the profit motive, is providing them. The same with mass transit. People prefer their own cars, manufactured by big business, providing what people want." I also saw some images of that eagle-man, flapping his huge, furry wings as the canoeists rowed some Pacific bay. I saw some pictures in my head of the Southwest desert and a lonely Navajo woman on horseback, herding sheep.

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need
by Naomi Klein
Published 12 Jun 2017

Please visit noisnotenough.org for a list of ways to plug into the movements described in these pages, and to connect with many more organizations and theorists. PART I HOW WE GOT HERE: RISE OF THE SUPERBRANDS We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. —MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. “Beyond Vietnam,” 1967 CHAPTER ONE HOW TRUMP WON BY BECOMING THE ULTIMATE BRAND The night Donald Trump was declared the winner of the 2016 election and forty-fifth president of the United States was particularly disorienting for me because it wasn’t a night at all.

Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic
by Hugh Sinclair
Published 4 Oct 2012

One can only speculate if that prospect featured in the minds of the CEOs queuing up for a slice of LAPO’s equity. With these ratings in the public domain, can there be any other explanation why so many of the world’s supposedly most reputable funds had invested in an institution that was so obviously exploiting the poor and had only one thing going for it—profitability? Motivation is a hard thing to prove, but more evidence would soon emerge. A final blow to the creditor taskforce was mentioned in a subtle phrase toward the end of the rating: “The insufficient transparency in reporting to funders in December 2008, combined with the Nigerian economic crisis, detracted some potential investors in 2009 and contributed to a request for early repayment.”17 Although vague, this most likely refers to a microfinance fund canceling a due diligence midway upon discovery of “anomalies,” and the other funds withdrawing from LAPO as a result of the revelations emerging.

The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late
by Michael Ellsberg
Published 15 Jan 2011

Ellsberg’s writing is not strong enough to overcome the simple fact that he is not a very likable person.” At the time, of course, I viewed these letters as pure confirmation of my worst suspicions: the corrupted aesthetics of middle-class consumerist mediocrity and philistinism, the complete venality of corporate publishing pandering to those tastes, the wickedness of the profit-motivated media-entertainment complex—unable to recognize the genius of Art even if they were hit over the head with a two-pound manuscript of experimental nonfictionin-fragments. Over time, my views of this episode in my life mellowed and matured. The word “undisciplined” was used by several different editors rejecting my manuscript, and I have come to see that they were right—in fact, all the rejections were right.

The Trade of Queens
by Charles Stross
Published 16 Mar 2010

Did I just hear the minister for prisons boast that he was supplying labor quotas to mines and road-building units? The skin on the back of his neck crawled. Yes, there were a lot of soldiers in the royalist camp, and many prisoners of war—and yes, there was a depression-spawned crime wave—but handing a profit motive to the screws stuck in his throat. He glanced around the table. At least a third of the commissioners he recognized had done hard time in the royal labor camps. Yet they just sat there while Fowler regurgitated his self-congratulatory litany of manacles refastened and windows barred. That can't be what's going on, he decided.

Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician
by Sandeep Jauhar
Published 18 Aug 2014

“I’d never thought of medicine as a business. I thought we were in it to take care of patients. But I guess it is.” I asked him how he felt about going into private practice. “I won’t have much time to think about it,” he replied. “I’ll be too busy vomiting for the first six months.” Certainly, there has always been a profit motive in medicine, but financial considerations have never been as prominent as they are today, in part because so many hospitals and doctors, especially in large metropolitan areas, are in financial trouble. Even as payments by insurers are decreasing inexorably to control health costs, office expenses are increasing, and the economy is in recession.

Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars
by Lee Billings
Published 2 Oct 2013

He obtained a value of $6.5 billion—coincidentally about the same amount of money astronomers often estimate would be needed to build a space telescope capable of seeking signs of life on such a world. If humans actually voyaged there, Laughlin once pointed out to me, the star would become ever brighter, until it was a new Sun in a new sky of a New World. “So in going there, you have this ability to intrinsically increase value. And that’s an exciting thing because it ultimately provides a profit motive for perhaps going out and making a go of it with these planets. This is saying that something that is several billion dollars on Earth could be, if you go there, a quadrillion-dollar payoff.” Months before our encounter at Tomales Bay, I had interviewed Laughlin about his equation for an article I published on the website BoingBoing.net.

Among Chimpanzees
by Nancy J. Merrick

Active Conservation Awareness Program, WildAid, 105 Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary, 134 African Wildlife Foundation, 217 Afrika (chimpanzee), 21–23, 24, 131 AIDS research, 171, 172–73 AIDS treatment program, 44, 163, 194, 200, 211 Ajarova, Lilly, 14, 131, 140, 142 Akagera National Park, 115 American Sign Language, 78–79 Amin, Idi, 15–16, 88, 130, 163, 164 Annan, Kofi, 161, 162, 227 Arcus Foundation, 166 Association of Zoos and Aquariums, 180, 188 Baeckler, Sarah, 185 Bailey, Jarrod, 173 Bandit (chimpanzee), xiv, 91, 93 Barnard, Christian, 172 Benedict, Faye, 50–54 biomedical research with chimps: costs versus benefits, 171–73; morality of, 174; movement in US to limit, 173–74; xenotransplantation and, 172 black rhinos, 149 Bonobo Conservation Initiative, 205 bonobos (Pan paniscus), 52, 102; endangered species designation, 205; likely population loss scenario, 213; resemblance to humans, 74; similarity and differences with chimps, 204–5 Bornean orangutans, 213 Born Free Foundation, 103 British-American Tobacco Company, 141 Bryceson, Derek, 158 Bugoma and Budongo Forest Reserves, 135, 137, 139 Bulindi Survivor chimpanzee group, 231–33 Burundi: chimp rescue story, 19–20; history of atrocities, 42–43, 163, 164; location, 41; refugees in Kigoma, 82 Bushmeat Crisis Task Force, 148 bushmeat trade: campaigns promoting other sources of protein, 150; DNA barcoding project, 146–47; efforts to work with timber concessions, 154; impact on wildlife populations, 104–5, 148; international landscape conservation efforts, 153–54; law enforcement response to wildlife crime, 151, 155; percentage that is ape meat, 148; poachers’ profit motivation, 149; poaching in national parks, 152–53; popularity of bushmeat as a protein source, 147–48; public-awareness campaigns against, 149; strategies and tactics for addressing poaching, 150–52; traffickers and corruption and, 150, 154–55, 208 Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, 115, 122, 123, 125–30 Cameroon: bushmeat trade in, 105; chimp population status in, 206, 213; Drori’s anti-trafficking efforts in, 150–51; primate-protection efforts in, 134; threats to the chimp population, 144 CAP (Conservation Action Plan): elements of the program, 197–98; estimated costs, 200 carbon-footprint calculator, 219 CarbonFund.org, 219 Cargo Tracck, 209 Carlos (chimpanzee), 165–66, 175 Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, 160 Carnegie Corporation of New York, 159–61 CBFP (Congo Basin Forest Partnership), 153, 215 Center for Great Apes, Florida, 184 Central African Bushmeat Monitoring System.

Sam Walton: Made in America
by Sam Walton and John Huey
Published 1 Jan 1992

We've improved the standard of living of our customers, whom we've saved billions of dollars, and of our associates, who have been able to share profits. Many of both groups also have invested in our stock and profited all through the years. When we started out, the whole idea was nothing but a pure profit motive: our business strategy was to bring the customers into the tent by selling the highest quality goods we could at the lowest possible prices. It worked, and those few of us who believed in it from early on and invested in the idea got rich off it. Obviously, everybody who went to work in a Wal-Mart didn't get rich.

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
by Bill McKibben
Published 15 Apr 2019

“I hope that someday all of you on the advisory committee can tell your families that you were part of the process that ended the use of toxic treatments like chemotherapy and radiation as standard treatments, and turned blood cancers into a treatable disease that most people survive,” said Emily’s dad.11 So, again, let’s be clear: this first kind of genetic engineering, the repair of defects in existing human beings, does not present a threat to the human game. Somatic engineering extends traditional medicine, allowing us to cure some diseases we were unable to treat before, or that we could attack only crudely, with massive doses of chemicals or radiation. Yes, there are all the usual complications that come with Big Pharma’s profit motives and with our unequal health care system. But this kind of work is going to happen, and it is going to make lives better. Three cheers for Kurzweil’s law of accelerating information returns, which made it possible. Or, maybe, two cheers. Because CRISPR, as I’ve said, also allows for a second type of power.

Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age
by Alex Wright
Published 6 Jun 2014

And the Semantic Web community sees enormous potential in creating so-called Webs of Data to serve these and other specialized communities. While it seems unlikely that Otlet’s classification scheme will ever supplant any of these initiatives, his vision does offer an organizational model for worldwide knowledge sharing, fostered through an enterprise devoid of corporate profit motives. That is why Paul Otlet still matters. His vision was not just cloud castles and Utopian scheming and positivist cant but in some ways more relevant and realizable now than at any point in history. To be sure, some of his most cherished ideas seem anachronistic by today’s standards: his quest for “universal” truth, his faith in international organizations, and his conviction in the inexorable progress of humanity.

Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse: And Other Lessons From Modern Life
by David Mitchell
Published 4 Nov 2014

“What personality cocktail of laziness, self-loathing and intractable mediocrity would have led you to try to make your fortune (your incredibly modest fortune, albeit with overgenerous pension provision made possible only by tying the hands of enterprise) in that gloomy bureaucratic Mariana trench, far from the nourishing rays of the profit motive? How did the sorting hat of fate come to put you in life’s Hufflepuff (but with a touch of Slytherin thrown in when it comes to local government contracts)?” Those are the sort of questions that Carl Lygo, the chief executive of BPP, one of Britain’s only two run-for-profit universities, must have to bite his tongue to stop himself asking when talking to other educators.

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You
by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms
Published 2 Apr 2018

The structure of TEDx is less similar to a distributed movement like the hacker collective Anonymous—where anyone can claim membership and take things in whatever direction they please—and more like a franchise, where a service agreement enforces specific expectations. The parameters are designed to preserve what TED sees as intrinsic to its model: high-quality curation, the absence of a profit motive, and a ban on pay-to-play sponsors. TEDx organizers must make a clear case for why they are well positioned to pull off a compelling local event, and they need to play by TED’s rules. Occasionally those rules are broken. Nilofer Merchant, writing in the Harvard Business Review, has documented various skirmishes over TEDx talks that peddled pseudoscience, or technical-sounding nonsense topics like “vortex-based mathematics,” “plasmatics,” and Egyptian psychoaromatherapy.

Down the Tube: The Battle for London's Underground
by Christian Wolmar
Published 1 Jan 2002

Instead, they had knocked off by 4 a.m., disappearing into their white vans, off to bed. Perhaps, with slightly better planning, they could have done a bit more, but the sheer complexity of working on a long railway, mostly only accessible at stations, means that it will be difficult for the new infracos, with their profit motive at the forefront, to improve efficiency very much. Under PPP, of course, there will be fines of tens, even potentially hundreds, of thousands of pounds if either party overruns its allotted slot – London Underground for operating trains beyond the timetabled hours, the infracos for handing the track back late.

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
by Joel Kotkin
Published 11 May 2020

After all, nearly 40 percent of private entrepreneurs also belong to the Communist Party.2 In the West, entrepreneurs have historically tended to be a force for liberalization and for limiting the power of entrenched aristocracies and clerical elites, since “commerce desires to be free,” in the words of the seventeenth-century Dutch economist Peter de la Court.3 By contrast, leading oligarchs in today’s tech and finance sectors are often inclined to support the heavy-handed “progressive” policies embraced by the dominant elements of the clerisy—as long as it doesn’t threaten their own fortunes.4 Thus the real cultural power lies in the “Brahmin left,” to use Thomas Piketty’s term.5 “Post-Economic Goals” Alvin Toffler predicted almost half a century ago that growing affluence would result in replacing the profit motive with more aesthetic goals, a quest for self-fulfillment, or unbridled hedonism. “Affluence serves as a base from which men begin to strive for post-economic goals,” he wrote.6 The “woke” values of the upper classes are an example of such “post-economic” goals. Many business leaders—and the vast majority of students at the Harvard Business School—favor what the philosopher John Gray calls “hyper-liberalism,” defined as a “mixture of bourgeois careerism with virtue-signaling self-righteousness.”7 A large proportion of top CEOs see it as their responsibility to influence public attitudes and policy, rather than simply meet the needs of shareholders or serve customers.

Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus
by Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green
Published 7 Jul 2021

We felt a bit disconnected: as though decisions that would really affect our working lives (by this point all of us were working on this project all of the time and it had completely taken over every waking and sleeping hour) were being taken at the highest level of the university with no consultation with those of us who actually knew how to make this vaccine. We also felt a bit of trepidation that teaming up with a pharmaceutical giant would mean someone else making large profits off the back of our efforts. We were realistic that there would need to be a profit motive for big pharma to get involved, but we were hopeful that if the vaccine was going to end up making a lot of money for other people, at least the university might also see some returns on its investment. The press release that Andy had sent round suggested that both partners had agreed to operate on a not-for-profit basis for the duration of the pandemic, and that royalties returned to the university after that would be reinvested into pandemic preparedness.

Owning the Sun
by Alexander Zaitchik
Published 7 Jan 2022

To cover the remaining fifty percent needed to achieve herd immunity, the countries would be left to compete on the global market. Launched to great fanfare by industry and Gavi’s media relations department, COVAX was based on a faith that the market could be nudged and guided into balance between global public health and safety needs, and the profit motives of monopoly-wielding companies in possession of the first WHO-approved vaccines. It also depended on rich governments—“self-financing countries” in the COVAX lingo—not racing against each other to close bilateral deals with manufacturers, and thus leave everyone else staring at empty shelves.

IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives
by Chris Stedman
Published 19 Oct 2020

In a moment when our challenges are more and more connected—when problems global in scale force us to confront how our actions impact others—this tool can help us find a path forward. We will never rid ourselves of uncertainty; we can only learn to abide it together. The irony of turning to profit-­motivated platforms for meaning and belonging, seeking it out as individuals instead of through other kinds of institutions, is that these platforms currently turn us back toward ourselves. The apps and tools that promise structure and order, that claim they will streamline our lives and give us security, can never do what they seem to promise—do away with uncertainty—because uncertainty adapts.

Dear Chairman: Boardroom Battles and the Rise of Shareholder Activism
by Jeff Gramm
Published 23 Feb 2016

I have nothing but respect for men like James Peck, who bought one share of Greyhound Bus to push the company to integrate its southern bus lines, but I’ve largely ignored this brand of shareholder activism. As hard as these activists have pushed public companies to behave responsibly, it’s difficult to pressure a management team without appealing to the profit motive of other shareholders. The biggest changes in the corporate governance landscape over the past hundred years have been driven by large shareholders seeking to generate economic profits from their investments. They are the focus of this book. The conflict between shareholders seeking profits, and stakeholders such as laborers and communities, is also largely outside the scope of this book.

Merchants of the Right: Gun Sellers and the Crisis of American Democracy
by Jennifer Carlson
Published 2 May 2023

No doubt, they gain from the deregulation of firearms and the protection of gun rights, which have translated into new markets and surging profits for those in the gun industry. But expansive gun laws are simultaneously about championing rights, safeguarding a culture practice, and protecting a market.94 Chalking up the incentives of gun sellers to mere profit motives, however, vastly simplifies the cultural work that happens within, around, and through the marketization of gun rights. As they sell the firearms central to the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, gun sellers also shape how those rights are engaged and exercised. To put this into sociological perspective, recall that deliberative spaces are crucial building blocks for what Jürgen Habermas95 theorized as the “public sphere”—that arena where citizens can discuss public issues, exchange ideas, and eventually form public opinion that reflects mutual understandings.

Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts About Alternative Medicine
by Edzard Ernst and Simon Singh
Published 17 Aug 2008

Maurice believed in that and it pained him a lot to see what was happening in the UK. The mass media must decide whether it wants to report medical issues responsibly in order to inform the public, or to report it luridly in order to create shocking headlines. Unfortunately, the media has a profit motive and a lack of discipline, so the latter option will probably continue to be too tempting, particularly in light of how easy it is to scaremonger. This was demonstrated by an article entitled ‘Mysterious Killer Chemical’, published in 2005, which highlighted the dangers of the chemical DiHydrogen MonOxide, sometimes called DHMO.

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy
by Raghuram Rajan
Published 24 May 2010

In the United States, the expansion of home ownership—a key element of the American dream—to low-and middle-income households was the defensible linchpin for the broader aims of expanding credit and consumption. But when easy money pushed by a deep-pocketed government comes into contact with the profit motive of a sophisticated, competitive, and amoral financial sector, a deep fault line develops. This is not, of course, the first time in history when credit expansion has been used to assuage the concerns of a group that is being left behind, nor will it be the last. In fact, one does not even need to look outside the United States for examples.

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations
by Nicholas Carr
Published 5 Sep 2016

MAKING SHARING SAFE FOR CAPITALISTS November 8, 2010 “I AM NOT A COMMUNIST,” declared author-entrepreneur Steven Johnson in a recent column in the business pages of the New York Times. Johnson made his disclaimer in the course of celebrating the creativity of “open networks,” the groups of volunteers who gather on the net to share ideas and produce digital goods of one stripe or another. Because they exist outside the marketplace and don’t operate in response to the profit motive, one might think that such social-production collectives would represent a threat to traditional markets. What could be more subversive to consumer capitalism than a mass movement of people working without pay to create free stuff for other people? But capitalists needn’t worry. The innovations of the unpaid, web-enabled masses may be “conceived in nonmarket environments,” writes Johnson, but they create “new platforms” that “support commercial ventures.”

The Clash of the Cultures
by John C. Bogle
Published 30 Jun 2012

When a fund’s management subsidiary reports to a multi-line financial services company, the scope for abuse of investor capital broadens dramatically. . . . Investors fare best with funds managed by not-for-profit organizations, because the management firm focuses exclusively on serving investor interests. No profit motive conflicts with the manager’s fiduciary responsibility. No profit margin interferes with investor returns. No outside corporate interest clashes with portfolio management choices. Not-for-profit firms place investor interests front and center. . . . Ultimately, a passive index fund managed by a not-for-profit investment management organization represents the combination most likely to satisfy investor aspirations.

Discover Kaua'i Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

The end result is a quickening of the rate at which people come and go, and a quiet strain on the social fabric of the community. Sustainability Another global trend that has found its way to Kaua'i’s shores is the sustainability movement. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Kaua'i has rediscovered its sustainable roots, as ancient Hawaiians, who weren’t even aware of the profit motive, were certainly inherently green. The first area of interest here is sustainable agriculture. There is a major movement on Kaua'i towards becoming self-sufficient in food production. And why not? We are talking about an island with hundreds of thousands of acres of fertile fields, and relatively few people.

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future
by Paul Mason
Published 29 Jul 2015

Even the theorists of moderate social-democracy were so perplexed that they declared the West’s economic system had effectively become non-capitalist. ‘The most characteristic features of capitalism have disappeared,’ wrote Labour MP Anthony Crosland in 1956, ‘the absolute rule of private property, the subjection of all life to market influences, the domination of the profit motive, the neutrality of government, typical laissez-faire division of income and the ideology of individual rights.’12 By the mid-1950s, almost the whole left had embraced the theory of ‘state monopoly capitalism’ – first suggested by Bukharin, then by Varga, and now turned into a full-blown theory by the US left economist Paul Sweezy.13 He believed that state intervention, welfare measures and permanently high military spending had abolished the tendency to crisis.

Joel on Software
by Joel Spolsky
Published 1 Aug 2004

But, with very few exceptions (and I'm sure I'll get a whole host of email from tedious supporters of arcane and unloved platforms like the Amiga or RSTS-11), no software developer with the least bit of common sense would intentionally write software for a platform with 100,000 users on a good day, like BeOS, when they could do the same amount of work and create software for a platform with 100,000,000 users, like Windows. The fact that anybody writes software for those oddball systems at all proves that the profit motive isn't everything; religious fervor is still alive and well. Good for you, darling. You wrote a nice microEmacs clone for the Timex Sinclair 1000. Bravo. Here's a quarter, buy yourself a treat. So. If you're in the platform-creation business, you probably will suffer from what is commonly known as the chicken-and-egg problem: Nobody is going to buy your platform until there's good software that runs on it, and nobody is going to write software until you have a big installed base.

The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking Medicine's Deepest Mystery
by George Johnson
Published 26 Aug 2013

About 70 percent of men in their seventies who die of other causes have been found on autopsy to have prostate cancers that they probably knew nothing about. A man rendered impotent and incontinent by surgery may be left to wonder if he should have resisted the pressure to get tested. As with breast cancer, the hype—often well meaning but also driven by the profit motive—has been criticized for overselling the value of early diagnosis. Sports stadiums have become a popular recruiting ground. Urologists offer free tickets in return for an office visit and advertise on arena billboards. A Florida doctor places advertisements on the deoderizer pucks that sit inside the urinals of public restrooms: “Strike Out at the Urinal?”

The Meritocracy Myth
by Stephen J. McNamee
Published 17 Jul 2013

These decisions allowed corporations to operate for private gain without explicitly serving the public interest, established the principle of limited liability, and extended the legal rights of individuals to corporations. The elimination of the requirement for public service enabled an unrestricted profit motive. Under the principle of limited liability, investors would risk only the amount of money they invested in a corporation and would not be liable for whatever other debts the corporation acquired. Especially critical to these court rulings was the extension of the legal rights of individuals to corporations.

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century
by Ronald Bailey
Published 20 Jul 2015

Political Peak Oil “The real problems concerning future oil production are above the surface, not beneath it, and relate to political decisions and geopolitical instability,” notes Maugeri. It is a disquieting fact that government-owned oil companies control nearly 90 percent of the world’s oil reserves and produce about 75 percent of current supplies. Not guided by the profit motive to take future income into account, governments use their state-owned oil companies to plunder petroleum reserves as quickly and as messily as possible, often using oil revenues to buy off restive populations. In the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011, Saudi Arabia’s monarchy bought social peace by quickly boosting wages by $130 billion; Algeria announced a $156 billion infrastructure and jobs program; and Kuwait gave every citizen $3,600 and fourteen months of free groceries.

High-Frequency Trading: A Practical Guide to Algorithmic Strategies and Trading Systems
by Irene Aldridge
Published 1 Dec 2009

In fact, Sandas (2001) in his study of limit orders on actively traded stocks on the Stockholm Stock Exchange finds that the expected profit on limit orders appears to decrease as the time duration between market orders increases, contradicting previously formulated theory. The implicit outcome of empirical evidence is that the limit orders are submitted by traders with active profit motives, rather than by market makers interested strictly in providing liquidity. Demand for trading immediacy can be fueled by the traders’ need for capital and their risk aversion, among other factors. Traders strapped for cash may choose to set the limit price close to the market to turn their positions into cash as soon as possible.

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 26 May 2014

The big break came with the agricultural collectivization in 1928, in which the lands of large farmers, or kulaks, were confiscated and turned into state farms (sovkhoz) and small farmers were forced to join agricultural cooperatives (kolkhoz), which were state farms in all but name. Markets were eventually abolished and replaced by full-blown central planning by 1928, when the first Five Year Plan started. By 1928, the Soviet Union had an economic system that was definitively not capitalist. It ran without private ownership of means of production, profit motives and markets. As for the other cornerstone of capitalism, wage labour, the picture was more complicated. Yes, in theory the Soviet workers were not wage labourers because they owned all the means of production – through state ownership or cooperatives. In practice they were indistinguishable from wage labourers in a capitalist economy, since they had little control over the way in which their enterprises and the wider economy operated, and their daily work experience was still subject to the same hierarchical relationship.

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth
by Jonathan Rauch
Published 21 Jun 2021

In fact, it assumes the opposite: that people are naturally inclined to hold strong beliefs and usually enter into negotiations reluctantly. They compromise not because they want to but because they have to, and their firm convictions ensure that multiple views receive energetic advocacy. Political zeal is to Madison’s political system what the profit motive is to Adam Smith’s economic system and what strong opinions are to Locke’s epistemic system: an energy source. Like all energies, ambition and zeal can be destructive; compromise contains, channels, and exploits them. So that, in (very) brief, is Madison’s plan: a system which forces anyone who wants power or influence to persuade others, thereby harnessing personal ambition to stimulate dynamism and organize cooperation.

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe
by Roger McNamee
Published 1 Jan 2019

From a technology perspective, the most promising path forward is through innovation, something over which the platforms have too much influence today. To get around them, I propose that Silicon Valley embrace human-driven technology as the Next Big Thing. In America, if you want to solve a problem, it helps to incorporate the profit motive, which we can do by shifting the focus of technology from exploiting the weakest links in human psychology to a commitment to serving the most important needs of users. Working together, Silicon Valley and users have the power to make technology a bicycle for the mind once again. Human-driven technology would serve the needs of its users, not just in terms of providing answers or stimulation but also with respect to their mental and physical well-being, privacy, and rights as citizens.

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All
by Robert Elliott Smith
Published 26 Jun 2019

In implementing this principle, it may be possible to technically measure whether algorithms are helping or impeding ‘edge of chaos’ effects in evolving social networks, and to adjust their behaviours to overcome emergent polarization and similar negative effects. These suggested principles stand in stark contrast to the motivations of most commercial algorithms today; that is, the drive towards content ‘personalization’, which really just means profit-motive-driven targeting of commercial and political messages to individuals and groups based on the granular categorization of people based on the personal data we’ve freely volunteered. Thus, to realize these goals, more will be required than just an expectation that corporations will act on their own to regulate their algorithms towards better social outcomes.

Licence to be Bad
by Jonathan Aldred
Published 5 Jun 2019

The most comprehensive long-term study of these British privatizations shows that the results did not live up to the rhetoric.20 Since the privatized firms in question were mostly monopolies or oligopolies facing little competition, they made substantial profits. And management salaries rose significantly (with no evidence of firing poor managers in pursuit of better ones: there was minimal management turnover). Advocates of privatization had claimed that the profit motive would drive privatized firms to cut costs. But in reality, rising salary costs and shareholder dividends essentially cancelled out any cost savings: overall, privatization made little difference to long-term trends in productivity and service prices. In sum, what does Baumol’s cost disease tell us?

Bean Counters: The Triumph of the Accountants and How They Broke Capitalism
by Richard Brooks
Published 23 Apr 2018

If Enron was the house that McKinsey built, it was also one that Arthur Andersen should have condemned. It didn’t do so because keeping the corrupt edifice standing paid more. Many people and companies take a share of the blame for the Enron scandal, with its executives and bankers in the front row of culpability. But these people had legitimate profit motives, albeit ones they corrupted. Arthur Andersen ought not to have had such a motive. It was the watchdog that should have been checking and preventing the misleading and often illegal methods that were being used. It therefore failed most in its duty because it betrayed its core purpose and its higher professional responsibility.

King Icahn: The Biography of a Renegade Capitalist
by Mark Stevens
Published 31 May 1993

The pill’s toxin stemmed from the fact that the 30-percent buyer would be the only shareholder ineligible for the $62 in notes. Even worse, he would face huge debt as he was forced to make good on the commitment to the other stockholders. This seemed to be a good time for Icahn to cash in the modest profit he had made on the rise in Phillips shares to date. But instead he plowed ahead, motivated by the profit motive and by rage that the system, this time reflected in the poison pill, would further entrench management at the expense of the shareholders. “The poison pill is what I consider to be legal trickery,” Icahn said. “What it amounts to is a law firm trying to rewrite the law. One law firm said at the time that the law should be changed to bar any shareholder from buying more than 20 percent of a public company.

file:///C:/Documents%20and%...
by vpavan

I have come to believe that Chinese walls serve more often as marketing tools than a shield against conflicts. Privately, Wall Street leaders allowed, even encouraged, the two to work closely together. The Street's culture assumed it was acceptable to ignore conflicts that might harm individual investors as long as the IPO business was booming. Balancing the profit motive with the public interest had gone out of fashion. Greed in the end clouded the business judgment of a lot of smart people. For a few billion dollars in short-term profits, brokerage firms tarnished their own brands. In an industry where trust is paramount, loss of faith among investors can't be restored by simply mounting a savvy public relations campaign.

The Future of Fusion Energy
by Jason Parisi and Justin Ball
Published 18 Dec 2018

That would enable the smallest power plant to produce the most electricity. Unfortunately, we aren’t that good at fusion yet, so a bunch of trade-offs arise. Figure 8.3:The motivations and optimizations involved in the design of a tokamak power plant. For example, the first two boxes indicate that the desire to maximize profits motivates minimizing the cost of electricity because of free market competition. Reactor size is one example. Because turbulence degrades our plasma confinement, it sets the minimum size of the plasma in order to get near to ignition. Moreover, larger plasmas are preferable as they tend to require less external power to drive the plasma current.16 On the other hand, the plasma also has a maximum size, above which its power exhaust would destroy even the most durable divertor.17 While there is still a lot of uncertainty in these two constraints on size, it’s clear that they will become mutually exclusive if we push the fusion power density too high.

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World
by Cade Metz
Published 15 Mar 2021

Bengio drew up a list of promising young researchers from across the community, and as Brockman contacted these and many others, he grabbed the interest of several researchers who shared at least some of Musk’s concern over the dangers of artificial intelligence. Five of them, including Ilya Sutskever, had recently spent time inside DeepMind. They were drawn to the idea of a lab outside the control of the big Internet companies and completely detached from the profit motive that drove them. That, they believed, was the best way of ensuring that artificial intelligence progressed in a safe way. “Very few scientists think about the long-term consequences of their work,” says Wojciech Zaremba, who was among the researchers approached by Brockman. “I wanted the lab to take seriously the possibility that AI might have sweeping negative implications to the world despite being an incredibly fulfilling intellectual puzzle.”

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World
by Alan Rusbridger
Published 26 Nov 2020

<https://www.mba.ac.uk/two-views-ocean-acidification-which-fatally-flawed> Philp, Catherine and Richard Spencer. ‘Critics leap on reporter Robert Fisk’s failure to find signs of gas attack’. The Times, 18 April 2018. <https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/critics-leap-on-reporter-robert-fisk-s-failure-to-find-signs-of-gas-attack-fx7f3fs2r> Pickard, Victor. ‘Take the profit motive out of news’. The Guardian, 23 July 2009. <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/jul/23/newspapers-internet-adverstising> Pilger, John. ‘War by media and the triumph of propaganda’. JohnPilger.Com, 5 December 2014. <http://johnpilger.com/articles/war-by-media-and-the-triumph-of-propaganda> Plunkett, John.

A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life
by Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein
Published 14 Sep 2021

We must seek the foothills of peaks that are higher and more promising than the ones that we are now on. We must become more than our best selves, and save ourselves in the process. The Corrective Lens Learn to hack and kludge your own mental architecture for a better life. Keep markets as far from your motivational structure as you can—don’t let someone else’s profit motive determine what you desire or do. Keep commerce away from children, for as long as possible. Children raised to put high value on the transactional nature of being become dedicated consumers. Consumers are less observant, meditative, and deeply thoughtful than people who value creating, discovering, healing, producing, experiencing, communicating.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris
Published 14 Feb 2023

When World War I ended, production cratered by over 98 percent as the market flooded with surplus war planes.17 Independent pilots “barnstormed” the country and wowed crowds with stunts; flight was more or less an entertainment medium during peacetime. The Europeans, however, turned World War I into an air war by the end, and Hoover was convinced that the country had an existential need for a healthy domestic air industry. At the same time, he believed the government couldn’t just build the planes itself efficiently without a profit motive. This sick sector was Hoover’s first priority at Commerce, and a solid success for his strategy. Bert’s model was to get the federal government to set flight paths, research weather patterns, license pilots, and otherwise facilitate development in a general way. After some hemming and hawing about the “Air Dictator,” Congress gave him the go-ahead in 1926 with the Air Commerce Act.

…

The router included a few different networking circuits and ran on a new high-power computer board based on the Alto and designed by a Stanford graduate student named Andy Bechtolsheim. Combined with an upgraded version of the Yeager code, it worked, and they quickly built and distributed a couple dozen. In the public-private era of the proto-internet, Stanford was the multiprotocol router, translating between state investment, academic research, and the profit motive. Making all three compatible, however, meant compromises. The multiprotocol router was a Stanford campus hack, the kind of device you need at a white-hot geographic center of computer R & D—internal demand was solid, and other universities wanted some, too—but probably not anywhere where there wasn’t an extraordinary concentration of computing power.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
by Michelle Alexander
Published 24 Nov 2011

The greatest failure of the Reform Act, however, has nothing to do with one’s due process rights once property has been seized in a drug investigation. Despite all of the new procedural rules and formal protections, the law does not address the single most serious problem associated with drug-war forfeiture laws: the profit motive in drug-law enforcement. Under the new law, drug busts motivated by the desire to seize cash, cars, homes, and other property are still perfectly legal. Law enforcement agencies are still allowed, through revenue-sharing agreements with the federal government, to keep seized assets for their own use.

How Will Capitalism End?
by Wolfgang Streeck
Published 8 Nov 2016

One could also say that the concept of capitalism refers to a society that has enlisted the possessive individualism of its members as its main vehicle of social progress, measured again as an increase in wealth-as-money – a society that has made the amelioration of its collective living conditions and the realization of its core value of personal freedom both dependent on and subservient to successful activation of the profit motive and the maximization of the rate of increase of its capital. With this in mind and in this sense, I do think that, pace Block, capitalism as a system does have ‘a fundamental unity’,10 due to its ‘economy’ extending far into its society and profoundly shaping and conditioning social life.11 Practising Polanyian that I have become, not least under the influence of Fred Block,12 I still hesitate to discard the Marxian heritage as light-heartedly as he does.

Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence: Revised and Updated for the 21st Century
by Vicki Robin , Joe Dominguez and Monique Tilford
Published 31 Aug 1992

Are you able to stay true to your own integrity? As long as you are receiving money for the work you do, there is the possibility, however minute and subtle, of selling out your vision, your values or your beliefs. In The Biology of Art, zoologist Desmond Morris tells of an experiment in introducing the “profit motive” to apes. The first step was teaching them to be artists and to produce drawings and paintings that were decidedly lovely. Once their “art” was established he began to “pay” them, rewarding them with peanuts for their work. Under the reward system their artwork quickly deteriorated, and they began turning out hasty scrawls just to get the peanuts.

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance
by Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna
Published 23 May 2016

Over 70 percent of 2015 crowdfunding was in the form of short-term, person-to-person loans that lenders expect to be repaid, with interest.15 And science is notoriously bad at keeping to a quick repayment schedule when it’s camped out on the far northern frontier of human understanding. Research, especially basic research, aims to acquire new knowledge, often without any particular application in view. The payoffs are just too far off and too uncertain for those with a profit motive to get involved. That’s why, although the private sector funds almost 70 percent of total research and development work across the developed world, it funds only about 20 percent of the basic research activity within that total.16 Instead, state funding—to which a much bigger crowd of citizens contributes yearly through taxes—lines up better with the costs and time horizon of doing fundamental science.

Armed Humanitarians
by Nathan Hodge
Published 1 Sep 2011

Providing manpower, consulting services, and logistics for nation-building projects became a more promising growth business than building warships, helicopters, and tanks.18 Aid contracting first became a big business with the Clinton administration’s push to “reinvent government” in the 1990s. That same privatization dynamic was at work in the first decade of the twenty-first century, but on a much larger scale. The profit motive would often be at odds with the mission. Wars of choice, such as the Iraq War, may prove the exception in American foreign policy, but the experience of administering Iraq, Afghanistan, and other frontier states will mold a new generation of soldiers, diplomats, and bureaucrats. This new doctrine—still a work in progress—will shape future interventions.

The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives
by Sasha Abramsky
Published 15 Mar 2013

Some of this was simply about responding to the ongoing memories of the Great Depression, assuring a generation that had grown up in the hardest of hard times that the government had their back. Much of it, though, was about mediating the worst excesses of markets—excesses that left significant sectors of the population at risk even absent the conditions of a Great Depression—and about recognizing that complex modern societies had needs that transcended the profit motive. “Within the nation,” wrote Karl Polanyi in 1944, in his book The Great Transformation, “we are witnessing a development under which the economic system ceases to lay down the law to society and the primacy of society over the system is secured.” A Hungarian-born sociologist living in exile in London at the end of the war, Polanyi pondered the new world that, he hoped, would emerge out of the ashes of the old.

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters
by Diane Coyle
Published 21 Feb 2011

There are many companies that are as hierarchical as ever and place no reliance on a highly skilled and motivated workforce. Still, the transition to a business structure appropriate to the weightless economy is under way in the private sector, especially in competitive industries open to international trade. The profit motive has acted as a strong imperative for change. This is much less true of public sector organizations—a point to which I’ll return below. They tend to be organized still on a hierarchical model, with employees not allowed to take advantage of the flexibility and new capabilities created by new technologies.

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties
by Christopher Caldwell
Published 21 Jan 2020

If one shared the opinion that government was too big, then tax cuts were laudable at all times and in all contexts. But there was an even harder-line position. It was based on the logical-sounding assertion that tax rates, if they got sufficiently high, retarded productive activity. Capitalists, bereft of the profit motive, would withhold their irreplaceable creativity. In effect, the elites would go on strike, like the cabal of Promethean industrialists who alternately sermonize and taunt a starving world in the later pages of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Keynesian economists had believed that higher taxes could make the economy not only fairer but also more efficient.

A People’s History of Computing in the United States
by Joy Lisi Rankin

He concluded by calling for a National Computer Development Agency (NCDA) “to develop hardware-­software systems useful on a national scale but too complex or other­wise costly to attract commercial interest.”98 According to Kemeny, such an agency would support standardization, thereby facilitating connections among multifarious hardware and software systems on the network, and it would spread development costs among states and cities, so that no one locale bore burdensome expenses. Kemeny pitched the NCDA as an agency devoted to improving society; he acknowledged that “major computer companies” ­were understandably “profit motivated” rather than ser­v ice motivated, and that universities focused on research and teaching.99 Kemeny argued, “A prestigious agency with sufficient financing and a strong commitment to attack social prob­lems would have an im­mense impact. . . . ​ It is a rare opportunity for the federal government to take an imaginative, effective, and yet inexpensive step in the right direction.”100 During the discussion, Kemeny owned his reputation as an “incurable optimist” in imagining the creation of this federal agency; however, his fellow panelist and discussant Perlis corroborated, “If we do not follow Kemeny’s suggestion, our mishandling of the computer’s promise w ­ ill prob­ably not kill us, but it ­w ill give rise to questions in the f­ uture as to why intelligent and coordinated action was not carried out by a wealthy society devoted to the advancement and freedom of man.”101 Kemeny, Perlis, and many of the other participants in the Hopkins-­Brookings lecture series concurred that more immediate work needed to be done to develop, regulate, and direct the activities of a national computing network.

The Great Firewall of China
by James Griffiths;
Published 15 Jan 2018

Even as Chinese companies took over the core infrastructure contracts, there was still plenty of money to be made. “The internet was wildly successful beyond anybody’s imagination,” Robinson said. “You couldn’t believe how it took off and how profitable it was. There was definitely an alignment of political will and profit motive to expand internet access throughout the country as rapidly as possible.” For a time in Beijing, the internet was everywhere – on billboards and the sides of buses – as the country followed the government’s lead on going all in on the new technology. The Party wasn’t completely sold on the internet, however.

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings
by Philip A. Fisher
Published 13 Apr 2015

Far earlier than most other companies, Dow not only recognized the need to spend sizable sums to avoid pollution but concluded that, if major results were to be attained, something more was needed than just exhortations from top management. It was necessary to obtain the consistent cooperation of middle-level managers. It was decided that the surest way of doing this was to appeal to the profit motives of those most directly involved. They were encouraged to find profitable methods of converting the polluting materials to salable products. The rest is now business history. With the full power of top management, plant management, and highly skilled chemi-cal engineers behind these projects, Dow has achieved a series of firsts in eliminating pollution that has won them the praise of many environmental groups that are usually quite antibusiness in their viewpoints.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI
by Frank Pasquale
Published 14 May 2020

However, there is no magic free speech “default” on offer here. The platforms have made choices about whether to allow users to direct-message anyone (or only those who friend / follow them), how long hosted videos may be, and how rapidly stories spread or are suggested to other users. At present, those decisions are driven almost entirely by the profit motive: what communicative arrangement best maximizes advertising revenue and user engagement. These calculations can be made instantaneously and will often limit (and sometimes severely limit) the dissemination of a post. All Noble is suggesting is that more values—including those that take more time to discuss and apply—enter into the calculus.

For Profit: A History of Corporations
by William Magnuson
Published 8 Nov 2022

By pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.” The section is remarkable for what it does not say. Smith does not say that profit-seeking individuals always promote the greater good. He says only that they frequently do. More importantly, he is clear that the profit motive is simply a means to an end, not an end in itself. We allow firms to profit from their efforts because we believe that it will ultimately benefit us all. Firms have a public purpose, in Smith’s view, and that is to promote the public good. The connection between corporations and the public good has historically been much clearer than it is today.

Money Men: A Hot Startup, a Billion Dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Truth
by Dan McCrum
Published 15 Jun 2022

He watched in rising astonishment as Perring and his ‘friend’ berated him in the manner of a Punch and Judy show. ‘What do you mean he hasn’t paid you, he sounds like a real dirtbag.’ ‘Yeah, that’s exactly what I said, Ian.’ Earl’s jaw dropped. This guy is out of his mind, he thought.fn2 Yet Earl wasn’t thinking straight either. Wirecard got inside people’s heads. Otherwise rational and profit-motivated short sellers found they couldn’t let it go. The way it shucked off every criticism and fact was too infuriating. Earl tried two separate gambits. First he published anonymously again, trying to rescue the work of Zatarra. Posing as a corporate investigator, on Monday, 5 December he sent everyone with a known interest in Wirecard yet another anonymous email.

Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear
by Dr. Frank Luntz
Published 2 Jan 2007

In fact, even after the failed public effort to reform and modernize Social Security, a majority of individuals younger than fifty would still support “personalizing” Social Security, while less than 40 percent would “privatize” it. Why? “Personalizing” Social Security suggests ownership and control over your own personal retirement savings. “Privatizing” Social Security suggests a profit motive, as well as winners and losers. The word “private” and all its derivatives have a negative connotation in today’s political environment. Private schools, private clubs, and private health care all suggest a level of exclusivity that’s not akin to equal opportunity. While Americans don’t believe in the need for equal outcomes, they do believe everyone should start at the same place—and private anything implies an unfair advantage.

The Invisible Web: Uncovering Information Sources Search Engines Can't See
by Gary Price , Chris Sherman and Danny Sullivan
Published 2 Jan 2003

While many Vortals provide great information resources for searchers, their primary focus is usually on providing a virtual marketplace for the trade of goods and services. As such, Vortals can be excellent resources for researchers looking for current 44 The Invisible Web information on business concerns ranging from manufacturing to global trade. The searcher should beware, however, that Vortals often have an unabashed profit motive that may introduce a degree of bias into the information they provide. We’re not suggesting you avoid Vortals; rather, just keep a more vigilant eye out for quality or bias than you normally might with “pure” Web guides. How to Find Vortals There are thousands of Vortals on all conceivable subjects.

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
by Niall Ferguson
Published 13 Nov 2007

However, in each case the entities had a limited term that was specified in advance - usually the expected duration of a voyage - after which the capital was repaid to investors.10 This business model could not suffice to build the permanent bases and fortifications that were clearly necessary if the Portuguese and their Spanish alliest were to be supplanted. Actuated as much by strategic calculations as by the profit motive, the Dutch States-General, the parliament of the United Provinces, therefore proposed to merge the existing companies into a single entity. The result was the United East India Company - the Vereenigde Nederlandsche Geoctroyeerde Oostindische Compagnie (United Dutch Chartered East India Company, or VOC for short), formally chartered in 1602 to enjoy a monopoly on all Dutch trade east of the Cape of Good Hope and west of the Straits of Magellan.11 The structure of the VOC was novel in a number of respects.

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality
by Jaron Lanier
Published 21 Nov 2017

He didn’t have a plan for world domination; only a plan to support physicists at a lab. Despite the feeling of guilt, the rise of the Web also felt miraculous. I used to wax rhapsodic about it in my lectures. The first time in history that millions of people had cooperated to do something not because of coercion, profit motive, or any influence other than the sense that the project was worthy. Well, actually in retrospect, there was and remains an excess of vanity as motive, but even so; what a remarkable moment to support a touch of optimism about our species! If we could fill the Web out of thin air, maybe we could solve our big problems.

Dawn of Detroit
by Tiya Miles
Published 13 Sep 2017

When your wench will be forwarded together with Negro Boy in case she may sometime hereafter choose a Husband we apprehend he will be useful to you or advantageous at the Sloop or you can despose [sic] of him as you find best the price £50 each.”94 In this case, Phyn and Ellice were providing Porteous with the woman slave he had requested (again, an indication of the market for black women) and throwing a young black man in with the deal, assuming that the man would make a fitting sex partner for the woman, prove useful in boat work, and barring either outcome, be resalable in Detroit. Although the merchants who doubled as slave traders paired black men and women for practical reasons that served their own profit motives, by forcibly arranging enslaved blacks into couples, Detroit elites provided for the formation of black nuclear families. Sometimes enslaved men and women formed ties that endured and entered the state of formal marriage recognized by the Catholic Church. Most of these enslaved couples were composed of black husbands and wives; the few interracial marriages were between black men and Native women.

Fallen Astronauts: Heroes Who Died Reaching for the Moon
by Colin Burgess and Kate Doolan
Published 14 Apr 2003

And how fitting, for no one knew the value of books more than Ted. Just as Ted was a shining example of American manhood, this library is a shining example of American determination and dedication. It is the product of a group of people with enough self-reliance and confidence to undertake a tremendous task without government aid and without profit motive, only for the good of the community. One of these people I'm speaking of is Betty Ulrich, the librarian. Ted Freeman accepted his challenge as an astronaut. Betty Ulrich and her volunteer group have accepted the challenge to provide our community with the very best library possible. As we each face our challenge, let the Theodore C.

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet
by Jeffrey Sachs
Published 1 Jan 2008

Protected Habitats One standard and successful approach to high-priority conservation is the establishment of protected habitats by regulation. These include national parks and refuges, protected marine areas, conversion of open-access sites to community management, and even private ecotourism sites, which under certain circumstances can harness the profit motive and biodiversity conservation. There is a long experience with terrestrial parks and refuges. The recent move to marine-protected areas is new and exciting. The idea is to define an area of ocean within which the rights to fishing and commercial exploitation are severely curtailed. President Bush recently adopted such a protected area in Hawaii.

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else
by Chrystia Freeland
Published 11 Oct 2012

But instead of trying to get corporate executives to behave more like public-spirited civil servants, Murphy and his fellow business school professors thought the answer lay in the opposite direction: the stewards needed to be turned into the red-blooded founder-owners they had replaced. To do that, their financial incentives needed to be aligned as closely as possible with the success or failure of the companies they ran. That wouldn’t give them as powerful a profit motive as owning the whole company, to be sure, but it would be a close second-best. The “Worth Every Nickel” movement was in part a response to the success of the New Dealers’ efforts to create a social and political order in which managers were constrained. Thirty years after Berle and Means worried that managers would be tempted to profit at the expense of the companies they ran, here is how John Kenneth Galbraith, hardly an apologist for the C-suite, described the ethos of corporate America: “Management does not go out ruthlessly to reward itself—a sound management is expected to exercise restraint. . . .

It's Our Turn to Eat
by Michela Wrong
Published 9 Apr 2009

‘All the suits that day were either Kikuyu, Meru or Embu. Every non-Kikuyu saw it, but the people at the Nation, who published the photo, didn't even notice.’ But the two doomsayers were in the minority. Most analysts noted how often the country had teetered on the brink of disaster, only for commonsense and the profit motive to triumph every time. Land of the compromise and the fudge, Kenya had a knack for staring ruin in the face, backing off and muddling along. The nation, declared businessmen, journalists and diplomats, had now staged so many multiparty elections it qualified as a seasoned democratic player, with all that implied in terms of stability.

Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine
by John Abramson
Published 20 Sep 2004

One of the most disturbing findings from the Dartmouth study of variations in Medicare spending was that people in the high-spending regions were almost three times as likely to receive “invasive life support,” meaning intensive care, emergency intubation, use of a ventilator, and feeding tubes, without any demonstrable benefit. It behooves all of us to make our wishes known to our loved ones and especially to a person designated to speak on our behalf (a health care proxy) and to empower them to stand up, if necessary, to unwanted treatment at the end of our lives. THE PROFIT MOTIVE TAKES OVER The cost of the oversupply of medical services to our nation’s pocketbook is staggering. Fisher and his colleagues estimate that 30 to 33 percent of Medicare expenditures could be saved nationally without compromising the quality of medical care. The goal of achieving these savings, they conclude, is “not unreasonable; after all, large metropolitan areas such as Minneapolis and Portland [Oregon] are getting along just fine with relatively modest Medicare expenditures.”

The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground Was Built and How It Changed the City Forever
by Christian Wolmar
Published 30 Sep 2009

William, ref1 Depression, the, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Detroit tramways, ref1 District Line, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 accidents, ref1 church interval, ref1 Circle Line and merger, ref1, ref2 electrification, ref1, ref2, ref3 equipment purchases, ref1 and Exhibition Road subway, ref1 fares, ref1 finances, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 improvements, ref1 and leisure travel, ref1, ref2, ref3 locomotives, ref1 negative publicity, ref1 open-air sections, ref1 passenger numbers, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and Piccadilly Line extension, ref1, ref2 suburban expansion, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 terrorist attacks, ref1 travelling conditions, ref1, ref2 under UERL control, ref1, ref2 and wartime, ref1, ref2 Yerkes takeover, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 District Railway (Metropolitan District Railway), see District Line Docklands Light Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Docklands regeneration, ref1 doors, sliding, ref1, ref2 Douglas, Hugh, ref1, ref2, ref3 Dover, ref1 Down Street, ref1 Dreiser, Theodore, ref1 drivers, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 duck egg trade, ref1 Ealing, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Ealing Broadway, ref1 Earls Court, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 East Finchley, ref1 East London Line, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 East London Railway, see East London Line Eastbury Estate, ref1 Eastcote, ref1 Eden, Sir Anthony, ref1 Edgware, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Edgware Road, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 terrorist attacks, ref1, ref2 Edward VII, King, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Edward VIII, King, ref1 Eiffel Tower, ref1, ref2 electric multiple units, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Electric Traction Company, ref1 electricity, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 electrification, ref1 Elephant & Castle, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Elgin Marbles, ref1 Eliot, Watney and Co. brewery, ref1 Ellis, Lloyd, ref1 Embankment, ref1 Empire Exhibition, ref1, ref2 Enfield, ref1, ref2, ref3 Enfield West, ref1 English Illustrated Magazine, ref1 Epping, ref1, ref2, ref3 escalators, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and uplighters, ref1 Euston, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 main line services, ref1 Euston Square, ref1, ref2, ref3 Evening News, ref1, ref2 Evening Standard, ref1 Exhibition Road subway, ref1 exhibitions, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Exploration Company, ref1 ‘extension railway’, ref1 Faith, Nicholas, ref1 fans, ref1, ref2 fares coordination of, ref1 flat-fares policy, ref1, ref2 under LT control, ref1 see also workmen’s trains Fares Fair policy, ref1, ref2 Farringdon, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20 Farringdon & High Holborn, ref1, ref2 Farringdon Street, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Fenchurch Street, ref1 Fennell, Desmond, ref1 Fenton, Myles, ref1, ref2 Field, Marshall, ref1 Financial News, ref1, ref2 Finchley Road, ref1, ref2 Finchley Road & Golders Green syndicate, ref1 Finsbury Park, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and Piccadilly Line extension, ref1 and wartime, ref1 Fleet Line, ref1 Fleet sewer collapse, ref1 flood barriers, ref1, ref2 Forbes, James Staats, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 Ford, Peter, ref1 Formby, George, ref1 Fowler, John, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Fowler’s Ghost (locomotive), ref1 Franco, General Francisco, ref1 Franco-British Exhibition, ref1 Franz Joseph, Emperor, ref1 freight services, ref1, ref2 French Revolution, ref1 Fulham, ref1 garden suburbs, ref1 gatemen, ref1, ref2 General Buses, ref1 General Strike, ref1 George V, King, ref1 Gibb, Sir George, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Gibbs & Flew builders, ref1 Gilbert & Sullivan, ref1 Gladstone, William, ref1, ref2 Glasgow, ref1 Gloucester Road, ref1 Golders Green, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Goldhawk Road, ref1 golf courses, ref1, ref2 Gollop, Kate, ref1 Gomm, Charles, ref1 Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, ref1 Gooch, Daniel, ref1, ref2 Gosling, Harry, ref1 Gower Street, ref1, ref2, ref3 Grand Central Railway, ref1 Grand Trunk Railway, ref1 Grand Union Canal, ref1 Great Eastern & Midland Railway, ref1 Great Eastern Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Great Northern & City Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 see also Northern Line Great Northern & Strand Railway, ref1 Great Northern, Piccadilly & Brompton Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3 Great Northern Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 Great Portland Street, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Great Western Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 Greater London Council, ref1, ref2, ref3 Greathead, James, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Green, Leslie, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Green Belt, ref1 Green Lane, ref1 Green Line coaches, ref1 Green Park, ref1 Greenwich, ref1 guards, ref1, ref2, ref3 Gunnersbury, ref1 Hackney, ref1, ref2 hackney cabs, ref1, ref2 Hailsham, Lord, ref1 Hammersmith, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Hammersmith & City Line, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Hampstead, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Hampstead & Highgate Express, ref1 Hampstead Garden Suburb, ref1, ref2, ref3 Hampstead Heath, ref1 Hardman, Sir John, ref1, ref2 Harmsworth, ref1 Harringay, ref1 Harrington, Lord, ref1 Harris, ‘Bumper’, ref1 Harrods, ref1, ref2 Harrow, ref1, ref2, ref3 Harrow Garden Village, ref1, ref2 Harrow on the Hill, ref1 Harrow Weald, ref1 Hatfield, ref1, ref2 Haussmann, Baron, ref1 Haward, Sir Harry, ref1 Hawkshaw, Sir John, ref1 Hay, Harley Hugh Dalrymple, ref1 Heaps, S.A., ref1 Heathrow Airport, ref1 Heathrow Express, ref1 Heathrow Extension, ref1, ref2 Hendon, ref1, ref2 Henson, George, ref1 Herne Hill, ref1 Hertford, ref1 High Barnet, ref1, ref2 Highbury & Islington, ref1, ref2 Highgate, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Hillingdon, ref1, ref2 Hitchin, ref1 Hitler, Adolf, ref1, ref2 Hogarth, Janet, ref1 Holborn, ref1, ref2, ref3 Holden, Charles, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 holidays, ref1 Holland Park, ref1, ref2 Holloway Road, ref1 horses, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Hounslow, ref1 Hounslow & Metropolitan Railway, ref1 Hyde Park, ref1 Hyde Park Corner, ref1, ref2 Ickenham, ref1 Ilford, ref1 Illustrated London News, ref1, ref2 immigration, ref1 infrastructure companies (infracos), ref1 Ireland, ref1, ref2, ref3 Isleworth, ref1 Jane, Fred, ref1 Jenkins, Simon, ref1, ref2 Johnson, Boris, ref1 Johnston, Edward, ref1 Jubilee Line, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 resignalling project, ref1, ref2 Jubilee Line Extension, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Kennington, ref1, ref2, ref3 Kennington Road, ref1 Kensington, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Kensington High Street, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Kentish Town, ref1 Kew, ref1 Kilburn, ref1, ref2 Kilburn Park, ref1 Kiley, Bob, ref1 King William Street, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 King’s College, Cambridge, ref1 King’s Cross, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 fire, ref1 and Metropolitan Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 terrorist attacks, ref1, ref2 and wartime, ref1 Kingsbury, ref1, ref2, ref3 Kingston, ref1 Knightsbridge, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 labour shortages, ref1 Ladbroke Grove, ref1 ladies’ coaches, ref1 Lambeth North, ref1 Latimer Road, ref1 Lea Park, ref1 Leicester Square, ref1, ref2 Leinster Gardens, ref1 leisure travel, ref1, ref2 Letchworth Garden City, ref1, ref2 Leverhulme, Lord, ref1 Lewisham, ref1 Leytonstone, ref1 Limehouse, ref1 Liverpool, ref1 Liverpool & Manchester Railway, ref1, ref2 Liverpool Street, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 and Central Line extension, ref1 and Crossrail, ref1, ref2, ref3 and wartime, ref1 Livingstone, Ken, ref1, ref2, ref3 Lloyd George, David, ref1, ref2, ref3 locomotives Beyer, Peacock, ref1, ref2 electric multiple units, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Fowler’s ghost, ref1 replacement of, ref1 London congestion, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 gas companies, ref1 geology, ref1, ref2 Great Fire, ref1 Green Belt, ref1 integrated transport, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 population growth, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 slums, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 suburban expansion, ref1, ref2, ref3 traffic count, ref1 London & Blackwall Railway, ref1 London & Croydon Railway, ref1 London & Globe Finance Corporation, ref1 London & Greenwich Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3 London & North Eastern Railway, ref1, ref2 London & North Western Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3 London & South Eastern Railway, ref1 London & South Western Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 London Bridge, ref1, ref2, ref3 London Bridge (station), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 London, Chatham & Dover Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 London City Airport, ref1 London clay, ref1 London County Council (LCC), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 council housing, ref1 tramways, ref1 London General Omnibus Company, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 London, Midland & Scottish Railway, ref1 London Overground, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 London Passenger Transport Board, see London Transport London Regional Transport, ref1 London Stock Exchange, ref1 London Transport board members, ref1 finances, ref1, ref2, ref3 formation, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 GLC control, ref1 headquarters, ref1 loss of independence, ref1, ref2 New Works Programme, ref1, ref2 publicity and design, ref1 and racial integration, ref1 reputation and ethos, ref1, ref2 staff and conditions, ref1 and suburban railways, ref1, ref2 London Transport museum, ref1, ref2 London Underground budget process, ref1, ref2 Johnston typeface, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 map, ref1, ref2, ref3 posters, ref1, ref2, ref3 public private partnership (PPP), ref1 publicity and design, ref1, ref2 renewed investment, ref1 roundel logo, ref1, ref2, ref3 tickets, ref1, ref2 Underground signs, ref1 underinvestment and overcrowding, ref1 wartime operation, ref1 London United Tramways, ref1 Lord’s Cricket Ground, ref1, ref2, ref3 Lots Road, ref1 Louderback, DeLancey, ref1 Lucas, Charles, ref1 Ludgate Hill, ref1, ref2 Lyttleton, Alfred, ref1, ref2 MacDonald, Ramsay, ref1 McEwan, Ian, ref1 McIntosh, Andrew, ref1 Maida Vale, ref1 Maidenhead, ref1 Maidstone, ref1 Manchester, ref1, ref2 Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway, ref1, ref2 Manor House, ref1 Mansion House, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12 Marble Arch, ref1, ref2, ref3 Margate, ref1, ref2 Markes, Francis, ref1 Marlborough Road, ref1 Marylebone, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Marylebone, Great Central Hotel, ref1 Mayhew, Henry, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Mersey Railway, ref1 messengers, ref1 Metroland, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Metroland booklets, ref1, ref2, ref3 Metronet, ref1 Metropolitan Board of Works, ref1, ref2, ref3 Metropolitan District Railway, see District Line Metropolitan Inner Circle Completion Company, ref1 Metropolitan Line, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 advertisements, ref1, ref2 church interval, ref1, ref2 Circle Line and merger, ref1 City widened lines, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 competition with Central Line, ref1, ref2, ref3 construction, ref1 electrification, ref1 expansion, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 fares, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 finances, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 freight services, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 gas lighting, ref1 Great Northern & City takeover, ref1, ref2 improvements, ref1, ref2 interchanges, ref1, ref2, ref3 and leisure travel, ref1, ref2 locomotives, ref1, ref2 logo, ref1 and London Transport, ref1 and Metroland, ref1, ref2, ref3 open-air sections, ref1 opening, ref1, ref2, ref3 outside UERL control, ref1, ref2 passenger numbers, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Pullman service, ref1, ref2 refreshment bars, ref1 safety and accidents, ref1, ref2, ref3 signalling, ref1 and smoking, ref1 Stanmore branch, ref1 stations, ref1, ref2 terrorist attacks, ref1 travelling conditions, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 trial runs, ref1 and underground railway concept, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Watford branch, ref1 working hours, ref1 workmen’s trains, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 see also Hammersmith & City Line ‘Metropolitan Mixture’, ref1 Metropolitan Railway, see Metropolitan Line Metropolitan Railway Country Estates, ref1, ref2 mice, ref1 Midland Railway, ref1 Mill, John Stuart, ref1 Mill Hill East, ref1, ref2 Mill Hill Park, ref1 Millennium Dome, ref1, ref2 Mills, Darius Ogden, ref1 Mitcham, ref1 Montague Smith, H.H., ref1, ref2 Moor Park, ref1 Moore-Brabazon, John, ref1 Moorfields chapel, ref1 Moorgate, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 disaster, ref1 Moorgate Street, ref1, ref2 Morden, ref1 Morgan, John Pierpont, ref1 Morning Advertiser, ref1 Morris, William, ref1 Morrison, Herbert, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Moscow Metro, ref1, ref2 mosquitoes, ref1 motor cars, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Motor Traction Company, ref1 Moxon, John, ref1 Munich Agreement, ref1 Muswell Hill, ref1, ref2 Napoleon III, Emperor, ref1 National Gallery, ref1 National Portrait Gallery, ref1 navvies, ref1, ref2, ref3 Neasden, ref1, ref2, ref3 New Cross, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 New Cross Gate, ref1 New Jersey, ref1 New York, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 New York Rapid Transit Commission, ref1 Newington Causeway, ref1 Nock, O.S., ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Nokes, G.A., ref1, ref2, ref3 North Eastern Railway, ref1, ref2 North Kensington, ref1 North London, Hammersmith & City Railway, ref1 North London Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Northampton, ref1 Northern Line, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 and Automatic Train Operation, ref1 Bank branch, ref1, ref2 Charing Cross branch, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 extensions, ref1, ref2 flood barriers, ref1 Moorgate disaster, ref1 upgrade scheme, ref1 and wartime, ref1, ref2 see also Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway; City & South London Railway; Great Northern & City Railway Northfields, ref1 Northwood, ref1, ref2, ref3 Northwood Hills, ref1 Notting Hill, ref1 Notting Hill Gate, ref1 Oakwood, ref1 Old Colony Trust, ref1 Old Street, ref1 Olympia, ref1, ref2 Olympia & York, ref1 Olympic Games, ref1, ref2 omnibuses, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 see also buses (motor) Ongar, ref1 Oppenheim, Henry, ref1 Osglim lighting, ref1 Osterley, ref1 Otis lifts, ref1 outer circle scheme, ref1, ref2 Oxford Circus, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Oxford Music Hall, ref1 Oxford Street, ref1, ref2 Oyster Cards, ref1 Paddington, ref1, ref2, ref3 and Bakerloo extension, ref1 and Crossrail, ref1, ref2, ref3 and electrification, ref1 and Metropolitan Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14 slum housing, ref1 terrorist attacks, ref1 see also Bishop’s Road Palmers Green, ref1 Palmerston, Lord, ref1, ref2 Pardoe, J.W., ref1 Paris, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 RER, ref1, ref2, ref3 Paris Métro, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 fire, ref1, ref2 Parson, John, ref1 passimeters, ref1 Passing Brompton Road, ref1 Paxton, Sir Joseph, ref1 Pearson, Charles, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 his death, ref1, ref2 idealism, ref1, ref2 and Metropolitan Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 and underground railway concept, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Pearson, Mary, ref1, ref2 Pearson, Thomas, ref1 Pearson, Sir Weetman, ref1 Perks, Robert, ref1, ref2, ref3 Peterborough, ref1 Pevsner, Nikolaus, ref1 Philadelphia, ref1 Piccadilly Circus, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 station architecture, ref1 Piccadilly Line Aldwych branch, ref1 alternate trains, ref1 equipment purchases, ref1 extensions, ref1, ref2, ref3 fares, ref1 finances, ref1 formation, ref1 improvements, ref1 interchanges, ref1, ref2 and King’s Cross fire, ref1 and LT control, ref1 passenger numbers, ref1 precursor schemes, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 stations, ref1, ref2, ref3 terrorist attacks, ref1 ticketing, ref1, ref2 and wartime, ref1 Pick, Frank, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 flair for publicity and design, ref1 and London Transport, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 partnership with Ashfield, ref1 and wartime, ref1 Pinks, William, ref1 Pinner, ref1, ref2, ref3 Plessey aircraft factory, ref1 Plummer, Desmond, ref1 Porter, Roy, ref1, ref2 porters, ref1 Portland Road, ref1, ref2, ref3 post office railway, ref1 Powell, Albert, ref1 Powell, Thomas, ref1 power generation, ref1 Praed Street, ref1, ref2, ref3 Prescott, John, ref1, ref2 Price Waterhouse Cooper, ref1 Prince of Wales, see Edward VII, King Princess Alice disaster, ref1 profit-sharing notes, ref1, ref2 Public Record Office, ref1 publicans, ref1 Punch, ref1, ref2 Putney, ref1, ref2 Putney Bridge, ref1 Queen’s Park, ref1 Queensbury, ref1 Railway and Travel Monthly, ref1 Railway Engineer, ref1 Railway Executive, ref1 Railway Gazette, ref1, ref2 Railway Magazine, ref1, ref2, ref3 Railway News, ref1 Railway Times, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 railways business model, ref1, ref2 and capitalism, ref1 commissions and inquiries, ref1 development of, ref1, ref2 and First World War, ref1 investment, ref1 land holdings, ref1 legislation, ref1, ref2 mania of 1840s, ref1 privatization, ref1, ref2 and profit motive, ref1 and smoking, ref1 suburban, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 and suburban expansion, ref1 underinvestment, ref1 rats, ref1 Rayners Lane, ref1, ref2 Reeves, Thomas, ref1 refreshment trains, ref1 Regent’s Park, ref1, ref2 Reid, E.S., ref1 Richmond, ref1, ref2 Rickmansworth, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 road improvements, ref1 Roehampton, ref1 Ruislip, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Ruislip Manor, ref1 Ruislip Manor Ltd, ref1 Russell Square, ref1 St James’s Park, ref1, ref2 St John’s Wood, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 St Pancras, ref1, ref2 St Paul’s Cathedral, ref1, ref2 Sandy Lodge, ref1 Scotland, ref1 Scotland Yard, ref1, ref2 Selbie, Robert, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Selfridges, ref1 Sellon, Stephen, ref1 Sevenoaks, ref1 ‘sewer-rats’, ref1 Shakespeare, William, ref1 Shaw, Norman, ref1 Shenfield, ref1 Shepherd’s Bush, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Sheridan, H.

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It
by Owen Jones
Published 3 Sep 2014

This great carve-up of the NHS is a threat to the health and even the lives of patients. According to Professor Terence Stephenson of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, ‘unnecessary competition [would] destabilise complex, interconnected local health economies, in particular hospitals, potentially having adverse effects on patient services’. Putting the profit motive at the heart of health care had profound consequences. ‘The market literally wants to make money, profit, that’s their philosophy, simple as that,’ says Dr Kailash Chand. ‘If it doesn’t generate profit, it doesn’t want to know. There will be cherry picking of elective surgery, for example. It will end with a two-tier health-care system, where elective surgery and so on will be done in the private sector.’

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated)
by Charles Wheelan
Published 18 Apr 2010

Any rational discussion of trade must begin with the idea that people in Chad or Togo or South Korea are no different from you or me; they do things that they hope will make their lives better. Trade is one of those things. Paul Krugman has noted, “You could say—and I would—that globalization, driven not by human goodness but by the profit motive, has done far more good for far more people than all the foreign aid and soft loans ever provided by well-intentioned governments and international agencies.” Then he adds wistfully, “But in saying this, I know from experience that I have guaranteed myself a barrage of hate mail.”1 Such is the nature of “globalization,” the term that has come to represent the increase in the international flow of goods and services.

Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff
by Fred Pearce
Published 30 Sep 2009

They believe they are the quickest, smartest kids on the block, and that they can gain a market advantage over their slower rivals once the limits are in place. Not all corporations are like that, of course – and even the best will only act under strong public pressure. Yet I believe there is the potential for a ‘race to the top’ based in part on the profit motive. But if it is to happen, it will be because we, as customers and voters, demand it. Some say that there is little point in the rich world getting its act together if developing countries like China, India and Brazil don’t act too. They point out that China builds two new power stations every week and in 2007 became the world’s biggest CO2 emitter.

What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way
by Nick Cohen
Published 15 Jul 2015

He tried the list of periodicals and couldn’t find one academic journal anywhere in the world devoted to proletarian literature and concluded: In Tony Blair’s Britain as in many other Western nations, professionals in the creative industries have successfully reconciled bourgeois and Bohemian values. Affluent and ambitious, profit-motivated and style-conscious, they are sincerely committed to women’s equality and genuinely interested in the literature, music, art and cuisines of non-Western peoples. But the boutique economy they have constructed involves a process of class formation where the accoutrements of the avant-garde are used to distance and distinguish cultural workers from more traditional manual workers.

This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers
by Andy Greenberg
Published 12 Sep 2012

May read Rand’s Atlas Shrugged as just another science fiction novel. But this one was about politics, not technology or science. The thousand-page manifesto spoke to him about the hypocrisy of altruism and the exclusive virtue of selfishness. It explained in stark terms why anyone who seeks to oppose the profit motive and take from the rich to give to the poor is a “moocher” or a “looter” and a temporary hurdle to human progress. And most resonant with the young physics wunderkind, Rand imagined a fantasy world, what the book calls “Galt’s Gulch,” a hidden place in the mountains where the extraordinary and hypercompetent can escape the neediness and regulatory clutches of the masses—a Shangri-La devoted to science, progress, and human greatness.

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information
by Frank Pasquale
Published 17 Nov 2014

Health privacy experts have already spearheaded “data segmentation for privacy” in medical records, allowing for, say, a person to segregate entries from a psychiatrist from those coming from a podiatrist. It is time for the controllers of Big Data generally to become far more careful about how they log data, to be sure its collection, analysis, and use can be influenced by public values, and not just the profit motive. Better audit practices would also permit more substantive regulation of the private sector. As storage costs decline and cloud computing becomes ubiquitous, a decision maker can use software to default to recording the online “leads” pursued as she investigates an applicant. Anyone who has seen a search engine’s “web history” knows how revealing and meticulous that documentation can be.32 The exact scope of the requirements will need to be worked out by administrative agencies, which will not need to reinvent the wheel.

From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia
by Pankaj Mishra
Published 3 Sep 2012

The peasant in his village and the market trader in his town were being forced to abandon a life defined by religion, family and tradition amid rumours of powerful white men with a strange god-on-a-cross who were reshaping the world – men who married moral aggressiveness with compact and coherent nation-states, the profit motive and superior weaponry, and made Asian societies seem lumberingly inept in every way, unable to match the power of Europe or unleash their own potential. As European countries went from one easy conquest to another, leaving manifold social, economic and cultural disruptions in their wake, many Asian intellectuals would grow profoundly anxious about the fate of their societies.

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits
by Richard Davies
Published 4 Sep 2019

In Chile’s education system, built on free-market ideals, the ratio of the cost of the average university course to average incomes is 41 per cent, the highest in the OECD. This means students who complete their degrees must make massive debt repayments – 18 per cent of income for 15 years for the typical graduate. The profit motive ensures prices are high and costs, including pastoral care, are cut: Chile has a 50 per cent university dropout rate. In this troubling statistic the country is a world leader, with Santiago full of people like Emmanuel with half-baked degrees but fully loaded debts. While the prices are high, the quality is not.

The Abandonment of the West
by Michael Kimmage
Published 21 Apr 2020

Two classics of the Wisconsin school were William Appleman Williams’s monograph The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959) and Gabriel Kolko’s The Politics of War (1968). The Wisconsin school sought a demystification of American foreign policy. The drive for liberty was analyzed as ideological subterfuge, cover for the profit motive of the American business and governing elite: the truth of American foreign policy was economic and exploitative, while the rhetorical smokescreen was Jeffersonian and democratic. A linguistics professor from MIT rather than Wisconsin, Noam Chomsky raised the political temperature in a burst of writing and public speaking about Vietnam and American foreign policy.

Policing the Open Road
by Sarah A. Seo

That is because, as he quotes a seventeenth-century Parliamentarian, enforcement “ to the utmost ” would be “ unsufferable. ” In short, “subjective and discretionary decisions not to enforce the law … were (and are) necessary to sand off the hard edges of modern state power so it can win acceptance by the population.” Nicholas Parrillo, Against the Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government, 1780–1940 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 4, 39–40, 278, 282. 47. Neal Dow Becker, Road Rules and the Law of Automobiles (New York: Erle W. Whitfield, 1910), secs. 44–49; “Proposals Outlined”; “Indianapolis Chief,” 26; Burton W. Marsh, Director, Safety and Traffic Engineering Department, American Automobile Association, to Vollmer, May 8, 1935, box 1, AVP.

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone
by Sarah Jaffe
Published 26 Jan 2021

In other words, charity is necessarily asymmetrical and reproduces inequalities. 5 The problems of today’s nonprofit sector are outgrowths of this necessary inequality: nonprofits exist to try to mitigate the worst effects of an unequal distribution of wealth and power, yet they are funded with the leftovers of the very exploitation the nonprofits may be trying to combat. Nonprofit work then is also caring work, also service work, privatized, on the one hand, unlike public school teaching, but supposedly not in service of the profit motive. Nonprofits are not, despite their supposed lack of interest in profit, exceptions to the capitalist system but embedded in it, necessary to its continued existence. But even before the rise of capitalism, charitable giving or philanthropy was an expression of inequality; the rich as far back as ancient Greece gave back by sponsoring public buildings, festivals, and even schools.

Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization
by Iain Gately
Published 27 Oct 2001

It was the subject of plays and essays in which the prospects of not just a new world but a new society too had been examined. As a result of all these factors, the Virginia Company was incorporated in 1606 with the aim of establishing commercially viable colonies in America, and with the side effect of inculcating the profit motive into its future citizens. In order to avoid the king’s censure, the Virginia Company’s aims in the New World were to produce wine and olive oil, to weave silk, and to mine whatever metals it came across, precious ones especially. Tobacco was not on this wish list, although it was comprised of articles England presently had to import.

The Laundromat : Inside the Panama Papers, Illicit Money Networks, and the Global Elite
by Jake Bernstein
Published 14 Oct 2019

The victory, Mossfon’s newsletter reported, ensured that “we have before us a very positive outlook.”2 Mossfon was entering the most profitable period of its existence. At the same time, new global standards increasingly required it to identify and jettison its worst customers. In the contest between growth and compliance, the profit motive proved the stronger. Mossfon continued to collect crooked clients and sidestep any scandals they brought. In September 2003, the partners sent Mossfon’s chief operating officer, Christoph Zollinger, to Samoa to inquire about incorporating companies there. Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca had met Zollinger in Panama City six years earlier, at the local helicopter club.

Shadow Libraries: Access to Knowledge in Global Higher Education
by Joe Karaganis
Published 3 May 2018

While waiting for trial, however, the State Prosecutor reversed course and dropped the charges, observing: “Although the behavior displayed by the accused fits without difficulty into the penal framework … the insignificant harm that may have been caused to the property of the rights holder does not warrant the severe sanctions of this judicial process.”20 Where a profit motive could be more easily established, publisher campaigns had somewhat more success. In 1999, actions against a group of twelve copy shop owners near UBA campuses resulted in a mix of probation, community service, and small fines. The faculty and students identified in the investigations were not pursued (Clarín 1999).

Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food
by Chris van Tulleken
Published 26 Jun 2023

Divestment doesn’t usually meaningfully affect share price,6 because there is always someone willing to buy a share that will pay a dividend. Cutting off the supply of income is the only real way to change corporate behaviour. I asked the cheerful management consultant about this. ‘Over 250 years, the achievement in terms of providing sufficient food is incredible and that has been driven by the profit motive,’ he said. ‘So, it can create fantastic things.’ But he thinks all those external costs are a problem: ‘The incentives in the system are straightforwardly to produce and sell more. It’s government that should step up to set rules that deliver proper regulation of markets that don’t right themselves.

Madoff: The Final Word
by Richard Behar
Published 9 Jul 2024

Surely not to permit crimes to happen? “No, but the problem with all these banks to different degrees is that the compliance functions are cost centers, not profit centers, in what is a profit-seeking enterprise.” Translated into plain English, this means that the compliance needs are subjugated to the profit motive as long as someone can justify it to themselves that they are doing the bare legal minimum. JPMorgan had a compliance function for each part of the bank, each of which reported up the chain of command. But information never flowed across and around. “So,” the investigator explains, “you had one part of the bank over in Europe that had some information, and in the US, where they were hosting bank accounts, they had other information.

A People's History of the United States
by Howard Zinn
Published 2 Jan 1977

The capitalists of the East were conscious of the need for this “security to your own property.” As technology developed, more capital was needed, more risks had to be taken, and a big investment needed stability. In an economic system not rationally planned for human need, but developing fitfully, chaotically out of the profit motive, there seemed to be no way to avoid recurrent booms and slumps. There was a slump in 1837, another in 1853. One way to achieve stability was to decrease competition, organize the businesses, move toward monopoly. In the mid-1850s, price agreements and mergers became frequent: the New York Central Railroad was a merger of many railroads.

…

His speech could well be taken to represent the thinking of the American corporate elite: Vietnam, Watergate, student unrest, shifting moral codes, the worst recession in a generation, and a number of other jarring cultural shocks have all combined to create a new climate of questions and doubt. . . . It all adds up to a general malaise, a society-wide crisis of institutional confidence. . . . Too often, Simon said, Americans “have been taught to distrust the very word profit and the profit motive that makes our prosperity possible, to somehow feel this system, that has done more to alleviate human suffering and privation than any other, is somehow cynical, selfish, and amoral.” We must, Simon said, “get across the human side of capitalism.” As the United States prepared in 1976 to celebrate the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence, a group of intellectuals and political leaders from Japan, the United States, and Western Europe, organized into “The Trilateral Commission,” issued a report.

Theory of Games and Economic Behavior: 60th Anniversary Commemorative Edition (Princeton Classic Editions)
by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern
Published 19 Mar 2007

Thus the discussions which follow will be dominated by illustrations from Chess, “Matching Pennies,” Poker, Bridge, etc., and not from the structure of cartels, markets, oligopolies, etc. At this point it is also opportune to recall that we consider all transactions at the end of a game as purely monetary ones—i.e. that we ascribe to all players an exclusively monetary profit motive. The meaning of this in terms of the utility concept was analyzed in 2.1.1. in Chapter I. For the present—particularly for the “zero-sum two-person games” to be discussed first (cf. the discussion of 5.2.1.)—it is an absolutely necessary simplification. Indeed, we shall maintain it through most of the theory, although variants will be examined later on.

…

It will also be feasible to scrutinise the assumptions of perfect competition and examine whether the results of the old approach can be reaffirmed. Now and then interesting conclusions emerge; for instance, the exact definition of “discrimination” and the indeterminacy of the result with discrimination present.2 Professors Neumann and Morgenstern of course accept some of the axioms of economic theory, notably that of the profit motive. Their theory deals with economic statics only, and we must accept their assurance of its promises when applied to dynamic problems. The problem of economics, however, is considered from the point of view of the mathematician only, that is as a formal problem. Is it not the case that the backwardness of the science of economics is due not only to the lack of success of mathematical economics but also to the essential difference between the social and natural sciences?

Women Leaders at Work: Untold Tales of Women Achieving Their Ambitions
by Elizabeth Ghaffari
Published 5 Dec 2011

Little did I know that going there would result in a complete change in my whole focus and perception of my career and beliefs. If I had chosen, for myself, I would have pursued a political science major or something similar because that was my orientation. But Carnegie Mellon had no major like that—everything was very quantitative. In Pittsburgh, at Carnegie Mellon University, I learned all about profit motives and business and thinking differently from what I’d been brought up to believe. That’s were I learned that there could be an entrepreneurial option in my career. Ghaffari: How did you come to Washington, DC? Millman: I had done an internship on Capitol Hill during my junior year. Right then, I realized, “This is where I want to be.”

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together
by Bruce Schneier
Published 14 Feb 2012

They have some of the same characteristics as individuals—they try to maximize their trade-offs, they have a self-preservation instinct, etc.—but they are not individuals. In some very important ways, they differ from individuals. These differences may affect corporations' defection characteristics: They have a single strong self-interest: the profit motive. The case can be made that it's the only relevant interest a corporation has. A corporation is legally required to follow its charter, which for a non-profit corporation means maximizing shareholder value. Individuals have many more competing motivations. They try to hire people who will maximize their selfish interest.

The Invisible Hands: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Bubbles, Crashes, and Real Money
by Steven Drobny
Published 18 Mar 2010

It potentially all goes wrong for China in the transition zone. How quickly China handles the transition to free float with regards to monetary and fiscal policy adjustments will be key. The other key risk for the Chinese is that economic output at the corporate level is not driven exclusively by the profit motive. Employment stability, inflation control, and a slow transition to a domestic-led economy are the apparent policy goals. Therefore, at some point, excess production will be significant. We already see evidence of this in markets such as steel. If U.S. demand remains stagnant for several years, this could drive a destabilizing deflationary impulse, considering how fast lending growth and debt has been over the past year.

Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase
by Duff McDonald
Published 5 Oct 2009

Others were busy selling company materials on eBay. Bear T-shirts sold for $151; stock certificates sold for $42 apiece.) In one sense, at least, the comparison was apt. During the panic of 1907, when Morgan had saved a floundering bank, he had picked up its stake in Tennessee Coal & Iron in return—patriotism and the profit motive rolled into one. “With his peculiar bifocal vision, he saw the panic as a time for both statesmanship and personal gain,” writes Ron Chernow in The House of Morgan. Likewise for Jamie Dimon a century later. Behind the scenes, however, things weren’t so peachy. The third page of the presentation Cavanagh had made to investors on Sunday night included the following line: “[JPMorgan] will guarantee the trading obligations of [Bear Stearns] and its subsidiaries effective immediately.”

In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India
by Edward Luce
Published 23 Aug 2006

In essence, these companies are modern versions of the East India Company, the British outfit that used its royal charter to colonize India in the eighteenth century. They see a “neoliberal” dystopia that profits from the entrapment and immiseration of the developing world’s poor—and in which moving to the city in today’s India happens not voluntarily but because you have been brutally uprooted by new technology and the profit motive. This new globalized form of capitalism forces people to migrate to the city by replacing their skills and traditions with the work of large machines. Once in the city, they will be slotted in as microscopic cogs in the giant apparatus of globalization. In short, it is a view that harbors many more fears than hopes about economic liberalization and urbanization

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone
by Brian Merchant
Published 19 Jun 2017

But if there’s anything I’ve learned in my efforts to pull the iPhone apart, literally and figuratively, it’s that there are rarely concrete beginnings to any particular products or technologies—they evolve from varying previous ideas and concepts and inventions and are prodded and iterated into newness by restless minds and profit motives. Even when the company’s executives were under oath in a federal trial, they couldn’t name just one starting place. “There were many things that led to the development of the iPhone at Apple,” Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said in 2012. “First, Apple had been known for years for being the creator of the Mac, the computer, and it was great, but it had small market share,” he said.

A History of Future Cities
by Daniel Brook
Published 18 Feb 2013

In 2009, on the sixtieth anniversary of the Communist revolution, posters of Shanghai’s imposing skyline were featured in the official celebration in Beijing as a vindication of China’s authoritarian system. And on one level, of course, Shanghai’s breakneck redevelopment constitutes the perfect ad for the Party’s authoritarian rule: the ability to move a million families, order companies to relocate, and devote resources on the basis of a long-term investment strategy rather than the short-term profit motive has made the city’s global reemergence possible. But on another level, opening up a great global city in a bid for stability betrays a stunning hubris. Historically, global Shanghai brought many things to China—technology, culture, ideas, trade—but the one thing it never brought was stability.

The Working Poor: Invisible in America
by David K. Shipler
Published 12 Nov 2008

Some Canadians have experienced long waits in getting such treatment as chemotherapy after breast surgery, for example. In spreading finite medical assets more evenly throughout the population, would Basicare also deprive the wealthy of their privileged access to boundless supplies of specialists, high-tech testing, and advanced remedies? Would it constitute “socialized medicine” and sap the profit motive that drives research and draws talent into the profession? Many doctors who resent government regulation of their fees now refuse to see Medicaid and Medicare patients because the payments are so low—or they charge the elderly rich annual subscription fees to compensate for Medicare reimbursements.

Beyond the Random Walk: A Guide to Stock Market Anomalies and Low Risk Investing
by Vijay Singal
Published 15 Jun 2004

The primary objective is to ensure an understanding of these anomalies so that investors can sidestep unprofitable situations or marginally alter their trading patterns in beneficial ways. Role of Individual Investors The fact that the market cannot be fully efficient in spite of the personal profit motive and the presence of arbitrageurs and other smart investors provides the basis for this book. As noted above, constraints placed on arbitrageurs allow many mispricings to continue. On the other hand, individual investors are free to invest and trade in any way they want, with few constraints. Unlike professional arbitrageurs, individuals can continually change the strategy they use.

The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap
by Matt Taibbi
Published 8 Apr 2014

And then the analyst in his report gleefully showed this graph: Sources: “The Punishing Decade,” Justice Policy Institute report; “Prisoners in 2006,” Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin NCJ 219416. Who wouldn’t invest in that? Theoretically, the political winds might have blown the same way without the profit motive. But there’s no way to look at the financial picture and not conclude that the explosive combination of anti-immigrant politics and easy profits turbocharged the construction of the Big Dragnet. Ironically, the very brokest people in America, Hispanic immigrants, are one of America’s last great cash crops.

Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
by Johann Hari
Published 20 Jan 2015

So heroin under prohibition becomes, in effect, a pyramid selling scheme.45 “Insurance companies would love to have salesmen like drug addicts,” with that level of motivation, John remarked. Here’s why drug use went into reverse in John Marks’s clinic. Prescription, it turns out, kills the pyramid selling scheme, by stripping out the profit motive. You don’t have to sell smack to get smack. This explains why when you prescribe heroin, fewer people are recruited to use heroin, and why when you prescribe cocaine, fewer people are recruited to use cocaine. As Russell Newcombe tells me this, I can’t help but think of a weird little twist of history.

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
by Matthew Desmond
Published 1 Mar 2016

— If we acknowledge that housing is a basic right of all Americans, then we must think differently about another right: the right to make as much money as possible by providing families with housing—and especially to profit excessively from the less fortunate. Since the founding of this country, a long line of American visionaries have called for a more balanced relationship, one that protects people from the profit motive, “not to destroy individualism,” in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s words, “but to protect it.”40 Child labor laws, the minimum wage, workplace safety regulations, and other protections we now take for granted came about when we chose to place the well-being of people above money. There are losers and winners.

Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants
by Maurice E. Stucke and Ariel Ezrachi
Published 14 May 2020

In a nutshell, when the farmers market adds two jobs, another job is created elsewhere in the local economy.77 These workers will also pay local taxes, which can potentially reduce the overall tax burden for the rest of us. And once we view competition as positive sum, we can support markets in which ethical trading and social awareness are celebrated alongside the profit motive. Consider, for example, one study of small to mid-sized farms in Pennsylvania. They are part of the fastest-growing demographic in agriculture, namely women-owned farms that have “redefined successful farming in terms of providing services to their community, as well as in terms of profit and productivity.”78 The study explored how some of these women turn their farms into “a resource for the community.”

The Streets Were Paved With Gold
by Ken Auletta
Published 14 Jul 1980

But as Professor Raymond Horton of Columbia observed in a recent unpublished paper—Sayre and Kaufman Revisited—they assumed, as did James Madison, that the many competing special interests would balance each other, creating stability. In theory. In fact, city officials grew politically more dependent for their power and reelection on the very forces they were to regulate, on those who shared a public-profit motive and benefited from the growth of government. Instead of being dependent on one political machine that practiced the art of political trading, they were now dependent on many smaller machines that got more than they gave. “The result,” Francis Fox Piven writes in The Fiscal Crisis of American Cities, “was a virtual run upon the city treasury by a host of organized groups in the city, each competing with the other for a larger share of municipal benefits.… The cities are unable to raise revenues commensurate with these expenditures; and they are unable to resist the claims that underlie rising expenditures.

Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth
by Stuart Ritchie
Published 20 Jul 2020

Outside observers tend to fall into a sort of stunned disbelief when describing this setup … A 2005 Deutsche Bank report referred to it as a ‘bizarre’ ‘triplepay’ system, in which ‘the state funds most research, pays the salaries of most of those checking the quality of research, and then buys most of the published product’.69 Once you remember that the fees universities pay to rent-seeking companies such as Elsevier are largely public funds, the whole thing begins to seem immoral: shouldn’t universities be making more efficient use of taxpayer money? It’s not even that we should be opposed to the profit motive, or to commercial publishers getting involved in science. But the irrational system of prestige that’s built up around the journal publishing system represents a market failure, impeding the necessary competition that could drive down its costs. It’s hard to argue that journal publishers are adding much value to the papers: they often serve merely as a conduit between the authors and the volunteer peer reviewers, doing barely any editing or other work of their own beyond superficial typesetting.70 Big changes can happen to the journal publishing system – and we’re witnessing one right now.

The Cleaner: The True Story of One of the World's Most Successful Money Launderers
by Bruce Aitken
Published 2 Mar 2017

Most of the folks in my new quarters were either those who had been found “guilty as charged” and were awaiting sentencing, or were awaiting bail, like me. I was one of about a dozen Federal prisoners being housed in a State facility. Since the Federal government pays the State something like seventy-seven dollars a day for Federal prisoner maintenance, the State does not like to let us go. The profit motive is alive and well in the correctional institutions system. I was still wearing bright orange when they took me to HU#3, so I had to stand there looking like a neon traffic cone in a field of green grass. As I stood at the entrance surveying the crowd, I saw at least seventy-five tough-looking characters.

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand
by John Markoff
Published 22 Mar 2022

The debate, moderated by Earth Island Journal editor Mark Hertsgaard, almost didn’t happen—a “security threat” after a “powerful but unnamed member of the environmental community had objected to offering a platform to Brand because of his pro-nuclear stance” came close to jeopardizing the event—but eventually things went forward.[24] He was clearly entering hostile territory. LaDuke and Brand covered a gamut of topics that had been discussed in Whole Earth Discipline, from nuclear power to GMO foods to geoengineering. “Brand appears to inhabit a parallel Earth that is free of the specter of corporate control or haunted by the profit motive; where new technology arises spontaneously, pure and without intent,” wrote Gar Smith, the correspondent for the Berkeley Daily Planet.[25] When he was asked about Fukushima, Brand responded with a forced analogy, recalling the E. coli outbreak that had killed scores and sickened thousands in Europe, then exclaiming, “But you didn’t hear anyone demanding that organic farms should be shut down!”

AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future
by Kai-Fu Lee and Qiufan Chen
Published 13 Sep 2021

Michael stared at Allison. He recalled those years of daily heated debate in classrooms. She was intelligent and radical, the kind of MBA student who loved Atlas Shrugged. She’d always liked to attack Michael’s worldview, suggesting it was a hypocritical sham—that his “community spirit” masked the profit motive, which she saw as the quintessence of human virtue. These clashes had the effect of creating romantic sparks, but their fundamental differences had made the relationship fizzle out quickly. “You haven’t changed a bit,” Michael said, laughing. Allison shook her head. “Look, I’m offering you the chance to help way more people than you do now.

Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy
by Benjamin Barber
Published 20 Apr 2010

The twin assault on democratic citizenship from the fractious forces of Jihad and the spreading markets of McWorld in effect cuts the legs out from under democratic institutions. Whether or not they can secure new foundations either in the parochialism of ethnic identity (and its accompanying politics of resentment) or in the universalism of the profit motive (and its accompanying politics of commodities) is the crucial question. The bare bones answer, on which I hope presently to put some flesh, is simply this: neither Jihad nor McWorld promises a remotely democratic future. On the contrary, the consequences of the dialectical interaction between them suggest new and startling forms of inadvertent tyranny that range from an invisibly constraining consumerism to an all too palpable barbarism.

The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time
by Karl Polanyi
Published 27 Mar 2001

(That the essential philosophy of Marx centerd on the totality of society and the noneconomic nature of man is irrelevant here.*) Marx himself followed Ricardo in defining classes in economic terms, and economic exploitation was undoubtedly a feature of the bourgeois age. In popular Marxism this led to a crude class theory of social development. Pressure for markets and zones of influence was simply ascribed to the profit motive of a handful of financiers. Imperialism was explained as a capitalist conspiracy to induce governments to launch wars in the interests of big business. Wars were held to be caused by these interests in combination with armament firms who miraculously gained the capacity to drive whole nations into fatal policies, contrary to their vital interests.

Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back
by Guy Shrubsole
Published 1 May 2019

‘He expects to make a profit out of his building operations, and this he will be able to do when the Bill becomes law just as much as he could before.’ Landowners and developers, however, hated the development charge. Because it was levied at 100 per cent of the increase in land values after development had been granted, it effectively removed the profit motive for developing the land – leading landowners to simply refuse to sell. The charge had been set too high, and the government lacked an effective backstop to compel private landowners and developers into cooperating. A ‘landowner strike’ ensued, slowing private housebuilding. Landowners sat it out, waiting for the Conservatives to take office and repeal the charge, which they duly did in 1953.

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 29 Nov 2011

For Reich the former secretary of labor, it was clear that governments rather than companies should be in the business of protecting public goods. Governments are the only people who can represent the democratic will; governments are the only people who can be trusted to put the general interest above the profit motive. Reich is clearly no business booster. In his memoir, Locked in the Cabinet, he recalls giving a lunchtime speech to the National Association of Manufacturers only to be howled at by a bunch of all-male cigar-smoking bigots. The memory was in fact a revealing fantasy: when the book was published, Jonathan Rauch pointed out that the speech took place at breakfast, that the Association has a no-smoking policy, and that a third of the delegates were women.15 But Reich’s antibusiness venom has not prevented business people from listening to what he has to say.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
by Naomi Klein
Published 11 Sep 2023

The tech writer and theorist Ben Tarnoff, in his book Internet for the People, argues that this is an achievable goal but it must begin with a process of “deprivatization”—putting the tools that have become our public square into the public’s hands, under democratic control. “To build a better internet, we need to change how it is owned and organized,” Tarnoff writes, adding, “What is at stake is nothing less than the possibility of democracy—a possibility that an internet organized by the profit motive precludes.” It’s a reminder that just because something is currently enclosed in a certain kind of financial arrangement does not mean it must forever stay enclosed. History is filled with successful struggles against earlier forms of enclosure—colonial powers were ejected from their onetime colonies; foreign-owned mines and oil fields have been nationalized and put under public control; Indigenous peoples have won legal victories reclaiming sovereign control over their ancestral territories.

Air Crashes and Miracle Landings: 60 Narratives
by Christopher Bartlett
Published 11 Apr 2010

Searchers have spent tremendous sums trying to locate her aircraft on relatively nearby islands such as Nikumaroro, and under water near Howland. Recently more credence has been given to some of the radio messages received after her disappearance purporting to be from her. Though searchers are truly fascinated, there is a profit motive. Anyone who succeeds in finding the lost Electra could put the artifacts on show and write the definitive book on the subject of her disappearance. Tom Crouch, senior curator of aeronautics at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, who perhaps like others, feels he has devoted more than enough time to the case is quoted as saying, ‘I’m convinced that the mystery is part of what keeps us interested.

Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World
by Mark Pendergrast
Published 2 Jan 2000

Cheek made it clear that he favored honesty but that his famous blends didn’t always cost him all that much. “The various grades of coffee you roast can be made to yield certain results in the cup that will cheapen the cost,” he explained. “If you don’t know that, you ought to get busy and learn it, because if you don’t, you will have a hard road to travel.” While Cheek believed in the profit motive, he claimed not to extort money at others’ expense. “Any transaction between me and my fellow man that has not the moral in it on my part to profit him, is an immoral transaction.” He conveyed what appeared to be a real concern for the traveling salesman, explaining that he had been on the road himself for twenty-eight years.

The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and Our World
by John Robbins
Published 14 Sep 2010

"I want to emphasize," Monsanto's CEO, Bob Shapiro, said in 1999, "that we will remain fully committed to the promise of biotechnology, because we believe that it can be a safe and sustainable and useful tool in agriculture and nutrition, in Human health, and in meeting in particular the world's needs for food and fiber."7 It sounds as if his goal is to help the world. But Monsanto, like Astra- Zeneca, DuPont, Novartis, and Aventis, is governed by the profit motive. These five top biotech companies together account for nearly 100 percent of the market in genetically engineered seeds. They also account for 60 percent of the global pesticide market. And, thanks to a flurry of recent acquisitions, they now own 23 percent of the commercial seed market." Whatever their PR might say, their efforts are filtered through, and focused on, the pursuit of corporate profit.

Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions
by Toby Segaran and Jeff Hammerbacher
Published 1 Jul 2009

Motivation Finally, although we’ve talked about concerns over how to make it possible for respondents to use the form, as well as the problems of getting them to trust us enough to keep participating, avoiding scaring them off with a lot of questions, and making sure we didn’t subconsciously influence their answers, we haven’t mentioned perhaps the most important part of any survey: why should the person want to participate at all? For this type of research survey, there is no profit motive to participate, unlike online forums such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, in which users complete tasks in their spare time for a few dollars or cents per task. But when there is no explicit profit to be made, how do you convince a person to take the time to answer your questions? Designing Our Solution We’ve talked about some of the pitfalls inherent in a data-collecting project; in the next few sections, we discuss the nuts and bolts of our design, including typography, web browser compatibility, and dynamic form elements.

The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid
by C. K. Prahalad
Published 15 Jan 2005

We will show that a 10 to 200 times advantage (compared to the cost structures that are oriented to the top of the pyramid markets) is possible if firms innovate from the BOP up and do not follow the traditional practice of serving the BOP markets by making minor changes to the products created for the top of the pyramid. Most charitable organizations also believe that the private sector is greedy and uncaring and that corporations cannot be trusted with the problems of poverty alleviation. From this perspective, profit motive and poverty alleviation do not mix easily or well. Aid agencies have come full circle in their own thinking. From aid focused on large infrastructure projects and public spending on education and health, they are also moving toward a belief that private-sector involvement is a crucial ingredient to poverty alleviation.

The Right to Earn a Living: Economic Freedom and the Law
by Timothy Sandefur
Published 16 Aug 2010

In the case of political speech, prosecuting people for making false statements might scare innocent third parties, deterring them from expressing themselves and creating a kind of censorship through intimidation. But those engaged in commercial speech are supposed to be less susceptible to intimidation because the profit motive will ensure that they will continue to express themselves.38 Thus, subjecting businesses to potential liability for making false statements will in theory not deter them from participating in public controversies. In addition, the California Supreme Court held, businesses are better able to verify the accuracy of their statements than are private citizens, so subjecting them to greater liability is fairer.

Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them
by Donovan Hohn
Published 1 Jan 2010

Most of the chitchat aboard the Morning Mist is similarly interdisciplinary and esoteric. When did people first begin using boats—forty thousand years ago? Fifty thousand years ago? What does it take to start a migration—a critical mass, or a few individuals with the itch to explore? Why did people migrate in the first place—the profit motive? Hunger? Exile? Chance? Computer models like OSCURS may help these marine archaeologists reconstruct the routes of those transoceanic migrations, the history of which is inseparable from the history of global climate change. In other words, it is humanity’s own past and future that the oceanographers are scrying in the tangled drift routes of the toys.

Underground
by Suelette Dreyfus
Published 1 Jan 2011

The espionage wouldn’t even have to be about new products; it could simply be about the company’s business strategies. With access to all sorts of internal memos between senior executives, a hacker could procure precious inside information on markets and prices. A competitor might pay handsomely for this sort of information. And this was just the start of what a malicious or profit-motivated hacker could do. In many companies, the automated aspects of manufacturing plants are controlled by computers. The smallest changes to the programs controlling the machine tools could destroy an entire batch of widgets – and the multi-million dollar robotics machinery which manufactures them.

Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World
by Bruce Schneier
Published 1 Jan 2000

Sounds just like the physical world: Lots of people get burned. Destructive Attacks Destructive attacks are the work of terrorists, employees bent on revenge, or hackers gone over to the dark side. Destruction is a criminal attack—it’s rare that causing damage to someone else’s property is legal—but there is often no profit motive. Instead, the attacker asks: “How can I cause the most damage by attacking this system?” There are many different kinds of destructive attacks. In 1988, someone wrote a computer virus specifically targeted against computers owned by Electronic Data Systems. It didn’t do too much damage (actually, it did more damage to NASA), but the idea was there.

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
by Matt Ridley
Published 17 May 2010

Shakespeare could not bring himself to make the persecuted Shylock a hero. Of 1900, Brink Lindsey writes: ‘Many of the brightest minds of the age mistook the engine of eventual mass deliverance – the competitive market system – for the chief bulwark of domination and oppression.’ Economists like Thorstein Veblen longed to replace the profit motive with a combination of public-spiritedness and centralised government decision-taking. In the 1880s Arnold Toynbee, lecturing working men on the English industrial revolution which had so enriched them, castigated free enterprise capitalism as a ‘world of gold-seeking animals, stripped of every human affection’ and ‘less real than the island of Lilliput’.

ZeroMQ
by Pieter Hintjens
Published 12 Mar 2013

It literally (and I mean that metaphorically) whispers “eat me” in the little voice one imagines a cube of cheese might use when it’s sitting next to an empty bottle of the best beer in the world, which is of course Orval, brewed by an ancient and almost extinct order of silent Belgian monks called Les Gars La-Bas Qui Brassents l’Orval. The BSD license, like its near clone MIT/X11, was designed specifically by a university (Berkeley) with no profit motive, to leak work and effort. It is a way to push subsidized technology at below its cost price, a dumping of underpriced code in the hope that it will break the market for others. BSD is an excellent strategic tool, but only if you’re a large, well-funded institution that can afford to use Option One.

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 31 Mar 2014

Fifth, in a global logistics system dominated by hundreds of thousands of private carriers, there is a lack of common standards and protocols that would allow firms to collaborate with each other, using the newest IT and Internet technology apps, and share logistical resources in a way that would increase efficiencies and productivity and reduce operating costs.95 Free-market economists would argue that a capitalist system wedded to private exchange of goods and services in the marketplace and driven by the profit motive is the most efficient means of allocating scarce resources for productive ends. However, when it comes to logistics—the means by which these goods and services are stored and delivered to customers—the process is so grossly inefficient and unproductive that it should at least give economists pause.

Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government
by Robert Higgs and Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr.
Published 15 Jan 1987

Only the absence of an emergency prompting a large increase in the number of people under arms permits the volunteer military system to survive. Alone among collectivist systems, fascism preserves private property, but "capitalism is turned inside out in this unlikely union." Fascism recognizes people's desire to possess private property and admires the strength of the profit motive, but it "uses these features of capitalism [only] insofar as they do not conflict with the national interest as formulated by fascism's political authori- 242 History ties." Every part of economic life is ideologically, constitutionally, and legally vulnerable to governmental control. Hence "fascism tolerates the form of private ownership at the government's pleasure, but it eliminates any meaningful right of private property."

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World
by Bruce Schneier
Published 2 Mar 2015

I’ve met hardened privacy advocates who nonetheless think it should be a crime not to put your medical data into a society-wide database. I’ve met people who are perfectly fine with permitting the most intimate surveillance by corporations, but want governments never to be able to touch that data. I’ve met people who are fine with government surveillance, but are against anything that has a profit motive attached to it. And I’ve met lots of people who are fine with any of the above. As individuals and as a society, we are constantly trying to balance our different values. We never get it completely right. What’s important is that we deliberately engage in the process. Too often the balancing is done for us by governments and corporations with their own agendas.

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide
by Henry Jenkins
Published 31 Jul 2006

Shopping malls are seen as private property, and their management is assumed to have the right to expel anyone w h o causes a disruption; there are few protections for dissent i n such an environment. H o w e v e r m u c h they represent themselves as civic experiments, massively multiplayer game worlds are, like the shopping malls, commercial spaces. We should be concerned about what happens to free speech i n a corporate-controlled environment, where the profit motive can undo any decision made b y the citizenry and where the company can p u l l the p l u g whenever sales figures warrant. For example, w e l l before the election controversy, L u d low, the editor of the Alphaville Herald, was temporarily expelled from the Sims Online (2002) because Electronic Arts was angered over his coverage of some of the issues confronting his online c o m m u n i t y — i n particular an exposé he ran on child prostitution (teens selling cybersex for games credit).

Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage, 1775-1821
by George Anthony Selgin
Published 13 Jul 2008

The first British bank to gain widespread acceptance for its notes was the Bank of England, founded in 1694-not, as some suppose, to shore up the British monetary system, but to fund Great Britain's ongoing war with France. Besides coming up with the million pounds the government needed as fast as you can say "monopoly," the "Old Lady of Threadneedle Street," as the Bank came to be known, proved to be exceedingly profitable. But for reasons difficult to square with the profit motive, the Bank refused to set foot outside of the City until the government forced it to set up branch offices in 1826. The Bank thus earned its second (since forgotten) moniker, the "Bank of London." Moreover, the Bank refused to issue notes for less than the princely sum of twenty pounds before 1759 or for less than ten pounds before 1793, when it began to issue five-pound notes.

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection
by Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Mar 2015

The deliberate erosion of user privacy, the push toward constant, frictionless sharing, the institution of a wide array of tracking mechanisms, the digitization of every thought, gesture, and scrap of culture—all of these measures are designed so that social networks may harvest more user data. Given the direct relationship between data collection and targeted advertising, advertising-supported social media may be incapable of guaranteeing users’ privacy. When combining the supposedly far-reaching possibilities of Big Data with the urgent profit motives of being a publicly traded corporation, it’s difficult for firms such as Google and Facebook to set limits for themselves. As Facebook’s VP of infrastructure told GigaOm in August 2012, “Everything is interesting to us.” At the time, the company was harvesting 500 terabytes per day, including 2.7 billion likes and 300 million photos.

The Default Line: The Inside Story of People, Banks and Entire Nations on the Edge
by Faisal Islam
Published 28 Aug 2013

Kingston upon Thames is an unlikely hub for anything, but nestled in the greenery beside the River Thames lies a futuristic office block designed to accommodate a small army of planet-saving, carbon-dioxide-sapping capitalists. Arthur Tait is in charge here, and his ambition is clear: to become the number one trader of carbon in the world. It is 2008, the heyday of trading carbon. I asked Tait whether ambition such as this – the profit motive itself – can really be the saviour of the planet. ‘Effectively, yes,’ he replies. ‘I think it’ll save it a lot more efficiently than a carbon tax would, or forcing draconian measures on countries that wouldn’t take those measures. So a market-driven force is probably the only way we’re going to save the planet.’

The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession
by Peter L. Bernstein
Published 1 Jan 2000

As a result, the Americans would end up spending increasing amounts of money on imports and investing in foreign countries to a point where their massive gold hoard would be drawn down below its original swollen levels and their debts to foreigners would increase above the levels of the 1940s. The Americans happily obliged by engaging in a great spending spree. As the economies of Europe and Asia revived according to plan and in response to American aid, the lure of the profit motive drove massive amounts of private capital from the United States into thousands of enterprises across the seas and attracted rising imports of foreign merchandise to America's shores. The United States undertook an unprecedented level of international economic assistance, launched large-scale social programs at home, deployed American military might around the world, and fought two hot wars in Asia as well as the Cold War against the Russians.

The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History
by Derek S. Hoff
Published 30 May 2012

This development marked the emergence of the central conundrum in the postwar population debate: the tension between the argument that slower population increase would help per capita economic growth and welfare and the argument that both population and economic expansion had to be halted to prevent ecological (and hence social and economic) catastrophe. In 1948, William Vogt’s Road to Survival had called for limiting not only population but also economic growth and professed that the profit motive was fundamentally incompatible with ecological health. Vogt called for a planned economy to manage resources and economic redistribution between the rich and poor nations.129 However, his economic critique was largely ignored at the time, as other Malthusians stopped well short of advocating a planned economy.130 According to historian Jeffrey Ellis, the political climate of the Cold War made conservationists much more likely to identify overpopulation rather than capitalism as the root cause of resource scarcity.131 Hence, though postwar Malthusians expressed nascent limits-to-growth thought, they primarily articulated their message in simple ecological terms (e.g., “Is there enough water?”)

Economic Dignity
by Gene Sperling
Published 14 Sep 2020

Any health insurance company would be driven out of business if people were allowed to buy insurance—to pay premiums—only when they knew they were ill and needed large health-care expenditures. This is the issue of insurance death spirals. It is 100 percent clear. On the flip side, if insurance companies have no regulations on who they can take and what prices they can charge, they will have a clear profit motive to allow only those who are most likely to be healthy to obtain coverage—so they pay out the least for the premiums they take in—and keep out or charge excessive prices to those who are sick or seem most likely to be. That also is 100 percent clear. There is no possibility—zero—that a totally unregulated health system will lead to those who are sick or likely to be sick not being locked out or facing excessive costs.

The-General-Theory-of-Employment-Interest-and-Money
by John Maynard Keynes
Published 13 Jul 2018

Given the social and political environment and the national characteristics which determine the propensity to consume, the well-­ being of a progressive state essentially depends, for the reasons we have already explained, on the sufficiency of such inducements. They may be found either in home investment or in foreign investment (including in the latter the accumulation of the precious metals), which, between them, make up aggregate investment. In conditions in which the quantity of aggregate investment is determined by the profit motive alone, the opportunities for home investment will be governed, in the long run, by the domestic rate of interest; whilst the volume of foreign investment is necessarily determined by the size of the favourable balance of trade. Thus, in a society where there is no question of direct investment under the aegis of public authority, the economic objects, with which it is reasonable for the government to be preoccupied, are the domestic rate of interest and the balance of foreign trade.

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities
by Benjamin R. Barber
Published 5 Nov 2013

They worry that its inclination to “push” (to tell us what we want) will overwhelm its capacity for “pull” (to ask us what we want); or that “pull” will be subjected to endless marketing and manipulation and become another form of “push.” They worry that calculating how to control and monetize the web may overshadow efforts to open it to all and put it to public and civic uses. They observe that the profit motive shows little interest in net neutrality (an open web in which all information is equal and those controlling the networks may not favor any particular content or consumer group). Google advertises that it opens the world of information access to all, but in practice it has occasionally allowed tyrants to manipulate the search engine and censor its content.

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole
by Benjamin R. Barber
Published 1 Jan 2007

For every Christian rocker who thinks she can use pop music to displace pop culture’s secularism with religion conversions, there is a Christian skeptic who worries (with considerable reason) that being cool will always mean being “flippant, irreverent, quick with biting one-liners that exalt self and embarrass others” and that far from being designed by hip Christians hoping to strengthen spiritual resolve, “Christian rock was the invention of big, profit-motivated record companies who were looking for a way of selling more rock music. By offering a Christianized form, they sold it to children whose parents would otherwise object.”25 It may seem an odd source to cite in looking for support of the arguments about the real character of liberty offered above, but the insight from The Moorings website that the devil “and his spokesmen in the media promise you freedom, but in truth they want to put you in bondage” rings of truth; as does the claim that “the entertainment industry wants to make you a mindless, helpless, addicted consumer of their products.”

How Money Became Dangerous
by Christopher Varelas
Published 15 Oct 2019

The lights blazed on empty pavement, on the rows of trees pruned shorter and shorter as they progressed up the street, on the fronts of buildings of likewise diminishing height, meant to create a spatial illusion to make Main Street appear longer. The magic of the place dissipated for a moment. It all felt wrong, forced, even a little ominous. I saw Disneyland at that moment for what it was—a carefully orchestrated, profit-motivated business, not a Magic Kingdom that existed solely to spread happiness. I turned around and left through the guest entrance, rounding the towering outer walls to the employee lot, where I found my car alone in the far corner and drove home. * * * “Oh my god, you guys, I’m totally freaking out.”

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World
by Clive Thompson
Published 26 Mar 2019

He quickly amassed 9,000 videos, a large percentage that seemed custom designed to shock, inflame, or mislead, ranging from “rape game jokes, shock reality social experiments, celebrity pedophilia, ‘false flag’ rants, and terror-related conspiracy theories,” as he wrote. Some of it, he figured, was driven by sheer profit motive: Post outrageous nonsense, get into the recommendation system, and reap the profit from the clicks. Recommender systems, in other words, may have a bias toward “inflammatory content,” as Tufekci notes. Another academic, Renée DiResta, found the same problem with Facebook’s recommendation system for its “Groups.”

Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth
by Selina Todd
Published 11 Feb 2021

If national television and broadcasters and newspaper proprietors are obliged to invest in the regions, we can create a media that is more in touch with events and concerns in the country at large. This might mean that events such as the Brexit vote of 2016, or Labour’s popularity in the 2017 General Election, come as less of a surprise to broadcasters, editors and politicians. To build a media driven by our needs, rather than by the profit motive, small groups or individuals should not be allowed to create media empires. This would also fill a gap that international rivals to the BBC can’t address. Government funding of the arts, sport and media should be used to encourage mass participation across the country. The ability of more people to create and distribute music, film and photography via smartphone and Internet technology should be celebrated and supported by directing some of the government funding received by the BBC and the arts at regional training programmes, arts groups emphasising opportunities for all, and grants for social media and artistic start-ups.

The Asian Financial Crisis 1995–98: Birth of the Age of Debt
by Russell Napier
Published 19 Jul 2021

We are living with the consequences of those decisions made in 1998 today and are likely to live with them for a very long time to come. The battle between US-style capitalism and social capitalism did not end in victory for one side; it ended in a truce. In that truce it was the side pursuing the profit motive that was forced to make the greatest adjustments. The consequences of those adjustments continue to echo through the global economic, financial and political systems. I was wrong about Japan and social capital and the nature of the adaptation that it would force upon free market capitalism. There was a fourth option for the free market system and it was to involve assuming dangerously high levels of debt to keep returns to shareholders high through the use of ever more financial engineering.

Your Computer Is on Fire
by Thomas S. Mullaney , Benjamin Peters , Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip
Published 9 Mar 2021

One of the most highly valued companies in Silicon Valley started out as a site that stole women’s pictures without their consent and asked users to rate their attractiveness.4 Facebook now commands the attention of more than two billion users worldwide and uses its power to influence everything from minor purchasing decisions, to who gets elected, to—in extreme instances—which populations live or die.5 That the concept of merit structures our understanding of high technology and its successes, even as a lack of diversity at the top of Silicon Valley corporations creates an echo chamber, means that the infrastructure tech builds actually often worsens social inequalities.6 As Safiya Noble has shown, existing problems become entrenched and magnified by profit-seeking technologies masquerading as neutral public resources.7 Google, for example, presents itself as a neutral information tool when the company’s real business model is to sell as many advertisements as possible—Google brings in more than 100 billion dollars annually in advertising revenue, the vast majority of its revenue.8 Such technological systems have little incentive to push back against sexism and racism and a strong profit motive to look the other way, or even to lean into them. This is not new: as something that grew out of the Second World War and the Cold War that followed, electronic computing technology has long been an abstraction of political power into machine form. Techno-optimist narratives surrounding high technology and the public good—ones that assume technology is somehow inherently progressive—rely on historical fictions and blind spots that tend to overlook how large technological systems perpetuate structures of dominance and power already in place.9 As the United States finds itself in the midst of a “techlash” or backlash against high tech’s broken promises, the history of computing offers us a chance to reflect critically on the roots of these developments and the potential dangers that lie ahead.

As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age
by Matthew Cobb
Published 15 Nov 2022

The experiment was repeated with another type of plasmid and was published in June.49 The NIH was not told of any of this, and the forbidden plasmid was finally certified in July 1977 (it is still used by researchers). In spiky exchanges about the role of Genentech (which had nothing to do with the affair), the senators grilled Rutter and Boyer over whether competition and the profit motive were behind the breach of the NIH guidelines. It seemed as though the scientists – perhaps with the connivance of the NIH – were prepared to sidestep the guidelines in order to make money.50 In the end, the affair was nothing more than a minor cock-up that had been corrected, and the senators limited themselves to some stern finger-wagging.

One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War
by Michael Dobbs
Published 3 Sep 2008

His travels around Latin America had exposed him to the evil ways of companies like United Fruit: he had sworn, in front of a portrait of "our old, much lamented comrade Stalin," to exterminate such "capitalist octopuses" if he ever got the chance. In Che's ideal world, there was no place for the profit motive or any kind of monetary relations in the economy. Che's saving grace was his restless idealism. Of all the Cuban leaders, it was he who best encapsulated the contradictions of the revolution, rigidity and romanticism, fanaticism and fraternal feeling. He was a disciplinarian, but also a dreamer.

The Power Elite
by C. Wright Mills and Alan Wolfe
Published 1 Jan 1956

But more important than the fact that illegal businesses are now well-organized industries is the fact that the ‘hoods’ of the ‘twenties have in the ‘forties and ‘fifties become businessmen who own hotels and distilleries, resorts and trucking companies. Among such members of the fraternity of success, to have a police record means merely that you did not know the right people.15 Organized crime in the underworld raises to an extreme the individualistic philosophy of predatory success, the indifference to the public weal, the fetish of the profit motive and of the laissez-faire state. As an integral part of American culture, the ‘underworld … serves to meet demands for goods and services which are defined as illegitimate, but for which there is nevertheless a strong demand from respectable people … It is implicit in our economic, political, legal and social organization … It is in this sense that we have the criminals we deserve.’16 For the New Jersey banker, Harold G.

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies
by Geoffrey West
Published 15 May 2017

Companies typically operate as highly constrained top-down organizations that strive to increase efficiency of production and minimize operational costs so as to maximize profits. In contrast, cities embody the triumph of innovation over the hegemony of economies of scale. Cities aren’t, of course, driven by a profit motive and have the luxury of being able to balance their books by raising taxes. They operate in a much more distributed fashion, with power spread across multiple organizational structures from mayors and councils to businesses and citizen action groups. No single group has absolute control. As such, they exude an almost laissez-faire, freewheeling ambience relative to companies, taking advantage of the innovative benefits of social interactions whether good, bad, or ugly.

Alcohol: A History
by Rod Phillips
Published 14 Oct 2014

By the early 1900s, 10 percent of all Swedes were members of temperance societies, women’s organizations had embraced temperance and abstinence as means of improving family life, and leading sections of the labor movement argued that alcohol was used by the bourgeoisie to control workers. Their efforts at the local level led to a number of communities taking over management of alcohol sales so as to remove the profit motive that was believed to lead retailers to encourage alcohol sales. This system of “disinterested management” guaranteed modest returns (about 5 percent) to shareholders, with the remainder of the profits disbursed to the community. This arrangement, called the “Gothenburg system,” after the city that was one of the first communities to adopt it, became mandatory throughout Sweden in 1905.32 While this system might have reduced alcohol consumption, popular opinion in Sweden favored outright prohibition.

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 10 Jun 2012

In fact, around the world the poor are sinking in debt as a result of the spread of the same rogue capitalism. India had its own version of a subprime mortgage crisis: the hugely successful microcredit schemes that have provided credit to poor farmers and transformed their lives turned ugly once the profit motive was introduced. Initially developed by Muhammad Yunus of the Grameen Bank and Sir Fazle Hasan Abed of BRAC in Bangladesh, microcredit schemes transformed millions of lives by giving the poorest, who had never banked, access to small loans. Women were the main beneficiaries. Allowed to raise chickens and engage in other productive activities, they were able to improve living standards in their families and their communities.

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief
by Lawrence Wright
Published 17 Jan 2013

Drugs merely mask mental distress, he said, whereas “Scientology will solve the source of the problem.” The medical and pharmaceutical industries are “prime funders and sponsors of the media,” he said, and therefore might exert “influence on people telling the whole and true story about Scientology just because of the profit motive.” He said that only Scientology could help mankind right itself. “What else is there that we can hang our hopes on?” “That’s improving civilization,” Archer added. “Is there some other religion on the horizon that’s going to help mankind?” Jastrow asked. “Just tell me where. If not Scientology, where?”

Red Plenty
by Francis Spufford
Published 1 Jan 2007

Don’t you see that the very fact that the hemburger kiosk is there means that somebody has worked out how to make a profit by selling the meal at fifteen cents. If the capitalist who owns the kiosk couldn’t make a profit at that price, he wouldn’t be doing it. That is the secret of everything we see here.’ ‘Not quite everything, surely,’ said Lodge, after the inevitable pause. ‘The profit motive isn’t everything. We do have such a thing as public service. We do have a welfare state!’ ‘Oh, pfft,’ he said, waving a hand in front of his face like somebody getting rid of an insect. ‘You almost sounded as if you admired us,’ said Lodge, curiously. No reply. Of course he admired the Americans.

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
by Bessel van Der Kolk M. D.
Published 7 Sep 2015

E., 232 Lazar, Sara, 209–10, 275 learning disabilities, neurofeedback and, 325 LeDoux, Joseph, 60, 206 legal cases: admissibility of evidence in, 174–75 involving pedophile priests, 183, 190, 191 Lejune, Camp, 270 Letters to a Young Poet (Rilke), 87 Let There Be Light (film), 187, 220 Levine, Peter, 26, 96, 217–18, 245, 408n Lifton, Robert J., 19 limbic system, 42, 42, 56–57, 59, 60, 64 development of, 56–57 therapy for, 205–6 in trauma survivors, 59, 95, 176, 265 see also emotional brain lithium, 27–28, 136, 225 loss, as basic human experience, 26–27 love, as basic human experience, 26–27 LSD, 223 L-tryptophan, 34 lupus erythematosus, 126 Lyons-Ruth, Karlen, 119–22 MacArthur, Douglas, 186 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 43, 230 McFarlane, Alexander, 89, 245–46, 311–12, 324–25 McGaugh, James, 176 MacLean, Paul, 64 McNeill, William H., 333 Maier, Steven, 29–30 Main, Mary, 115–17, 381n Mamet, David, 331 managers, in IFS therapy, 282, 286–88, 291–92, 293 Mandela, Nelson, 356 map of the world, internal: in childhood trauma survivors, 127–30 of children, 109, 127, 129 March of the Penguins (film), 96 Marlantes, Karl, 233–34 martial arts, 86, 208, 355 Massachusetts Department of Mental Health, 253 Massachusetts General Hospital, 192, 251 Neuroimaging Laboratory of, 40 Massachusetts Mental Health Center, 19–20, 22, 26, 28, 36, 142, 259–60 see also Children’s Clinic (MMHC); Trauma Clinic massage therapy, 89, 92 Matthew, Elizabeth, 253–54 Maurice, Prince of Orange, 333–34 MDMA (ecstasy), 223–24 meaning-making, as human trait, 16–17 medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), 62, 63, 69, 91, 92, 96, 274, 274 accessing emotional brain through, 206, 206, 236, 353 balance between amygdala and, 62–64 sensory self-awareness and, 90–91, 206, 354, 376n, 408n, 417n Medicaid, 37 medicine, non-Western, 76, 86, 207–8 meditation, 208 mindfulness, 63, 321, 400n in yoga, 270 Meltzoff, Andrew, 112 memory: level of arousal and, 175–76 as narrative, 176, 179, 194, 219 rewriting of, 175, 191, 236, 255–56, 398n see also repressed memory; traumatic memory mental health, safety as fundamental to, 351, 352 mental hospitals, population of, 28 mental illness: disorder model of, 27 genetics and, 151–52 pharmacological revolution and, 36–38 as self-protective adaptations, 278–79 social engagement and, 78–79 methylation, 152 militarism, 186 mindfulness, 62, 63, 96, 131, 207, 208–10, 224, 225, 269, 270, 283, 292, 321 meditation for, 63, 321, 400n Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), 209 Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation, 160–61 Minsky, Marvin, 281 mirror neurons, 58–59, 78, 102, 111–12 misdiagnosis, of childhood trauma survivors, 136–48, 150, 151, 157, 226 model mugging program, 218–19, 308 monomethylhydrazine (MMH), 315 mood dysregulation disorder, 226 mood stabilizing drugs, 225 Moore, Dana, 269 MPFC, see medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) multiple personality disorder, 277–78 Murray, Henry, 105–6 Murrow, Ed, 43 muscular bonding, 333–34 music, in trauma recovery, 242–43, 349, 355 Myers, Charles Samuel, 185, 187, 189 Myers, Frederic, 189 naltrexone, 327 Nathan Cummings Foundation, 155 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 315 National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors, 159 National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN), 155–56, 157, 351, 356 National Institutes of Health, 28, 138, 207, 251, 254, 315, 329 DSM-5 diagnostic criteria rejected by, 165–66, 329 nature vs. nurture debate, 153–55, 160 Nazis, shell-shock victims as viewed by, 186–87 neocortex, see rational brain nervous system, 76–77 autonomic (ANS), 60, 63–64, 77, 80, 225, 266–67 parasympathetic (PNS), 77, 83–84, 264, 266–67 sympathetic (SNS), 77, 82, 82, 209, 266–67 neuroception, 80 neurofeedback, 207, 312–29, 313, 418n ADHD and, 322 alpha-theta training in, 321, 326 author’s experience of, 313–14 dissociation and, 318 epilepsy and, 315 history of, 315 learning disabilities and, 325 performance enhancement and, 322 PTSD and, 326–28 self-regulation in, 313 substance abuse and, 327–28 Trauma Center program for, 318–20 neuroimaging, see brain scans neuroplasticity, 3, 56, 167 neuroscience, 2, 29, 39, 275, 347 neurotransmitters, 28–29 see also specific neurotransmitters Newberger, Carolyn and Eli, 355 New England Journal of Medicine, 374n–75n New York Times, 334, 375n nightmares, 8, 9, 14, 15, 20, 44, 134–35, 327 Nijenhuis, Ellert, 281 1984 (Orwell), 109 non-Western medicine, 76, 86, 207–8 norepinephrine, 29 North American Association for the Study of Obesity, 144 numbing, 14–15, 67, 71–73, 84, 87–89, 92, 99, 119, 124, 162–63, 198, 205, 247, 265–66, 273, 279, 304–5, 306 see also freeze response (immobilization) obesity, 144, 147, 162, 266 Ogden, Pat, 26, 96, 217–18 Olds, David, 167 On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 74 oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), 150, 151, 157, 282, 392n orbital prefrontal cortex, 91 Oresteia (Aeschylus), 332 Orr, Scott, 33 Orwell, George, 109 out-of-body experiences, 100, 132–33, 286, 386n oxytocin, 223 Packer, Tina, 330, 335, 345–46 “Pain in Men Wounded in Battle” (Beecher), 32–33 painkillers, 146, 349 panic attacks, 97, 172 Panksepp, Jaak, 334, 387n, 398n paralysis, episodic, 228–29 paranoid schizophrenia, 15 parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), 77, 83–84, 264, 266–67 parent-child interactive therapy (PCIT), 215 parietal lobes, 91 Pascual-Leone, Alvaro, 417n Pasteur, Louis, 164 Patton, George, 186 Pavlov, Ivan, 39 Paxil, 35, 225, 254 PBSP psychomotor therapy, see psychomotor therapy Pearlman, Chester, 409n pendulation, 217–18, 245, 286, 333, 408n Peniston, Eugene, 326, 327 Pennebaker, James, 239–41, 243 performance enhancement, neurofeedback and, 322 periaqueductal gray, 102 Perry, Bruce, 56 Perry, Chris, 138, 141, 296 Pesso, Albert, 297–99 pharmaceutical industry, power of, 374n–75n pharmacological revolution, 27–29, 36–38, 310 profit motive in, 38 phobias, 256 physical actions, completion of, in trauma survivors, 96 physical activity: calming effect of, 88 in trauma therapy, 207–8 physiology: self-regulation of, 38 see also body; brain Piaget, Jean, 105 Pilates, 199 Pitman, Roger, 30, 33, 222 placebo effect, 35 plane crashes, survivors of, 80 Plutarch, 334 pneumogastric nerve, see vagus nerve Pollak, Seth, 114 polyvagal theory, 77–78, 86 Porges, Stephen, 77–78, 80, 83, 84–85, 86 positron emission tomography (PET), 39 Possibility Project, 335, 340–42 posterior cingulate, 90–91, 91 Posttraumatic Cognitions Inventory, 233 pranayama, 86, 270 prefrontal cortex, 59, 68–69, 102 executive function in, 62 see also medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) prefrontal lobes, 254 Prince, Morton, 184 Principles of Psychology, The (James), 277 prisons: population of, 348 spending on, 168 prolactin, 223 propranolol, 225 proprioceptive (balance) system, 247 protagonists, in psychomotor therapy, 297, 300–302 proto-self, 94 Prozac (fluoxetine), 34–35, 37, 223, 262 PTSD and, 35–36, 225, 226, 254, 261 psychiatry: drug-based approach of, 315, 349 socioeconomic factors ignored in, 348 psychoanalysis, 22, 184, 230–31 see also talk therapy (talking cure) psychodynamic psychotherapy, 199 Psychology Today, 315 psychomotor therapy, 296–308 author’s experience in, 298–99 feeling safe in, 300, 301 protagonists in, 297, 300–302 structures in, 298–308 witnesses in, 297, 300, 301, 306 psychopharmacology, 20, 206 psychotherapy, of child neglect survivors, 296–97 psychotropic drugs, 27–29, 37–38, 101, 136, 315, 349–50 PTSD and, 254, 261, 405n in trauma recovery, 223–27 see also specific drugs PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder): acupuncture and acupressure in treatment of, 410n–11n amygdala-MPFC imbalance in, 62–64 attention and concentration problems in, 311–12 brain scans of, 102, 347, 408n brain-wave patterns in, 311, 312 CBT and, 194, 220–21 children of parents with, 118–19 diagnosis of, 136–37, 142, 150, 156–57, 188, 319 dissociation in, 66–68 EMDR in treatment of, 248–49, 253–54 exposure therapy and, 256 flashbacks in, 72, 327 in Holocaust survivors, 118–19 HRV in, 267, 268 hypersensitivity to threat in, 102, 327, 408n language failure in, 244–45 MDMA in treatment of, 223–24 memory and, 175, 190 numbing in, 72–73, 99 psychotropic drugs and, 254, 261, 405n reliving in, 66–68, 180–81, 325 and security of attachment to caregiver, 119 sensory self-awareness in, 89–92 social engagement and, 102 substance abuse and, 327 yoga therapy for, 207, 228–29, 268–69 PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder), of accident and disaster survivors, 41–43, 142–43, 348 EMDR and, 260 flashbacks in, 66–67, 68, 68, 196–98 hypersensivity to threat in, 45–47, 68 irritability and rage in, 68, 248–49 Lelog as, 177–78 numbing in, 198 PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder), of combat veterans, 1–2, 106, 348, 371n antipsychotic drugs and, 226–27 attention and concentration problems of, 312 CBT and, 194, 220–21 diagnosis of, 19–21 downside of medications for, 36–37 flashbacks in, 8, 13, 16, 227 hypersensitivity to threat in, 11, 327 hypnosis and, 187, 220 in-or-out construct in, 18 irritability and rage in, 10, 14 neurofeedback and, 326–28 nightmares in, 8, 9, 14, 15, 134–35 numbing in, 14–15 pain and, 33 prevalence of, 20 Prozac and, 35–36, 226 serotonin levels in, 33–34, 36 shame in, 13 shell-shock as, 11, 184–85 sleep disorders in, 409n stress hormone levels in, 30 suicide and, 17, 332 theater as therapy for, 331–32, 343–44 traumatic event as sole source of meaning in, 18 VA and, 19, 187–88, 222–23 yoga therapy for, 270 PTSD scores, 254, 319, 324 Puk, Gerald, 252–53 purpose, sense of, 14, 92, 233 Putnam, Frank, 30, 161–64, 251 qigong, 86, 208, 245, 264 quantitative EEG (qEEG), 323 rage, 83 displacement of, 133–34, 140 in PTSD, 10, 14, 68, 248–49 in trauma survivors, 46, 95, 99, 285, 304 “railway spine,” 177 rape, 1–2, 17, 88, 213–14 increased incidence of, in survivors of childhood abuse, 85, 146–47 prevalence of, 20–21 rational brain, 55, 57–58 balance between emotional brain and, 64–65, 129–30, 205, 310 feelings and, 205 Rauch, Scott, 40, 42 reactive attachment disorder, 150, 151 reciprocity, 79–80 reckless behavior, 120 reenacting, 31–33, 179, 180, 181, 182 relationships: emotional brain and, 122 mental health and, 38, 55 in trauma recovery, 210–13 see also intimacy; social engagement reliving, 66–68, 180–81 Relman, Arnold, 374n–75n Remarque, Erich Maria, 171, 186 Rembrandt van Rijn, 215 Remembering, Repeating and Working Through (Freud), 219 REM sleep, 260–61, 309–10, 409n repressed memory, 183, 184–99 of childhood sexual abuse survivors, 190, 397n false memories and, 189, 190, 191–92 reliability of, 191 see also traumatic memory Research Domain Criteria (RDoC), 165–66 resilience, 105, 109, 161, 278–79, 314, 316, 351, 355, 356 Respiridol, 215 rhesus monkeys: peer-raised, 154 personality types in, 153 rheumatoid arthritis (RA), IFS in treatment of, 291–92 rhythmic movement, in trauma therapy, 85, 207, 208, 214, 242–43, 333–34, 349 right temporal lobe, 319, 324 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 87 Risperdal, 37, 226, 227 Ritalin, 107, 136 ritual, trauma recovery and, 331–32 Rivers, W.

The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life
by Robert Wright
Published 1 Jan 1994

In seventeenth-century Japan, a Buddhist monk advised that “All occupations are Buddhist practice; through work we are able to attain Buddhahood”—an utterance that has rightly drawn comparison with the Protestant work ethic. Meanwhile, over in the cities of Mughal India, purportedly otherworldly Hindus were, as the historian Paul Kennedy has put it, “excellent examples of Weber’s Protestant ethic.” Confucianism, unlike Buddhism, treated the profit motive with suspicion well into the Middle Ages. Then again, as Kennedy has noted, in that regard it is reminiscent of the pope’s condemnations of usury during the Middle Ages. But this papal doctrine adapted to commercial exigencies, and so would Confucianism. In the thirteenth century, when Eurasia was spanned by a commercial web of unprecedented density, commerce was abetted by Confucians and for that matter by Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Zoroastrians—a transcontinental patchwork of spiritual traditions, all with one thing in common: their adherents were human beings, and thus liked mutually profitable exchange.

The Asylum: The Renegades Who Hijacked the World's Oil Market
by Leah McGrath Goodman
Published 15 Feb 2011

(Enron and Refco would be accused of similar cloak-and-dagger money-shuffling schemes in later years, only they would engage in trickery on a much grander scale before losses gutted them both.) The CFTC’s view was that these types of prearranged, anticompetitive trades weren’t driven so much by the profit motive (read: the good kind of greed) as by the faulty instinct of an insolvent trader to undeservedly survive (read: the bad kind of greed). Prearranged trades were illegal because they did not involve the taking of any risk. And anyone who was anyone on Wall Street knew that taking risk was what you got paid for.

The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society
by Binyamin Appelbaum
Published 4 Sep 2019

Companies were returned to private ownership, public spending was slashed, and wage growth slowed as the state focused on reducing inflation. The unemployment rate hit 10 percent; France remained in the European Monetary System. “The Socialists were converted to ideas that they had previously suspected: the importance of private enterprise, the profit motive, and so on,” said the political scientist René Rémond. “To replace the idea of socialism with the idea of modernization is an enormous change.”109 In 1982, the Italian economist Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, the European Commission’s director of economic affairs, published a paper reviving the case for the creation of a pan-European currency.

Bill Marriott: Success Is Never Final--His Life and the Decisions That Built a Hotel Empire
by Dale van Atta
Published 14 Aug 2019

Five thousand Poles flooded Marriott’s Warsaw recruitment office to apply for jobs, lured by the higher pay and the opportunity to learn Western business and service practices. General Manager Haile Aguilar decided to “grow his own staff” from applicants untainted by prior hotel experience. He turned down all but three applicants with hotel résumés, believing “that the lack of a profit motive and more than 40 years of state control had deadened the notion of service in most Warsaw hotels.”9 Instead, he said, “We looked for young people with big smiles who spoke English and were willing to work. The ones who held the most intelligent conversations in interviews were made managers.”

Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
by Robert Wright
Published 28 Dec 2010

In seventeenth-century Japan, a Buddhist monk advised that “All occupations are Buddhist practice; through work we are able to attain Buddhahood”—an utterance that has rightly drawn comparison with the Protestant work ethic. Meanwhile, over in the cities of Mughal India, purportedly otherworldly Hindus were, as the historian Paul Kennedy has put it, “excellent examples of Weber’s Protestant ethic.” Confucianism, unlike Buddhism, treated the profit motive with suspicion well into the Middle Ages. Then again, as Kennedy has noted, in that regard it is reminiscent of the pope’s condemnations of usury during the Middle Ages. But this papal doctrine adapted to commercial exigencies, and so would Confucianism. In the thirteenth century, when Eurasia was spanned by a commercial web of unprecedented density, commerce was abetted by Confucians and for that matter by Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Zoroastrians—a transcontinental patchwork of spiritual traditions, all with one thing in common: their adherents were human beings, and thus liked mutually profitable exchange.

When Cultures Collide: Leading Across Cultures
by Richard D. Lewis
Published 1 Jan 1996

HORIZON HORIZON F RE NCH Concepts and Values outside U.S. and French Ken Concepts and Values outside U.S. and French Ken Figure 8.1 French and U.S. Horizons: General Concepts modesty use of silence laid back U.S.A. HORIZON haute cuisine formal manners status by family or education respect for intellectuality savoir faire justice proud of revolution consumerism profit motive science arts liberty equality messianic media-driven direct, blunt discourse egalitarian company organization hunches risk-takers civil-service driven roundabout discourse hierarchical company organization obsession with logic cautious Asian standards of politeness understatement mañana mentality Figure 8.2 Horizons: French and U.S.

Wealth, Poverty and Politics
by Thomas Sowell
Published 31 Aug 2015

The history of government economic central planning in the twentieth century, whether in democratic or undemocratic countries, is a case in point. In the early twentieth century, many people in various countries took it as more or less axiomatic that the efficiency of an economy could be much improved if more economic decisions would be transferred to governmental institutions, unbiased by individual profit motives and dedicated to the good of the general public, rather than special interests. Thus, in the United States, President Woodrow Wilson described the Federal Reserve System created during his administration as a government financial institution which “provides a currency which expands as it is needed and contracts when it is not needed” and that “the power to direct this system of credits is put into the hands of a public board of disinterested officers of the Government itself”18 to avoid control by bankers or other special interests.

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 14 Jun 2017

Learning to balance (and hold) the audacity to dream a different world with the humility to start with the world as it is has been one of the most important lessons of my life. It is an essential attribute of leading for anyone who wants to bring about change. And right now, that needs to be all of us. If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say and why? A single bottom line of profit motive no longer serves our interdependent world. We must move from a focus on shareholders to one on stakeholders, take a long-term view, and measure what matters, not just what we can count. That’s a lot easier to say than to do. So we created a manifesto at Acumen, a moral compass to guide our decisions and actions.

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership
by Andro Linklater
Published 12 Nov 2013

The bourgeoisie flourished especially in the west, where urban prosperity spilled over into a countryside where French influence had ensured that peasant holdings were already held virtually as property. Further east, in traditional Prussia’s deeply conservative society, the changes caused widespread anxiety. Paradoxically the mood received its most eloquent expression in The Communist Manifesto in Karl Marx’s famous paragraph raging against the bourgeoisie whose embrace of the profit motive had “put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations . . . it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation . . . All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life.” Social upheaval exacerbated a need for national identity.

The Dream Machine: The Untold History of the Notorious V-22 Osprey
by Richard Whittle
Published 26 Apr 2010

The “present financial situation” was the Great Depression, which was holding back other aviation dreamers as well, and leading many to seek government contracts, often without success. * * * When Dick Spivey flew to Washington in 1983 to deliver the Bell-Boeing tiltrotor proposal to the Naval Air Systems Command, he was treading what by then was a well-worn path. Since World War II, the military’s special needs, massive budgets, and lack of a profit motive have made it a driving force behind new technology—especially in aviation. “You can’t make a business case to develop a risky plane from scratch just for the commercial world,” Spivey once explained to me. “It takes a long time to develop an airplane, and in the commercial world, you don’t get any money until you sell the first airplane.

Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy
by Philippe van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght
Published 20 Mar 2017

An alternative approach, arguably less distant from Marx’s own view (as formulated most explicÂ�itly in his critique of the Gotha program) does not attribute a direct ethical superiority to socialism over capitalism in connection with the removal of exploitation.67 It rather regards socialism as instrumentally superior to capitalism in bringing about a state of abundance, itself the condition required for the abolition of alienation, understood as the perÂ�forÂ�mance of activities that do not have their aim in themselves. The capÂ� iÂ�talÂ�ist organÂ�ization of production—Â�because it lacks central planning, Â�because 123 BASIC INCOME effective demand chronically fails to match supply, and Â�because the profit motive inhibits the dissemination of innovation—is claimed to hinder the development of productive forces. Socialism, Marx believed, can remove Â�these obstacles and thereby unleash Â�human productivity growth to such an extent that our economy Â�will soon reach a state of abundance. In other words, society will then be in a position to operate in accordance with the princiÂ�ple that defines the communist ideal: “from each according to his capacities, to each according to his needs.”

The Idea of Decline in Western History
by Arthur Herman
Published 8 Jan 1997

For a brief period, from 1900 to 1910, Du Bois had evoked the image of a talented tenth of Negro intellectuals and politicians, who would assert a sense of racial pride by building a record of cultural achievements without “bow[ing] a knee to Baal.”71 Then he had turned to Pan-African nationalism and then to black separatism, according to which American blacks would build their own independent economy parallel to that of whites, again with no invidious profit motive. Finally, in the thirties, he turned to Marx and Communism. He had learned a good deal about Marx during his stay in Germany in 1892 to ’94 and visited the Soviet Union in 1924. His own analysis of imperialism had anticipated V.I. Lenin’s Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, which argued (wrongly) that the scramble for Africa was due to surplus capital, and that late capitalism could only derive its profits from an expanding colonial empire.* For a time after World War II, Du Bois even worried that the capitalist world, in its final death agonies, would crush out the cause of liberation of nonwhite people.72 Then the British granted independence to India, the United States forced the Dutch to leave Indonesia, and the European powers began to shed their colonies—and prospered.

The Pot Book: A Complete Guide to Cannabis
by Julie Holland
Published 22 Sep 2010

There is an investment that goes into studying their value, and it is always the same—the synthetic drug is better, newer, and fresher. People forget that LSD is synthesized from a mold that grows on rye, and a great many drugs have been created in that way. Opium is another great example. So we denigrate those drugs by saying they’re not as pure; we don’t know exactly what’s in them. There’s a profit motive in belittling what the plant world gives us. JULIE: It reminds me of In Defense of Food, where you talk about food being reduced to its building blocks. MICHAEL: It’s a reductive approach. JULIE: And Big Pharma chooses to be reductive over something more complex and whole, like a plant. MICHAEL: That’s the real issue with THC and cannabinol, and there are others too.

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
by Daniel J. Levitin
Published 18 Aug 2014

The printing press was introduced in the mid 1400s, allowing for the more rapid proliferation of writing, replacing laborious (and error-prone) hand copying. Yet again, many complained that intellectual life as we knew it was done for. Erasmus, in 1525, went on a tirade against the “swarms of new books,” which he considered a serious impediment to learning. He blamed printers whose profit motive sought to fill the world with books that were “foolish, ignorant, malignant, libelous, mad, impious and subversive.” Leibniz complained about “that horrible mass of books that keeps on growing” and that would ultimately end in nothing less than a “return to barbarism.” Descartes famously recommended ignoring the accumulated stock of texts and instead relying on one’s own observations.

The Evolution of God
by Robert Wright
Published 8 Jun 2009

In various societies, including some hunter-gatherer ones, people accused of sorcery or witchcraft and punished by banishment or death tend to be notoriously uncooperative or otherwise antisocial characters.) 56 More generally, Polynesian religion seems to have kept the machine humming. Under the severe gaze of gods, canoes got made, fish got caught, pigs and yams got raised. But wasn’t there an easier way to get good workmanship—like, say, letting teams of canoe builders compete with one another to sell canoes to fishermen, and relying on the profit motive to instill craftsmanship? Ever hear of free enterprise? These are questions asked from a modern perspective, in a society featuring things like money and efficient markets. Back when humanity made the first step toward that world, moving from small hunter-gatherer villages toward large, multivillage agrarian societies, the logic of these things wasn’t so obvious.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years
by David Graeber
Published 1 Jan 2010

The Confucian state may have been the world’s greatest and most enduring bureaucracy, but it actively promoted markets, and as a result, commercial life in China soon became far more sophisticated, and markets more developed, than anywhere else in the world. This despite the fact that Confucian orthodoxy was overtly hostile to merchants and even the profit motive itself. Commercial profit was seen as legitimate only as compensation for the labor that merchants expended in transporting goods from one place to another, but never as fruits of speculation. What this meant in practice was that they were pro-market but anti-capitalist. Again, this seems bizarre, since we’re used to assuming that capitalism and markets are the same thing, but, as the great French historian Fernand Braudel pointed out, in many ways they could equally well be conceived as opposites.

IBM and the Holocaust
by Edwin Black
Published 30 Jun 2001

In fact, said the Justice Department, Farben alone had consummated contracts with more than 100 hundred American firms, and that those efforts had retarded America’s military preparedness by tying up patents and resources.9 Certainly scores of American firms used international connections to trade with the enemy. None of them needed more than their own profit motive to pursue such deals. Many of them were proud members of the International Chamber of Commerce, which, during Watson’s tenure, espoused an official enthusiasm for trade with the Hitler regime. Ironically, none of IBM’s subsidiaries were on the Proclaimed List because they fell into a double-edged corporate identity as “American-owned property.”

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military
by Neil Degrasse Tyson and Avis Lang
Published 10 Sep 2018

Asked by a BBC interviewer for a “big thought” on the crisis and whether it constituted “a permanent indictment of capitalism,” he responded, “My big thought is, we desperately need capitalism in order to create interesting work to be done, for ordinary people—unless maybe we can go to war against Mars or something as an alternative.”1 A vibrant economy, in other words, depends on at least one of the following: the profit motive, war on the ground, or war in space. On September 14, 2009, just a few months after the satellite smashup and a few blocks from where the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers had stood eight years and four days earlier, President Barack Obama spoke to Wall Street movers and shakers to mark the first anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the investment firm whose bankruptcy is often presented as having triggered the avalanche of financial failures in 2008–2009.

Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953-1975
by Hannah Arendt
Published 6 Mar 2018

Thus from the start, Russian imperialism’s main concern was not how to establish the European imperial distinction between national and colonial areas, but on the contrary how to equalize conditions in the newly conquered countries quickly and radically, to bring their standard of living down to Russia’s own. Russia’s postwar expansion was not economically motivated, and even the raids by the Russian armies had only a secondary economic aim. The profit motive, which so clearly ruled overseas imperialism, is replaced here by sheer power considerations. But these considerations are not of a national character, and have little to do with Russia’s foreign policy interests as such, though it is true that for a decade the Moscow rulers seemed interested in nothing more than robbing their satellites and forcing them into grossly unfair trade agreements.

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
by Christopher Lasch
Published 16 Sep 1991

The early Walter Lippmann, New Dealers like Stuart Chase and Thurman Arnold, and Keynesian liberals like John Kenneth Galbraith argued that capitalism could be transformed from within by a corporate "technostructure," as Galbraith called it, whose interest in economic growth collided with the profit motive. The well-known study by Adolph Berle and Gardiner Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932), seemed to provide empirical underpinning for the idea of an autonomous category of industrial managers and experts by calling attention to the growing divergence between ownership of the corporation, now dispersed among a multitude of stockholders, and those who actually controlled and operated it.

The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food
by Lizzie Collingham
Published 1 Jan 2011

The growing Allied reliance on margarine to compensate for the decline in butter production, and the use of glycerine (which could be extracted from the beans) to make explosives, led to the doubling of the area under soya from 5 to 11 million hectares.52 Already in 1939 Illinois was known as the ‘Manchuria’ of the United States, producing more than one-half of America’s soya beans. The farmers complained that the crop robbed the soil of nutrients but the profit motive for growing soya was too powerful. A new, fattier bean known as the Lincoln was developed by the Illinois Agricultural Experiment Station, and the Secretary of State for Agriculture guaranteed a generous wartime price per bushel which amounted to twice that paid for corn.53 Until the Second World War Americans were resistant to the charms of margarine.

MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom
by Tony Robbins
Published 18 Nov 2014

DS: I’m basically an optimistic person, but when it comes to the world that individual investors face, it’s a mess. TR: Why is that? DS: The fundamental reason that individuals don’t have the types of choices they should have is because of the profit orientation in the mutual fund industry. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a capitalist, and I believe in profits. But there’s a fundamental conflict between the profit motive and fiduciary responsibility—because the greater the profits for the service provider, the lower the returns for the investor. TR: When we’re talking about fiduciary responsibility, not all investors even know what that means. What we’re really talking about is: you have to put investors’ interests ahead of your own.

How to Survive a Pandemic
by Michael Greger, M.D., FACLM

It still retained full antiviral activity.681 “Thus,” the researchers had concluded, “amantadine and rimantadine could be synthesized in large quantities and stored for at least one generation without loss of activity in preparation for the next influenza A pandemic in humans.”682 Not anymore, though, thanks to global poultry industry practices.683 Amantadine was no panacea—it had rare but serious side effects, and resistance may well have developed with human use as well684—but it may have been our best bet,685 a bet we gambled away. Profit Motive What about advances in medical technology? With a virus such as H5N1 and in severe cases of COVID-19, the immune system’s attack on the lungs can cause a condition called acute respiratory distress syndrome, a devastating, often lethal, inflammatory form of severe lung failure seen in other conditions such as extensive chemically seared lung burns.686 Treatment involves paralyzing the patients, producing a drug-induced coma, and mechanically ventilating them with a tube down the windpipe connected to a ventilator—that is, hooking them up to a breathing machine.

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything
by Nate Silver
Published 12 Aug 2024

When I saw it, I recalled our investigation into the modern gaming industry in chapter 3, including how casinos use algorithms to manipulate gamblers into spending more on slot machines. What if you extrapolated that outward? The commercial applications of AI are just now coming into view. OpenAI is nominally still a hybrid between a for-profit and a nonprofit, but the failed coup against Altman by the nonprofit board in November 2023[*40] made clear that the profit motive (and the loyalty of engineers like roon) will steer its direction. However, the business impacts will come soon. I already know political operatives using Meta’s open-source AI to tweak campaign messaging for 2024. Corporate profits are at record highs, and there is some evidence this is because companies are using algorithms to induce customers to spend more on categories like fast food.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond
Published 2 Jan 2008

Warren bedrock bees, as pollinators Belgian Antarctic Expedition Betancourt, Julio Bhopal chemical plant BHP mining company big business chemical industry fishing industry logging industry long-term planning in mining industry non-environmentalist reputation of oil industry pollution-intensive profit motive of and public opinion regulation of in resource extraction responsibility to shareholders Big Hole Basin biodiversity losses Bismarck Archipelago Bitterroot River, as “impaired stream,” Bitterroot Stock Farm Bjergo, Allen Bolle Report (1970) borax mining Borneo, illegal logging in Bosch, Juan bottom-up environmental management Australia Inuits New Guinea Southwestern U.S.

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power
by Steve Coll
Published 30 Apr 2012

Then there was tier four: the enemy, as some of the military veterans who manned ExxonMobil’s Washington office did not mind putting it from time to time. These were Democrats and environmental activists who, it seemed to the corporation’s executives, wanted to disenfranchise ExxonMobil and to use the corporation’s unpopularity to galvanize liberal constituents and funders. These activists did not believe in the legitimacy of the profit motive, in the estimation of some ExxonMobil executives. Senators Charles Schumer and Dick Durbin fell into this category; Senator Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, did not. Lee Raymond accepted that there was not much he could do about the company’s permanent opposition in Washington; these people were not going to change their views.

Basic Economics
by Thomas Sowell
Published 1 Jan 2000

For about a century—from the 1770s to the 1870s—most of the leading economists believed that the relative prices of goods reflected their relative costs of production, especially the amount of labor they required. What are some of the problems with that theory? (pages 607–611) 6. Explain how the presence or absence of the profit motive affects an organization’s likelihood of achieving the purpose for which it was created, to the maximum extent possible with the resources at its disposal. (pages 578–580) 7. During the era before there were laws against racial discrimination in employment, were black chemists more likely to be hired in profit-making businesses or in non-profit organizations such as colleges and universities—and why?

Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities
by Vaclav Smil
Published 23 Sep 2019

In contrast, Mokyr (2009, 122) refutes Allen’s arguments and concludes that the country became the industrial leader because it took advantage of its physical endowment “thanks to the great synergy of the Enlightenment: the combination of the Baconian program in useful knowledge and the recognition that better institutions created better incentives.” To simplify, this sets profit motivation vs. knowledge and the institutional environment as the principal agent of change. Allen sees the Enlightenment, at best, as a marginal factor, for Mokyr the Enlightenment rules. But Crafts (2010) is closer to the real explanation: those two perspectives are not mutually exclusive and they might be seen eventually as complementary.

Public Places, Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design
by Matthew Carmona , Tim Heath , Steve Tiesdell and Taner Oc
Published 15 Feb 2010

The following sections discuss the main development roles and actors and are grouped into producers, consumers and regulators. Producers Developers Developers are many and various. The term embraces a wide range of agencies, at a range of scales from, for example, volume house builders to small local house builders and self-builders, and with various levels of profit motivation, from the most profit-driven private sector developers through central and local government and other public agencies to charities and non-profit organisations. Some developers specialise in particular sectors of the market, such as retail, office, industrial or residential, while others operate across a range of markets.

Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook That Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and The...
by Sally Fallon , Pat Connolly and Mary G. Enig, Phd.
Published 14 May 1995

Gradually beat in Rapadura and vanilla. Spoonful by spoonful beat in the butter. Chill well. Assemble the cake on a decorative plate, applying icing between the layers and to the top and sides. Food quality is first determined upon the farm by the way we interact with nature and its forces. The profit motivation does not lead to quality food production. This thesis can be proved by looking into the history of modern farming in the last 100 years and into the state of affairs with our processed foods. Farming differs here from the production and marketing of industrial goods. You cannot sell cars that have grave deficiencies for very long, but you can deceive mankind for a long time with deficient food.

A History of Zionism
by Walter Laqueur
Published 1 Jan 1972

Jews could be free and equal partners only in a purely secular society; all traditional religion had therefore to be abandoned. Marx’s answer moved on an even higher level of abstraction; he was not really interested in the Jewish question as such but in the social order in general which had to be overthrown; Judaism symbolised the profit motive, egoism. Marx’s aperçus, too, would hardly be remembered today but for the person of the author. There was often an extra edge of animosity in the comments of the philosophers that cannot be explained by the general aversion to religion that was fashionable in the age of the Young Hegelians and Feuerbach.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
by Shoshana Zuboff
Published 15 Jan 2019

Capitalism has survived the longue durée less because of any specific capability and more because of its plasticity. It survives and thrives by periodically renewing its roots in the social, finding new ways to generate new wealth by meeting new needs. Its evolution has been marked by a convergence of basic principles—private property, the profit motive, and growth—but with new forms, norms, and practices in each era.72 This is precisely the lesson of Ford’s discovery and the logic behind successive episodes of revitalization over many centuries. “There is no single variety of capitalism or organization of production,” Piketty writes. “This will continue to be true in the future, no doubt more than ever: New forms of organization and ownership remain to be invented.”73 Harvard philosopher Roberto Unger enlarges on this point, arguing that market forms can take any number of distinct legal and institutional directions, “each with dramatic consequences for every aspect of social life” and “immense importance for the future of humanity.”74 When I speak to my children or an audience of young people, I try to alert them to the historically contingent nature of “the thing that has us” by calling attention to ordinary values and expectations before surveillance capitalism began its campaign of psychic numbing.

Nobody's Perfect: Writings From the New Yorker
by Anthony Lane
Published 26 Aug 2002

We know the pair of hard-core, humorless utopians who will eventually quit the house and move “to Mother Earth,” presumably asking directions along the route. We know Erik (Olle Sarri), the son of a banker and a devotee of the “Communist Marxist Leninist Revolutionary League,” who agrees to fornicate with Lena on condition that they can talk about the iniquity of the profit motive immediately afterward. And we know Klas (Shanti Roney), who says that he would “love to be a housewife,” and whose urgent quest for a man to share his bed is unduly hampered by his eerie, preemptive resemblance to Garth of Wayne’s World. Party on, Klas. Then, there are the children. If you want an unsentimental view of what an infected marriage can do to those conceived within it, try this film.

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World
by Deirdre N. McCloskey
Published 15 Nov 2011

He would have been surprised to be told it, but he used the Socratic method: he prompted the other directors and middle managers and even the foremen to identify the problems themselves and to reach by their own reasoning the solutions he had himself already determined upon. It was so deftly done that she had sometimes to temper her admiration by reminding herself that it was all directed by the profit-motive.4 Or as the German poet Rose Äuslander (1901–1988) put it, “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God. And God gave us the word, and we lived in the word. And the word is our dream, and the dream is our life.”5 * What’s the aggregate evidence? Roughly a quarter of national income, to be statistical about it, is earned from merely bourgeois and feminine persuasion—not orders or information but persuasion, changing minds.

The Fountainhead
by Ayn Rand
Published 1 Jan 1943

Under all the complications of verbiage, haven’t they all had a single leitmotif: sacrifice, renunciation, self-denial? Haven’t you been able to catch their theme song—‘Give up, give up, give up, give up’? Look at the moral atmosphere of today. Everything enjoyable, from cigarettes to sex to ambition to the profit motive, is considered depraved or sinful. Just prove that a thing makes men happy—and you’ve damned it. That’s how far we’ve come. We’ve tied happiness to guilt. And we’ve got mankind by the throat. Throw your first-born into a sacrificial furnace—lie on a bed of nails—go into the desert to mortify the flesh—don’t dance—don’t go to the movies on Sunday—don’t try to get rich—don’t smoke—don’t drink.

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
by Ron Chernow
Published 1 Jan 1997

In many ways, Rockefeller seemed a finely tuned instrument of the zeitgeist, the purest embodiment of the dynamic, acquisitive spirit of the postwar era. Like other Gilded Age moguls, he was shaped by his faith in economic progress, the beneficial application of science to industry, and America’s destiny as an economic leader. He steeled himself to persevere, subordinating his every impulse to the profit motive, working to master unruly emotions and striving for an almost Buddhist detachment from his own appetites and passions. “I had a bad temper,” Rockefeller said. “I think it might be called an ugly temper when too far provoked.” 7 So he trained himself to control this temper and tried never to be guided by ego or pique.

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914
by Richard J. Evans
Published 31 Aug 2016

Governments everywhere increasingly made efforts to improve the efficiency of agriculture, with the Russians establishing a Ministry of State Domains in 1837 to build and run model farms and set up training schools for state peasants. Local agricultural improvement societies formed by progressive-minded landowners had some influence in distributing information. But most effective of all was the profit motive, which only really took hold after the emancipation of the serfs. Even before this, landowners had begun to import British-made tools and machines such as threshers, and new improved breeds of sheep and cattle onto the Continent. By the middle of the century, a quarter of the 44 million sheep kept in European Russia were fine-wool varieties like the merino.

Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism
by Peter Marshall
Published 2 Jan 1992

Indeed, their recommendations may well prove prerequisites to survival. There are of course two main strains in anarchist economic thinking. Individualists and their contemporary counterparts, the anarcho-capitalists, rely entirely on the free market to supply public goods, and they retain the profit motive and the wage system. Social anarchists, including the collectivists, syndicalists and communists, seek to organize production for use through co-operatives, collectives, syndicates and communes. Undoubtedly real difficulties exist with the economic position of the individualists. If occupiers became owners overnight as Benjamin Tucker recommended, it would mean in practice that those with good land or houses would merely become better off than those with bad.

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First
by Frank Trentmann
Published 1 Dec 2015

Health and recreational services were not just savings now but raised the future quality of life and with it the potential to consume more later. Economists have emphasized such effects for developing nations,19 but they played a similarly important role in Western societies in the heat of industrialization. That companies had their own profit motives for introducing such services should not obscure their contribution to well-being. Many company towns were openly dedicated to what today would be called lifestyle change. Their mission was to socialize peasants and immigrants into a ‘wholesome’ pattern of consumption, not so different from what Stalinists tried in Russia in the 1930s.

Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health
by Laurie Garrett
Published 15 Feb 2000

T., 245–46 pertussis (whooping cough), 127, 173–74, 176, 294, 302, 311, 418, 419 Peters, C. J., 73–74, 107 phages technology, 646 pharmaceuticals bioweapons and, 503, 522–23 genomic medicine and, 571 inspections and, 591 and medicalized model, 581–84 neutraceuticals, 755 plague and, 32 profit motive of, 572–84, 590, 755–56 U.S., 361–63, 370–71, 377, 395–96 PHRI (Public Health Research Institute), 200, 422, 470, 670 Pintard, John, 284–85 Piot, Peter, 218, 236, 579–80 plague, 283, 551–52 antibiotics and, 21, 31, 32, 34–35, 40–41, 44, 45, 595 plague (continued) bubonic, 20–24, 26, 35–36, 41–42, 44–45, 447 in California, 314 economic consequences of, 33, 38, 41, 43–44, 46–49 hms (hemin storage) gene and, 20 in India, 20–49, 597 lack of surveillance for, 19, 24, 32, 35–37, 46, 47 mortality rates, 594–95 pneumonic, 21, 24, 26–28, 43–44 poverty and, 47 rats and fleas in, 17, 18, 19–20, 21, 24, 27, 38, 47, 127, 665 squirrels and, 665 street conditions and, 16–18, 23, 25–26, 32, 38, 40, 47 vaccine for, 523–25 weaponized, 522 Plague Laboratory, Russia, 44 Pleasure Without Risk, 229–30 pneumonia, 161, 272, 279, 298, 311, 326 pneumonic plague, 21, 24, 26–28, 43–44 Pokrovsky, Vadim, 203, 208, 224 Pokrovsky, Valentin, 203 polio in former Soviet Union, 124, 127, 176, 178–79 iron lung and, 664 natural immunization to, 660 in U.S., 302, 304–05, 312–13, 331–33, 370 pollution, 11 acid rain, 154, 162 agricultural waste, 466 air quality, 153, 154, 156, 161, 163, 183, 320–22, 330, 351, 354, 373–74, 381 Chernobyl and, 145–48, 620 data lacking on, 144–46, 147, 149–50 153, 160, 163–64 in former Soviet Union, 144–63 and immune system, 154–55, 163 industrial waste, 154–63, 183, 354–55, 466 natural food and, 354 nuclear waste, 151–52 in U.S., 320–22, 330, 354–55, 358–60, 566 water quality, 154, 183–85, 354, 435, 460, 466–67 Pomerantsev, A.

From Peoples into Nations
by John Connelly
Published 11 Nov 2019

The realism was thus not “real” but reduced people to the images required by ideology.51 Viewers were meant to feel smaller than life: surrounded and controlled by heroic and muscular figures in paintings and sculptures, or the imposing columns, entry ways, and other “neoclassical” forms that adorned the new socialist housing that went up in central Warsaw or East Berlin (though not the old Habsburg metropolises of Prague or Budapest). Because the profit motive had been abolished, workers worked for high ideals of creating socialism and making a better future for humanity. For inspiration, the party selected the most productive miners or bricklayers as hero workers, featured on giant posters, in film, and in newspapers, men and women whose enthusiasm for socialism was supposed to be contagious.

Stigum's Money Market, 4E
by Marcia Stigum and Anthony Crescenzi
Published 9 Feb 2007

In addition, speculators frequently have a herd mentality and are therefore more likely to alter their positions when commercial players ignite a change in the market’s direction. Moreover, speculators have a tendency to accumulate relatively large positions toward the end of a market trend, when they allow human nature to get the best of them by letting the profit motive dictate their actions. As a group, the noncommercial traders are most definitely among those people who give too much weight to their most recent experience and extrapolate recent trends that are at odds with long-run averages and statistical odds. Speculators tend to remember their successes more than their failures, hence prompting them to take increasingly higher levels of risk.

Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty
by Bradley K. Martin
Published 14 Oct 2004

The latter were officially keyed, to be sure, to group rather than individual performance. Even such relatively mild heresy, however, was not something the regime’s ideology permitted it to take pride in. Chinese followers of Deng Xiaoping by then had become communist in name only as they pursued economic reforms nakedly intended to unleash the individual’s profit motive, but North Koreans were still required to praise the communist ideal of selfless behavior. “All for one and one for all” was the rule. The propaganda machine promulgating such beliefs, heavy-handed though it was, still succeeded “well enough that even in 1989 North Koreans were reciting their collectivist catechism smilingly and with evident sincerity.

The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey
by Emmanuel Goldstein
Published 28 Jul 2008

There was suddenly so much more to play with. Of course, a lot of the hackers from the ’80s were now the programmers or designers of the 1990s. The Net itself, though an offshoot of the military, was largely managed with the hacker ethic—avoidance of any sort of social hierarchy whenever possible, disdain for the profit motive, strict adherence to the principles of free speech in public forums, and an almost religious devotion to UNIX. Had it played out differently— if the mainstream had somehow gotten there first or if the phone companies had been running the show from the start—I think the Net would have resembled one gigantic AOL.