Devil in the details

Alot of people will tell you that it’s the Devil who is responsible for all the world’s suffering. But as far as I’m concerned, the Devil doesn’t exist. I think it’s too easy to blame all the world’s problems on an external force; it frees us from introspection and lets us absolve ourselves of personal responsibility for our lot in life. I’m all for changing the world for the better; I just think that we have to first change ourselves.\nIf you look at the free-market system, it stands to reason that if a sizeable number of people desired some kind of good, someone would sell it to them in an effort to make a profit. Usually we see these sorts of goods as physical items, like cars, or services, like consulting. But these days, consumers don’t just want the good, they want the person who sells it to them to behave responsibly. And in the vein of capitalism, companies have complied.\nMaybe you’ve noticed how the sorts of advertisements that large companies run these days are increasingly about their contributions to society and the environment. It isn’t unheard of for ads to focus exclusively on that fact. And when this goes on, I must admit I like it. If people are willing to pay for companies to do good in the world, all the better.\nI never saw it as idealism. Companies exist solely to make profit, and in these charitable endeavors they hope that people will see them in a favorable light and thus buy from them more often. It’s wonderful that such a thing could happen, but it’s not due to Sony’s benevolence or Bill Gates’ big heart that these things are happening. They’re public relations causes. And that’s okay, so long as people remember that no successful company would ever voluntarily make a decision that would result in a lower long-term profit. It’s just the truth.\nBut I read an article in the Economist recently, in which they measured the financial gain of so called “corporate responsibility” and found that the results were not very considerable. It turns out that funding charities and doing right by the environment had no sizeable effect on revenue, and thus, corporate responsibility doesn’t have much of a future. \nA lot of people don’t like that. They say that corporations have an obligation to give aid. But what about us as consumers? If a company’s humanitarian or environmental efforts can’t spur us to favor them in our purchasing decisions, what does that say about us? We say that we want corporate responsibility, but when the economics of it are boiled down, the demand just isn’t there. People aren’t willing to do enough.\nI guess it’s what we deserve for trying to dress up profit-maximizing organizations as Captain Planet, but maybe in light of this failure, people will begin to see that if they really want a change, they should pressure each other, not businesses, to make it happen.