Ego.

[phantom power]

I think this is especially true during periods in history like ours, where a boom cycle created a lot of millionaires because -- well, everything was booming, and everybody was deregulating.

The thing to understand when trying to look at how big business works in the world is that big business is run by human beings, and they’re often human beings with giant, easily hurt egos. As Matt noted recently, one of the biggest problems with this model of business as being a completely rational profit-creation machine is that it obscures the fact that a lot of people in the top echelons of these businesses have more luck than brains. Peter Thiel of Facebook, for instance, seems like he’s a particularly dim bulb who basically pulled a winning lottery ticket by giving money to Facebook. There’s a thousand Peter Thiels who gamble and fail for every one that succeeds, but we only look at the successes and therefore draw incorrect conclusions about their rationality and intelligence. But just because Thiel got really lucky with Facebook doesn’t mean he’s a different person---he’s still a libertarian douchebag who swims in fantasies of escaping the meanie government by getting into seasteading.

Ego is a major deal in the world of business. A lot of poor decisions stem from the heavy amounts of ego-stroking and egomania amongst the power players in capitalism. Ego isn’t rational. If you ever see business mindlessly resisting perfectly reasonable government regulation, and wonder why they care so much even though it’s probably not going to hurt their bottom line that much? Ego. A lot of business people give lots of money to groups that promote the message that regulation is a “nanny state” not just because they’re feeding red meat to the plebes in order to make more money. They also eat that rhetoric up. They like the image that conservatives paint of them, as people who are the smartest and best people in the world, and therefore should be above having to follow laws. If you ever wonder why some rich assholes prefer to give all their money to libertarian organizations instead of just paying their taxes, that’s your answer. They enjoy believing they know better than the federal government what to spend money on. One of the major reasons that conservative arguments that we don’t need a social safety net because people will just give to charity is wrong is because the charities that rich people spend their money on are usually ones that are best prepared to stroke their egos. Giving to a food bank just creates moral satisfaction. Writing a giant check to a university so they can build a new building means they name it after you. Therefore, the latter has an easier time of fund-raising.

Really, if you think about it, money itself only goes so far. It’s what money buys you that makes it so attractive. And one of the biggest things money can buy a person is a relentless ego boost. Which explains why people who already have more money than they could ever hope to spend still will do everything they can, break all sorts of moral rules, to make more money. The bigger the number in the bank account, the better they feel about themselves. It’s why it’s not enough to be rich, but also to resent not-rich people who try to make a better life for themselves. Fabulous wealth looks even better when it’s compared to poverty instead of middle class comfort. Even the more generous and kind capitalists out there seem to have irrationally large egos, which is why I found it more disturbing than funny that Bill Gates won’t let his kids have iPods. It’s that kind of thinking that seems to be underlying Lamebook’s legal troubles---less that Facebook sees a threat to its profits and more that the management at Facebook cannot stand the idea that someone has an irreverent attitude towards their product.

http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/lame/

[pscot]

1. Avarice

There's a reason it's one of the 7 deadly sins.