More Culture and Greed

The Economist’s Opinion column contains an essay on corporate responsibility. While the article covers the subject of corporate social responsibility (CRS), it does not mention the magnitude of the shifting business environment from an industrial economy to an information economy. Specifically one might consider the abuses of the post mature monopolies valorizing legislatures and bueaurocracies to dam up the wave of technological progress, often at great harm to the common good. For instance, the media monopolies dam up cultural information in the form of art, music, and pictures, while flooding the market with cheap prurient programming. The motivation must be greed but often contrary to their best interests as well. In another instance, the old Bell companies defeat bandwidth in a myriad of ways in order to maintain their collective control of communication and the dissemination of information. In both examples the threatened incumbents engineer a planed scarcity, a practice that itself seems contrary to corporate citizenship.

The old institutions have a right to market whatever they like at whatever price, but they do not have a right to be a dog in the manger or to defeat, by illegal means, the competition that advances better cheaper offerings. The bigger the corporate crime, the less chance that the corporation will be prosecuted. The people complain, but they do not recognize this clearly anti-trust activity as a crime. As a country, our manufacturing capability is long gone. If we do not make a transition to the information economy, our technical dominance and thus our standard of living may be gone as well. Productivity is everything. Information technology leverages productivity like nothing else in history. I submit, the good company has an obligation to advance the channeling of information and communication in every way imaginable.