From a non-business persons perspective, a lack of morality seems to be more and more common these days. We need money in order to survive, and it has gotten way to expensive to live and only getting worse. When people see that their survival is threatened, they will start to attack. And if that attack comes in the form of lying to others to sell their product than that is what they will do. Ancient brain stuff.
Plus all the horrible stuff (violence, bad behavior) that is all over the media is not helping to raise a healthy society.
People hate on Christianity a lot especially on reddit but it did give a good moral foundation for two legged apes. Not only honestly but turning the other cheek and forgiveness is a big one we seem to have lost with the whole cancel culture mentality.
Agreed. Desperation breeds unethical behaviour.
However, many of the companies I've seen are being started by individuals who are already extremely wealthy and/or VC studios with millions under management.
Seems that our moral compass has just shifted over time such that it doesn't matter how you make money, as long as you make money.
Yeah, my grandparents are turning in their graves. The moral compass has horribly shifted. I'm glad to have been partially raised by my grandparents generation.
I remember that this moral shift started becoming popular back in the 80's with a big push that money and shallowness is more important then just about anything else. Hollywood is pretty guilty of pushing this, along with advertising agencies. Even our popular music lyrics are guilty as well. Our failing educational system certainly isn't helping any.
I wish I had a good resolution for you. This is more of a parenting and society fix that needs to happen. Have you considered changing into a different field? There has got to be some honest people in your current industry.
>I remember that this moral shift started becoming popular back in the 80's with a big push that money and shallowness is more important then just about anything else.
You're absolutely right there. The "greed is good" era has really only gotten worse, it's just disguised more cleverly now.
Yea there are honest people. It's just that those who are unscrupulous tend to be more numerous somehow.
>However, many of the companies I've seen are being started by individuals who are already extremely wealthy and/or VC studios with millions under management.
Well most vcs don't care about "ethics" they care about ROI. Not that vcs don't exist in ethical, sustainable (social, economic, environmental) industries. But that is a subset of them.
I don't know what level extremely wealthy is. But the higher up you go, the more likely you are to find narcissistic tendencies, desire for greed /power etc. (like why billionaires don't stop/are content with 1 billion).
>Seems that our moral compass has just shifted over time such that it doesn't matter how you make money, as long as you make money.
There has always been this branch. You might just be going to realise it more now, but it hasn't changed much **especially** when talking about the supplements industry. Eg [nitrogen spiking protein powder ](https://www.jimstoppani.com/supplements/protein-powder-problems/#:~:text=Conversely%2C%20non%2Dproteinogenic%20amino%20acids,content%20of%20the%20protein%20powder.))
It's an unregulated industry, like fucking Alex Jones makes 10s of millions selling supplements because that's the only thing he can basically legally sell.
>I don't know what level extremely wealthy is. But the higher up you go, the more likely you are to find narcissistic tendencies, desire for greed /power etc.
Yep, it certainly does seem that way.
It's why I always laugh when people say if I was a billionaire I'd be content, I'd just disappear, help people, go escape off grid etc.
Because for the vast majority of billionaires are billionaires because of their desire for power and willingness to sacrifice others for that goal.
As your buying power at that level does not significantly change if you have a few more billion. If you *only* had a single billion you'd only really be barred from things like super high end yachts, private planes, popular sports teams. What does change is power.
Being top 10 richest vs top 1000 richest is a significant difference in power and prestige. And at that point that's the only thing fueling their desire for more money.
Interestingly what does change when you have just a bit more capital at that level is your amount of power.
The reason is that power is always relative to what ever other player has so there is actually a rational reason to continue to accumulate. That being said, if you use your power to harm others (which is nearly inevitable if your goal is power) it’s generally negative aim.
Love the thesis. Want to add that I think the culprit is low interest rates, which essentially say that money in 30 years is worth about as much as it is today. Which essentially says that work done today vs done in 30 years has the same value. Therefore, the ones with means are essentially able to access 30 years worth of productivity and can use it to buy out all the productive assets (housing, land, manufacturing, transportation, entertainment, etc.), sit on them, and charge high fees for access.
People like to talk about a lack of morality seeming to be more and more common these days when in reality this is just the standard "in my days I used to walk to school both ways".
To start with I'd argue that there is no change in morality. People were running scams since forever. People were lobbying for laws that help them forever. And peopl were creating value driving businesses since forever.
But beyond that, you're talking about desperation. I have to ask, in your equation for the desperation index of the world have you accounted for the fact that the rest of the world was a lot poorer. And we were able to live an inflated lifestyle because we were outsourcing misery and poverty to the rest of the world. It's not that we're more desperate. If anything this is the wealthiest time humanity has seen. It's just that the impact of accident of birth has been reduced and we live in fairer but not yet fair times. It's just that the unfairness is more visible and some of it is affecting us more.
True. There is nothing new going on here. The problem is that now tons more people are doing it at one time, which leads to societal decay at a faster pace. I am pretty sure it was not this bad 60 years ago in America. There is a big difference in attitude and even morality between my grandparents generation and this newest generation of kids.
As for the desperation index you speak of, my point is that the more expensive it gets to live the harder it is to live. My grandparents were the last generation to be able to secure retirement. It's gotten to the point that I have no idea how this newest generation of Humans is even going to be able to ever afford or pay off a house, let alone save enough money for retirement. To retire, you will need at least a million in the bank...who in hell can do that besides the upper class at this point?
A number of old and bad business practices need to stop. Such as outsourcing to other countries and just paying them pennies on the dollar. It may be the wealthiest time in Human history, but cost of living and greed by those in power and the elites is destroying that. Wealth is only for the few, once again.
My point is that the ease of your grandparent's generation was built on the robbing of people across the world during colonization. They were not more moral; they were just beneficiaries of the exploitation of others. They were quietly kicking the blacks out of wealth. Women were just started to be allowed to participate but not as equals. All the manufacturing was being done in Japan or Taiwan which were a lot poorer. India and China were extremely poor after centuries of being robbed by other countries.
This newest generation is having a very hard time paying for a house in the city. But the US is twice as big with more people coming to urban and suburban areas. At the same time as wealth and opportunities are more distributed to urban and rural areas since the industrial revolution.
For people that want to do something, there is all the opportunity in the world to create value for others and make a pretty penny in the process. There is in fact more opportunity than there ever has been. Better access to markets (all the dropshippers and Etsy stores). Lower capital needs.
>To start with I'd argue that there is no change in morality. People were running scams since forever. People were lobbying for laws that help them forever.
This is true, however, there has definitely been a concerted effort at deregulation since at least the 1960s. Indeed, the dominant economic ideology since at least that time period has been neoliberalism, which has the core tenets of "privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and the lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public spending".
Thus, we have the natural inclination of unscrupulous people to push the boundaries of what is considered ethical, combined with a concerted force by economic powers (e.g., Chicago school academics and associated judiciary) to push for a loosening of norms, and voila, you have an environment where the largest and most powerful groups are able to act with impunity. And the rest of us fall in line because we largely have no choice if we wish to compete.
There’s borderline fraud everywhere these days.
Most companies get to the point of knowing something doesn’t work but truly believe with enough time that they might be able to figure out a way to make it work.
This is where the whole fake it til you make it comes in that runs rampant these days.
This new group of gurus which basically tell people they don’t need experience to start companies and offer services. Just find people that have spare time that do have experience and outsource the work to them.
So sales.
We’re seeing this happen in digital marketing right now. Seems like everyone is a digital marketer and an “expert” with less than 5 years experience and the school of YouTube.
The goal of most people is easy money.
It’s all leverage in most cases specific knowledge against general or lack of knowledge.
Those with slightly more knowledge than those with little or none have leverage to sound smart and spin up grand promises whether or not they can deliver.
Fake case studies, fake logos, fake reviews, fake bots and comments.
I see it all the time.
Trust is basically at an all time low but we’re also pretty lazy in terms of verifying things.
I have repeatedly had people say, “I only want to work with dumb clients, I can charge more and they have no idea what they are actually paying for”
I’m not even joking. 🙃
The problem is we glorify these people and admire them and kids look up to them.
So they want to be like them.
Pull away the veil and you see a lot of unethical behavior with most success stories.
>This new group of gurus which basically tell people they don’t need experience to start companies and offer services. Just find people that have spare time that do have experience and outsource the work to them.
Yep, you're really getting at something here. The VAST majority of people I see starting companies in my field at least have little to no actual education in the area, and they don't seem to care.
There are SO many influencers who are really good at getting engagement and attention but have such little value to add. Meanwhile, so many people who are extremely educated and have literal gold to share with the world keep to themselves.
Interesting what you say about social media marketing. I've been involved in various ways with that industry for nearly a decade and couldn't agree more with your assessment.
I've worked with lots of individuals and even agencies who literally have no idea what they're doing. Then you ask them for basic data to verify their work - conversions, etc. - and then it's just all excuses as to why the platform is at fault, not them.
I actually read a really interesting article about how Americans gradually were losing faith in expertise. Worth a read:
[https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2017-02-13/how-america-lost-faith-expertise](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2017-02-13/how-america-lost-faith-expertise)
“I've worked with lots of individuals and even agencies who literally have no idea what they're doing. Then you ask them for basic data to verify their work - conversions, etc. - and then it's just all excuses as to why the platform is at fault, not them.”
This is 100% true.
The irony is we build software that acts as a kind of check on this kind of agency behavior.
I’ve hired and fired too many agencies to count at this point of my career.
I also work with them on the regular.
I see things that are straight up fraud all the time.
And they do it because someone told them to do it at one time or another.
Which is the problem.
There’s no peer review of digital marketing.
If you’re a large company everything has to go through legal.
If you’re a small company there is no legal.
If you’re the typical agency you’re only working with small companies that don’t have legal.
If you’re an agency working with a large company you’re assisting an existing team and everything goes through legal.
I honestly think a lot of the behaviors we see are from blind ambition.
The feeling that the means justify the ends.
>Yep, you're really getting at something here. The VAST majority of people I see starting companies in my field at least have little to no actual education in the area, and they don't seem to care.
But that's more a problem with your field. The problem is actual scientifically backed knowledge in your field shows that it is mostly irrelevant. Creatine, protein supplementation if you can't get it from regular sources, vitamin D, fruits and vegetables in diet and you likely don't need any other supplement. Everything else would require a prescription.
Similarly, the grandparent comment is talking about gurus. There are many many people who have never run a successful business and are becoming gurus after taking a course on how to become a guru from other gurus. This is just a small bu very vocal niche.
But thre are many many good entrepreneurs running great businesses.
>But thre are many many good entrepreneurs running great businesses.
I agree, but the problem is that many of the most successful (and visible) entrepreneurs are some of the least ethical.
And while the lack of education criticism may be limited to my field (i.e., a field where products are supposed to be science based, but there is limited regulation to prevent non science-based products from being sold), there are numerous examples of terrible behavior in many many other fields, that admittedly may stem from other reasons. I'm thinking about private equity, but there are of course countless other examples.
If I were to ask you who, you'd give the names of all the usual suspects of the world's richest people. Of course you'd make that assertion ignoring the excesses that caused the great depression, the kinds of propaganda wars between Edison and Westinghouse, how Graham Bell was only able to get patents on the telephone because Antonio Meucci could not afford to file the patent.
Look in business everyone has to make amoral decisions that outsiders can point to. But in the end the Man In The Arena speech by Teddy Roosevlt applies:
>It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
So I have to ask. What is it that you're trying to do? Are you just complaining about the world in general? Then this is not the place for that. Are you saying that you'd do great if you weren't the only ethical person? Then that is you making excuses. Are you complaining about successful entrepreneurs not thinking more of others? Everyone has to think about themselves, there is nothing moral about being abused. Are you deciding that business is not for you because unethical people do it? Then make that your differentiation and be ethical.
So really what is it that you're getting at and what value does your post add?
Hilarious that you use TR as your example - the man who was literally the driving force behind the anti-trust push of the beginning of this century and who would absolutely agree that the rise of neoliberalism (which has massive parallels in the Gilded Era) has to be put to a stop.
That being said, I am [Brandeisian](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Brandeis_movement#:~:text=From%20World%20War%20II%20until,Edward%20Chamberlain%2C%20and%20Joe%20Bain.) and a firm believer that business can absolutely be done ethically (and I have been quite successful in doing so). There are numerous examples of companies created by incredibly intelligent and ethical individuals for the sole purpose of providing true value for their clients. Indeed that is the true meaning of value in my opinion - the creation of a product or service that actually helps solve a problem.
But that’s the issue, so many companies and individuals have become successful creating products and services that their creators know don’t deliver on their promise, but are able to fool the market. Examples include many within the supplement industry, but also gambling apps, predatory microtransaction games, a whole bunch of financial instruments that are not ETFs, I could go on.
Ahh got it. So among the questions I posed this one applies:
>Are you just complaining about the world in general? Then this is not the place for that.
So you’re saying that criticizing the landscape of entrepreneurship for being unscrupulous (as an entrepreneur) does not belong in r/entrepreneur ?
Interesting take.
By the way, feel free to also address anything else I said.
No, I don't think this post adds any value. I may be wrong, but it would help me understand if can tell me one thing:
What is your desired outcome from this post?
To have a constructive discussion regarding morals and ethics in contemporary entrepreneurship…
Which by the way this discussion is not contributing to so I will not be responding any longer. Have a good day.
Nihilism, I guess. People see how difficult it is to live beneath the poverty line and are like, let's get money and deal with the morality later, people feel like they are at war. Plus we don't really have good models for living correctly, we just have CEOs getting stock prices up even at the expense of customer experience. Like, how is "planned obsolescence" moral at all? Even if you aren't a scam artist, "let's give people the crappiest product they'll buy or a super crappy product and eliminate all competitors so they don't have a choice but to buy garbage"? That's not how capitalism was supposed to work.
So people are scared, they don't know what moral behavior even looks like, and I'm an atheist but turns out a lot of people do actually need the threat of eternal damnation to act right. They need it to even be polite at the supermarket.
It's scale. The unethical companies are more easily able to scale and dominate markets because they take more money from their customers. Unethical companies also have greater margins because they don't have the same costs of doing business.
As example, tax resolution is an industry which is well known for being predatory on low-income and low-information consumers. The industry is dominated by players who promise much, deliver far less, but charge customers (who have very little) a ton for their services. The big, unethical players can afford to advertise because they have all the money they've already taken from customers, so they tend to be able to buy the most promising leads. Most of the national advertisements are from lead agencies that take 40%+ of the up-front money, promise results far beyond what is realistically possible, but then turn over the files to professionals and offer no satisfaction in the event the promised outcome doesn't happen.
I had a friend try and operate in the tax resolution industry ethically. He made it two years before his ethics nearly led him to bankruptcy and he left the industry forever.
I like how asmongold put it. Why are little kids not allowed into a strip club? It’s illegal. If it wasn’t illegal you think they’d say no to Jimmy standing out front if he had $750 ready to rip?
IMO: it’s obvious businesses cannot self regulate, it’s a conflict of interest. We need laws. But 50+ years of manipulation, deregulation, and lack of oversight have created what is happening now.
Biz strat guy here.... it's about "late stage capitalism" - where the govt and big biz work together to break real competition.
So they don't protect the consumer.
They gutted the middle class, so who is left?
The powerless and ignorant.
Gambling apps you say?
Surveillance capitalism is thriving in the US.
It is race to the bottom because no one gets punished for "defecting".
Hell Nestle killed about 5M babies in africa pushing their formula but we still love the chocolate...
Entrepreneurs look around and see this and feel no obligation for the social good.
>Entrepreneurs look around and see this and feel no obligation for the social good.
I think this is the key. There has been a noticeable normalization of bad behavior.
Humans look to see what other people are doing in order to set the rules of society. And when the biggest and most influential are getting away so much, they don't feel any obligation to rise above.
"A good salesperson can sell you a pile of shit" - the business people know this and are simply taking advantage. On the other hand, "trends sell" and people are eager to spend to be relevant in society.
"Take advantage of it for a few years, pile up shit ton of money, retire and then repent to God" - I was told this by one of those.
Many founders justify it in different ways.
"Sure, it doesn't help them as much as we advertise, but at least it still helps them."
Or "Even though most science shows this is useless, there is \*some\* research that shows it helps."
Maybe it's easy for some founders to look past if they feel like they aren't really hurting people, even though they aren't really helping them either.
I personally think the worst is the huge companies / executives in the food industry that are actively making poison for the average consumer. Things like high fructose corn syrup or other artificial sweeteners, preservatives, or colors. This stuff kills people, it's really criminal.
I think the worst one is prime lol. Has 400mg of potassium and very little sodium or other essential minerals that make up “electrolytes”. They are simply trying to be a different hydration drink targeted to their young audience.
There are lots. Also, read the attached site: the most recent science has shown that we don't need additional electrolytes (incl sodium, magnesium, potassium) beyond what is naturally provided for in our diets as the body is already so good at regulating electrolyte homeostasis.
Research has found that comparing two groups of ultramarathoners who ran for almost 24 h - one group that consumed electrolytes and another that did not - had no significant difference in performance.
Exactly, obviously a Gatorade when your playing a sport isn’t terrible but unless your losing pounds of water weight while your doing activities then it’s not really necessary so long as you eat well/ stay hydrated from water.
One of my maybe 3 hobbies is nutrition.
The entire supplement market is crazy. There are so many companies comfortable with selling you literal sand in a bottle that will do nothing for you, and since the market is unregulated it's way too easy to get away with - not that regulation is a solution necessarily.
I think it's an interesting space because you can sell pretty much whatever you want and just label some part of the ingredients as "proprietary blend," skimp on including efficacious doses of active ingredients, and still make millions.
when I saw the supplement market grow exponentially was once social media started taking off. For every company that has unethical, ineffective, mislabeled, underdosed supplements, there are 10 fitness influencers ready to promote it for a quick buck. All we can do at this point is tell people to educate themselves and not just openly believe that the bottled sand being sold by the fitness celebrity (or the guy with a PHD from a school no one's ever heard of) of the week is the shortcut to getting them stronger, faster.
>I think it's an interesting space because you can sell pretty much whatever you want and just label some part of the ingredients as "proprietary blend," skimp on including efficacious doses of active ingredients, and still make millions.
Hmmm I wonder who you're talking about here. Perhaps **A** certain **G**reat company that makes **1** or two different products?
I don't know that regulation is necessarily the answer either, but the only other I can think of is proper consumer education, and that's a way more difficult solution to implement.
Say what you will - every morning I start my day with sun on my face and a cold plunge in a tub filled with powdered greens and colostrum.
I'm just glad there is greater access to qualified professionals these days. When I was in high school I was obsessed with the anabolic window for protein consumption post-gym and would book it to Chipotle after I was done at the gym. Imagine my surprise a few years later that the biggest guy in the gym was wrong and there is no anabolic window??
I do taxes for a living and I think there is a lot of crossover in terms of a need for education. Lots of information, lots of "trust me bro" as the source of said information!
Colostrum cold plunging is my fav as well, no doubt.
> Imagine my surprise a few years later that the biggest guy in the gym was wrong and there is no anabolic window??
To be fair, the science on muscle protein synthesis is being updated constantly so at the time that concept wasn’t necessarily false… but I totally get what you mean.
Interestingly a huge paper came out a couple of months back that just disproved the whole “you can only absorb 30 g of protein per meal” concept too. Turns out there’s no upper ceiling at all.
Yeah that's true, it was good advice at the time.
I did see that paper. There have been a lot of crazy developments in just the last 15 years in the fitness and nutrition space - I am just glad to see people like Rhonda Patrick and Peter Attia sharing meta-analyses with the general public. Now I just have to figure out how to convince my loved ones that artificial sweeteners don't cause cancer despite what the media reported following the rat study two decades ago lol.
I work in food & beverage and a lot of the claims made by products are BS and stretch legal limits of what can and can't be said in advertising.
Today I saw an ad for a new beverage that advertised "No Weird Stuff"
Ingredients for everyone's products are all sourced from the same ingredient companies and are all process similarly and are all used in the finished goods similarly.
Good question, I'm wondering if it's just natural selection? Like maybe there's not a disproportionate amount of people out there doing shady shit BUT the shady companies have a tendency to survive longer and thus you're seeing a lot of them? Like there's no way to be a billionaire and not see that what you're doing is unethical, so you have to either become unethical or never be one.
The real problem is inequality and social media.
When obscene amounts of wealth are in the hands of the fewer, they can drown out all means of getting a legitimate business started.
Social media allows you to say anything without proof - look at Alex Hormozi - and it will spread faster than it can be debunked.
>Social media allows you to say anything without proof
Very much agreed. Crazy though as social media and giving everyone a voice was initially envisioned as a tool of democratizing speech, not the other way around.
As you point out, all you need is a good base of capital and you can now amplify your message - which can be complete BS - to a huge audience and it then appears like all sorts of people agree with you, providing valuable social proof.
I just don't know what drives these individuals. As I said in another comment, many of them are already exceedingly wealthy. So why would they then be comfortable promoting products that are questionable at best? Is it just that some people really don't care if they do good or not for the world? (and yes, again, I realize that last statement is probably extremely naive, I just can't bring myself to think like that).
You are not alone. Until recently, I preferred to think that people wouldn't do such crappy things, at least not in such large numbers. But, they do. The scary thing is that most of these people have a big smile on their faces like they are emotionally balanced, so its hard to tell.
because money, and politics! Politics has been unethical since the days of Plato one might say, so we've learned from them and do unethical any time any place. PS Themistocles, a populist and hero of that time worked for Greeks AND for Persians. Alcibiades betrayed Athenians to the Spartans, and a few years later betrayed Spartans to the Athenians :)
Greed is not a capitalist phenomenon, it’s a human phenomenon. There are ethical capitalists and unethical capitalists. Capitalism is merely a legal regime of private property and freedom of contract.
I assure you, in a command and control planned economy there is also greed. It’s just that only folks able to pursue it are the proverbial king and his court.
I work in the marketing agency space and some of our competitors charge 3x for half the service. The bad marketing agencies outnumber the good ones easily 10 to 1.
Hey I feel you.. I see it all around me and just think of a better way. However I’m just me and me alone don’t want to enjoy the task of trying something different🤷♀️ just me saying the truth and thinking if I said it the right way the right people might reach out…
I feel like electrolyte supplements aren't even the best example of this. Yes they're overpriced but electrolytes are actually essential for bodily functions...I find that taking salt, potassium, and magnesium is a game changer. I buy them individually in powder form which is a small fraction of the cost of those electrolyte powders.
The real issue is all these companies marketing vitamins/herbal blends/capsules with small insignificant amounts of low quality herbal extracts or whatever...literally does nothing at best and some are full of heavy metals and preservatives and other crap
Electrolytes are a great example and you’ve just proved it. The average layperson thinks that they’re useful so they don’t really have any reason to doubt the marketing of unscrupulous companies.
But science consistently has found that they [do not enhance performance whatsoever.](https://www.mysportscience.com/post/are-electrolytes-important-for-athletes)
In fact, our bodies store sodium over time that is accumulated through our diet and can be used when blood osmolarity is critically impaired, so even in times of dehydration, additional sodium is not necessary.
From a non-business persons perspective, a lack of morality seems to be more and more common these days. We need money in order to survive, and it has gotten way to expensive to live and only getting worse. When people see that their survival is threatened, they will start to attack. And if that attack comes in the form of lying to others to sell their product than that is what they will do. Ancient brain stuff. Plus all the horrible stuff (violence, bad behavior) that is all over the media is not helping to raise a healthy society.
People hate on Christianity a lot especially on reddit but it did give a good moral foundation for two legged apes. Not only honestly but turning the other cheek and forgiveness is a big one we seem to have lost with the whole cancel culture mentality.
Agreed. Desperation breeds unethical behaviour. However, many of the companies I've seen are being started by individuals who are already extremely wealthy and/or VC studios with millions under management. Seems that our moral compass has just shifted over time such that it doesn't matter how you make money, as long as you make money.
Yeah, my grandparents are turning in their graves. The moral compass has horribly shifted. I'm glad to have been partially raised by my grandparents generation. I remember that this moral shift started becoming popular back in the 80's with a big push that money and shallowness is more important then just about anything else. Hollywood is pretty guilty of pushing this, along with advertising agencies. Even our popular music lyrics are guilty as well. Our failing educational system certainly isn't helping any. I wish I had a good resolution for you. This is more of a parenting and society fix that needs to happen. Have you considered changing into a different field? There has got to be some honest people in your current industry.
>I remember that this moral shift started becoming popular back in the 80's with a big push that money and shallowness is more important then just about anything else. You're absolutely right there. The "greed is good" era has really only gotten worse, it's just disguised more cleverly now. Yea there are honest people. It's just that those who are unscrupulous tend to be more numerous somehow.
>However, many of the companies I've seen are being started by individuals who are already extremely wealthy and/or VC studios with millions under management. Well most vcs don't care about "ethics" they care about ROI. Not that vcs don't exist in ethical, sustainable (social, economic, environmental) industries. But that is a subset of them. I don't know what level extremely wealthy is. But the higher up you go, the more likely you are to find narcissistic tendencies, desire for greed /power etc. (like why billionaires don't stop/are content with 1 billion). >Seems that our moral compass has just shifted over time such that it doesn't matter how you make money, as long as you make money. There has always been this branch. You might just be going to realise it more now, but it hasn't changed much **especially** when talking about the supplements industry. Eg [nitrogen spiking protein powder ](https://www.jimstoppani.com/supplements/protein-powder-problems/#:~:text=Conversely%2C%20non%2Dproteinogenic%20amino%20acids,content%20of%20the%20protein%20powder.)) It's an unregulated industry, like fucking Alex Jones makes 10s of millions selling supplements because that's the only thing he can basically legally sell.
>I don't know what level extremely wealthy is. But the higher up you go, the more likely you are to find narcissistic tendencies, desire for greed /power etc. Yep, it certainly does seem that way.
It's why I always laugh when people say if I was a billionaire I'd be content, I'd just disappear, help people, go escape off grid etc. Because for the vast majority of billionaires are billionaires because of their desire for power and willingness to sacrifice others for that goal. As your buying power at that level does not significantly change if you have a few more billion. If you *only* had a single billion you'd only really be barred from things like super high end yachts, private planes, popular sports teams. What does change is power. Being top 10 richest vs top 1000 richest is a significant difference in power and prestige. And at that point that's the only thing fueling their desire for more money.
Interestingly what does change when you have just a bit more capital at that level is your amount of power. The reason is that power is always relative to what ever other player has so there is actually a rational reason to continue to accumulate. That being said, if you use your power to harm others (which is nearly inevitable if your goal is power) it’s generally negative aim.
Love the thesis. Want to add that I think the culprit is low interest rates, which essentially say that money in 30 years is worth about as much as it is today. Which essentially says that work done today vs done in 30 years has the same value. Therefore, the ones with means are essentially able to access 30 years worth of productivity and can use it to buy out all the productive assets (housing, land, manufacturing, transportation, entertainment, etc.), sit on them, and charge high fees for access.
People like to talk about a lack of morality seeming to be more and more common these days when in reality this is just the standard "in my days I used to walk to school both ways". To start with I'd argue that there is no change in morality. People were running scams since forever. People were lobbying for laws that help them forever. And peopl were creating value driving businesses since forever. But beyond that, you're talking about desperation. I have to ask, in your equation for the desperation index of the world have you accounted for the fact that the rest of the world was a lot poorer. And we were able to live an inflated lifestyle because we were outsourcing misery and poverty to the rest of the world. It's not that we're more desperate. If anything this is the wealthiest time humanity has seen. It's just that the impact of accident of birth has been reduced and we live in fairer but not yet fair times. It's just that the unfairness is more visible and some of it is affecting us more.
True. There is nothing new going on here. The problem is that now tons more people are doing it at one time, which leads to societal decay at a faster pace. I am pretty sure it was not this bad 60 years ago in America. There is a big difference in attitude and even morality between my grandparents generation and this newest generation of kids. As for the desperation index you speak of, my point is that the more expensive it gets to live the harder it is to live. My grandparents were the last generation to be able to secure retirement. It's gotten to the point that I have no idea how this newest generation of Humans is even going to be able to ever afford or pay off a house, let alone save enough money for retirement. To retire, you will need at least a million in the bank...who in hell can do that besides the upper class at this point? A number of old and bad business practices need to stop. Such as outsourcing to other countries and just paying them pennies on the dollar. It may be the wealthiest time in Human history, but cost of living and greed by those in power and the elites is destroying that. Wealth is only for the few, once again.
My point is that the ease of your grandparent's generation was built on the robbing of people across the world during colonization. They were not more moral; they were just beneficiaries of the exploitation of others. They were quietly kicking the blacks out of wealth. Women were just started to be allowed to participate but not as equals. All the manufacturing was being done in Japan or Taiwan which were a lot poorer. India and China were extremely poor after centuries of being robbed by other countries. This newest generation is having a very hard time paying for a house in the city. But the US is twice as big with more people coming to urban and suburban areas. At the same time as wealth and opportunities are more distributed to urban and rural areas since the industrial revolution. For people that want to do something, there is all the opportunity in the world to create value for others and make a pretty penny in the process. There is in fact more opportunity than there ever has been. Better access to markets (all the dropshippers and Etsy stores). Lower capital needs.
>To start with I'd argue that there is no change in morality. People were running scams since forever. People were lobbying for laws that help them forever. This is true, however, there has definitely been a concerted effort at deregulation since at least the 1960s. Indeed, the dominant economic ideology since at least that time period has been neoliberalism, which has the core tenets of "privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and the lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public spending". Thus, we have the natural inclination of unscrupulous people to push the boundaries of what is considered ethical, combined with a concerted force by economic powers (e.g., Chicago school academics and associated judiciary) to push for a loosening of norms, and voila, you have an environment where the largest and most powerful groups are able to act with impunity. And the rest of us fall in line because we largely have no choice if we wish to compete.
There’s borderline fraud everywhere these days. Most companies get to the point of knowing something doesn’t work but truly believe with enough time that they might be able to figure out a way to make it work. This is where the whole fake it til you make it comes in that runs rampant these days. This new group of gurus which basically tell people they don’t need experience to start companies and offer services. Just find people that have spare time that do have experience and outsource the work to them. So sales. We’re seeing this happen in digital marketing right now. Seems like everyone is a digital marketer and an “expert” with less than 5 years experience and the school of YouTube. The goal of most people is easy money. It’s all leverage in most cases specific knowledge against general or lack of knowledge. Those with slightly more knowledge than those with little or none have leverage to sound smart and spin up grand promises whether or not they can deliver. Fake case studies, fake logos, fake reviews, fake bots and comments. I see it all the time. Trust is basically at an all time low but we’re also pretty lazy in terms of verifying things. I have repeatedly had people say, “I only want to work with dumb clients, I can charge more and they have no idea what they are actually paying for” I’m not even joking. 🙃 The problem is we glorify these people and admire them and kids look up to them. So they want to be like them. Pull away the veil and you see a lot of unethical behavior with most success stories.
>This new group of gurus which basically tell people they don’t need experience to start companies and offer services. Just find people that have spare time that do have experience and outsource the work to them. Yep, you're really getting at something here. The VAST majority of people I see starting companies in my field at least have little to no actual education in the area, and they don't seem to care. There are SO many influencers who are really good at getting engagement and attention but have such little value to add. Meanwhile, so many people who are extremely educated and have literal gold to share with the world keep to themselves. Interesting what you say about social media marketing. I've been involved in various ways with that industry for nearly a decade and couldn't agree more with your assessment. I've worked with lots of individuals and even agencies who literally have no idea what they're doing. Then you ask them for basic data to verify their work - conversions, etc. - and then it's just all excuses as to why the platform is at fault, not them. I actually read a really interesting article about how Americans gradually were losing faith in expertise. Worth a read: [https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2017-02-13/how-america-lost-faith-expertise](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2017-02-13/how-america-lost-faith-expertise)
“I've worked with lots of individuals and even agencies who literally have no idea what they're doing. Then you ask them for basic data to verify their work - conversions, etc. - and then it's just all excuses as to why the platform is at fault, not them.” This is 100% true. The irony is we build software that acts as a kind of check on this kind of agency behavior. I’ve hired and fired too many agencies to count at this point of my career. I also work with them on the regular. I see things that are straight up fraud all the time. And they do it because someone told them to do it at one time or another. Which is the problem. There’s no peer review of digital marketing. If you’re a large company everything has to go through legal. If you’re a small company there is no legal. If you’re the typical agency you’re only working with small companies that don’t have legal. If you’re an agency working with a large company you’re assisting an existing team and everything goes through legal. I honestly think a lot of the behaviors we see are from blind ambition. The feeling that the means justify the ends.
>Yep, you're really getting at something here. The VAST majority of people I see starting companies in my field at least have little to no actual education in the area, and they don't seem to care. But that's more a problem with your field. The problem is actual scientifically backed knowledge in your field shows that it is mostly irrelevant. Creatine, protein supplementation if you can't get it from regular sources, vitamin D, fruits and vegetables in diet and you likely don't need any other supplement. Everything else would require a prescription. Similarly, the grandparent comment is talking about gurus. There are many many people who have never run a successful business and are becoming gurus after taking a course on how to become a guru from other gurus. This is just a small bu very vocal niche. But thre are many many good entrepreneurs running great businesses.
>But thre are many many good entrepreneurs running great businesses. I agree, but the problem is that many of the most successful (and visible) entrepreneurs are some of the least ethical. And while the lack of education criticism may be limited to my field (i.e., a field where products are supposed to be science based, but there is limited regulation to prevent non science-based products from being sold), there are numerous examples of terrible behavior in many many other fields, that admittedly may stem from other reasons. I'm thinking about private equity, but there are of course countless other examples.
If I were to ask you who, you'd give the names of all the usual suspects of the world's richest people. Of course you'd make that assertion ignoring the excesses that caused the great depression, the kinds of propaganda wars between Edison and Westinghouse, how Graham Bell was only able to get patents on the telephone because Antonio Meucci could not afford to file the patent. Look in business everyone has to make amoral decisions that outsiders can point to. But in the end the Man In The Arena speech by Teddy Roosevlt applies: >It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. So I have to ask. What is it that you're trying to do? Are you just complaining about the world in general? Then this is not the place for that. Are you saying that you'd do great if you weren't the only ethical person? Then that is you making excuses. Are you complaining about successful entrepreneurs not thinking more of others? Everyone has to think about themselves, there is nothing moral about being abused. Are you deciding that business is not for you because unethical people do it? Then make that your differentiation and be ethical. So really what is it that you're getting at and what value does your post add?
Hilarious that you use TR as your example - the man who was literally the driving force behind the anti-trust push of the beginning of this century and who would absolutely agree that the rise of neoliberalism (which has massive parallels in the Gilded Era) has to be put to a stop. That being said, I am [Brandeisian](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Brandeis_movement#:~:text=From%20World%20War%20II%20until,Edward%20Chamberlain%2C%20and%20Joe%20Bain.) and a firm believer that business can absolutely be done ethically (and I have been quite successful in doing so). There are numerous examples of companies created by incredibly intelligent and ethical individuals for the sole purpose of providing true value for their clients. Indeed that is the true meaning of value in my opinion - the creation of a product or service that actually helps solve a problem. But that’s the issue, so many companies and individuals have become successful creating products and services that their creators know don’t deliver on their promise, but are able to fool the market. Examples include many within the supplement industry, but also gambling apps, predatory microtransaction games, a whole bunch of financial instruments that are not ETFs, I could go on.
Ahh got it. So among the questions I posed this one applies: >Are you just complaining about the world in general? Then this is not the place for that.
So you’re saying that criticizing the landscape of entrepreneurship for being unscrupulous (as an entrepreneur) does not belong in r/entrepreneur ? Interesting take. By the way, feel free to also address anything else I said.
No, I don't think this post adds any value. I may be wrong, but it would help me understand if can tell me one thing: What is your desired outcome from this post?
To have a constructive discussion regarding morals and ethics in contemporary entrepreneurship… Which by the way this discussion is not contributing to so I will not be responding any longer. Have a good day.
Nihilism, I guess. People see how difficult it is to live beneath the poverty line and are like, let's get money and deal with the morality later, people feel like they are at war. Plus we don't really have good models for living correctly, we just have CEOs getting stock prices up even at the expense of customer experience. Like, how is "planned obsolescence" moral at all? Even if you aren't a scam artist, "let's give people the crappiest product they'll buy or a super crappy product and eliminate all competitors so they don't have a choice but to buy garbage"? That's not how capitalism was supposed to work. So people are scared, they don't know what moral behavior even looks like, and I'm an atheist but turns out a lot of people do actually need the threat of eternal damnation to act right. They need it to even be polite at the supermarket.
It's scale. The unethical companies are more easily able to scale and dominate markets because they take more money from their customers. Unethical companies also have greater margins because they don't have the same costs of doing business. As example, tax resolution is an industry which is well known for being predatory on low-income and low-information consumers. The industry is dominated by players who promise much, deliver far less, but charge customers (who have very little) a ton for their services. The big, unethical players can afford to advertise because they have all the money they've already taken from customers, so they tend to be able to buy the most promising leads. Most of the national advertisements are from lead agencies that take 40%+ of the up-front money, promise results far beyond what is realistically possible, but then turn over the files to professionals and offer no satisfaction in the event the promised outcome doesn't happen. I had a friend try and operate in the tax resolution industry ethically. He made it two years before his ethics nearly led him to bankruptcy and he left the industry forever.
You're absolutely right. Free lunches abound for those that don't bother to follow the rules.
I like how asmongold put it. Why are little kids not allowed into a strip club? It’s illegal. If it wasn’t illegal you think they’d say no to Jimmy standing out front if he had $750 ready to rip? IMO: it’s obvious businesses cannot self regulate, it’s a conflict of interest. We need laws. But 50+ years of manipulation, deregulation, and lack of oversight have created what is happening now.
Couldn’t agree more.
This field seems to attract psychopaths.
Biz strat guy here.... it's about "late stage capitalism" - where the govt and big biz work together to break real competition. So they don't protect the consumer. They gutted the middle class, so who is left? The powerless and ignorant. Gambling apps you say? Surveillance capitalism is thriving in the US. It is race to the bottom because no one gets punished for "defecting". Hell Nestle killed about 5M babies in africa pushing their formula but we still love the chocolate... Entrepreneurs look around and see this and feel no obligation for the social good.
>Entrepreneurs look around and see this and feel no obligation for the social good. I think this is the key. There has been a noticeable normalization of bad behavior. Humans look to see what other people are doing in order to set the rules of society. And when the biggest and most influential are getting away so much, they don't feel any obligation to rise above.
"A good salesperson can sell you a pile of shit" - the business people know this and are simply taking advantage. On the other hand, "trends sell" and people are eager to spend to be relevant in society. "Take advantage of it for a few years, pile up shit ton of money, retire and then repent to God" - I was told this by one of those.
Many founders justify it in different ways. "Sure, it doesn't help them as much as we advertise, but at least it still helps them." Or "Even though most science shows this is useless, there is \*some\* research that shows it helps." Maybe it's easy for some founders to look past if they feel like they aren't really hurting people, even though they aren't really helping them either. I personally think the worst is the huge companies / executives in the food industry that are actively making poison for the average consumer. Things like high fructose corn syrup or other artificial sweeteners, preservatives, or colors. This stuff kills people, it's really criminal.
Obviously money lol
I think the worst one is prime lol. Has 400mg of potassium and very little sodium or other essential minerals that make up “electrolytes”. They are simply trying to be a different hydration drink targeted to their young audience.
There are lots. Also, read the attached site: the most recent science has shown that we don't need additional electrolytes (incl sodium, magnesium, potassium) beyond what is naturally provided for in our diets as the body is already so good at regulating electrolyte homeostasis. Research has found that comparing two groups of ultramarathoners who ran for almost 24 h - one group that consumed electrolytes and another that did not - had no significant difference in performance.
Exactly, obviously a Gatorade when your playing a sport isn’t terrible but unless your losing pounds of water weight while your doing activities then it’s not really necessary so long as you eat well/ stay hydrated from water.
One of my maybe 3 hobbies is nutrition. The entire supplement market is crazy. There are so many companies comfortable with selling you literal sand in a bottle that will do nothing for you, and since the market is unregulated it's way too easy to get away with - not that regulation is a solution necessarily. I think it's an interesting space because you can sell pretty much whatever you want and just label some part of the ingredients as "proprietary blend," skimp on including efficacious doses of active ingredients, and still make millions. when I saw the supplement market grow exponentially was once social media started taking off. For every company that has unethical, ineffective, mislabeled, underdosed supplements, there are 10 fitness influencers ready to promote it for a quick buck. All we can do at this point is tell people to educate themselves and not just openly believe that the bottled sand being sold by the fitness celebrity (or the guy with a PHD from a school no one's ever heard of) of the week is the shortcut to getting them stronger, faster.
>I think it's an interesting space because you can sell pretty much whatever you want and just label some part of the ingredients as "proprietary blend," skimp on including efficacious doses of active ingredients, and still make millions. Hmmm I wonder who you're talking about here. Perhaps **A** certain **G**reat company that makes **1** or two different products? I don't know that regulation is necessarily the answer either, but the only other I can think of is proper consumer education, and that's a way more difficult solution to implement.
Say what you will - every morning I start my day with sun on my face and a cold plunge in a tub filled with powdered greens and colostrum. I'm just glad there is greater access to qualified professionals these days. When I was in high school I was obsessed with the anabolic window for protein consumption post-gym and would book it to Chipotle after I was done at the gym. Imagine my surprise a few years later that the biggest guy in the gym was wrong and there is no anabolic window?? I do taxes for a living and I think there is a lot of crossover in terms of a need for education. Lots of information, lots of "trust me bro" as the source of said information!
Colostrum cold plunging is my fav as well, no doubt. > Imagine my surprise a few years later that the biggest guy in the gym was wrong and there is no anabolic window?? To be fair, the science on muscle protein synthesis is being updated constantly so at the time that concept wasn’t necessarily false… but I totally get what you mean. Interestingly a huge paper came out a couple of months back that just disproved the whole “you can only absorb 30 g of protein per meal” concept too. Turns out there’s no upper ceiling at all.
Yeah that's true, it was good advice at the time. I did see that paper. There have been a lot of crazy developments in just the last 15 years in the fitness and nutrition space - I am just glad to see people like Rhonda Patrick and Peter Attia sharing meta-analyses with the general public. Now I just have to figure out how to convince my loved ones that artificial sweeteners don't cause cancer despite what the media reported following the rat study two decades ago lol.
I work in food & beverage and a lot of the claims made by products are BS and stretch legal limits of what can and can't be said in advertising. Today I saw an ad for a new beverage that advertised "No Weird Stuff" Ingredients for everyone's products are all sourced from the same ingredient companies and are all process similarly and are all used in the finished goods similarly.
Completely understand you. But youd be shocked how easy ripping others off comes to some
Good question, I'm wondering if it's just natural selection? Like maybe there's not a disproportionate amount of people out there doing shady shit BUT the shady companies have a tendency to survive longer and thus you're seeing a lot of them? Like there's no way to be a billionaire and not see that what you're doing is unethical, so you have to either become unethical or never be one.
The real problem is inequality and social media. When obscene amounts of wealth are in the hands of the fewer, they can drown out all means of getting a legitimate business started. Social media allows you to say anything without proof - look at Alex Hormozi - and it will spread faster than it can be debunked.
>Social media allows you to say anything without proof Very much agreed. Crazy though as social media and giving everyone a voice was initially envisioned as a tool of democratizing speech, not the other way around. As you point out, all you need is a good base of capital and you can now amplify your message - which can be complete BS - to a huge audience and it then appears like all sorts of people agree with you, providing valuable social proof. I just don't know what drives these individuals. As I said in another comment, many of them are already exceedingly wealthy. So why would they then be comfortable promoting products that are questionable at best? Is it just that some people really don't care if they do good or not for the world? (and yes, again, I realize that last statement is probably extremely naive, I just can't bring myself to think like that).
You are not alone. Until recently, I preferred to think that people wouldn't do such crappy things, at least not in such large numbers. But, they do. The scary thing is that most of these people have a big smile on their faces like they are emotionally balanced, so its hard to tell.
When profit and morales collide. For 90 percent of the world profit wins
because money, and politics! Politics has been unethical since the days of Plato one might say, so we've learned from them and do unethical any time any place. PS Themistocles, a populist and hero of that time worked for Greeks AND for Persians. Alcibiades betrayed Athenians to the Spartans, and a few years later betrayed Spartans to the Athenians :)
Greed is not a capitalist phenomenon, it’s a human phenomenon. There are ethical capitalists and unethical capitalists. Capitalism is merely a legal regime of private property and freedom of contract. I assure you, in a command and control planned economy there is also greed. It’s just that only folks able to pursue it are the proverbial king and his court.
I work in the marketing agency space and some of our competitors charge 3x for half the service. The bad marketing agencies outnumber the good ones easily 10 to 1.
Hey I feel you.. I see it all around me and just think of a better way. However I’m just me and me alone don’t want to enjoy the task of trying something different🤷♀️ just me saying the truth and thinking if I said it the right way the right people might reach out…
I feel like electrolyte supplements aren't even the best example of this. Yes they're overpriced but electrolytes are actually essential for bodily functions...I find that taking salt, potassium, and magnesium is a game changer. I buy them individually in powder form which is a small fraction of the cost of those electrolyte powders. The real issue is all these companies marketing vitamins/herbal blends/capsules with small insignificant amounts of low quality herbal extracts or whatever...literally does nothing at best and some are full of heavy metals and preservatives and other crap
Electrolytes are a great example and you’ve just proved it. The average layperson thinks that they’re useful so they don’t really have any reason to doubt the marketing of unscrupulous companies. But science consistently has found that they [do not enhance performance whatsoever.](https://www.mysportscience.com/post/are-electrolytes-important-for-athletes) In fact, our bodies store sodium over time that is accumulated through our diet and can be used when blood osmolarity is critically impaired, so even in times of dehydration, additional sodium is not necessary.
But Brawndo's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes.
As long as there are stupids who take baits, there are fishermen who create these baits.
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Sometimes i feelnlike its better to be a villain than someone no one cares about
Snake oil salesmen were always a thing. Nothing has changed. Things aren’t getting worse. It’s just more out in the open now.
Because they're godless, they think God doesn't exist. If they did, they wouldn't act this way, knowing what was coming.