April 4, 2025

21 thoughts on “The Rise And Fall of Corporate Social “Responsibility”

  1. I swear your vids are starting to contradict themselves. I distinctly remember you having a vid about corporate mandated fun and corpo culture and referencing the Sam Walton story. And I recall you saying, companies pay for these because they work. Now you're saying that studies show that they don't and never did. These studies sound so confusing

  2. I've been poor my entire adult life and don't care much beyond the basics, but when my son was born 2 decades ago (when I was 33) I wanted to be able to eventually 'leave him something' so looked into "Ethical Funds" and was appalled that it included a major Canadian mining company that had been under fire for hiring paramilitary groups to disappear labour/enviro activists in at least one of the developing countries they were operating in, and the Canadian gov't (which includes the military industrial complex). Big Nope. Then I heard that the small fair trade sugar & cocoa company in South America that my org distributed at our markets was seeking investors to invest a minimum of $5000 to help the company grow, which was perfect; unfortunately by the time I'd saved $5k to give them, they'd upped the minimum to $10k, and it wasn't long after that it all got eaten up in rent-increases. Total bummer. Great video to file along with greenwashing, whitewashing, and pinkwashing. I know a ton of old school progressive left-wingers who now boycott the companies that went all in on the "rainbow branding" bullshit (read: it's not just right-wingers turned off by it). Amazing that big corporations still think we are too stupid to recognize when we're being manipulated. Bernays would be proud.

  3. So among the same types of other businesses covering a similar amount of the market as in the past it hasn't necessarily fallen as much. People just now consider those businesses as "medium".

  4. Businesses caring about stakeholders is the right path. Just look at Boeing and Intel if you want examples of companies run by accountant CEOs looking for near term profitability.

    ESG is a different story and like any market place is only as good as the institutions and cultures that ensure the quality of goods traded.

  5. That "Tiger at a birthday party" is an incredibly weak metaphor.

    If you find that your company is poisoning a river that people use to drink water, the company as a whole, the corporate board (90% of the burden right here), and the people doing the work all have a duty of care to not poison the river.
    Yes, if the company brings a tiger to the workplace, not ONLY does the company have an overwhelming burden to ensure safety, but they ought to have a heavy toll to pay if anything goes wrong.
    "Ohh, won't SOMEONE think of the SHAREHOLDERS?" yes, we've been exclusively catering to them since January 1981.

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