Being motivated by money isn't greed. Per Merriam-Webster, greed is an "excessive desire for more of something (such as money) than is needed". The key qualifiers there are excessive and more than is needed. How do we determine what excessive employment is?

I'm not even sure how companies can be greedy. Many animals will gorge themselves on food far beyond what they "need" in the moment. There's nothing guaranteeing their next meal, so it's an adaptive strategy. In a competitive free market, growth is a survival strategy. Companies can and do die when their old sources of revenue decline and they failed to discover and grow new sources. Not only do they lose out on profits, but they have to fire employees. Avoiding or minimizing layoffs and the toll they take on lives is absolutely something many executives and managers have in mind, even at large corporations, when running a business.

We don't normally ascribe greed to animals, and it doesn't make much sense to do so for corporations, particularly commercial corporations. But to the extent we can equivocate the entity and the people who manage it, underlying motivations are mixed, complicated, and varied.

And I'd argue that not all corporations, even multinationals, are similarly aggressive and "ruthless", so clearly there are complex social dynamics beyond profit maximization. Corporations aren't moral agents in the same way we consider people, yet they're not pure profit maximizing automatons, either.

Yeah, the parent comments feel confused, it's kind of a truism that corporations make decisions based on greed. Capitalism, at it's best, tries to align personal/corporate self-interest with the interests of society. If you can't beat 'em, try to direct their interest towards things that benefit society. Keyword here is "try", I mean it's better than feudal lords pursuing self interest by constantly killing each other. The article does a good job of showing how that drive has really made a mess of the job market, and criticizing it because it blames all this stuff on corporate greed is really confusing since both critics and proponents of capitalism agree corporate decisions are all driven by self-interest, they just disagree on the outcomes.

If anything, I take corporate greed as axiomatic. Saying something happened because of it is stupid. There's no information in it.

And hey, look, turns out the article was AI slop generated to make the front page of HN.

Something can be falsifiable without being false. F=ma is falsifiable but not false. With humanities stuff it's less clear cut, but I'm inclined to be skeptical of ideas that explain too many things.

Falsifiability is relevant because I'm not saying the framing is wrong (I'm not even convinced it can possibly be proven wrong), I'm saying it's not very useful. In practice this has the same effect as me saying that "corporate greed" is axiomatic, so blaming it for things is like blaming water for flowing downhill.

It would be much more productive to frame this as an example, say, of market failure. Or a discussion of short-term thinking, or lacking negative feedback. All would be interesting.

PS: the author has now stated his post was AI slop written to make the front page of HN. I feel extremely validated.

So what would be impossible to explain in a world where “corporate greed” is indeed what causes all these things? The answer can’t be “nothing”—or “corporate greed” doesn’t mean anything.

I can say, for example, that under gravity, an object will not accelerate upwards when entering else stays down; if you show me that happening, I either have to say gravity didn’t cause it, or that gravity is not what we thought it was (and we should probably get a new word for whatever it has).

Oh, interesting. I meant the argument "they can afford it, they have enough money, look at the stock market", not "they are trying to save money and drive up their stock value"