A hypothesis re: unethical private sector BS

[lady_*nix]

I have a hypothesis about unethical business decisions in the US: corporate leadership are so used to perverse incentives, i.e. being rewarded for unethical behavior, that they will make unethical business decisions even when it hurts them on the basis that if it's unethical, it must make them more money.

Case in point: insurance companies refusing to pay for COVID vaccines, and making people jump through extra hoops to get them. In the long run, letting COVID run loose will lose them enormous amounts of money in long-term care costs that they will have to fork out. I'm not even convinced that it saves them money in the short term, since acute COVID also generates large medical costs. But C-suite execs and shareholders are not rational, and if they are used to doing the wrong thing to make more money... well, they might reflexively do the wrong thing on the hunch that it will work better for them, even in the presence of massive contradictory evidence. Like a lab rat that keeps pulling a lever to shock another rat even though it is no longer rewarded for it, as one of my friends put it.

Probably not an iron rule, but I bet this could explain some of the bullshit that shortsightedness alone doesn't cover.

[Sigma_Orionis]

I don't have any sympathy for Corporate Leadership. But I think you're not taking something into account: People high up in the corporate world are extremely short sighted. They usually can't see past the current quarter's earnings, or the current fiscal year's earnings. And yes, they're rewarded for that. So, as unethical as they might be, the main thing is that major stockholders (or owners if it's a private company) are usually only interested in the current quarter's profits. Therefore, upper management gets rewarded by short term gains. And they act accordingly- EVEN if they need to act unethically.

[lady_*nix]

I'm not even convinced that it saves them money in the short term, since acute COVID also generates large medical costs.

But yeah, constant rewards for short-term thinking also sound like a factor.