But asking consumers to vote for moral, intelligent legislative agents is somehow better? Optimizing for past opinions, moral fiber, understanding of the issues, etc. is easier?

Personal responsibility is required in a good society, irrespective of the system of government or the level of regulation that currently exists. Even if it's consumers/voters pushing their legislators to build regulations, you need a mass of regular old people who care in order to change a society.

Then the onus is on you to prove that regulation of an issue--say, drinking and driving--didn't just happen to coincide with a national education campaign coming from a well-funded 501(3)(c). Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes not so much.

In my opinion, the problem here isn't regulation vs. collective action people like grand-OP who are willing to continue using the service. Those same people will push back against legislation if they believe it will increase their prices, or eliminate the service altogether (Uber/Lyft in e.g. Austin?)

And in any case, consumer-driven action is MUCH faster than regulation. You can boycott them TODAY and cause an actual hit to their bottom line.

The problem is that corporations have people beat in terms of being able to obfuscate their business practices. While certainly true that people can often cause a business to change its actions when a big scandal come out, it's usually only the very obvious or very stupid, or relies on quality investigative journalism or things to quickly spread on social media to a large enough amount of people - and despite this seemingly happening regularly, it's still a drop in the ocean compared to the amount of companies doing morally grey stuff.

However, laws and independent bodies specifically created for the purpose of regulating industry and researching consumer effects are much better than people at finding out the broad effects of company practices. They are specifically reviewing and analysing company practices and making targeted recommendations on effective regulation.

For me, relying on consumer driven action is ineffective, it certainly should be a part of any society, but with the pace of society today, you can't rely on people to be able to have the time, information and energy to vote with their wallets - especially when it often hurts their wallet to do so. Governments and independent bodies have to lead the way with the support of people. I'm painfully aware of being privileged with the time and wealth to be able to vote with my wallet, but I think the majority of people have neither for most of these boycotts.

I wonder if this is all a problem of scale. Maybe it is unreasonable for us to expect very large companies and governments to be anything but corrupt and minimally responsive, nothing like the smaller scales that humans are evolved to deal with. This is all very new, and loaded with bugs...

This is just my suspicion, but I figure many people don't boycott because they feel it doesn't make a difference, that they are giving up something useful to them and nothing at all will come of it. That feels unfair in addition to being unproductive.

I'm constantly reminded of a short blurb/study-abstract I read a little while back that found the chief determinant of whether people perceived the taxes they paid were 'fair' was perceived compliance of everyone else. That is, it was more important that everyone else was paying whatever their fair share was, than exactly what my own particular rate is.

Thus you can get people to vote for things that might hurt them a little, that they wouldn't do on their own, as long as they know that everybody else will fairly share in the burden.

The boycott of South African goods during apartheid, and that against Nestle because of them promoting formula over breast milk in the developing world beg to differ. Very significant numbers participating, to no noticeable effect. Nestle undoubtedly considers it an acceptable cost of doing business, cheap at ten times the price. Those who participate are likewise aware it means never buying anything Nestle ever again.

But it's a great way to put the onus on the consumer and not blame the cause - the government or multinational.

EU or US regulation on the other hand could probably have Nestle ceasing that practice in days.

There is no democraty if the people don't exercice their power. Voting once for a group of people make it one day democraty, the rest of the year oligarchy.

There is litterally no other way to have a democraty that to make your day to day actions matter. Each citizen has to have a life directed to create a society.

Now I understand how hard it is. And I don't blame people for failing at it, me included. But as long as we label it as unrealistic, it stops all hope of progress.

This kind of assumption (that you must optimize your behavior for common good) is unrealistic. Only "good people" will do so, and that caring will put them at a competitive disadvantage compared to people who simply don't care.

No, regulation has the possibility of leveling the playing field and making everyone behave in a certain way, irrespective of how good or bad they are.

> Only "good people" will do so, and that caring will put them at a competitive disadvantage compared to people who simply don't care.

That's always the case. If you recycle, you are at a competitive disadvantaged compared to people who don't care. If you are veggie as well. Or if you help your kids to do their homework.

Do you think it's unreasonable to promote recycling ?

It's not a binary choice, it's a spectrum anyway.

> No, regulation has the possibility of leveling the playing field and making everyone behave in a certain way, irrespective of how good or bad they are.

Regulations are very slow, subject to intense lobbying and conflicts of interest, and assume people in charge are benevolent and compentent.

Regulations are not the base of the society. They come, they go. They change according to the time, the context, the place... People are what's matter.

Again, I understand how hard this is. I also notice that a lot of people don't want to hear about it, because of the resonsibility it involves. But power to the people cannot comes without responsability to the people.

And responsability only truely work if it's chosen, not enforced.

It's unreasonable to expect that promoting recycling alone leads to systematic recycling of non-precious materials. Recycling is the law in places where it is considered commonplace.

Swedes don't just love recycling; the government makes it worthwhile by increasing the cost of not-recycling (fines, jail time).

This is taking the stance that the governement is the source of society, while I tend to think the governement is the consequence of society.

But it probably goes both way, and I don't see a good reason to not do both: acting as micro and macro citizen.

Personal responsibility has a place, and it's important... But it doesn't scale to solve all problems.

Calling for personal responsibility is a good way to misdirect attention.

True. This thread convinced me both bottom to top and top to bottom is necessary. But I do think that ignoring bottom to top leads to temporary fixes, or illusions.

I don't see any link between what I said and capitalism. Thinking of the policical and societal impact of your day to day actions does not only largely go beyong economy, but also doesn't assume the nature of the economic system you are in.

The instacart topic is just an example. An example saying, "if your economic system is currently capitalistic, and based on money, then voting with your wallet makes sense".

> I understand that it's hard, but try to imagine

That's so condescending.

> a world where workers can demand a living wage and not have to rely on the generosity of "good people" for the right to live.

Life is not binary, you can work on both. But your solution delegate the action to a small 3rd party, so it's still an oligarchy.

> That's so condescending.

I was quoting you from the previous comment

Not the "hard" part. The "try to imagine".

To be pedantically clear about what needs are vs strategies for meeting needs, this is why we need autonomy; unions are a strategy for achieving that.

Learning to empower one's self is a skill we could benefit from teaching in society. Unfortunately, our primary education systems are not oriented toward teaching autonomy. They teach independence & compliance, which is false separation (since we're interdependent, not independent) and giving up power to others, respectively.

As participants in a democratic nation (whether that be the US republic, the UK parliamentary monarchy or whatever) it is our responsibility to be involved in all facets of the world we interact with.

We hire people to grow our food because it is a better optimisation of labour, not because we can just forget about the process of growing food. We need to be aware of things like: is this food processing sanitary, is the farm run by ethics that we agree with, is the environmental impact acceptable, is this food then best thing to grow in this environment (eg: growing cotton and rice in the desert makes no sense at all).

We then exercise choice by hiring people who best match our criteria.

When the only criteria we filter by is cost, we throw everything else out the window: ethics, ecological sustainability, economic viability, morality, food safety: everything.

Are you trying to say something, or did that word salad you vomited up only exist for the purpose of satisfying your need for attention?

There are two separate and very different issues at hand. On the one hand is the issue you are tackling, the economic and large scale one. But there is another - the personal and small scale one.

Regardless of whether it is a good or bad practice to rely upon, in any capacity, the moral action of consumers generally, the fact still remains for the individual that if they have learned a provider they are using is acting immorally, they have a choice to contribute to and reward that or not. Even if it is terrible to rely upon this on a social scale, it does not absolve you of moral culpability for your own actions. Everything else aside, if you know such a thing, you still made the choice to contribute to a thing you claim to not agree with. It creates a bit of dissonance, where your professed moral beliefs are not reflected in your actions. And that's something that plays a role in your own evaluation of self even if others don't learn of your actions and judge you for them.

Relying on certifications is laughable. Things like "Organic", "Fair Trade", and "Cage Free" do not always mean what you think they mean. Even what constitutes products like peanut butter is up for dispute by those trying to sell a cheapened product as the real thing[1].

Even in tech you have paper CCNA who don't know anything, but have a piece of paper saying they're certified.

You're also saying in this case it is theft, and should be handled by the legal system, which in part is legislated by labor regulations.

1. https://www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/History/ProductRegulation/ucm13...

It's not at all laughable. It is as effective as the organizations people create and choose to follow.

There's nothing that makes giving an entity like a union or regulatory agency a monopoly that makes it more competent. There's no advantage in monopolizing a market under one quality assessor.

We essentially did that with credit ratings, by creating a special class of credit ratings agencies, that only three firms fall under, and making regulatory requirements requiring participants to receive a passing rating from one of them to be allowed to engage in various market activities.

The result in a non-competitive credit ratings industry with profit margins of approximately 40%, meaning they're extracting a massive amount of economic rent.

>>You're also saying in this case it is theft, and should be handled by the legal system, which in part is legislated by labor regulations.

I'm not endorsing those aspects of the legal system that prohibit contractually agreed terms. Only tort should be punished by the legal system.