>>We should change them such that executives face direct personal punishment for negligent or intentional harm. We should have learned that lesson during the 2008 financial crisis, but instead nobody did time
does not contradict anything else.
But this
>>So either this is exactly what they want or they're hopelessly incompetent.
is incorrect. Those are not the only two options. Reality is typically more complex, and more boring than that. Doing harm does not require willful malice or profound stupidity and trying to reduce it down to that does no one any good.
Not that after investigation we could find that it was really one of those two cases for many people! But 'negligent harm', which is something you want people to be held accountable (me too!), does not require gross incompetence. It can be as simple as ignoring a couple inconvenient truths and being insulated from the consequences of ones decisions, or the cumulative outcome caused by the group.
I am saying that we end "being insulated from consequences" by choosing to reduce it down to those two options.
Think of it similar to handling explosives. Are they useful and important in society? Definitely. Are they subtle and complicated, such that working with them can easily harm somebody in ways that are not foreseeable to the naive? You bet.
But when somebody decides to create and apply explosives and hurts somebody, we don't just say, "Gosh, that's very complicated. Who could have known how it would work out?" We say, "You intentionally chose to work with something powerful and dangerous, so you're responsible for the harm you caused."
Is it more complicated? Sure. And I'm saying that when it comes to highly paid executives who seek out positions that put them in control of dangerous complexity, they become responsible for the outcomes.
They are already seen as responsible when it comes to anything good that happens on their watch, which is why they get paid such fast sums. I'm saying they should be seen as equally responsible when it comes to the harms. No more of this, "Oops we crashed the economy/poisoned a bunch of people/actively enabled genocide" stuff. All of that "more complex" reality becomes their problem if they are in control of it.
>>We should change them such that executives face direct personal punishment for negligent or intentional harm. We should have learned that lesson during the 2008 financial crisis, but instead nobody did time
does not contradict anything else.
But this
>>So either this is exactly what they want or they're hopelessly incompetent.
is incorrect. Those are not the only two options. Reality is typically more complex, and more boring than that. Doing harm does not require willful malice or profound stupidity and trying to reduce it down to that does no one any good.
Not that after investigation we could find that it was really one of those two cases for many people! But 'negligent harm', which is something you want people to be held accountable (me too!), does not require gross incompetence. It can be as simple as ignoring a couple inconvenient truths and being insulated from the consequences of ones decisions, or the cumulative outcome caused by the group.