The Sport of Business, the Business of Law, and the Legality of Bargaining Power
The goal of this is to show how we need to use law, science, statistics and even a little philosophy to explain what is going on in business.
https://www.civicsoftechnology.org/data-and-justice-lesson
To build on this idea, I bring up another example of how data that are created for one purpose can be used in unexpected ways.
This reminds me of an important statistical concept in reading research and why in so many scientific fields it is of paramount importance to label your answer with the units. So we know what was actually measured so we have context and can make more accurate inferences. As my high-school physics teacher used to say “20.2 what? Meatballs? Stromboli?”. Not directly related but it gets at the idea that companies keep our own context away from us so we can’t effectively leverage our positions to do what is best for ourselves. This is taking away our autonomy and is inherently in opposition of the spirit of antitrust laws
3. Whose goals are pursued with these data?
“People decide which data to collect, which data to report, and how those data are represented. Through those decisions, certain stories are told, and others are not. Certain objectives are pursued, and others are not.”
This again, directly comes back to how statistics are done and more plainly talks on how p-hacking and other statistical mal-practices can be used to bolstered a decision in an erroneous manner
I have come to the point that I know too much yet not enough on the curve. I am not Dunn yet… I think that is the convenience of the current system. There is too much to sift through to directly pull out the problems areas with certainty. We have opinions and ideas and assumptions that only hold weight relative to parties but many don’t hold the weight of a fact because there is always another way to look at it, other ideas to be accounted for. We have to start with simple things we have more understanding of mechanistically. Our digital environment is designed to maintain our attention. This we can accept. This is important for navigating because something simple gets your attention, but something emotional yet complicated usually keeps it longer. Something different draws our attention, but something we are used to is usually easier to use but also keeps us there. Our digital environments are becoming increasingly more complex and interactive while our physical environments seem to be diminishing in detail. Infrastructure is more simple, less physical exchange in our environment occurs. Less use of physical cash, job markets shifting towards digital are consistent. Less physical stores. Less physical products, books, video games, many art forms have become digitized and usually licenced not even bought but that is for another time. This trend is clearly pervasive through most of our life. This coincides with the trend of tracking everything to optimize transactions. Theory would suggest that in capitalism there is inherently a balancing system that occurs through competition and a meritocracy. With this build up you may know I am going to say that is not the case. That is where we have such a systemic issue and why the “bipartisan” system just toils away back and forth. It is unarguably a meritocracy. Simply based on the idea that there has historically been competition and that means not everyone gets the same amount, someone can win. We may say that is motivating to those at the bottom. That is where we have to get more specific. We haven't said what the “merits” of this system are. To answer this we have to ask the question of how to win. We have to be clear and simple to get an understanding and then slowly add variables of context as we go. In any sport there is a goal or clear directive. In track and field sports it couldn’t be more simple at least for what you need to do. Jump the highest, run the fastest. In team sports it is still simple. There are just more ways to do it. I promise this is going somewhere. I'll use football since this is America, know your audience. All that matters is who scored more touchdowns, that is it. One team could be bigger, faster and stronger, but the other team cna technically win, maybe they were more strategic and used plays that counter the other team's plays really well or maybe just got lucky and had catches at more important times. This is an important concept to remember under capitalism. I said we want to keep things simple to start but what we can’t say is that whoever provides the best service is rewarded with the most money is a negligent simplification.
We now come back to what the goal of the digital space is. It is to keep your attention. That is it. The companies that do that best will be far more likely to make more. There is yet another layer that we have to add which gets to be where. These politics exist in sports as well, which makes even their meritocracy slightly less univariant than it may seem. Meaning you not only have to be one of the best at your sport or role in your sport but you have to convince people you are, it is optics. How a player or business is perceived is crucial and less univariate the more interpretable it is. For instance running a 100 meter dash has minimal optics, they exist but significantly less so than say a basketball or hockey player. These sports have parts of aesthetic importance and flare that contribute to viewer ship and keeping people's attention. That is where we finally merge the two. That is why you get companies that rebranded to each social cause associated with that month but do nothing other than marketing with it. Customers are not the only people that companies need to care about optics for though. Many larger companies need to be aware of how they are perceived by regulatory bodies associated with the business that they do. You may say well that is the law, that isn't optics. The law is interpretations of interpretations of interpretations. This is not me discrediting the law. I believe it is a cornerstone of society that can help shape many parts of our life both good and bad. We come back to realize the actual thing being measured to then draw appropriate context and make better decisions for ourselves. Many people accuse democracy of not working because people are stupid. Frankly everyday I see more anecdotal evidence of that being true. When we look at the law though. The players don't even know the rules. In my endeavors of learning exercise science and human physiology. I started with clear structural things that can be more easily perceived. Muscles’ origins, insertions and actions and the bones and joints and connective tissue. This took many years to get a feel for just all the mechanical parts that allow for simple things like circumduction. Then we get to things where we are measuring something else to infer another. Most studies do not measure exactly what we are looking for. You may measure creatine kinase to infer muscle damage or you may measure the difference in circumference of a limb to infer hypertrophy but to directly get those readings would usually require dissecting someone, and well… ya… so we don't do that. We make inferences and use statistics to attempt to get a better gauge of where on the scales of the magnitude effect and variance of results we may sit. What I can appreciate about all this madness though is as a democracy of idiots we have access to almost everything part of everything I just mentioned. I have spent close to ten- thousand hours (conservatively 15 years everyday with at least an hour and sometimes much more) learning these things. When we come to the law though, I am slowly learning that the barrier for entry is usually lawyers only or a pretty penny, or immense time to cross reference many places to get the actual text of a case and that comes with no guarantee. So not only in case law are we interpreting the facts of the case we are using the context of previous cases to see if there is precedent and comparing them with some expectation of standard but even those standards are often interpretable. Companies use this madness to their advantage. They just like a big law firm have the resources to sift through all this information to best protect themselves. Law firms use services like Westlaw and Lexis which are research databases that you have to subscribe to. Now I do not have years of experience in this so their may be ways around it but I have looked for say 5-10 hours and found Cornell law and Google scholars case law function but there doesn't seem to be any requirement to publish laws to case to these sites. The barrier to enter this field seems to be that you are in or graduated law school but this information should be easily accessible to the public because it governs how they exist. This is another case of information that affects a person not being accessible. You either have to read an immeasurable amount of interpretations and legalese or trust the unregulated summaries that are opinion based and don't show the original sources. What I have gathered from the law is that part of its goal is to balance the forces at play to keep a balance in the economy. For example National Labor Relations Act, which is codified at 29 U.S.C 151-169 Congress expressly found, among other things, that “(t)he inequity of bargaining power between employees who do not possess full freedom of association or actual liberties of contract and employers who are organized in the corporate or other forms of ownership association substantially burdens the affects flow of commerce, and tends to aggravate recurrent business depressions” the remedy then became determination and prevention of unfair labor practices and rights to determination of and forming a union. Antitrust laws are also in place partly for this idea.
https://www.justice.gov/atr/antitrust-laws-and-you
In summary it outlines the enforcement of preventing monopolies as to allow for a balancing of powers. With a monopoly a company can offer unfair wages and increase prices. Tying it all together, these laws do not negatively impact a meritocracy in the assumed sense of one. The idea that the best bookstore will sell the most books. What these laws outline is the underlying forces that I have been trying to summarize some of. Corporate strategy typically uses Porter's Five Forces to understand their place in the market better.
As you can shown above, we have come back to this idea of bargaining power. STOP, to clarify it may seem that I am trying to lead you to assume this is illegal, that is not the case. The point is that business is about “power”. I think many would agree with that or accept that as a fact of life. Easy come easy go though. It is important to know the WHY of things, which is another idea I have consistently brought up during this. If we know why we are trying to measure something and what we are actually measuring and the end goal, we have better results. Businesses have started to learn that and are taking advantage of that. It is also subsequently taking the focus off of what is classically accepted as what we assume will be the result of a meritocracy. It is still technically a meritocracy, we just mis-labeled our units.
Bibliography
https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/
https://www.justice.gov/atr/antitrust-laws-and-you
https://www.civicsoftechnology.org/data-and-justice-lesson
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text
https://www.khanacademy.org/math/ap-statistics/xfb5d8e68:inference-categorical-pro
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIkRbAvaQjs
The Sport of Business, the Business of Law, and the Legality of Bargaining Power