The Profit Motive, Vegans vs. McDonald's, etc.

there's a new store kicking around at
the moment claiming that the McDonald's Corporation is on the edge of bankruptcy or collapse or what-have-you don't believe the hype the good news is that people in China are more warm-hearted than you might have imagined people in China are capable of being shocked and refusing to eat at McDonald's because of a documentary they saw on TV some footage from slaughterhouses or meat processing plants or both was shown on the TV in China and apparently a lot of people said forget it I don't want to eat it Donald's anymore I don't want to get you fresh anymore in this video I'm gonna try to talk about a somewhat broader and deeper issue of the profit motive and how it shapes all of our lives or at least my life in particular but I have a quick word of thanks to close in the greenhouse if it were not for clothes and his own YouTube channel I would not be aware of this story googling around quickly I see there's been quite a lot of irresponsible journalism about declining profits from McDonald's the McDonald's Corporation special credit goes to the Guardian one of England's worst newspapers with the best reputation the card Ian gets a lot of respect and they put out a lot of really shoddy and misleading journalism so the Guardian makes the headline that McDonald's is at a 15% plunge in profits and they conclude that this is because people all around the world are becoming much more interested in their health and so the future of the McDonald's Corporation is grim because of rising health consciousness yeah well a lot of people will read that article and will want to believe it people will not be skeptical you stop and look at the numbers which is what the journalists over the Guardian should have done if they have a background of reading social science statistics if they have a background of reading economic statistics what they would find is that the slowdown in global sales for McDonald's is less than 1% its 0.9 percent now you might say well that's global and the globe includes places like China and India where McDonald's has very visible franchises what about the numbers in the united states the united states decline is only 1 point 7 percent now if you want to believe that this reflects an explosion of a new attitude towards health consciousness good luck the official analysis simply atributes it to better competition there are some other restaurants the united states that are more popular than mcdonald's right now and even so a decline of only 1.7 percent although that might be of concern to executives at the McDonald's Corporation to try some kind of rebranding or something that does not indicate the collapse of the McDonald's brand or corporation in any way so what has happened the big news that is concealed in a lot of the Western reporting on this is that there have been scandals in the production of meat that McDonald's makes use of in China so there's been a sequence of food safety scandals that have negatively impacted McDonald's and another chain fast-food chain called yum yum Corporation yum Corporation is a parent company that owns a number of other brands including Kentucky Fried Chicken so South China Morning Post among other things is reporting now forty eight point one percent of all of the mainland food processing factories failed to meet acceptable standards this is from an auditing company that's based in Hong Kong and is paid by the meat packing industry to go in and inspect factories slaughterhouses etc on their own behalf so again this this perception versus reality here there is sort of a strange question of how people construct ethical questions what assumptions are left unstated if over 48 percent of factories are failing these standards the problem is not that they're feeling my standards the problem is not even that they're failing government standards or international standards orientation standards these are failing standards that are set by members of the same industry who are only motivated by profit they just want to keep business going now they do want to meet certain professional standards certain standards of hygiene and safety or what have you but this has nothing to do with the welfare of animals there's nothing to do with ecology there's nothing even to do with the public good you know what's best for the greatest number of people in society it doesn't even have to do with economic efficiency which is another interesting question to bring to bear on meat production this is the history's own set of standards and research being carried out and paid for by the industry itself so you know from that perspective 48% of these factories are failing from my perspective I'm sure 100% of these factories are feeling my perspective doesn't count however in Asia the change has been more dramatic and more interesting why well back in 2012 there was a scandal that impacted both young corporation and McDonald's that involves chickens being fed excessive amounts of antibiotics now I'm vegan I don't buy native stuff I'm eating this stuff I would prefer to see this whole industry abolished or at least marginalized greatly reduced in scope but I can recognize in terms of the profit motive and the logic of meat production of what's going on here that it's completely inevitable that this industry uses more and more antibiotics you have a system of chickens living in urban densities some that were never evolved to do chickens in nature do not live like bees in a beehive disease breaks out amongst the chickens the owner of the farm wants to make money so he gives them antibiotics maybe that works for a short time but then it's not working anymore so he gives them more antibiotics you know you can draw up a flowchart this is not shocking this is completely predictable so what's interesting the question is how is it possible that from the public perspective from the consumers perspective that this is shocking what was it they assumed did they imagine that these chickens were running around freely in a you know green field with trees what did they imagine was the situation for these these chickens in the you know industrialized agriculture industry I don't know but obviously the gap here the gap here is not between good and evil the gap is just between perception and reality good and evil is another conversation really worth having but that's not why people in 2012 suddenly decided to stop eating at McDonald's in China I wish that it were but it just ain't so so there's a more recent scandal 2014 a TV report emerged showing workers picking up meat from a factory floor as well as mixing meat that had gone past its expiration date with fresh meat okay completely inevitable alright with the same caveat that I'm not making excuses for the meatpacking industry I just see the logic of if you're working in a factory where you cut up corpses into pieces why would you regard a people a piece of meat falls off the conveyor belt and you pick it up and put it back on the conveyor belt why not for one thing you have the profit motive you make more money if you do it for another thing you don't necessarily have the delusion that the bacteria on the floor are more harmful than the bacteria that are already found inside the rotting corpse of an animal and animals running corpse contains blood contains mucus contingency horrible bacteria and sources and causes of disease also contains poo for lack of a better word and you know the feces from animals both passing through the digestive system and the animals are covered with when they're brought in misery to the slaughterhouse it is a source of contamination in me so yeah this what's amazing to me is that people in China saw a videotape of this and they found it shocking they thought this what's unacceptable and they decided in large numbers to stop eating at McDonald's in Kentucky Fried Chicken that this was worse than what they imagined the standards were for slaughterhouses and meat processing pet plants in China so what did they imagine I can remember living in Hong Kong one of the brands of milk that were on the store shows there was called Kowloon dairy now just even that name Kowloon dairy it's as surreal as saying Manhattan dairy Kowloon is a very densely populated part of Hong Kong every inch of it is covered with concrete with high-density apartments with tiny little shops there is absolutely no room anywhere in Kowloon for cows to be walking freely over green grassy hills there's no way you can have this the in Hong Kong I mean if you want to know the conditions of those cows and those chickens you can see it but evidently most people buying these things have have some set of impossible fantasies about the conditions of meat production what I just read it doesn't shock me does if if I were making the moral compromise of eating meat at McDonald's in China which is something I would never do then the news I just read it say that's no scandal sure the meat falls in the floor pick it up off the floor put it back of the conveyor belt what do you think what do you think happens in a factory what do you you think the floor is is any dirtier than the the corpse they just hacked up and pull the stuff out of give me a break and look I mean the profit motive it distorts life for us in so many strange ways and I can remember working in a grocery store back when I graduated from university the first time around I remember in the grocery store I got fired because I report it in a totally helpful way in a totally positive not B way that the procedure they were following with their coffee with whole being coffee was inevitably resulting in rancid coffee being served the customers because they just were not separating old and new coffee so what I was suggesting wouldn't cost them any money it wouldn't cause them any trouble it just basically was setting up the drawers of coffee in a way so that you moved forward the older coffee and sold it first and didn't dump in and mix together all the new coffee beans it was a totally helpful suggestion and my boss didn't want to hear it and I was fired from working my counter of a grocery store that's Canada that's the that's the intensely oppressive hierarchical culture of Toronto Canada back when I was a kid and that grocery store wouldn't make any more money by mixing together a rancid coffee with good coffee if you've got money to make mixing rancid beef with new beef it's gonna happen my solution is torn dony beef well figure it out so there's good news there's bad news and there's indifferent news coming out of this particular flashpoint this peculiar event that has put some light on McDonald's and where your hamburgers come from briefly the good news is that people in China are more warm-hearted than you might have imagined people in China are capable of being shocked and refusing to eat at McDonald's because of a documentary they saw on TV some footage from slaughterhouses or meat processing plants or both was shown on the TV in China and apparently a lot of people said forget it I don't want to eat it you thought owns anymore I don't want you talking anymore I've lived in China and I've lived around Chinese people all my life I'm delighted to hear that there is a public there that's still sensitive to those issues and it's still spotting in both ways because believe me indifference to animal suffering indifference to human suffering is very real China so look the fact that this is a scandal at all and that it shows up in the economic records at all is good news it's heartening the bad news is look all of these reports including the headline from The Guardian the supposedly respectable Guardian that McDonald's is teetering on the edge of collapse McDonald's is facing a short-term crisis and profitability caused by a short-term scandal in China and the effects of most scandals are indeed short-term it's very unlikely this is going to change the world for the better the profit motive and what it does to people and then what those people do to the environment is a riddle that is gonna be with us forever and we're always going to be coming up to new solutions for it many seemingly convincing social and political philosophies fall apart on this point I noticed that there are libertarians in this world who have confidence that human beings can operate sewage systems at a profit show me an example of a government anywhere in the world that has for-profit corporations running the sewers show me an example of a country that has for-profit corporations running prisons show me an example of a country that has for-profit corporations running nuclear power plants all of these things exists and any soberin detached study of these things is gonna find guess what there are some forms of business that really cannot be handled by for-profit companies that was the real lesson of the meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi in Japan there are many lessons to be learned from that example but the profit motive does not mix very well with the type of public responsibility that is entailed by operating a nuclear power plant one of the great sources of sadness for me in my life my professional life was that I felt I was separating myself from the rat race of you know for-profit industries of the profit motive by getting involved in things like humanitarian work charity work research in third-world countries in Laos and Cambodia research that was supposed to make the world a better place and the sad reality is that just like inside academia the profit motive is still haunting you it's still motivating and warping everything that's going on around you and you find this again and again and just as I found back when I was working at that grocery store or back when I was working at Starbucks as a kid I found that I was very different from most of the other people around me that I viewed the moral decisions being made around me in a very fundamentally different way than my colleagues when I did research in Cambodia I was doing research to make the world a better place for example I did research on the health sector so I was not doing medical research myself but I was doing research on how health insurance worked how the actual health system worked and we also did evaluations of healthy how the hospitals themselves were performing that included things like the conditions in the surgery room whether or not doctors and nurses were washing their hands research that does directly and indirectly make a difference and you know my attitude was I'm being paid enough to do a good job I'm being paid enough to do something positive my wage was extremely low I was not earning enough money to save up and buy an airplane ticket back to Canada to be quite honest my very modest wage in Cambodia was enough to survive in Cambodia however I was not being paid enough to lie and cheat and steal or harm people you'd have to pay me a lot more for that you know the morality of the job was what motivated me to take the job in the first place and keep the job and the immorality of the job the compromises my employer was making the immoral decisions might blur that was the reason why I quit that job but look there are many different types of people in this world there are people who will work in a meat processing plant and say look you pay me enough to cut up this corpse and make it into ground beef but you don't pay me enough to poison people you'd have to pay me more for me to knowingly and intentionally mix together rancid meat with good meat and poison people you'd ask pay me more for that it seems that a very small percentage of people feel that way when I was working at Starbucks as a kid back during my first year of university I was amazed that with no profit motive I had colleagues same age as myself sometimes sometimes a few years older who would quite willingly um you know fake the best before dates on perishable products in the fridge and poison people that they would serve rancid product instead of fresh product when they had no profit motive they wouldn't make one penny more they would just be slightly lazier do slightly less work they would do a bad job instead doing good job my moral perspective on that was no I get paid enough to pour coffee I get paid enough to mop the floor to wash the windows that's all honest work cleaning the toilet is honest work and you wash your hands before and after I when I had that job I felt good about doing all that I wasn't being paid enough to poison people I wasn't being paid to lie and cheat and steal or to do something I considered immoral when I was in Cambodia doing that social science research you know it was very sad for me to realize that I was the only person on the team who felt like I was being paid enough to do legitimate research to publish real numbers real statistics but not to do fake research not to publish fake numbers not to cover up and deceive holes in the research or mislead the client if you've got a client that's paying you to go out and survey hospitals in Cambodia and discover what's wrong with them so that the Cambodian government and so that international donors charities can go into those hospitals and fix the problems so that there can be an intervention to save lives if instead you're going to take that clients money and lie and cheat and deceive talk to that research it's not the same as killing people it's not the same as poisoning people as a matter of principle it's close and I got to say for me in all those lines of work whether I was doing research on Buddhism research on the healthcare system even I was working in museums I used to say to people all the time look if this were about money all of us would be in real estate I mean none of us are really making money here none of I mean if real estate is cutthroat if people are stabbing each other in the back in the real estate industry I can understand that because people do not by and large go into real estate to make the world a better place they're going into real estate to make money and this may shock you to learn but people are not cutting the throats of cows and pigs and chickens in order to make the world a better place it's about money but for me it's with great sadness that I had to realize even when I was doing NGO work even I was doing charity work even when I was doing research of an historical nature that would seem to in no way be shaped by the profit motive man the profit motive was there haunting me and changed the behavior of all the other cats around me