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All I'm saying is his logic isn't, well, logical. On the one hand he says Apple's policy has been great for business, which would imply other companies should be adopting these kinds of policies without any kind of prodding from the government.

And yet he supports a law to force everyone to adopt those policies. It's like he doesn't actually believe "workplace equality" is good for business and would like to use the government to level the playing field he tilted against himself. If he really believed the policy was good for the bottom line, from a financial perspective he'd be overjoyed to compete against companies that don't have a similar policy.

Well, this is just nonsense. All this jibber jabber about being non-discriminatory is good for business falls flat when discrimination becomes good for business, which s not difficult to imagine.

Let's take an example. Southern Baptists, or any group you like, want to grow their numbers. Lets say they succeed and gain a majority of followers in the US. All of a sudden it can be a boost to business to comport with whatever discriminatory practices are popular with the majority. The invisible hand moveth.

Let's assume that a) he thinks companies will continue to be systematically discriminatory despite their best interests and b) he cares less about the competitive advantages of Apple and more about the overall health of the economy. He could care about that personally or on behalf of Apple, which also benefits from a larger, faster-growing economy in which to sell its goods. Does that help?

People on the left can't seem to make up their minds about corporations. On the one hand corporations are amoral profit machines, completely without qualm or consideration for the human element. On the other, they don't care about profit. It just does't work for me as a logical framework.

The most likely explanation here, IMO, is Apple's policy actually hurts the bottom line a tiny bit, but the PR value outweighs the problems. But note if this is the case the law he's pushing will be a net (small) negative for other companies.

It doesn't work because its a straw man.

No, it doesn't help, because it's probably unreasonable to believe that Apple would recoup enough of those gains to counteract the losses they suffer from losing their competitive advantage.

It's like telling US Sugar that it'd be a net gain for them to lose their tariff protections.

That some global optimizations with direct negative effects on a particular business outweigh their downstream positives for that business doesn't mean they all do. Perhaps this is more like Wal-Mart lobbying for higher minimum wage so that its customers have more money [1].

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2005/10/25/news/fortune500/walmart_wage...

Walmart was paying above minimum wage when they lobbied for that change. They were in favor of the wage rise because it would harm their competitors - and give them positive PR as most of their critics were unaware that Walmart paid above minimum wage.

My source is the (then) CEO of Walmart.

The CEO certainly says he pays more than minimum wage (when the statement was clarified, it turns out it doesn't include part time labor or contract labor, so it's not clear how true that actually is). But why would he pay more than his competitors? (I can find no evidence that it does and a fair amount of evidence that it doesn't.) And paying above minimum wage does not remove the labor market pressure that comes from increasing it.

All that aside, you may be right that it was a chiefly PR stunt and perhaps Walmart is in fact a poor example.

I was enjoying this discussion until your edit.

Removed the edit, my apologies.

I'd venture that most well run and dominant companies pay more than their competitors. This is likely (speculation ahead) because these companies know that they must obtain and retain higher quality employees than do their competition.

Even for Walmart, their employees are the most important asset. From top to bottom. People like you and me (I'm assuming you've never worked there - I haven't) aren't aware, but supposedly Walmart really does treat their workers well. All in relative terms of course... And based upon pure hearsay of course.

Finally, regarding whether or not it was a publicity stunt: Maybe I'm jaded, but I consider everything that a corporate employee says publicly and in official capacity to be a publicity stunt, almost by definition.

FWIW, I am always shocked by how more helpful I find Walmart employees than their counterparts at competitors.

Do you have a proposed mechanism for why the law would be a net negative for companies?

Discrimination imposes an extra cost on the discriminator. In a free market, firms that engage in irrational discrimination will be driven out of business. This is a central thesis of "Capitalism and Freedom" by Milton Friedman.

It took the government to intervene into a very long running and prosperous "free market" to bring an end to discrimination, and nobody was making a economic case for it.

There was no such "free market" before the Federal government intervened; there was an entrenched system of state and local governments not providing a level playing field. IMO the biggest mistake the civil rights movement made was to ask the Federal government for affirmative action, instead of asking it to guarantee a level playing field, so that minority-owned businesses could simply out-compete businesses run by bigots.

Why do you assume that minority-owned or nondiscriminating businesses would run discriminating businesses out of the market? You're assuming, at the very least, that the competitive benefit of nondiscrimination exceeds the barriers to entry in the market.

The barriers I'm referring to aren't Jim Crow but instead the standard barriers to entry: required initial capital, brand recognition, the economies of scale and existing position of the firm currently in the market, etc.

I am suggesting that when entering the market is already difficult (which is true of many American industries where discrimination might be a problem), a new firm being nondiscriminatory is unlikely to be a sufficient competitive advantage to displace existing firms.

It is possible for nondiscrimination to be beneficial for already existing firms but not an immediate, substantial, and sure-fire competitive advantage.

How did the already existing firms get into the market and achieve their existing positions? Free market competition, or government regulations that gave them preferential treatment?

With a level playing field, I don't think entry into the market is as difficult as you claim for many areas of businesses. The discrimination that the civil rights movement protested against wasn't discrimination about who could build new semiconductor chip fabs: it was about who could ride at the front of the bus, or who could stay at which hotels. In a free market these would be easy businesses to get into; the main barriers to entry are government regulations.

Companies usually have to grow to a particular size before they're able to negotiate preferential treatment. Even so, I don't believe most industries are less competitive because of regulatory capture. Purely competitive markets are a mathematical abstraction.

The ENDA isn't about accommodation discrimination (buses, hotels, etc.), though, it's about employment discrimination. Discriminating against potential customers is obviously bad business, and the competitive benefit for not discriminating might be decisive. Even so, government action was effective in almost entirely eliminating that form of discrimination (to the extent that when it occurs, it's seen as a throwback and an outrage).

The barriers to entry for operating a bus service would be enormous even without government regulation. The initial capital outlay is substantial, and established firms would be likely to have lucrative exclusive contracts with businesses. Potential riders would take a long time to trust a new bus service, and it would have to operate at a considerable loss for quite some time to build up a reputation.

government action was effective in almost entirely eliminating that form of discrimination

After government action had enabled it in the first place. Jim Crow laws didn't just prevent blacks from riding at the front of the bus: it prevented blacks from starting their own bus companies.

The barriers to entry for operating a bus service would be enormous even without government regulation.

If all the bus services in town discriminate against blacks by making them ride at the back of the bus, but there's no government regulation, a new bus service, even if it's just a single bus, that does not impose that restriction has an immediate customer base: all the blacks that don't want to ride at the back of the bus. (We're assuming that this is a substantial number, which seems historically accurate.) Similar remarks apply to any other product or service where discrimination exists. I find it extremely implausible that, in the absence of government regulation, there would not have been many, many entrepreneurs willing to take advantage of such opportunities, or people to fund them.

I don't believe most industries are less competitive because of regulatory capture.

How would you know?

Purely competitive markets are a mathematical abstraction

So are government regulations that magically apply just the "right" correction for a "market failure".

You're assuming, at the very least, that the competitive benefit of nondiscrimination exceeds the barriers to entry in the market.

Tim Cook was making the same assumption in the article when he said that workplace equality is good for business.

Also, the "barriers to entry" came from those state and local government regulations I referred to; asking the Federal government to provide a level playing field would have meant asking the Federal government to force state and local governments to remove those barriers to entry.

I'm not sure we should expect them to be now.

If you really believe this, then your response should not be to ask the government to pass laws forcing such companies to be "rational". Your response should be to start a "rational" company that out-competes them, by hiring all the talented people that can't get jobs at the bigoted company, and thereby drive the bigoted company out of business.

Tech is full of companies that basically do what Tim Cook and Apple wants everyone else to do. Yet we still have a problem. And no amount of publicity blasting discrimination in any form seems to make a difference - sometimes it even does worse by calling all the trolls and bigots to attack the victim(s) involved. So no, that doesn't really work, does it now.

I find it depressing that I have to bundle this industry into the same basket as other companies and industries that other women complain about on the female-dominated forums I frequent. Meritocracy? hahahahahahahaha

no amount of publicity blasting discrimination in any form seems to make a difference

Have you considered not doing business with companies whose hiring or employment practices you don't like? Or forming your own company to out-compete them?

Again, do you actually believe that the widespread discrimination against pre-civil rights blacks was rational behavior? If not, why did it persist for so long? Where were all of those entrepreneurs fixing the system through competitive advantage?

I think the answer here is that the advantages it confers aren't sufficient to allow an upstart to overcome its disadvantage--namely, market position. Having more rational hiring practices is not a trump card. Lots of poorly run companies beat well-run ones all the time, but it doesn't mean they wouldn't be more successful as better-run companies.

I'll also note that there are a number of confounding factors that make non-discrimination more attractive when enforced corrosively. For example, let's say you're an industry with widespread discrimination against gay people. Gay people leave the industry, and are thus not readily available to those willing to hire them. And perhaps they're typically less experienced because of that discrimination, so that makes it less useful to hire them. A sort of tragedy of the commons in the labor market. It's still irrational to discriminate, just less so, and perhaps the disadvantages of doing so fit under the noise floor. But with legislation, the feedback loop works the other way, and it makes a lot more sense to hire from this now larger and more experienced labor pool. Could increase the overall output a lot more than having one company float to the top through marginally better hiring.

>Again, do you actually believe that the widespread discrimination against pre-civil rights blacks was rational behavior?

It absolutely was, because at that time in much of the country if you hired a black guy all his coworkers would refuse to work with him. White people would refuse to patronize your business.

Which is why state intervention was required to change the norms in place.

Where were all of those entrepreneurs fixing the system through competitive advantage?

They were prevented from doing so by government regulations--state and local government regulations.