How to make companies into engines of good: make harm unprofitable

One oversimplified but potentially useful way to think about corporate regulation is to prevent it from being profitable to cause harm. Of course, this can be very challenging to achieve, and one can debate what "harm" means, how broadly it should be construed, and what to do in cases where there is substantial uncertainty about how to make harm unprofitable. But insofar as it's unprofitable to cause harm, and companies behave as profit maximizers, companies are basically forces for good. ...
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Your Law Firm Does Not Have Your Incentives

If you hire a law firm, as an individual or the owner of a small business, there is a pretty good chance they will bill you by the hour. So if the work performed takes 100 hours rather than 50, you will pay them twice as much. From the law firm’s perspective, this is reasonable, because each one of their work hours is about as valuable to them as every other one (holding the specific employees on the project constant). However, if we are justified in assuming that law firms are entities that can...
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