Summary and How My Views Changed on Markets and Morality

Similar to Bernie Madoff: In His Own Words, this documentary is a breakdown of the rise and fall of a titan that once dominated the market known as Enron. In Bernie Madoff: In His Own Words, the personal narrative that the documentary puts on is that Madoff is an evil individual, not swayed by anyone, to commit the crimes that he did. However, Enron takes a more humanistic approach and attributes both work environment and morality of an individual to having equal leverage in this disaster. While characters like Lay, Fastow, Belden were the ring leaders of the operation, they couldn’t have built Enron by themselves. The documentary provides phone calls, anecdotes from the employees, and voice recordings to allow us perspective on what it was like to be an employee in the macho, risk-all, hustle, Enron culture.

How this documentary changed my views on markets and morality was that competition is a structural issue, not a morality issue. Those that are within competition are not immoral, but the ones that incite competition may be doing it for immoral reasons. Another claim that I have is that the Theory of Moral Sentiment is outdated because of the external factors that now come into an individual’s decision making such as institutional powers (government) and commerce.

Competition Aids the Initiator

The common belief that competition fuels better products, better productivity is what made the PRC a likeable HR practice in the Enron company. However, the PRC was, instead, used to disillusion Enron as a pure meritocracy and allow the top executives to have greater bonuses at the end of the day by result of the success in the company. The term model minority comes to mind where minorities were pitted against each other by white people, fighting on who was the “best” minority, which allowed white people to hold their position as the dominate status while those fight for the “best” subordinate status.

Enron disguised competition to their employees as advantageous like how they disguised free market to their customers. The free-market agenda allowed Enron to create an expensive market to consumers. Like in Life and Debt, first world countries pushed for third world countries to enter free trade because it would result in their economic prosperity through troubling times, but the aftermath led to the first worlds squashing them out in the end.

By one of the executives, it was said that “money is the only thing that motivates people.” As read in What Money Can’t Buy, money was used as a shortcut to incentivize kids to write thank you letters instead of developing the skills of gratitude. In this quote, I see money being used as a cop-out, like how the devil was cause for the evil in markets, to drive Enron employees to believe that if anyone was in their position, they would be doing the same shady business deals. By normalizing this greed and selfishness in their inherent mission statement, the employees instead tell themselves, “If I don’t do it, then someone else will.” The executive’s true motives for saying this outrightly to their employees is to increase the risks that their employees would take, eventually making them even more money and greater pay outs.

The Outdated Concept of the “Invisible Hand” in the Theory of Moral Sentiment

The Theory of Moral Sentiment describes one’s actions being a result of the “impartial spectator.” However, Enron discredits this and provides insight on how both work environment and the morality of an individual has equal responsibility on market corruption. Society today has evolved an individual to become a civilized man that has more social responsibilities that attribute to his social identity; civilized man has other reasons for his actions other than himself. The “invisible hand” is an outdated concept supported by Enron and What Money Can’t Buy mainly due to the infringing power that commerce now has on unprecedented institutions such as the government, hospitals, and schools. In this case, Enron was able to leverage the government for money and national political power to become the titan that it was in the early 2000s.

However, because the invisible hand’s effect on an individual is diminishing, I don’t believe this correlates to the diminishing morality or moral compass of an individual today. In Enron, we see commentators, politicians, reporters comment about the immorality of what Enron was doing during the same time. The difference in attitudes were that Enron employees believed what they were doing was more moral than employees outside of Enron; it wasn’t that people became less moral over time, it was that their environment affected their judgement. It is not that the workers in Enron are naturally evil people but that this work culture of hyper masculinity and risk taking was forced upon them. Ad hominems discredit the market too easily; they attack the people that were involved instead of the actions they made. It’s essential to ask how the regular worker could have done the practices that an Enron worker did.

The Unprecedented Influence Commerce Has On Political Institutions

Everything, even institutions that are seemingly structed on efficiency and logic, are clouded in their decision making with emotions and biases which are claims that Sandel makes with the examples of gift receiving and blood donations. No market trend can truly be calculated because of the confounding variables that come when humans and not logical robots run the markets. I reflected on this statement as I watched Arnold become governor of California. Even in something like the government, what should be untouchable from pop culture and celebrity likability to uphold representative democracy, California ultimately gave their legislative powers to a Hollywood movie star with no political experience. In current day, politicians like AOC are prioritized first as celebrities, then politicians. The influence Hollywood has on the government can be seen the same way commerce has corrupted the government.