The problem is that corporations have people beat in terms of being able to obfuscate their business practices. While certainly true that people can often cause a business to change its actions when a big scandal come out, it's usually only the very obvious or very stupid, or relies on quality investigative journalism or things to quickly spread on social media to a large enough amount of people - and despite this seemingly happening regularly, it's still a drop in the ocean compared to the amount of companies doing morally grey stuff.
However, laws and independent bodies specifically created for the purpose of regulating industry and researching consumer effects are much better than people at finding out the broad effects of company practices. They are specifically reviewing and analysing company practices and making targeted recommendations on effective regulation.
For me, relying on consumer driven action is ineffective, it certainly should be a part of any society, but with the pace of society today, you can't rely on people to be able to have the time, information and energy to vote with their wallets - especially when it often hurts their wallet to do so. Governments and independent bodies have to lead the way with the support of people. I'm painfully aware of being privileged with the time and wealth to be able to vote with my wallet, but I think the majority of people have neither for most of these boycotts.
I wonder if this is all a problem of scale. Maybe it is unreasonable for us to expect very large companies and governments to be anything but corrupt and minimally responsive, nothing like the smaller scales that humans are evolved to deal with. This is all very new, and loaded with bugs...
However, laws and independent bodies specifically created for the purpose of regulating industry and researching consumer effects are much better than people at finding out the broad effects of company practices. They are specifically reviewing and analysing company practices and making targeted recommendations on effective regulation.
For me, relying on consumer driven action is ineffective, it certainly should be a part of any society, but with the pace of society today, you can't rely on people to be able to have the time, information and energy to vote with their wallets - especially when it often hurts their wallet to do so. Governments and independent bodies have to lead the way with the support of people. I'm painfully aware of being privileged with the time and wealth to be able to vote with my wallet, but I think the majority of people have neither for most of these boycotts.