Microblog Memes

capitalism is society optimizing for the wrong values

There's an argument that clean energy and efficient supply of health care and a conservative regional defense strategy more invested in reducing violence than instigating it all create virtuous profit-cycles for the economy at large and for individual business units.

I'd argue that what we have is an echo of the WW2 economic boom. Not necessarily the product of capitalism, per say, but the result of capitalist expansion running through the grooves built out a century beforehand. Water following the course of least resistance, decade after decade, until the institutions are impossible to shift due to its sheer size and depth.

It makes terrible sense if you’re optimizing for peace, health, and safety.

It makes sense if you're simply chasing the last economic wave. The automotive industry compounds on itself because we build cars and the cars need roads so we build roads and now we have demand for more cars. Go over to Japan or Spain or China or NYC, where they've invested heavily in rail and you have the opposite dynamic - rail infrastructure snowballs because that's where the money already is.

Similarly, countries that aren't heavily invested in the MIC - Japan, Mexico, South Africa, India - have thrown their GDP into non-military applications at a far more voluminous rate. Taiwan keeps reinvesting in their chip fabs because that's where their revenue comes from. France keeps throwing more and more money at vineyards and airplanes and nuclear energy.

Profit-seeking is bad and creates all sorts of moral hazards, but there's no reason you're forced to profit-seek through these explicitly destructive methods.