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I said this the other day, but this is because capitalism is society optimizing for the wrong values.
It makes perfect sense if you’re optimizing for profit. It makes terrible sense if you’re optimizing for peace, health, and safety.
Profit-seeking is capitalism doing exactly as it’s meant to. I don’t place any blame there. Every time capitalism optimizes for the wrong benefit, is detrimental to society or its citizens or its fixture, the blame is entirely on those who establish and maintain the market. A profit-seeking healthcare industry is not a failure of capitalism, but a failure of regulators to focus capitalism on positive outcomes, or a failure of regulators to establish a beneficial market. In that case, the existence of the market itself may be the root failure, but capitalism can’t fix that, only those who should be regulating that market
People assume capitalism is all powerful, but it’s not. We have extensive systems in place to establish fair markets for capitalism to act within: where are they? Who do they serve? Who benefits? We keep forgetting capitalism is just a tool, not a goal itself
I don't even think it's that we're optimizing for the wrong value. Optimizing for maximum profit is probably fine -- everyone gets the best utility possible. The problem is in the algorithm being a greedy approach where every individual personally chooses the best option for themselves. Greedy algorithm settles on a local maximum but drastically overshoots the global maximum.
Maximizing profits is why America still has slavery. Ever heard of prisoner leasing? It’s also why we exploit other nations and pay them 1/100th of what we would Americans. It’s also why countless other tragedies happen.
Optimizing for profit IS the evil.
No, being greedy is why America still has slavery, technically. As a whole they could get a ton more profit and save on costs if the system cared to develop prisoners, reduce prison populations and make them more productive members of society.
Individual and short-term profits are gained through this exploitation. The fix isn't to eliminate profit "waste money" then everybody loses. The solution is to address the externality in the market, thereby making it so that everyone can profit.
I assume you're making the argument that a motivated worker does better work and if they do better work they're more productive and thus make more profit. However, a motivated worker also costs more so really the profit maximum is somewhere between worker production and how much you're paying for the worker. Now imagine how little the prison worker is paid. Different sources give different numbers but all of it ends up in the ballpark of $1/h. The federal minimum wage is $7.5/h. That means a minimum wage worker would have to be at least 7 times more productive than the prison laborer and that's just the floor of what you're legally supposed to pay. If we talk about the average american we're talking about needing to be around 10-11 times for efficient than a prison worker.
Slave labor is the most efficient way to make a profit. because you're effectively paying nothing to produce something that you could sell at market value.
Optimizing for max profit is always the wrong answer, because it can only lead to this state. Eventually, capital takes over government to get even more profit, at the expense of everything else.
it might be worth mentioning here that the reason greedy algorithms don’t generally find local maximums is because they’re “too short-sighted”, and are always focused on making the best possible short term decision, while failing to consider any long term implications.
so in that way the greedy algorithm is a pretty good description of many of our current problems
People seem to think that you're saying "just like now, but tweaked"
As I see it to aim at max global profit we would need a whole different economic system, or at least a new way to direct capital at businesses toward the global max
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.