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To build a better world, stop chasing economic growth
(www.nature.com)
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this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2023
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Capitalism has one positive, and that's the notion of competition leading to the best outcome as they try to win over consumers.
We've lost that though with how unfettered it's become in general. Companies merge and conspire, eliminating competition.
Public universities and research actually produce the most amount of innovation. Another one of capitalisms lies
There's a difference between lab bench research and discoveries and then actually making them into usable products on a mass scale. That's a big part of where engineering comes into focus, on that scale up. There's a lot of research that proves impractical in reality because the synthesis of a material is really finicky or the purification of it is exceedingly difficult.
That said, I actually agree that private industry shouldn't be part of this space. Companies shouldn't be sponsoring research and picking winners like this. We need something analogous to national labs that's focused solely on the scale up of discoveries -- taking something discovered in a university or national lab and making it usable for the everyday person. And from there companies can get licenses from the government to offer the technology to consumers and make their own innovations, all of which must be reported to the government.
... So I think I've just convinced myself that you're right and I agree with you, actually.
You said it better than I ever could
Exactly. We've let them become way too powerful. They shouldn't be able to do this.
Competition doesn't lead to innovation in improving people's lives, but company profits. See: enshittification.
I see that as a consequence of the absurd monopolies we have. The best product should be what's the most popular, and enshittification is counter to that. It tanks the product quality, and in a market with lots of competitors, it would be punished.
It is one of the consequences of monopolies, but monopolies are a consequence of economic competition.
The "winner" gets the losers stuff and customers (mergers for example), making the winner bigger and more able to manipulate the market to their benefit.
When there are few enough companies profits can be chased without consideration for anything else (planned obsolescence, shipping jobs outside the country, lay-offs, etc.)
So, like you said except in a for profit market, monopolies are inevitable.
In the absence of regulation, absolutely. If we had more stringent anti trust legislation though it might be possible to avoid.
The best product should not be what's most popular in Capitalism, what's profitable to produce is what's most profitable. With tons of competition, you just have competing levels of automation, corner cutting, and exploitation.
Competition and markets in general are the cause of enshittification.
That is a good point actually.
Yep, Marx predicted this actually. A huge portion of Marx's literature is even more relevant today than ever before.
This is how capitalism has always worked.
When companies compete, eventually some of them lose. This means they go out of business.
The remaining companies become more powerful.
That's a fair point actually. Competition can only exist if there's an influx of new companies that's roughly the number of them going out of business.
Even then though there's an issue, because the companies which have been around the longest will have all the necessary equipment, which may be really expensive.
I'm not sure how we address this, but it's clear the government needs to step in.
"Best outcome" covers for a lot. The "best" coffee is still grown in the global south and shipped using grossly polluting methods. The "best" computer will eventually be obsolete e-waste with minimal recycling value. The "best" EV is still reliant on car-centric infrastructure that is strangling cities.
What is "best" is highly variable, and competition cannot possibly cover all possibilities of what is best.