"Is capitalism an efficient economic system? It depends on what you want to
optimise for: if the purpose of your economic system is to transfer wealth from
everyone else to a handful of billionaires, then capitalism is already very
efficient and becoming ever more efficient. If the purpose is the long term
thriving of the human race, then capitalism is a terrible system: the thing you
are optimisimg for (called “profit”) is actually a form of friction and loss to
the system as stores of value (money) get extracted from the economic cycle and
stashed away unproductively. Whole industries, such as advertising and banking,
are purely destructive of value.
A better economic system would eliminate the concept of “profit” as something
extracted by shareholders and board members. Activities that are most efficient
when nationalised, such as fire service, police, army, energy distribution,
transport, and of course, the health service, should never be allowed to fall
into private hands or should be taken out of private hands. Each of these
activities gets a budget to do a certain thing and should be laser focused on
doing that thing. The post office delivers letters and parcels, the railway
network runs railways, the health service keeps the population healthy, the
universities generate knowledge and so on. This leads to a lot of difficult
discussions about how much each service needs in order to ensure human thriving
without a negative impact on other services. But the current approach where
everything is reduced to profit is once again, optimising for the wrong thing.
For private industry, small family businesses and small to medium cooperatives
will ensure that any “profit” is recycled back into the economy.
In conclusion: The reason that poverty and homelessness exist is not because
capitalism is not working properly, but because that is the way it works.
– Martin Ward"
In
The RISKS Digest Volume 34 Issue 1:
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/34/1#subj36
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
