this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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This is basically us on the verge of world altering environmental collapse while worrying about the economy.
Corporations will profiteer just fine don't you worry.
Nah. We only have next quarter problems. This quarter is all that matters.
We should be taking the planet into consideration, but clearly the most important thing is the shareholders
(/s if it wasn't obvious)
So how is humanity gonna solve multiple global crises without an economy?
Don't sweat it dude the economy isn't going anywhere, you won, the planets gonna die but investors can keep the line going up.
So I assume your solution is that we go back to the woods? Or everyone just become subsistence farmers?
The lines that investors see go up and down are prices, detached from physical reality. The economy is a real thing that outputs goods and services that all of us use every day. How could we not be worried about it? We want to change the economy, decarbonise it, but we don't want to get rid of it.
If you must know my main issue is the intense need for infinite growth and incentivizing things like planned obsolescence in the name of short term gain.
The concept of an economy is not what I'm railing against but rather the late stage capitalism that pervades most of the developed world.
Okay, I understand that. I'm also worried that the wrong corporations are going to profit from it, as they're currently doing. The "right corporations" however could play a big role in speeding up the changes we need so urgently. If that's going to happen is a question of incentives. And incentives are created by regulating markets so that they optimise for the benefit of society. Of course I don't see many politicians out there who get that or are eager to regulate markets whatsoever...
see, this rationality is the crux of the issue. Our systems should be robust enough it shouldn't have to rely on the "right corporations" being the driver, just as we shouldn't rely on charity from the wealthy to help the poor. The system should have checks and balances to assert that you should be a victim of your success (something like a severe drag coefficient) to balance capitalistic tendencies to always have line go up if its a detriment to the markets they participate in.
The system in most cases are the governments and worker unions which should counterbalance, but late stage capitalism has co-opted the former via lobbying to use globalism to weaken the latter, and those poor countries which haven't the educated population and corrupt government to develop their union base are never going to because civil disobedience organization nowadays is super transparent, so they can be easily squashed.
I agree it is a question of incentives. But the status quo has made it so that the people capable of changing the incentives themselves have no incentive to do so.
I try to stay out of the political aspect of it but personally I believe that capitalism incentivizes corporations to collude and prioritize profits over long term sustainability.
It is because of this that I believe that all corporations will eventually if given enough time turn into the worst examples of themselves. This is much more true for publicly traded corporations as they have a fiduciary obligation to provide maximum value to shareholders.
I'm not going to pretend to be an expert in the field this is just my opinion.