If anything, capitalism often stands in the way of innovation, because you must consider the profit margins first and foremost.
this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2025
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kinda like that George Lucase interview where he pointed out Soviet filmmakers had more creative freedom than he did. They weren't allowed to call for regime change. Otherwise, they could make whatever they liked. George had to make profitable movies, which is a far narrower slice of what's artistically possible.
In order to take an innovative idea, develop it into a product or service that can be delivered for reasonable time, cost, and effort, and then spread that innovation to anyone who wants it, you need massive bureaucratic organizations and simple ways of trading effort between organizations. Very few people are passionate about bureaucracy, even fewer when they're not getting paid. Without the safety systems in place to allow for big organizations and reliable imter-organization collaboration, most cool ideas would stay in the garage.
Also, in the modern world, most innovations require access to machines and resources too expensive to be secured by some guy playing with ideas and materials in his free time.
There are examples of innovative individuals doing amazing things for the love of the game on their own dime and on their own time, yes, but their achievements are dwarfed by the innovations created by people working in systems and bankrolled by organizations.
There is also an entire mountain range of innovation thrown out because private business didn’t want it because it might negatively affect their bottom line. It’s staggering how many good ideas and smart people were thrown to the side because the company that owns them decided that it would cost too much, or how many times a company locked down IP that they never planned to use because they didn’t want to spend the money but also didn’t want anyone who did use the idea to compete with them.
What you have is a misunderstanding. Of course a lot of stuff that is “successful” is supported by corporations, that’s the system we live in no matter how good or bad it is. And you’d be shocked to realize how many government organizations or projects that only survived through government funding were major developments, if you looked. You’d be even more surprised just how many people can innovate without fancy machines and the only reason they need them is for mass production, not for the design and prototyping phase.
Seriously, we do not need to live with unpredictable, dangerous billionaire middlemen in order to make the world a better place.
Seriously, we do not need to live with unpredictable, dangerous billionaire middlemen in order to make the world a better place.
You're right! I do not believe the concentration of wealth into so few hands is necessary or even a good thing. What I am saying is that the profit motive is necessary in order to mobilize people who do not care about your great new idea, no matter how great it is. Do you really think intentional shipping would function at any recognizable level if there wasn't profit in it for the sailors, ship builders, insurance companies, port authorities, and so on and so forth? None of then give a shit about your really cool idea. They don't even know about it. But they're necessary for you to get ahold of that molybdenum you need in order to prove your idea works, much less scale it to production levels that would actually benefit society.
You have to remember, the world is filled with people who mostly just want to hang out with their friends, and that's fine. Some of us are movers, shakers, and innovators, yes, but we need help from all those people who would rather be tanning or at a soccer match. How do we get them to help out? Pay em. Give them money for their trouble.
When the Tulsa race riots happened, black applications for patents in the US fell dramatically. Why? Because black people saw that they could put in lots of hard work, become hugely successful, and the US government wasn't gonna protect them and their wealth like it would other people's. Why spend your time on something that could be taken at at any moment? It should be unsurprising for you to learn that increases corruption and authoritarianism cause decreases in inventions and economic activity. Why? Same reason. Why put in the hard work and take the risks if some official's cousin is going to get a contract at ridiculous rates and drive you out of business? Why even bother when the government could just nationalize your industry on a whim?
You mentioned that businesses will kill ideas they don't think are profitable or will cannibalize sales. Do you know who used to be the biggest killer of innovation? The government and the workers. Most innovation is fundamentally finding ways to do things better with less labor. You know who doesn't like suddenly not having a job? Workers. Why would a government oppose labor saving devices? Too many people out of a job can lead to political unrest.
I suggest: Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson.
Of course black patents, in a world where their ideas could be stolen and they could even be barred from access to them, went down. Like, that’s in a system with a heavy profit motive.
People will always like a little treat for doing their task. That’s at a very basic level, though, and when you start talking about everyone needing a “profit motive” you’re now talking about an economic system that claims that few people would do anything without a deeply selfish reward. And yea, not everyone would have the really great ideas but they would do work, and we can see that happen. I literally don’t have a job right now and just to keep busy I’ll go help my friends with stuff, for free, because I like to keep busy and feel productive. The low salaries in my last few jobs weren’t the reasons I left, it was because the management made it very clear they didn’t value any of us and were essentially stealing our labour to enrich themselves.
Like in the patent example, the thing people want is for their work to be recognized. If you steal their work they get pissed, obviously, but most people are happy to do things for others. I even know conservatives who are genuinely motivated to make the world a better place and who want to supprort others(except that they’re really stupid and easily misinformed so they end up doing it wrong and it turns them sour on anyone who isn’t directly in front of them).
Let’s invert the reason why people out of a job leads to political unrest: People with longer hours and low pay are simply largely unable to risk anything when there are no social safety nets, and it gives them more time to actually get into politics and learn about shitty things that the government is doing. It’s a big reason that the USA is the way that it is right now but many countries in Europe have shorter work weeks, better pay, more protections for workers, and stronger safety nets.
You’ve got everything backwards because it’s all you know. You’re justifying the suffering being inflicted on you because it’s easier than facing it.
You're looking at the source of new ideas: inventive people, and saying they would exist under any system. I'm looking at the system and saying great ideas go nowhere without a way to engage people who don't care about your idea.
Imagine a world without money. In order to convince people to promote and enable your great idea, you have to convince them it's valuable, beneficial, and actually a great idea. Imagine a world with money. In order to convince people to promote and enable your great idea, you have to pay them. I'm being serious here: which do you think is easier?
A massive reason why people are hard to convince in the system we live in is because they’re scared of not having enough money. Trying new things is hard and scary when you don’t have a lot of money to go around. On the flipside, if all you have to do is pay them then it doesn’t matter if your idea is good or bad, only that you have enough money to pay for it and your competitor doesn’t. A big wallet is not a good replacement for convincing people that an idea is good.
I don’t care which is easier when one of them is basically cheating. Of course it’s simpler to essentially bribe people to care, but that’s not a system we should strive for. I don’t mind a challenge if the challenge is fair, or near enough to fair.
Besides, money is definitely a fine thing to have and we know this. The problem is when it is made the central and singular goal of a system and when people who don’t have an active income stream are left in the dirt.
But like, money is what creates the profit motive? How do you keep money and remove the ability to accumulate wealth? Money is power and there are those who crave power. I agree, the less money you have, the more help you should get. Same with the opposite. But like, this discussion is based off "innovation exists without the profit motive" and I chimed in to point out that it's not really the innovation that the profit motive is good for. It's all the support systems around the invitation that enable these ideas to become big. The ultra-fast pace of innovation is enabled by these systems and given us all the wonderful medicines and quality of life improvements. I am on disability. My lifestyle is immense luxury compared to royalty from even just a dozen generations ago.
Money is power when the lack of it is death and/or suffering. If someone wants to work a little more or does something particularly awesome then ok, they get a cooler thing, but when you take care of everyone’s basic needs and you properly enforce taxation then everything on top is just a little bonus and not a runaway train to tyrrany. Money is not the core of that system but it can still exist.
I was thinking about this conversation earlier while watching a video about vaccines and was reminded also that the profit motive, for many companies in that sphere, actually prevents them from releasing technologies that could help people long term because they make more money off of costly, short term solutions. Life saving medicine is worthless to these people of they can’t charge a premium for it and but you better believe they’ll lock down that patent so no one else can get to it, just in case.
See, that’s the thing about putting money first, it doesn’t matter how you get it. Sometimes you gotta innovate, but these companies are chasing easy money, not honest money. I mean look at stock market traders and you’ll see an army of criminals and thieves. The very concept of private health insurance is making gobs of money off of people you never plan on actually helping in their time of greatest need. Large corporations will spend untold millions on propaganda and hush money schemes before they’ll actually make improvements. 3M knew the dangers of PFAS and still dumped it into the environment and hurt a lot of people. GM did the math and found that recalls for a faulty ignition would be more expensive than paying out any settlements if someone died so they just let it ride because the lives of their customers are less important than lining their pockets.
I need you to work on imagining a better world. It’s not that far away but we’ll never reach it if we don’t even try.
I think you take my defense of the usefulness of the profit motive, and the wonderful things it's gotten us, as a declaration that it is the best external motivator and should be used in all situations. Of course not.
Your first paragraph is simply not true in the sense that even if everyone's basic needs were met (and we should create a society where they are) money would still be the main source of power outside violence. Most people are not satisfied by basic necessities, especially when given examples that better is possible.
Your second paragraph is an excellent example of the limitations of the profit motive, and it's why we should continue to fund public research and development in areas where the profit motive fails. We already do it and in fact we should significantly increase our funding levels. There are other areas where the profit motive fails (utilities, healthcare at the point of delivery, national defense, education, etc.) and I think we (the United States) should expand into internet and universal health insurance.
For your third paragraph.... What do you want? For humans to be better? They will nearly always go with the easy solution. It's weirdos who look at difficult problems and take the honest, long term, responsible solution at the expense of themselves or even just short-term pain. This is fine. You're not going to change human nature. I just don't know what kind of system you want to set up where money still exists, yet greedy short-sighted people don't exist or work their ways into leadership positions at companies? I think the current punishments they receive for their bad behavior isn't nearly harsh or immediate enough, but.... They're still gonna do it.
I have lots of improvements I want to make to the world, they just don't involve denying human nature when you keep the fundamental structure of the system they exist in.
To respond to your last paragraph, there are regualtions to combat these things and cultural shifts we can make as populations work themselves off of the fear and stress of poverty. Everyone is terrified of not having enough money and there are so many studies showing the effect that being poor has on our ability to think critically and to plan longterm.
You live in a world that is pretty much designed to make everything seem like this is all “human nature”. We don’t have to be like this, certainly not to the degree we’re at right now, and we have ample evidence to show that this is true. I do not know why you are so resistent to these things, Liz, but I hope one day you can break free of it and see a better world than one where we need to always have the gnawing fear of abject poverty clawing at the backs of our minds 24/7. It doesn’t have to be like this.
We're arguing past each other.
Sure, innovation exists and always has but the pace is determined by the funding.
"So you're saying innovation is a cost center that must be cut."
-every CEO
Is that the Poland globe?
Is it not the "it's all Ohio" globe?
Is Ohio Polska shaped?
Actually, yes. And if you look up the "it's all ohio" meme it's the same globe.
EDIT: Here's a comparison
Tbf, I did actually try looking it up but I got no proper results, just globes with where ohio was pointed out on them, and it was too small to see the shape of and then I got distracted. This was a boring story, sorry. Thank you for the side by side comparison!
I was curious too because if this was a picture of China I'd be abhored, but actually it is the original Ohio Template.
ML is leaking again
Laziness is the root of invention. And innovation.
I disagree to a point, I maintain that annoyance is a way better motivator for innovation and invention
People want things easy. Call it lazy. Call it avoiding annoyance. Call it wanting things easy like I did. They're all synonymous.
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Also it requires cooperation way more than competition.
Friendly competition can be good as well, because that may be encouraging to think differently and explore new ways of solving a problem, to avoid hitting a local optimum. But it needs to friendly in the sense that you also cooperate when relevant, sharing what works and what doesn't.
Competition is just as innate in humans as cooperation is. We don't need to venerate one over the other, let alone embrace an economic ideology that doesn't even acknowledge the other.
Take sport as a case study. There are both elements at play and nobody questions the need for both.
Or take a less friendly example like academia, where competition is nothing but a hindrance.
Markets should be an obvious case too.
Happy to expound if you need me to.
I got you. We form a price setting cartel and gouge out any new competitor emerging if necessary.
-Big Corp
Sometimes the "profit" is just "this makes my life better"
Me caveman discover fire
Me not sure how to stonetise it?
Fire useless, not giving me more rocks to buy sexy caveladies time.
More often than not, the profit motif makes people more hesitant to try something new if you can't be sure it works. Being free of the profit motif gives you the space to work on your own schedule and create something innovative that might or might not work
Historically the overwhelming majority of important innovations in science and technology were done with public money in academia, military or government-sponsored industry programs. All most corporations usually did with their own money is productionize them and make incremental improvements.
The only reason that's slowly changing now is because such an insane amount of money is leaving universities and being accumulated by a small number of trillion-dollar multinationals, which isn't good either.
How many innovations have been canned and fucked over because the only thing it was going to improve was the shareholders pockets...
Too few
Given that so much of our history (the history of people genetically indistinct from us) was unrecorded and presumed to be some form of hunting and gathering where no innovation took place (that was recorded), I think it goes too far to call innovation a human universal trait. I wish we could know what human cultures were like prior to all recorded history, even thirty thousand years ago. Perhaps we innovated in oral traditions, art, cooking, animal handling, social customs (you can innovate e.g. slang), dance etc. That would convince me of innovation's place as a part of human nature. Short of that, I think of it as more of an occasional capacity or potential, and something we can find rewarding. Dogs can learn a great deal of clever tricks that they enjoy doing, but you wouldn't call it canine nature to play dead when shot with a finger gun. It's a novel behaviour borne of circumstances that can become rewarding with gradual behaviour shaping processes. I think of things like human invention as basically the same process with a more complex brain.
"Innovation" really started accelerating when we started using agriculture and had division of labor. An aristocracy (not sure what's the best term here) would form where some people had a lot of free time, and didn't need to spend all their time hunting/gathering/building/migrating. This enabled them to follow intellectual pursuits. All of this was at the expense of everyone else though. It's still kind of like that with wealthy nations extracting wealth/labor from poor nations, allowing the wealthy nations to spend some money funding universities and research.
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