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Capitalism is the paywall of life
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this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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I am pro healthy capitalism too (including strong welfare state) but don't agree that capitalism deserves any credit for technological advancement. Science does. And there shouldn't be any comparison between the totalitarian states and free-capitalism states of the past. We can't give credit to a thief for prosperity because he is not a murderer.
Science doesn't exist in a vacuum. With capitalism, you're directly incentivized to invest in R&D because you can come out with a better product that people will want, thus advancing science. Everything from the lightbulb to HVAC machines started as capitalistic endeavors as opposed to purely academic ones.
Economic systems are fundamentally about resource allocation. Capitalism is not the only system that allocates resources to science nor is it the optimal one. You're making a lot of assumptions on what makes a "better" product. Under capitalism, "better" is quantified as whatever brings in the highest return on investment, which doesn't align with and is often diametrically opposed to the interests of the end users of that technology.
This is especially relevant for things like lightbulbs, cell phones, cars, etc, which are constructed in such a way that they will only last a certain amount of time, because the other alternative would be a product that never failed, and therefore only needed to be purchased once. True technological advancement would be the perfection of technology, but capitalism would never allow that because it wouldn't be profitable in the long term
Government regulation is the route to go for the edge cases where capitalism incentivizes dark patterns. For cases where an endeavor is unprofitable, government investment is typically the way to go, and seems to work rather well (eg NASA and the many inventions that came out of it, that arguably form the basis of our modern life.)
I am not calling for unfettered capitalism, but I do think we have struck a somewhat happy medium today compared to almost any other point in human history. I think it can be improved further, but I see no evidence, historical or otherwise, that communism could fare better.
It starts out that way, but regulation always fails and things get worse. The scientific method is young, most inventions were stolen and excessively exploited wayyyyy past what's ethical, and the standard expectation for level of exploitation is exponentially approaching dystopia. But at least capitalism will save us! (Good luck!)
As others said, science also needs governance, direction. Scientists have internal motivation and sense of what to do, but they often disagree and choices for resource allocation need to be made. Exteme competetiveness in some scientific institutions can cause bad culture (like favoring hype over achievement) but authoritharian systems also often breed bad science (like what soviets disregarded quantum physics at first). Speaking as a scientist myself.
Paradoxically regulation is needed to ensure free and fair competetion in science (and in other things)