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It's important to reiterate that this isn't an issue with companies, nor with people per se. The issue is that the bottom line is the only incentive in capitalist economies.

One can dream up other forms of economies where the incentive would not be there. Some have already been discussed in great detail over the past couple centuries.



It's interesting to see number of ultra-wealthy individuals who refocus their lives on philanthropy. Perhaps there's a point at which reputation and "good karma" became a more valuable commodity.


The extra problem here is: can the alternative forms of economy survive in competition with capitalism? If not, then they're unfortunately a non-starter.

(It's like with what is said about early humans discovering agriculture. Settling down and growing crops led to worse health and less happy life than hunter-gathering, but still gave people competitive advantage over the societies that did not make the transition.)


This is exactly the reason the USSR fell. Sure, a lot of morally reprehensible actions were performed on innocent citizens, but that's not what actually ended it. The US et al. fought the USSR by destroying their crops and imposing high tariffs. The USSR couldn't produce everything it needed and so suffered because it still had to defer to the capitalist nations for the rest (who were, measured using the capitalist GDP metric, accelerating far in front of the USSR). The "communism" employed by the leaders of the USSR wasn't as profit-hungry as other strategies and so the federation suffered.




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