Well, you see, the thing about capitalism is it empowers exactly the people who don’t want that to happen. Consumerism-driven, wasteful capitalism is the in-built trend of capitalism itself, not an unfortunate variant - even government regulation doesn’t solve these problems.
That’s not exactly my point, it’s more that our current political economy penalises pro-social behaviour (a business is more likely to be out-competed and fail if they actually treat their workers and customers well, so it’s an exceptional thing to see) and sociopaths are rewarded for profiting in this system, their gain comes at our exploitation so they’re effectively rewarded for hurting us.
If we can restructure our political economy so that sociopaths are rewarded by contributing to society, then their own competitiveness and greed is much less of a problem. For lack of another better developed-world example, look at how China keeps their billionaires on a leash[1]. Now obviously there’s plenty of problems in their political system and some would say they their billionaires are still a problem despite them being dominated by the government, but it’s an example of an alternative to the oligarchical system we know, proof that there are successful ways forwards which are applicable to our economies, even if we don’t copy them exactly (that would be silly).
(On top of this, a society is certainly capable of detecting and ostracising or punishing anti-social people such as sociopaths. The problem is that the most important ones are effectively out of reach in our society since they have a police force protecting them and we have a more alienated, disorganised society)
Well, you see, the thing about capitalism is it empowers exactly the people who don’t want that to happen. Consumerism-driven, wasteful capitalism is the in-built trend of capitalism itself, not an unfortunate variant - even government regulation doesn’t solve these problems.
True that. Sociopaths always win. This is pretty much true of any form of society though.
That’s not exactly my point, it’s more that our current political economy penalises pro-social behaviour (a business is more likely to be out-competed and fail if they actually treat their workers and customers well, so it’s an exceptional thing to see) and sociopaths are rewarded for profiting in this system, their gain comes at our exploitation so they’re effectively rewarded for hurting us.
If we can restructure our political economy so that sociopaths are rewarded by contributing to society, then their own competitiveness and greed is much less of a problem. For lack of another better developed-world example, look at how China keeps their billionaires on a leash[1]. Now obviously there’s plenty of problems in their political system and some would say they their billionaires are still a problem despite them being dominated by the government, but it’s an example of an alternative to the oligarchical system we know, proof that there are successful ways forwards which are applicable to our economies, even if we don’t copy them exactly (that would be silly).
(On top of this, a society is certainly capable of detecting and ostracising or punishing anti-social people such as sociopaths. The problem is that the most important ones are effectively out of reach in our society since they have a police force protecting them and we have a more alienated, disorganised society)
https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/#fnref14 ↩︎