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this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
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Is capitalism good for scientific progress?
The opposite, in fact.
Modern movies, tv, music, and gaming prove pretty decisively that putting hyper-greedy capitalist shareholder proxies in charge of said industries turns their creativity to shit. It also turns healthcare, education, and more core societal functions to shit, but that's another story.
Why take a risk on a bold, original, visionary script that might succeed or fail spectacularly, a risk your industry exists to take, when you can make another derivative established IP sequel with a mass appeal formula applied to the story resulting in a highly predictable revenue stream?
Capitalism eats itself in the quest for infinite growth in a finite system. When it runs out of room to grow, it starts eating itself and calling it maximizing efficiency.
*edit sorry I replied to the person's top question instead of their followup of whether capitalism increases creativity, still applies though.
Not to mention stuff like patents and being secretive for profit, hiding knowledge instead of it being used for the good of all and allowed to be iterated upon. Also monopolizing, undermining others, intentionally sabotaging innovations for profit, wasting a ton of resources and effort on things useless on the grand scheme of things, such as how to manipulate people into buying more of your product.. etc.
Also not seeking the most logical option/investing in the logical technologies, such as intentionally sabotaging climate change/renewable energy efforts in order to earn more from oil sales and so on, and so forth. Capitalism/competition does not breed innovation. Cooperation does. And it shows, because research is very much based on cooperation.. at least researchers love to cooperate in the quest for more knowledge.
I think this is ignoring the seas of dross that have fallen away in the past. There have always been bad movies, and unoriginal movies, some of them doing quite well at the box office(used as a metric to show that people were showing up to see them). We don’t hold a lot of them in popular memory because we don’t watch them anymore, and what’s left from those eras are the movies of sufficient quality or resonance that we continue to watch them.
The system has a number of issues that are well trod, and certain pitfalls which are inherent, but hanging a lack of quality or unoriginality entirely on capitalism is overselling it.
I would posit that a lack of moderation, or a form of monomania is a bigger culprit here. Too much focus on the business side can stifle creativity, but too much focus on the creative side can result in sprawling, unfinished messes. With too much focus on safety we can be stigmatised from action, but with too much focus on action we can lose our humanity in favor of feeding the gears of progress.
This accounts for the bean counters, but doesn’t grant them the power of being the one true reason for everything being bad.
Of course not. Capitalism is only good for a very tiny subset of the population's bank accounts.
what about creativity? does it promote creativity?
It promotes money. If creativity happens to align with that, then yes.