this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2025
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So extreme heat is extreme cold? It just wraps around? The bigger you make cars, eventually they become small cars? Like, in what universe do extremes exhibit circularity?
Entrepreneurship is the process of discovering unmet needs. You do not need capitalism to do that. Capitalism uses the profit motive to incentivize this activity, which means the ONLY unmet needs that get met are the ones that are profitable. There are MANY unmet needs that are not profitable to meet - like feeding the hungry, stopping domestic violence, ending police killings of black people, or housing the unhoused. Literally all of those needs are present, they have been identified, the resources exist, and the techniques exist, but, no profit, no movement.
Think about how weird it is to need profit to incentivize this behavior anyway. There is literally unmet need. People are experiencing it. What's the problem? They don't solve it themselves. Why? Because they don't have the power to do so. Why not? Because of the consequences of a society that privileges the ultraminority over the ultramajority. What's the solution? Stop doing that and people will have the power to actually address the problems they have. How? Democratically by raising their problems and working towards a solution.
The alternative is that the only problems that entrepreneurs solve are the ones that rich people make profit from - the least democratic way of solving problems ever.
very interesting points!
I've just started a non-profit (to try to reduce/undermine surveillance capitalism) - and we'll probably build software along the way. That is entrepreneurship, but not profit focused. However, we would need to be funded and paid to make it work.
How should I frame this in your way of thinking?
Non-profits either 1) live off of someone else's profits, or 2) they raise grassroots funding. 2 is incredibly difficult to pull off, and worse, if there is enough demand in the market, then a for-profit entrepreneur is going to come in and do it with private equity and dominate because they're incentivized to do it.
But more to the point, even if you are wildly successful with grassroots funding, you will be part of less than 1% of all entrepreneurial endeavors in the history of capitalism. Just because some people can grow small batch heirloom plants in tightly controlled environments doesn't mean that's what phenomenon of agriculture is. The phenomenon of entrepreneurship is what I described and I wish you good luck trying to do what many failed non-profits have tried to do before and your success cannot possibly be enough to contradict the vast majority of entrepreneurship.