If anything, capitalism often stands in the way of innovation, because you must consider the profit margins first and foremost.
this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2025
507 points (97.7% liked)
Political Memes
9144 readers
3640 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
No AI generated content.
Content posted must not be created by AI with the intent to mimic the style of existing images
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
kinda like that George Lucase interview where he pointed out Soviet filmmakers had more creative freedom than he did. They weren't allowed to call for regime change. Otherwise, they could make whatever they liked. George had to make profitable movies, which is a far narrower slice of what's artistically possible.
Sure, innovation exists and always has but the pace is determined by the funding.
"So you're saying innovation is a cost center that must be cut."
-every CEO
Also it requires cooperation way more than competition.
Friendly competition can be good as well, because that may be encouraging to think differently and explore new ways of solving a problem, to avoid hitting a local optimum. But it needs to friendly in the sense that you also cooperate when relevant, sharing what works and what doesn't.
Competition is just as innate in humans as cooperation is. We don't need to venerate one over the other, let alone embrace an economic ideology that doesn't even acknowledge the other.
Take sport as a case study. There are both elements at play and nobody questions the need for both.
Or take a less friendly example like academia, where competition is nothing but a hindrance.
Markets should be an obvious case too.
Happy to expound if you need me to.
I got you. We form a price setting cartel and gouge out any new competitor emerging if necessary.
-Big Corp
Me caveman discover fire
Me not sure how to stonetise it?
Fire useless, not giving me more rocks to buy sexy caveladies time.
In order to take an innovative idea, develop it into a product or service that can be delivered for reasonable time, cost, and effort, and then spread that innovation to anyone who wants it, you need massive bureaucratic organizations and simple ways of trading effort between organizations. Very few people are passionate about bureaucracy, even fewer when they're not getting paid. Without the safety systems in place to allow for big organizations and reliable imter-organization collaboration, most cool ideas would stay in the garage.
Also, in the modern world, most innovations require access to machines and resources too expensive to be secured by some guy playing with ideas and materials in his free time.
There are examples of innovative individuals doing amazing things for the love of the game on their own dime and on their own time, yes, but their achievements are dwarfed by the innovations created by people working in systems and bankrolled by organizations.
There is also an entire mountain range of innovation thrown out because private business didn’t want it because it might negatively affect their bottom line. It’s staggering how many good ideas and smart people were thrown to the side because the company that owns them decided that it would cost too much, or how many times a company locked down IP that they never planned to use because they didn’t want to spend the money but also didn’t want anyone who did use the idea to compete with them.
What you have is a misunderstanding. Of course a lot of stuff that is “successful” is supported by corporations, that’s the system we live in no matter how good or bad it is. And you’d be shocked to realize how many government organizations or projects that only survived through government funding were major developments, if you looked. You’d be even more surprised just how many people can innovate without fancy machines and the only reason they need them is for mass production, not for the design and prototyping phase.
Seriously, we do not need to live with unpredictable, dangerous billionaire middlemen in order to make the world a better place.
Seriously, we do not need to live with unpredictable, dangerous billionaire middlemen in order to make the world a better place.
You're right! I do not believe the concentration of wealth into so few hands is necessary or even a good thing. What I am saying is that the profit motive is necessary in order to mobilize people who do not care about your great new idea, no matter how great it is. Do you really think intentional shipping would function at any recognizable level if there wasn't profit in it for the sailors, ship builders, insurance companies, port authorities, and so on and so forth? None of then give a shit about your really cool idea. They don't even know about it. But they're necessary for you to get ahold of that molybdenum you need in order to prove your idea works, much less scale it to production levels that would actually benefit society.
You have to remember, the world is filled with people who mostly just want to hang out with their friends, and that's fine. Some of us are movers, shakers, and innovators, yes, but we need help from all those people who would rather be tanning or at a soccer match. How do we get them to help out? Pay em. Give them money for their trouble.
When the Tulsa race riots happened, black applications for patents in the US fell dramatically. Why? Because black people saw that they could put in lots of hard work, become hugely successful, and the US government wasn't gonna protect them and their wealth like it would other people's. Why spend your time on something that could be taken at at any moment? It should be unsurprising for you to learn that increases corruption and authoritarianism cause decreases in inventions and economic activity. Why? Same reason. Why put in the hard work and take the risks if some official's cousin is going to get a contract at ridiculous rates and drive you out of business? Why even bother when the government could just nationalize your industry on a whim?
You mentioned that businesses will kill ideas they don't think are profitable or will cannibalize sales. Do you know who used to be the biggest killer of innovation? The government and the workers. Most innovation is fundamentally finding ways to do things better with less labor. You know who doesn't like suddenly not having a job? Workers. Why would a government oppose labor saving devices? Too many people out of a job can lead to political unrest.
I suggest: Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson.
Of course black patents, in a world where their ideas could be stolen and they could even be barred from access to them, went down. Like, that’s in a system with a heavy profit motive.
People will always like a little treat for doing their task. That’s at a very basic level, though, and when you start talking about everyone needing a “profit motive” you’re now talking about an economic system that claims that few people would do anything without a deeply selfish reward. And yea, not everyone would have the really great ideas but they would do work, and we can see that happen. I literally don’t have a job right now and just to keep busy I’ll go help my friends with stuff, for free, because I like to keep busy and feel productive. The low salaries in my last few jobs weren’t the reasons I left, it was because the management made it very clear they didn’t value any of us and were essentially stealing our labour to enrich themselves.
Like in the patent example, the thing people want is for their work to be recognized. If you steal their work they get pissed, obviously, but most people are happy to do things for others. I even know conservatives who are genuinely motivated to make the world a better place and who want to supprort others(except that they’re really stupid and easily misinformed so they end up doing it wrong and it turns them sour on anyone who isn’t directly in front of them).
Let’s invert the reason why people out of a job leads to political unrest: People with longer hours and low pay are simply largely unable to risk anything when there are no social safety nets, and it gives them more time to actually get into politics and learn about shitty things that the government is doing. It’s a big reason that the USA is the way that it is right now but many countries in Europe have shorter work weeks, better pay, more protections for workers, and stronger safety nets.
You’ve got everything backwards because it’s all you know. You’re justifying the suffering being inflicted on you because it’s easier than facing it.
You're looking at the source of new ideas: inventive people, and saying they would exist under any system. I'm looking at the system and saying great ideas go nowhere without a way to engage people who don't care about your idea.
Imagine a world without money. In order to convince people to promote and enable your great idea, you have to convince them it's valuable, beneficial, and actually a great idea. Imagine a world with money. In order to convince people to promote and enable your great idea, you have to pay them. I'm being serious here: which do you think is easier?
A massive reason why people are hard to convince in the system we live in is because they’re scared of not having enough money. Trying new things is hard and scary when you don’t have a lot of money to go around. On the flipside, if all you have to do is pay them then it doesn’t matter if your idea is good or bad, only that you have enough money to pay for it and your competitor doesn’t. A big wallet is not a good replacement for convincing people that an idea is good.
I don’t care which is easier when one of them is basically cheating. Of course it’s simpler to essentially bribe people to care, but that’s not a system we should strive for. I don’t mind a challenge if the challenge is fair, or near enough to fair.
Besides, money is definitely a fine thing to have and we know this. The problem is when it is made the central and singular goal of a system and when people who don’t have an active income stream are left in the dirt.
But like, money is what creates the profit motive? How do you keep money and remove the ability to accumulate wealth? Money is power and there are those who crave power. I agree, the less money you have, the more help you should get. Same with the opposite. But like, this discussion is based off "innovation exists without the profit motive" and I chimed in to point out that it's not really the innovation that the profit motive is good for. It's all the support systems around the invitation that enable these ideas to become big. The ultra-fast pace of innovation is enabled by these systems and given us all the wonderful medicines and quality of life improvements. I am on disability. My lifestyle is immense luxury compared to royalty from even just a dozen generations ago.
Money is power when the lack of it is death and/or suffering. If someone wants to work a little more or does something particularly awesome then ok, they get a cooler thing, but when you take care of everyone’s basic needs and you properly enforce taxation then everything on top is just a little bonus and not a runaway train to tyrrany. Money is not the core of that system but it can still exist.
I was thinking about this conversation earlier while watching a video about vaccines and was reminded also that the profit motive, for many companies in that sphere, actually prevents them from releasing technologies that could help people long term because they make more money off of costly, short term solutions. Life saving medicine is worthless to these people of they can’t charge a premium for it and but you better believe they’ll lock down that patent so no one else can get to it, just in case.
See, that’s the thing about putting money first, it doesn’t matter how you get it. Sometimes you gotta innovate, but these companies are chasing easy money, not honest money. I mean look at stock market traders and you’ll see an army of criminals and thieves. The very concept of private health insurance is making gobs of money off of people you never plan on actually helping in their time of greatest need. Large corporations will spend untold millions on propaganda and hush money schemes before they’ll actually make improvements. 3M knew the dangers of PFAS and still dumped it into the environment and hurt a lot of people. GM did the math and found that recalls for a faulty ignition would be more expensive than paying out any settlements if someone died so they just let it ride because the lives of their customers are less important than lining their pockets.
I need you to work on imagining a better world. It’s not that far away but we’ll never reach it if we don’t even try.
Laziness is the root of invention. And innovation.
I disagree to a point, I maintain that annoyance is a way better motivator for innovation and invention
People want things easy. Call it lazy. Call it avoiding annoyance. Call it wanting things easy like I did. They're all synonymous.
Sounds like work.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(7 replies)
Sometimes the "profit" is just "this makes my life better"
More often than not, the profit motif makes people more hesitant to try something new if you can't be sure it works. Being free of the profit motif gives you the space to work on your own schedule and create something innovative that might or might not work
Historically the overwhelming majority of important innovations in science and technology were done with public money in academia, military or government-sponsored industry programs. All most corporations usually did with their own money is productionize them and make incremental improvements.
The only reason that's slowly changing now is because such an insane amount of money is leaving universities and being accumulated by a small number of trillion-dollar multinationals, which isn't good either.
Is that the Poland globe?
Is it not the "it's all Ohio" globe?
Is Ohio Polska shaped?
Actually, yes. And if you look up the "it's all ohio" meme it's the same globe.
EDIT: Here's a comparison
Tbf, I did actually try looking it up but I got no proper results, just globes with where ohio was pointed out on them, and it was too small to see the shape of and then I got distracted. This was a boring story, sorry. Thank you for the side by side comparison!
I was curious too because if this was a picture of China I'd be abhored, but actually it is the original Ohio Template.
Given that so much of our history (the history of people genetically indistinct from us) was unrecorded and presumed to be some form of hunting and gathering where no innovation took place (that was recorded), I think it goes too far to call innovation a human universal trait. I wish we could know what human cultures were like prior to all recorded history, even thirty thousand years ago. Perhaps we innovated in oral traditions, art, cooking, animal handling, social customs (you can innovate e.g. slang), dance etc. That would convince me of innovation's place as a part of human nature. Short of that, I think of it as more of an occasional capacity or potential, and something we can find rewarding. Dogs can learn a great deal of clever tricks that they enjoy doing, but you wouldn't call it canine nature to play dead when shot with a finger gun. It's a novel behaviour borne of circumstances that can become rewarding with gradual behaviour shaping processes. I think of things like human invention as basically the same process with a more complex brain.
"Innovation" really started accelerating when we started using agriculture and had division of labor. An aristocracy (not sure what's the best term here) would form where some people had a lot of free time, and didn't need to spend all their time hunting/gathering/building/migrating. This enabled them to follow intellectual pursuits. All of this was at the expense of everyone else though. It's still kind of like that with wealthy nations extracting wealth/labor from poor nations, allowing the wealthy nations to spend some money funding universities and research.
Pretty sure humans always did innovate as you said yes. And I mean, you can just look at modern humans for that, were not fundamentally biologically different to the humans back then. And we loooove slang, and trying out new things, and being curious, and learning. And we need no external motive to this
But you need to think yourself in their position, they wouldn't have known the limits of technology, they wouldn't have known that anything in our modern world was possible. They had nothing to go off on. All they had were rocks and wood and plants, and maybe fire (that's not hot enough to melt metal)
There is such a long way to get to any technological point resembling anything close to the industrial revolution it's not strange that it took a long time. Or, hell, even agriculture. A big problem with agriculture was that it didn't improve the well-being of the farmers in the short-term (and the long-term is beyond their lifespan), so it wasn't just a purely technological thing. It needed the correct set of external factors for it to be preferable to hunting and gathering.
I'd wager to guess that if you had the humans that were back then, but instead they just knew that our modern world is possible, you'd see a hell of a lot more progress happening a lot quicker. Because then it wouldn't be a question of whether gears, or electricity, or medicine, or a complete understanding of the world was possible, but instead how.
That is the point I was driving at. They're the same as us with different environmental factors. Hence the dog trick metaphor - you wouldn't expect a dog to learn the "play dead" trick before the invention of guns.
My only real point here was that if we're going to stake the claim that "innovation is human nature", we have to consider a broader scope of the word to include forms of innovation that are mostly invisible to archaeologists - the problem then being that we are making completely unsupported claims to do so.
Wouldn't say completely unsupported. Oldest tools, instruments, and cave paintings, are all older than 30 000 years old
Those cave paintings were likely just to entertain children. You look at modern drawings a grown-up will do of animals while drawing with kids, and they're not far off. These are people with brains exactly like yours and mine - if cave paintings were the apogee of artistic endeavour at the time, I'll eat my hat.
Is this based upon an expert's understanding of the topic, or is it just you speculating, though?
I do not intend to be hostile if it comes across that way, but it kinda feels to me a bit like you're saying things were like this or that so it fits your conclusion instead of basing it upon any literature
But regarding the art, have you ever tried drawing? That shit is so much more difficult than it might seem at first. Converting a 3D world into a 2D image is not easy. Drawing is a technology, and not just that, but it's culture, it's subjective. People back then might not have cared about replicating reality in art, but instead cared about other aspects of it, and the brain is good enough to fill in the blanks as needed anyway
To further the point, perspective drawing was an invention. It's not just something that humans intuitively know how to do. You look at old art humans made in the medieval times and so on, and they also look primitive compared to what human artists could make today (not me, however).
The technology of art needed time to develop, just like other forms of technology, and there was no such technology during those times. They had nothing to go off on, just like in other areas.
So, yes, it is not unreasonable to say that cave paintings probably were among the best drawings humans could make at the time, just like searing something over a fireplace might have been the best way of cooking food back then.
It's also not unreasonable to say that cave paintings likely were important parts of culture and artistic expression as well. Doubly so when some cave paintings were deep inside dark caves. That's not a place where you'd find people playing around with kids.
Saying that it was just to entertain children is very dismissive of the likely time and effort those art pieces, and the creation of their pigments, took
All those things you mentions have been around since prior to the neolithic revolutions.. Plus a whole bunch of tool making.
My only real point here was that if we're going to stake the claim that "innovation is human nature", we have to consider a broader scope of the word to include forms of innovation that are mostly invisible to archaeologists - the problem then being that we are making completely unsupported claims to do so.
Mmm.. But there is archaeological evidence for a bunch of those.. Cooking, art, animal handling. And art also provides evidence about other customs in some cases...
I think innovation is easier when you're not constantly preoccupied with survival, having to spend every waking moment worrying about starvation or predators or disease or freezing to death probably puts quite a bit hamper on what creative new ideas you are able to come up with and try.
Most hunter gatherers had a shitload of free time. Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything includes a bunch of references about this.
I love that book
How many innovations have been canned and fucked over because the only thing it was going to improve was the shareholders pockets...
Too few
view more: next ›