| It’s not. Profit is achieved primarily by selling people goods. people want cheap meat, coffee and toys. We found ways to give people that. There are other effects where corporations cheat the laws, corrupt government, and pillage the environment - true. But the system has always been about you and me getting more choice and more options at better prices. Your toothpastes offer different flavors, and come in a magic immortal material called plastic which costs nearly nothing to make and is better for our environment than using tin tubes. Profit has many ills, as single numbers often do - they reduce complex decisions down to a simple number. That’s the magic of it all. We don’t have to examine the calculus of our morality when buying a pixel or an iPhone. We just have to Examine the price. I think we have to come to terms with the fact that humanity as a distributed entity, is not a moral organism. Profit is just a way to reduce complexity. We have a society that reflects this because our reality is such. Which is why many of the popular solutions today are prices which reflect carbon costs. |