| > At a high level, the market is supposed to provide an incentive to serve customers That's not what markets do. Markets are a means of efficiently and accurately pricing things in a responsive way. Some markets don't even have customers. That price may or may not be money, depending on the market in question. > My point is that real-world incentives are never perfectly aligned with such lofty, nebulous goals. For markets, definitely not, since that's not really what they are for, and any created incentive will at best attempt to move a market towards that. > Making money is not the same as helping people and no incentive scheme is clever enough to make it so. Customers are often smarter than rules but even then, customers can be fooled. So there will always a way to make money without helping people and when you increase incentives, it also increases incentive to do things that aren't actually the goal. Nobody here has said it is. The original comment noted "People acting in their own interest are reliable." I interpreted that to mean "when there are forces urging a person or group to act a certain way for their own self interest, it's easier to rely on them to continue acting that way". If Microsoft benefits from doing something that benefits others, it's easier to rely on them to continue doing that. I'm still not sure what point you were trying to make from that, since I'm not following how your latest comment relates to that or to my call for clarification, since I thought maybe you were interpreting the statement somewhat differently than I was. |