| This may be a bit pedantic, but I think it's worth discussing. > The problem isn’t capitalism; it’s the imperfection of humanity. No economic system in history has eliminated waste. The fact that no economic system yet implemented at scale has eliminated waste does not necessarily imply that waste is unavoidable; we'd need to convincingly show that no such economic system could be possible. Similarly, I don't believe we can conclude that capitalism minimizes waste among all feasible, stable economic systems. As far as balancing exploration and exploitation goes, it might be argued that we should focus on reaping the benefits of our current economic system and deprioritize the exploration new economic systems, but it's too much at this point (imo) to assert that exploration is futile. My other thoughts: • "Capitalism or central planning" is a false dichotomy; there are economic systems besides capitalism that have free markets. • The goal of capital holders in a capitalist system is not efficiency (in the colloquial sense), but profit – planned obsolescence is perhaps the perfect example of this. • I agree with you that central planners can be catastrophically wrong, and my current opinion is that incorporating externalities into the pricing system (through taxes) is a good idea. It can be difficult to correctly identify, distinguish, and price externalities; I wonder if a benefit of more local economic systems is that there are fewer externalities (by which I mean, actors experience more of the effects that they cause and impose fewer incidental effects on third parties), which would reduce the number of things we need to manually identify and correct. |