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by cortesoft
26 days ago
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"Chasing the highest margins" is almost the entire point of a market based economy, and is the main selling point for capitalism. I get your complaint, but if you reframe it I think it isn't the real problem here. The whole point of a market-based economy is to allocate resources to making things people actually want. How does the market figure out what people want more of? Well, profit margin. If someone is making a lot of profit selling something, that is a really good sign that people want more of that thing. Other people see the high profit margin, and move to get into that business. More of that thing is created, and people's demand is satisfied. The high profit margin is the signal (and the incentive) to get more of that thing. In other words "Compulsively chasing only the highest margins" can be rephrased as "investing in things that people want more of" |
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That's news to the ALDI brothers and Henry Ford. Capitalism used to be about the exact opposite. We moved from low volume - high margin, extractive feudal-like economics to consumer capitalism, high volume low margin. You create wealth by churning out commodities at low margins that the average worker could buy.
The tech industry is trying to exactly reverse this, as Varoufakis appropriately points out, by returning to techno-feudalism where you're not a consumer but a sort of platform serf. High volume commodity markets is exactly what these people try to eliminate to return to a kind of direct resource extraction.