Economist Confronts 400 Environmentalists

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[@Nevio197]

As an European is quite interesting to see that academic conferences there looks more like ted-talks/motivational speeches rather than lectures

[@jonathanbauer2988]

I am a little confused by this comment, we have lectures all of the time in classes this was just more of an event we can go to

[@Max-nt5zs]

@@jonathanbauer2988Europeans are just stuck up snobs

[@andrewseaman9913]

I wish there was a grammatical case or particle in english that would casually express that, whenever I say the word "economist", it is intended as an insult.

[@gabrielpetersen8528]

Yo did a terrific job. I wish I was at the conference to hear the rest of the speakers.

[@madmadigan6497]

Great video, loved the evidence and the call for progress not stagnation.

[@lhumanoideerrantdesinterne8598]

Progress doesn't mean "producing more". You can have a happy, wealthy, scientifically advanced society where ressource usage is kept only to what is necessary and yet with a much higher standard of living than ours. On the other hand, you can have a society like our current ones where an ever-increasing production is being directed to the benefit of a small amount of wealthy people or thrown away as waste while most people don't benefit from it. What he is advocating for isn't "progress" it's cunsumption.

[@madmadigan6497]

I agree, I guess we have different definitions of progress. Maybe a better word would be improvement. Push the envelope of what we can do with an ever decreasing amount of resources. Like his example of producing more food supply with fewer acreages of land. Instead of limiting ourselves, I firmly believe we can preserve the Earth and improve standards of living, it will just take more ingenuity than we have currently.

[@adamatraore2286]

You made a great presentation.

[@user-qt2yi1tz4g]

Great talk!

[@pinklinecabs3967]

This was phenomenonal. 🗿🌟

[@Hansulf]

Confronts? It was basically a motivational Ted talk with history background...

[@tuckerbugeater]

This dialectic goes back probably more than 100 years.

[@JTalksNow]

Wow… your school seems amazing for organizing a meeting like this. I ask my professors about their career and they ignore me LOL. Your school seems Innovative, to inspire critical thought, discussion, teamwork and to have goals to make the world better.

[@user-zw5jj2uf1p]

I wish you had added more nuance. You basically made a strawman argument. 1) Of course we want to keep the food and the medicine part of the economy. But perhaps we'd be better off without fast fashion, car dependency, or those people who collect water bottles of every color. You could've made a discussion around whether this is division between keeping the _necessary_ economy while reducing the _luxuries_ economy is feasible. 2) I'll repeat this analogy because it's a good one: would you recommend a smoker to keep on smoking in the hopes that we'll some day "innovate" a medicine that reverses the harms of smoking? Innovation is great, let's invest more in it, but it's risky. We're also seeing that for some technologies, we're reaching close to their theoretical maximum efficiency. We might innovate our way out of this crisis... or we may not. 3) You talked about government failure, but markets can fail too. The Market for Lemmons paper won the 2001 Nobel Prize. Markets only work with perfect information, and the government could, say, force companies to disclose their CO2 emissions and that of their suppliers to create a true competition for sustainable products.

[@calamitycanyon9173]

1) I think that yes, it is likely more nuanced than he made it out to be, but I also think it might be more nuanced than you're making it out to be. There are certain goods out there that I think you and I can agree are purely luxuries, things like sneakers that cost several thousand dollars or the highest of high end vehicles. But anywhere below that and you'll often find that economies are incredibly complex and interconnected. We saw this with the closing of many non-essential businesses during covid, where manufacturers of certain kind of plastic wrap were closed down, which then contributed to shortages and wastage of certain foods, as they depended on plastics to keep them from rotting. I'd personally like more government involvement in the economy, but it WAS governments with policy analysts and designers with far more expertise than you or I that designed these policies. Or we could use the example you gave of fast fashion, which although is undeniably massively wasteful and dirty, has also undeniably supplied incredibly amounts of cheap clothing to people all around the world. It's the reason why you often see children in villages in Africa with mickey-mouse branded T-shirts and the like. I'd also say that car dependency is actually a hinderance to economic growth as well as to the environment. 2) Your criticism I actually don't think touches on an issue that I had with his talk, which was that often, efficiency often leads to additional use to the product, which often makes it so that the overall environmental impact of the use of that product is even more than when it was less efficient. But besides that, I'd agree that there are technologies that are reaching their maximum efficiency and competitiveness, but I'd say it's things like oil and coal where that's happening. Private and public investment into renewable technologies for example have been outpacing fossil fuels for a while now, because they know that it's an industry which will continue to grow and develop. Hydro, solar, and wind for example have been growing exponentially in their adoption and energy efficiency, and decreasing exponentially in their price, and aren't seen to be slowing down any time soon. We've seen richer countries like Europe and New Zealand already decrease their emissions over a decade ago now, which gives a great amount of hope to poorer countries who wish to develop, but that we wish didn't sacrifice environmental integrity when doing so. 3) He himself talked about market failures and the necessary role of good government policy, especially when it relates to proper pricing mechanisms and investment into the efficiency of production in underdeveloped nations, mostly near the end though.

[@user-zw5jj2uf1p]

1) 2) 3) I wasn't trying to make a specific argument about eco vs econ, just that generally even you could've given a better lecture that he did. Kinda disappointing because he does have good videos

[@ElMoonLite]

If I had to guess, his time was short and he picked topics that are important but often overlooked in environmental circuits and focus on that, and go less into details about other things. The things you mention are important but are mentioned quite often and do not add much to the point of his chosen topic. I have not seen the rest of the talks there but I would not be surprised if others already mentioned them. His main point is, don't be an extremist; don't go: full economy over everything, but also don't go: we need to stop everything we do. We need to do things smarter. And economy can help us motivate to do just that. And that can still mean we should waste less, give up some luxury, beware bad policies, etc. I'm not saying I agree with everything he said (some good points in other comments), but I do like someone actually being positive and showing how we could work toward something good, and what incentives to apply. Hungry or sick people generally will not care about the environment, and keep using cheap short term fixes over long term durable environment friendly solutions. If we can be efficient in basic needs like food, health, housing, energy, then we create room and motivation to improve our impact on the environment. If we only tell people they can not have nice things, far less people will want to do better and things will not improve. If we can show a way where we can still have nice things and improve our impact, even if that impact is less, if more people are willing to go there through innovation then some of that is better then nothing changing because nobody wants to give things up. I'm all for a better future, but if we can only show doom and gloom and can only tell people to stop having nice things then nothing will change until it is too late. Sorry, bit of a rant 😅 I'm no expert but I do think his topic could have merit and is at least worth thinking about, and is often shunned by environment activists and should not blindly be ignored and could use some attention.

[@fortunecooking2510]

Great Presentation and very insightful on how to look at the progression of Economic Growth as we go in the future. As an Econ student, I'd like to see more of your insightful analyses of how we can implement environmental policies that can aid us in producing more economic growth without depleting our natural resources drastically. How can we be more environmentally friendly in our inputs of producing new technologies? Thank you for this lecture and I hope you can do similar videos in the future.

[@GuidoAmbar]

Great talk! Viva la libertad carajo!

[@mitchellpalsson644]

I’m just here to remind people that Harambe lived with joy and so can you.

[@aescubed]

Energy efficiency is great but we need WAY more energy if we are to get the optimist sci fi future but that does mean we need more energy dense and cleaner fuels.

[@T1TT2]

Are you read why the world became rich by koyama ? Very good video .

[@user-fv1uf9bf4r]

Please excuse me, how is it that jiu jitsu teacher doesn't burn coal? He has a wife at home, he buys things. For academic training, it is necessary to maintain specialized buildings... it remains for this economist to learn engineering and logic.

[@saahiliyer11]

He didn’t claim that he never burned coal. But there’s nothing innate to coal that means it can’t be substituted out with something cleaner. If you want to make this an engineering issue, you can potentially convert existing coal-fired power plants to nuclear plants.

[@calamitycanyon9173]

The argument is that he's going to have a wife at home and buy things regardless of his source of income. He gets exercise, so he may have to consume a little more than in other circumstances and A building is required, but it's a fact that the vast majority of emissions and environmental degradation comes from the extraction, processing, and removal of natural resources. The service a Jiu Jitsu teacher provides does not itself require extraction, processing, or removal of natural resources if we are able agree that either way, he should be able to have a full stomach for him and his family. Or at the very least, being a Jiu Jitsu teacher doesn't create the emissions or environmental degradation that the vast majority of jobs in the past, and arguably jobs today, have created, whether it be by working on an oil rig, farm, whathaveyou.

[@user-fv1uf9bf4r]

@@calamitycanyon9173 You, like this economist, don’t understand... It doesn’t matter where you spent your money, bought a car or paid a coach for several years. The trainer himself buys goods with this money, the goods are made in the factory, the factory consumes resources. with a coach it’s a longer chain, but it’s there.

[@user-fv1uf9bf4r]

@@calamitycanyon9173 The building for training Jiu Jitsu must be supplied with electricity and heat. the equipment for it was produced in factories that consume resources and energy. A less harmful hobby than quad biking, but it still consumes resources.

[@smarchar]

I understand your confusion because it's hard to simplify to a story like that. What he means is as his income rises to a certain level, he will spend a smaller portion of it consuming physical, resource intensive goods. If his income doubles, he first doubles his spending on warm jackets let's say. But when his income doubles again he's not going to now double his spending on warm jackets. He's already got his family covered, and he buys jiu jitsu lessons. So the portion of his income going to resource intensive goods falls. The same goes for the jiu jitsu teacher. As the jiu jitsu teacher's income doubles maybe he also buys more warm jackets. But when his income doubles again he's got enough of those, so he buys some economics e-books. The portion of HIS income going to resource intensive goods falls. So overall the economy grew because the income of both these dudes grew, but the proportion of that income going to burning coal has reduced. The graph that shows the decoupling between income and energy use supports this. It's not that energy use stayed steady. It just rose much less steeply than income after a certain level. The logic of economics is proportions and aggregation. If you're used to engineering logic it may take a bit of thinking to understand, but the logic is definitely there! (part 1/2)

[@mr.e2962]

How familiar are you with the idea of Free Market Environmentalism?

[@eufrozinak9461]

You should read some Kropotkin, Bakunin and Bookchin. I don't think either growth or policy are the solution, it's community organizing and mutual aid. Another problem I have with your points is that technology doesn't devolve as we stop growth. It's not a coincidence it's called 'post-growth' and not 'pre-growth' or 'feudalism'. It can only work well because there was growth before it, and can only exist as a response to growth.

[@andrewseaman9913]

Save your time, economists arnt actually trying to solve problems, they're cultists whose job it is to make reality fit models via policy.

[@Brian-ug6zl]

I’m not sure community organizing is a solution when in America the communities organize to stop solar farms from being built “to protect the environment” and to stop affordable homes from being built “to protect the neighborhood character”

[@andrewseaman9913]

​@@Brian-ug6zl Those communities can choose to do that, and face the consequences. What needs to come in tandem with encouraging community organization is to stop subsidizing suburban living, because really thats the problem. By spending so much to enable the wealthier 50% to squat on larger geographic areas we allow them the illusion of community. When we say the word "community" it is intrinsically geographically bounded, and suburbanism has allowed for the formation of synthetic community-proxies which we allow the dignity of the parent object to which their form refers ("community") when by their very structure they have none of its key features.

[@waterbloom1213]

I don't see how reading Russian anarchists is supposed to provide a strong framework for correctly analyzing modern economic consequences of growth related to market externalities and arguable failures regarding technology or the environment.

[@andrewseaman9913]

@@waterbloom1213 Because most anti-capitalist writers pointed out those "externalities" as inevitabilities and inherent frailties in capitalist systems, which we are now living with. Degradation is a natural consequence of capitalism, not because the people helming it arnt good enough, but because the way in which it treats basic goods as commodities is inherently alienating to actual human concerns. It is, at its core, an engineering exercise that has turned into a moral one - and that moral exercise is failing us dailly.

[@bjarkih1977]

How can you say we're using less energy for more growth when China is building new coal fueled power plants and poisoning the environment? China is not a developed country and therefore not in your graph of energy use. I live in Iceland and economic growth has had a negative impact on the environment. Please tell me how this growth is sustainable? Scarce resources are great for making money for the owners of those resources. I see that with allocation of energy, driven by the constant drive for economic growth. All this innovation is useless since it's not profitable, and when it will be it might be to late.

[@meglukes]

You’re creating a disembodied idea of what economic growth is. China is still poor as in a massive number of people don’t have indoor electricity or running water (don’t believe the BS statistics produced by the Chinese communist party). They’re still at the point of development where “economic growth” Just means being less painfully poor. Environmentalism a lingerie for those who are well fed with a solid roof over their heads, access to plenty of entertainment, healthcare, heat, and air-conditioning as the local climate demands. If you want them to give a crap, get them up to an Icelandic level of development. You can’t educate and fearmonger people into not caring about their own personal living requirements, it’s why the carbon footprint of those obsessed with the issue are nearly indistinguishable from those who are not.

[@omkarchakraborty1739]

300 Spartans against the Persian army lol

[@clehaxze]

Some rebuttable to the core argument. 1. Yes the developed country uses less energy - they shifted their manufacturing to developing countries like China and India. aka. The current largest polluters. The numbers tells a different story. Global warming doesn't stop in the US just because the US reduces their power consumption. It's global. 2. Sustainably is equally about the future generations, I'm Ok with 1 out of 3 of my child die if that means 10 generations later the mortality is not 100% from all the pollution and warming. It's not ideal, but that's the tradeoff metric we are working with. It can go the other way too. Don't think it's can only go better from here on out. 3. Innovation is cool and all. But it's not a guarantee. Renewable energies has it's limits. I strongly prefer us live under that limit until we innovate some new stuff that breaks it. Be it 100% efficient solar, new cheap geothermal and what not. Guaranteeing the survival of the human race is much more important then us keeping our current lifestyle.

[@bobhearinger]

I hope this guy is not really a professor. In Europe these personal stories would be considered cringy and not related to something a scientist would need to involve in a science/college setting. Where are the environmentalists? How do we know they are all environmentalists? Why do we have to listen to a personal story at the beginning? He is talking about more fulfilling lives as an argument, but more and more people are depressed in capitalistic society. We did meet "the needs of the current generation", it's just that if the generation can have more, why not have more than they need? This is not science.

[@waterbloom1213]

Angus Maddison's time series disprove a lot of your arguments on needs not being fulfilled by economics. Poverty rates, Life expectancy, Mortality rates, Inequality rates measured by GINI, Crime rates and general shortage statistics are just some of the data sets that completely disprove your main argument. Rather odd that you would say that the numbers tell a different story when the only thing you come up with are supposed mental health statistics when you do not even prove causality between an economic system and their purported rise.

[@lhumanoideerrantdesinterne8598]

Urgh... I don't wanna go too hard on this kind of people because I'm sure this guy is well-meaning and really thinks he is arguing for the good of mankind, but on the other hand, not only are his idea terrible, he felt they were worth diplaying in a public forumm like KZbin, so... fair game I guess. And so I have to say this is typical economist brainrot where you are unable to distinguish wealth creation from human happiness because your whole education has taught you to attain the former and that becomes the only lens you use to see the world and how to improve it. Let's take the child mortality rate example for instance. Sure, the drop in the last centuries correlates with economic growth but... does it? This drop happened mainly thanks to germ theory and better hygiene, not money being pumped directly into the children to make them healthy. Now, sure, to produce scientific advances like this one, you need an educated population, which means the rest of society must be able to provide for them while they do their research. That requires excess wealth. You also need wealth for maintaining hospitals in good condition and with competent doctors and nurses. Also, another important factor in the drop was the better nutrition which does require production on a larger scale. So yeah, this curve certainly wouldn't look as nice without the Industrial Revolutions of the XIXth century. But if you look at the costs for all the things I listed and compare them to the economic growth the West has seen during that period... Well... It doesn't compare. In fact, in the US, infant mortality rate had pretty much plateaued by the end of the 80s (the curve in this presentation only keeps dropping because of currently industrializing countries). Meanwhile, US GDP has quintupled during the same period. So where did all that money go? What purpose does it serve? Now, obviously, public health isn't the only thing economic growth can foster, be it education, transports, comfort, lodging, entertainment... there are many things that can be improved by higher prodution and more wealth. But currently, ecnomic growth outstrips progress in any of these fields by such a margin that you can say they are completly decoupled from one another. Guys like these will point at feudal times and ask if you want to go back to that. And no, obviously, noone does. Compared to ours, a pre-industrial society sucks. But the argument for degrowth is that we don't need our current production rates to keep our current living standards, or even get better ones and that, instead of endlessly increasing production for marginal gains, we should instead make it more efficient by wasting less of our production and taking away the excess wealth being hoarded by a small group of ulra wealthy people. God, it's tiring to keep having this conversation...

[@waterbloom1213]

Pretending that the Industrial Revolutions were not a direct outcome of greater economic freedoms and a focus on achieving greater capital gains through increased savings and investments by private individuals is extremely short-sighted, especially during the second industrial revolution which streamlined engineering and chemistry into production lines. You can take a look into Angus Maddison's time series on poverty and healthcare and how they improve the very moment capitalist modes of production skyrocket in Europe. So yeah, not only is there correlation, but a strong causal relationship between improvement and economic system of choice. Regarding your poorly reasoned example, mortality rates are indeed a product of better hygiene and understanding of science, innovations which you conveniently ignore were provided and improved by an infrastructure and legal framework that themselves were a direct and indirect product of businessmen, factories and inventors doing their job freely and being able to provide for consumer needs via market systems. Hospitals, sewers, pharmaceuticals and equipment for improvement do not appear by themselves, even less so in the vast amounts we have today when compared to the past. The lecturer gave you multiple examples of how economic growth allows private individuals to develop better services: the example of guano and the Haber-Bosch process to produce ammonia are two of them; other examples include dehydrated milk, aspirin, or the invention of the fridge and cold transport chains as in Argentina and the U.S. All of these examples and many more were a product of commercially-oriented private enterprises seeking profit by trying to find a solution to a problem. Countries with higher amount of resources, living standards and education have one thing in common: a strong capital-focused economy with incentives for saving and investment. As for your comment on a minority of individuals hoarding more and more, it is tiring that people like you don't bother understanding what a GINI index is or that there is a difference between relative measures and absolute measures of wealth.

[@lhumanoideerrantdesinterne8598]

@@waterbloom1213 "Pretending that the Industrial Revolutions were not a direct outcome of greater economic freedoms and a focus on achieving greater capital gains through increased savings and investments by private individuals is extremely short-sighted" Good think I never said that then. Yes, capitalism is what gave birth to the IR, I agree. Now, I think we could imagine a world where a similar increase in productivity happened under different circumstances with a different economic model leading to potentialy better outcome, but honestly, I find the exercise to be a bit pointless. We live in a world shaped by capitalism, both in good and bad, I'm not denying that nor trying to erase everything that entails, just to find a better system. "that themselves were a direct and indirect product of businessmen, factories and inventors doing their job freely and being able to provide for consumer needs via market systems." Are you seriously using the medical system to defend private ownership ? Do you realize this might be the worst example you could have picked ? Like... Even if you truly believe that the US, with its private model has the best medical system in the world, pretty much every other developped country has an at least comparable in quality but much, much more accessible because it is at least partly public. It is obvious that the general health of the population is better served by public involvement in the matter of public health to the point that it has become a meme to complain about the US system. And to back it up, you'll notice that, despite the US system being much more profitable and having incredible potential on the top end, US average lifespan lags behind many other countries. "All of these examples and many more were a product of commercially-oriented private enterprises seeking profit by trying to find a solution to a problem." Okay, allow me to give you a counterexample : NASA sending people to the Moon. Not a profitable venture by any means, in fact a very costly one and a very complex one at that. But a lot of incredibly talented people worked on it because profit isn't the only thing that can motivate people to innovate. Desire to improve society, to satify one's curiosity or simply to be famous as that super smart inventor are all factors that motivate millions of scientists working for public institutions worldwide to innovate. Obviously the private sector can produce innovation, but not at an especially impressive rate, its actual strength lies in production and distribution. "Countries with higher amount of resources, living standards and education have one thing in common: a strong capital-focused economy with incentives for saving and investment." Yes ? So what ? Once upon a time, the most prosperous country on Earth was China, ruled under the absolute power of an emperor and its confucean administation, with the merchant class considered as outcast and a mercantilist ecnomy. Should we assume that it is thus the best system there could ever be ? Capitalism is the system that brought the prosperity of the modern West (at a severe cost to the rest of the world I might add, but let's not go there), I'm not denying that. That doesn't mean the system cannot be improved or that there cannot be a compltely different, better one. "As for your comment on a minority of individuals hoarding more and more, it is tiring that people like you don't bother understanding what a GINI index is or that there is a difference between relative measures and absolute measures of wealth." Oh, get off your high-horse, you pompous asshole. By GINI index, do you mean the one that went up by almost 7 points in the US between 1980 and 2020 ? As an uneducated pleb, I wonder what that mean. I guess number goes up, so good ? I know that, depending on the metric you use, you can make it seem like inequalty retes vary, but I challenge you to find me a single measure showing me it has been going down in the last decades. You would have to be delusional to believe that.

[@waterbloom1213]

@@lhumanoideerrantdesinterne8598 Much has been theorized about economic systems, and this is not the XIXth century where speculation and proof were not so clearly distinguishable. Empirically and theoretically there is no successful alternative system to capitalism that we know of or can seriously theorize about excluding post-scarcity economics which is either science fiction Singularity (Futurology) or communist/anarchist utopia (Marx, Bakunin, Proudhon, etc) The example you gave of NASA is somewhat valid and not as much of a counterexample as you may think, as it showcases how public investment alongside private enterprises can achieve impressive scientific and engineering feats. However, if you actually bothered with the details you would know that much of the Apollo missions' success was also due to the intervention of private businesses like Grumman. Most of the R&D, particularly outside fundamental physics, was the work of private companies contracted by NASA. Your counterexample is not a particularly good one, DARPA Fundamental Projects or FDA intervention would be much better. As for you saying healthcare is the worst example I could possibly give, it seems to me you go with the myth of American privatized healthcare and are not aware that the American health system is heavily and mostly subsidized by public budgets, both at the federal and state levels (by programs like Medicare and Medicaid), while also posing one of the major threats to U.S déficit spending (i.e. it's potentially a massive bubble); while it is also the State the one that places barriers to entry so that an artificial oligopoly in sectors like insurance and pharma is maintained. And yes, while life expectancy is lower in the U.S than in other countries, once you analyze by disease cohort you see that a lot of the problems are not due to semi-privatized healthcare but American lifestyle choices (obesity rates in particular). If you actually wanted a decent example of capitalism not having to save the day in healthcare, Alexander Fleming and penicillin is one of the few examples you could give, and even then it would be more than debatable considering that mass production and distribution of it is different from discovering in the first place. Your comment on the rate of innovation being smaller than the Public sector is just, and I hope you will excuse me, laughable and almost a non-sequitur. I think you should understand the difference between Fundamental Research (Physics, Particle Accelerators, Gravitational Wave Laser Detectors) and Innovation (applied engineering, energy, renewables, electronics, consumer products) and that Private Businesses and Private inventors beat Public Institutions by an incredibly strong margin in the latter category, the opposite being true for the former. Your response to the GINI comment. Income inequality worldwide has generally shown a downtrend during the last thirty years (World Bank, FRED), and in America it has become remarkably stable during the last twenty. Not that it matters much because inequality is a relative measure which provides no details on much more important measures like poverty, famine, mortality, disposable income, Per capita GDP and similar rates that are known to be much more important to prosperity and well-being. Not only are you wrong in implying a minority of hoarders is more prevalent, there are many reasons that direct towards if that were the case it would not necessarily be a problem.

[@lhumanoideerrantdesinterne8598]

@@waterbloom1213 "Empirically and theoretically there is no successful alternative system to capitalism that we know of or can seriously theorize about excluding post-scarcity economics" I'm kinda stuck trying to answer that... This is enshrining a lack of knowledge as an universal axiom. There is no counter argument I could make to this kind of point. Yes, we don't currently know of a better worldwide economic system than capitalism, just like we don't know what Dark Matter is exactly, that doesn't mean they don't exist. And I don't pretend to have an answer to the question, but to not look for one seems incredibly lazy to me. Also, even if I don't have a global theory to change the world, I'm confindent in local ideas that would make some situations obviously better for most. Giving more rights and responsibilities to workers in the companies they work in, for instance, or making essential services such as housing, food and health more available at lower costs. Once again, even if we agree that capitalism is overall better than previous systems, I'm sure we also agree that it is very flawed in many respects, and not trying to correct a flawed system is just wrong. I'm not asking for a big revolution, just for incremental changes that will make things better, one at a time, and might hopefully lead eventually to a better model. "Most of the R&D, particularly outside fundamental physics, was the work of private companies contracted by NASA." My point wasn't that private companies didn't help (although I have some doubts about your "most" but I'll trust you on that) it was that people can be motivated to innovate by things other than money. Now, in our current world, money is obviously the main facotr because everything relies on it. But in a world where you could expect a decent living without doing anything exeptional (and no, I'm not talking about some post-scarcity utopia, you would still need to work) and where doing research isn't especially profitable compared to other options, people would still do it for other reasons. In fact, I don't even need to invent some imaginary world, I know plenty of researcher who aren't contracted to big corporations and struggle to maintain their reasearch afloat and still keep working into a domain considered nonprofitable when they could make a lot more money working for said big companies. And if they make a breakthrough that makes society better, companies will immediatly exploit their findings and people like you will thank their existence and forget where the original research came from. "it seems to me you go with the myth of American privatized healthcare and are not aware that the American health system is heavily and mostly subsidized by public budgets" Come on! Subsidies aren't the same thing as a public health sector and you know it! There is a difference between the state doing something and the state giving money to companies so that they do it. Also, I love how you will always find a way for the state to be responsible for every issue. "Your comment on the rate of innovation being smaller than the Public sector is just, and I hope you will excuse me, laughable and almost a non-sequitur." Once again, this answer is the result of a lack of imagination. Sure, currently most of the research is privately funded, but that's because private research is where all the money goes. Private research benefits both from profits and private investments, but also from tons of subsidies. Meanwhile public researchers survive on crumbs. If we funded these public institutions decently, scientists and engineers would flock to them instead of getting hired by private enterprises because they are the only ones who can give them good work conditions.

[@waterbloom1213]

@@lhumanoideerrantdesinterne8598 "This is enshrining a lack of knowledge as an universal axiom" No it is not. Economists, politologists, sociologists and many more have developed multiple frameworks and theorized alternatives considering several viewpoints and modes of analysis, both qualitative and quantitative. This is what the last two centuries of academic study and practice has given us and at this point we have a good idea of what is possible and not possible in a world of scarcity and human behavior. Imagination has little to do with it anymore. Social sciences if you want to call them that are not like physics or chemistry where you can use math and isolated experiments to delve into some new layer of abstraction. There is no successful or viable alternative system that we know of to capitalism, and most people that study economics regardless on their trust degree of markets will agree, bar marxists and some futurologists which believe in automation, Von Neumann singularities and AI rendering human labor obsolete. What we do have is degrees to which it is applied as most economies today are mixed-market economies with both a Public and Private sector. There are indeed other incentives other than money to research. Fleming himself was a good example. Plenty of other scientists are as well. This does not mean that the surge in innovations has not increased dramatically ever since the money incentive of capitalism and private property was nudged into society. For Healthcare, when government has strict regulations on what is and what is not allowed for companies to do and when the sizeable majority of funds are being spent by the State, you are gonna have a hard time proving that said Healthcare system is capitalist or private. The word subsidy does not mean that it is money that goes directly for the poor, rather that the whole system's spending is financed and controlled by the Public sector, regardless of whether this is a desirable, effective or ineffective outcome. For researchers, this idea of constrained funding and non-profit work is just an everpresent issue and theme, and if we analyze counterfactuals such as Soviet or ancient research we see that actually the phenomenon is less common the more capitalistic a society tends to be. I would remind you that my issues with your comments mainly come from you condescendingly being dismissive of the points the lecturer gave while providing arguments which either did not follow from the premises or that straight up have no causal link proven between the outcome/result/conclusion you came up with and your diagnosis (e.g Decrease in mortality rate is not an outcome of capitalism when it actually is because the causes you cited are a known byproduct of the system) Not only that, but a lot of the points you have raised have been consistently disproven or heavily contested by the people that study them (wealth hoarding by a minority, as if this was some inherent feature of capitalism and no other system or as if it actually had increased when it has not)