there are a lot of funny passages in here, but this one really made me laugh:
> If you want to change the world to a better place, the best way to do it is a for-profit because for-profits have to take feedback from reality. Ironically, for-profit entities are more sustainable than non-profit entities. They’re self-sustainable. You’re not out there with a begging bowl all the time.
Tech, finance, and the automotive industry are three great examples of for-profit industries that are almost always insulated from feedback from reality and are constantly "out there with a begging bowl."
>Tech, finance, and the automotive industry are three great examples of for-profit industries that are almost always insulated from feedback from reality and are constantly "out there with a begging bowl."
And with all three what's missing is competition.
When you get big enough competition stops existing and quality stops mattering for a very long time. You can only fail because you're awful at what you do when you're small. Get big enough and you can just buy out anybody better than you.
It's interesting to me that you include the Tech industry. I am familiar with bailouts for the auto and financial industry. In what way is the Tech industry "insulated from feedback"?
Venture capital is at its core a vehicle to shield businesses while they’re figuring out PMF — aka, figuring out how to turn ideas into money. At the scale that it operates at today it’s barely distinguishable from bailouts — I’m thinking of examples like Uber and WeWork.
The timescales are quite different though. A failing car factory can be propped up by government subsidies for decades; a Juicero will crash and burn in a year or two.
Uber and WeWork are outliers in that they provide what's clearly a useful and novel service, but it's still unclear how profitable they can be.
The article starts with a shoddy overreach about group dynamics, countered by countless exceptions raised on this page where groups in fact self-correct.
Then it continues with a howler about the supposed "sustainability" of for-profit enterprise. The engine behind the success of marketplace capitalism is creative destruction! In a healthy marketplace for-profit entities must constantly compete to stay alive, and those that can't adapt die because they are not sustainable.
There's something to the idea that groups are reluctant to change course, but we aren't learning anything about it from this article, which chose to go down the path of ideological screed.
> If you want to change the world to a better place, the best way to do it is a for-profit because for-profits have to take feedback from reality. Ironically, for-profit entities are more sustainable than non-profit entities. They’re self-sustainable. You’re not out there with a begging bowl all the time.
Tech, finance, and the automotive industry are three great examples of for-profit industries that are almost always insulated from feedback from reality and are constantly "out there with a begging bowl."