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Greed.
It rewards greed above all else. The desire to hoard and take more than you need. And only through your greed for yourself will be able to overcome the others in your life that hold you back from what you desire. It isolates and it rewards you for holding yourself separate from others.
It rewards greed.
Theres a reason western european dragons are so popular over chinese dragons or mesoamerican ones. Hoarding is seen as a genuine skill
The mesoamerican dragon deities aren’t popular because europeans genocided those cultures.
The loong/snake-like dragons are plenty popular, Tolkien just has gorilla grip on pop culture.
Money. It rewards money.
Those who have money are the only ones deserving of getting money.
It’s why the old nobility liked the system and molded it to their needs.
It’s kind of in the name…
The best way to make a fuckton of money is to start with a shitload of money. Crony capitalism (and all capitalism devolves into crony capitalism) is rigged in favor of those with the most capital to wield its influence over others.
Cronies predate capitalism by millenia. There’s no devolving happening. It’s not like you can make a capitalism that has no cronies and then it devolves. The cronies are the people who made the capitalism in the first place
True, I should clarify I meant devolving from their imaginary capitalist ideal, which they fantasize as a libertarian utopia based on pure merit.
Nothing makes money more then money
The compounding returns of a capitalist economy reward iterative investments in new productive capital. That’s fine. Good even. At least, according to Marx. If your goal is to approach a post-scarcity economy, you need a period of growth in productive capacity and distribution.
Because we use currency as a token of exchange, and capital improvements require currency to implement, we incentivize a virtuous cycle of re-investment in token-accruing capital as we operate a capitalist system.
The flaws in the system begin to stand out when the process of cycling currency into capital investment fails to value anything without a price-tag attached to it. Go back to the 1970s/80s and you’ll see the neoliberal economists struggling with this paradox of post-Bretton Woods economic modeling. Economic growth has material limits, but our fiat currency system does not. Negative externalities don’t have a built in short-term economic cost, so investors and administrators don’t recognize the accumulating socio-economic friction until a fire breaks out.
But OP’s premise is all wrong. The skill, the creative talent, and the labor that capitalism rewards is all bound up in the rapid recirculation of currency through capital. Neurosurgeons, muralists, and janitors aren’t missing out because capitalism fails to reward them. They’re missing out because they have no vehicle to rapidly compound the returns on their initial efforts.
Even then, there are tools for compounding efforts that all three of these professions can and do exploit. Education is one example. A skilled neurosurgeon can profit more handsomely as a mentor or professor than as a pure surgeon. An art school will generate more professional art than any single artist. And management is another. A veteran service worker who can efficiently direct the efforts of a large number of peers will control more productive forces than if they were hands-on at a single job site. A doctor who operates a clinic full of juniors or a sculptor or prodigious author with a team underneath her will yield far more work product than they could alone.
The compounding returns of a capitalist economy reward iterative investments in new productive capital. That’s fine. Good even. At least, according to Marx. If your goal is to approach a post-scarcity economy, you need a period of growth in productive capacity and distribution.
Marx described the good and the bad of it, at a time when capitalism was reaching its late/monopoly/imperial stage, and he largely correctly predicted what late-stage capitalism would look like. Lenin further developed these theories while living under capitalism’s highest stage.
Western Marxists saw China’s “opening up” as an abandonment of Communism/socialism. Ultras fear the scroll. They don’t understand that, in order to get to the end-goal, you need to leverage the good parts of capitalism—while keeping the capitalists on a short leash—in order to quickly develop the productive forces, especially when the imperialist states are trying to crush you.
Ultras fear the scroll.
Well, they should. That’s in a 2-pt font. You’ll blow your eyes out trying to read it.
They don’t understand that, in order to get to the end-goal, you need to leverage the good parts of capitalism—while keeping the capitalists on a short leash—in order to quickly develop the productive forces, especially when the imperialist states are trying to crush you.
.world and it’s shitlib affiliates have pretty neatly expunged anyone who could possibly be called “Ultra” from it’s platform years back.
So, while I agree with the sentiment, idk if that’s what we’re seeing today. More that people in a Western capitalist institution are getting crushed in the machine. And they justifiably don’t like that. So they say “turn the machine off”, without really considering what the machinary of capitalism is doing or why they might still need it or how you can operate heavy machinery without people getting chewed up in the gears.
it mostly rewards luck and having money
And psychopathy
This is a critical aspect.
The utter disregard for everyone and everything for the sake of making more money is the second most valuable asset of a capitalist.
The first is obviously capital.
Just the cluster B people
on one hand, yes: people with strong Cluster B personality disorder tendencies (well, narcissistic and anti-social at least) tend to float to the top in capitalist societies. On the other hand no, because these diagnoses are harmful for us poors, and can be used to deny necessary care. Borderline personality disorder is an especially common misdiagnosis for autistic women, and the drugs they pump all of us bpds with do more harm than good and therapists specializing in dialectical behavior therapy are few and far between. In my case I got overmedicated and undertherapized, and eventually just dumped and told to get a job. (/rant).
Agreed, I’m one of those women. Thankfully, I’ve got the right diagnosis but I’d been taking antipsychotics for years, they’re pretty dangerous drugs.
precise value predictions
This is real good entry level agitprop
I have a group of friends who I have known since I was a kid. This is useful in that, while it’s of course anecdotal, I can say that it’s a sample of people who all knew each other before any of us were capable of earning money.
Within this group, there is zero correlation between intelligence or work ethic and wealth/income. My wealthiest friend inherited his family business. My second wealthiest friend married into money. These two are among the least hard working and intelligent friends I have. Meanwhile the smartest friend I have - the one who almost aced his SAT - is doing ok but not like he’s swimming in money (community college professor - which honestly is a pretty great gig, he was smart enough to recognize that). Another truly brilliant friend of mine is doing research in a field he is passionate about but he’s definitely not the highest earner in our group.
Admittedly none of us are extremely hard workers, but I know tons of workers - especially some undocumented folks, who work way harder than I can even imagine, and they are of course making very little.
Of my childhood friend group, I am the second smartest, and the poorest at the moment (aside from the ones that are in prison), the smartest is the wealthiest among us, but only because she was smart enough to utilize her intelligence into a degree and a higher GS grade in a government job. None of us are wealthy, but she’s doing the best. Buying a home, and can pay her bills, and has about 200 bucks per paycheck to put into savings. We all came from very economically disadvantaged backgrounds, but she had the advantage of both of her parents being in the military, so while we lived in the same neighborhood, she lived in a much nicer home, whereas the rest of us lived on roads her parents told her never to walk down.
I am currently attempting to follow the path she did, just 15 years later.
I’m very intelligent, and fairly hard working, but I also have the power of empathy and compassion for others. That drastically limits my earning potential. Even more so since I want to make a large scale positive difference in the world.
All the best ways to get rich are exploitative: of employees, of customers, of society as a whole, of the planet.
Linus Torvalds: Maked Linux and become absurdly rich Taylor Swift, Eminem, Michael Jackson, The Rolling Stones: all artist that become absurdly rich too
And the millions of other equal or even more smart and talented engineers and creatives? Most of them are in poverty and/or gave up their life passion.
Also, Linus is not absurdly rich. He’s modestly rich at best. He still works as an employee. Most estimates are about a few million.
- Give me examples about those you talk about
- Yeah, my mistake. Is rich, but not absurdly rich
Weirdly enough, most of the incredibly smart and talented people who didn’t get famous enough for me to hear about them, I haven’t actually heard about.
I personally know an engineer who revolutionised world food packaging in a way that’s still being used to the benefit of billions, and he has bugger all.
sorry but if you dont give me examples i still believe in my thoughs
??? I literally gave you an example.
You want an example of people who are super talented but not rewarded for it? okay: Steve. Haven’t heard of him? Exactly.
- Emm, no? you has not give me an example, you are just saying lol
-
Gould is one of the most frequently cited scientists in the field of evolutionary theory. His 1979 “spandrels” paper has been cited more than 5,000 times
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Jay_Gould
Try again
Your logical skills are sorely lacking, I’m quite honestly not sure how you’re not seeing the utter flaw behind your thinking, but we are clearly incapable of communicating successfully.
Hope you come round and things click eventually.
capitalism rewards owning things. if you own a thing that makes money you can do no work and be rich
Capitalism rewards owning things of value*
You cant come from nothing and work your way to the top; you have to work until you can own something of value, then profit off of that. These days it appears to be getting lucky on crypto 10 years ago or hopping on the next big wallstreet short. Maybe buying an apartment complex
And greed, manipulation, ethical and moral flexibility
No, it really only does have one metric - returns to the current holders of capital. Everything else falls aside.
Capitalism rewards those who have the most command over capital. And how much command over capital one has is determined by how much command over capital one already has.
Capitalism rewards those who control more capital. Period.
Goods, materials, labor sources, infrastructure, intellectual property, supply chains, real estate, contracts, and political influence. The more of all of that you control, the more you reap financial rewards.
The most idealistic view of capitalism is that you earn such reward by improving the world and providing what people need. You invent a product, process, IP, etc. and people pay you money for materially improving their lives or meeting a need.
But that is far from the only way to gain such control. Using your massive wealth to gain political influence. Using both your wealth and political influence to buy or destroy your competition. Using unethical methods like collusion to remove choice from consumers, to force them to buy your product, to raise prices because you can.
Hell, you can even do everything to destroy a good productive company and still make bank. David Zaslav at Warner Bros is proving that you can buy a profitable company, merge it with a company in massive debt, put that debt on the profitable company, use that debt to justify massive cuts that make the company less productive with fewer profit streams including cancelling finished movies for tax write-offs, destroy the stock valuation of the company screwing over the shareholders, force a new sale/merger to a MAGA billionaire to save the company, and fly away from the wreckage on your $886 million dollar golden parachute richer than when you started.
A 16 year old barista does much more to contribute to society than David Zaslav did, but the rewards are not even close.
Socialism rewards these things even less. Socialism rewards those who are lucky enough to work for a profitable company or those loyal enough to work for the government.
How does that make any sense? How does running a worker-owned society based on fulfilling needs over profits translate?
Congratulations on being less coherent than a chat bot.
Nothing I said is hard to understand I’m sorry socialist education has failed you. Maybe if your parents get a job in the government you can get an education instead of being put in a
youth labor camprural school.
I think it’s almost tautological - The ability and will to accumulate wealth, by any means. That’s not necessarily greed, but after a point it basically always is.
Some skilled people, some union workers, some talented creatives, earn decent money because they, by differing means, have the ability to leverage their skills for above-average money. Obviously, in a free market, that leverage has a limit.
If you can get wealth by murder, by abuse, if you can offset your expenses by dooming the human race to the extinction, if you can bring in more sales by destruction, genocide and theft, if you can avoid helping others, caring about people, righting your wrongs or repairing damages, then you will do extremely well. Because those things minimise your outgoings and maximise your incoming.
“Successful” people typically do these things because of pathological greed, but some might do those things because they’ve build a fake world in their head and don’t accept reality, or simple sociopathy. Often a combination of all three. The common thread is an ability and will to accumulate capital by any means.
See: All billionaires.
It rewards all of those if they are applied close to the money. Hanging art for sale where millionaires go, working hard handling their money or business, being a surgeon working for them, not the poor. But make no mistake, you will not be equal to them. They just don’t want to be eye to eye with poor people.
