The blue LED was supposed to be impossible—until a young engineer proposed a moonshot idea.
It also shows how capitalism hinder innovation. It doesn’t create it. The potentially innovative path took money without any guarantee of creating profit. It’s bad business to be innovative. Capitalism prioritizing profit never chooses the best path, even if it gets a good ending eventually despite itself.
It’s a capitalist company that funded him to go to Florida and bought him the machine to do his work.
Where do you think he would get the 3 million the company gave him? It’s the company that spent that money to bet on innovation and they got a return on investment
Capitalism never chooses the best path, but neither does any other system. We haven’t invented a perfect system, and it’s probably impossible. Sounds like a strange critique since we’ll never reach perfection
And then capitalism that made the company repeatedly ask for him to stop researching it.
Where do you think he would get the 3 million the company gave him?
As the story describes, it was the founder who was acting emotionally that funded him. It was no different than a noble patronage of someone like DaVinci in medieval times. When the capitalist son in law took over, he was cut off. It was only Japanese culture from Japan’s pre-capitalist era that saved his job.
The founder was acting in the company’s interest, that’s why you fund research.
He was actually not cut off either, he wasn’t fired when he continued his research despite being told not to. He still received a salary and was able to use the equipment purchased with company funds
Capitalism never chooses the best path, but neither does any other system. We haven’t invented a perfect system, and it’s probably impossible. Sounds like a strange critique since we’ll never reach perfection
Just because nothing is perfect doesn’t mean we can’t call out stuff for not being it. Sounds like a strange critique since we’re supposed to improve on things.
Yes, but in any system some guy will decide which research is important. And that guy can’t possibly make correct decisions every time.
I don’t see a way to improve on it
You’re right that nothing is perfect. How does that make critique invalid though?
Capitalism prioritizes profit. That’s it. We can imagine systems that prioritize any number of things; public welfare, innovation, creativity, equality, etc. Nothing will be perfect, but I’d say any goal is better than the selfish goal of profit seeking. Do you disagree?
Yeah where he went to a university not a capitalist company to learn. Then persisted in his research despite the capitalist company wanting to shut him down for not being profitable, then that company specifically and consciously screwed him over and didn’t reward him for it. Then tries to screw him over once again when he got a different job because of it.
Who funded him to go? It’s not like he paid for the trip out of his pocket
The company could have also just fired him for not listening to orders. But I agree that they didn’t compensate him enough
I’m not sure how you come to this conclusion. For every example of a capitalist avoiding risky investments, there are 100 capitalists betting on the next innovation.
Venture capital. Heard the term? AI, Metaverse, crypto, web 2.0, .com… The tech space alone is full of capital making (stupidly risky) bets. They also make good bets too, like PC, search engines, online shopping (oh, look how the tech giants came to be).
I get it, capitalism bad. But this is just a nonsensical argument.
I was working for a place that was the market leader in a certain niche of simulation software. Their simulation was about 10x more efficient than their competitors. However, that version of the software is strictly off limits for the public, and made a version which they sold with a sleep statement so that it was only 1.1x faster than the next best solution. That way they could remain market leaders any time the competitors released a better version. Even though many systems rely on growing simulations to simulate bigger scenarios that could help save lives.
Just an example of capitalism impeding progress.
Sure, it happens sometimes. However, the goal is never innovation for the sake if innovation. It’s innovations to create profit. The idea is you invest into one of these ideas that then creates a monopoly that can practice anti-completive behaviors to create more profit.
For example of something better, look at research universities. They are normally outside of capitalism and create innovation primarily for the goal of advancing knowledge of a subject or to solve some issue. It’s rarely purely for profit to sit on the thing after it’s created and ensure no one else can use it.
This is something that’s often poorly understood. There’s no profit in a perfectly competitive market. That is, according to orthodox economic theory, the most efficient market conditions are the ones where no participants make profit. From that you can derive what you said - that innovation is sought for moving a business away from perfect competition by gaining competitive advantage, which is anticompetitive! 😆
The ratio might not be 1:100. It might not even be tilted towards the risk takers. Also some if not most of the examples you mentioned are based research done in universities and defence agencies. That research is typically a much riskier endeavor. That’s why the private sector doesn’t even attempt it and only shows up to productize or build upon that research once the risk for not turning profit is minimized.
Yeah metaverse and crypto are such innovate projects that will really change the world and not just more the same bullshit cash grabs.
Really undermining your own argument.
You completely missed the point there, damn. He’s saying those things are very likely to be bad investments.
Capitalists are motivated to innovate if there’s undistorted competition. If they don’t they will lose new markets. For exemple Microsoft and IBM failed to build the start of general public web search and Google won. More recently, Google failed the race to release the first general public LLM, OpenAI backed by Microsoft did.
There are probably as many examples of this as there are of companies ruining innovation for stupid reasons.
Though, what better system that a regulated “free” market do we have successfully tested? A bunch of political leaders deciding alone of what the companies should do? How does that prevent irrational decision that stops innovation? How do you prevent them from just doing whatever benefits them as seen in many authoritarian regimes that were supposedly socialist?
