Capitalism

November 5, 2024

I was watching an interview with Ezra Klein and Jon Stewart yesterday, and Jon Stewart made an interesting comment about someone being cancelled for a moral lapse of judgement. He said that the real reason was because their segment didn’t bring in enough ad revenue. It’s sad to think, at the end of the day, capitalism drives people and companies to make decisions that favor money over anything else. After all, that’s what the shareholders would want.

It reminded me of a video I watched a month earlier, where Jon interviews Steve Ballmer and capitalism came up again. In this video Steve Ballmer explains capitalism as a very predictable model, but perhaps one that needs to be trained to do what we want it to do. I think Jon is trying to make the point that someone isn’t going to be able to come in and pass regulations like they do in Europe because there are so much inertia with the status quo that anyone trying to do that would never make it into public office.

I wonder if things like free software or urbanism/community-focused public works projects like bike/train infrastructure are at odds with the incentive structure of capitalism.