This is a tangent, but the reason that capitalist societies outproduce communist societies really isn’t about money as a motivator, it’s about allocation of resources by supply and demand vs allocation by a bureaucracy of humans. The more complicated the supply chain, the more intractable it becomes for people to predict how resources are best spent at each stage of it in order to create complex final goods; but the simple answer “what creates the biggest profit margin for each economic actor” turns out to be a pretty efficient solution.
...with major caveats like “efficiently creates goods to meet people’s desires weighted by purchasing power” and “this doesn’t account for externalities” and “money can corrupt politics in various ways”.
A market economy would work even better if people were completely unselfish! They would enact full redistribution (i.e. consumption completely decoupled from earnings) and price in the externalities and resist corruption. In such a society, money would be the true unit of caring: maximizing profit would be identical to doing your most efficient part in creating things people want.
This is a tangent, but the reason that capitalist societies outproduce communist societies really isn’t about money as a motivator, it’s about allocation of resources by supply and demand vs allocation by a bureaucracy of humans. The more complicated the supply chain, the more intractable it becomes for people to predict how resources are best spent at each stage of it in order to create complex final goods; but the simple answer “what creates the biggest profit margin for each economic actor” turns out to be a pretty efficient solution.
...with major caveats like “efficiently creates goods to meet people’s desires weighted by purchasing power” and “this doesn’t account for externalities” and “money can corrupt politics in various ways”.
A market economy would work even better if people were completely unselfish! They would enact full redistribution (i.e. consumption completely decoupled from earnings) and price in the externalities and resist corruption. In such a society, money would be the true unit of caring: maximizing profit would be identical to doing your most efficient part in creating things people want.