If it is not profitable, then it morally shouldn’t ought to exist; the market is indicating that the business is a waste of society’s limited resources.
This seems much too strong: it e.g. suggests that no non-profits should exist. Profitability and overall benefit to society are two very different things.
Non-profits are “profitable” in the limit sense of a profit of zero. Non-profits with negative profit cannot exist and, in fact, generally quickly cease to.
There are problems with the equation “profit=worth”, but it holds to a first approximation. The free market is vulnerable to collusion, fraud and outright value hijacking, but those are all manipulations and divergences of the baseline, which is “1 money = 1 unit of caring.”
I usually tend to assume that the markets, being the dominant optimization power in society, are the “authority” on value, because they generally function to model society’s revealed preferences. A thought that often comes to mind is “If you didn’t want X, why did you allow your markets to fall into an X attractor?” I suspect people tend to model markets as cosmic laws, whereas I think of them more as highly powerful mechanical contraptions that require maintenance. Or maybe as a dev I just model everything as software.
This seems much too strong: it e.g. suggests that no non-profits should exist. Profitability and overall benefit to society are two very different things.
Non-profits are “profitable” in the limit sense of a profit of zero. Non-profits with negative profit cannot exist and, in fact, generally quickly cease to.
There are problems with the equation “profit=worth”, but it holds to a first approximation. The free market is vulnerable to collusion, fraud and outright value hijacking, but those are all manipulations and divergences of the baseline, which is “1 money = 1 unit of caring.”
I usually tend to assume that the markets, being the dominant optimization power in society, are the “authority” on value, because they generally function to model society’s revealed preferences. A thought that often comes to mind is “If you didn’t want X, why did you allow your markets to fall into an X attractor?” I suspect people tend to model markets as cosmic laws, whereas I think of them more as highly powerful mechanical contraptions that require maintenance. Or maybe as a dev I just model everything as software.