I'm not really understanding the author's position. He seems to think the point of business is to solve problems rather than turn a profit. There are no end of problems to solve in the world, but only a very few of them are profitably solved. You can't keep going without profit. If you want to solve a social problem, you need the tools of social policy, which can bring enough resources to bear that you can afford to ignore profit.
> They're (not) profitably solved because the economic and political systems have been designed to make them unprofitable.
Not so, and even if it were, that would only further underscore the fact that you still can't solve them with capitalism. The author is effectively recommending that the local high school football team get out there and fix homelessness in the city. The best you can hope for is that they'll provide a nice photo op for the mayor.
> The basic problem is a feedback system which rewards certain activities as 'profitable' and punishes others as 'unprofitable'.
Could you go into detail? Because to me that "feedback system" just seems to be the market. You can't tell people what to want or what to like. That's the basic reason why we have markets.
You might be able to influence the system in small ways through social policy, but again, you can't dictate to people what they should want or not want, because they won't listen to you. The best you can hope for is something like the Fed. You manipulate the levers you have, not the levers you wish you had.
What the author should have done was offer up some ways for Silicon Valley to solve big social problems in profitable ways. Since they don't exist or are really hard to find, otherwise someone else would have gotten rich already solving them, all she can do is moralize.
No it isn't. There's no such thing as 'markets' and it's sloppy thinking to believe there is. What we have have is a political system that uses a stylised propaganda framework to propagate and reinforce itself - much as the Church did in the middle ages.
Belief in 'markets' as some kind of metaphysical efficient all-but omniscient decision-making entity is central to that, in some segments of the population - just as belief in Church dogma used to be equally pervasive.
The reality from anthropology is that there's nothing inevitable about trade or markets at all. Some cultures don't have any concept of a 'market', or if they do, trade is a peripheral activity, and certainly not used as a tool for centralised decision making.
>you can't dictate to people what they should want or not want, because they won't listen to you.
Which is why advertising is such a huge industry, and all governments use propaganda?
It's actually incredibly easy to dictate what people want. What's hard is creating an educated and informed population capable of original, independent, creative thought and high-quality long-term strategy.
Using the many available tools of persuasion to direct the thinking of a majority of the population isn't difficult at all.
If you believe your culture doesn't do this, it's possible you may not have asked some hard questions about how it works.
