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I highly agree. And I think in practice, what is driven by curiosity and passion ends up being a better product. I think part of the reason why is that all over social media and the internet there are gurus telling people "you can be the next to be rich and you deserve it". But that's the wrong motivation to have ingrained in every potential founder.





> in practice, what is driven by curiosity and passion ends up being a better product.

If it can survive. The problem here is that startups compete in the same economy as those more sustainable, passion-driven businesses - and because of their ruthless focus on growth, as well as access to vastly more capital, they win, effectively suppressing good products or outright preventing them from entering the market.


Free market thinkers here would say this is the market working as intended.

Free market thinkers should realize that market doesn't work as intended - it just works. POSIWID[0] and all. The workings of the market are sometimes aligned with the best interest of humanity, but not always, and they have no obligation to be, because at this point, we've long lost any control we had over it (if we ever had any).

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[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...


I believe that's not really saying anything if the market is intended to work by the forces of the invisible hand. If it is, the it is working as intended.

If you believe that, you're effectively believing that a runaway system of feedback loops is right by definition. But that's basically just a religion that worships a non-personified deity.

You can tell that to the free market faithful.

I was merely pointing out that saying the market 'just works' instead of it 'working as intended' logically doesn't add anything, because in the free market concept it is meant to to "just work", which implies that is what it is intended to do.


Sure, but in the real world, there aren't that many true believers in the Free Market. There's just a lot of people confused about what the market is, and it's useful to help them realize that it's just a name we give to a complex set of feedback loops. There is no intention behind them - it's just what happens when people do stuff people do. It is not a moral authority, and it does not magically limit itself to trading dollars for food or sex either - we limit it to that conceptually, by drawing a border and then regulating it to stay away from the other things.

A truly free market just degenerates into the "natural state" in which non-social animals live. There is, nor there ever will be, a truly free market in a human society. The only intentional thing, the only thing we can discuss whether it "works as intended" or not, is the boundaries (cultural and regulatory) we set around the market. It's the only thing we control (sort of - the same feedback loops that form the market also affect our attempts at regulating it).




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