And if society truly cared about quality of life for the poorest/weakest, the market would re-align itself, and the direction of creativity would be self corrected.
I feel capitalism and profits are working just fine, we just don't want to admit what our true preferences are.
Fudging the distinction is a fantastically pernicious way to sneak the "capitalism is enlightened altruism" assumption into your argument.
You forget that the market responds to the total volume of buyers at various levels. There are a lot more people in the 0-150k bracket than the people in the 150k+ bracket and when you count the total spending in dollars by each category as a whole, the first group is significantly more powerful.
The most successful companies sell to the masses (McDonald's, Walmart, Google, Facebook). The rich have a much smaller influence on the market than you would like to think.
The preferences of rich _individuals_ have a much higher influence than those of poor individuals.
In the absence of a basic income, willingness to pay represents the true preferences of "people close to the source of money creation", not people or societies in general.
When some parties can conjure money out of thin air, this idea that prices reflect what people want simply doesn't work. The prices begin to reflect, more and more, the desires of people with the ability to manufacture money.
What you seem to be saying is "if the large number of poor people in the world cared about _their own quality of life, they would have it".
> What you seem to be saying is "if the large number of poor people in the world cared about _their own quality of life, they would have it".
Definitely not - but what I won't mind saying is - if the large number of middle class people in the developed world cared about the poor people, the living condition of poor people would significantly improve.
"Working just fine" is a moral judgment you're making, which would be "just fine" in an amoral society (this being a contradiction proving that "morality" exists, "amorality" being one of its possible states).
I do agree that it might be skewed. But I believe there is a sufficiently large middle class that can still drive creativity in the right places if it was so inclined.