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Comment by abathur | Hacker News Reader

At the risk of saying something dumb and meta... it's ideas all the way down (for a really long time now).

The individual corporations are ideas, and then of course there's the idea of the corporation itself. As the post notes, corporations only work because of other ideas about property rights and scarcity. But more fundamentally they only work because they're an idea quite a few people already believe in.

I'm a little fuzzy on the level at which the post means "autonomous ideas" will steer society--do they mean autonomous ideas like Unix? Or autonomous ideas like governments and corporations and pope-less religions?

I think the post helps draw a latent curiosity out of me that I probably wouldn't have put quite like this, but: can we better identify and allocate resources towards good ideas that don't make market sense?

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> good ideas that don't make market sense

I think this is incorrect framing. You have to shape the market, not the idea.

Capitalism’s fault is not accounting for externalized costs, like climate change.

The market allocates resources very effectively, but the costs the market uses to allocate resources are lies. They omit costs that producers can ignore or otherwise avoid paying for.

If these externalities were captured and embedded into the price of the good/service, the market could actually account these issues.

I guess you could also have “Tragedy of the commons” good idea. Those could be adapted to capitalism with subsidies or other government funding, or VC funding

Not much of an expert in any of this, just openly postulating to invite conversation

If I could make one change to popular parlance (or perhaps I should say technical jargon), it would be the usage of the word externality. While it is a technically correct description, the framing implied leads to analysis that I don’t think is fundamentally sound.

Markets optimize for products. If something can’t be made into a product wherein the full value and cost to society is express captured within the transaction itself, you generally end up with less than ideal outcomes.

Capitalism is the best system for optimizing for productive efficiency, but creating an abundance of material wealth isn’t quite the same thing as making society as a whole the best that is can be.

I agree that there are multiple roles here (making EVs for the market that exists vs. shaping the market for the EVs you make or want to make)

That said, I don't really mean products that don't make sense to the market as it exists--I mean that all good ideas are not necessarily products. There are good ideas that don't fit the logic of the market (regardless of what it thinks it is a good idea at the moment).

i applaud the simplicity

>can we better identify and allocate resources towards good ideas that don't make market sense?

no, but we shall die trying

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