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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (740200)	9/18/2013 11:14:44 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572918

I don't know if I'd go as far as "nothing else". Profits (esp. if broadly defined) cover the vast majority of the incentive for innovation but not 100%. OTOH what's let over is tiny, and its not just a matter of innovating, you have to make that innovation useful, which requires money, and on very large scales requires a profit motive or socialism, with the former normally working out much better. Even some altruistic effort, like say donating nets to keep mosquitoes off of people in third world countries, may have a profit motive related component. Those nets might be bought from for profit companies, and even if they are donated the companies that make them exist to make profits and the design and the production facilities where created because of a profit motive. The majority is clearly pretty much straight 100 percent or close to it profit motive derived, and most of what's left has some connection to profit. Even in more socialist systems you have in effect public choice "markets", where officials try to enrich themselves, sometimes with the competition for power rather than money as such, but if profit was considered bad (and I don't consider it to be bad at all) this competition is worse.