<story><title>Capital Is No Longer Scarce</title><url>http://continuations.com/post/134920840275/capital-is-no-longer-scarce</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jondubois</author><text>Misallocation is a massive problem. I think a significant amount of money is going into advertising, pointless startups, entertainment and social media.&lt;p&gt;Basically, we are spending huge amounts of money getting numbed out of our minds instead of solving real fundamental problems.&lt;p&gt;In general, I think it reveals a deeper problem about capitalism; none of us understand value anymore (we have more junk in our lives than we could possibly need)... So we struggle to allocate capital properly. We just blindly follow trends. The people who are getting rich now are not those who want to make the world a better place; the winners are those who just want to make quick cash (short-term thinkers who take insane risks).&lt;p&gt;Does society prefer Snapchat or a cure for cancer? In the current economic environment, investors prefer Snapchat because Snapchat is pretty likely to get a ROI within the next 5 years.&lt;p&gt;The return on investment for a cancer cure is probably small (especially given the large amount of recurring revenue that big pharmaceuticals are currently making by selling cancer drugs). Also, it&amp;#x27;s much riskier than Snapchat... Could take 5 years, 10 years or 20 years.&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, we are satisfying people&amp;#x27;s short-term &amp;#x27;wants&amp;#x27; at the expense of their long-term needs. We&amp;#x27;re a society of addicts who just want to get a quick buzz.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>merpnderp</author><text>Capitalism has never been about making the world a better place. All systems deal with humans and humans inevitably prefer helping out themselves and people close to them over others, which leads to corruption regardless of the system. And capitalism seems the best method for controlling innate human corruption (see China&amp;#x27;s incredible economic growth once socialism was all but abandoned for capitalism in the 80&amp;#x27;s pulling a billion people out of abject poverty).&lt;p&gt;As for investors preferring Snapchat to curing cancer? The amount of money invested in cancer dwarfs Snapchat&amp;#x27;s investments by magnitudes. You don&amp;#x27;t just cure &amp;quot;cancer&amp;quot; you find cures for the hundreds of different diseases that fall under the umbrella of cancer. There&amp;#x27;s so much money invested in cancer there are often not enough candidates for a new clinical trials.&lt;p&gt;If we have a shortage of anything, it is medical research scientists. And the way to get more of those is to change the regulations so there is more room for profit medical research.</text></comment>
<story><title>Capital Is No Longer Scarce</title><url>http://continuations.com/post/134920840275/capital-is-no-longer-scarce</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jondubois</author><text>Misallocation is a massive problem. I think a significant amount of money is going into advertising, pointless startups, entertainment and social media.&lt;p&gt;Basically, we are spending huge amounts of money getting numbed out of our minds instead of solving real fundamental problems.&lt;p&gt;In general, I think it reveals a deeper problem about capitalism; none of us understand value anymore (we have more junk in our lives than we could possibly need)... So we struggle to allocate capital properly. We just blindly follow trends. The people who are getting rich now are not those who want to make the world a better place; the winners are those who just want to make quick cash (short-term thinkers who take insane risks).&lt;p&gt;Does society prefer Snapchat or a cure for cancer? In the current economic environment, investors prefer Snapchat because Snapchat is pretty likely to get a ROI within the next 5 years.&lt;p&gt;The return on investment for a cancer cure is probably small (especially given the large amount of recurring revenue that big pharmaceuticals are currently making by selling cancer drugs). Also, it&amp;#x27;s much riskier than Snapchat... Could take 5 years, 10 years or 20 years.&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, we are satisfying people&amp;#x27;s short-term &amp;#x27;wants&amp;#x27; at the expense of their long-term needs. We&amp;#x27;re a society of addicts who just want to get a quick buzz.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bko</author><text>Why would a cure for cancer be a small return on investment? You&amp;#x27;re assuming that the only people who could enter the market and find a cure would be the current players who are profiting from the current treatment or some global conspiracy to keep the cure hidden. If someone were to discover a very effective treatment, they would surely profit nicely. Hepatitis C was recently cured, a brutal disease that affected some of the most marginal people in society [0]. And it was done thanks to a profit motive. Barring extreme price controls on drugs by politicians, this type of progress can be greatly encouraged by the profit motive.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.scientificamerican.com&amp;#x2F;article&amp;#x2F;we-now-have-the-cure-for-hepatitis-c-but-can-we-afford-it&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.scientificamerican.com&amp;#x2F;article&amp;#x2F;we-now-have-the-cu...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[edit] I would also like to add, the non-profit approach [IMO] has failed to produce anything but the abundance of the color pink and self congratulatory galas for wealthy donors. Perhaps the profit motive and choice that has served society so well in practically all aspects of our lives can be equally leveraged on solving hard problems like disease.</text></comment>