alt Hacker News> “market and incentives always lead to the greater good”
I never said anything of the sort, I'm just explaining basic economic facts. Feel free to pretend they aren't true if you wish, but if you do then for all our sakes please stay as far away from the levers of economic policy as possible.
These aren't “basic economic facts”, these are basic pieces of economic liturgy, it's not grounded in any factual reality. It only works in microeconomics lalaland.
In the real world, executives simply aren't being incentivized for all-or-nothing risk taking and the shareholders of public industrial companies don't want the executives to make gambles in an attempt to make a big payout, they want steady yields with limited risks. And the financial actors who would be ready to take this kind of “high risk high reward” bets aren't operating in these kinds of markets.
Just look out of the window, semiconductor and electronics fabs aren't rushing to expand their capacity, they are very familiar with the issue of oversupply and are always very cautious before making capacity investment, because they know it could very well make them go under very quick should the market reverse.
The more time passes, the more convinced I am that nothing did more damage to the broader public understanding of economic dynamics than the average Econ 101 class.