alt Hacker News> increasingly productive jobs.
This needs to be defined a little bit better.
If I own a hospital that makes infinite money and every patient that comes to it dies the economy measures this is infinite productivity. This is contrived, but really matches some of what we see in real life.
This is why making a measurement a target can be horrifically destructive and contrary to the actual goal society wants.
The west doesn't seem to believe in the idea of social stability over increased profits which can lead to things like corporations being the social structure that is optimized for rather than the wellbeing of the individuals it contains. Left to run out of control the society can collapse.
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It seems to me that oligarchies as a whole function a lot like PE's taking over a socially unstable polity.
The west has been an oligarchy for several decades at least, so it's not that people in the west don't believe in social stability, it's that they are living in the hollowed out shell of the former "company" where that doesn't exist. We need to optimize for the people's prosperity and well being.
> If I own a hospital that makes infinite money and every patient that comes to it dies the economy measures this is infinite productivity. This is contrived, but really matches some of what we see in real life.
You wouldn't have any business if all, or many, of your patients die.