>Because people always act within their own self interest for the most part. That's not really true. People are, roughly speaking, reinforcement learners. Th

>Because people always act within their own self interest for the most part. That's not really true. People are, roughly speaking, reinforcement learners. This means that, yes, they respond to rewards by seeking further such rewards, but there are multiple kinds of reward. Financial profit is only one of those, and it actually has a declining marginal happiness once personal income goes over a certain level. Other major rewards for real humans include being useful to other people, acting with personal autonomy, and exercising mastery (or learning towards mastery) in a domain of skill. When we talk about economic value, what we really care about is the intersection: good work is useful to others (meets the customer's needs), and it lets the worker autonomously exercise mastery over a skillset (or otherwise, save their energy for domains in which they can do so), and it's profitable or self-sufficient with respect to resources. That's the psychologically real self-interest of the person doing the work, combined with the psychologically real self-interest of the person who needs the work done. When you start disregarding working conditions and customer needs in the process of maximizing profit, your profit-maximization system has become useless for human purposes.