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One reason that a lot of very intellectual people express a skepticism of capitalism is because so often you see very successful who aren't very bright. It's ty
by dcolkitt 5y ago
One reason that a lot of very intellectual people express a skepticism of capitalism is because so often you see very successful who aren't very bright. It's typical to see a small-to-medium business owner worth $20 million, who's maybe above average intelligence, but nowhere near the brain power of say a physics PhD who's grinding out postdocs at $45k/year.
I think one reason for that is because the market price system already does a lot of the intellectual heavy lifting. In many cases the market gives you very transparent signals about relative cost and scarcity of resources. For a typical entrepreneur, it's often just about putting in the hustle, grit, and risk tolerance to convert low-priced inputs into high-priced outputs.
For example, I can pretty clearly identify that my area needs a car wash. A lot of homes were built in this zip code recently, and there's no car wash to service a new, large market. The car wash business model is pretty easy to project. With a tiny bit of research I can easily figure out prices, wages, rents, etc.
Opening and running a successful car wash would not be a hard intellectual problem. What it would be is a hard pain-in-the-ass problem. The challenge of owning a car wash isn't solving differential equations. It's waking up to an emergency call at 6 am that your bathroom's flooding, and half your staff called out sick because they're hung over.
- newbie2020 5y agoThat in my opinion is the great thing about capitalism. Someone with average intelligence but an insane work ethic can make it big. I see this completely the other way. And one thing I’ve learned as I’ve grown older is that my patience runs thin these days. That means I’m willing to pay big bucks for people to handle pain-in-the-ass problems for me. Conversely, I don’t know what I’d do with a paper on theoretical physics other than use the back side as scratch paper
- Rioghasarig 5y agoI don't see anything wrong with this situation. People who exhibit profit-seeking behavior (entrepreneurs) can make much more money than people don't exhibit profit-seeking behavior (PhD students). That sounds like a reasonable system to me.