That’s way too hard to figure out for a huge number of jobs. The guy who codes the website interface? The guy who writes The box that on the website that you can click (where each click generates revenue)?
Or take my field, insurance.
The sales person who courts (or at least talks to) the customer.
The underwriter who decides which customers to court and how.
The actuary who calculates the rates to charge those customers.
The claims adjuster who actually pays the claims.
The other actuary who tells management how much more we’re going to pay in claims that have already happened, but we haven’t paid for yet.
The IT staff who kept track of the data so everyone else can do their jobs, and the company knows who its customers are.
By your language, only the salespeople generate “direct profits”. But it’s the claims adjusters who actually “manufacturer” our “product”. And all those people except possibly the salespeople (who might be on commission) are paid wages.
Being a former civil engineer myself before working as a management and technology consultant for Wall Street firms I feel like I often view capitalism in a bit of an old fashioned context of steel mills and coal mines and factories making shit. I sometimes forget how modern capitalism seems to be run by this layer of bullshit jobs facilitating more bullshit.
I was reminded of that today in a job interview.
A recruiter from another firm had called me up. Things have been pretty slow at my firm and I’ve become dissatisfied with our direction so I decided to speak to her. Long story short, I couldn’t tell if she was fishing for market intel on my current firm or simply didn’t understand what her own firm did. I mean I get I work in somewhat of a bullshit profession, but I feel like I have all these stupid conversations with some pretty senior executives who can’t seem to articulate what, if anything, they are trying to do.
At least the firms in @Slithy_Tove 's examples have “ideas”, even if many of them end up being short-sighted or stupid.
I was reading something the other day which made me realise that something we really underestimate about capitalism is the extent to which firms/corporations are in fact central planning organisations.
It was a summary of an investigation into precisely this question - how do firms organise themselves so that they can take effective decisions based on the available information. My summary of the summary is:
Successful firms will over time become more and more complex and generate more information, thus making themselves harder to effectively run.
Sometimes technology lets owners/managers get a jump ahead and organise the flow of information better but not often enough leading to…
Successful companies continually divide, creating autonomous sub-units who can manage a particular domain of information.
But within these divisions we don’t have emergent behaviour driven by individual decisions: we have centralised planning by a committee, sorry, C-level Executive Team, based on aggregated and abstracted information. (We are going to make this kind of product, launch this kind of service, use this kind of material in our supply chain, leave this market and enter that one, put our factory in this region and not that one etc.)
Having firms as the master organising units of production works quite well. In any domain where it is possible to meet people’s needs profitably, that will largely happen. (As per @Omar_Little’s morning drive-through coffee example.) Where it falls down is where needs (e.g. SEN provision, food and shelter for indigent people) can’t be met profitably. But that is because our production in response to need is driven by profit.
(Also, as an aside: a lot of people object to unions on the basis that it is somehow unfair for workers to have a vehicle that permits collective action. Of course the firm, a legal person that allows shareholders to act collectively rather than individually, is completely fine!)
So I can see alternatives to capitalism where we have some sort of corporate body (perhaps a co-op) which is driven by something other than the profit motive but still functions much as a firm: digests a certain quantity of information, makes strategic and operational decisions about what to produce to meet the needs its set up to meet…
But can you have a system that somehow doesn’t rely on some level of central planning? Where there is no small group of people looking through reports and charts but instead production decisions are just as individualised as consumption decisions. I can’t quite see how but some sort of decentralised preference aggregation scheme might be possible.
When the supermarket can only get what the chain allocates them, despite the fact that the local manager knows the customers want something else – then what we get is the downsides both of central planning and of private business.
And the larger the corporations get, the more that kind of thing happens.
That isn’t necessarily true in all corporations. A lot of companies have been shifting towards more modern management methodologies where decision-making is becoming more decentralized and made closer to the customers or where the work actually happens. The C-level still makes overall vision and company-wide strategic decisions, but more autonomy is allowed at all levels of the company.
My personal experience is more in the finance and tech sectors. Usually adopting various flavors of “Agile” project management. They were originally designed for software development, but a lot of those principles are making their way into more traditional sectors like construction or manufacturing. Concepts like applying small, self contained, largely autonomous (within specified guard rails) teams that are empowered to make decisions around stuff like product design.
But in my experience, corporations, especially large ones, are far from “central planning organizations”. More often than not, they consist of dozens, if not hundreds of little silos and fiefdoms, often fighting for budget and resources.
There are people that genuinely love to work professionally and succeed at the highest level. There life is defined by their career. Naturally they want to be properly compensated.
What does one do with excess money? Go to fine restaurants with the best chefs. Buy nice cars. Take vacations. Purchase all kinds of stuff.
I can’t see a world without Capitalism. The exchange of goods and services for profit is a natural motivation to open and run businesses.
Maybe items like essential groceries and prescriptions could become available to everyone under a government plan. But it would cost Billions. Obviously Farmers need payment and the companies that make food items have expenses. They need payment from somewhere.