Comment by geofft

> How did we get to a place where billions of dollars are exchanged in millions of business transactions but there are no winners?

Simple. Capitalism is broken.

In order for capitalism to work, there has to be a meaningful profit/loss incentive. People who are doing the work must get rewarded if the work is done well and penalized if the work is done poorly.

We already started moving away from this many years ago with the growth of large corporations. When was the last time that you at your "capitalist" firm were aware of revenue and costs for the things you were working on in a more-than-superficial way? When was the last time you saw someone make a buy-vs.-build decision based on the actual numerical cost of the employees needed to run the project and not just handwaving? (When was the last time you even knew what the cost of the employees on your team was, given the widespread taboos about compensation?) When was the last time that someone who said "I saved the company X million dollars" got some proportion of those X million dollars? When was the last time that someone who needlessly made the company spend X million dollars in the first place paid for it?

The function of a big company is to abstract away the cold, unfeeling invisible hand of the market and protect people/groups who make unprofitable decisions. This is actually totally fine and good in the short term - nobody makes consistently good decisions, and insurance is a thing for a reason. You want people to take bigger risks on behalf of the company than they're willing to subsidize with their own paychecks, which is why individual artisans and professionals team up to form a company in the first place. But it's grown past that. As the article points out, some regional director somewhere is able to convince other people at the company that their work is profitable - with no hard link to whether the work is, in fact, profitable. And that scenario is entirely plausible for all of us; it's not specific to this one company in any way. If you're in the unlucky position where both you want to draw good charts and everyone around you wants to see good charts, there's no real way to figure out if you're wrong unless the company as a whole is dying, and there might be a host of reasons why it's not dying that have nothing to do with your decision-making.

And now venture "capitalists" have decided that this model needs to scale out from protecting teams to protecting entire companies. You can run a business for years without even attempting to make a profit and get acquired based on the potential of the business. No more messy realities of the market determining whether you are in fact profitable or not - what matters is whether you look profitable. And, again, this is genuinely good at small scale, because it allows new ventures to ignore bumps and potholes that would otherwise have ended a small company. But if you scale it up, it also allows new ventures to ignore driving straight off a cliff.

I expect capitalism to work very well if implemented right. But I don't know how we go from where we are today to actual, functioning capitalism.