Comment by mikestorrent
8 hours ago
One of the reasons for this is that the financial system - which is supposed to serve as a mechanism for representing value in a fungible way - does not assign value to many forms of structured, engineered creation. For instance, a high-performing team within an organization has value, held in the agreements and trusts between the people; organizations will destroy this in a second if it suits them because there is no quantitative record of the value of that group. Similarly, at scale, there is intense value in having all of the necessary tooling in one city to manufacture something as complicated as a car, to use your Detroit example. We can see the shadow of the qualitative value by looking at the losses incurred by all the ancillary industries affected when a major company like GM moves manufacturing out of town and everything downstream of that shuts down; and we can see the long tail of the loss in terms of the socioeconomic outcomes of the average working class person living there.
In a sense, these corporate (and on the next scale up, governmental) decisions have a large scale social cost that is externalized when it should probably have to be borne by the company. A generation of men that should have grown up to take their father's place building cars instead are relegated to either leaving their city or accepting one of the lesser jobs that they're forced to fight for; meanwhile the shareholders of the company profit from lower labour cost somewhere else.
Capitalism offers no means of dealing with this problem; creating this problem is incentivized. Many of the problems capitalism does solve, it does so through quantization of value; perhaps we need to find a better way to map social value as a second or third order system out beyond raw currency so that we don't destroy it.
Capitalism offers a means of dealing with the problem. Workers are free to start their own companies. People can just do things and don't need permission. Henry Ford himself started from nothing.
Your "just" there is doing a lot of work. Don't trivialize the difficulty of starting a company. Most people who start companies and are successful either have some financial backing or reserves already, or they have very little in the way of other responsibilities (like a spouse, children, or elderly family members) to cause them to think twice about living on ramen for years.
Yes, there are exceptions, as with everything, but this isn't a path to be taken lightly. Your average worker who lost their job due to globalization ends up scrambling to find a job, any job, immediately, or else risk their family living on the street.
If you try hard enough you can always find a plausible excuse for failure.