The Moral Limitations and Pragmatic Dangers to the Environment, Health, and the Economy of Technological Innovation, Under Capitalism

Abstract

Survival in a truly competitive environment requires maximizing efficiency, which is to say the ratio of outputs over inputs, or profitability, which entails taking the most possible from, while contributing the least possible to, labor and the physical and socio-cultural environment, and also externalizing as many costs as possible. This, in addition to maximizing the exploitation of labor, thereby resulting in a crisis of overproduction, results in environmental degradation. While conversely, any contribution made by capitalist enterprises, as opposed to technology, to general welfare, which they survive, must be indicative of a lack of competition. Moreover, absent government investment, the preponderance of the benefits of the increased productivity generally characteristic of ever more complex, and expensive, technologies, will increasingly accrue, uncontested, to the wealthy, thereby, as per Thomas Piketty, leading to ever-greater economic inequality.