You're ignoring the proportions. Your happiness is maybe 80% related to your job and salary (at least up to a point where you can be considered wealthy, after that there's decreasing returns), and each product you consume from each different company affects your wellbeing by a minuscule amount. Even adding them all up won't give more than, say, 15% as most of your expenses are not on products, but things like housing and transport.

Given that, if you could make everyone's jobs more fullfilling and increase people's salaries at the cost of things costing a bit more, you would definitely increase overall wellbeing. People would afford a small amount less, but that would not impact them significantly, or maybe at all.

The problem I see is that in global competition, you may be put out of business by countries that give much less shit about worker's wellbeing because people will still spend almost all their money on the cheapest available option (even more so if they can afford less!), and that IMHO explains why American companies have taken over so many markets overseas (and now, China seems to be doing it even more). When that happens, everyone in the country loses. So there needs to be a balance, which I think Europe is doing more or less well: people still have great working conditions but can afford less than in the USA, where people have very near the worst possible working conditions (nearly no vacation mandated by law, no parental leave, no healthcare except for the best jobs), but can buy more useless stuff.

Given that wealth is continually being concentrated towards the very rich I don't think this is accurate. As a whole the working class is producing more value than they are consuming, but the excess is going to the rich not those producing the value

By definition, the average person consumes as much as they produce. Generally speaking, the poorer someone is, the more they produce relative to what they consume. Making life better for producers improves the lot of the poor; making life better for consumes improves it for the overconsumers (i.e. the rich).

>Each of us consumes far more services than we produce.

Speak for yourself, not everyone is in debt all the time, and some never in debt whatsoever even when they have no unusually above-average earnings.

But as part of a vast majority, you are as correct as possible.

Then again capital is just plain Other Peoples' Money, and you can't be a capitalist without capital, no matter how much you wish it was true.

One problem with housing is that real estate has investment potential but for decades it has been too expensive for average people. Debt is crafted to barely make it possible to get into a property, and you may do well if values increase but there is an entire system in place so that others profit more from the same piece of property than you. Vehicles are another high-dollar item where debt is usually incurred, but these almost always depreciate fast. You can draw the line there and be pretty realistic, but there are plenty of people who are at the extreme where everything that costs money is borrowed.

So that's about as close to capitalist as most people get. That's about all of OPM they have at their disposal, and the only thing invested in that has upside potential is the home. For those fortunate enough to have gotten in when it was more within reach. And there can still be a gradual spiral downward which is too slow to notice until it's too late.

Sometimes it helps to do the math and not be afraid to admit how far from capitalist you actually are compared to how capitalist everbody thinks they are.

Disclaimer: this article was DOA & flagged instantly with zero comments, but it seemed OK to me and I vouched and now look at it. Nobody's fault but mine.

That's not as relevant as you'd think - the "customers" of teachers are, arguably, taxpayers and not children. Alternatively it's parents, or perhaps politicians who set the budget.

Focusing on children is the more pro-social preference, but children who attend schools famously don't have jobs in functioning societies.

More importantly, the teaching system is basically un-incentivized by incentives - teachers in the US (focusing just on the US for a sec) are incredibly underpaid, and basically rely on masters-degree teachers putting in effort completely disproportionate to the pay. Everyone accepts this state of affairs specifically because we're all ignoring market incentives in favor of the good of society (i.e. the quality of childrens' education).

So, let's suppose we judge teachers based on how well they appease politicians and parents who support their funding: they pass all students, regardless of how poorly they do on tests and how badly the children need to just repeat the year. This is a terrible outcome, and yet you're implicitly endorsing it.

I assure you that being allowed to teach well would greatly increase the pleasantness of life for a hell of a lot of teachers.

Nobody gets into teaching for the money—and, for that matter, there’s not a clear connection between doing it well and any kind of rewards at all, as it stands.

Obviously by how well they teach, but if we give them a stake in their teaching performance, their teaching should improve even more…

I think key word here is "feel". The reality is that modern products are absurdly complex, and consumers truly don't know what is (and isn't) worth their money. Which is why marketing, making people "feel" a certain way, is SO important. Maybe even more important than the product itself.

I mean, do you know how any of your food is produced? If you wanted to verify that the ingredients are what they say they are, can you? If you're buying a car how confident are you the transmission is reliable? Do you actually understand how the transmission is designed OR... is it just brand name? It's brand name, right.

Ultimately companies don't need to, and are better off not, producing high quality and safe goods. It makes much more sense to produce lower quality goods and reinvest the savings into advertising. The consumer won't know the difference, and they couldn't find out even if they wanted to.

> if they don't feel like they are obtaining net positive value from the transaction, they won't be.

Excepting for the cases where people have no other choice.