I was drawing on my model of another person- but my model was based on so little information that it was very likely to be wrong.
Building on ewbronv's response: The starving man is best off if you open a bakery which can profitably sell him bread at a price he can afford. If there are starving people, it is because food is not available at a price they can afford.
It isn't about driving other companies out of business, it's about meeting an unmet need. If you can make a greater profit than the free market competition, it must be because you are filling needs more effectively- everyone who would have their personal needs filled more valuably by the competition patronizes the competition, driving their profits instead of yours.
Building on ewbronv's response: The starving man is best off if you open a bakery which can profitably sell him bread at a price he can afford. If there are starving people, it is because food is not available at a price they can afford.
Right. So I am saying that businesses can affect both the price, and the affording.
Today's post, Traditional Capitalist Values was originally published on 17 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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