>Just one report puts the top 100 companies in the primary sector at $7.3 trillion / year in externalized costs related to the environment [1]. Still, measuring these things in capital doesn't capture the problem, since you can't buy back environment and it has far reaching consequences. This doesn't account for social well being either.

Well, if you want to account for externalities like that, then we need to account for positive externalities not captured by these corporations either, as GDP or profit figures do not adequately capture the difference between a $200 smartphone and a $200 feature phone.

>'m talking about capitalism not providing the best solutions to concrete problems the society faces, despite being - in theory - a system that allows the best solutions to strive. In practice, we know it's parasitic, and the solutions that strive are the ones that move the economy itself forward, in detriment of society.

Capitalism does not promise to solve global optimization problems which are not priced in or demanded, that's the whole point of having a democracy in order to set the constraints of the game, a negative external feedback system.

And best solution to what? If you have an optimization algorithm, you have to set up the constraints so that it optimizes for what you want. Market competition optimizes for the demands of individuals, not for the demands of society. If you want capitalists and entrepreneurs to do this, then the incentives have to encourage a gradient in that direction. If you want more fuel efficient cars, than tax carbon and pollution, the capitalists will quickly find that their profits are dropping as their cars get more expensive and will seek out alternatives. Tax an incandescent lightbulb, and the market will start competing on LEDs and CFLS.

You're making the same fallacy people make when talking about "survival of the fittest" in an ecosystem, they think natural selection is optimizing for a certain kind of creature, rather than just the creature that can reproduce the best in that ecosystem. Capitalism is undirected evolution, and if we want it to solve global problems, we need to guide it via political feedback in a mixed economy.

You started this thread by trying to criticize the analogy of capitalism to natural selection, but nothing you've said has debunked it. You've criticized capitalism for not solving global first or second order costs, but a market can't solve these problems if there's no price signals for them, in much the same way that species have naturally gone extinct in the past, because individual selection doesn't necessarily select for health of the group.

If there's one criticism of capitalism, it's that the 'best' product or service doesn't always win (assuming you can objectively define best). Sometimes superior marketing wins out, sometimes superior execution wins out, and sometimes underhanded tactics win out, especially if it involves political favors.

No one's denying that, but you're criticizing a strawman of a pure, perfect capitalist system. I am not, nor has anyone here, asserted such a perfect system,

My point is simple, capitalism, for all it's flaws, is a useful system to have to optimize productive capacities along the lines that we want (in contrast to top-down centralized control), and that we should have a mixed economy, where political decisions adjust costs to factor in externalities, and to ensure that the capitalists are working on optimizing the problems that we want solved as a society. It needs to be managed for costs, for transparency, for corruption, but there isn't any real alternative to the current mixed systems we already have, we just need to work on them to improve them.

That's it, nothing more. If you came to do battle with Ayn Rand, you're in the wrong thread.