Can There Be Innovation Under Socialism?

How many times have you heard the claim "without the profit motive there would be no innovation"? It's a line repeated so often that it seems like common sense to many people. Let's investigate that claim. Can there be innovation under socialism?

Can There Be Innovation Under Socialism? – Second Thought

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Citations and Further Reading:

Capitalism and Innovation

The iPhone

Public investment in health innovations

The 11 lines of open-source code that broke the internet

COVID patents and Africa, mutations

6.7% of world has a college degree

Cuban medical innovations

Economic planning and innovation

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About Second Thought:
Second Thought is a channel devoted to education and analysis of current events from a Leftist perspective. Welcome!

[samkelo]

"But it's not profitable so I guess never mind" nothing is more true about capitalism

[RickyRei]

I've always felt that capital, and the fact that there's always a need for profit, has stifled innovation. Look at America, we're basically a few corporations pretending to be a country.

[bpygkor]

How Apple innovated over the last years:

- Removing the headphone jack
- Ignoring expandable storage and user removable batteries
- Serializing parts to make repairs extremely difficult
- Removing useful ports and adding them again
- Making spare parts as unaccessible as possible

After seeing this brilliant video, I'd really love to see a Right to Repair video!

[BberryBberrydude]

I'm an engineer and I always wished more people understood how socialist maker spaces can be. In the 3D printing community, people have been printing artificial limbs forever. It's a fun nifty toy and source of great joy to try to improve on the design further and further, like the joy of solving a puzzle. But eventually people were drowning in plastic limbs, so know what they did? They sought out families of disabled children and sent them custom-printed prosthetics for free.

Has no one considered the fact that engineering is actually fun? Why do people act like writing and drawing are the only 2 creative outlets in the universe? In a world where people can do whatever they want without fear of starving to death, people will busy themselves with things that they enjoy. And for many many of these people, they'll seek ways to improve their everyday activities, or just strive towards mastery of a subject matter.

Humans have been innovating since before capitalism and we'll continue to do so long after it

[KoolAidManOG]

"Isms do not create things, workers do. Isms only decide who gets paid."

Beautiful

[KalikAP]

My favorite take on this issue still comes from a tweet I read a long time ago: "If Capitalism breeds innovation, why don't printers work?"

[johnson]

My old refrigerator was made by a company who tried to build the absolute best quality refrigerators. We overtook it from the people who had lived in the house before us, who told us that it was about 30 years old. When we moved house and left the refrigerator behind 15 years later it was still going strong, and when we visited the new owners three years later, it still stood in the kitchen after nearly 50 years.
The company who made it went bankrupt shortly after they had made it.

[LapsedLawyer]

Just ran across another example: Volvo invented the three-point seat belt back in 1959, yet made the patent free to any car company wanting to use it, precisely because it promoted safety and saved lives. In other words, contra the whole reason to be in business (to make a profit) they demonstrated more concern for use value than exchange value and eschewed profit. You might see this as some species of charity, but it also illustrates your point about how innovation under socialism would be driven by actual material needs

[Fredy_carreño_MD]

Planned obsolescence, the great innovation of capitalism

[abelabel]

Imagine if the best minds were not competing or being tied by profit motives, but cooperating and focusing on efficiency, net-benefits and sustainability...

Or if education was not so focused on making people fit the wills of the market...

Or if people had enough time to dedicate to their passions instead of worrying about the next meal or rent...

Or if academia stopped adopting industrial-like performance indicators for researchers and journals were open-access instead of controlled by ultra greedy companies...

[tamegaming]

Man, you give me hope, not just in introducing me to an alternative to our failing system, but highlighting how common sense so many Socialist principles are. The fact people around me are starting to speak up about believing in Socialist ideas, to your 1.3m subscriber voice, I have hope that we can slowly start to change the world with this information.

[kongspeaks]

I love how you dismantle capitalist propaganda without ever getting bitter or sarcastic. It's a skill I'll need to learn.

[forstudentpower]

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” — Stephen Jay Gould 💯

[seth_sesu]

This is spot on. It's why open source tech actually accelerates innovation. Capitalism is about locking down and monopolizing every little innovative idea to extract profit.

[staytheknight]

“Just because you sell it doesn’t mean you made it”
Best quote ever!!!

[boipolloi]

Just saw this come up at work. Here's a comment for the algorithm! Love that you're continuing to promote socialism as well as critique capitalism, not a lot of creators are willing to do that.

[Sorenzo]

Most early innovation was done by monks and aristocrats, like Mendel, Newton, Darwin, Volta - and hundreds others who either were completely free from the profit motive, or were employed by people who were. And even in a modern corporation, researchers have no profit motive, because their corporation owns all their research. It's just facially ridiculous to attribute innovation to the profit motive, unless you're specifically talking about private investment and marketing research . But those are just, charitably speaking, two areas out of many where innovation takes place.

[Greenkrieg]

Capitalism actively disincentives innovation. For example, in my job I’ve developed many methods to automate both mine and others work. If I were to share all of this with my coworkers and managers I’d probably get a nice pat on the back and a congratulatory email. Then the company would give us more work to fill up our time and/or fire people because now it only take 2 ppl to do the work if 10. So I am incentivized to keep quiet and only use my tools to make my work easier.

[BdR]

Talking about innovation.. as a game developer I find it fascinating that both *Tetris* and *Bejeweled* were invented by Soviet Union era Russians.

The inventor of Tetris moved to America and became very rich, while the Russian student who in the 90s created the game "Shariki" (aka Ша́рики, which was ripped off by Bejeweled) remains largly unknown.

[nejxyel]

As a french student in mathematics and economics, innovation is usually the most acquainted argument in order to discredit socialism or state intervention (specifically in TIC and medical research). You just showed facts about intuitions that one can have by studying economic history and thanks for that, I hope it will help some to understand that the economic future can be different. It should be different. Therefore, let’s create it different. It is all up to us.