Ultimately that money is made by people choosing to spend their money on something, because it helps them, because they like it, because they need it for whatever reason (real or imagined). That's what grounds the financial markets: eventually someone is buying a thing because they want the thing, and all the rest of it is basically just figuring out who can make the thing, how many people want the thing and how badly, and whether the stuff used to make the thing could make a different thing that people want more. Financial markets can depart from that reality for a while, but mainly because of a collective belief in some falsehood about the above (everyone really badly wants AI, right?).

Number go up infinitely is due to inflation and that's basically just an incentive to not hoard cash indefinitely, and instead use it for something useful. But the only thing that uses up is numbers. Everything else is because people, on average, want more stuff and are willing and able to work hard to get it.

(Of course, this generally means that the markets chase the desires of those who have something valuable enough. People who don't will be marginalised by this mechanism, for sure. And of course there's lots of opportunity for people to steal or abuse powerful positions in the market to the detriment of others. Which is why a free market is not the be all and end all of organising a society, and other organisational structures exist to regulate it and to allocate resources in a less transactional manner)

But isn't that counter to the very article we're commenting on? Everyone is shoving half baked AI junk into everything because that's what makes number go up on the stock market, but I'm pretty sure that's not actually what most people would want those resources to be used for.

I'd posit that markets are completely detached from the real world and are more of a speculative/religious element than an indicator of any ground truths.

Edit: I just realized I missed a sentence of yours where you kinda spoke to this. I still believe that this is more of a rule than an exception - there is nothing inherently tying markets and reality together - they're mostly about people making bets on what the next big hype is; not on what is actually useful to anyone.

Most people or most people with money? Ultimately it's the people making investment decisions you need to convince in order to get the money from them. Then the reality check is whether you can give them that money back and more. Those investors should in theory be self-interested in making sure that this is actually useful, because if they don't they'll lose their money, but in practice they are not superhuman and prone to fads and echo-chambers (especially because it's a relatively smaller group that can move a lot of money around, and short-term investing rewards running with the crowd to some degree), but there's not a single group of people that would not fall victim to poor decisions in this regard (whether you're imagining a centrally managed economy, the electorate, or some hypothetical benevolent dictator).

Optimizing for capital returns is a simplification of the real world, where it allows for comparing whether it makes more sense to put one's money into opportunity A or B.

There's a lot that's not captured by solely looking at dollars, like the examples that you bring up, such as quality of life, human welfare, and so on.

If you care about minimizing child mortality, increasing literacy, pulling people up out of poverty, you should be a capitalist, as it's empirically the best way to meet those goals. This seems to be a hard thing for many to understand or accept because it is largely a second order effect, the capitalist primarily concerned with their own personal gain but winds up improving the lives of others as a side effect.

This is the essence of Adam Smith's often misunderstood invisible hand metaphor. Of the individual he observed: "By pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it." Second order effects stack up and improve quality of life for more people better than trying to do so explicitly.

Multiplying capital creates abundance and that abundance allows for improved standards of living for and the means to spend excess resources in support of charitable endeavors. Growth is good because it means more abundance and opportunity. I would argue that pursuit of growth is not an ideology but a force of nature. Life is opportunistic and will expand to wherever there is fertile conditions, and often adapt even when they are not. We are part of nature and understand this intuitively, seeking growth opportunities. As an example, one is better off being part of a growing company (more wages and opportunities) than one that is stagnant or declining (fighting for scraps and survival).

>If you care about minimizing child mortality, increasing literacy, pulling people up out of poverty, you should be a capitalist, as it's empirically the best way to meet those goals If you look at it empirically, the majority of people brought out of poverty (and I suspect the other metrics but am not as familiar with them) in the past few decades have been in China as the result of deliberate policies by the CPC.

Then why are all of these metrics worse in the US than even in notoriously poor communist Cuba?