Money is not solving our problems any more. Adam smith argues that the optimal decision making structure consists of the entities executing the transaction. They have ‘perfect’ information on value and utility for themselves. This was clearly shown by the ‘failure’ of communism and central administration in an attempt to add ‘fairness’ across all members of the economic community who are not involved in the transaction. Today we are exploring the illusion of fairness with taxation and entitlements on an increasingly granular level with the help of deep learning, large databases and subscriptions. Still no one has addressed the elephant in the room - economic inertia. Even with perfect information and frictionless transactions there is a strong disincentive to ‘improved’ products and services. The profit centers are intent on maintaining the transaction patterns even tho they are destroying the infrastructure that they require - examples include the irreversible change of the climate through Using the short term decisions without modeling long term consequences as well as the homogenization and ‘dumbing down’of our civilization through lowest common denominator strategies.
Even with perfect information and perfect short term utility, we are not mentally equipped to sense, evaluate and act on long term effects of our choices. Although this shortcoming has little impact in the ‘linear’ regime where we are a trivial component of the ecology, at current size and growth rate, humanity significantly destabilizes capitalism’s ability to succeed.