Money. It rewards money.

Those who have money are the only ones deserving of getting money.

It's kind of in the name...

The compounding returns of a capitalist economy reward iterative investments in new productive capital. That's fine. Good even. At least, according to Marx. If your goal is to approach a post-scarcity economy, you need a period of growth in productive capacity and distribution.

Because we use currency as a token of exchange, and capital improvements require currency to implement, we incentivize a virtuous cycle of re-investment in token-accruing capital as we operate a capitalist system.

The flaws in the system begin to stand out when the process of cycling currency into capital investment fails to value anything without a price-tag attached to it. Go back to the 1970s/80s and you'll see the neoliberal economists struggling with this paradox of post-Bretton Woods economic modeling. Economic growth has material limits, but our fiat currency system does not. Negative externalities don't have a built in short-term economic cost, so investors and administrators don't recognize the accumulating socio-economic friction until a fire breaks out.

But OP's premise is all wrong. The skill, the creative talent, and the labor that capitalism rewards is all bound up in the rapid recirculation of currency through capital. Neurosurgeons, muralists, and janitors aren't missing out because capitalism fails to reward them. They're missing out because they have no vehicle to rapidly compound the returns on their initial efforts.

Even then, there are tools for compounding efforts that all three of these professions can and do exploit. Education is one example. A skilled neurosurgeon can profit more handsomely as a mentor or professor than as a pure surgeon. An art school will generate more professional art than any single artist. And management is another. A veteran service worker who can efficiently direct the efforts of a large number of peers will control more productive forces than if they were hands-on at a single job site. A doctor who operates a clinic full of juniors or a sculptor or prodigious author with a team underneath her will yield far more work product than they could alone.

precise value predictions

it mostly rewards luck and having money

Just the cluster B people

And psychopathy

It rewards people with the skill and talent and who work very hard to not work very hard at all.

Edit: /s

The compounding returns of a capitalist economy reward iterative investments in new productive capital. That’s fine. Good even. At least, according to Marx. If your goal is to approach a post-scarcity economy, you need a period of growth in productive capacity and distribution.

Marx described the good and the bad of it, at a time when capitalism was reaching its late/monopoly/imperial stage, and he largely correctly predicted what late-stage capitalism would look like. Lenin further developed these theories while living under capitalism’s highest stage.

Western Marxists saw China’s “opening up” as an abandonment of Communism/socialism. Ultras fear the scroll. They don’t understand that, in order to get to the end-goal, you need to leverage the good parts of capitalism—while keeping the capitalists on a short leash—in order to quickly develop the productive forces, especially when the imperialist states are trying to crush you.

It is basically techno feudalism. Late stage capitalism is techno feudalism.

I find arguments like these so difficult because the thing that deserves rewarding constantly changes.

It rewards hard work! Well okay maybe billionaires don't work thousands of times more than the average person, But it rewards people took the risk and got the reward. Well Okay maybe people shouldn't be rewarded for luck, But it rewards the people who had the mindset to never give up when things get tough! Well Okay maybe homeless people did have much tougher lives, But it rewards people who studied the system and learned to work within it! Stop questioning the system your just jealous you don't understand it as well as they do!

I find arguments like these so difficult because the thing that deserves rewarding constantly changes.

In reality it doesn’t actually change, and it’s not a matter of who/what is deserving. What changes is the capitalists’ lies they use to cover up the truth.

I think it rewards being an asshole.

Capitalism is the most efficient way to distribute resources (to the 1%).

capitalism values the machines (capital) that increase productivity.

Capitalism rewards capital.

hey everybody, we've got a temporarily inconvenienced billionaire on our hands

Nothing makes money more then money

Linus Torvalds: Maked Linux and become absurdly rich
Taylor Swift, Eminem, Michael Jackson, The Rolling Stones: all artist that become absurdly rich too

I have a group of friends who I have known since I was a kid. This is useful in that, while it’s of course anecdotal, I can say that it’s a sample of people who all knew each other before any of us were capable of earning money.

Within this group, there is zero correlation between intelligence or work ethic and wealth/income. My wealthiest friend inherited his family business. My second wealthiest friend married into money. These two are among the least hard working and intelligent friends I have. Meanwhile the smartest friend I have - the one who almost aced his SAT - is doing ok but not like he’s swimming in money (community college professor - which honestly is a pretty great gig, he was smart enough to recognize that). Another truly brilliant friend of mine is doing research in a field he is passionate about but he’s definitely not the highest earner in our group.

Admittedly none of us are extremely hard workers, but I know tons of workers - especially some undocumented folks, who work way harder than I can even imagine, and they are of course making very little.

Of my childhood friend group, I am the second smartest, and the poorest at the moment (aside from the ones that are in prison), the smartest is the wealthiest among us, but only because she was smart enough to utilize her intelligence into a degree and a higher GS grade in a government job. None of us are wealthy, but she's doing the best. Buying a home, and can pay her bills, and has about 200 bucks per paycheck to put into savings. We all came from very economically disadvantaged backgrounds, but she had the advantage of both of her parents being in the military, so while we lived in the same neighborhood, she lived in a much nicer home, whereas the rest of us lived on roads her parents told her never to walk down.

I am currently attempting to follow the path she did, just 15 years later.

capitalism rewards owning things. if you own a thing that makes money you can do no work and be rich

Um, my bad a bad joke.
I was trying to do the inverse of each statement and to imply that it rewards talentless unskilled people who put no value to society.

And greed, manipulation, ethical and moral flexibility

lol Poe's law

Oops yup that's what happened. Sometimes you forget the '/s' and the internet reminds you

It rewards all of those if they are applied close to the money. Hanging art for sale where millionaires go, working hard handling their money or business, being a surgeon working for them, not the poor. But make no mistake, you will not be equal to them. They just don’t want to be eye to eye with poor people.

Congratulations on being less coherent than a chat bot.

I'm very intelligent, and fairly hard working, but I also have the power of empathy and compassion for others. That drastically limits my earning potential. Even more so since I want to make a large scale positive difference in the world.

All the best ways to get rich are exploitative: of employees, of customers, of society as a whole, of the planet.

This is a critical aspect.

The utter disregard for everyone and everything for the sake of making more money is the second most valuable asset of a capitalist.

The first is obviously capital.

It's why the old nobility liked the system and molded it to their needs.

on one hand, yes: people with strong Cluster B personality disorder tendencies (well, narcissistic and anti-social at least) tend to float to the top in capitalist societies. On the other hand no, because these diagnoses are harmful for us poors, and can be used to deny necessary care. Borderline personality disorder is an especially common misdiagnosis for autistic women, and the drugs they pump all of us bpds with do more harm than good and therapists specializing in dialectical behavior therapy are few and far between. In my case I got overmedicated and undertherapized, and eventually just dumped and told to get a job. (/rant).

Greed.

It rewards greed above all else. The desire to hoard and take more than you need. And only through your greed for yourself will be able to overcome the others in your life that hold you back from what you desire. It isolates and it rewards you for holding yourself separate from others.

It rewards greed.

How does that make any sense? How does running a worker-owned society based on fulfilling needs over profits translate?

Late stage capitalism is imperialism. "Technofeudalism" isn't really a thing, workers still work for wages under capitalists that control the state.

Even the groups of people and their asaociated characteristics in this meme is an example of how capitalism colonizes.

No, it really only does have one metric - returns to the current holders of capital. Everything else falls aside.

Theres a reason western european dragons are so popular over chinese dragons or mesoamerican ones. Hoarding is seen as a genuine skill

Capitalism rewards owning things of value*

You cant come from nothing and work your way to the top; you have to work until you can own something of value, then profit off of that. These days it appears to be getting lucky on crypto 10 years ago or hopping on the next big wallstreet short. Maybe buying an apartment complex

Capitalism rewards trade, patents, grift,
but above all, sales pitches.

The richest people in capitalism are the best orators
and tradespeople at the bazaar.
It's what Steve Jobs is most famous for.
His infamous iPhone sales pitchis infamous the world over.
It's what Elon Musk does, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg,
Bill Gates, all of the big wigs in the world.
And they get rewarded for it like no other.

It's why liberal democracy is associated with a person
on the soapbox trying to sell a crowd,
whatever they want to hear,
instead of a people's democracy,
that has a council of political entities
around a table that debate each other,
where all members have power,
instead of a capitalist corporate board room,
with a corporate head that
appoints its subjects.
It's not like neither have one or the other,
but it's one more emblematic to their style of governing.

It's why the US has Donald Trump.
What is he good at? What does he do?
He campaigns, relentlessly. That's his sole quality.

Usonians (US citizens) seem to keep thinking that
capitalism is making money and socialism is when
capitalism fails at making money.

And I believe I will slightly go off Marx' thought and
explain all socio-economic systems as such:

Primitivism = Gatherer ideologues + Hunter rule
Feudalism = Priestly ideologues + Nobility rule
Capitalism = Judiciary ideologues + Merchantry rule
Socialism = Academic ideologues + Engineering rule
Communism = Copyleft ideologues? + AI rule?

Ultras fear the scroll.

Well, they should. That's in a 2-pt font. You'll blow your eyes out trying to read it.

They don’t understand that, in order to get to the end-goal, you need to leverage the good parts of capitalism—while keeping the capitalists on a short leash—in order to quickly develop the productive forces, especially when the imperialist states are trying to crush you.

.world and it's shitlib affiliates have pretty neatly expunged anyone who could possibly be called "Ultra" from it's platform years back.

So, while I agree with the sentiment, idk if that's what we're seeing today. More that people in a Western capitalist institution are getting crushed in the machine. And they justifiably don't like that. So they say "turn the machine off", without really considering what the machinary of capitalism is doing or why they might still need it or how you can operate heavy machinery without people getting chewed up in the gears.

The mesoamerican dragon deities aren't popular because europeans genocided those cultures.

The loong/snake-like dragons are plenty popular, Tolkien just has gorilla grip on pop culture.

Capitalism rewards those who control more capital. Period.

Goods, materials, labor sources, infrastructure, intellectual property, supply chains, real estate, contracts, and political influence. The more of all of that you control, the more you reap financial rewards.

The most idealistic view of capitalism is that you earn such reward by improving the world and providing what people need. You invent a product, process, IP, etc. and people pay you money for materially improving their lives or meeting a need.

But that is far from the only way to gain such control. Using your massive wealth to gain political influence. Using both your wealth and political influence to buy or destroy your competition. Using unethical methods like collusion to remove choice from consumers, to force them to buy your product, to raise prices because you can.

Hell, you can even do everything to destroy a good productive company and still make bank. David Zaslav at Warner Bros is proving that you can buy a profitable company, merge it with a company in massive debt, put that debt on the profitable company, use that debt to justify massive cuts that make the company less productive with fewer profit streams including cancelling finished movies for tax write-offs, destroy the stock valuation of the company screwing over the shareholders, force a new sale/merger to a MAGA billionaire to save the company, and fly away from the wreckage on your $886 million dollar golden parachute richer than when you started.

A 16 year old barista does much more to contribute to society than David Zaslav did, but the rewards are not even close.

Agreed, I'm one of those women. Thankfully, I've got the right diagnosis but I'd been taking antipsychotics for years, they're pretty dangerous drugs.

Capitalism rewards those who have the most command over capital. And how much command over capital one has is determined by how much command over capital one already has.

Machines are not capital. They are tools.

Well, they should. That’s in a 2-pt font. You’ll blow your eyes out trying to read it.

You have to zoom in: the image is 34006  × 1063 pixels.