Profit Doesn’t Serve Us (Here’s How To Fix That)

TLDR – Profits & People

• Our systems should serve human flourishing, not profit metrics.
• A profit-first mindset turns medicine, food, housing, and work into exploitative revenue streams.
• Profit culture erodes relationships, freedom, empathy, and social trust — even for the wealthy.
• Profit often slows real progress in science, tech, climate, and health by favoring quick, lockable wins.
• Shareholder primacy mimics central planning: bad info, warped incentives, concentrated power.
• Profit doesn’t grow long-term productivity; it mainly shifts value from workers to owners.
• We can decommodify essentials and cap profit where harm is predictable.
• Co-ops, employee ownership, commons, open-source, participatory budgeting show post-profit paths.
• Autonomy, mastery, purpose, care, and community can drive a healthier economy than money alone.
• Core test for any policy or metric: does it build a freer, more connected, less stressed world?

Shouldn’t the systems of our world — our governments, our economies, our businesses, our societies — help us live better lives? Lives that are healthy, free, secure, and connected?

If that’s the case, then why have we become a profit-driven world? How has it served us? Profits and stocks soar as more and more regular people go homeless and hungry.

Who is our economic system for — people or profit?

Once you see how a profit-first mindset shapes medicine, food, housing, work, relationships, freedom, and even scientific progress, it’s hard to unsee it.

That makes it all the easier to imagine something better: institutions built around human flourishing, where profit takes a back seat, if it exists at all.

Let’s walk through how profit hurts everyday people, why it even backfires for the rich, and what realistic alternatives already exist.

How Profit Hurts People

You don’t have to dig through academic journals to see how profit hurts people. You can feel it in your body, in your grocery bill, in your rent, in the way your boss talks about “headcount.” When profit becomes the main objective, systems that should protect and sustain us start treating us as revenue streams instead. You see it most clearly in the basics of a decent life: medicine, food, housing, work, relationships, and even our rights and freedoms.

Profit in Medicine: When Care Becomes a Revenue Strategy

Modern medicine should exist to reduce suffering. But a profit-driven healthcare system often treats illness as a growth market.

We saw this in the opioid crisis. Pharmaceutical companies spent years promoting powerful painkillers as safe for chronic pain, despite weak evidence and strong risk of addiction. Investigations show that firms like Purdue Pharma used aggressive marketing, misleading claims, and high-pressure sales tactics to expand prescriptions — and profits.

Regulators lagged or bent under pressure, allowing labels and approvals that made over-prescribing easier.

This wasn’t “a few bad apples.” It was the logic of shareholder value:

• Addiction becomes repeat business.
• Marketing budgets balloon.
• Harm falls on families, communities, and public health systems.

We see the same pattern in where pharma does not invest. Developing new antibiotics is risky and less profitable. You want people to use them sparingly, not daily for life. Big companies have largely abandoned antibiotics R&D, leaving smaller firms and nonprofits to carry a fragile pipeline while resistant infections kill tens of thousands each year.

If health, not profit, came first, we’d:

• Pay for drugs based on long-term outcomes, not prescription volume.
• Fund critical, low-profit research (like antibiotics and neglected diseases) publicly and through mission-locked entities.
• Make deceptive marketing a career-ending move, not a cost of doing business.

When you read histories of firms like Johnson & Johnson, you see the same arc. From relatively simple products that genuinely improved life to increasingly aggressive drug marketing and financial engineering once profit became the primary lens.

Profit in Food: Ultra-Processed Profits, Ultra-Damaging Diets

Food should nourish us. Under a profit-first model, it often does the opposite.

Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are cheap, engineered, heavily marketed. They now make up a huge share of calories in many rich countries. A major international study found that each 10% increase in UPFs in the diet was linked to about a 3% rise in premature death, and in some countries UPFs may be tied to up to ~14% of early deaths.

Meta-analyses and cohort studies link high UPF consumption to:

• Higher all-cause mortality
• Greater risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and some cancers

Why are these products everywhere?

• They’re cheap to produce and extremely high margin.
• They’re designed for “bliss point” craveability, not satiety or health.
• They get huge marketing budgets, including targeted ads at kids.
• Companies lobby hard to block regulation on labeling, marketing, and taxes.

A profit-optimized food system gives us:

• Growing rates of obesity and chronic disease
• Ballooning healthcare costs
• Food deserts where poor communities get the worst choices

In a people-first food system, the easiest option would also be the healthiest:

• Strong rules on marketing junk food (especially to children)
• Taxes and regulations that make UPF-heavy business models unprofitable
• Public and cooperative investment in fresh, local, minimally-processed food

Tying our pursuit-of-profit mindset to human lives (and deaths) isn’t an abstract notion here. It’s real — with evidence continuing to pile up.

Profit in Housing: When Homes Become Financial Products

Shelter is a basic human need. When housing becomes a financial asset first and a home second, people lose.

The UN Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing calls this the “financialization of housing”: homes treated as vehicles for global capital, with investors, REITs, and private equity firms buying up housing stock for returns.

Patterns show up across countries:

• Large investors buy single-family homes and apartment blocks, raise rents, and sometimes leave units empty as “safe assets.”
• Local wages stagnate while land and property values soar.
• Tenants face more evictions, instability, and displacement.

This is what “profit motive problems” look like at street level:

• A family spending half their income on rent
• Young people locked out of ownership
• Cities hollowed out as investments, not communities

If we treated housing as a human right, not a speculative game, we’d see:

• Expansion of public, non-profit, and cooperative housing where rents reflect costs, not investor yield targets
• Vacancy taxes and ownership caps for large investors
• Strong tenant protections and community land trusts anchoring neighborhoods

Housing shouldn’t be reduced to numbers on a stock ticker — but under a profit-driven economy and mindset, that is increasingly the case.

Profit at Work: Shareholder Capitalism vs Human Beings

Work is where most of us spend the majority of our waking lives. It’s also where “shareholder value” bites hardest.

Recent research from central banks and economists finds that when ownership is concentrated in powerful institutional investors, firms tend to:

• Cut jobs and payroll
• Depress workers’ long-term earnings
• Increase shareholder returns
• Without raising long-run productivity in any meaningful way

In plain language: the pursuit of profit often shifts value away from workers without making the economic pie bigger.

Layer on top:

• Gig work and algorithmic management that treat people as interchangeable cost centers
• Constant surveillance and rating systems that erode autonomy and dignity

This is how a focus on profit impacts the shop floor. You get a tiny group of owners and executives setting KPIs and cost targets. Meanwhile, everyone else scrambles to hit them or get cut.

A people-first model of work would:

• Give workers formal power in governance (worker representation on boards, co-determination, strong unions)
• Rein in exploitative algorithmic controls (transparency, rights to explanation, collective bargaining over data and metrics)
• Reward firms for creating stable, well-paid, humane jobs — not just short-term earnings per share

Worker cooperatives and employee-owned firms already show this is possible. Evidence suggests they can match or exceed the productivity of conventional firms while reducing wage inequality.

Profit and Relationships: When Everything Becomes a Transaction

Does the pursuit of money itself damage how we relate to each other? Psychology research points in a clear direction.

Studies on “money priming” — subtle reminders of money — find that when people focus on money, they:

• Help others less
• Feel less connected
• Prefer greater social distance

Other work shows that when we make time more salient than money, people:

• Spend more time with friends and family
• Report higher happiness and stronger social connection

On top of that, research by Dacher Keltner, Paul Piff, and others suggests that people from higher social classes — who have more money and independence — often show lower empathy and weaker attunement to others’ emotions.

It’s not that rich people are evil. It’s that wealth plus a profit-first culture signals that humans are disposable and money is everything.

I would argue that this negatively impacts the elite as well. Wealthy people live trapped in “number go up” anxiety, social suspicion, and isolation. Research on time, wealth, and happiness keeps circling back to the same theme: connection beats accumulation.

Profit, Freedom, and Democracy: When Data and Prisons Become Revenue Streams

Freedom isn’t only about law; it’s about how much real control you have over your life. Profit can quietly undermine that.

Two examples stand out:

1. Surveillance capitalism
   • Big tech firms collect and monetize intimate data to target ads and nudge behavior.
   • The more they know about you, the more valuable you are as an advertising asset.
   • This creates incentives to maximize engagement, outrage, and addiction rather than truth or well-being.
2. Carceral profit models
   • Private prison contracts and prison labor can reward high incarceration rates and long sentences.
   • Public systems also benefit from cheap incarcerated labor and per-diem funding.

When prison beds and “user minutes” become revenue lines, you’ve effectively monetized lost freedom.

Meanwhile, growing wealth inequality and concentrated corporate power erode democratic control. Surveys and research show majorities in several countries believe the very rich have too much influence over politics and policy.

A freedom-first approach would:

• Treat core information infrastructures as public utilities or heavily regulated commons
• Enforce strict data minimization and privacy rules
• Remove profit motives from prisons and core policing

In short, putting profits before people has led to a serious degradation in the civil liberties of people across the world.

Profit, Life Satisfaction, and Social Cohesion

Most of us have grown up believing that economic growth is good. We’ve been told that this leads to more individualized products and services. The idea is that more consumer choice means more individual expression, freedom, and happiness.

The data says otherwise.

Meta-analyses on materialism and life satisfaction find a consistent pattern: People who prioritize money and possessions report lower well-being on average.

Research on income inequality and subjective well-being is complex, but many studies link higher inequality to:

• Lower social cohesion and trust
• Worse health outcomes
• Higher crime in some contexts

A recent large study even connects high regional inequality to structural changes in children’s brains and higher levels of anxiety and depression. This suggests a toxic physio-social environment impact, not just individual poverty.

Globally, reports highlight declining institutional trust and growing polarization — signals of fraying social fabric.

In other words, profit-first systems don’t just hurt the poor. They warp the shared environment of meaning we all live in. Everyone breathes the same air of stress, comparison, and “never enough.”

A life-satisfaction-first economy would aim for:

• Less time scarcity, more time affluence and balance
• Lower inequality, especially for children
• Public goods that reliably raise well-being (parks, libraries, transit, arts, care systems)

Shifting our focus to KPIs like this, instead of money, would literally change our world for the better.

How Profit Inhibits Scientific & Technological Progress

People often make an argument that the pursuit of profit, particularly in a capitalist system, leads to more competition and innovation. However, this argument quickly falls apart on scrutiny. Here’s a look at how profit often slows or distorts progress.

Medicine

Big pharma has retreated from antibiotic development because the business model is weak. You want new antibiotics on the shelf and used sparingly, which means lower sales. Many companies that did develop new antibiotics went bankrupt because sales stayed low — even as resistant infections continue to rise.

Climate and Energy

Major fossil fuel companies have known about the climate risks of their products for decades yet funded disinformation, lobbied against policy, and misled the public about their climate commitments. Courts and lawsuits are now beginning to call this out directly.

Technology and Patents

Dense “patent thickets” in sectors like smartphones and biotech create webs of overlapping claims that raise costs, increase legal risk, and deter smaller innovators from entering the market.

Finance and Short-Termism

Research and business reporting highlight how short-term profit pressure pushes firms to underinvest in long-term R&D and human capital. A short-term focus often leads to weaker revenue growth and job creation over time.

Competition vs. Collaboration

In general, a profit-driven focus actually stifles competition by encouraging monopolization. Giant companies and wealthy individuals have a long and strong track record of doing most anything they can — legal or illegal — to stifle competition.

So instead of free markets that unleash innovation, what we actually see is that profit feeds a very narrow slice of “innovation.” Specifically, innovation that is quick, lockable, and monetizable. Meanwhile, it neglects anything that is slow, shared, or hard to own.

That’s bad news for things like basic science, climate resilience, pandemic preparedness, and open knowledge. And it holds human progress in general back.

Instead, we should be shifting away from profit and competition as the drivers of our economy to values that encompass collaboration and shared, mutual growth and prosperity.

Social Progress and Adaptation

The same dynamics show up in social change.

• Companies that profit from status-quo arrangements — fossil fuels, private health insurance, for-profit prisons, predatory finance — have strong incentives to delay or water down reforms, even when most people want change.
• High inequality and low social trust make it harder to build coalitions around big transitions. People suspect that any change will just benefit the already powerful.

Profit also tends to favor adaptation for the rich (private bunkers, gated communities, concierge medicine) over structural fixes that would help everyone. That means we end up with lots of individual coping and not nearly enough collective problem-solving.

Why Profit Exists (and How It Undermines Itself)

Let’s zoom out. Why does profit exist at all?

Inside a money-based economy, profit plays two main roles:

1. Motivation: It rewards people and organizations that make or do things others are willing to pay for.
2. Signal: It compresses complex information into “do more of this” or “do less of that” feedback.

Economists like Friedrich Hayek argued that prices and profit signals help millions of people coordinate without a central plan.

That argument isn’t wrong. It’s just incomplete.

Because when you make one metric — shareholder profit — the primary thing that matters, you recreate the failures of central planning in a new costume:

• Information bottlenecks: Executives only “see” what hits the balance sheet. Climate risk, unpaid care, trauma, social trust — they’re invisible until they explode.
• Perverted incentives: Just like factories faking Soviet production quotas, firms game KPIs and quarterly earnings — flooding the world with harmful products or addictive apps so the numbers go up, even if life gets worse.
• Power concentration: Wealth and corporate power accumulate, giving a small elite huge influence over law, media, and which futures are even thinkable.

Here’s the kicker: this system doesn’t even maximize long-term profit very well.

Evidence on shareholder primacy suggests that:

• Aggressive shareholder-value strategies cut wages and jobs
• They do not increase long-term productivity or sustainable growth

In other words, “maximize profit at all costs” often backfires — even on its own narrow terms.

Alternatives To Profit-Seeking Inside Our Current System

We don’t have to jump straight to a post-money society to fix these problems. There’s a wide middle ground: post-profit hybrids that keep useful parts of markets while putting human flourishing in charge.

1. Decommodify Essentials

Some things should not be run for profit:

• Healthcare
• Basic housing
• Primary education
• Core digital infrastructure
• Essential transport, water, energy

The idea of universal basic services is to guarantee everyone essential services — healthcare, education, housing, transport, internet — based on need, not ability to pay.

Outcomes:

• Fewer bankruptcies and health tragedies
• More stable lives and neighborhoods
• Higher baseline freedom to leave bad jobs or relationships

How to get there:

• Public and non-profit providers with strong democratic oversight
• Clear service guarantees; funding tied to outcomes, not revenue growth
• Rules that limit or remove profit extraction in these sectors

This doesn’t eliminate private options. It just shrinks the territory where profit can hold basic needs hostage.

2. Democratize Firms

A democratic economy doesn’t just show up at the ballot box. It shows up where we work.

Worker cooperatives and employee-owned firms:

• Often match or exceed the productivity of conventional firms
• Reduce within-firm wage inequality
• Keep more surplus in the community

Outcomes:

• More stable jobs, less “quarterly layoff roulette”
• Greater voice for workers in decisions that shape their lives
• Local wealth building instead of extractive ownership

How to get there:

• Legal support and financing for co-ops and employee buyouts
• “Public interest corporations” with baked-in social missions and multi-stakeholder boards
• Tax advantages for firms that share ownership and governance broadly

You still have profit, but it flows differently — and benefits more people.

3. Strengthen Commons and Open Knowledge

Not all production has to run through markets. Commons-based peer production — think Linux, Wikipedia, open-source software — shows that large groups can create complex systems driven by curiosity, reputation, and shared purpose rather than paychecks.

Outcomes:

• Faster, more flexible innovation where knowledge is shared
• Lower costs and more autonomy for users and nonprofits
• Less lock-in by giant proprietary vendors

How to get there:

• Public funding for open-source infrastructure and open science
• Licenses that keep key tools in the commons
• Institutions (like foundations and cooperatives) that steward these projects

In a commons-based economy, the default isn’t “how do we own this?” It’s “how do we share this while keeping it sustainable?”

4. Democratize Public Budgets and Planning

Instead of central committees or back-room budget deals, many cities are experimenting with participatory budgeting — “people’s budgets” where residents directly decide how to spend parts of public funds.

Evidence suggests participatory budgeting can:

• Increase inclusive decision-making and civic engagement
• Align spending more closely with community needs
• Build democratic skills and trust

Outcomes:

• Streets, parks, and services that reflect what people actually ask for
• Stronger sense of ownership and accountability
• A habit of collective problem-solving

How to get there:

• Regular, well-publicized public budget cycles at city, school, state, and national levels
• Inclusion of marginalized communities in design and voting
• Transparent tracking of funded projects

Zoom this up with citizen assemblies and sortition-based panels, and you start to get democratic planning without a politburo.

Building an Economy Driven by Purpose

Here’s the thing for me: I don’t believe we need money at all. I believe we live in a post-scarcity, post-labor world. I think we just haven’t collectively caught on and pivoted yet. Partly due to manufactured scarcity and work as oppression.

But it does raise a question:

What will drive economies and people in the absence of money and profit?

We don’t have a full-scale example yet. But we do have building blocks and mental models.

Motive Engines Stronger Than Profit

Research on Self-Determination Theory shows people do their best, most creative work when they experience:

• Autonomy
• Mastery
• Purpose

We already run huge parts of life on non-monetary motives (for better and worse):

• Parenting and care work
• Volunteerism and mutual aid
• Open-source software and citizen science
• Community-managed forests, fisheries, and irrigation systems (which Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom documented as stable and sustainable over centuries when designed with clear rules and shared governance).

Profit is not what makes people love, create, protect, grow, or do. More often, it is antagonistic toward these motives.

Moving Toward a Post-Profit World

We don’t need a perfect blueprint to achieve this dream. Just a direction to head in (preferably one built on real-world evidence). Here is a look at evidence-backed ways to shrink the focus of profit in our world. Ultimately, we can shift away from money altogether.

1. Shrink the Role of Money and Profit Step by Step

• Decommodify essentials (health, housing, education, core infrastructure).
• Cap returns and remove profit motives in harm-prone domains (prisons, basic meds, child care).
• Expand co-ops, commons, and public options that “compete” with extractive models by being better, not just cheaper.

2. Expand Non-Monetary Coordination

• Use digital tools for large-scale participatory planning and budgeting.
• Support time banks, mutual aid networks, and local exchange systems that build trust and resilience.
• Make shared metrics — health, happiness, ecological stability, time autonomy — public dashboards, instead of PR fluff.

3. Re-Train Our Own Instincts

• Personally and culturally practice valuing time, connection, and contribution over income and status.
• Normalize “enough” and a sense of gratitude instead of “always more.”
• Celebrate people who step off the profit-motive train and build community infrastructure.

Money and profit won’t disappear overnight. But as these pieces grow and come together, they will stop being the center of the story.

Why Even Elites Would Benefit

It may sound contradictory, but a profit-driven world hurts wealthy people as well. A post-profit world benefits the wealthy as much as everyone else. In some ways, they would benefit most.

For the ultra-rich, the current system offers:

• Endless pressure to keep numbers rising
• Constant legal, reputational, and political threats
• Suspicion of every relationship — “Would they still love me without the money?”
• A social environment where other people’s struggles are abstract

Research on wealth and empathy suggests that higher social class and a money-centric mindset can blunt compassion and social attunement, which undermines deep connection.

In a society where basics are guaranteed, work is more democratic, and status comes from contribution rather than accumulation, the wealthy would:

• Be less trapped by dynastic fear and image management
• Have more chances to build relationships not defined by power gaps
• Be free to pursue mastery, beauty, curiosity, and care without constant optimization

They’d get to be fully realized human beings. They would get to experience real contentment and happiness.

How to Build a Better World with One Question

Everything in this article boils down to one question you can carry into any policy debate, workplace meeting, or personal decision:

What does this metric serve — what kind of world does it build?

If the answer is “it serves profit, and the world it builds is more stressed, unequal, and lonely,” then we know it’s time to find a new KPI.

We don’t have to wait for a revolution. We can:

• Back policies that decommodify essentials and shrink the role of profit where it does predictable harm.
• Support co-ops, commons, participatory budgeting, and universal basic services where we live.
• Redesign our own lives around time, connection, and contribution instead of income alone.

In short, put people before profit.

Share this article with someone you love. Use it as a prompt for an honest conversation about what the systems that run our world are really for — and who they are really benefiting.

FAQ: Profit, Capitalism, and Building a People-First Economy

What do you mean by “profit doesn’t serve us”?

In theory, profit is supposed to reward useful work and signal where resources should go. In practice, it starts to distort everything around it. Especially when maximizing profit becomes the main goal.

A profit-first mindset turns medicine, food, housing, work, relationships, and even our freedoms into revenue streams instead of things that exist to help people. The result is higher stress, worse health, more inequality, and a sense that life is getting harder even as GDP and stock markets rise.

Is capitalism still the best economic system we have?

That depends what “best” means. Capitalism is good at coordinating lots of people without a central plan and sometimes rewarding a very narrow band of innovation. But capitalism at its core is profit-driven (specifically toward capitalists – the upper class).

This is causing:

• Exploitative healthcare and drug markets
• Housing treated as a financial asset instead of a human need
• Workplaces that cut jobs and wages without boosting people-first outcomes
• Rising inequality, declining trust, and lower life satisfaction

Capitalism no longer serves common people (if it ever did) — and we can do better.

Why does capitalism feel so broken right now?

Because many of the things we most depend on have been financialized or optimized for short-term profit:

• Medicine: Opioids aggressively marketed while lifesaving but low-profit research (like antibiotics) is neglected.
• Food: Ultra-processed foods dominate because they’re cheap to produce and highly profitable, even though they harm health.
• Housing: Investors and funds treating homes as speculative assets push prices and rents beyond what local wages can support.
• Work: Shareholder value leads to layoffs, gig work, and surveillance instead of stable, dignified jobs.

People feel this directly: higher bills, more precarity, and less control over their lives. The system feels broken because it serves profit instead of people. Which is exactly how capitalism is meant to function.

Does capitalism cause inequality and lower happiness?

Profit-first systems are strongly associated with inequality and lower well-being.

Patterns include:

• Economies that prioritize shareholder profits tend to shift income from workers to owners without growing the real “pie” much.
• High inequality erodes social trust, worsens health, and can even shape children’s brain development and mental health.
• People who prioritize money and possessions report lower life satisfaction on average.

Markets or business aren’t inherently bad. But when we center profit and accumulation as the main goal, happiness, community, and health often become collateral damage.

Why are housing and healthcare so expensive under capitalism?

Because both have become prime targets for profit extraction.

Housing:

• Global capital, REITs, and private equity treat homes as investment vehicles.
• They buy up properties, raise rents, and sometimes keep units empty as “safe assets.”
• Local wages can’t keep up with land and asset prices, pushing people into rent burdens and instability.

Healthcare:

• Pharmaceutical and healthcare firms are rewarded for volume, high prices, and chronic treatment — not for cures and long-term health.
• Low-profit but socially crucial areas (like new antibiotics) are underfunded.
• Marketing and lobbying shape policy and culture to protect revenue.

In both cases, the logic of “maximize returns” conflicts with making essentials affordable and accessible.

How can we fix capitalism without “going full socialism”?

A middle path keeps useful parts of markets but takes essentials and core infrastructure out of the profit game. That can look like:

• Decommodifying essentials: Run healthcare, basic housing, education, and core utilities as public, non-profit, or mission-locked services.
• Democratizing firms: Grow worker cooperatives, employee ownership, and multi-stakeholder corporate structures.
• Strengthening commons: Support open-source software, shared knowledge, community-managed resources, and public digital infrastructure.
• Democratizing budgets: Use tools like participatory budgeting and citizen assemblies to let people directly shape public spending.

Essentially, where necessities are concerned, we need to put human flourishing ahead of profit.

Is there a middle ground between capitalism and a post-profit world?

Yes. We’re already living in parts of it. A “post-profit hybrid” world looks like this:

• Markets still exist, but they’re bounded: some sectors are non-profit or heavily regulated, and harmful profit models (like private prisons) are phased out.
• Public, cooperative, and commons-based models coexist with private firms and often outperform them on stability and well-being.
• Democratic decision-making (participatory budgeting, citizen assemblies) guides public investment and planning instead of leaving everything to either markets or a tiny political elite.

How do both free markets and central planning fail — and what’s the alternative?

Pure free markets and pure central planning both run into three big problems:

1. Information bottlenecks
   • Central Planning: Central planners can’t know enough, fast enough.
   • Free Markets: Profit-driven executives only “see” what hits the balance sheet, ignoring things like climate risk, unpaid care, and trauma until they explode.
2. Perverted incentives
   • Central Planning: Planned economies produce fake numbers to hit quotas.
   • Free Markets: Corporations game quarterly earnings and KPIs, flooding the world with harmful products as long as the metrics “look good.”
3. Power concentration
   • Central Planning: One-party states concentrate power in political elites.
   • Free Markets: Profit systems concentrate wealth and corporate power, letting a small elite capture law, media, and policy.

The alternative is democratic, distributed, mixed: use markets, public planning, and commons together — anchored by democratic oversight and human-centered metrics (health, happiness, ecological stability, time autonomy).

What are realistic alternatives to pure free-market capitalism that actually work today?

Several already-existing models point the way:

• Universal basic services: Public or non-profit systems for healthcare, housing, transport, education, and internet, funded collectively and provided based on need.
• Worker cooperatives and employee ownership: Firms where workers share both ownership and governance—and often match or exceed conventional productivity with less inequality.
• Commons-based peer production: Open-source software, Wikipedia-style knowledge projects, and community-managed resources that run on shared purpose and collaboration.
• Participatory budgeting: Cities and communities where residents directly decide how to spend portions of public budgets.

These are actual models currently in use all over the world that foster a more people-first economy.

What comes after capitalism? What is a “post-profit” or “people-first” economy?

A people-first or post-profit economy would:

• Guarantee essential needs as rights, not products.
• Use democratic governance inside workplaces and over public budgets.
• Treat knowledge, infrastructure, and nature as commons to be stewarded, not assets to be strip-mined.
• Measure success in health, happiness, time freedom, ecological resilience, and social connection — not GDP and stock indices.

Are there real examples of commons-based or non-capitalist models?

Yes. Many of the building blocks already exist:

• Open-source ecosystems (software, tools, standards) that companies and individuals rely on daily.
• Community-managed resources like forests, fisheries, and irrigation systems sustainably governed using shared rules.
• Time banks, mutual aid networks, and local exchange systems that swap services and support without money being central.
• Public libraries, parks, transit, and cultural institutions that deliver huge value without profit incentives.

These show that another mode of living is possible — and can be expanded.

Why does everything feel like it serves profit instead of people?

Because it does. We’ve organized our institutions, laws, and cultural stories around a single metric: shareholder value and GDP growth.

That shows up as:

• Corporate charters and investor pressure that legally and culturally prioritize returns.
• Political systems heavily influenced by wealth and corporate lobbying.
• Social norms that equate success with income, status, and consumption.

When you design around profit, you predictably get systems that serve profit — even when politicians and brands talk about “purpose.” The deeper question is: What if we chose different metrics — and built systems to serve those instead?

How would a post-profit, people-first world benefit even the rich?

The ultra-rich are also trapped by profit-driven systems:

• They live under constant pressure to keep numbers rising.
• They face legal and reputational risk as the public reacts to harm caused by profit-seeking.
• They struggle to trust relationships, wondering who would stick around without the money.
• A money-centric mindset can blunt empathy and limit deep connection.

In a world where basics are guaranteed, inequality is lower, and status comes from contribution instead of accumulation, wealthy people would have more freedom to pursue curiosity, mastery, beauty, and care — without constantly optimizing everything. They’d get to be full humans again.

If profit isn’t the main motivator, what actually drives people and economies?

Research and everyday experience suggest people do their best work when they have:

• Autonomy – a sense of choice and control
• Mastery – chances to get better at meaningful skills
• Purpose – a reason beyond “make the numbers go up”

We already organize huge chunks of life without profit: parenting, friendship, art, volunteering, open-source projects, community care.

A post-profit system would intentionally build around these motivators.

What can I personally do to help move beyond a profit-driven society?

You don’t need a revolution to start. Three main directions:

1. Shrink the role of profit where you can
   • Support policies and candidates that decommodify essentials and rein in harmful profit models.
   • Choose co-ops, public options, and mission-driven organizations when possible.
2. Expand non-monetary coordination
   • Join or support mutual aid, time banks, local projects, and open-source or commons-based efforts.
   • Participate in local budget processes, councils, or community planning when they exist.
3. Retrain your own instincts
   • Shift your personal metrics from “more money” to time, connection, and contribution.
   • Normalize gratitude and a sense of “enough” in your own life.
   • Celebrate people who build community rather than just wealth.

Keeping asking this question everywhere: What does this metric serve — and what kind of world does it build? If the answer is “profit,” you know the KPI needs to be shifted to something else.