comment: >
  
  We currently live in the most peaceful, most healthy, most productive, time in human history. We have the lowest crime rates, best literacy, best access to food, best access to information, and most of that progress has happened since the invention of capitalism, in capitalist countries.
context: So, the time to develop the product would be N*2. That is a halving of the speed of development.
  
  This isn't actually how development time usually scales, but even if it were, the problem is why are any of these people developing anything? Are they being paid? By whom? And why? What are the peoples motivations? It's very easy to imagine 50 highly motivated people working faster than 100 unmotivated people. You can come up with all manner of critique of capitalism if you want, but we can at least describe the motivation as those people are competing for profits. You talk about "halving the speed of development", but halving only makes sense if you're comparing the system to something else. But what are you comparing it to and how do you account for those hypothetical workers' productivity? >
  
  I don't think I understand your example.
  If you have 2 companies with 50 people each, wouldn't you end up with twice the amount after the extended time? There really is no slowdown - perhaps a lack in flexibility, but not in creation of goods.
  Unless, of course, you're talking about purely scientific developments - which really can't be scaled like that to begin with... >
  
  It is one of the most nonsensical CMVs I have seen so far...it even fails to consider capitalism. There are many economic models with competition that are not capitalistic. >
  
  You're missing a huge part of the equation: what happens to the commodities after they are produced, and how much of the commodity should be produced?
  An essential concept of economics (and human behavior) is that more is better than less, but that everything exhibits diminishing marginal utility. For a concrete example, it means that two pieces of cake is always better than one piece of cake, but the second piece of cake will be less valuable than the first piece of cake (ie. once you start getting full you don't want cake as much). However, each piece of cake costs the same, so even if the first piece of cake is worth less than the cost to purchase it, eventually the value of the Nth piece of cake will be less than the cost of a cake and so you should stop buying cake.
  In your example you've implicitly assumed that 1 commodity every N hours is preferable to 1 commodity every N*2 hours, but because of diminishing marginal utility once you factor in costs this may not actually be true. It could be that the optimal amount of commodity is actually 1 every N*2 hours, in which case the remaining 50 people should actually be working on a different commodity.
  A second concern is that if all 100 people work on making the commodity, it will actually be in their best interest to not work as hard as they could, because by working less there will be less of the commodity on the market, which means they can sell each commodity for more, sacrificing only a little money for leisure time. This is an example of monopolistic behavior.
  Capitalism (with competition) addresses these concerns by making sure the amount of the commodity that gets produced matches the optimal amount of the commodity that people actually want and are willing to pay for. >
  
  When people say markets are efficient, they mean they are efficient at solving the economic calculation problem. That is, markets efficiently can allocate the proper amount of  resources to produce a proper amount of supply and set fair prices. 
  In an artificial example where the number of companies, experts, and so on are artificially fixed, no system can ever be maximally efficient, except by serendipity. 
  In the real world, a market economy may respond by incentivizing the production of new experts or by one of the companies losing and being absorbed by the other. 
  "But, wait", you might say, "that still doesn't solve the issue of sequestered parallel development, because obviously competition exists in real market economies. Isn't that just wasted development?" Yes and no. There is waste in redundancy, but there is also value in it. Competition to meet demand is what allows for markets to be efficient at the economic calculation problem. Open markets solve this issue through a complex network of actors addressing their own local needs and abilities to satisfy others needs. The alternative, a centralized monolithic agent that tries to efficiently guess the needs to distributed actors and meet them in a fair way is incredibly hard, leading to other inefficiencies, and prone to abuse. Hence why we generally don't like monopolies. 
  The reality is that no system is without waste. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Free markets are not perfect, no system is, but they are efficient. >
  
  Yours is the best response I've seen so far, but there are a few bits I'd like to add.
  OP is focused on "efficiency" in the sense of a cost:value ratio for research and manufacturing. While the idea of doubling your efficiency by doubling your workforce is exaggerated, the core idea isn't wrong. Monopolies have the ability to be far more efficient (in that one, limited sense) than dispersed efforts.
  But monopolies are almost universally recognized as inefficient from a societal standpoint. The cost savings they receive from their market power are offset by the deadweight loss from their demands for higher profits. And their ability to command those higher profits provides a disincentive to innovate. Why be more efficient if you can profit regardless? 
  And if a company has no reason to be more efficient, chances are it won't be. The effort and expense required to build that efficiency is unnecessary, which makes the process of becoming more efficient paradoxically inefficient. >
  
  One thing "the market" does is do a good job at setting incentives.   If company A is better than company B at developing nestling, it's generally given positive feedback which helps enable it. 
  OK, so let's use your scenario.  A and B are both trying to develop X mk1.  For whatever reason,  A wins,  develops X a few months before B.
  Consumers notice, wow, X is cool!  I will pay more because X is better.
  A has increased cash flow, poaches some R&D employees from B.  A has 60, B has 40.
  But A fucked up.  Ooopsie.  Hired prima Donna self important prices who fucked up. B, now streamlined, beats A in X mk2, gets market share buff...
  The thing about "the invisible hand", (wiki it plz) is that it automagically selects for efficiency.  And I mean efficiency in the economic sense.  Better/best stuff for less inputs.
  I'm no capitalism absolutist.  There's a whole raft of problems that aren't addressed well or there are powerful interests trying to make them worse.   A market is efficient when it is competitive.  Lots of dickishness  seeks anticompetitive stuff.
  Your example is kinda over simplified BTW.  What if it's 10 companies, with 10 employees each, but they're all pursuing different "innovations".  The market selects for the "best" innovation, no matter what it is. 
  What if it's 100 companies, all doing different things?  People need say 5 products from the 100 companies but different people prefer different mixes....
  What if it's 1000 companies, people consume 50 different mixes, etc.
  A competitive market delivers the best in a complex system. >
  
  
  That is a halving of the speed of development.
  
  No, it's setting the pace of development. You're assuming that it's taking place via another means - it's not.
  You're making the argument about two timber trucks passing each other on the highway. Why are they taking logs one way when logs are coming from there already? You see that as inefficiency - when reality already deemed it to be efficient. 
  Are the logs identical? Probably not. Probably different types of trees. Do they need to be dried or not? Are they being used for industrial means or commercial? Maybe residential? It it being cut in a particular way for a particular use-case?
  Your argument relies on having a concrete 'end' that is being measured to judge 'efficiency' but you're ignoring the entire means that actually make up that efficiency in the first place. >
  
  I'm not assuming anything. I'm telling you how it currently is. Like, the facts. 
  Our current structures divide the talent into competing pools were information is siloed and not allowed to transfer. So, development ideas take longer to come by.
  > You're making the argument about two timber trucks passing each other on the highway. Why are they taking logs one way when logs are coming from there already? You see that as inefficiency - 
  That's not the same thing at all. So you can take it there, but that only makes me think that you missed the idea I was floating.
  > Your argument relies on having a concrete 'end' that is being measured to judge 'efficiency'  
  Again, no.  But, in capitalism, we do have an end goal anyway; that's the commodity that we bring to the market. >
  
  
  Our current structures divide the talent into competing pools were information is siloed and not allowed to transfer. So, development ideas take longer to come by.
  
  This is a non-sequitur.
  Your conclusion does not follow from the premises. >
  
  Compared to a hypothetical perfect system yes.  But it's much more efficient than feudalism, mercantilism, socialism, corporatism, or any other system we've tried so far. >
  
  
  or any other system we've tried so far.
  
  Citation needed.  There are plenty of Social Democracies that have state run programs that outperform "purely" capitalist ones.
  An easy example would be the US health care system, which costs more per person for the worse overall levels of care than pretty much every other developed economy.  The one exception at this current time would probably be the UK, which is suffering from years of Tory leadership pushing austerity measures which have substantially affected their public health system. >
  
  Those social democracies are all Capitalist, making one thing (healthcare provision) government run doesn't make an economy non-Capitalist. >
  
  It's not just healthcare - there are nationally run airline companies, nationally run Oil companies, nationally run public transit, and so on.  All of these tend to give better service at cheaper prices than their US comparisons.
  Many of these things the average person would call "socialist."  So we have to define terms here - are you using these phrases with their actual meanings, or are you using loaded language to refer to systems that have been branded certain terms without actually being them?
  If we're using the actual definitions of these words, then most that you listed are forms of capitalism, and have many real world examples.  Using them to say "these failed" but "capitalism is still going" is non-sensical, as they currently exist (in varying degrees) within our current capitalist society.  
  Feudalism, meanwhile, isn't really an economic system, but a social one - and it failed for social reasons.  
  Socialism tends to be a boogeyman, but there have rarely been real-world examples of them, and thus saying it's inferior because it's been tried before is not really a solid argument.
  Your argument sounds more like a half-thought, oft repeated adage rather than something true.  Plus, you acknowledge that publicly run services don't make an economy not-Capitalist, so why can't we impose strict restrictions on capitalism to ensure it doesn't run away from us, like it currently is in countries like the US? >
  
  If you remove choice of labor from people and make it into a single party central planning operation then the bureaucracy makes it more wasteful and fewer routes get explored >
  
  So, you're agreeing with my assertion, is that it? But you're saying that something that you can think of to "replace it", would be worse? Am I reading your right? >
  
  Are you asserting that in a hypothetical perfect world we could make significant efficiency gains? Sure I’d agree to that! Do I think that one’s freedom of choice in who they work for supersedes a hypothetical efficiency gain? Yes >
  
  This would be true if capitalism actually encouraged competition of the type you describe. But it doesn't. What happens in practice is that one of the two companies has some advantage: it has some increased market capitalization, better workers, patents, etc. For example, in your scenario, imagine that the distribution of workers is not exactly 50/50, but that one company has 60 and the other has 40. This lets the company with 60 workers bring products to market more quickly, allowing them to outcompete the company with 40 workers. Eventually, this allows the 60-worker company to hire away the workers of the 40-worker company. The resulting process tends towards a monopoly in which all capital resources are concentrated in a single entity: the one company that has all the workers. So efficiency problems from competition of the type you describe are only transitory: they go away when one company "wins" and manages to dominate the market. >
  
  
  This would be true if capitalism actually encouraged competition of the type you describe. But it doesn't. What happens in practice is that one of the two companies has some advantage: it has some increased market capitalization, better workers, patents, etc.
  
  Historically, that's not true.  In a capitalist society, without regulation, those two companies would team up to control the market, inflating profits so that each rakes in more money at a lower quality than if there were regulations in place.  We have seen this take place dozens of times over. >
  
  In your example there is no difference between one firm or two.  One firm = 2 outputs after N2 hrs.  Two firms = 2 outputs after N2 hrs.  The difference is that both firms are working to drive down N.  By competing, both are incentivized by the competition.  But this is just looking at the supply side.
  Without the competition you get monopoly pricing which pushes prices up and reduces demand.  So you have fewer people who are paying more for the same thing, so more people who would like the thing, but are priced out.  In my book, more people getting more stuff is more efficient. 
  Additionally, with two firms, there are two products.  These fir,s are going to try to make a better product to win customers.  The resulting innovation improves the product for everyone. >
  
  Your example assumes that the development of product N is an inevitable process that occurs directly in proportion to the number of people working on it. It also treats the development of N as an isolated process, ignoring the fact that reality is full of complex tradeoffs between priorities. 
  If only one company is developing N, what's the hurry? Its 100 workers can take their time. They might even decide that product M (the earlier version of N) is doing its job just fine as it is since no other business will offer an alternative. So, the world may never get N.
  With two companies, each has an incentive to invent new, better products. Each group of 50 workers knows that if they take too long, they've wasted their time. They work harder for longer to keep ahead of the other company. If both develop N, competition between the two encourages them to find new ways of producing N faster or cheaper to seize market share from the other, which benefits consumers of N. >
  
  That reminds me the quote as 'democracy is a bad system, only all others are even worse.
  Without referring to your example, there are several problems. One is that in an advanced economy nobody has an idea what is efficient and what is not. Should you use copper for cabels? Metal? Gold? Some of these are more rare, some of these have better conductivity, some are harder to work with. Should you plant 100 apple trees and 50 pear trees or something completely different? Where should you spend your valuable time in order to efficiently produce what the 'society wants'?
  How do you figure out what the society wants? You need price system. Which means reasonably free markets. See Mises & problem of socialist computation.
  Suppose you have the 1 company C which produces widget X. And now suppose you have a great idea how to produce widget X more efficiently. But maybe the people deciding about how to produce widget X are not very open to changing the technology. Maybe they fear losing a job. Maybe they are just stupid. Or maybe your idea is stupid.
  When there's competition, you can start competing against company C. And maybe your idea was great. And maybe it wasn't. But the incentives are aligned in a way, that more often than not if you really had a great idea, it would be tried. Without competition, you get corruption, brotherhoods, winks... 
  Yes, the competition does have some costs. But it does have enormous benefits. >
  
  Wait what?
  If only 100 people on the planet can make a type of burger. And there is 50 fast foods employing exactly two. Why couldn't they have both burger makers make burgers at the same time? Why would they have to take turns? Unless I completely missunderstood your example. >
  
  Ok.
  What are the alternatives? >
  
  Capitalism is not meant to be efficient in the sense of managing the status quo. That's what communism tries to address. But you'll only reach a local optimum that way. Capitalism works more like evolution. It's sacrificing efficiency for a better long term result. >
  
  I dont think you understand that managing 50 people is more easy and efficient than managing a hundred. Besides there isnt a case like this in the real world. A certain job wouldnt be sped up buy just adding more workforce. It would either remain stagnant or slow ot down. A certain number of people are only needed for a certain job. And there are a hell lot more qualified people than 50 >
  
  In your example each company will produce 1 commodity every 2N hours for a total production of 1 commodity every hour which is the maximum possible rate in your commodity.  Your hypothetical example of Capitalism is a 100% efficient.  It is literally impossible to be any faster or more efficient according to your description of your example. >
  
  I wasn't talking about production, to be honest. But, sure, that's a factor. I guess it all filters in. From design to distribution. But, this is more about "competition" in a market for the same type of commodity. 
  I mean, take a current example; chat-gpt have done a thing. And they did that with N humans that were capable. And yeah, Google haven't done that yet. They also have N humans that could have been capable, had the resources and knowledge been shared.
  This is the essence of open source and how quick it can be to develop things.
  Now, google, given the completion, have to respond to Chat-gpt. 
  However, as humans, as a species, we already have chat-gpt, and if we want to develop that more, then we can through more capable humans at it. 
  As it is, google will have to try and play "catch up", which is just wasted human hours. Given that we, as a species, already have the solution. >
  
  In your example though all 100 people would work at google so we’d never of got chatgpt. Actually they would have worked at ask Jeeves so we’d of never got google or chatgpt. Actually they wouldn’t of worked on anything of the sort and just worked to make pages of bookmarks better as those were the precursor to search engines. And on and on we could go and say those 100 people would likely just be farmers >
  
  
  So, with 100 people working on it it would take N hours.
  
  But, now we have only 50 people working on it any any one time for one company.
  So, the time to develop the product would be N*2. That is a halving of the speed of development.
  But they would be producing 200. It takes 2x longer for 50 people to make 100 things, but there's 2 companies so they would be producing 200 things in 2N. 
  Also this is obviously very simplistic, the two companies probably won't be making the exact same product, and free market capitalism would allow people to choose to buy the best product (price or quality) out of the two companies. >
  
  
  But, now we have only 50 people working on it any any one time for one company.
  So, the time to develop the product would be N*2
  
  There are still 100 people working on the products. Being split among two companies doesn't mean half aren't working. >
  
  You are wrong because you do not seem to understand efficiencies and incentives.
  In your example, you are correct that if there are 100 people that know how to make a thing and they get split into two groups of 50 that those two groups would be slower than the one group of 100.  
  But let us compare those two groups of 50 to the alternate one group of 100.  
  Your one group has no incentive to make their processes any better.  Without profit there is no incentive to improve the process.  Ever.  Does this group of 100 have any incentive to train more people?  No.  Does this group of 100 have any incentive to speed up the process so that they only need 95 people?  No.  Does this group of 100 have any incentive to develop cost savings measures so that they can make the same amount and quality of product at a lower price?  No.
  Now compared to the two groups of 50, each one of those groups had HUGE incentives to train more workers, find process improvements, save money, etc.
  If we could start hypothetical two timelines and had your one group of 100 and the other timeline had the two groups of 50, what classical economists would say is that the one group would make the first product faster than either of the smaller groups.  But those two smaller groups would constantly looking for efficiencies and implementing them.  Basically after each initial unit the two smaller groups would incrementally be making improvements that bring down costs, increase speed, etc.
  So, if the market is for a limited number of very expensive options, like heavy lift rockets in 1965, then it would make sense for all of that expertise to be in one location, make the 12 rockets necessary.  And be done.
  But if the market is for 14 medium lift rockets and 4 heavy lift rockets per year for the next 15 years, then having multiple companies will drive down costs, and spur innovation. >
  
  I'm not sure how to put it sensitively, but this seems like it started by looking for an excuse to dislike capitalism and then made something with numbers to act as that excuse.  
  There are efficiencies of scale, but mostly, when two different factories are making stuff with 50 people each then their combined output is likely to be roughly the same as one factory with 100 people.
  If 100 trucks are driving goods from place A to place B, is it really going to make a huge difference in how much stuff gets moved from place A to place B if those 100 trucks are divided into two fleets fo 50 instead of being a single fleet of 100? >
  
  What about capitalist companies that contribute to open source software for other people (and companies) to contribute to and benefit from? For example, WordPress.
  Edit: Added WordPress example. >
  
  The analogy I’d use to counter this is it takes one woman 9 months to give birth to one child so that means with 9 women we can get 1 child in 1 month. Things don’t always scale linearly and there is no guarantee doubling the size of a team halves the time just like reducing the team doubles the time
  Second point is competition breeds innovation. If you have a central authority saying we need a search engine, here’s the top 100 people you don’t necessarily get google. You might end up with ask Jeeves and stuck there because now instead of many people finding alternatives you get people just trying to make the original marginally better. Then again what if the central authority doesn’t even value a search engine, then you end up with nothing.
  Thirdly competition allows alignment of supply and demand while providing feedback. If a company builds something people don’t want then it’s product doesn’t sell and they change. This might not occur with a central authority because that feedback doesn’t have the same impact and can simply be ignored. Companies have to compete and improve or else potentially decline. The degree in which completion should be promoted or reduced is certainly a point to argue but to say without completion things would be better is a bit far fetched. 
  Lastly your whole premise assumes everyone has perfect knowledge of everything under some system other then capitalism. How do you know who the 100 people are that can build this thing? In capitalism we compete but under a central authority half of those could be assigned to be farmers. Maybe the central authority doesn’t think this thing is worthwhile, maybe it hasn’t been invented because the person who would have invented instead worked in a coal mine. Maybe it was invented but improvements on it were all minor instead of someone else innovating it at some point. In capitalism everyone is a decision maker in the market while under central authority there is one or few. On top of all of this political entrenchment can basically stop innovation and inventions whereas in capitalism barriers are much lower (although rent seeking should still be mitigated through laws/regulations) >
  
  This is true on paper, but without proper motivations other systems are more inefficient. In a perfect system those 50 employees are competing directly to be better than the other 50, so overall instead of an overall product of 100, you get something more because a has to outdo b and vice versa because if not you become K-mart, Sears, etc. >
  
  As compared to what? Any other real-life system? Or a hypothetical system that only exists in your mind? >
  
  The number of companies is not a limited resource. We can have 1 company or 1000 companies (with each one occupying 10% of each person's time. You can do whatever is the most optimal thing for you at any given moment. If you come up with a more efficient way to produce a good or service than an existing company, you can choose to compete against them. If you can't come up with one, you can choose to work on something else. The goal of capitalism is to maximize the total amount of goods and services created for a given amount of natural resources. So if there is something really simple (e.g., making soda) we might end up with just a few companies that dominate the market (e.g., Coke, Pepsi). But if something is complicated and new innovations keep being invented, we end up with millions of companies that come and go frequently (e.g,. tech startups).
  In fact, your view explains why free market capitalism is significantly more efficient than any alternative system. You've limited the total number of companies to two in your example. You've centrally planned the economy instead of giving people the freedom to work where they find the most optimal opportunity. This decision created significantly more inefficiency/bureaucracy. You're describing a system that is the polar opposite of free market capitalism. >
  
  Capitalism encourages efficient profit making, which in a market economy usually implies meeting some human need or desire. But it doesn't meet the need or desire efficiently, it only needs to be most efficient at making money in some activity around this. Actual economic efficiency would be the most sustainable and efficient use of resources, both material resources as well as time and effort, in meeting human need.
  The two are often in direct contradiction. Consider built-in obsolence, for example. Consumer goods nowadays last a relatively short time compared to the past or the rare well made design, despite advances in material science and design meaning we could make them last much longer than in the past. This is deliberate - it is far more profitable for everybody to have to buy goods more frequently rather than building things to last. In this way, we encourage massive inefficiences and squander precious limited resources in the short-term pursuit of profit. It's very efficient for profit making and grossly inefficient in actual terms of resource efficiency.
  Capitalist market economies are full of such contradictions. The profit motive destroys efficiency by incentivizing behaviour which is lauded as business genius now, but that future generations will consider to be grave crimes against the species. >
  
  One of the significant gaps in your logic is that companies generally do not create the exact same product.
  There are differences that arise from different systems and the creativity of the people involved.
  These differences compete on the market. The better ideas win and get picked up by competitors and the cycle repeats.
  This becomes a form of product Darwinism yielding better and better products.
  To test my point, name best-in-class products that were the result of no competition. >
  
  As opposed to what?  Everything as a monopoly where there is no competition?   If that's the case there is no incentive to innovate or even deliver on time.   The Soviet Union developed some fairly sophisticated computers for the period, at least on par with what was developed in the west, at least for a time.  But because there was no market mechanism to drive innovation or deliver to clients, the market remained comparatively small and the technology stagnated.   Why would a monopoly ever want to innovate?  What is the market going to do?  NOT buy the product they want?  They'll just have to sit and wait.  And that's how it was for top-down command economies.  
  The other issue is that there is no fixed pool of people who can build any given thing.  And when a thing is too costly in time, resources, or money, usually someone else comes up with a cheaper or better, or faster alternative to compete.   
  Sure, we can say "in theory" if factory X has Y people and produces A product at B price in T time, but hypotheticals don't exist.   They are just thought experiments.   
  It's actually kind of mind-boggling how efficient the market really is.   It's said that Louis XIV, the "Sun King" had something like 600 kitchen staffers.  Cooks, suppliers, butchers, pastry chefs and so on.  Each day, every day, they would have to prepare a wide range of foods for the King and his court because they never knew what the King might like at any particular meal.   Spectacular inefficiency (though I suspect the lower servants, kitchen staff and royal dogs ate pretty well).   Today, a person on a modest budget in any modern country, ( US, UK, France, Singapore, Germany, Italy, Israel, Japan, etc. ) for example, has more than 600 food options at most times of the day in most cities and towns.   That's kind of miraculous.  
  To bring it a little closer to home, I just bought bananas and I currently have 3 inches of snow on the ground.  I've never been to a banana plantation, I've never met a banana farmer, I probably live at least 1000 miles from the nearest banana tree.   But I bought some at a reasonable price and I am not rich. >
  
  Innovation is sped up by competition. 
  Human incentive is necessary, it’s part of our caveman brains. >
  
  Capitalism is not only inefficient, but immoral. A system's ultimate goal should be to provide for those living under it, not drive people to further misery. Alas, i'm not an economist, and if anyone here knows a viable alternative, i'd love to hear it.