But the market still does not reflect what people want?
Most people don't have malaria, they don't care about malaria, and they will only care if it affects them.
It is not that capitalism is evil regarding that, but why a person living in Japan for example will care if someone half planet away that have zero interaction with him will die?
Now suppose that farmers that make your food are plagued with some disease... This would make your food expensive, and this would make you want to heal them, so they make your food cheap again.
What happens today, is that the news about the world are faster than the economic interactions, you feel pity for people in blasted places, but you don't need them, most people don't need them, so most people won't care for them. Now tell me, if someone had asked for donations to do more research on the cancer that killed Steve Jobs, I am sure lots of people would help, not because they like Steve Jobs or because it is noble to do so, but because they like what he did.
Face it, even collectivist humans are still thinking about themselves, humans either think about themselves only (the ultimate individualism) or about their immediate community.
Few people care about a person with no genetic relation to you, that live half planet away, and have no economic interaction with you, either as buyer or seller.
The market does excel at giving people what they want. That's not a feature. It's a bug.
"If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse." - Henry Ford (possibly apocryphal, but probably true)
Markets pander. They do not elevate. I do not want what I want. I want things that are so much better than what I want that I have not imagined them yet.
Think about when you see a movie or read a book. Isn't it boring if someone's already told you the plot? You want to be surprised, and you're usually disappointed if things turned out the way you expected them to.
Of course, markets do have virtues. They excel at solving multi-dimensional resource allocation problems in the short term, and they excel at taking new things and delivering them to customers. Big science bureaucracies and such are good at discovering and inventing, but they suck at shipping. The "pirates of Silicon Valley" invented little, but they shipped.
Markets excel at giving people what they want in the long term, too. For example, the Henry Ford you quoted built a car company that became one of the most successful in the world. There is nothing about markets that prevent entrepreneurs from selling innovative products and it happens all the time. Entrepreneurs creating new things and then selling them is so common that on Hacker News, people like Steve Blank and Eric Ries have made names for themselves encouraging entrepreneurs to listen to the market even just a little bit.
A market that decides what I want is the dream of every communist dictator.
Sometimes invention is the mother of necessity. That doesn't mean it's a bug. It means there are innovative and resourceful people who realize what people want before they ask for it. Capitalism gives those people a better chance to succeed than any other economic system.
It also has room for the guy trying to treat baldness.
P.S. Is there evidence that Henry Ford actually said that? Because he definitely didn't invent the automobile; Karl Benz did.
Why the average chinese for example, would care about malaria? He has other problems, the malaria mosquito does not do well in China, but other diseases do, they will care about their own diseases for example.
Actually, the Chinese have a large malaria control program. They get a lot of cases in southern China, especially along the border with Myanmar.
So do the (South) Koreans. They get a lot of malaria cases along the demilitarized zone, which has basically been left to return to a state of nature. This leads to stagnant water, which allows mosquitoes to breed.
But, of course, they spend a lot more money on malaria control in their own countries than in, say, Equatorial Guinea. Also, China and Korea are lucky in that the prevailing form of malaria is Plasmodium vivax -- which actually used to be called "benign tertian malaria." In terms of death rate, it's about as benign as the flu. Which is to say, not benign at all -- until you compare it to the other form of malaria.
The markets reflect what the money wants. But money isn't distributed equally. So the markets really just reflect what people with money want... and that's not a malaria vaccine.
But the market still does not reflect what people want?
Most people don't have malaria, they don't care about malaria, and they will only care if it affects them.
It is not that capitalism is evil regarding that, but why a person living in Japan for example will care if someone half planet away that have zero interaction with him will die?
Now suppose that farmers that make your food are plagued with some disease... This would make your food expensive, and this would make you want to heal them, so they make your food cheap again.
What happens today, is that the news about the world are faster than the economic interactions, you feel pity for people in blasted places, but you don't need them, most people don't need them, so most people won't care for them. Now tell me, if someone had asked for donations to do more research on the cancer that killed Steve Jobs, I am sure lots of people would help, not because they like Steve Jobs or because it is noble to do so, but because they like what he did.
Face it, even collectivist humans are still thinking about themselves, humans either think about themselves only (the ultimate individualism) or about their immediate community.
Few people care about a person with no genetic relation to you, that live half planet away, and have no economic interaction with you, either as buyer or seller.