I've had some discussions over on the environmnental thread where I argued for reducing the extent to which our society revolves around money and economics, but didn't qualify it particularly well (it may have sounded to some like I was arguing for abolishing capitalism, which is a common agenda among some environmental circles).

I do think that in moderation, capitalism is a very good thing. But the problem at the moment is that most policymakers tend to consider only the economic perspective on issues, and ignore all other perspectives. For example:

• Developers building mass housing in the South East using supply and demand economics
  
• Greenfield sites and flood plains preferred over brownfield sites because it maximises short term profit
  
• Public transport companies providing minimum service for maximum profit
  
• Deliberately building appliances with a limited shelf-life to make people keep shelling out, maximising profit, consuming a lot of excess resources
  
• Councils reluctant to install energy saving streetlights until it will provide short term economic gain
  
• Pleasurable things are considered unnecessary, work is considered necessary
  

What I'm thinking is that we need to see factors other than economics, including social and environmental factors, being assigned value to a much greater extent than they are nowadays. Even if money is "most important" it doesn't mean other factors should be ignored. The problem with relying upon free markets to bring this about is that, ultimately, they won't. They will continue to do whatever is most profitable. Thus, we probably need some kind of government incentivising for them to start changing emphasis away from being focused only on the one consideration.