@performing-personhood I heard the quote from Justin Roczniak, an engineer who also makes some infrequent youtube videos and slightly more frequent podcasts. I'll try my best to remember more of the explanation; I think it's something like:
1) In order for a modern capitalist business to be "successful" it must grow infinitely. Not only that, but the growth needs to be faster and faster year over year.
2) A company whose profit comes only from selling a product is limited by (a) the cost to produce the product vs the price it's sold at, and (b) the number of products that can be physically bought by consumers; the demand for a physical product is finite.
3) Any private investor is going to invest their money into whatever company can promise the greatest return on the investment - this money from investors does not depend on the actual values of products being made and sold, just what the investors think these values will be in the future.
4) Railroads make their profits from charging people to travel or ship things. But doing this incurs costs of maintaining the tracks & trains with steel & fuel, paying employees to run the trains and manage the tracks, building new rail lines or improving old ones to ship more goods.
5) A company like a railroad is thus seen as a bad investment compared to a company which promises vast growth, quickly and consistently, with low costs to start and run e. g. an app developer - the cost to make an app is low, it requires no money to maintain once it's made, and the theoretical market is every person who owns a phone.
6) The management of the railroad would very much like to get the sort of investment that the app developer is getting, and so desires to cut all costs - if a company is all income and no expenses, the return on investment would be infinite! Every investor would pour their money in!
7) If there's no track, trains, or employees, how would the railroad make a profit? Purely from the investors! Management would make promises about what the business could be in the future, and point to the massive amount of money they're making, to show future investors that it's a good business to put their money into!
Now all this is just theoretical and it quickly runs into problems where actual goods need to get moved - oil & coal need to get to power plants, grain needs to get to mills, chlorine to wastewater plants etc. or else people die. But railroad management for decades has been cutting costs wherever possible and pushing business away to trucking when they can.
To these managers & owners, it's better to be a company that spends $1 to make $100, rather than a company that spends $10,000 to make $11,000. You're getting a much higher return on investment in the first case, which makes you more enticing to private investors! Never mind that the second case made 10 times as much money, it's only grown by 10% - and how can you ensure that the growth is going to get faster and faster each year with such a small margin of income vs expenses?
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