The fundamental concept behind Financial Selection is simple to grasp. The majority of technological and scientific progress will only take place when somebody can profit from it.

In developed nations, governments usually cannot hope to compete with corporations. Entertainment and marketing companies have more sway over the masses than politics could hope to achieve. Just because Robatusin says in commercials that their brand name is the "bless you" for coughs people have taken up saying it. And when it comes to taking action on any issue or bill, lack of public interest, lack of funding, and technicalities within government processes can easily postpone any progress for years.

The US government's National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was, for the majority of the Space Age, the leader. Today, wavering public interest and the high costs of warfare have reduced NASA, financially, to the point where they considered scrapping ongoing missions, including Voyager, the first man-made object to leave the solar system. The International Space Station is falling into disrepair, and the Space Shuttle Project is at the end of it's lifecycle. The shuttle is being replaced by a technologically inferior craft, and the long-term future of the spacestation is still vague. The European space agency (a union of several nations) and the Chinese space agency (with the communist government ensuring a constant, high budget) are starting to make progress, but in the end it will still be the corporations that gain supremacy.

With the recent and continued support of the Xprize Foundation (http://www.xprizefoundation.com/), we will hopefully see more companies shifting development to the currently-infantile Space market. The Spirit of St. Louis flight (the first trans-Atlantic flight) was undertaken in a similar contest. This same drive for riches is arguably the underlying reason for the majority of the great exploration and colonization booms since the adoption of agriculture.

Relatively poor nations, such as Brazil and China, are becoming increasingly wealthy and developed as the modern world has clued in one of the most valuable resources any nation can offer: labour. Many frown upon cheap labour, and exclaim that corporations should pay equal wages or leave the locals be. Yes, the workers do deserve better, I have no disagreements with that, but think of the long-term benefits this short-term "extortion". Instead of earning nothing at all (leaving the economy stagnant), these workers are bringing money into their nations. With money to be spent, it can promote the further business opportunities (to put it simply, would you bother going into business if literally nobody had money to buy what you were selling?), and potentially can bring in the wealth to improve public infrastructure and help develop the nation.

Companies are generally in business to earn profit, not to help anyone else. Fast food one example of a negative drawback to financial selection. There is more money to be made with greasy, nutrition-free food than with a healthy alternative. Healthy fastfood locations don't tend to last very long against their fatty counterparts, and is a contributing factor to the increasing obescity rate. If it were more profitable to cure disease instead of providing routine, temporary relief, I'm willing to bet that there would be a lot less health issues plaguing our society.

When looking to the future, one must never forget the strongest influence on society: profit. There are very few problems in our world that are beyond our ability to repair, it is just that people have yet to figure out how to effectively make a buck from doing it.