link to original reddit post by /u/mrpenguin_86
I was discussing how much I disliked my undergrad university with a socialist friend, and I had a bit of a revelation applicable to so many topics. Our undergrad continuously reported record enrollment and record % of people graduating with degrees. This was success to my friend. On the other hand, it's well known that our undergrad university pumped out graduates with little chance of find a job. Hell, our school of engineering lost accreditation for a while due to the horrible quality of the education and labs. I did my BS and an MS in Physics there and got to teach and know the professors, and they all agreed that the quality of students was going downhill. The year after I graduated, I visited, and my old advisor was telling me how the students going into the intro physics courses were having trouble with, of all things, properly adding fractions and doing the quadratic equation. IN COLLEGE. The administration said this was okay and basically told the department to stop failing students and holding them back.
Anyhow, that's a whole 'nother story, but in my discussion with my friend, I started to realize that we have 2 very different concepts of success that can be applied to many things, including the economy. My socialist friend felt that the optimal outcome is for everyone to have a degree, regardless of what that degree apparently meant given that our undergrad university was actually blacklisted from many regional companies because of how bad the engineers were. I on the other hand felt that success was creating grads that could contribute the most to the economy and improve the quality of life of all citizens. My concept, to him, I imagine, would be a failure because many people would not be able to achieve such a degree that had tougher requirements to obtain.
Obviously, the quality of life and "equality gap" between grads in my perfect world and his perfect world would be very different. I think we all know which world we'd want to live in though.
Translate this to economics. Socialists seem to think that, as we all hear, equality in results is optimal. However, the world has seen economic inequality grow, but we've also seen levels of progress the world has never seen before. We communicate instantly to people around the world with handheld supercomputers. Profit motives have led to the development of medical therapies for treatments that were absolute death sentences a couple decades ago. Billionaires have been minted making electric vehicles a reality that was seen as science fiction only a couple decades ago. This has all been deemed a failure by socialists because these developments were not distributed equally from the beginning, and some people profited from it. We all, I assume, understand how big of a success this is because we all care more about overall outcomes and not about ensuring everyone is equally impoverished.
Tl;Dr: Socialists care about equality of poverty; capitalists believe in maximizing benefits to society.