The quality floor of "reliable" work produced solely by economic self-interest is also quite vulnerable to misaligned incentives.
If you don't provide the right balance of economic incentives for quality, the rational economic answer becomes "quiet quitting", and quality plummets. And maintaining that balance of incentives is also someone's job, which needs the right economic incentives to be done well, so it's turtles all the way down (or up).
In practice, it's an unstable, patchwork combination of care and economic incentives that keeps real-life institutions in working order.
If you don't provide the right balance of economic incentives for quality, the rational economic answer becomes "quiet quitting", and quality plummets. And maintaining that balance of incentives is also someone's job, which needs the right economic incentives to be done well, so it's turtles all the way down (or up).
In practice, it's an unstable, patchwork combination of care and economic incentives that keeps real-life institutions in working order.