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Evidently, Capitalism needs to be hacked. _For Profit_ doesn't cut it and is buggy. The side-effects are the waste due to consumerism, unsustainability and pot

Evidently, Capitalism needs to be hacked. _For Profit_ doesn't cut it and is buggy. The side-effects are the waste due to consumerism, unsustainability and potential application crash (climate & earth). The variables in the model needs to be tweaked so a new system evolves.

harryh 11y ago
http://bit.ly/1MBTFzC http://bit.ly/1MBTFzC
- rjruxhchd 11y ago
  That trend started long before our society's current pillaging by the rich and their big businesses. The global elimination of poverty has more to do with grassroots technological and industrial development than it does with concentrating as much capital in as few hands as possible.
- wavefunction 11y ago
  It's not very clever to just post a picture, as if that makes a very compelling argument for whatever you presumably are trying to make. It's nice that less people are living off the equivalent of $1.25 a day, but according to this: http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-sta... 50% of the world's population live off the equivalent of $2.50 a day. I guess we can cheer that 30% of the world's inhabitants have doubled their income and call it a day.
  - harryh 11y ago
    Who says we're calling it a day? The rate at which capitalism is pulling people out of poverty is accelerating not stopping.
    - fjrjcjjcdh 11y ago
      >capitalism is pulling people out of poverty Citation needed. You have to control for other factors before you can say that.
      - wcummings 11y ago
        http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/rwss/docs/2010/fullreport.pdf http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/rwss/docs/2010/fullreport.pdf
        iamsohungry 11y ago
        > http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/rwss/docs/2010/fullreport.pdf http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/rwss/docs/2010/fullreport.pdf Ugh. Don't post things that you haven't read as if they proved your point. You'll find that the word "capitalism" is used 3 times in that PDF. Let's grab those paragraphs, shall we? "Privatization has been a major part of Mongolia’s transition to capitalism. Its move to a market economy has been accompanied by increases in poverty and income inequality. More than 10 years after it began its transition, Mongolia remains one of the poorest countries in the world." This being an example cutout within the following quote: "After reviewing the distributional impact of privatization activities involving utilities in a wide range of developing economies, principally in Africa and Latin America, Bayliss (2002) concluded that privatization had demonstrably harmed the poor, either through loss of employment and income, or through exclusion from, or reduced access to, basic services, as the result of private firms’ principal concern with profits, prices and costs. At the same time, weak governance and regulatory capacity in many developing countries led to poor control of market abuses by private utility companies." The next two usages of the word capitalism is in the bibliography: "de Soto, Hernando (2000). The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. New York: Basic Books." "Robbins, Richard H. (1999). Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, chap. 5 (“The problem of population growth”), pp. 147-178." I'm not sure how the second citation feels about capitalism, but the first one certainly isn't positive. So no, your link doesn't say much about capitalism, and what it does say is that capitalism is not pulling people out of poverty; on the contrary, it sounds like that document thinks capitalism is causing some poverty.
    - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
      Doubling income is not the same as improving quality of life. Capitalism suffers from a plague number of social ailments, including epidemic levels of stress and mental illness, that aren't present in "poor" cultures. Besides, terraforming our planet to make it less, not more, inhabitable, hardly counts as a big win.
      - harryh 11y ago
        > Doubling income is not the same as improving quality of life. LOL. Easy for you to say rich man. Go tell that to someone in Mozambique or Haiti or Nepal who is using their newfound wealth to finally be able to feed their kids a healthy diet. Stress and mental illness. Please.
        lifeformed 11y ago
        Overall, things are getting better for sure, but it's going in a trajectory that will settle into a shitty local minimum where poor people survive but are stuck with low quality of life. Getting people out of extreme poverty in the world is high priority, and we've been doing a pretty good job at that, as your graph shows. But there's a big rut after that that we need to work on removing too.
        harryh 11y ago
        > it's going in a trajectory that will settle into a shitty local minimum It's very hard to find evidence to support this point of view. You might hypothesize some future change in trajectory sure. But looking at the current trajectory? Pretty hard.
        lifeformed 11y ago
        Based on the rut that most poor people in developed countries are stuck in.
        alextgordon 11y ago
        And many subsistence fishermen were able to feed their kids a healthy diet, until commercial fishing came along. Capitalism is pulling people out of poverty, but it is also destroying natural ecosystems. Is the reduction in poverty sustainable, or will it come back when the resources are gone?
    - iamsohungry 11y ago
      Why are you crediting this to capitalism? Having worked in a nonprofit that works on obtaining foreign aid, it's my opinion that these improvements have occurred despite capitalism due to the hard work of people like me, not because of capitalism.
      - harryh 11y ago
        Even assuming that the money your spending is being put to good use (and there is at least some evidence that makes people skeptical), where do you think the money you're obtaining comes from?
        iamsohungry 11y ago
        > Even assuming that the money your spending is being put to good use (and there is at least some evidence that makes people skeptical) This is a legitimate criticism of NGOs, but it's also one of the ways in which capitalism is counterproductive to reducing poverty. Many of the cases in which aid spending is misused result from corporate interests determining where the money is spent instead of the people who need aid. An ongoing example of this is the milk lobby pushing for milk in food drops in areas where nearly everyone is genetically lactose-intolerant, or water aid going to buy Coca Cola's bottled water instead of building sustainable water utilities and infrastructure. One of the reasons I left the NGO I worked at was that I felt they didn't do a good job of decoupling the aid programs they supported from corporate interests. > where do you think the money you're obtaining comes from? Governments, who in turn get it from taxpayers. The exact system that free market capitalists rail against. And if capitalist corporations didn't evade taxes so deftly, maybe I'd have obtained more. Certainly democratic-socialist governments give more aid per-capita than more capitalistic ones. Instead of asking leading questions as if they proved your point, why don't you try actually making an argument? Yes, much of the revenue I've obtained is indirectly generated within a capitalist system. But if you want to argue that capitalism produces more aid than the alternatives would, that's ridiculous.
  - RyanZAG 11y ago
    Woah! You're coming from the right direction I guess, but.. Yes, we can very much cheer for people living off $1.25 to be living off $2.50 now. The numbers might look stupid if you're living in luxury, but it quite literally means going to bed with a full stomach instead of going to bed hungry. It's a far bigger change for them and their lives than for your income to be increased by 10x (assuming $100k to $1m). If you're all about increasing the well-being of the most people possible on the planet, then it is something to cheer for. Having that increase to $5 might be the biggest humanitarian change for the future that we could cheer for too.
- myth_buster 11y ago
  I would be curious to know what is the philosophical definition for _absolute poverty_. Are we doing the best we can for the billions, definitely not. Are we doing the least we could, arguably not.
- sankho 11y ago
  It doesn't seem like this chart takes inflation of the $ into account either, making it irrelevant over time. $1.25 was a lot more valuable even 30 years ago than it is today.
  - harryh 11y ago
    It does, in fact, take inflation into account. As well as purchasing power parity (PPP) across countries.
    - sankho 11y ago
      Yeah I see "PPP" in the picture but nowhere is there an explanation of how they accounted and adjusted for inflation on a yearly basis. A link to the actual study would be a lot more informative. At any rate it doesn't address the moral concerns brought up in the article.
      - harryh 11y ago
        http://www.vox.com/2015/8/13/9145467/extreme-poverty-global-poverty http://www.vox.com/2015/8/13/9145467/extreme-poverty-global-...
        sankho 11y ago
        no mention of inflation in your link, only PPP. The article author also goes on to state that this isn't enough / as meaningful as you're making it out to be... "And making sure everyone's making at least $1.25 a day isn't the end of the fight either. The world's median income is still only $3 to $4 a day. By comparison, the poverty line in the US for a family of four is $16.61 per person per day. Once under-$1.25-a-day poverty is eradicated, the world needs to set about eradicating under-$15-a-day poverty, which will be a substantially harder task."
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
gtpasqual 11y ago
No Capitalism's been 'hacked' and that's why you have consumerism and unsustainability. The free-market is the most effective way to distribute resources in an environment, that's it. All problems come from central planning.
- thescriptkiddie 11y ago
  I honestly can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.
  - knowaveragejoe 11y ago
    He's most likely not. There are honestly people that believe this, rather than a more nuanced view.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    That free markets ensure a Pareto optimal allocation of resources is the first fundamental theorem of welfare economics. It does not imply any normative statement on whether the distribution is "just", as that is very difficult to qualify.
    - thescriptkiddie 11y ago
      There's quite a bit of difference between pareto optimal and "most effective". In many situations, pareto optimality is actually among the worst of all possible outcomes (see the prisoner's dilemma, also local maxima). If you had used the former term in your comment it would have been more clear. As it is, it reads like a deliberate attempt to invoke poe's law. EDIT: Oh wait, you're not the same person.
  - gtpasqual 11y ago
    I'm not
  - kamaal 11y ago
    Its not sarcasm. I come from a formerly socialist economy(India). Central planning is a scheme to create bullshit jobs which don't have to exist at the first place. This distract funds and human resources from other competing higher priority work. Every thing is state planned starting from detergent to air planes. All services are mediocre and everything is in a state of stagnation and slow decay.
xj9 11y ago
We are very experimental at the moment, but my startup[1] is doing something along those lines: we a trying to create a toolkit for building cooperative organizations. [1]: https://infinite.ai https://infinite.ai
mindcrime 11y ago
Not every firm in a capitalist / free market system is "for profit". There are already a wide variety of non-profit corporations, collectives and cooperatives, and a relatively recent trend is the rise of the "benefit corporation". All of these represent ways that operate within the context of our existing economic system, without necessarily having to obsess about "profit first".
- walshemj 11y ago
  coops are run to make a profit - its just distributed more equitably amongst the members.
  - mindcrime 11y ago
    Coops can earn a profit, but that's not their primary purpose, at least not the kind of coops I'm thinking of. The coops I'm familiar with exist to provide a service first and foremost (utility coops like electricity and phone service come to mind), and making a profit is secondary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative
    - walshemj 11y ago
      Having worked at a well know worker coop in the UK I do know what one is. And consumer coops where the ones that came historically after worker coops - originally to provide a retail outlet for worker coops goods. but don't they normally pay a dividend in the USA? And you are not going to run a high capital coop like a telco or electricity company with out making a decent excess of income over expenditure to service you capital needs
      - mindcrime 11y ago
        Sure, and I'm not here to argue the fine details of how coops are organized. My point is only that there are elements of a market economy that differ from the traditional "profits first, maximize shareholder value, evil corporation". Cooperatives are just one example of a somewhat different model. Actual "non profit" corporations, and "public benefit corporations" are also examples of that.

harryh 11y ago

http://bit.ly/1MBTFzC http://bit.ly/1MBTFzC

rjruxhchd 11y ago
That trend started long before our society's current pillaging by the rich and their big businesses. The global elimination of poverty has more to do with grassroots technological and industrial development than it does with concentrating as much capital in as few hands as possible.
wavefunction 11y ago
It's not very clever to just post a picture, as if that makes a very compelling argument for whatever you presumably are trying to make. It's nice that less people are living off the equivalent of $1.25 a day, but according to this: http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-sta... 50% of the world's population live off the equivalent of $2.50 a day. I guess we can cheer that 30% of the world's inhabitants have doubled their income and call it a day.
- harryh 11y ago
  Who says we're calling it a day? The rate at which capitalism is pulling people out of poverty is accelerating not stopping.
  - fjrjcjjcdh 11y ago
    >capitalism is pulling people out of poverty Citation needed. You have to control for other factors before you can say that.
    - wcummings 11y ago
      http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/rwss/docs/2010/fullreport.pdf http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/rwss/docs/2010/fullreport.pdf
      - iamsohungry 11y ago
        > http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/rwss/docs/2010/fullreport.pdf http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/rwss/docs/2010/fullreport.pdf Ugh. Don't post things that you haven't read as if they proved your point. You'll find that the word "capitalism" is used 3 times in that PDF. Let's grab those paragraphs, shall we? "Privatization has been a major part of Mongolia’s transition to capitalism. Its move to a market economy has been accompanied by increases in poverty and income inequality. More than 10 years after it began its transition, Mongolia remains one of the poorest countries in the world." This being an example cutout within the following quote: "After reviewing the distributional impact of privatization activities involving utilities in a wide range of developing economies, principally in Africa and Latin America, Bayliss (2002) concluded that privatization had demonstrably harmed the poor, either through loss of employment and income, or through exclusion from, or reduced access to, basic services, as the result of private firms’ principal concern with profits, prices and costs. At the same time, weak governance and regulatory capacity in many developing countries led to poor control of market abuses by private utility companies." The next two usages of the word capitalism is in the bibliography: "de Soto, Hernando (2000). The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. New York: Basic Books." "Robbins, Richard H. (1999). Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, chap. 5 (“The problem of population growth”), pp. 147-178." I'm not sure how the second citation feels about capitalism, but the first one certainly isn't positive. So no, your link doesn't say much about capitalism, and what it does say is that capitalism is not pulling people out of poverty; on the contrary, it sounds like that document thinks capitalism is causing some poverty.
  - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
    Doubling income is not the same as improving quality of life. Capitalism suffers from a plague number of social ailments, including epidemic levels of stress and mental illness, that aren't present in "poor" cultures. Besides, terraforming our planet to make it less, not more, inhabitable, hardly counts as a big win.
    - harryh 11y ago
      > Doubling income is not the same as improving quality of life. LOL. Easy for you to say rich man. Go tell that to someone in Mozambique or Haiti or Nepal who is using their newfound wealth to finally be able to feed their kids a healthy diet. Stress and mental illness. Please.
      - lifeformed 11y ago
        Overall, things are getting better for sure, but it's going in a trajectory that will settle into a shitty local minimum where poor people survive but are stuck with low quality of life. Getting people out of extreme poverty in the world is high priority, and we've been doing a pretty good job at that, as your graph shows. But there's a big rut after that that we need to work on removing too.
        harryh 11y ago
        > it's going in a trajectory that will settle into a shitty local minimum It's very hard to find evidence to support this point of view. You might hypothesize some future change in trajectory sure. But looking at the current trajectory? Pretty hard.
        lifeformed 11y ago
        Based on the rut that most poor people in developed countries are stuck in.
      - alextgordon 11y ago
        And many subsistence fishermen were able to feed their kids a healthy diet, until commercial fishing came along. Capitalism is pulling people out of poverty, but it is also destroying natural ecosystems. Is the reduction in poverty sustainable, or will it come back when the resources are gone?
  - iamsohungry 11y ago
    Why are you crediting this to capitalism? Having worked in a nonprofit that works on obtaining foreign aid, it's my opinion that these improvements have occurred despite capitalism due to the hard work of people like me, not because of capitalism.
    - harryh 11y ago
      Even assuming that the money your spending is being put to good use (and there is at least some evidence that makes people skeptical), where do you think the money you're obtaining comes from?
      - iamsohungry 11y ago
        > Even assuming that the money your spending is being put to good use (and there is at least some evidence that makes people skeptical) This is a legitimate criticism of NGOs, but it's also one of the ways in which capitalism is counterproductive to reducing poverty. Many of the cases in which aid spending is misused result from corporate interests determining where the money is spent instead of the people who need aid. An ongoing example of this is the milk lobby pushing for milk in food drops in areas where nearly everyone is genetically lactose-intolerant, or water aid going to buy Coca Cola's bottled water instead of building sustainable water utilities and infrastructure. One of the reasons I left the NGO I worked at was that I felt they didn't do a good job of decoupling the aid programs they supported from corporate interests. > where do you think the money you're obtaining comes from? Governments, who in turn get it from taxpayers. The exact system that free market capitalists rail against. And if capitalist corporations didn't evade taxes so deftly, maybe I'd have obtained more. Certainly democratic-socialist governments give more aid per-capita than more capitalistic ones. Instead of asking leading questions as if they proved your point, why don't you try actually making an argument? Yes, much of the revenue I've obtained is indirectly generated within a capitalist system. But if you want to argue that capitalism produces more aid than the alternatives would, that's ridiculous.
- RyanZAG 11y ago
  Woah! You're coming from the right direction I guess, but.. Yes, we can very much cheer for people living off $1.25 to be living off $2.50 now. The numbers might look stupid if you're living in luxury, but it quite literally means going to bed with a full stomach instead of going to bed hungry. It's a far bigger change for them and their lives than for your income to be increased by 10x (assuming $100k to $1m). If you're all about increasing the well-being of the most people possible on the planet, then it is something to cheer for. Having that increase to $5 might be the biggest humanitarian change for the future that we could cheer for too.
myth_buster 11y ago
I would be curious to know what is the philosophical definition for _absolute poverty_. Are we doing the best we can for the billions, definitely not. Are we doing the least we could, arguably not.
sankho 11y ago
It doesn't seem like this chart takes inflation of the $ into account either, making it irrelevant over time. $1.25 was a lot more valuable even 30 years ago than it is today.
- harryh 11y ago
  It does, in fact, take inflation into account. As well as purchasing power parity (PPP) across countries.
  - sankho 11y ago
    Yeah I see "PPP" in the picture but nowhere is there an explanation of how they accounted and adjusted for inflation on a yearly basis. A link to the actual study would be a lot more informative. At any rate it doesn't address the moral concerns brought up in the article.
    - harryh 11y ago
      http://www.vox.com/2015/8/13/9145467/extreme-poverty-global-poverty http://www.vox.com/2015/8/13/9145467/extreme-poverty-global-...
      - sankho 11y ago
        no mention of inflation in your link, only PPP. The article author also goes on to state that this isn't enough / as meaningful as you're making it out to be... "And making sure everyone's making at least $1.25 a day isn't the end of the fight either. The world's median income is still only $3 to $4 a day. By comparison, the poverty line in the US for a family of four is $16.61 per person per day. Once under-$1.25-a-day poverty is eradicated, the world needs to set about eradicating under-$15-a-day poverty, which will be a substantially harder task."
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]

gtpasqual 11y ago

No Capitalism's been 'hacked' and that's why you have consumerism and unsustainability. The free-market is the most effective way to distribute resources in an environment, that's it. All problems come from central planning.

thescriptkiddie 11y ago
I honestly can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.
- knowaveragejoe 11y ago
  He's most likely not. There are honestly people that believe this, rather than a more nuanced view.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  That free markets ensure a Pareto optimal allocation of resources is the first fundamental theorem of welfare economics. It does not imply any normative statement on whether the distribution is "just", as that is very difficult to qualify.
  - thescriptkiddie 11y ago
    There's quite a bit of difference between pareto optimal and "most effective". In many situations, pareto optimality is actually among the worst of all possible outcomes (see the prisoner's dilemma, also local maxima). If you had used the former term in your comment it would have been more clear. As it is, it reads like a deliberate attempt to invoke poe's law. EDIT: Oh wait, you're not the same person.
- gtpasqual 11y ago
  I'm not
- kamaal 11y ago
  Its not sarcasm. I come from a formerly socialist economy(India). Central planning is a scheme to create bullshit jobs which don't have to exist at the first place. This distract funds and human resources from other competing higher priority work. Every thing is state planned starting from detergent to air planes. All services are mediocre and everything is in a state of stagnation and slow decay.

xj9 11y ago

We are very experimental at the moment, but my startup[1] is doing something along those lines: we a trying to create a toolkit for building cooperative organizations. [1]: https://infinite.ai https://infinite.ai

mindcrime 11y ago

Not every firm in a capitalist / free market system is "for profit". There are already a wide variety of non-profit corporations, collectives and cooperatives, and a relatively recent trend is the rise of the "benefit corporation". All of these represent ways that operate within the context of our existing economic system, without necessarily having to obsess about "profit first".

walshemj 11y ago
coops are run to make a profit - its just distributed more equitably amongst the members.
- mindcrime 11y ago
  Coops can earn a profit, but that's not their primary purpose, at least not the kind of coops I'm thinking of. The coops I'm familiar with exist to provide a service first and foremost (utility coops like electricity and phone service come to mind), and making a profit is secondary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative
  - walshemj 11y ago
    Having worked at a well know worker coop in the UK I do know what one is. And consumer coops where the ones that came historically after worker coops - originally to provide a retail outlet for worker coops goods. but don't they normally pay a dividend in the USA? And you are not going to run a high capital coop like a telco or electricity company with out making a decent excess of income over expenditure to service you capital needs
    - mindcrime 11y ago
      Sure, and I'm not here to argue the fine details of how coops are organized. My point is only that there are elements of a market economy that differ from the traditional "profits first, maximize shareholder value, evil corporation". Cooperatives are just one example of a somewhat different model. Actual "non profit" corporations, and "public benefit corporations" are also examples of that.