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Nearly 1 billion people have been taken out of extreme poverty in 20 years - Economist Magazine. Harnessing the energy of people across the planet by letting t

by vixen99 11y ago

Nearly 1 billion people have been taken out of extreme poverty in 20 years - Economist Magazine. Harnessing the energy of people across the planet by letting them trade with each other has so clearly been a disaster for everyone, has it? Essentially, isn't this capitalism with all its fault lines? One way or another it can be got to work for everyone's advantage.

JDDunn9 11y ago
A fair number of those lifted out of poverty were in China. Haiti is still the poorest country in the western hemisphere, despite having capitalism forced on them. A black-and-white view of the world misses a lot. Economies wouldn't function without public utilities, roads, militaries, etc.
- patrickaljord 11y ago
  Haiti is more of a crony capitalism as it's one of the most corrupted country http://www.heritage.org/index/country/haiti http://www.heritage.org/index/country/haiti
  - JDDunn9 11y ago
    Corruption is highly correlated with poverty. If you play the "no true Scotsman" fallacy with capitalism, where only the least corrupt countries are capitalistic, then by definition they will be wealthier as well.
    - patrickaljord 11y ago
      The USSR was capitalist too, it's just that the government held all of it. You have various kinds of capitalistic models, there is no "true capitalism" so I'm not claiming that all. You have mixed economies like France, Germany or the US where capital is shared between the private sector and the public one, then you have more free market oriented capitalism where capital flows more freely such as Switzerland or Singapour or Hong Kong where public sector holds much less capital. Note that mixed economies also have a decent amount of free market depending on the country. Crony capitalism is when most of the capital is held by the government and its cronies almost exclusively, this is probably one of the worst kinds of capitalism second only maybe to the Soviet model (and yes, they all have elements of cronyism but mixed and free market have much less). tl;dr: the freer the market the better capitalism works. Just have a look at the top freer economies here, they're also the wealthiest http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking
creshal 11y ago
The article isn't lamenting capitalism, it's lamenting that we're leaving it behind and have no idea what to do next. > Nearly 1 billion people have been taken out of extreme poverty in 20 years But it has been done without generating the sort of full-time blue collar employment that is implied behind all sorts of economic policies around the globe. China has gone from feudalism to post-industrial robotization in one generation, skipping most the wealth-building industrialization phase Western Europe and North America went through in the last century. The global creed is "you're not worth something without work", yet we are, for all purposes, running out of work. The computer revolution is optimizing away all its menial jobs already – just how much have trends like virtualization, clouds, infrastructure orchestration and so on reduced the demand for warm bodies to throw at hardware issues in the last few years? – while education systems still haven't finished ramping up the creation of more and more menial labourers. The earlier industrial revolutions have, quite soon, created more jobs than they destroyed, but this does not seem to happen any more. We've reached the point where we have, globally, more people of working age than we can possibly need to satisfy all global needs, and this trend is not going to reverse. And the problem is: We have no idea what to do about it. The left is blabbing "muh robots" and "muh basic income", but nobody has a consistent, practicable theory of what a post-full-employment society (which is something entirely different from a post-employment-at-all society) could look like. We're still going to need menial labour, blue collar work, white collar… but not enough. What do we do with all the excess population?
- nixusg 11y ago
  Lower birth rates? Short term economic pain of a graying population for a long term gain.
  - creshal 11y ago
    How does that help long-term? Let's say we, somehow, reduce the world's population to one billion. Great, so we only have one one seventh the workers to keep busy… but also only one seventh the market size. We're back to square one: Still the same unemployment rate, even if the total amount of unemployed is smaller.
  - 11y ago
1stop 11y ago
I think you're missing the point. If I could summarise: Capitalism generates capital. Yay for us, we now have lots of capital. But once you've generated all the capital, and maximised all the profits to the point of driving surplus value to 0. What then? * Also a major nitpick, most of that billion were brought out of poverty in China in the 1950s at the peak of Maoism/Communism... so you're point is kind ironic, no? The majority of the remainder were also in China during DengXiao ping driven state run capitalism or "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics"... So even if you weren't missing the point, the point you are making is still very moot.
- patrickaljord 11y ago
  > But once you've generated all the capital, and maximised all the profits to the point of driving surplus value to 0. What then? You're assuming you will be able to keep this capital forever. History demonstrates that most of even the richest families don't stay such after 3 or 4 generations. Ask any Family Office managing finances for HNW investors and they'll give you examples. * Decreasing marginal utility of wealth. * Difficulty investing as wealth increases. Capital accumulation lowers rates, incentivizing individuals to spend (h/t Reisman) * Empathy and philanthropy (one can't just ignore this, it's human action all the same). * The calculation problem builds in inefficiencies as organizations grow (h/t Peter Klein). Intergenerational differences in ability and goals and the squandering of inheritances. Entrepreneurship and innovation. Punctuated equilibrium (h/t Schumpeter).
  - 1stop 11y ago
    That doesn't actually matter to the point at hand. My point was we've got all the surplus value there is to be had. The fact that we'll probably squander that too, or it will decrease in value, only strengthens the questions... so what do we do after that?
    - patrickaljord 11y ago
      After what exactly? People will keep exchanging goods and services voluntarily in a free market for a long time. That's like worrying about what we'll do to deal with over-population on Mars. Let's focus on trying to get there first?
aspec 11y ago
> Harnessing the energy of people across the planet by letting them trade with each other has so clearly been a disaster for everyone, has it? Yes. Mining and drilling have obliterated the natural resources of hundreds of millions of people around the world. That's why oil spillage in Nigeria is called an environmental disaster. > Essentially, isn't this capitalism with all its fault lines? One way or another it can be got to work for everyone's advantage. Not when capital is turned into a commodity that has necessarily less value, which are then still traded on the market as securities with no regulation. Then you end up with scenarios in which political intervention is the only method for preventing the entire global economy from collapsing. That's already happened once, which is evidence that this article's fairly milque-toast thesis is correct.
- OJFord 11y ago
  Why would we not have mined and drilled without capitalism? Indeed, there are present day countries serving as examples. Unless I've misunderstood your point?
- adventured 11y ago
  What does Capitalism have to do with your example? Capital has always and will always be a traded good. Nothing about that can ever change. Unless you plan to return humanity to the most basic of existence, living day to day, scrounging, trying not to starve without reserves. No regulation? Please point me to the industrial economy without financial regulations on any major specific thing. What happened with the global financial meltdown was very obviously not due to lack of regulation. It was caused by the Fed encouraging reckless behavior by intentionally inflating asset bubbles as an attempt to accelerate recovery from the 2000/2001 recessionary economy. Hint: they're doing the exact same thing all over again right now, they're doing it on purpose and have been for over half a decade, and they're openly admitting it.
EliRivers 11y ago
You're equating "capitalism" with "exactly what we have now". They're not the same. Capitalism is a small subset of what we have now. It's quite possible, for example, to have free market socialism; everyone trading with everyone else isn't exclusive to capitalism.
- vlehto 11y ago
  What portion of companies should be cooperatives of public for economy to be free market socialism?
eevilspock 11y ago
You take it as a given that capitalism was the savior. What if The Enlightenment, mathematics and science, egalitarian laws and democracy were actually greater contributors to lifting humans out of poverty? All the greatest advancements in law, mathematics and science don't appear to be profit driven, while exploitation of people has always been driven by profit. And even if capitalism did deserve much of the credit, that doesn't mean it shouldn't be criticized or that we should stop looking for better. Feudalism may have lifted more humans out of poverty than any other system that came before it by leaps and bounds. It's a good thing we didn't decide to stop there. Communism, oligarchy and dictatorships (the first really being a special case of the latter two) are supremely harmful and stupid. I wish people would stop using them as straw men to prove that capitalism is great.
- simonh 11y ago
  I don't think of Capitalism as being a political agenda or agency in that way. I think of it more as a law of nature. You can't say that Capitalism deserves credit for anything, or saves anyone any more than you can say that gravity or Newtons laws of motion deserve credit for anything. In this account, political ideologies or principles that attempt to replace or supersede citalism end up just reorganising it. So communism doesn't get rid of capitalism at all, it just harnesses it to the party in the form of state capitalism. Looking at it this way, you're quite right that The Enlightenment, science, egalitarianism and democracy deserve the credit because they are choices we make. They are motivating and organisational forces we have control over and so can be credited with achievements. When an Engineer builds a bridge we celebrate the skill of the engineer and the educational and organizational forces that made the project possible, not the laws of physics. In this way of thinking, there is no such thing as an end to capitalism. Anyone talking about the future in that way is simply asking the wrong questions. They can't see the wood for the trees.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    If you use the word "capitalism" to refer to some set of actual or proposed "laws of nature" (presumably, about the operation of economies) you aren't using the word to mean either what the critics that coined the term of the modern proponents of "capitalism", or basically anybody else talking about it mean by the term, which has always referred to an economic system, that is, a set of high-level policy covers about how the economy should be organized and governed. So, on this regard, you are literally not speaking the same language as any body else when it comes to that issue.

by vixen99 11y ago

JDDunn9 11y ago

A fair number of those lifted out of poverty were in China. Haiti is still the poorest country in the western hemisphere, despite having capitalism forced on them. A black-and-white view of the world misses a lot. Economies wouldn't function without public utilities, roads, militaries, etc.

patrickaljord 11y ago
Haiti is more of a crony capitalism as it's one of the most corrupted country http://www.heritage.org/index/country/haiti http://www.heritage.org/index/country/haiti
- JDDunn9 11y ago
  Corruption is highly correlated with poverty. If you play the "no true Scotsman" fallacy with capitalism, where only the least corrupt countries are capitalistic, then by definition they will be wealthier as well.
  - patrickaljord 11y ago
    The USSR was capitalist too, it's just that the government held all of it. You have various kinds of capitalistic models, there is no "true capitalism" so I'm not claiming that all. You have mixed economies like France, Germany or the US where capital is shared between the private sector and the public one, then you have more free market oriented capitalism where capital flows more freely such as Switzerland or Singapour or Hong Kong where public sector holds much less capital. Note that mixed economies also have a decent amount of free market depending on the country. Crony capitalism is when most of the capital is held by the government and its cronies almost exclusively, this is probably one of the worst kinds of capitalism second only maybe to the Soviet model (and yes, they all have elements of cronyism but mixed and free market have much less). tl;dr: the freer the market the better capitalism works. Just have a look at the top freer economies here, they're also the wealthiest http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking

creshal 11y ago

The article isn't lamenting capitalism, it's lamenting that we're leaving it behind and have no idea what to do next. > Nearly 1 billion people have been taken out of extreme poverty in 20 years But it has been done without generating the sort of full-time blue collar employment that is implied behind all sorts of economic policies around the globe. China has gone from feudalism to post-industrial robotization in one generation, skipping most the wealth-building industrialization phase Western Europe and North America went through in the last century. The global creed is "you're not worth something without work", yet we are, for all purposes, running out of work. The computer revolution is optimizing away all its menial jobs already – just how much have trends like virtualization, clouds, infrastructure orchestration and so on reduced the demand for warm bodies to throw at hardware issues in the last few years? – while education systems still haven't finished ramping up the creation of more and more menial labourers. The earlier industrial revolutions have, quite soon, created more jobs than they destroyed, but this does not seem to happen any more. We've reached the point where we have, globally, more people of working age than we can possibly need to satisfy all global needs, and this trend is not going to reverse. And the problem is: We have no idea what to do about it. The left is blabbing "muh robots" and "muh basic income", but nobody has a consistent, practicable theory of what a post-full-employment society (which is something entirely different from a post-employment-at-all society) could look like. We're still going to need menial labour, blue collar work, white collar… but not enough. What do we do with all the excess population?

nixusg 11y ago
Lower birth rates? Short term economic pain of a graying population for a long term gain.
- creshal 11y ago
  How does that help long-term? Let's say we, somehow, reduce the world's population to one billion. Great, so we only have one one seventh the workers to keep busy… but also only one seventh the market size. We're back to square one: Still the same unemployment rate, even if the total amount of unemployed is smaller.
- 11y ago

1stop 11y ago

I think you're missing the point. If I could summarise: Capitalism generates capital. Yay for us, we now have lots of capital. But once you've generated all the capital, and maximised all the profits to the point of driving surplus value to 0. What then? * Also a major nitpick, most of that billion were brought out of poverty in China in the 1950s at the peak of Maoism/Communism... so you're point is kind ironic, no? The majority of the remainder were also in China during DengXiao ping driven state run capitalism or "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics"... So even if you weren't missing the point, the point you are making is still very moot.

patrickaljord 11y ago
> But once you've generated all the capital, and maximised all the profits to the point of driving surplus value to 0. What then? You're assuming you will be able to keep this capital forever. History demonstrates that most of even the richest families don't stay such after 3 or 4 generations. Ask any Family Office managing finances for HNW investors and they'll give you examples. * Decreasing marginal utility of wealth. * Difficulty investing as wealth increases. Capital accumulation lowers rates, incentivizing individuals to spend (h/t Reisman) * Empathy and philanthropy (one can't just ignore this, it's human action all the same). * The calculation problem builds in inefficiencies as organizations grow (h/t Peter Klein). Intergenerational differences in ability and goals and the squandering of inheritances. Entrepreneurship and innovation. Punctuated equilibrium (h/t Schumpeter).
- 1stop 11y ago
  That doesn't actually matter to the point at hand. My point was we've got all the surplus value there is to be had. The fact that we'll probably squander that too, or it will decrease in value, only strengthens the questions... so what do we do after that?
  - patrickaljord 11y ago
    After what exactly? People will keep exchanging goods and services voluntarily in a free market for a long time. That's like worrying about what we'll do to deal with over-population on Mars. Let's focus on trying to get there first?

aspec 11y ago

> Harnessing the energy of people across the planet by letting them trade with each other has so clearly been a disaster for everyone, has it? Yes. Mining and drilling have obliterated the natural resources of hundreds of millions of people around the world. That's why oil spillage in Nigeria is called an environmental disaster. > Essentially, isn't this capitalism with all its fault lines? One way or another it can be got to work for everyone's advantage. Not when capital is turned into a commodity that has necessarily less value, which are then still traded on the market as securities with no regulation. Then you end up with scenarios in which political intervention is the only method for preventing the entire global economy from collapsing. That's already happened once, which is evidence that this article's fairly milque-toast thesis is correct.

OJFord 11y ago
Why would we not have mined and drilled without capitalism? Indeed, there are present day countries serving as examples. Unless I've misunderstood your point?
adventured 11y ago
What does Capitalism have to do with your example? Capital has always and will always be a traded good. Nothing about that can ever change. Unless you plan to return humanity to the most basic of existence, living day to day, scrounging, trying not to starve without reserves. No regulation? Please point me to the industrial economy without financial regulations on any major specific thing. What happened with the global financial meltdown was very obviously not due to lack of regulation. It was caused by the Fed encouraging reckless behavior by intentionally inflating asset bubbles as an attempt to accelerate recovery from the 2000/2001 recessionary economy. Hint: they're doing the exact same thing all over again right now, they're doing it on purpose and have been for over half a decade, and they're openly admitting it.

EliRivers 11y ago

You're equating "capitalism" with "exactly what we have now". They're not the same. Capitalism is a small subset of what we have now. It's quite possible, for example, to have free market socialism; everyone trading with everyone else isn't exclusive to capitalism.

vlehto 11y ago
What portion of companies should be cooperatives of public for economy to be free market socialism?

eevilspock 11y ago

You take it as a given that capitalism was the savior. What if The Enlightenment, mathematics and science, egalitarian laws and democracy were actually greater contributors to lifting humans out of poverty? All the greatest advancements in law, mathematics and science don't appear to be profit driven, while exploitation of people has always been driven by profit. And even if capitalism did deserve much of the credit, that doesn't mean it shouldn't be criticized or that we should stop looking for better. Feudalism may have lifted more humans out of poverty than any other system that came before it by leaps and bounds. It's a good thing we didn't decide to stop there. Communism, oligarchy and dictatorships (the first really being a special case of the latter two) are supremely harmful and stupid. I wish people would stop using them as straw men to prove that capitalism is great.

simonh 11y ago
I don't think of Capitalism as being a political agenda or agency in that way. I think of it more as a law of nature. You can't say that Capitalism deserves credit for anything, or saves anyone any more than you can say that gravity or Newtons laws of motion deserve credit for anything. In this account, political ideologies or principles that attempt to replace or supersede citalism end up just reorganising it. So communism doesn't get rid of capitalism at all, it just harnesses it to the party in the form of state capitalism. Looking at it this way, you're quite right that The Enlightenment, science, egalitarianism and democracy deserve the credit because they are choices we make. They are motivating and organisational forces we have control over and so can be credited with achievements. When an Engineer builds a bridge we celebrate the skill of the engineer and the educational and organizational forces that made the project possible, not the laws of physics. In this way of thinking, there is no such thing as an end to capitalism. Anyone talking about the future in that way is simply asking the wrong questions. They can't see the wood for the trees.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  If you use the word "capitalism" to refer to some set of actual or proposed "laws of nature" (presumably, about the operation of economies) you aren't using the word to mean either what the critics that coined the term of the modern proponents of "capitalism", or basically anybody else talking about it mean by the term, which has always referred to an economic system, that is, a set of high-level policy covers about how the economy should be organized and governed. So, on this regard, you are literally not speaking the same language as any body else when it comes to that issue.