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World Bank estimates that global poverty fell to less than 10% for the first time in history [0]. Perhaps this wasn't solely caused by capitalism and globalizat

by bko 11y ago

World Bank estimates that global poverty fell to less than 10% for the first time in history [0]. Perhaps this wasn't solely caused by capitalism and globalization, but considering those two idea were probably the driving forces of the last century, I believe they are instrumental in reducing global poverty. I just don't buy the argument that absolute livings standards have always been increasing due to capitalism but eventually when we get to a certain point it will all turn into disaster. That's similar to the argument that luddites have always made and they have always been wrong. [0] http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2015/10/04/world-bank-forecasts-global-poverty-to-fall-below-10-for-first-time-major-hurdles-remain-in-goal-to-end-poverty-by-2030 http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2015/10/04/wo...

nabla9 11y ago
>That's similar to the argument that luddites have always made and they have always been wrong. Industrial revolution resulted malnutrition and deterioration of absolute living standards. It took almost hundred years from the start of the industrial revolution before real wages started to grow. You can see it from the historical records. The height of enlisted men in Britain decreased. Luddites were mostly right. They were not fighting against technology per se btw, they were fighting against losing their jobs. The real benefits from industrialization were realized after hard political changes were made and capitalism was limited. It was very violent struggle. People were shot or beaten. Economic history teaches us that technological changes require political changes. What you attribute as triumph of capitalism ignores the fact that capitalism changed a lot. You don't create middle class from mid 18th century society. Summary: capitalism + technology + political change == benefits for everyone.
- branchless 11y ago
  The industrial revolution needs to be understood in the context of land enclosure laws. Workers had no choice. That is what allows employer exploitation: work for me or starve. This is why the USA had slavery - there was abundant land. In the UK the UK was the plantation with land enclosure. This is why now we feel exploited by "capitalism". Banks are flooding the world with fiat money as private debt primarily against land. Don't want to work for the man? You have no choice. Take out your banker debt for education and land and then pay them part of your salary as tribute. This isn't capitalism. http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/enclosure-acts-industrial-revolution/ http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/enclosure-acts-indust... When we have access to land we have a choice. Presently we must all toil away to maintain access to living space via a death pledge (mort-gage). In a capitalist world money is the medium for the message. If we aren't financially free we aren't free.
  - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
    The US inherited an existing slave regime from the Caribbean. It entailed exactly the same cognitive dissonance required of soldiers in the British Empire as described by Orwell in "Burmese Days". So it looks Mercantilist to me. I don't hold that debt is inherent to what we consider capitalism. I run the risk of a "no true Scotsman" fallacy with this, but debt is something we have because of path dependence, not because it's shown to be inevitable or optimal. The fact that debt cannot be easily retired indicates that we haven't finished this as an institution. At the level of a debt holder, of course you can't do this. At the level of a general person living in society, the un-retire-ability of debt creates a common, sort-of pubic goods problem because it slows growth. Classical and pre-Classical societies held debt jubilees. Could we? I don't know.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      Debt jubilees would be directly contrary to the capitalist conception of property; insofar as it features them, a society has broken with capitalism.
      - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
        Debt is an artifact of finance, not of capitalism. If some genius tomorrow announced a way to have money creation without the attendant debt overhang, we'd do that instead. Capitalism would still be exactly the same. Debt precedes capitalism by... the entirety of human history. The map is not the territory and accounting and finance are technologies that attend to productive enterprise, not the enterprises themselves.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- AndrewUnmuted 11y ago
  > Industrial revolution resulted malnutrition and deterioration of absolute living standards. What? Capitalism did not create poverty or famine - it inherited it, and then swiftly solved it. The industrial revolution, if anything, obliterated it from the Western world. Compared to the centuries of pre-capitalist starvation, the living conditions of the poor in the early years of capitalism were the first chance the poor had ever had to survive.
  - SolaceQuantum 11y ago
    Have you actually read any muckrake pieces of that time? The industrial revolution brought about the redunancy of weavers who were skilled workers that were brought to poverty[1]. 1. http://webs.bcp.org/sites/vcleary/ModernWorldHistoryTextbook/IndustrialRevolution/IREffects.html#workingconditions http://webs.bcp.org/sites/vcleary/ModernWorldHistoryTextbook...
    - fennecfoxen 11y ago
      And everyone who was not a weaver (most of the population, and mostly not skilled workers) could now afford unthinkable luxuries in their daily life, like a second or third shirt (lightly used). I think this has been posted around here before: http://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-lesson-in.html http://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-l...
    - branchless 11y ago
      I think the main problem is workers lacked choice due to access to alternative means of employment due to land enclosure laws. Had they been able to choose between say farming and working 12 hour shifts in bad conditions they would have looked at the risk/reward. As it was the choice was work or starve. Wages are therefore set at subsistence levels rather than at the floor set by the alternative. Land enclosure created unemployment. Employers were not bidding against one another to secure workers, they were in a dutch auction with labourers to "save them". Similarly today due to very high land prices we cannot work selectively (unless you earn a lot). Were land prices to be suppressed I think we would see people choose to work less which would put pressure on employers who would have to hand over to workers a greater share of the value they produce.
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  The Industrial Revolution is a very large, complicated suite of changes. If we hold as a spectrum capitalism in one direction and mercantilism in the other direction, on a single line ( for simplicity's sake ) then most of the excesses attributed to capitalism begin to look more like mercantilism than actual capitalism. People like Henry Frick just didn't know any better because it was all new. Capitalism works well at eliminating production as a bottleneck. The rest is up to us. There's generally another bottleneck. Much of the 20th Century was about logistics. But it's sort of dangerous to say that "capitalism was limited" - the thing that limits capitalism is economic busts. It's dangerous for two reasons. One, it's extremely hard to do at all, much less well, and two, you have to ask yourself if it ever actually was done to start with. Peter Whybrow has a very good presentation on one of the CSPANs using Adam Smith as a yardstick for what may be wrong with capitalism today.
- ctlby 11y ago
  > It took almost hundred years from the start of the industrial revolution before real wages started to grow. Even the most pessimistic view suggests that real wages grew, especially after the conclusion of the Napoleanic Wars. [1] > The real benefits from industrialization were realized after hard political changes. The real benefits of industrialization were immediately realized via mass production of widely desired and previously unobtainable goods. This should be clear from migratory patterns: workers abandoned the countryside en masse (in spite of city living/working conditions) for a reason. Enclosure laws were not a major factor until 1845. > You don't create middle class from mid 18th century society. Of course you do. The rise of the managerial and professional classes is a direct consequence of the Industrial Revolution. [1] http://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/users/Allen/unpublished/pessimism-6.pdf http://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/users/Allen/unpublished/pessimi...
  - nabla9 11y ago
    >Of course you do. The rise of the managerial and professional classes is a direct consequence of the Industrial Revolution. Not without political changes. Nobody is saying that industrial revolution did not bring middle class or reduce poverty. It's just that whole society must change and that includes new politics, new laws protecting their new rights, etc. Some examples: - 1819: Factory Act limited child working hours to 12 hours per day. - 1832: any man owning a household worth £10 or more was allowed to vote, - 1867: some working men were allowed to vote. - 1874: Maximum weekly working hours per worker: 56.5 hours per week. - 1918: all men over 21 and women over 30 were able to vote. And that brings us back to the issue. Automation changes things and laws, rights and whole society must change.
- bko 11y ago
  Can you provide some further reading on the industrial revolution resulting in malnutrition, and during what periods and regions did this occur? Also, it's worth noting that "real wages" is not as important as compared to what those wages can buy. Sure, someone from 100 years ago could have "real wages" much higher than mine, but it doesn't mean much to me if I can't use the wages to purchase modern indoor plumbing, air conditioning, safe travel across the world and a very high likelihood that my wife won't die in child-birth.
  - brbrodude 11y ago
    You've got to also factor in that someone from the industrial revolution era didn't even had the concept or living for the clock, working for wages or consumerist society, if you had your house and fields and chickens and some pigs plus your wife/you had took an extra-income of manufacturing and selling products in your own place, with time left for leisure and family and you were not starving, even though you worked a lot you were doing it for yourself and your subsistence means were actually yours, you could be somewhat happy and feel free with that, no? And then instead of buying goods directly from you you're now told that you'll be inside a factory producing for x hours for income just enough to sustain yourself, how is this any so much better? Plenty of people at the time thought that was not much different from being a slave, land meant freedom.
TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
You're confusing "more consumption" and "organised work that produces profit for shareholders" with "higher living standards." If your definition of living standards is broader and includes overall welfare and social mobility, the point becomes debatable. As for a Malthusian crash - denying the fact that ecosystems have a carrying capacity is irrational and counterfactual. Logistic collapse has been observed time and again in natural populations. It's also been observed in human populations. See e.g. among many possible examples: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3925430/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3925430/ So it's factually wrong to claim that disasters have never happened for environmental reasons - because they certainly have happened in the past. Being unaware that something has happened isn't a justification for claiming that it can't be possible.
hellbanner 11y ago
I think the world is a disaster right now. Maybe not for Silicon Valley, but many people around the world are * living under repressive and/or dangerous regimes * lacking access to good nutrition & medical infrastructure * living in over-populated, under-maintained cities
- vlehto 11y ago
  Currently larger percentage or countries are democratic than ever before. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Number_of_nations_1800-2003_scoring_8_or_higher_on_Polity_IV_scale.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Number_o... Smaller percentage or world population is malnourished than ever before. http://ourworldindata.org/data/food-agriculture/hunger-and-undernourishment/ http://ourworldindata.org/data/food-agriculture/hunger-and-u... Your last point is true in some sense, because more people live in cities than ever before. And you can say any city is under-maintained if you put your standards high enough. Due to this effect, there are mixed results in global sanitation trends. Access to clean water is improving, but I can't say for overall picture.
ideonexus 11y ago
> eventually when we get to a certain point it will all turn into disaster. William F. Buckley liked to quote a friend that, "The problem with socialism is socialism. The problem with capitalism is capitalists." Socialism is the force meant to keep capitalists from becoming the totalitarian rulers of us all. The responsibility of voters in a democracy is to keep the forces of capitalism and socialism in check so that neither one dominates us and brings on disaster. Understanding this fact that America and all other functioning democracies are a balance of socialism and capitalism has made me realize I am a Noam Chomsky-style anarchist. He observes that one cannot be an anarchist without also being a tempered socialist, because without some socialism to constrain the capitalists, they would quickly oppress us all in a tragedy-of-the-commons scenario [1]. [1] https://chomsky.info/state01/ https://chomsky.info/state01/
Houshalter 11y ago
There is absolutely no law of economics that says that wages can't decrease. Wages are based on the supply and demand of labor, and there is no question that robots will affect that. If the wages fall below minimum wage, or even what it is feasible to survive on, then you get unemployment. Most human jobs for most of history have been unskilled work. Things anyone could be trained to do, not requiring high intelligence, and involving physical or repetitive work. The industrial revolution moved unskilled laborers from farms to factories, but there were still jobs. But with near future tech, there will be very few things, if anything, unskilled humans can do that robots can't. We are just starting to see AI good enough that it can match humans in visual recognition tasks - which 10 years ago was unthinkable, and progress incredibly slow. This level of AI has been the main limitation to robots. We've had decent robots, but AI wasn't good enough to use them for anything interesting. Now it is. Soon robots will take over almost all existing jobs. From truck drivers to shelf stockers to the mail man. Of course there will be jobs that AI can't do (for now.) E.g. computer programmers or doctors. But realistically, what percent of the population can actually do those jobs? What percent of unemployed truck drivers are actually going to be able to retrain as computer programmers?

by bko 11y ago

nabla9 11y ago

>That's similar to the argument that luddites have always made and they have always been wrong. Industrial revolution resulted malnutrition and deterioration of absolute living standards. It took almost hundred years from the start of the industrial revolution before real wages started to grow. You can see it from the historical records. The height of enlisted men in Britain decreased. Luddites were mostly right. They were not fighting against technology per se btw, they were fighting against losing their jobs. The real benefits from industrialization were realized after hard political changes were made and capitalism was limited. It was very violent struggle. People were shot or beaten. Economic history teaches us that technological changes require political changes. What you attribute as triumph of capitalism ignores the fact that capitalism changed a lot. You don't create middle class from mid 18th century society. Summary: capitalism + technology + political change == benefits for everyone.

branchless 11y ago
The industrial revolution needs to be understood in the context of land enclosure laws. Workers had no choice. That is what allows employer exploitation: work for me or starve. This is why the USA had slavery - there was abundant land. In the UK the UK was the plantation with land enclosure. This is why now we feel exploited by "capitalism". Banks are flooding the world with fiat money as private debt primarily against land. Don't want to work for the man? You have no choice. Take out your banker debt for education and land and then pay them part of your salary as tribute. This isn't capitalism. http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/enclosure-acts-industrial-revolution/ http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/enclosure-acts-indust... When we have access to land we have a choice. Presently we must all toil away to maintain access to living space via a death pledge (mort-gage). In a capitalist world money is the medium for the message. If we aren't financially free we aren't free.
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  The US inherited an existing slave regime from the Caribbean. It entailed exactly the same cognitive dissonance required of soldiers in the British Empire as described by Orwell in "Burmese Days". So it looks Mercantilist to me. I don't hold that debt is inherent to what we consider capitalism. I run the risk of a "no true Scotsman" fallacy with this, but debt is something we have because of path dependence, not because it's shown to be inevitable or optimal. The fact that debt cannot be easily retired indicates that we haven't finished this as an institution. At the level of a debt holder, of course you can't do this. At the level of a general person living in society, the un-retire-ability of debt creates a common, sort-of pubic goods problem because it slows growth. Classical and pre-Classical societies held debt jubilees. Could we? I don't know.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    Debt jubilees would be directly contrary to the capitalist conception of property; insofar as it features them, a society has broken with capitalism.
    - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
      Debt is an artifact of finance, not of capitalism. If some genius tomorrow announced a way to have money creation without the attendant debt overhang, we'd do that instead. Capitalism would still be exactly the same. Debt precedes capitalism by... the entirety of human history. The map is not the territory and accounting and finance are technologies that attend to productive enterprise, not the enterprises themselves.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
AndrewUnmuted 11y ago
> Industrial revolution resulted malnutrition and deterioration of absolute living standards. What? Capitalism did not create poverty or famine - it inherited it, and then swiftly solved it. The industrial revolution, if anything, obliterated it from the Western world. Compared to the centuries of pre-capitalist starvation, the living conditions of the poor in the early years of capitalism were the first chance the poor had ever had to survive.
- SolaceQuantum 11y ago
  Have you actually read any muckrake pieces of that time? The industrial revolution brought about the redunancy of weavers who were skilled workers that were brought to poverty[1]. 1. http://webs.bcp.org/sites/vcleary/ModernWorldHistoryTextbook/IndustrialRevolution/IREffects.html#workingconditions http://webs.bcp.org/sites/vcleary/ModernWorldHistoryTextbook...
  - fennecfoxen 11y ago
    And everyone who was not a weaver (most of the population, and mostly not skilled workers) could now afford unthinkable luxuries in their daily life, like a second or third shirt (lightly used). I think this has been posted around here before: http://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-lesson-in.html http://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-l...
  - branchless 11y ago
    I think the main problem is workers lacked choice due to access to alternative means of employment due to land enclosure laws. Had they been able to choose between say farming and working 12 hour shifts in bad conditions they would have looked at the risk/reward. As it was the choice was work or starve. Wages are therefore set at subsistence levels rather than at the floor set by the alternative. Land enclosure created unemployment. Employers were not bidding against one another to secure workers, they were in a dutch auction with labourers to "save them". Similarly today due to very high land prices we cannot work selectively (unless you earn a lot). Were land prices to be suppressed I think we would see people choose to work less which would put pressure on employers who would have to hand over to workers a greater share of the value they produce.
ArkyBeagle 11y ago
The Industrial Revolution is a very large, complicated suite of changes. If we hold as a spectrum capitalism in one direction and mercantilism in the other direction, on a single line ( for simplicity's sake ) then most of the excesses attributed to capitalism begin to look more like mercantilism than actual capitalism. People like Henry Frick just didn't know any better because it was all new. Capitalism works well at eliminating production as a bottleneck. The rest is up to us. There's generally another bottleneck. Much of the 20th Century was about logistics. But it's sort of dangerous to say that "capitalism was limited" - the thing that limits capitalism is economic busts. It's dangerous for two reasons. One, it's extremely hard to do at all, much less well, and two, you have to ask yourself if it ever actually was done to start with. Peter Whybrow has a very good presentation on one of the CSPANs using Adam Smith as a yardstick for what may be wrong with capitalism today.
ctlby 11y ago
> It took almost hundred years from the start of the industrial revolution before real wages started to grow. Even the most pessimistic view suggests that real wages grew, especially after the conclusion of the Napoleanic Wars. [1] > The real benefits from industrialization were realized after hard political changes. The real benefits of industrialization were immediately realized via mass production of widely desired and previously unobtainable goods. This should be clear from migratory patterns: workers abandoned the countryside en masse (in spite of city living/working conditions) for a reason. Enclosure laws were not a major factor until 1845. > You don't create middle class from mid 18th century society. Of course you do. The rise of the managerial and professional classes is a direct consequence of the Industrial Revolution. [1] http://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/users/Allen/unpublished/pessimism-6.pdf http://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/users/Allen/unpublished/pessimi...
- nabla9 11y ago
  >Of course you do. The rise of the managerial and professional classes is a direct consequence of the Industrial Revolution. Not without political changes. Nobody is saying that industrial revolution did not bring middle class or reduce poverty. It's just that whole society must change and that includes new politics, new laws protecting their new rights, etc. Some examples: - 1819: Factory Act limited child working hours to 12 hours per day. - 1832: any man owning a household worth £10 or more was allowed to vote, - 1867: some working men were allowed to vote. - 1874: Maximum weekly working hours per worker: 56.5 hours per week. - 1918: all men over 21 and women over 30 were able to vote. And that brings us back to the issue. Automation changes things and laws, rights and whole society must change.
bko 11y ago
Can you provide some further reading on the industrial revolution resulting in malnutrition, and during what periods and regions did this occur? Also, it's worth noting that "real wages" is not as important as compared to what those wages can buy. Sure, someone from 100 years ago could have "real wages" much higher than mine, but it doesn't mean much to me if I can't use the wages to purchase modern indoor plumbing, air conditioning, safe travel across the world and a very high likelihood that my wife won't die in child-birth.
- brbrodude 11y ago
  You've got to also factor in that someone from the industrial revolution era didn't even had the concept or living for the clock, working for wages or consumerist society, if you had your house and fields and chickens and some pigs plus your wife/you had took an extra-income of manufacturing and selling products in your own place, with time left for leisure and family and you were not starving, even though you worked a lot you were doing it for yourself and your subsistence means were actually yours, you could be somewhat happy and feel free with that, no? And then instead of buying goods directly from you you're now told that you'll be inside a factory producing for x hours for income just enough to sustain yourself, how is this any so much better? Plenty of people at the time thought that was not much different from being a slave, land meant freedom.

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago

You're confusing "more consumption" and "organised work that produces profit for shareholders" with "higher living standards." If your definition of living standards is broader and includes overall welfare and social mobility, the point becomes debatable. As for a Malthusian crash - denying the fact that ecosystems have a carrying capacity is irrational and counterfactual. Logistic collapse has been observed time and again in natural populations. It's also been observed in human populations. See e.g. among many possible examples: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3925430/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3925430/ So it's factually wrong to claim that disasters have never happened for environmental reasons - because they certainly have happened in the past. Being unaware that something has happened isn't a justification for claiming that it can't be possible.

hellbanner 11y ago

I think the world is a disaster right now. Maybe not for Silicon Valley, but many people around the world are * living under repressive and/or dangerous regimes * lacking access to good nutrition & medical infrastructure * living in over-populated, under-maintained cities

vlehto 11y ago
Currently larger percentage or countries are democratic than ever before. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Number_of_nations_1800-2003_scoring_8_or_higher_on_Polity_IV_scale.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Number_o... Smaller percentage or world population is malnourished than ever before. http://ourworldindata.org/data/food-agriculture/hunger-and-undernourishment/ http://ourworldindata.org/data/food-agriculture/hunger-and-u... Your last point is true in some sense, because more people live in cities than ever before. And you can say any city is under-maintained if you put your standards high enough. Due to this effect, there are mixed results in global sanitation trends. Access to clean water is improving, but I can't say for overall picture.

ideonexus 11y ago

> eventually when we get to a certain point it will all turn into disaster. William F. Buckley liked to quote a friend that, "The problem with socialism is socialism. The problem with capitalism is capitalists." Socialism is the force meant to keep capitalists from becoming the totalitarian rulers of us all. The responsibility of voters in a democracy is to keep the forces of capitalism and socialism in check so that neither one dominates us and brings on disaster. Understanding this fact that America and all other functioning democracies are a balance of socialism and capitalism has made me realize I am a Noam Chomsky-style anarchist. He observes that one cannot be an anarchist without also being a tempered socialist, because without some socialism to constrain the capitalists, they would quickly oppress us all in a tragedy-of-the-commons scenario [1]. [1] https://chomsky.info/state01/ https://chomsky.info/state01/

Houshalter 11y ago

There is absolutely no law of economics that says that wages can't decrease. Wages are based on the supply and demand of labor, and there is no question that robots will affect that. If the wages fall below minimum wage, or even what it is feasible to survive on, then you get unemployment. Most human jobs for most of history have been unskilled work. Things anyone could be trained to do, not requiring high intelligence, and involving physical or repetitive work. The industrial revolution moved unskilled laborers from farms to factories, but there were still jobs. But with near future tech, there will be very few things, if anything, unskilled humans can do that robots can't. We are just starting to see AI good enough that it can match humans in visual recognition tasks - which 10 years ago was unthinkable, and progress incredibly slow. This level of AI has been the main limitation to robots. We've had decent robots, but AI wasn't good enough to use them for anything interesting. Now it is. Soon robots will take over almost all existing jobs. From truck drivers to shelf stockers to the mail man. Of course there will be jobs that AI can't do (for now.) E.g. computer programmers or doctors. But realistically, what percent of the population can actually do those jobs? What percent of unemployed truck drivers are actually going to be able to retrain as computer programmers?