7 ms·

Capitalism Is Collapsing and Nothing Is Rising to Replace It

37 points by kodfodrasz 10y ago

krschultz 10y ago
Our agency is collapsing. I recently read the Federalist papers. What struck me most was the impression that the founders viewed government simply as a problem to be solved. We view the Constitution as second only to God's word handed down on stone tablets, but it was just a bunch of guys getting together thinking through the potential implications of different systems. I'm reminded of the part of Zero to One that talks about how we used to imagine large scale projects (e.g. filling in the SF Bay, for better or worse), but today we barely can get 2 miles of subway built in NYC. Somewhere along the way we fell into stasis. We have a bunch of a problems in society and in the world. They need to be solved. These days the only two dynamic areas are philanthropy and startups. Almost everything else - US federal, state, and local government, large legacy businesses, small businesses, the UN, the EU, NGOs - are stagnant.
- donatj 10y ago
  As far as gargantuan projects go, the knowledge of the red tape in the way is a limiter on imagination.
- 0xCMP 10y ago
  We basically started caring about what people think and how we affect their lives. Those previous projects were done at the expense of those it affected negatively. Maybe they were willing to accept that because they believed life would be better for everyone as a result.
- antisthenes 10y ago
  > Somewhere along the way we fell into stasis. We have a bunch of a problems in society and in the world. They need to be solved. Internet may be partly to blame. It is at least somewhat responsible for making people believe their opinion is equally as valid as everyone else's, which diminishes experts and their ability to spearhead projects significantly. It made everyone into a NIMBY to some degree, and those NIMBYs penetrated all levels of government and policy. Good god, that made me sound Ayn Randian...
rabidvermin 10y ago
It's been on the verge of collapsing imminently for almost 200 years now.
- Bombthecat 10y ago
  3000,since humans used some kind of currency. It's always almost dead :) The ones calling capitalism dead are the ones who want to replace it with communism and co. And we know how that will end... So we stick to capitalism and going back to future/ past feudalism
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - baq 10y ago
    the problem is trust. there's a lot of people who don't trust capitalism and/or people with access to capital and thanks to technology only a few crazies are needed to completely destabilize the system. if you think about it it's actually amazing that the whole scheme hasn't collapsed yet.
  - ant6n 10y ago
    capitalism in most of the world is less than 200 years old. Before that we had feudalism. Most progressives want to amend capitalism with some socialism; social democracy exists or did exist in much of Europe, and is largely under pressure by the race to the bottom caused by globalization. And of course ever-more powerful multi-national corporations.
    - witty_username 10y ago
      What is the race to the bottom? And if so, it's a great thing. Lower wages mean cheaper products. Powerful multi-national corporations often lobby for anti-capitalistic measures (protectionism, subsidies). Socialism only increases the influence of corporations via a bigger government.
      - 10y ago
blakes 10y ago
A more open, free, and transparent version of capitalism will be the cure I think. Transparency is key, we need to start requiring openess in all aspects of government and business.
- ythn 10y ago
  Could you elaborate on why you believe transparency is the cure?
  - nateabele 10y ago
    Prototypical example: healthcare. Healthcare in the US is one of the most unfree markets anywhere. Price transparency is near zero across the board, and federal and state agencies, which engage in reverse price-fixing (mandating costs for goods and services they cover), account for over 30% of all healthcare spending. Coupled with the copious regulations around insurance, pushing it out of the realm of reasonable affordability for all but the biggest corporations, and insurance companies' backroom dealing with major healthcare providers, price discovery for the consumer is basically dead. As a result, US healthcare costs have ballooned out of control compared to everywhere else in the world, with no measurable improvement in outcomes.
_yosefk 10y ago
Dean Baker, a great economist and easily the best on the (relatively) radical left, said (in the context of discussing Piketty's work) that "capitalism is infinitely malleable" - markets are shaped by infinite rules and tweaking those rules tweaks the outcomes. To speak of "capitalism" as a thing with defined outcomes is to ignore how vast that range of outcomes is, and how badly things work without any market whatsoever, which is what true alternatives (as opposed to tweaks) to capitalism amount to. "That changed on Nov. 8, when the American oligarchs ousted noncompliant professional politicians and assumed direct power through Donald Trump and his cabinet." Does it follow that Obama was defiant of "the American oligarchs" in his bold support for, say, TPP? "Marx thought communism would see the withering-away of the state. Instead, capitalism has reduced the state until its chief functions are protecting the rich and policing the poor." Does TFA imply that things got worse since Marx's days in terms of the absolute standard of living of "the poor"? Does the modern state redistribute less from "the rich" to "the poor" than it did in Marx's days?
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  Since the rich don't pay taxes, and the poor (unemployed) get only money from the state, there is no redistribution from the rich to the poor. There is redistribution from the middle class to the poor, right?
  - _yosefk 10y ago
    Do you mean that Warren "tax me harder" Buffet's much-publicized income tax of slightly less than $2M per year is not much relatively to his net worth of tens of billions, about half of which is taxpayers' money from bailouts? I guess you have a point. Still, I can't believe he completely evades the capital gains tax. Anyway, I never looked very deeply into it, but I'm pretty sure that single-digit millionaires pay plenty of taxes, and I find it fair to call them "rich." I do agree that taxing income much more heavily than capital gains, property, etc. doesn't sound like a great idea.
  - falcolas 10y ago
    The rich do pay taxes, just a smaller portion of their income as compared to your average taxpayer. But that smaller portion is leaps and bounds larger than the bigger portion paid by the average taxpayer. I seem to recall some graph indicating that even though they pay 4-5x (or higher) lower percentage of their money in taxes, the higher amounts mean they shoulder most of the tax burdon. I don't think the percentage difference is ultimately beneficial to society, but it's not correct to say they pay nothing.
jdpedrie 10y ago
> the American oligarchs ousted noncompliant professional politicians and assumed direct power through Donald Trump and his cabinet. This strikes me as an extremely odd reading of the election results. The establishment (which oligarchs are almost by definition part of) was by and large very much anti-Trump.
- amalag 10y ago
  Yes Trump was not very establishment. I have to think in the really high circles he was known more as a flashy con-man.
  - wavefunction 10y ago
    Flashy con-men have their uses.
- Gupie 10y ago
  Well, Trump definitely ousted the professional politicians and his cabinet is full of the very rich.
- jcranmer 10y ago
  What happened after the election is that a lot of those people decided to try to convince themselves that maybe a Trump administration won't be so bad, but yes, they were very-much anti-Trump on election day.
  - cylinder 10y ago
    And not to mention Clinton spent about $1 billion from very large donors on a very industrialized campaign based on TV advertising and direct mail, while Trump spent $60 million made up of small donations. To say presidential elections are won by big money oligarchs is kind of silly.
    - alphabettsy 10y ago
      $60 Million? He put in over $60 Million of just his own money so that figure is off bigly! Big money put their money into PACs on both sides so it's impossible to say they have/had no effect. WAPost: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-election/campaign-finance/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-electi... Forture: http://fortune.com/2016/12/09/donald-trump-campaign-spending/ http://fortune.com/2016/12/09/donald-trump-campaign-spending...
nix0n 10y ago
Weirdly Vancouver-centric. If Vancouver is collapsing, maybe Milwaukee can replace it.
adamnemecek 10y ago
I've always found georgism to be an interesting political idea but idk if I'm actually in favor of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism Check out this book by Henry George himself https://www.amazon.com/Social-Problems-Henry-George-ebook/dp/B00C8WJXS8/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&qid=1484147841&sr=8-5&keywords=georgism&linkCode=ll1&tag=akhn-20&linkId=5f89431033f02154d32f8e9d8a0760d6 https://www.amazon.com/Social-Problems-Henry-George-ebook/dp...
0xCMP 10y ago
Question: Why is this flagged?
- FuNe 10y ago
  sssst - you will get downvoted for asking such questions. Answer: HN is pro-capitalism first and foremost. Everything else -democracy and truth included- take a back seat here. @HN admins: you can hide your heads in the sand as much as you like. Good luck and thanks for the fish. UPDATE: OK - I'll take at face value the replies and apologize for the attack to admins. I'm still not following though why/how this is flagged.
  - witty_username 10y ago
    I think there's a sizeable pro-socialism portion that's at least 50%. Just look at the comments here.
    - vidarh 10y ago
      HN does have quite a few left wing commenters, but also a very large liberal and libertarian portion that often express concern about where capitalism is heading without necessarily wanting socialism... But in either case I think this article's comment-section is a bad one to judge by - the headline draw in a specific subset of commenters with a specific interest in the idea of the collapse of capitalism, which I suspect will disproportionally include left-wingers.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    Actually, while HN is certainly strongly pro-capitalism, I regularly post lengthy comments here about socialism and have gotten plenty of upvotes from comments that have quoted things likethe Communist Manifesto to make my argument. It's more likely to have been flagged because there's always some that flag political discussions of any kind not directly related to tech, and even more that flag political discussions that they expect will get heated because they don't think those kind of discussions belong here. I'm strongly left wing and have not noticed any particularly strong bias either way in terms of what type of political articles get flagged. Specific subjects are more likely to be a trigger.
FuNe 10y ago
flagged? It transcends me why this post might be flagged. And it will be a marker of very bad undemocratic qualities of this forum if it stays like that.
- grzm 10y ago
  Flagging is the result of user action. Speculation, but one reason may be that users think the discussion is likely to generate much more heat than any additional new light on the topic.
  - FuNe 10y ago
    I'm not following though. So -any user can flag a post without any need to justify his action? Where is the value in that? Only posts that are at least neutral to all get to pass? Then we end up talking about anything but the things that actually matter in fear that they will generate "heat". The posted article is much more decent than most anti-Trump articles that were the norm in here the past months. Personally I cannot wrap my head around it being flagged. If this is a result of a defective process then fix the process - that is if this is supposed to be a forum of reasonable practical people trying to find solutions to problems (aka hackers).
    - grzm 10y ago
      Multiple users need to have flagged a submission for it to receive a '[flagged]' label. My initial comment is not meant as arguing for or against flagging in general or for this submission in particular. You asked why it might have been flagged. Another commenter responded similarly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13374725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13374725 If you've noticed submissions from the past couple of months, you've likely come across user discussion about flagging and what submissions are appropriate for HN. For example, there was a Political Detox Week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404 As an aside, I think it's a difficult process figuring out how have civil and substantive online discussions. Just asking people to do so, even if they're generally reasonable people, doesn't seem to be enough. Some topics will nearly always result in flame wars of various temperature, and too many of those can drive away those who are willing to be reasonable. I respect your desire to want to dig into topics like this, and they're things that should be discussed. That said, it's a legitimate question if this is indeed the forum where they can be discussed constructively. That's not necessarily a failing of HN or its community, either. It just may not be the right tool for the job, so to speak. There are other forums other there.
rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
Why is this flagged? I would imagine that the nature of capitalism is something many tech employees with uncertain stock option payouts would be somewhat interested in.
- grzm 10y ago
  This question has been asked twice in this submission with responses: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13374538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13374538 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13374571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13374571
tim333 10y ago
>Capitalism Is Collapsing but it isn't really - it's a pretty robust system that's been through worse challenges such as the great depression and rise of communism. The author moaning about things like washing machines not lasting like they used to doesn't change that.
throw2016 10y ago
Systems of governance are not static. They have to keep on evolving. We have pretty highly educated populations now compared to 50 or 100 years ago. Raising the scare of communism seems to be a position of anti-change and resorting to the anti improvement TINA factor. Like capitalism communism was another form of governance, an experiment that did not always work but the motivation as not negative. It was a reaction to feudalism and a effort to find a better alternative. Currently we need more democracy and accountability as elections are increasingly becoming token gestures while special interests and organized groups indulge in lobbying and regulatory capture everyday.
skilesare 10y ago
I'm trying. http://catallax.info http://catallax.info Real life keeps getting int he way.

37 points by kodfodrasz 10y ago

Our agency is collapsing. I recently read the Federalist papers. What struck me most was the impression that the founders viewed government simply as a problem to be solved. We view the Constitution as second only to God's word handed down on stone tablets, but it was just a bunch of guys getting together thinking through the potential implications of different systems. I'm reminded of the part of Zero to One that talks about how we used to imagine large scale projects (e.g. filling in the SF Bay, for better or worse), but today we barely can get 2 miles of subway built in NYC. Somewhere along the way we fell into stasis. We have a bunch of a problems in society and in the world. They need to be solved. These days the only two dynamic areas are philanthropy and startups. Almost everything else - US federal, state, and local government, large legacy businesses, small businesses, the UN, the EU, NGOs - are stagnant.

donatj 10y ago
As far as gargantuan projects go, the knowledge of the red tape in the way is a limiter on imagination.
0xCMP 10y ago
We basically started caring about what people think and how we affect their lives. Those previous projects were done at the expense of those it affected negatively. Maybe they were willing to accept that because they believed life would be better for everyone as a result.
antisthenes 10y ago
> Somewhere along the way we fell into stasis. We have a bunch of a problems in society and in the world. They need to be solved. Internet may be partly to blame. It is at least somewhat responsible for making people believe their opinion is equally as valid as everyone else's, which diminishes experts and their ability to spearhead projects significantly. It made everyone into a NIMBY to some degree, and those NIMBYs penetrated all levels of government and policy. Good god, that made me sound Ayn Randian...

rabidvermin 10y ago

It's been on the verge of collapsing imminently for almost 200 years now.

Bombthecat 10y ago
3000,since humans used some kind of currency. It's always almost dead :) The ones calling capitalism dead are the ones who want to replace it with communism and co. And we know how that will end... So we stick to capitalism and going back to future/ past feudalism
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- baq 10y ago
  the problem is trust. there's a lot of people who don't trust capitalism and/or people with access to capital and thanks to technology only a few crazies are needed to completely destabilize the system. if you think about it it's actually amazing that the whole scheme hasn't collapsed yet.
- ant6n 10y ago
  capitalism in most of the world is less than 200 years old. Before that we had feudalism. Most progressives want to amend capitalism with some socialism; social democracy exists or did exist in much of Europe, and is largely under pressure by the race to the bottom caused by globalization. And of course ever-more powerful multi-national corporations.
  - witty_username 10y ago
    What is the race to the bottom? And if so, it's a great thing. Lower wages mean cheaper products. Powerful multi-national corporations often lobby for anti-capitalistic measures (protectionism, subsidies). Socialism only increases the influence of corporations via a bigger government.
    - 10y ago

blakes 10y ago

A more open, free, and transparent version of capitalism will be the cure I think. Transparency is key, we need to start requiring openess in all aspects of government and business.

ythn 10y ago
Could you elaborate on why you believe transparency is the cure?
- nateabele 10y ago
  Prototypical example: healthcare. Healthcare in the US is one of the most unfree markets anywhere. Price transparency is near zero across the board, and federal and state agencies, which engage in reverse price-fixing (mandating costs for goods and services they cover), account for over 30% of all healthcare spending. Coupled with the copious regulations around insurance, pushing it out of the realm of reasonable affordability for all but the biggest corporations, and insurance companies' backroom dealing with major healthcare providers, price discovery for the consumer is basically dead. As a result, US healthcare costs have ballooned out of control compared to everywhere else in the world, with no measurable improvement in outcomes.

_yosefk 10y ago

Dean Baker, a great economist and easily the best on the (relatively) radical left, said (in the context of discussing Piketty's work) that "capitalism is infinitely malleable" - markets are shaped by infinite rules and tweaking those rules tweaks the outcomes. To speak of "capitalism" as a thing with defined outcomes is to ignore how vast that range of outcomes is, and how badly things work without any market whatsoever, which is what true alternatives (as opposed to tweaks) to capitalism amount to. "That changed on Nov. 8, when the American oligarchs ousted noncompliant professional politicians and assumed direct power through Donald Trump and his cabinet." Does it follow that Obama was defiant of "the American oligarchs" in his bold support for, say, TPP? "Marx thought communism would see the withering-away of the state. Instead, capitalism has reduced the state until its chief functions are protecting the rich and policing the poor." Does TFA imply that things got worse since Marx's days in terms of the absolute standard of living of "the poor"? Does the modern state redistribute less from "the rich" to "the poor" than it did in Marx's days?

JoeAltmaier 10y ago
Since the rich don't pay taxes, and the poor (unemployed) get only money from the state, there is no redistribution from the rich to the poor. There is redistribution from the middle class to the poor, right?
- _yosefk 10y ago
  Do you mean that Warren "tax me harder" Buffet's much-publicized income tax of slightly less than $2M per year is not much relatively to his net worth of tens of billions, about half of which is taxpayers' money from bailouts? I guess you have a point. Still, I can't believe he completely evades the capital gains tax. Anyway, I never looked very deeply into it, but I'm pretty sure that single-digit millionaires pay plenty of taxes, and I find it fair to call them "rich." I do agree that taxing income much more heavily than capital gains, property, etc. doesn't sound like a great idea.
- falcolas 10y ago
  The rich do pay taxes, just a smaller portion of their income as compared to your average taxpayer. But that smaller portion is leaps and bounds larger than the bigger portion paid by the average taxpayer. I seem to recall some graph indicating that even though they pay 4-5x (or higher) lower percentage of their money in taxes, the higher amounts mean they shoulder most of the tax burdon. I don't think the percentage difference is ultimately beneficial to society, but it's not correct to say they pay nothing.

jdpedrie 10y ago

> the American oligarchs ousted noncompliant professional politicians and assumed direct power through Donald Trump and his cabinet. This strikes me as an extremely odd reading of the election results. The establishment (which oligarchs are almost by definition part of) was by and large very much anti-Trump.

amalag 10y ago
Yes Trump was not very establishment. I have to think in the really high circles he was known more as a flashy con-man.
- wavefunction 10y ago
  Flashy con-men have their uses.
Gupie 10y ago
Well, Trump definitely ousted the professional politicians and his cabinet is full of the very rich.
jcranmer 10y ago
What happened after the election is that a lot of those people decided to try to convince themselves that maybe a Trump administration won't be so bad, but yes, they were very-much anti-Trump on election day.
- cylinder 10y ago
  And not to mention Clinton spent about $1 billion from very large donors on a very industrialized campaign based on TV advertising and direct mail, while Trump spent $60 million made up of small donations. To say presidential elections are won by big money oligarchs is kind of silly.
  - alphabettsy 10y ago
    $60 Million? He put in over $60 Million of just his own money so that figure is off bigly! Big money put their money into PACs on both sides so it's impossible to say they have/had no effect. WAPost: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-election/campaign-finance/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-electi... Forture: http://fortune.com/2016/12/09/donald-trump-campaign-spending/ http://fortune.com/2016/12/09/donald-trump-campaign-spending...

nix0n 10y ago

Weirdly Vancouver-centric. If Vancouver is collapsing, maybe Milwaukee can replace it.

adamnemecek 10y ago

I've always found georgism to be an interesting political idea but idk if I'm actually in favor of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism Check out this book by Henry George himself https://www.amazon.com/Social-Problems-Henry-George-ebook/dp/B00C8WJXS8/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&qid=1484147841&sr=8-5&keywords=georgism&linkCode=ll1&tag=akhn-20&linkId=5f89431033f02154d32f8e9d8a0760d6 https://www.amazon.com/Social-Problems-Henry-George-ebook/dp...

0xCMP 10y ago

Question: Why is this flagged?

FuNe 10y ago
sssst - you will get downvoted for asking such questions. Answer: HN is pro-capitalism first and foremost. Everything else -democracy and truth included- take a back seat here. @HN admins: you can hide your heads in the sand as much as you like. Good luck and thanks for the fish. UPDATE: OK - I'll take at face value the replies and apologize for the attack to admins. I'm still not following though why/how this is flagged.
- witty_username 10y ago
  I think there's a sizeable pro-socialism portion that's at least 50%. Just look at the comments here.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    HN does have quite a few left wing commenters, but also a very large liberal and libertarian portion that often express concern about where capitalism is heading without necessarily wanting socialism... But in either case I think this article's comment-section is a bad one to judge by - the headline draw in a specific subset of commenters with a specific interest in the idea of the collapse of capitalism, which I suspect will disproportionally include left-wingers.
- vidarh 10y ago
  Actually, while HN is certainly strongly pro-capitalism, I regularly post lengthy comments here about socialism and have gotten plenty of upvotes from comments that have quoted things likethe Communist Manifesto to make my argument. It's more likely to have been flagged because there's always some that flag political discussions of any kind not directly related to tech, and even more that flag political discussions that they expect will get heated because they don't think those kind of discussions belong here. I'm strongly left wing and have not noticed any particularly strong bias either way in terms of what type of political articles get flagged. Specific subjects are more likely to be a trigger.

FuNe 10y ago

flagged? It transcends me why this post might be flagged. And it will be a marker of very bad undemocratic qualities of this forum if it stays like that.

grzm 10y ago
Flagging is the result of user action. Speculation, but one reason may be that users think the discussion is likely to generate much more heat than any additional new light on the topic.
- FuNe 10y ago
  I'm not following though. So -any user can flag a post without any need to justify his action? Where is the value in that? Only posts that are at least neutral to all get to pass? Then we end up talking about anything but the things that actually matter in fear that they will generate "heat". The posted article is much more decent than most anti-Trump articles that were the norm in here the past months. Personally I cannot wrap my head around it being flagged. If this is a result of a defective process then fix the process - that is if this is supposed to be a forum of reasonable practical people trying to find solutions to problems (aka hackers).
  - grzm 10y ago
    Multiple users need to have flagged a submission for it to receive a '[flagged]' label. My initial comment is not meant as arguing for or against flagging in general or for this submission in particular. You asked why it might have been flagged. Another commenter responded similarly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13374725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13374725 If you've noticed submissions from the past couple of months, you've likely come across user discussion about flagging and what submissions are appropriate for HN. For example, there was a Political Detox Week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404 As an aside, I think it's a difficult process figuring out how have civil and substantive online discussions. Just asking people to do so, even if they're generally reasonable people, doesn't seem to be enough. Some topics will nearly always result in flame wars of various temperature, and too many of those can drive away those who are willing to be reasonable. I respect your desire to want to dig into topics like this, and they're things that should be discussed. That said, it's a legitimate question if this is indeed the forum where they can be discussed constructively. That's not necessarily a failing of HN or its community, either. It just may not be the right tool for the job, so to speak. There are other forums other there.

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago

Why is this flagged? I would imagine that the nature of capitalism is something many tech employees with uncertain stock option payouts would be somewhat interested in.

grzm 10y ago
This question has been asked twice in this submission with responses: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13374538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13374538 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13374571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13374571

tim333 10y ago

>Capitalism Is Collapsing but it isn't really - it's a pretty robust system that's been through worse challenges such as the great depression and rise of communism. The author moaning about things like washing machines not lasting like they used to doesn't change that.

throw2016 10y ago

Systems of governance are not static. They have to keep on evolving. We have pretty highly educated populations now compared to 50 or 100 years ago. Raising the scare of communism seems to be a position of anti-change and resorting to the anti improvement TINA factor. Like capitalism communism was another form of governance, an experiment that did not always work but the motivation as not negative. It was a reaction to feudalism and a effort to find a better alternative. Currently we need more democracy and accountability as elections are increasingly becoming token gestures while special interests and organized groups indulge in lobbying and regulatory capture everyday.

skilesare 10y ago

I'm trying. http://catallax.info http://catallax.info Real life keeps getting int he way.