5 ms·

Capitalism also drives greed, destruction and human misery as well as some other pretty evil things.

by mesh 10y ago

visarga 10y ago
Also, the tragedy of the commons. Companies pollute our environment externalizing costs on society. They collect the profits, we pay for the damage. The weakest point of capitalism is the same as its greatest advantage - greed.
- wyager 10y ago
  > Companies pollute our environment externalizing costs on society. Interestingly, historical experiments in communism have led to vastly increased rates of environmental destruction as compared to market economies. The reason is fairly obvious if you have a some economic background and think about it for a bit; in a market economy with resource ownership, people who own resource rights (e.g. to fell the trees in an area) will notice that they can make a lot more money if they spread the resource sales over time; if they sell all their trees now, they'll push down the market value of lumber and have decreasing marginal returns on each tree they fell. In the presence of a rich market system including market mechanisms like futures, market participants make a lot more money planning for the future than just trashing the environment as fast as possible. Compare this to a communist state. The people in charge of resource management don't make money anyway, so they don't really care about the same optimization a capitalist would. Of course, they can buy political favor at little cost to them by pushing way down the diminishing marginal returns curve and exhausting a resource way faster than a self-interested capitalist would. Great job, commissar, look at all this wood! After all, if you can make your peers happy for a few years you'll get a promotion to a better government position (or retire early on your pension) and the fact that this area is now barren is someone else's problem.
  - Someone 10y ago
    That doesn't always work. If you expect demand for lumber will go down in a few years, as far as you can tell forever, it's better for you to take out your trees as fast as possible. I think that's part of what's happening with oil, where renewable sources are going to replace them as a bulk good. If you have lots of it like Saudi Arabia, your capitalism-optimal strategy may be to pump up oil now, even if it significantly drives down prices. It also may be rational to destructively mine lumber if that's the only way you can produce it competitively. Your competition might own woods closer to rivers, for example, making it cheaper for them to transport their wood to the customer.
  - paublyrne 10y ago
    I don't know a huge amount about this. Just wondering though, if those increased rates of environmental damage could also be related to communist states tending to have restrictions on the press, which in turn makes it easier for corruption to flourish. What you're saying certainly makes sense though.
  - dv_dt 10y ago
    I've always felt that the big arguments stacking Capitalism and Communism seem to revolve around the practical results of distributed vs centralized allocation of resources - and yet that seems to be a feature that is mostly tangential to both economic theories. Yes, many centrally planned Communist economies failed, but we seem to be approaching a centralization by concentration in the US - where we can't get broad public goods agreed upon (even though private healthcare e.g. has been a clear economic inefficiency compared to public). It's a big economic disconnect akin to the disconnect of factory workers in Communist-centralized factories not being motivated or allowed to improve the output. Wouldn't it be ironic if all the energy directed to arguing Communism vs Capitalism had completely missed the fundamental principles on both sides?
friedman23 10y ago
All the things you described existed before capitalism and will exist after capitalism.
witty_username 10y ago
What is wrong with greed? Most people want more money. Is it wrong for a poor person to earn more money? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWsx1X8PV_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWsx1X8PV_A
- Retra 10y ago
  It is wrong to idealize the desire for more money to the point where you hurt people to achieve it. That's what "greed" means. It doesn't mean "wanting more". It means wanting too much. And tautologically, "too much" is too much to want.
  - witty_username 10y ago
    Just like stealing, hurting people is not part of capitalism. What is "too much"? Do people here, who are mostly globally (and often nationally) rich, earn "too much" money?
    - fictioncircle 10y ago
      Refusing life saving assistance except in return for payment is part of the pattern of Capitalism. You cannot ignore externalities inherent to a system and claim yourself absolved of the consequences.
      - wyager 10y ago
        > Refusing life saving assistance except in return for payment is part of the pattern of Capitalism. Comments like this must come from a background of absolute ignorance of utility theory or quantitative economics. I can't think that anyone would make this complaint if they thought critically for a moment about what they were suggesting. Whether you like it or not, we live in a universe with scarce resources. Humans have finite time, matter, and energy that we need to allocate. As of today (or at least the very near future), it's probably possible to keep any individual human alive for arbitrarily long. We just might burn trillions of dollars doing it. Obviously, even to someone who can't multiply, this doesn't make sense. If we did our absolute best to keep everyone in the world alive, we would run out of resources immediately. Now, let's say instead of trillions of dollars, it's millions. This is a plausible multi-year treatment cost. Now instead of running out of resources at 10 people, it's 10,000,000 people. This is still less than the number of people in the world who would plausibly rack up these kind of costs if we didn't "refuse life-saving assistance except in return for payment". The unfortunate harsh reality is that everyone's life has a finite value. It doesn't make sense to spend more resources keeping someone alive than they're worth; as I said, you'd run out of resources very quickly, even if we pretend it makes sense to dedicate 100% of humanity's output to medicine. Additionally, some people's lives are worth more to everyone else than others. People revile this fact for many reasons, but that's how it is. The market, and most individuals, place a higher value on the life of, say, a surgeon than on that of a busker. The market is a way to (surprisingly accurately) stochastically approximate the value people place on things, including the time of other people. A surgeon gets paid more because (assuming the market is allowed to operate unimpeded) they are valued more, and it therefore makes sense that (through the indirection of money) they are able to pay for that expensive multi-million dollar treatment if they get some complicated disease. Common objections to this include "what about rich retired people who aren't productive anymore", and the answer is that if people knew they couldn't spend the money they were saving right now later on, this would induce even more drastic inefficiencies than that of rich retirees being able to afford medical care more than people still in the workforce.
wyager 10y ago
> Capitalism also drives greed, destruction and human misery Interesting you say this, because (by a huge margin) the worst instances of all these things took place under non-capitalist governments. Here's a good rundown wrt destruction and human misery: http://necrometrics.com/20c5m.htm http://necrometrics.com/20c5m.htm The most incredibly flourishing of human potential has, around and since the renaissance, occurred in market environments. It looks like greed and destruction and misery are probably going to happen no matter what (at least, no one has figured out to prevent them yet), but they seem to actually be minimized in market societies.
thinkloop 10y ago
The problem is simpler than that: capitalism optimizes for resource allocation, while humans care about more than resources. Stuff is extremely important to our happiness (without getting into that it's probably not) but there are other things we care about too that capitalism is not good at providing.
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  The opportunity to not be obsessed with stuff is one benefit of the path we've taken. Perhaps you'd have to know Greatest/Silent generation people more to see the change.
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
Greed, destruction and misery are the defaults. Any system which scales at all will amplify them.
Turing_Machine 10y ago
And yet capitalist societies are invariably the ones that people actually want to live in. You didn't see West German border guards shooting people who were trying to get into East Germany. You don't see people leaving Miami for Havana on rafts they've made out of trash bags full of styrofoam packing peanuts. Why is that, do you suppose?
tomjen3 10y ago
Capitalism uses greed, but a person in the Soviet Union would still be greedy. Capitalism uses the environment and when you mine something you use a resource. Capitalism was not really present in Nazi Germany and they were the cause of an unbelievable amount of destruction. Human missery? Capitalism has almost eliminated all human missery, we are talking about it being a reasonable goal that by 2035 the should be no humans living at less than a dollar (adjusted for inflation) a day. In the last 15 years that number was cut in half, and it stayed mostly constant from 1900 to 1960 despite the fact that the worlds population grew massively. The only reason you can even write that is that you have no idea what human missery was before Capitalism.

Capitalism also drives greed, destruction and human misery as well as some other pretty evil things.

by mesh 10y ago

Capitalism also drives greed, destruction and human misery as well as some other pretty evil things.

Also, the tragedy of the commons. Companies pollute our environment externalizing costs on society. They collect the profits, we pay for the damage. The weakest point of capitalism is the same as its greatest advantage - greed.

wyager 10y ago
> Companies pollute our environment externalizing costs on society. Interestingly, historical experiments in communism have led to vastly increased rates of environmental destruction as compared to market economies. The reason is fairly obvious if you have a some economic background and think about it for a bit; in a market economy with resource ownership, people who own resource rights (e.g. to fell the trees in an area) will notice that they can make a lot more money if they spread the resource sales over time; if they sell all their trees now, they'll push down the market value of lumber and have decreasing marginal returns on each tree they fell. In the presence of a rich market system including market mechanisms like futures, market participants make a lot more money planning for the future than just trashing the environment as fast as possible. Compare this to a communist state. The people in charge of resource management don't make money anyway, so they don't really care about the same optimization a capitalist would. Of course, they can buy political favor at little cost to them by pushing way down the diminishing marginal returns curve and exhausting a resource way faster than a self-interested capitalist would. Great job, commissar, look at all this wood! After all, if you can make your peers happy for a few years you'll get a promotion to a better government position (or retire early on your pension) and the fact that this area is now barren is someone else's problem.
- Someone 10y ago
  That doesn't always work. If you expect demand for lumber will go down in a few years, as far as you can tell forever, it's better for you to take out your trees as fast as possible. I think that's part of what's happening with oil, where renewable sources are going to replace them as a bulk good. If you have lots of it like Saudi Arabia, your capitalism-optimal strategy may be to pump up oil now, even if it significantly drives down prices. It also may be rational to destructively mine lumber if that's the only way you can produce it competitively. Your competition might own woods closer to rivers, for example, making it cheaper for them to transport their wood to the customer.
- paublyrne 10y ago
  I don't know a huge amount about this. Just wondering though, if those increased rates of environmental damage could also be related to communist states tending to have restrictions on the press, which in turn makes it easier for corruption to flourish. What you're saying certainly makes sense though.
- dv_dt 10y ago
  I've always felt that the big arguments stacking Capitalism and Communism seem to revolve around the practical results of distributed vs centralized allocation of resources - and yet that seems to be a feature that is mostly tangential to both economic theories. Yes, many centrally planned Communist economies failed, but we seem to be approaching a centralization by concentration in the US - where we can't get broad public goods agreed upon (even though private healthcare e.g. has been a clear economic inefficiency compared to public). It's a big economic disconnect akin to the disconnect of factory workers in Communist-centralized factories not being motivated or allowed to improve the output. Wouldn't it be ironic if all the energy directed to arguing Communism vs Capitalism had completely missed the fundamental principles on both sides?

friedman23 10y ago

All the things you described existed before capitalism and will exist after capitalism.

witty_username 10y ago

What is wrong with greed? Most people want more money. Is it wrong for a poor person to earn more money? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWsx1X8PV_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWsx1X8PV_A

Retra 10y ago
It is wrong to idealize the desire for more money to the point where you hurt people to achieve it. That's what "greed" means. It doesn't mean "wanting more". It means wanting too much. And tautologically, "too much" is too much to want.
- witty_username 10y ago
  Just like stealing, hurting people is not part of capitalism. What is "too much"? Do people here, who are mostly globally (and often nationally) rich, earn "too much" money?
  - fictioncircle 10y ago
    Refusing life saving assistance except in return for payment is part of the pattern of Capitalism. You cannot ignore externalities inherent to a system and claim yourself absolved of the consequences.
    - wyager 10y ago
      > Refusing life saving assistance except in return for payment is part of the pattern of Capitalism. Comments like this must come from a background of absolute ignorance of utility theory or quantitative economics. I can't think that anyone would make this complaint if they thought critically for a moment about what they were suggesting. Whether you like it or not, we live in a universe with scarce resources. Humans have finite time, matter, and energy that we need to allocate. As of today (or at least the very near future), it's probably possible to keep any individual human alive for arbitrarily long. We just might burn trillions of dollars doing it. Obviously, even to someone who can't multiply, this doesn't make sense. If we did our absolute best to keep everyone in the world alive, we would run out of resources immediately. Now, let's say instead of trillions of dollars, it's millions. This is a plausible multi-year treatment cost. Now instead of running out of resources at 10 people, it's 10,000,000 people. This is still less than the number of people in the world who would plausibly rack up these kind of costs if we didn't "refuse life-saving assistance except in return for payment". The unfortunate harsh reality is that everyone's life has a finite value. It doesn't make sense to spend more resources keeping someone alive than they're worth; as I said, you'd run out of resources very quickly, even if we pretend it makes sense to dedicate 100% of humanity's output to medicine. Additionally, some people's lives are worth more to everyone else than others. People revile this fact for many reasons, but that's how it is. The market, and most individuals, place a higher value on the life of, say, a surgeon than on that of a busker. The market is a way to (surprisingly accurately) stochastically approximate the value people place on things, including the time of other people. A surgeon gets paid more because (assuming the market is allowed to operate unimpeded) they are valued more, and it therefore makes sense that (through the indirection of money) they are able to pay for that expensive multi-million dollar treatment if they get some complicated disease. Common objections to this include "what about rich retired people who aren't productive anymore", and the answer is that if people knew they couldn't spend the money they were saving right now later on, this would induce even more drastic inefficiencies than that of rich retirees being able to afford medical care more than people still in the workforce.

wyager 10y ago

> Capitalism also drives greed, destruction and human misery Interesting you say this, because (by a huge margin) the worst instances of all these things took place under non-capitalist governments. Here's a good rundown wrt destruction and human misery: http://necrometrics.com/20c5m.htm http://necrometrics.com/20c5m.htm The most incredibly flourishing of human potential has, around and since the renaissance, occurred in market environments. It looks like greed and destruction and misery are probably going to happen no matter what (at least, no one has figured out to prevent them yet), but they seem to actually be minimized in market societies.

thinkloop 10y ago

The problem is simpler than that: capitalism optimizes for resource allocation, while humans care about more than resources. Stuff is extremely important to our happiness (without getting into that it's probably not) but there are other things we care about too that capitalism is not good at providing.

ArkyBeagle 10y ago
The opportunity to not be obsessed with stuff is one benefit of the path we've taken. Perhaps you'd have to know Greatest/Silent generation people more to see the change.

ArkyBeagle 10y ago

Greed, destruction and misery are the defaults. Any system which scales at all will amplify them.

Turing_Machine 10y ago

And yet capitalist societies are invariably the ones that people actually want to live in. You didn't see West German border guards shooting people who were trying to get into East Germany. You don't see people leaving Miami for Havana on rafts they've made out of trash bags full of styrofoam packing peanuts. Why is that, do you suppose?

tomjen3 10y ago

Capitalism uses greed, but a person in the Soviet Union would still be greedy. Capitalism uses the environment and when you mine something you use a resource. Capitalism was not really present in Nazi Germany and they were the cause of an unbelievable amount of destruction. Human missery? Capitalism has almost eliminated all human missery, we are talking about it being a reasonable goal that by 2035 the should be no humans living at less than a dollar (adjusted for inflation) a day. In the last 15 years that number was cut in half, and it stayed mostly constant from 1900 to 1960 despite the fact that the worlds population grew massively. The only reason you can even write that is that you have no idea what human missery was before Capitalism.