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Capitalist countries have much higher standards of living than anti-capitalist countries. That is fact, not opinion.
by cgmg 9y ago
Capitalist countries have much higher standards of living than anti-capitalist countries. That is fact, not opinion.
- mrguyorama 9y agoThat ignores about a billion confounding factors. Correlation, causation, not equal to, and all that
- monort 9y agoThere are some experiments with control group. South/North Korea, West/East Germany. Taiwan/Mainland China.
- mrguyorama 9y agoThose "experiments" are not nearly robust enough to make such claims.
- cgmg 9y agoWhy?
- geezerjay 9y ago> Those "experiments" are not nearly robust enough to make such claims. ...and yet here you are making the exact opposite claims that have absolutely no basis in reality and go against any fact, and somehow you show no concern regarding lack of evidence or facts supporting your claims.
- cgmg 9y agoWhat are these confounding factors you speak of?
- vkou 9y agoAnd all of them completely rely on fossil fuels. Without them, we'd still have middle-ages-level wealth, life expectancies, and standard of living. [1] Non-capitalist countries also made huge improvements in standards of living, as they industrialized. Again, industrialization is the common factor, not the economic system. [1] Short, nasty, and brutish.
- cgmg 9y ago> Non-capitalist countries also made huge improvements in standards of living Not as much as capitalist countries. That's the point.
- vkou 9y agoIf you want to credit that to capitalism, capitalism was a multiplier to national economic prosperity. However, you need something to multiply for there to be any prosperity. Capitalism for stone-age people would not have resulted in prosperity, wealth, or rising standard of living, just as it did not cause it in industrial age people. Fossil fuels did. Crediting capitalism is putting the cart before the horse. Just because electrification happened faster in the West then the USSR, doesn't mean that electricity isn't the reason why both societies became more prosperous. Life was largely shit for most people for most of history, and it wasn't because because people didn't figure out that private ownership of the means of production is more efficient at producing widgets then state-owned means of production. When 70% of your population is growing just enough food to feed themselves, and the other 30% are banging rocks together to make tools for the first group, you don't have time to think about inventing antibiotics or bitcoin or bicycles.