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>Fighting poverty is a social and political problem. It is simply a question of will. We have enough wealth on earth to provide food, clothing, and housing to e

>Fighting poverty is a social and political problem. It is simply a question of will. We have enough wealth on earth to provide food, clothing, and housing to every single human being. Why don't we do it? That's a political question. The technology is trivial. Because there is a huge and complex domain of human motivation, appreciation for hard-earned things vs. taking them for granted and so on. USSR tried doing exactly that with the planned economy and trying to distribute the wealth more or less evenly and failed miserably. Mostly because people lost motivation for achievement and started blatantly faking numbers and statistics since the connection between the results of their work and their life quality was completely lost. As someone who survived that crash, I would really hope that SV can learn from others' mistakes rather than repeating them.

lsc 9y ago
eh, You can have a very strong welfare state that provides minimal food, shelter, medical care and clothing to everyone who needs it without having a planned economy. They really are different issues. there's a big difference between a welfare state and full out socialism; the difference is largely about power... Socialisim is about giving the workers control over the means of production. The welfare state is merely about seeing to it that people don't starve. We're rich enough, in America, at least, that with tax increases, we could provide the minimum for everyone, and pay for it out of the sorts of taxes we pay now (only, of couse, somewhat more) There was a lot of effort in that direction here and in the UK in the '70s; there was a lot of criticism that the public housing, for instance, wasn't very nice, but what really ended it was the rise of the political movement that backed Thatcher (in the UK) and Reagan (in the US)
- eartheaterrr 9y ago
  I like your reasoning, and I agree that we need more effort toward social programs that provide basic needs for the population. One argument against such programs is that they could allow people to have a lifestyle where they choose to never work, yet live a comfortable life and have lots of children. It seems like this could cause extreme population growth, but in a very bad way. Am I missing something, or is there a solution to address that problem?
  - tonmoy 9y ago
    Your logic assumes that most people are so shallow that they would stop working/trying to improve their conditions after they are able to live “comfortably”. There are several wealthy countries that provide this kind of welfare without much population growth or lazy workforce. On the other hand there are counties like Bangladesh that saw rapid growth in population in the 80s even though most people were very very poor - in fact the country’s pouplation growth has demolished now that more people can live comfortably due to increased wealth and access to education.
  - Frondo 9y ago
    The leap you're making, that I don't understand, is that if people didn't have to work, they'd start having huge families en masse. Why do you think that would happen? Is there any basis for having that concern?
    - godzillabrennus 9y ago
      Sex is fun, it’s free, and procreation is a biologically driven part of being human. The argument is that if we give people a basic sustainable way to live and the least motivated to improve their condition will likely fall back to the basics.
      - yorwba 9y ago
        Children are annoying, though. I doubt most people would start having huge families if they can easily prevent it while still having sex.
  - raquo 9y ago
    There's a huge gap between the current situation and a system where people on welfare who choose not to work are able to live "comfortably" in perpetuity. Somewhere within that gap is a decent system where poor people don't starve but are still incentivized to improve their situation. I also don't really see how having children relates to any of this. On the other hand, automation will probably force us into a welfare state one way or another.
- cmurf 9y ago
  Socialism is state (in some sense the public if it is also a democracy) owning the means of production. Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production. Workers owning the means of production is syndicalism.
  - lsc 9y ago
    I think I agree that you are more correct, especially as I specifically said 'workers' and not 'people' - syndicalism, as I understand it, is mostly about the workers in a particular industry (or factory) controlling said industry (or factory) however, it doesn't really change my point; Either way, socialism is about control of the means of production, and my point is that you can have a welfare state without changing the control of the means of production, as long as you have a means of significant taxation, which we have in place in the US already.
  - Parcissons 9y ago
    Capitalism is the private companys becoming little states of nepotism. So capitalism always leads to distributed socialism.
  - eeZah7Ux 9y ago
    Wikipedia page on socialism: "Social ownership may refer to forms of public, collective or cooperative ownership, or to citizen ownership of equity."
Fuzzy_Logic 9y ago
An additional problem is one of economic calculation. Mises argued one hundred years ago that a planned economy where the state owns the means of production and arbitrarily sets prices without an open market to determine prices by supply and demand would result in economic waste and shortages. He was largely proven right by the disastrous Soviet experience. https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/excursions/ludwig-von-mises-economic-calculation-under-socialism-part-1 https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/excursion...
- jjoonathan 9y ago
  In a capitalist system, a zero sum game in which titans buy ads to pull marketshare back and forth between each other creates value, yet feeding a starving person does not. That's a ridiculous statement, of course, but it demonstrates that the economic notion of value can diverge wildly from most other reasonable notions of value. The seemingly inoffensive "economic value = value" approximation is actually a trojan horse used by libertarians to sneak the more objectionable aspects of their theories past casual observers and put a tautological halo over markets and their preferences. It's a point worth keeping in mind when considering complaints that X system doesn't optimize economic value.
- fuck_google 9y ago
  There were however plans to move from 5 year plans to realtime planning with the help of computers, which would have probably worked a bit better as the planning could have been automated, made better use of optimization and react to changes much faster.
- TFYS 9y ago
  While he might have been right one hundred years ago, the economic calculation problem might not be a problem anymore. We're starting to get to the point where we have enough computing power to simulate the world economy. Everyone also now has a way to communicate their needs instantly to a computer. Compared to what could be achieved with todays technology, the price mechanism is inaccurate and slow.
  - 9y ago
gumby 9y ago
> USSR tried doing exactly that with the planned economy and trying to distribute the wealth more or less evenly and failed miserably. Actually if you look at where they started and where they got, they did a pretty good job in raising the very poorest our of poverty, electrifying the country, and really eliminating a lot of the abject poverty that was most of the country at the time of the revolution. Changes that the former (imperial) regime seemed uninterested in making. Even into the 1950s and even 1960s quite a lot of people, including a surprisingly large amount of US government officials, thought that there was a chance the USSR could surpass the USA. I think such people were delusional, since the signs were pretty clear at the time (I was a child at that time, but I did study the USSR in the 1980s when it was very obviously not a threat to the west). Don't get me wrong: the USSR was founded by a bunch of bloodthirsty assholes (Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky et al) and, for various reasons developed into a, yes, evil system. I don't blame it entirely on the people involved -- I think anyone who tries to follow that model, even with good intensions (and it's not clear the Bolsheviks had good intentions) is going to end up with a shitty result. But dispassionately one thing they did accomplish was the thing you said they failed miserably at. And it's unlikely the Menshevik republicans would have pulled that off.
- deleted 9y ago
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- deleted 9y ago
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- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  They were successful by the late 30s (after lots of misery), but the Russian economy had been growing for a long time. I'm not sure the imperials or republicans couldn't have pulled it off, Russia had lots of natural advantages, especially after winning WW2. GNP: Country 1890 1900 1913 1925 1938 Russia/USSR 21 180 32 000 52 420 32 600 75 964 Germany 26 454 35 800 49 760 45 002 77 178 Britain 29 441 36 273 44 074 43 700 56 103 France 19 758 23 500 27 401 36 262 39 284 They went from the second smallest economy in 1890 to the biggest in 1913 (imperials). The economy crashed after the revolution and bad economic experiments and then rebounded. Russia was late to the industrial revolution so a lot of that growth was just it kicking in, along with the Soviets removing anyone that got in the way. Hard to say how much can be attributed to either. They were holding their own late into WWI and actually had an agreement to obtain Istanbul, which the Bolsheviks revoked (hard to fault them) along with all that they gave up in the separate treaty with the Germans. Imagine them sticking it out to 1918 with gains from being on the allies and the revolution averted. They would have been as well positioned as anyone in Europe.
praulv 9y ago
And you think American capitalism provides "gratification" in being a corporate drone in middle management ticking checkboxes for your next paycheck? I'd gain much more happiness in seeing equality of all people around me, knowing my hard work benefits all, than feeding dividend-sucking corporate greed.
amelius 9y ago
> people lost motivation for achievement (...) since the connection between the results of their work and their life quality was completely lost. But this is the case for lots of people with a fixed salary.

lsc 9y ago

eh, You can have a very strong welfare state that provides minimal food, shelter, medical care and clothing to everyone who needs it without having a planned economy. They really are different issues. there's a big difference between a welfare state and full out socialism; the difference is largely about power... Socialisim is about giving the workers control over the means of production. The welfare state is merely about seeing to it that people don't starve. We're rich enough, in America, at least, that with tax increases, we could provide the minimum for everyone, and pay for it out of the sorts of taxes we pay now (only, of couse, somewhat more) There was a lot of effort in that direction here and in the UK in the '70s; there was a lot of criticism that the public housing, for instance, wasn't very nice, but what really ended it was the rise of the political movement that backed Thatcher (in the UK) and Reagan (in the US)

eartheaterrr 9y ago
I like your reasoning, and I agree that we need more effort toward social programs that provide basic needs for the population. One argument against such programs is that they could allow people to have a lifestyle where they choose to never work, yet live a comfortable life and have lots of children. It seems like this could cause extreme population growth, but in a very bad way. Am I missing something, or is there a solution to address that problem?
- tonmoy 9y ago
  Your logic assumes that most people are so shallow that they would stop working/trying to improve their conditions after they are able to live “comfortably”. There are several wealthy countries that provide this kind of welfare without much population growth or lazy workforce. On the other hand there are counties like Bangladesh that saw rapid growth in population in the 80s even though most people were very very poor - in fact the country’s pouplation growth has demolished now that more people can live comfortably due to increased wealth and access to education.
- Frondo 9y ago
  The leap you're making, that I don't understand, is that if people didn't have to work, they'd start having huge families en masse. Why do you think that would happen? Is there any basis for having that concern?
  - godzillabrennus 9y ago
    Sex is fun, it’s free, and procreation is a biologically driven part of being human. The argument is that if we give people a basic sustainable way to live and the least motivated to improve their condition will likely fall back to the basics.
    - yorwba 9y ago
      Children are annoying, though. I doubt most people would start having huge families if they can easily prevent it while still having sex.
- raquo 9y ago
  There's a huge gap between the current situation and a system where people on welfare who choose not to work are able to live "comfortably" in perpetuity. Somewhere within that gap is a decent system where poor people don't starve but are still incentivized to improve their situation. I also don't really see how having children relates to any of this. On the other hand, automation will probably force us into a welfare state one way or another.
cmurf 9y ago
Socialism is state (in some sense the public if it is also a democracy) owning the means of production. Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production. Workers owning the means of production is syndicalism.
- lsc 9y ago
  I think I agree that you are more correct, especially as I specifically said 'workers' and not 'people' - syndicalism, as I understand it, is mostly about the workers in a particular industry (or factory) controlling said industry (or factory) however, it doesn't really change my point; Either way, socialism is about control of the means of production, and my point is that you can have a welfare state without changing the control of the means of production, as long as you have a means of significant taxation, which we have in place in the US already.
- Parcissons 9y ago
  Capitalism is the private companys becoming little states of nepotism. So capitalism always leads to distributed socialism.
- eeZah7Ux 9y ago
  Wikipedia page on socialism: "Social ownership may refer to forms of public, collective or cooperative ownership, or to citizen ownership of equity."

Fuzzy_Logic 9y ago

An additional problem is one of economic calculation. Mises argued one hundred years ago that a planned economy where the state owns the means of production and arbitrarily sets prices without an open market to determine prices by supply and demand would result in economic waste and shortages. He was largely proven right by the disastrous Soviet experience. https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/excursions/ludwig-von-mises-economic-calculation-under-socialism-part-1 https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/excursion...

jjoonathan 9y ago
In a capitalist system, a zero sum game in which titans buy ads to pull marketshare back and forth between each other creates value, yet feeding a starving person does not. That's a ridiculous statement, of course, but it demonstrates that the economic notion of value can diverge wildly from most other reasonable notions of value. The seemingly inoffensive "economic value = value" approximation is actually a trojan horse used by libertarians to sneak the more objectionable aspects of their theories past casual observers and put a tautological halo over markets and their preferences. It's a point worth keeping in mind when considering complaints that X system doesn't optimize economic value.
fuck_google 9y ago
There were however plans to move from 5 year plans to realtime planning with the help of computers, which would have probably worked a bit better as the planning could have been automated, made better use of optimization and react to changes much faster.
TFYS 9y ago
While he might have been right one hundred years ago, the economic calculation problem might not be a problem anymore. We're starting to get to the point where we have enough computing power to simulate the world economy. Everyone also now has a way to communicate their needs instantly to a computer. Compared to what could be achieved with todays technology, the price mechanism is inaccurate and slow.
- 9y ago

gumby 9y ago

> USSR tried doing exactly that with the planned economy and trying to distribute the wealth more or less evenly and failed miserably. Actually if you look at where they started and where they got, they did a pretty good job in raising the very poorest our of poverty, electrifying the country, and really eliminating a lot of the abject poverty that was most of the country at the time of the revolution. Changes that the former (imperial) regime seemed uninterested in making. Even into the 1950s and even 1960s quite a lot of people, including a surprisingly large amount of US government officials, thought that there was a chance the USSR could surpass the USA. I think such people were delusional, since the signs were pretty clear at the time (I was a child at that time, but I did study the USSR in the 1980s when it was very obviously not a threat to the west). Don't get me wrong: the USSR was founded by a bunch of bloodthirsty assholes (Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky et al) and, for various reasons developed into a, yes, evil system. I don't blame it entirely on the people involved -- I think anyone who tries to follow that model, even with good intensions (and it's not clear the Bolsheviks had good intentions) is going to end up with a shitty result. But dispassionately one thing they did accomplish was the thing you said they failed miserably at. And it's unlikely the Menshevik republicans would have pulled that off.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
aaron-lebo 9y ago
They were successful by the late 30s (after lots of misery), but the Russian economy had been growing for a long time. I'm not sure the imperials or republicans couldn't have pulled it off, Russia had lots of natural advantages, especially after winning WW2. GNP: Country 1890 1900 1913 1925 1938 Russia/USSR 21 180 32 000 52 420 32 600 75 964 Germany 26 454 35 800 49 760 45 002 77 178 Britain 29 441 36 273 44 074 43 700 56 103 France 19 758 23 500 27 401 36 262 39 284 They went from the second smallest economy in 1890 to the biggest in 1913 (imperials). The economy crashed after the revolution and bad economic experiments and then rebounded. Russia was late to the industrial revolution so a lot of that growth was just it kicking in, along with the Soviets removing anyone that got in the way. Hard to say how much can be attributed to either. They were holding their own late into WWI and actually had an agreement to obtain Istanbul, which the Bolsheviks revoked (hard to fault them) along with all that they gave up in the separate treaty with the Germans. Imagine them sticking it out to 1918 with gains from being on the allies and the revolution averted. They would have been as well positioned as anyone in Europe.

praulv 9y ago

And you think American capitalism provides "gratification" in being a corporate drone in middle management ticking checkboxes for your next paycheck? I'd gain much more happiness in seeing equality of all people around me, knowing my hard work benefits all, than feeding dividend-sucking corporate greed.

amelius 9y ago

> people lost motivation for achievement (...) since the connection between the results of their work and their life quality was completely lost. But this is the case for lots of people with a fixed salary.