11 ms·

Capitalism approximates meritocracy, but democracy certainly does not.

_emacsomancer_ 9y ago
Only if you 'reset' it every year. Eventually particular companies become big enough that they hard to compete against (e.g. they can artificially depress prices until their competition goes out of business) and bribe governments etc etc
- jeoi2838 9y ago
  That’s true of every empire that’s existed It has nothing to do with the framework one uses to describe the current context and every thing to do with human behavior I’m with number theory: everyone should have the same social authority Fiefdoms and private ownership of capital should be in the waste bin It was rich people that came up with capitalism Shocking it protects the wealthy
- refurb 9y ago
  I question just how much influence big companies have. Thing about how many big companies you know stay big for decades? There were many mammoth US companies that no longer exist or are a shell of their former self.
  - adventured 9y ago
    It's a mixed bag, about half & half on the turnover part. GE, IBM, Sears, Alcoa, AT&T, GM, Ford, Xerox, Kodak, US Steel. Nobody seriously thinks of these companies as dominate giants today. Kodak and Sears are dead. Alcoa & US Steel are barely surviving in the era of Chinese production. Walmart is still holding on (with several straight years of contracting profits now), we'll see how they do the next ten years as Amazon's growth starts cutting into the muscle. A lot of people think the newer power group is exclusive to tech companies. However, Home Depot, as an example, was a far smaller company 10 and 20 years ago. Today it's worth $220 billion (with sales & profit that largely justify that). Disney is thought of as a conquering media juggernaut today. ~15 years ago it was worth $23 billion and its business was in disarray. 20 years ago Amgen was a barely a speck on Pfizer's wall. Gilead today is worth 100 times what it was 20 years ago. The same is conceptually true of Genzyme, Biogen and Celgene. Just ten years ago Netflix - which is part media company, part tech company - was worth less than two billion dollars. In the meantime it has blatantly surpassed companies like Fox, CBS, NBC, Viacom, etc. in the media game. 20 years ago 3M was a small shadow of GE, worth about 10% of what GE was. Now it's worth more than GE, with a 6x increase in valuation in that time. Boeing is thought of as a perpetual industrial titan. Not so however. As recently as 2003 it was worth a mere $15 billion. United Technologies is worth ten times what it was in the mid 1990s. Procter & Gamble was a sleepy, almost comatose, consumer goods company in the early 1990s. Johnson & Johnson was a far smaller, rather dusty company as recently as 1994, worth about ~$25 billion. Now it's worth $354 billion.
  - _emacsomancer_ 9y ago
    From an ordinary person point of view, what does it matter if it's the same megacorp or a new megacorp? If it's ATT or Comcast? So many things are part of huge conglomerates that I really don't think many of the theoretical advantages of capitalism end up manifesting.
- askvictor 9y ago
  Not only companies but people's wealth needs to be reset too. If you got rid of inheritance, then you might get closer to a meritocracy.
jeoi2838 9y ago
Capitalism is a set of human invented rails for economic behavior that has no basis in natural law (outside humans being a facet of nature that invented it). If it did we’d call it physics, and it would be studied by physicists, and vetted by rigorous experiments What humans are doing is religion. Brainwashing the masses to abide by social norms. The control knobs being in the hands of storied families Just like society worked before capitalism was a word They repacked divine mandate as “of course in this time and place, since I have the means, my family calls the shots. To consider otherwise would be terrible.” When pre-capitalist James Madison is quoted as writing the government ought “to protect the opulent minority from the majority.” there’s no amount of mental gymnastics that will convince me otherwise. That forced social trade of our time is upheld by so-called freedom loving people as fair... yeaaah. I’ve read it all, from Kant, Freire, Rousseau, Foucault, Chomsky, etc etc... Nothing in modern society strikes me as anything more than “build a pyramid for the ruler of this fiefdom.” When the most reliable polls suggest we’d rather work on housing, feeding, and caring for each other, but we spend our time following Wall Street and SV, we’re not working for each other or ourselves

Only if you 'reset' it every year. Eventually particular companies become big enough that they hard to compete against (e.g. they can artificially depress prices until their competition goes out of business) and bribe governments etc etc

jeoi2838 9y ago
That’s true of every empire that’s existed It has nothing to do with the framework one uses to describe the current context and every thing to do with human behavior I’m with number theory: everyone should have the same social authority Fiefdoms and private ownership of capital should be in the waste bin It was rich people that came up with capitalism Shocking it protects the wealthy
refurb 9y ago
I question just how much influence big companies have. Thing about how many big companies you know stay big for decades? There were many mammoth US companies that no longer exist or are a shell of their former self.
- adventured 9y ago
  It's a mixed bag, about half & half on the turnover part. GE, IBM, Sears, Alcoa, AT&T, GM, Ford, Xerox, Kodak, US Steel. Nobody seriously thinks of these companies as dominate giants today. Kodak and Sears are dead. Alcoa & US Steel are barely surviving in the era of Chinese production. Walmart is still holding on (with several straight years of contracting profits now), we'll see how they do the next ten years as Amazon's growth starts cutting into the muscle. A lot of people think the newer power group is exclusive to tech companies. However, Home Depot, as an example, was a far smaller company 10 and 20 years ago. Today it's worth $220 billion (with sales & profit that largely justify that). Disney is thought of as a conquering media juggernaut today. ~15 years ago it was worth $23 billion and its business was in disarray. 20 years ago Amgen was a barely a speck on Pfizer's wall. Gilead today is worth 100 times what it was 20 years ago. The same is conceptually true of Genzyme, Biogen and Celgene. Just ten years ago Netflix - which is part media company, part tech company - was worth less than two billion dollars. In the meantime it has blatantly surpassed companies like Fox, CBS, NBC, Viacom, etc. in the media game. 20 years ago 3M was a small shadow of GE, worth about 10% of what GE was. Now it's worth more than GE, with a 6x increase in valuation in that time. Boeing is thought of as a perpetual industrial titan. Not so however. As recently as 2003 it was worth a mere $15 billion. United Technologies is worth ten times what it was in the mid 1990s. Procter & Gamble was a sleepy, almost comatose, consumer goods company in the early 1990s. Johnson & Johnson was a far smaller, rather dusty company as recently as 1994, worth about ~$25 billion. Now it's worth $354 billion.
- _emacsomancer_ 9y ago
  From an ordinary person point of view, what does it matter if it's the same megacorp or a new megacorp? If it's ATT or Comcast? So many things are part of huge conglomerates that I really don't think many of the theoretical advantages of capitalism end up manifesting.
askvictor 9y ago
Not only companies but people's wealth needs to be reset too. If you got rid of inheritance, then you might get closer to a meritocracy.

jeoi2838 9y ago

Capitalism is a set of human invented rails for economic behavior that has no basis in natural law (outside humans being a facet of nature that invented it). If it did we’d call it physics, and it would be studied by physicists, and vetted by rigorous experiments What humans are doing is religion. Brainwashing the masses to abide by social norms. The control knobs being in the hands of storied families Just like society worked before capitalism was a word They repacked divine mandate as “of course in this time and place, since I have the means, my family calls the shots. To consider otherwise would be terrible.” When pre-capitalist James Madison is quoted as writing the government ought “to protect the opulent minority from the majority.” there’s no amount of mental gymnastics that will convince me otherwise. That forced social trade of our time is upheld by so-called freedom loving people as fair... yeaaah. I’ve read it all, from Kant, Freire, Rousseau, Foucault, Chomsky, etc etc... Nothing in modern society strikes me as anything more than “build a pyramid for the ruler of this fiefdom.” When the most reliable polls suggest we’d rather work on housing, feeding, and caring for each other, but we spend our time following Wall Street and SV, we’re not working for each other or ourselves