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That's only somewhat true. It will smooth out living standards as it crushes working people down by exploiting the lowest wages anywhere in the globe. Simultane

That's only somewhat true. It will smooth out living standards as it crushes working people down by exploiting the lowest wages anywhere in the globe. Simultaneously, the wealthy bourgeoisie will become richer and richer until the internal contradiction in capitalism, that profits come from consumers that must work for wages, tears the system asunder. The system that follows will likely be fascism, the seamless merger of corporations with the state to force exploited workers to work, or socialism, the people taking control of the government and using it to expropriate the rich in favor of workers. EDIT: Note that this doesn't require central planning, the rad idea these days are socialisms based on co-ops where employees own the organization they are a part of. If the system is fascist, living standards will sharply drop for everyone subjected to that system. If the system is a form of socialism, then yes differences will even out. The GDP of the United States divided by its population is roughly 55k in today's dollars, though certain services like medicine and housing will have their profits expropriated so 55k will go much further. If we look at world GDP, the income of all people will be closer to 11k USD, which might be barely livable, but will eradicate extreme poverty across the globe. We have a lot of work to do to treat humanity well and in a way the planet can survive.

Consultant32452 9y ago
If any of the previous experiments with socialism are any indication, fascism and socialism have the same approximate outcomes.
- jadedhacker 9y ago
  The old idea that occurred in the Soviet Union was not the only possible outcome. That idea was for a vanguard party to take control of the country and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. Unfortunately, this dictatorship was exactly that... it concentrated power in the hands of a small minority and lead to tremendous abuses. However, it also lead to obscenely rapid industrialization in one of the poorest most besieged countries in the world. Russia, post WW1 and WW2 was not a happy place having lost millions of soldiers to invasions by Germany, Japan, the US, and others. It is an open question what would have happened had they not been besieged. However, that is counterfactual, and there were large abuses, especially in the Ukraine. Other countries, like China, have produced significant abuses, but notably they are also rising economic powers. They are no longer strictly communist, but nor are they totally capitalist. China recently announced a plan to eliminate poverty within its borders (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/31/world/asia/xi-jinping-poverty-china.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/31/world/asia/xi-jinping-pov...). While you might say that they won't be able to do it, that would fly in the face of their 6+% (!) GDP growth. Can you imagine a US politician ever making a statement like that? Not since FDR have we seen anything like it. The closest we had was MLK's Poor People's Campaign in the late 60s. The new hip idea is for power to remain mostly decentralized to prevent this outcome. Hence, worker coops. If more stakeholders participate in decisions, hopefully fewer truly awful ones will occur. I could go on, but there is a lively debate going on right now that much of the US public is asleep to having been lulled into a zombie like state by Carter, Regan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump. It's acceptable to think about the shape of the new world that is coming and have a hand in shaping it. Otherwise the same old, frankly evil, behaviors will continue until something unimaginably terrible happens like a nuclear war or the seas and changing weather sweep our civilization away.
closeparen 9y ago
Years-long waiting lists for apartments shared with many strangers are the historical norm under socialist housing schemes and the only evidence-based expectation were we to implement one today. This despite central-planning allocation of graduates to work assignments and no freedom of internal movement. This alone would probably "solve" the housing crises in major cities today: just stop letting people move to them in such massive numbers. A coworker who grew up in Soviet-era Moscow remarked that it wasn't all bad - homelessness basically didn't exist - but each nuclear family (let alone individual) getting their own home is a development of the contemporary West's uniquely hyper-capitalist and hyper-atomized society. Embracing collectivization is not going to make it easier to get your own home.
- jadedhacker 9y ago
  I really appreciate your perspective. I'm still learning about all of this. My understanding is that most often these setups were started in relatively poor countries that didn't have enough housing to start with. That is not the case in the US where many houses remain vacant in the face of homelessness so that speculators can speculate. In China, they are building entire ghost cities and then filling them as fast as they can. In the Soviet Union, my understanding is that the economy was out of wack because of the need to build the military to defend against Western aggression. If those resources were diverted to the civilian sector, perhaps there would have been more and nicer housing? EDIT: Even in a capitalist country I'm still living with roommates, and this is part of a trend for younger people. That kind of takes the bite out of the criticism that capitalism offers more freedom in that regard. Such freedom once existed, but it has been declining. EDIT2: I like my roommates. Not dissing them at all. :)
  - closeparen 9y ago
    The problem in both cases is urbanization. Soviet central planners explicitly set out to industrialize their agrarian society; market forces are moving America's center of gravity from the Midwestern factory to the coastal R&D office. As populations move (or are ordered to move) to follow these changes, it creates blight and abandonment in the places they leave and a housing crunch in the places they head to. The empty houses are in the places that are no longer economically relevant; the housing crises are in the places everyone is moving to. The Soviets responded by building space-efficient housing in cities as fast as they could, which was just not fast enough. American cities are actively refusing to let this happen at any significant scale. We would first need these cities to decide to want enough housing for their ballooning populations. Then we could argue over whether the state or private developers should build it.
daodedickinson 9y ago
Differences are sure evening out in Venezuela. Good thing we have options other than "facism" and the ultimately indistinguishable "socialism", which is called "fascism" once it gets poor enough.
- jadedhacker 9y ago
  Fwiw, any society that becomes suddenly poor will not look very good. My understanding is that Venezuela invested too much in oil and didn't diversify the economy. When oil crashed, it took everything with it. This is the resource curse at work. I'm skeptical that other economic systems would have not been tempted to make a similar choice. That said, I am not a Venezuela expert.

Consultant32452 9y ago

If any of the previous experiments with socialism are any indication, fascism and socialism have the same approximate outcomes.

jadedhacker 9y ago
The old idea that occurred in the Soviet Union was not the only possible outcome. That idea was for a vanguard party to take control of the country and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. Unfortunately, this dictatorship was exactly that... it concentrated power in the hands of a small minority and lead to tremendous abuses. However, it also lead to obscenely rapid industrialization in one of the poorest most besieged countries in the world. Russia, post WW1 and WW2 was not a happy place having lost millions of soldiers to invasions by Germany, Japan, the US, and others. It is an open question what would have happened had they not been besieged. However, that is counterfactual, and there were large abuses, especially in the Ukraine. Other countries, like China, have produced significant abuses, but notably they are also rising economic powers. They are no longer strictly communist, but nor are they totally capitalist. China recently announced a plan to eliminate poverty within its borders (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/31/world/asia/xi-jinping-poverty-china.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/31/world/asia/xi-jinping-pov...). While you might say that they won't be able to do it, that would fly in the face of their 6+% (!) GDP growth. Can you imagine a US politician ever making a statement like that? Not since FDR have we seen anything like it. The closest we had was MLK's Poor People's Campaign in the late 60s. The new hip idea is for power to remain mostly decentralized to prevent this outcome. Hence, worker coops. If more stakeholders participate in decisions, hopefully fewer truly awful ones will occur. I could go on, but there is a lively debate going on right now that much of the US public is asleep to having been lulled into a zombie like state by Carter, Regan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump. It's acceptable to think about the shape of the new world that is coming and have a hand in shaping it. Otherwise the same old, frankly evil, behaviors will continue until something unimaginably terrible happens like a nuclear war or the seas and changing weather sweep our civilization away.

closeparen 9y ago

Years-long waiting lists for apartments shared with many strangers are the historical norm under socialist housing schemes and the only evidence-based expectation were we to implement one today. This despite central-planning allocation of graduates to work assignments and no freedom of internal movement. This alone would probably "solve" the housing crises in major cities today: just stop letting people move to them in such massive numbers. A coworker who grew up in Soviet-era Moscow remarked that it wasn't all bad - homelessness basically didn't exist - but each nuclear family (let alone individual) getting their own home is a development of the contemporary West's uniquely hyper-capitalist and hyper-atomized society. Embracing collectivization is not going to make it easier to get your own home.

jadedhacker 9y ago
I really appreciate your perspective. I'm still learning about all of this. My understanding is that most often these setups were started in relatively poor countries that didn't have enough housing to start with. That is not the case in the US where many houses remain vacant in the face of homelessness so that speculators can speculate. In China, they are building entire ghost cities and then filling them as fast as they can. In the Soviet Union, my understanding is that the economy was out of wack because of the need to build the military to defend against Western aggression. If those resources were diverted to the civilian sector, perhaps there would have been more and nicer housing? EDIT: Even in a capitalist country I'm still living with roommates, and this is part of a trend for younger people. That kind of takes the bite out of the criticism that capitalism offers more freedom in that regard. Such freedom once existed, but it has been declining. EDIT2: I like my roommates. Not dissing them at all. :)
- closeparen 9y ago
  The problem in both cases is urbanization. Soviet central planners explicitly set out to industrialize their agrarian society; market forces are moving America's center of gravity from the Midwestern factory to the coastal R&D office. As populations move (or are ordered to move) to follow these changes, it creates blight and abandonment in the places they leave and a housing crunch in the places they head to. The empty houses are in the places that are no longer economically relevant; the housing crises are in the places everyone is moving to. The Soviets responded by building space-efficient housing in cities as fast as they could, which was just not fast enough. American cities are actively refusing to let this happen at any significant scale. We would first need these cities to decide to want enough housing for their ballooning populations. Then we could argue over whether the state or private developers should build it.

daodedickinson 9y ago

Differences are sure evening out in Venezuela. Good thing we have options other than "facism" and the ultimately indistinguishable "socialism", which is called "fascism" once it gets poor enough.

jadedhacker 9y ago
Fwiw, any society that becomes suddenly poor will not look very good. My understanding is that Venezuela invested too much in oil and didn't diversify the economy. When oil crashed, it took everything with it. This is the resource curse at work. I'm skeptical that other economic systems would have not been tempted to make a similar choice. That said, I am not a Venezuela expert.