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I do my part in promoting captialism, which has done more to pull children out of poverty than any other program or charity in the world. Free market reforms in

I do my part in promoting captialism, which has done more to pull children out of poverty than any other program or charity in the world. Free market reforms in China and India have done just brain blistering amounts of good in reducing human suffering, from child malnutrition, suicide rates, longevity, and access to healthcare.

c22 8y ago
How do you tease apart the effects of capitalism and industrialism? Or are they inextricably linked in your world view?
- dnautics 8y ago
  Look at the noncapitalistic countries that industrialized and compare outcomes.
  - c22 8y ago
    Can you provide me one or two examples from this set? I found a list on Wikipedia [0] of currently non-capitalist countries and many of them sound like perfectly nice places, but I am not aware of when they all "industrialized" and what their socioeconomic climate was like at the time and it seems like drilling deeper is going to require a lot of research. So an example or two that you know about would be helpful. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anti-capitalist_and_communist_parties_with_national_parliamentary_representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anti-capitalist_and_co...
    - striking 8y ago
      Not all of these countries are "non-capitalist." This is a list of parties that are anti-capitalist/communist, some with only one or two seats in their country's parliament. The introduction to the article even makes this clear: > Of the 66 states listed here, 9 of them are republics ruled by a socialist, communist or anticapitalist party, five of them are official socialist states ruled by a communist party, of them four of them espouse Marxism–Leninism (China, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam) while the fifth (North Korea) espouses Juche. You are probably looking for the current article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_state#List_of_current_socialist_states https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_state#List_of_curren..., or the historical article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_states https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_states.
      - c22 8y ago
        Like I said, much deeper research ;) Thanks for the links, they are a much better jumping off point. I cross-referenced [0] with the tables on [1] and population data from [2] to build this list for further analysis: Country *ist since Total wealth (USD) Mean wealth/adult (USD) Median wealth/adult (USD) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- China 1 October 1949 29,000 billion 26,872 6,689 Pop 2017: 1.386 billion Pop 1949: 542 million* Pop growth/year: 12.41 million Laos 2 December 1975 22 billion 5,662 1,382 Pop 2017: 6.758 million Pop 1975: 3.042 million Pop growth/year: 88,476 Vietnam 2 July 1976 358 billion 5,391 2,235 Pop 2017: 95.54 million Pop 1976: 49.81 million Pop growth/year: 1.12 million Bangladesh 11 April 1971 263 billion 2,612 1,587 Pop 2017: 164.67 million Pop 1971: 66.42 million Pop growth/year: 2.14 million Guyana 6 October 1980 2 billion 5,345 2,510 Pop 2017: 777,859 Pop 1980: 780,153 Pop growth/year: -62 India 18 December 1976 4,987 billion 8,976 4,295 Pop 2017: 1.339 billion Pop 1976: 635.77 million Pop growth/year: 17.15 million Nepal 20 September 2015 40 billion 2,392 1,151 Pop 2017: 29.30 million Pop 2015: 28.66 million Pop growth/year: 320,000 Portugal 2 April 1976 750 billion 89,437 38,242 Pop 2017: 10.29 million Pop 1976: 9.4 million Pop growth/year: 21,707 Sri Lanka 7 September 1978 68 billion 4,802 2,448 Pop 2017: 21.44 million Pop 1978: 14.53 million Pop growth/year: 177,179 Tanzania 26 April 1964 22 billion 858 510 Pop 2017: 57.31 million Pop 1964: 11.34 million Pop growth/year: 867,358 *https://countryeconomy.com/demography/population/china?year=1949 Missing data for: Cuba, North Korea Then I noticed the information at [2] could be remixed in several interesting ways. Looking at charts like [3] and [4] was illuminating. It seems like the "outcomes" of some of these countries are not unfavorable, depending, of course, on what metric you choose to measure. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_state#List_of_current_socialist_states https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_state#List_of_curren... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_per_adult https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe... [2] https://data.worldbank.org https://data.worldbank.org [3] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.KD?locations=CN-BD-VN-TZ-LK-PT-NP-IN-GY https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.KD?location... [4] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.PP.CD?locations=CN-BD-VN-TZ-LK-PT-NP-IN-GY https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.PP.CD?locat...
  - dpc59 8y ago
    Russia made gigantic leaps from 1917 to 1956. They went from absolute backwards shithole to contending world power in 39 years (even less considering ww2 was over 10 years before that).
    - dnautics 8y ago
      What happened after 1956?
    - metiscus 8y ago
      They did so at tremendous human cost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_famine_of_1921%E2%80%9322 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_famine_of_1921%E2%80%9... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1946%E2%80%9347 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1946%E2%80%93...
      - NeutronStar 8y ago
        You're talking like they didn't get invaded by the germans and lost 20M comrades vs the "atrocious war crimes against the jews" that totalled 6M... Russia took a beating and basically stop the german progress for the WEST to be able to regroup and refight way later.
        metiscus 8y ago
        Please understand that I'm not trying to be argumentative; I believe this is a widely misunderstood era of Soviet history. The Holodomor and the 1921 famine predate the Barbarossa invasion significantly. The Holodomor was a product of the dekulakization efforts undertaken as part of the forced farm collectivization. The farm collectivization was driven in part by Stalin's ideology (he disliked the NEP for various reasons) and partly by the need to maintain hard currency levels to purchase machine tools etc from foreign states to maintain its industrialization push. The main exports of the USSR were grain and therefore the quotas were enforced by the NKVD at the expense of the lives of a large number of people. In certain areas, Stalin was persuaded to lower the quotas but in the geographical confines of the Holodomor (largely Ukraine SSR) the quotas were largely maintained. Historians still debate whether the Holodomor was an intentional act of genocide (because Stalin wanted to crush any independence movement within Ukraine SSR) or simply depraved indifference. Conservative estimates of the cost of the Holodomor vary from 3.3-6+ million dead. You implicitly posed an interesting moral question. Can history justify the deaths of 3.3-6+ million (Holodomor), 4+million (dekulakization), 5 million (1921 famine, admittedly coincident with the civil war) when compared to the planned atrocities of the Nazis if we credit those deaths with greatly contributing towards the defeat of the Hitler and the NSDAP? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_Plan
- ChrisLomont 8y ago
  Consider places that try industrialism without capitalism: do they perform worse than those with both? I think the answer is yes, by far. For example, there's plenty of communist countries that had industrialism but failed to grow economically as much as capitalist peers as examples. I'm unaware of many (any?) examples counter to this.
  - scotty79 8y ago
    I think russia did very well, even better than USA when it brought electricity, modern housing and basic education to rural populace. All without shread of capitalism. What ultimately killed communism was exclusion of russia from global technological progress. When there's no tech advancement central planning is way less efficient in running things. But when you just got new tech and need to undertake huge infrastructural projects to spread it I think that central planning has some advantages over capitalism thanks to not requiring having capital or not bothering about immediate profitability or not having to ensure that same entity that invests gets ultimate benefit out of the investment.
  - metiscus 8y ago
    We are at max depth but to address the perceived lack of a shred of capitalism in the USSR, I can't help but point to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy which was espoused by Lenin himself and included a large component of free market capitalism. It was the efforts undertaken by Stalin in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivization_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivization_in_the_Soviet... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization that saw the official state endorsement of capitalism expire. You can see what the effects of that were https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Soviet_Union#/media/File:Soviet_Union_USSR_GDP_per_capita.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Soviet_Union#/m... and draw your own conclusions. --edit-- Note that I thought this comment chain was at max reply depth, this comment was a reply to scotty79 not the parent.
    - ChrisLomont 8y ago
      I agree there was some capitalism, as there is components of it in every economy. Similarly, every economy has mixtures of other systems in it. The issue is how much of the various systems an economy allows. Certainly Soviet Russia was not considered a capitalist system, whereas most of Western Europe and the US were during that period. Your link provides a nice graph [1] showing that USSR and many countries that were capitalist had similar GDP per capita in 1913, but diverged wildly over the following years. I suspect academic has such a graph including more countries along with some rating of how the underlying economic system worked. It would be interesting to see that. I am aware of a decent amount of economic literature that does credit capitalism as a major force for pulling billions out of poverty. Your page seems to back up my point, does it not? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Soviet_Union_USSR_GDP_per_capita.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Soviet_Union_USSR_GDP_per...
- merpnderp 8y ago
  East Germany, West Germany? North Korea, South Korea? Case studies in extremely similar starting points which both tried to industrialize from nearly the same starting point, only differing in how the markets were regulated, with wildly differing outcomes. I imagine if someone could accurately answer your question they'd win a Nobel Prize. But there is little doubt free market economies vastly outperform centralized economies. Plus free markets are about exercising freedom over how your labor and assets are used. So yay freedom.
AtlasBarfed 8y ago
Science produced these possibilities. Capitalism is the distribution method enforced by the military by the rent-seeking ruling classes. Like democracy, it sucks but it's better than what was tried before. Or is it?
- azinman2 8y ago
  Is there a large implementation of any economic model that hasn’t had a military?
tyrust 8y ago
What does it mean to "promote capitalism"?
- los_angeles 8y ago
  Basically buying stuff made in poor countries. This (more than literally anything else) has made a staggering improvement in the lives of hundreds of millions of people over the last few decades.
  - tyrust 8y ago
    That's a big claim, do you have any further reading I could look at about this? That said, I wouldn't call purchasing cheap clothes "promoting capitalism". I'm still interested in user merpnderp's answer.
    - los_angeles 8y ago
      It is a big claim. It's probably the biggest, most important claim of the millennium. And it is really, really good for hundreds of millions (maybe billions). These two are pretty good start points. [1] [2] In short, globalization converted hundreds of millions of would-be Chinese farmers into middle class urbanites in about one generation. It is the most massive improvement of quality of life in world history. It is staggering to consider how much life has improved for so many people in such a short amount of time. This is basically step one of "how do we save the world". First get everyone to a baseline standard of living, then instill ideas of sustainability and environmentalism, then try to boost everyone to a more than bearable standard of living sustainably. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/the-story-of-globalization-in-1-graph/283342/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/the-sto... [2] https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/how-has-globalization-benefited-the-poor https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/how-has-globalization...
      - pmoriarty 8y ago
        Children as young as 4 years old are mining cobalt (used in lithium batteries) by hand in the DRC.[1][2] "More than half the world’s supply of cobalt comes from the DRC, with 20% of cobalt exported coming from artisanal mines in the southern part of the country. In 2012, Unicef estimated that there were 40,000 children working in all the mines across the south, many involved in mining cobalt." "Adult miners dig up to 600ft below the surface using basic tools, without protective clothing or modern machinery. Sometimes the children are sent down into the narrow makeshift chambers where there is constant danger of collapse. "Cobalt is such a health hazard that it has a respiratory disease named after it – cobalt lung, a form of pneumonia which causes coughing and leads to permanent incapacity and even death. "Even simply eating vegetables grown in local soil can cause vomiting and diarrhoea, thyroid damage and fatal lung diseases, while birds and fish cannot survive in the area. "No one knows quite how many children have died mining cobalt in the Katanga region in the south-east of the country. The UN estimates 80 a year, but many more deaths go unregistered, with the bodies buried in the rubble of collapsed tunnels. Others survive but with chronic diseases which destroy their young lives. Girls as young as ten in the mines are subjected to sexual attacks and many become pregnant. The cobalt "ends up in smartphones, cars and computers sold to millions across the world, by household brands including Apple, Microsoft and Vodafone" "Car maker Tesla – the market leader in electric vehicles – plans to produce 500,000 cars per year starting in 2018, and will need 7,800 tons of cobalt to achieve this. Sales are expected to hit 4.4 million by 2021. It means the price of cobalt will soar as the world gears itself up for the electric car revolution, and there is evidence some corporations are cancelling their contracts with regulated mines using industrial technology, and turning increasingly to the cheaper mines using human labour." [1] - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4764208/Child-miners-aged-four-living-hell-Earth.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4764208/Child-miners... [2] - https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/jan/19/children-as-young-as-seven-mining-cobalt-for-use-in-smartphones-says-amnesty https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/jan/19/c...
imsofuture 8y ago
Ahh, yes, capitalism, where we funnel all of our resources to the top and hope the benevolent billionaires will reach down to help those of us in poverty. You're of course correct that industrialization has an outsize positive impact initially. But it's pretty silly to ignore the eventuality of "and then Bill Gates donates money to make the world better!"
ohyes 8y ago
That could just be correlation. India and China were doing fine until the Europeans came and subjugated them. There was some upheaval when the Europeans left and created a power vacuum. Shockingly, being conquered and ceded and the related civil unrest could also be blamed for (for example) strongman dictators that happened to come into power and cause famines, or genocide and sectarian strife. A lot of that conquering was done in the name of capitalism. (The British East India company, specifically). Capitalism is fine, it serves the purpose of obtaining a local optimum in certain trade situations. But it is a completely amoral theory. All it tells us is if this, then that. It is a set of formulas. Sometimes it creates net good, because it causes us to have more efficient and liquid markets, overall creating more wealth for those allowed to participate in the market. But other times it tells us, these people should starve or go homeless, because they don't create economic value. (In true, unbridled capitalism, a lot of marginalized people would simply die). The number of people who don't create economic value will clearly increase if automation of 'work' continues.
- merpnderp 8y ago
  India and China were not doing fine when Europeans came and subjugated them. Slavery in a feudalistic society isn't some rosey funland that the Europeans ruined. Life sucked all over the world, for 99.999% of people, who lived in nearly eternal bone crushing poverty. And how is freely trading your labor and goods for other's labor and goods an immoral system? I would call capitalism the most moral system we've ever devised. I assume you would think some central authority should decide who gets and does what, in some system that graph theory quickly shows runs into O2 complexity with node to node interactions swamping any decision making authority. FYI, having an authority tell people what they can and can't do with their labor sounds suspiciously like slavery, or exactly how the majority of people in India and China lived most of their lives pre-contact - as serfs, just like the rest of the world.
  - eric_h 8y ago
    > how is freely trading your labor and goods for other's labor and goods an immoral system? GP said "amoral" not "immoral". Morality is only a factor in capitalism in so much as it informs the decisions of the actors involved. Both truly moral activities and truly immoral activities can coexist in a capitalist system.
kadenshep 8y ago
No it hasn't. Industrial and scientific advancements are to be credited with this. Not asinine resource allocation systems, that have in fact needlessly let people die.
claudiawerner 8y ago
This is a rather strange position to take, though I can understand your point, unfortunately it misses any qualitative aspects of life, and instead only focuses on the qualitative ones. You have also conveniently forgotten to mention any of capitalism's evils, including imperialist expansion, which has itself been responsible for a great many deaths. Instead, you have focused on the "by-products" of capitalism, that is to say, enlarging a workforce and giveng them what Marx called "double freedom", but at the same time capitalism has also given people double separation - these workers are separated from the means of production, and the products they make. This is no less true in China and India than it is in Britain (especially during the laws passed in the 16th century in the enclosure of the commons). For what it's worth, I do my part in criticising capitalism, spreading the works of those who also criticise it, and prompting people to think of alternative modes of production. I think that not only has capitalism saved a great many lives, but it's improved a great many too. That doesn't mean that it should be here to say, nor that its evils can be ignored. To use an analogy, capitalism is the boat one can use to cross the river; you don't carry the boat with you once you've finished. In another system you refer to capitalism as simply being "freely trading labour and goods". To me, this shows your ignorance of the history of capitalism, and what it is today. Have you read "The Origin of Capitalism"[0] or any contemporary critiques, such as those of the Frankfurt School? In short, capitalism requires a lot of separation and very strange ideas of liberty, which all rely on quite a neat subjectivist-individualist approach. [0] https://www.versobooks.com/books/2407-the-origin-of-capitalism https://www.versobooks.com/books/2407-the-origin-of-capitali...
sushid 8y ago
First of all, an all-out free market at the start of the industrial revolution is when we started seeing horrific child labor become the norm. It only quelled (or flowed to less fortunate regions) once there were legal measures put in place. Second, unless you are a diplomat or a policy maker (er, removed), I don't think you're promoting capitalism more than the rest of us.
dang 8y ago
Please do not break the HN guidelines by taking thread on generic ideological tangents. It leads to trainwrecks of offtopicness, as below. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17498676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17498676 and marked it off-topic.

c22 8y ago

How do you tease apart the effects of capitalism and industrialism? Or are they inextricably linked in your world view?

dnautics 8y ago
Look at the noncapitalistic countries that industrialized and compare outcomes.
- c22 8y ago
  Can you provide me one or two examples from this set? I found a list on Wikipedia [0] of currently non-capitalist countries and many of them sound like perfectly nice places, but I am not aware of when they all "industrialized" and what their socioeconomic climate was like at the time and it seems like drilling deeper is going to require a lot of research. So an example or two that you know about would be helpful. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anti-capitalist_and_communist_parties_with_national_parliamentary_representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anti-capitalist_and_co...
  - striking 8y ago
    Not all of these countries are "non-capitalist." This is a list of parties that are anti-capitalist/communist, some with only one or two seats in their country's parliament. The introduction to the article even makes this clear: > Of the 66 states listed here, 9 of them are republics ruled by a socialist, communist or anticapitalist party, five of them are official socialist states ruled by a communist party, of them four of them espouse Marxism–Leninism (China, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam) while the fifth (North Korea) espouses Juche. You are probably looking for the current article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_state#List_of_current_socialist_states https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_state#List_of_curren..., or the historical article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_states https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_states.
    - c22 8y ago
      Like I said, much deeper research ;) Thanks for the links, they are a much better jumping off point. I cross-referenced [0] with the tables on [1] and population data from [2] to build this list for further analysis: Country *ist since Total wealth (USD) Mean wealth/adult (USD) Median wealth/adult (USD) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- China 1 October 1949 29,000 billion 26,872 6,689 Pop 2017: 1.386 billion Pop 1949: 542 million* Pop growth/year: 12.41 million Laos 2 December 1975 22 billion 5,662 1,382 Pop 2017: 6.758 million Pop 1975: 3.042 million Pop growth/year: 88,476 Vietnam 2 July 1976 358 billion 5,391 2,235 Pop 2017: 95.54 million Pop 1976: 49.81 million Pop growth/year: 1.12 million Bangladesh 11 April 1971 263 billion 2,612 1,587 Pop 2017: 164.67 million Pop 1971: 66.42 million Pop growth/year: 2.14 million Guyana 6 October 1980 2 billion 5,345 2,510 Pop 2017: 777,859 Pop 1980: 780,153 Pop growth/year: -62 India 18 December 1976 4,987 billion 8,976 4,295 Pop 2017: 1.339 billion Pop 1976: 635.77 million Pop growth/year: 17.15 million Nepal 20 September 2015 40 billion 2,392 1,151 Pop 2017: 29.30 million Pop 2015: 28.66 million Pop growth/year: 320,000 Portugal 2 April 1976 750 billion 89,437 38,242 Pop 2017: 10.29 million Pop 1976: 9.4 million Pop growth/year: 21,707 Sri Lanka 7 September 1978 68 billion 4,802 2,448 Pop 2017: 21.44 million Pop 1978: 14.53 million Pop growth/year: 177,179 Tanzania 26 April 1964 22 billion 858 510 Pop 2017: 57.31 million Pop 1964: 11.34 million Pop growth/year: 867,358 *https://countryeconomy.com/demography/population/china?year=1949 Missing data for: Cuba, North Korea Then I noticed the information at [2] could be remixed in several interesting ways. Looking at charts like [3] and [4] was illuminating. It seems like the "outcomes" of some of these countries are not unfavorable, depending, of course, on what metric you choose to measure. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_state#List_of_current_socialist_states https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_state#List_of_curren... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_per_adult https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe... [2] https://data.worldbank.org https://data.worldbank.org [3] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.KD?locations=CN-BD-VN-TZ-LK-PT-NP-IN-GY https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.KD?location... [4] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.PP.CD?locations=CN-BD-VN-TZ-LK-PT-NP-IN-GY https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.PP.CD?locat...
- dpc59 8y ago
  Russia made gigantic leaps from 1917 to 1956. They went from absolute backwards shithole to contending world power in 39 years (even less considering ww2 was over 10 years before that).
  - dnautics 8y ago
    What happened after 1956?
  - metiscus 8y ago
    They did so at tremendous human cost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_famine_of_1921%E2%80%9322 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_famine_of_1921%E2%80%9... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1946%E2%80%9347 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1946%E2%80%93...
    - NeutronStar 8y ago
      You're talking like they didn't get invaded by the germans and lost 20M comrades vs the "atrocious war crimes against the jews" that totalled 6M... Russia took a beating and basically stop the german progress for the WEST to be able to regroup and refight way later.
      - metiscus 8y ago
        Please understand that I'm not trying to be argumentative; I believe this is a widely misunderstood era of Soviet history. The Holodomor and the 1921 famine predate the Barbarossa invasion significantly. The Holodomor was a product of the dekulakization efforts undertaken as part of the forced farm collectivization. The farm collectivization was driven in part by Stalin's ideology (he disliked the NEP for various reasons) and partly by the need to maintain hard currency levels to purchase machine tools etc from foreign states to maintain its industrialization push. The main exports of the USSR were grain and therefore the quotas were enforced by the NKVD at the expense of the lives of a large number of people. In certain areas, Stalin was persuaded to lower the quotas but in the geographical confines of the Holodomor (largely Ukraine SSR) the quotas were largely maintained. Historians still debate whether the Holodomor was an intentional act of genocide (because Stalin wanted to crush any independence movement within Ukraine SSR) or simply depraved indifference. Conservative estimates of the cost of the Holodomor vary from 3.3-6+ million dead. You implicitly posed an interesting moral question. Can history justify the deaths of 3.3-6+ million (Holodomor), 4+million (dekulakization), 5 million (1921 famine, admittedly coincident with the civil war) when compared to the planned atrocities of the Nazis if we credit those deaths with greatly contributing towards the defeat of the Hitler and the NSDAP? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_Plan
ChrisLomont 8y ago
Consider places that try industrialism without capitalism: do they perform worse than those with both? I think the answer is yes, by far. For example, there's plenty of communist countries that had industrialism but failed to grow economically as much as capitalist peers as examples. I'm unaware of many (any?) examples counter to this.
- scotty79 8y ago
  I think russia did very well, even better than USA when it brought electricity, modern housing and basic education to rural populace. All without shread of capitalism. What ultimately killed communism was exclusion of russia from global technological progress. When there's no tech advancement central planning is way less efficient in running things. But when you just got new tech and need to undertake huge infrastructural projects to spread it I think that central planning has some advantages over capitalism thanks to not requiring having capital or not bothering about immediate profitability or not having to ensure that same entity that invests gets ultimate benefit out of the investment.
- metiscus 8y ago
  We are at max depth but to address the perceived lack of a shred of capitalism in the USSR, I can't help but point to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy which was espoused by Lenin himself and included a large component of free market capitalism. It was the efforts undertaken by Stalin in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivization_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivization_in_the_Soviet... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization that saw the official state endorsement of capitalism expire. You can see what the effects of that were https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Soviet_Union#/media/File:Soviet_Union_USSR_GDP_per_capita.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Soviet_Union#/m... and draw your own conclusions. --edit-- Note that I thought this comment chain was at max reply depth, this comment was a reply to scotty79 not the parent.
  - ChrisLomont 8y ago
    I agree there was some capitalism, as there is components of it in every economy. Similarly, every economy has mixtures of other systems in it. The issue is how much of the various systems an economy allows. Certainly Soviet Russia was not considered a capitalist system, whereas most of Western Europe and the US were during that period. Your link provides a nice graph [1] showing that USSR and many countries that were capitalist had similar GDP per capita in 1913, but diverged wildly over the following years. I suspect academic has such a graph including more countries along with some rating of how the underlying economic system worked. It would be interesting to see that. I am aware of a decent amount of economic literature that does credit capitalism as a major force for pulling billions out of poverty. Your page seems to back up my point, does it not? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Soviet_Union_USSR_GDP_per_capita.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Soviet_Union_USSR_GDP_per...
merpnderp 8y ago
East Germany, West Germany? North Korea, South Korea? Case studies in extremely similar starting points which both tried to industrialize from nearly the same starting point, only differing in how the markets were regulated, with wildly differing outcomes. I imagine if someone could accurately answer your question they'd win a Nobel Prize. But there is little doubt free market economies vastly outperform centralized economies. Plus free markets are about exercising freedom over how your labor and assets are used. So yay freedom.

AtlasBarfed 8y ago

Science produced these possibilities. Capitalism is the distribution method enforced by the military by the rent-seeking ruling classes. Like democracy, it sucks but it's better than what was tried before. Or is it?

azinman2 8y ago
Is there a large implementation of any economic model that hasn’t had a military?

tyrust 8y ago

What does it mean to "promote capitalism"?

los_angeles 8y ago
Basically buying stuff made in poor countries. This (more than literally anything else) has made a staggering improvement in the lives of hundreds of millions of people over the last few decades.
- tyrust 8y ago
  That's a big claim, do you have any further reading I could look at about this? That said, I wouldn't call purchasing cheap clothes "promoting capitalism". I'm still interested in user merpnderp's answer.
  - los_angeles 8y ago
    It is a big claim. It's probably the biggest, most important claim of the millennium. And it is really, really good for hundreds of millions (maybe billions). These two are pretty good start points. [1] [2] In short, globalization converted hundreds of millions of would-be Chinese farmers into middle class urbanites in about one generation. It is the most massive improvement of quality of life in world history. It is staggering to consider how much life has improved for so many people in such a short amount of time. This is basically step one of "how do we save the world". First get everyone to a baseline standard of living, then instill ideas of sustainability and environmentalism, then try to boost everyone to a more than bearable standard of living sustainably. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/the-story-of-globalization-in-1-graph/283342/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/the-sto... [2] https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/how-has-globalization-benefited-the-poor https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/how-has-globalization...
    - pmoriarty 8y ago
      Children as young as 4 years old are mining cobalt (used in lithium batteries) by hand in the DRC.[1][2] "More than half the world’s supply of cobalt comes from the DRC, with 20% of cobalt exported coming from artisanal mines in the southern part of the country. In 2012, Unicef estimated that there were 40,000 children working in all the mines across the south, many involved in mining cobalt." "Adult miners dig up to 600ft below the surface using basic tools, without protective clothing or modern machinery. Sometimes the children are sent down into the narrow makeshift chambers where there is constant danger of collapse. "Cobalt is such a health hazard that it has a respiratory disease named after it – cobalt lung, a form of pneumonia which causes coughing and leads to permanent incapacity and even death. "Even simply eating vegetables grown in local soil can cause vomiting and diarrhoea, thyroid damage and fatal lung diseases, while birds and fish cannot survive in the area. "No one knows quite how many children have died mining cobalt in the Katanga region in the south-east of the country. The UN estimates 80 a year, but many more deaths go unregistered, with the bodies buried in the rubble of collapsed tunnels. Others survive but with chronic diseases which destroy their young lives. Girls as young as ten in the mines are subjected to sexual attacks and many become pregnant. The cobalt "ends up in smartphones, cars and computers sold to millions across the world, by household brands including Apple, Microsoft and Vodafone" "Car maker Tesla – the market leader in electric vehicles – plans to produce 500,000 cars per year starting in 2018, and will need 7,800 tons of cobalt to achieve this. Sales are expected to hit 4.4 million by 2021. It means the price of cobalt will soar as the world gears itself up for the electric car revolution, and there is evidence some corporations are cancelling their contracts with regulated mines using industrial technology, and turning increasingly to the cheaper mines using human labour." [1] - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4764208/Child-miners-aged-four-living-hell-Earth.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4764208/Child-miners... [2] - https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/jan/19/children-as-young-as-seven-mining-cobalt-for-use-in-smartphones-says-amnesty https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/jan/19/c...

imsofuture 8y ago

Ahh, yes, capitalism, where we funnel all of our resources to the top and hope the benevolent billionaires will reach down to help those of us in poverty. You're of course correct that industrialization has an outsize positive impact initially. But it's pretty silly to ignore the eventuality of "and then Bill Gates donates money to make the world better!"

ohyes 8y ago

That could just be correlation. India and China were doing fine until the Europeans came and subjugated them. There was some upheaval when the Europeans left and created a power vacuum. Shockingly, being conquered and ceded and the related civil unrest could also be blamed for (for example) strongman dictators that happened to come into power and cause famines, or genocide and sectarian strife. A lot of that conquering was done in the name of capitalism. (The British East India company, specifically). Capitalism is fine, it serves the purpose of obtaining a local optimum in certain trade situations. But it is a completely amoral theory. All it tells us is if this, then that. It is a set of formulas. Sometimes it creates net good, because it causes us to have more efficient and liquid markets, overall creating more wealth for those allowed to participate in the market. But other times it tells us, these people should starve or go homeless, because they don't create economic value. (In true, unbridled capitalism, a lot of marginalized people would simply die). The number of people who don't create economic value will clearly increase if automation of 'work' continues.

merpnderp 8y ago
India and China were not doing fine when Europeans came and subjugated them. Slavery in a feudalistic society isn't some rosey funland that the Europeans ruined. Life sucked all over the world, for 99.999% of people, who lived in nearly eternal bone crushing poverty. And how is freely trading your labor and goods for other's labor and goods an immoral system? I would call capitalism the most moral system we've ever devised. I assume you would think some central authority should decide who gets and does what, in some system that graph theory quickly shows runs into O2 complexity with node to node interactions swamping any decision making authority. FYI, having an authority tell people what they can and can't do with their labor sounds suspiciously like slavery, or exactly how the majority of people in India and China lived most of their lives pre-contact - as serfs, just like the rest of the world.
- eric_h 8y ago
  > how is freely trading your labor and goods for other's labor and goods an immoral system? GP said "amoral" not "immoral". Morality is only a factor in capitalism in so much as it informs the decisions of the actors involved. Both truly moral activities and truly immoral activities can coexist in a capitalist system.

kadenshep 8y ago

No it hasn't. Industrial and scientific advancements are to be credited with this. Not asinine resource allocation systems, that have in fact needlessly let people die.

claudiawerner 8y ago

This is a rather strange position to take, though I can understand your point, unfortunately it misses any qualitative aspects of life, and instead only focuses on the qualitative ones. You have also conveniently forgotten to mention any of capitalism's evils, including imperialist expansion, which has itself been responsible for a great many deaths. Instead, you have focused on the "by-products" of capitalism, that is to say, enlarging a workforce and giveng them what Marx called "double freedom", but at the same time capitalism has also given people double separation - these workers are separated from the means of production, and the products they make. This is no less true in China and India than it is in Britain (especially during the laws passed in the 16th century in the enclosure of the commons). For what it's worth, I do my part in criticising capitalism, spreading the works of those who also criticise it, and prompting people to think of alternative modes of production. I think that not only has capitalism saved a great many lives, but it's improved a great many too. That doesn't mean that it should be here to say, nor that its evils can be ignored. To use an analogy, capitalism is the boat one can use to cross the river; you don't carry the boat with you once you've finished. In another system you refer to capitalism as simply being "freely trading labour and goods". To me, this shows your ignorance of the history of capitalism, and what it is today. Have you read "The Origin of Capitalism"[0] or any contemporary critiques, such as those of the Frankfurt School? In short, capitalism requires a lot of separation and very strange ideas of liberty, which all rely on quite a neat subjectivist-individualist approach. [0] https://www.versobooks.com/books/2407-the-origin-of-capitalism https://www.versobooks.com/books/2407-the-origin-of-capitali...

sushid 8y ago

First of all, an all-out free market at the start of the industrial revolution is when we started seeing horrific child labor become the norm. It only quelled (or flowed to less fortunate regions) once there were legal measures put in place. Second, unless you are a diplomat or a policy maker (er, removed), I don't think you're promoting capitalism more than the rest of us.

dang 8y ago

Please do not break the HN guidelines by taking thread on generic ideological tangents. It leads to trainwrecks of offtopicness, as below. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17498676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17498676 and marked it off-topic.