5 ms·

The answer is pretty simple: "Capitalizm". It doesn't fix all the problems. It fixes them for creating profit, and not every serious problem promises profit whe

by robot 6y ago

The answer is pretty simple: "Capitalizm". It doesn't fix all the problems. It fixes them for creating profit, and not every serious problem promises profit when solved.

jjoonathan 6y ago
Capitalizm isn't about doing what people want, it's about doing what money-weighted-people want. This distinction has enormous explanatory power for why the market focuses on some things and not others, especially when there is so much low hanging fruit among the "others."
- refurb 6y ago
  it's about doing what money-weighted-people want So Coca-Cola is only made because people with money think it's worthwhile?
  - gotostatement 6y ago
    when moneyed-interests can make money by appealing to what non-moneyed people want, then there is alignment. this happens often in consumer products, including coca-cola, which I guess you're confusingly suggesting is an example of a smashing achievement of capitalism. other problems, such as with providing universal healthcare, ending homelessness, poverty, etc, are inherently non-profitable, so moneyed people won't invest in it, so those problems don't get solved by capitalism.
    - Mirioron 6y ago
      >other problems, such as with providing universal healthcare, ending homelessness, poverty, etc, are inherently non-profitable These are also problems that have no real solution outside of a general economic improvement. Universal healthcare is a black hole for money. You can literally spend all of the money in the world on it and you'd still be lacking in funding. It's a problem space that expands the more we learn about it requiring even more funding to actually help people. Gene therapies are so expensive that if universal healthcare offered them the governments would go bankrupt. Yet the hope is that as we improve our understanding we can improve the price. Antibiotics cost next to nothing in developed countries. 200 years ago you could've been the richest person on Earth and you still couldn't get them. Homelessness is a multifaceted problem. If you look at it from the perspective of trying to build more homes to offer it to people then you run into regulation issues. Everybody is in favor of it, as long as it's not in their backyard. On the other hand, if you try to focus on the homeless themselves, then it's largely a lack of self-help issue that ended up spiraling out of control. It's very difficult to help them, because many of them have different issues. The lack of a home is (usually) just a symptom of another issue. This makes it difficult to scale any actual solution. Dealing with poverty is an interesting issue. When you look at developed countries, then you're almost always dealing with relative poverty. It is impossible to get rid of it, because relative poverty is simply the bottom X% of the population. The US (relative) poverty line is $12,760 a year for a single person. The average income in Poland is $16,052 (~$12,000 after taxes). Are the Polish poor? There's also absolute poverty. This is set at around $2.2 a day or roughly $500-600 a year. We have been quite successful at improving the conditions for a lot of people in countries with large amounts is abject poverty. China is the poster child of this. China went from 88% of the population in 1981 living in absolute poverty to 0.7% in 2015. One of the main ways this happens is through sweatshops. Contrary to popular belief, sweatshops tend to be better than alternatives for the locals. That's why they work in them. It's not easy, but they've certainly lifted countries out of poverty. All in all, I don't think the problems you mentioned are solvable by capitalism, because they're not really "solvable" by any economic system (other than abject poverty). These problems largely improve when we improve our economies. Capitalism seems to be the best at that.
      - gotostatement 6y ago
        Universal healthcare is accomplished in many countries, so how does it not have a solution? Yes, it's a black hole for money - that's my entire point, it's not profitable, but it can be addressed with more money. No system is perfect, but just because we can't be perfect doesn't mean we shouldn't deliver more healthcare. In essence, I can answer all of your challenges with this: yes, every problem is multifaceted, but that doesn't change the fact that EVERY problem can be improved by giving people more money and services, and usually the problems can't really be improved without it. And instead of giving more and more profits to the people who happen to already own the capital to invest, we should be using those profits to take care of our people. If the economy improves but wages are stagnant (as they have been for years), then a rising tide doesn't lift all boats, because some people are hoarding all the...tide (bear with me). I come across this argument about relative poverty sometimes and I just don't get it. There's nothing relative about working 2 jobs, having less than 8 hours literally in the day left for sleep, having no leisure time, living paycheck to paycheck, not being able to afford nutritious food or having time to cook it, not having any power at work, having food or housing insecurity, not being able to afford to live in a good area, etc. I wouldn't say any one of these is the definition of poverty, per se, but my point is that these are objective factors of misery, it has nothing to do with percentile. Saying eliminating poverty is impossible because its defined as the bottom 10% is - sorry to be snarky - Ben Shapiro-level strawmanning and pedantry.
  - notahacker 6y ago
    'Money-weighted people' implies if you've got a billion people willing and able to buy something which is cheap to make on a semi-regular basis that's probably a very good business. Helps if you've got access to the capital to sink into advertising to them and building out that supply chain of course. It also implies that millions of Coca Cola's customers have absolutely no impact on the 'demand for new cars' and absolutely no four wheeled vehicles targeted at them because the cost of making cars vastly exceeds their purchasing power, whereas the weight of a few hundred rich people's money creates enough 'demand for business jets' to sustain competing products.
hypewatch 6y ago
~Capitalizm~ Capitalism is purely a theoretical idea. Free markets as capitalism defines them are impossible. Perfect information, competition, price taking, ect, which are baked into the economic theories of capitalism are simply not feasible. Often our critiques of capitalism are not critiques of capitalism at all. In fact they’re criticisms of monopolies and oligopolies in our modern society, which are antithetic to capitalism. The American economy is an aristocracy. VCs, the big ones at least, are members of that aristocracy. Many of which are filled with smart good hearted people. But there are some incentives baked into their position of power that we need to be cognizant of. Edit: “free-market capitalism” would probably have been a better term. Clearly that was not the point I was making.
- gotostatement 6y ago
  > Often our critiques of capitalism are not critiques of capitalism at all. While this is superficially true, the structure of capitalism arguably makes such concentration of wealth and power inevitable, so the phenomena of monopoly and oligarchy are intrinsic features of capitalism. Not free markets, but capitalism, i.e. the system where individual, private citizens own the means of production. I'm not sure yet whether I think that capitalism can ever be made work for the people (including the underclass that our society currently consumes as human fuel to keep the status quo). I think it's quite possible that it will foil all attempts to reform it. But we'll see.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    Monopolies come about because of government interference, not free markets. The reason is pretty simple - the larger a company gets, the more bureaucratic and inefficient it becomes, until a smaller, nimbler company eats it for lunch.
    - gotostatement 6y ago
      A large company can benefit from massive economies of scale or upfront costs that create an impenetrable barrier to entry. e.g. Wal-mart, Barnes and Noble, mobile phone networks. In certain areas, once you amass enough power, you have the power to crush competition, no government interference necessary. However, we're not just talking about market dynamics of monopoly, we're talking about concentration of power in a society. Billionaires control enough wealth to influence or even effectively buy politicians, who then make rules that benefit them. They use their money to control media narratives. They hamstring labor power and increase their own leverage without limit. You can't write this off as a consequence of government interference into an otherwise self-regulating system - government interference, and interference by other centers of power, on behalf of the super-rich is an essential feature of concentration of wealth and power in a society.

by robot 6y ago

The answer is pretty simple: "Capitalizm". It doesn't fix all the problems. It fixes them for creating profit, and not every serious problem promises profit when solved.

jjoonathan 6y ago

Capitalizm isn't about doing what people want, it's about doing what money-weighted-people want. This distinction has enormous explanatory power for why the market focuses on some things and not others, especially when there is so much low hanging fruit among the "others."

refurb 6y ago
it's about doing what money-weighted-people want So Coca-Cola is only made because people with money think it's worthwhile?
- gotostatement 6y ago
  when moneyed-interests can make money by appealing to what non-moneyed people want, then there is alignment. this happens often in consumer products, including coca-cola, which I guess you're confusingly suggesting is an example of a smashing achievement of capitalism. other problems, such as with providing universal healthcare, ending homelessness, poverty, etc, are inherently non-profitable, so moneyed people won't invest in it, so those problems don't get solved by capitalism.
  - Mirioron 6y ago
    >other problems, such as with providing universal healthcare, ending homelessness, poverty, etc, are inherently non-profitable These are also problems that have no real solution outside of a general economic improvement. Universal healthcare is a black hole for money. You can literally spend all of the money in the world on it and you'd still be lacking in funding. It's a problem space that expands the more we learn about it requiring even more funding to actually help people. Gene therapies are so expensive that if universal healthcare offered them the governments would go bankrupt. Yet the hope is that as we improve our understanding we can improve the price. Antibiotics cost next to nothing in developed countries. 200 years ago you could've been the richest person on Earth and you still couldn't get them. Homelessness is a multifaceted problem. If you look at it from the perspective of trying to build more homes to offer it to people then you run into regulation issues. Everybody is in favor of it, as long as it's not in their backyard. On the other hand, if you try to focus on the homeless themselves, then it's largely a lack of self-help issue that ended up spiraling out of control. It's very difficult to help them, because many of them have different issues. The lack of a home is (usually) just a symptom of another issue. This makes it difficult to scale any actual solution. Dealing with poverty is an interesting issue. When you look at developed countries, then you're almost always dealing with relative poverty. It is impossible to get rid of it, because relative poverty is simply the bottom X% of the population. The US (relative) poverty line is $12,760 a year for a single person. The average income in Poland is $16,052 (~$12,000 after taxes). Are the Polish poor? There's also absolute poverty. This is set at around $2.2 a day or roughly $500-600 a year. We have been quite successful at improving the conditions for a lot of people in countries with large amounts is abject poverty. China is the poster child of this. China went from 88% of the population in 1981 living in absolute poverty to 0.7% in 2015. One of the main ways this happens is through sweatshops. Contrary to popular belief, sweatshops tend to be better than alternatives for the locals. That's why they work in them. It's not easy, but they've certainly lifted countries out of poverty. All in all, I don't think the problems you mentioned are solvable by capitalism, because they're not really "solvable" by any economic system (other than abject poverty). These problems largely improve when we improve our economies. Capitalism seems to be the best at that.
    - gotostatement 6y ago
      Universal healthcare is accomplished in many countries, so how does it not have a solution? Yes, it's a black hole for money - that's my entire point, it's not profitable, but it can be addressed with more money. No system is perfect, but just because we can't be perfect doesn't mean we shouldn't deliver more healthcare. In essence, I can answer all of your challenges with this: yes, every problem is multifaceted, but that doesn't change the fact that EVERY problem can be improved by giving people more money and services, and usually the problems can't really be improved without it. And instead of giving more and more profits to the people who happen to already own the capital to invest, we should be using those profits to take care of our people. If the economy improves but wages are stagnant (as they have been for years), then a rising tide doesn't lift all boats, because some people are hoarding all the...tide (bear with me). I come across this argument about relative poverty sometimes and I just don't get it. There's nothing relative about working 2 jobs, having less than 8 hours literally in the day left for sleep, having no leisure time, living paycheck to paycheck, not being able to afford nutritious food or having time to cook it, not having any power at work, having food or housing insecurity, not being able to afford to live in a good area, etc. I wouldn't say any one of these is the definition of poverty, per se, but my point is that these are objective factors of misery, it has nothing to do with percentile. Saying eliminating poverty is impossible because its defined as the bottom 10% is - sorry to be snarky - Ben Shapiro-level strawmanning and pedantry.
- notahacker 6y ago
  'Money-weighted people' implies if you've got a billion people willing and able to buy something which is cheap to make on a semi-regular basis that's probably a very good business. Helps if you've got access to the capital to sink into advertising to them and building out that supply chain of course. It also implies that millions of Coca Cola's customers have absolutely no impact on the 'demand for new cars' and absolutely no four wheeled vehicles targeted at them because the cost of making cars vastly exceeds their purchasing power, whereas the weight of a few hundred rich people's money creates enough 'demand for business jets' to sustain competing products.

hypewatch 6y ago

~Capitalizm~ Capitalism is purely a theoretical idea. Free markets as capitalism defines them are impossible. Perfect information, competition, price taking, ect, which are baked into the economic theories of capitalism are simply not feasible. Often our critiques of capitalism are not critiques of capitalism at all. In fact they’re criticisms of monopolies and oligopolies in our modern society, which are antithetic to capitalism. The American economy is an aristocracy. VCs, the big ones at least, are members of that aristocracy. Many of which are filled with smart good hearted people. But there are some incentives baked into their position of power that we need to be cognizant of. Edit: “free-market capitalism” would probably have been a better term. Clearly that was not the point I was making.

gotostatement 6y ago
> Often our critiques of capitalism are not critiques of capitalism at all. While this is superficially true, the structure of capitalism arguably makes such concentration of wealth and power inevitable, so the phenomena of monopoly and oligarchy are intrinsic features of capitalism. Not free markets, but capitalism, i.e. the system where individual, private citizens own the means of production. I'm not sure yet whether I think that capitalism can ever be made work for the people (including the underclass that our society currently consumes as human fuel to keep the status quo). I think it's quite possible that it will foil all attempts to reform it. But we'll see.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  Monopolies come about because of government interference, not free markets. The reason is pretty simple - the larger a company gets, the more bureaucratic and inefficient it becomes, until a smaller, nimbler company eats it for lunch.
  - gotostatement 6y ago
    A large company can benefit from massive economies of scale or upfront costs that create an impenetrable barrier to entry. e.g. Wal-mart, Barnes and Noble, mobile phone networks. In certain areas, once you amass enough power, you have the power to crush competition, no government interference necessary. However, we're not just talking about market dynamics of monopoly, we're talking about concentration of power in a society. Billionaires control enough wealth to influence or even effectively buy politicians, who then make rules that benefit them. They use their money to control media narratives. They hamstring labor power and increase their own leverage without limit. You can't write this off as a consequence of government interference into an otherwise self-regulating system - government interference, and interference by other centers of power, on behalf of the super-rich is an essential feature of concentration of wealth and power in a society.