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America runs on managementism, not capitalism. It's been this way forever. Read this, "The Big Change" published in 1952 by Frederick Lewis Allen. http://guten

America runs on managementism, not capitalism. It's been this way forever. Read this, "The Big Change" published in 1952 by Frederick Lewis Allen. http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks05/0500881h.html http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks05/0500881h.html Looking at this segment of American business, we would almost find it appropriate to call our present economic system "managementism" rather than "capitalism."

anm89 6y ago
Funny to see this downvoted to hell because it's a very astute observation. It's very popular for Americans to portray capitalism in a negative light these days but in my experience if you get these people to define how they are using the word capitalism it has almost zero overlap with a traditional text book definition of the word relating to open capital markets and the ability to exchange goods in markets with money, and what they are angry about is something more like your "managementism", financialization, or crony capitalism. There is a contrarian money manger who does some good blogging on this topic which shows up on HN from time to time who has written extensively on this topic: https://www.epsilontheory.com/this-is-water/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/this-is-water/ His style can be off putting sometimes but I think his underlying messages are usually pretty astute.
- quadrangle 6y ago
  I agree almost fully. But Capitalism is about the private ownership of capital and means-of-production as opposed to state-owned. And if the state is actually run democratically, then that non-capitalist approach could be a democratic economy. That has its own set of issues, but it's not exclusive of the free exchange of goods in markets with money. See, e.g. Market Socialism. Capitalism does not equal markets. Markets predate capitalism. Capitalism can well have totally non-free dysfunctional markets controlled entirely by monopolists. That's today's situation. See https://mattstoller.substack.com https://mattstoller.substack.com for great reporting on this. It's just as much a mistake to assert that Capitalism is synonymous with markets as to assert that it's synonymous with today's crony-capitalism with regulatory-capture etc.
  - anm89 6y ago
    You are highlighting meaningless semantic differences and narratives in place of meaningful structural properties to define the two. "The means of production" is not a relevant idea outside of marxism. It's just called capital, assets or money to everyone else. Defining capitalism in terms of the "means of production" is part of a dishonest attempt to reframe the discussion in Marxist terms which is not taken seriously by anyone that is not Richard Wolff in academic economics and not by anyone who is involved in economic analysis professionally. Check out the wiki for the "means of production". It's part of the series on marxism (ie economics used by essentially no one in practice): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Means_of_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Means_of_production Focusing on the word private is not untrue, it's just dishonest in the sense that it is used to imply that any other meaningful framework exists and again to try to highlight the comparison to Marxism as primary which is not a debate that exists on any meaningful implementation level. Out of over 200 countries in existence, as far as I know North Korea is the only one potentially that doesn't acknowledge private ownership of goods (on paper only) and that only exists for unrelated complex international political reasons, not because it is a tenable system economically. You don't own things privately if there is no market to trade them in because markets are an emergent phenomenon of people owning things privately. The only way there wouldn't be this market is if you legally restricted private ownership. So market's and private ownership are meaningless without each other. And even then you are failing to understand the difference between markets as a concept and capital markets. So no, it is not a mistake to equate markets with capitalism, especially the existence of capital markets and this does not preclude markets existing before we thought of things in terms of capitalism. Also Matt Stoller is not an economist, he's a partisan author of popular media. He's not authority on any of this.
    - quadrangle 6y ago
      Thanks for your clarifications. However, if you don't want to make it a semantic debate, then try to have more grace in interpreting my semantics. I wasn't describing the abolition of private property. The emphasis is on major capital. That I can own my own computer and chair and even car is not comparable to the idea of organized capital owning massive factories and land etc. Yes, of course there's no clear defining line. If I own a car, I can use it to run a delivery business etc etc, and other than legal distinctions, there's a continuum from that to a massive factory. I don't happen to support any extreme position on these things. Absolute free-market capitalism and Marxist socialism both are simplistic if you try to just force the real world into these models. I'm more sympathetic to Georgism FWIW, but I'm much more agnostic than certain about any of this. I didn't say Matt Stoller was an economist. He's a journalist. And I mention him because he's done a great job of investigating and writing about the specific topic of monopoly in today's society. I don't just mean rhetorically but in terms of discussing specific examples and evidence. More importantly, I wasn't using the mention of Stoller to ask for deference to him as authority, I was suggesting his work as worth reading. Appeal to authority isn't the point at all. What critiques do you have of his work?
klaudius 6y ago
You might like: https://www.bradford-delong.com/2013/05/brad-delong-1997-the-corporation-as-a-command-economy.html https://www.bradford-delong.com/2013/05/brad-delong-1997-the... . It shows that corporations themselves are engaged in a planned economy. It's not just American thing, but it's the way things work. Paul Graham in his essay http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html also calls corporations "communist states".

anm89 6y ago

Funny to see this downvoted to hell because it's a very astute observation. It's very popular for Americans to portray capitalism in a negative light these days but in my experience if you get these people to define how they are using the word capitalism it has almost zero overlap with a traditional text book definition of the word relating to open capital markets and the ability to exchange goods in markets with money, and what they are angry about is something more like your "managementism", financialization, or crony capitalism. There is a contrarian money manger who does some good blogging on this topic which shows up on HN from time to time who has written extensively on this topic: https://www.epsilontheory.com/this-is-water/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/this-is-water/ His style can be off putting sometimes but I think his underlying messages are usually pretty astute.

quadrangle 6y ago
I agree almost fully. But Capitalism is about the private ownership of capital and means-of-production as opposed to state-owned. And if the state is actually run democratically, then that non-capitalist approach could be a democratic economy. That has its own set of issues, but it's not exclusive of the free exchange of goods in markets with money. See, e.g. Market Socialism. Capitalism does not equal markets. Markets predate capitalism. Capitalism can well have totally non-free dysfunctional markets controlled entirely by monopolists. That's today's situation. See https://mattstoller.substack.com https://mattstoller.substack.com for great reporting on this. It's just as much a mistake to assert that Capitalism is synonymous with markets as to assert that it's synonymous with today's crony-capitalism with regulatory-capture etc.
- anm89 6y ago
  You are highlighting meaningless semantic differences and narratives in place of meaningful structural properties to define the two. "The means of production" is not a relevant idea outside of marxism. It's just called capital, assets or money to everyone else. Defining capitalism in terms of the "means of production" is part of a dishonest attempt to reframe the discussion in Marxist terms which is not taken seriously by anyone that is not Richard Wolff in academic economics and not by anyone who is involved in economic analysis professionally. Check out the wiki for the "means of production". It's part of the series on marxism (ie economics used by essentially no one in practice): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Means_of_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Means_of_production Focusing on the word private is not untrue, it's just dishonest in the sense that it is used to imply that any other meaningful framework exists and again to try to highlight the comparison to Marxism as primary which is not a debate that exists on any meaningful implementation level. Out of over 200 countries in existence, as far as I know North Korea is the only one potentially that doesn't acknowledge private ownership of goods (on paper only) and that only exists for unrelated complex international political reasons, not because it is a tenable system economically. You don't own things privately if there is no market to trade them in because markets are an emergent phenomenon of people owning things privately. The only way there wouldn't be this market is if you legally restricted private ownership. So market's and private ownership are meaningless without each other. And even then you are failing to understand the difference between markets as a concept and capital markets. So no, it is not a mistake to equate markets with capitalism, especially the existence of capital markets and this does not preclude markets existing before we thought of things in terms of capitalism. Also Matt Stoller is not an economist, he's a partisan author of popular media. He's not authority on any of this.
  - quadrangle 6y ago
    Thanks for your clarifications. However, if you don't want to make it a semantic debate, then try to have more grace in interpreting my semantics. I wasn't describing the abolition of private property. The emphasis is on major capital. That I can own my own computer and chair and even car is not comparable to the idea of organized capital owning massive factories and land etc. Yes, of course there's no clear defining line. If I own a car, I can use it to run a delivery business etc etc, and other than legal distinctions, there's a continuum from that to a massive factory. I don't happen to support any extreme position on these things. Absolute free-market capitalism and Marxist socialism both are simplistic if you try to just force the real world into these models. I'm more sympathetic to Georgism FWIW, but I'm much more agnostic than certain about any of this. I didn't say Matt Stoller was an economist. He's a journalist. And I mention him because he's done a great job of investigating and writing about the specific topic of monopoly in today's society. I don't just mean rhetorically but in terms of discussing specific examples and evidence. More importantly, I wasn't using the mention of Stoller to ask for deference to him as authority, I was suggesting his work as worth reading. Appeal to authority isn't the point at all. What critiques do you have of his work?

klaudius 6y ago

You might like: https://www.bradford-delong.com/2013/05/brad-delong-1997-the-corporation-as-a-command-economy.html https://www.bradford-delong.com/2013/05/brad-delong-1997-the... . It shows that corporations themselves are engaged in a planned economy. It's not just American thing, but it's the way things work. Paul Graham in his essay http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html also calls corporations "communist states".