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how I imagine (straw) hyper-capitalists think: "why is poverty bad? not because we have empathy for poor people, nah, just because poor people are not being op

• fatsdomino001 6y ago
  Keep in mind capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system.
  • throwanem 6y ago
    I've heard this claim before, but I've never seen it substantiated. Would you like to do so?
    • Mountain_Skies 6y ago
      The difficulty is going to be around definitions. There are claims that communism has killed X million people, where both the definition of communism and what constitutes cause are very loose. On the flip side you have people who advocate for communism who claim it's never been tried and everything that has ever called itself communism wasn't true communism. You'll face the same issue with capitalism. The confounding factor I see here is what do we call China? They've experienced an incredible increase in wealth under their communist system but is what they have really communism? It certainly has lots of attributes of both theoretical capitalism and western capitalism as practiced mixed in with communist concepts. Whatever it is, China, for better and worse, is a very different country than it had been because in part due their hybrid economic system.
      • DC1350 6y ago
        Chinese people only became wealthy after major economic reforms that abandoned anything related to communism except for the name and aesthetic
        • bbreier 6y ago
          For some definitions of communism... in the US, many would have us believe that universal health care is a key component of communism and China still has plenty of that.
          • acta_non_verba 6y ago
            China doesn’t have universal healthcare free at the point of use. The UK, a capitalist country, does.
            • bbreier 6y ago
              I'm not sure how this relates to my claim
          • imtringued 6y ago
            I don't think capitalism is incompatible with government run services. Some services are so fundamental that everyone needs them and thus demand is very easy to predict. Adding profit incentives to basic needs just adds friction and inefficiency since the transaction is involuntary. Private industry is really, really good at innovation (e.g. discovering new drugs and treatments) and providing optional goods and services but most people just want a basic level of service and they want a funding structure that does not misalign incentives. For example, optional basic health insurance doesn't work because poor people will quit the insurance program while they are healthy and then only unhealthy people will stay and bear the full cost. This raises the cost for poor unhealthy people and then they quit insurance and get denied access to care. Finally only the wealthiest people will have health insurance. Capitalism is just a tool that's used to achieve certain outcomes. It just happens to work more often that it fails. Nothing more, nothing less. If a different tool works just as fine or better then it can be used selectively in areas where it's superior. Blind faith to any tool is stupid. Communism on the other hand tends to fail by default and because it requires external forces to make it work, it breeds authoritarianism and then everything goes bad.
            • bbreier 6y ago
    • u678u 6y ago
      Generally the last few decades as capitalism has swept the globe poverty has dropped dramatically in the poorest countries. https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/globalization-reduced-poverty https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/globalization-reduced-po... Western Europe vs Eastern Europe, N Korea vs S Korea, Colombia vs Venezuela, USA vs Russia - its pretty standard that the workers in the Capitalist countries have a better quality of life than those in the Communist ones.
    • Aunche 6y ago
      It's not so much capitalism as much as having good economics. Communism was economically advantageous to serfdom. Capitalism was economically advantageous to communism, which is why China's economy boomed after they started to embrace a market economy.
    • bbreier 6y ago
      It depends entirely on how you define poverty- typically these claims are based on a figure of $1.90 per day as the threshold for "extreme poverty", and you can use the World Bank's calculator to verify that they are true here: http://iresearch.worldbank.org/PovcalNet/povOnDemand.aspx http://iresearch.worldbank.org/PovcalNet/povOnDemand.aspx But it doesn't tell the whole story. Could you survive on $2 per day? The implication of this claim is that you are not in "extreme poverty" at that threshold, but I'm not sure many people would agree. The next natural step is to ask where the line really should be drawn? For many reasonable numbers, we can see that number has been rising in the past few decades. You can set your own inputs on the linked calculator based on where you believe the poverty line should be drawn and decide for yourself.
  • yulker 6y ago
    And created the very context for that poverty to exist in the first place as an extension of post ag society.
    • chordalkeyboard 6y ago
      I’m fairly sure the academic consensus is that agriculture created poverty.
    • pbourke 6y ago
      What do you mean? There was ample poverty before the advent of Capitalism.
    • refurb 6y ago
      “By curing 99% of cancers you created the very context for people dying of cancer.” Making some people rich doesn’t create poor people. They were poor before.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  • andrepd 6y ago
    How so? That sounds like overreaching conclusions. You might as well say "monarchy is responsible for the scientific and industrial revolutions", or "Christianity has created the Renaissance", just because those pairs of complex changes in society and history happened concurrently in time.
    • DC1350 6y ago
      Because nobody with money gave a shit about the global poor until they realized they could be used for cheap labour. The ability to collect the surplus value of their work encouraged investment in poor regions
      • tor11 6y ago
        cheap labour is better than no labour
      • andrepd 6y ago
        > Because nobody with money gave a shit about the global poor until they realized they could be used for cheap labour. They did. It's called slavery. It's only when that finally became mostly unacceptable (remember there are still millions of enslaved persons worldwide), that they had to turn to paying them wages of a dollar a day (slavery with extra steps).
        • DC1350 6y ago
          The transition from slave ownership to slavery as a service is truly one of the most disruptive innovations of the last 200 years.
          • imtringued 6y ago
            Working for income is not slavery. You can always go join open source ecology and build your own civilization from scratch. Forced work in a prison could be considered slavery depending on the reason for the arrest and the financial motives of the owner of the prison.
  • wyre 6y ago
    Advancements in technology lifts people out of poverty. There is no proof these advancements in tech would not have realized without capitalism. If anything China and the USSR turning their agrarian societies into world powers in the course of a few decades says otherwise. Whether or not the authoritarianism needed to accomplish this is worthwhile is another discussion. That said it is theoretically possible to achieve a more equal society without authoritarianism.
    • pbourke 6y ago
      This is a tremendous non sequitur. Being a world power and the level of poverty within a country have little to do with each other.
      • wyre 6y ago
        Can you give me an example? The only world power I can think of with high levels of poverty is the US, but I live here so I don’t have experience in other world power countries.
        • acta_non_verba 6y ago
          India and China are both super powers with large populations of extremely impoverished people.
        • AnimalMuppet 6y ago
          The USSR could produce enough nuclear weapons to keep pace with the US, but they couldn't produce toothpaste for their people. When that sank in for Gorbachev, he decided that something was fundamentally broken with the USSR economy.
    • cpursley 6y ago
      The late USSR frequently had to import its own grain and other food stuffs as it could not produce enough; it's one of the reasons USSR failed. And in the early USSR millions of people literally starved to death (holdimor). Today, despite all it's issues, modern capitalist (more or less) Russia is the largest wheat producer in the world. Not sure about China.
  • upbeat_general 6y ago
    I think this is the classic correlation != causation.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • djrobstep 6y ago
    Keep in mind capitalism systematically creates poverty by depriving income to the ~50% of the population that are not full time workers (children, elderly, sick, disabled, unemployed, students, etc).
    • chordalkeyboard 6y ago
      > capitalism systematically creates poverty by depriving income to the ~50% of the population that are not full time workers What income are they depriving them from? If they aren’t working, how could anyone deprive them of an income that doesn’t exist?
      • djrobstep 6y ago
        ??? That is literally what deprivation means - the thing you need is absent. The deprivation is enforced through a large government program called "property law".
        • chordalkeyboard 6y ago
          > That is literally what deprivation means - the thing you need is absent. “Deprivation” is the act or process of removing. You’re claiming someone removed the income, but they haven’t done anything to create an income. There’s no income from which to deprive them because they haven’t done anything to generate an income. > The deprivation happens through a large government program called "property law". That doesn’t make sense, the way I understand it, property law codifies the rules around the things that people own. That’s preventing owners from being deprived. You’re asserting that laws which forbid depriving people of property are the mechanism by which they are deprived? How does that work?
          • djrobstep 6y ago
            > but they haven’t done anything to create an income "People who don't work full time should starve" is ideology, not some law of physics. > There’s no income from which to deprive them There is plenty. US GDP is trillions a year. > How does that work? Property law creates property ownership. Ownership assigned to one person is deprived from others.
  • socialdemocrat 6y ago
    Since it is pretty much the only system used today, that is kind of hard to avoid. But on a serious note, the command economy of the Soviet Union did surprisingly well despite its profound number of flaws. Literacy rates, economic output, educational levels, scientific output etc was significantly improved in Soviet times, relative to the Czar area which after all was capitalist. This all happened despite the fact that: 1. They had a bloody and destructive revolution. 2. Their country got laid to ruins by the German invasion. 3. They had to rebuild the country after WWII with most of the healthiest and youngest members of society dead. Yet they pulled that off surprisingly well. Yes if you compare Soviet growth to a number of other countries it was not always stellar, but considering that these countries had not received the same kind of devastating blows, it was still quite remarkable. China is another good example. India and China had the same GDP per capita in the 1940s. China had a destructive Japanese invasion and then a bloody civil war. Then Mao did the crazy cultural revolution setting them back even more. Despite all this China has 3x the GDP per capita of India. All despite the fact that India had democracy, private property and capitalist enterprises in this whole period. Even today almost all key industries in China are fully or partially owned by the state. Such as construction, energy, banking etc. Yes China has lots of private enterprise as well. But they got growing rapidly long before these dominated the economy. No, economy has pulled as many people out of poverty as China, and they did that with what can best be described as hybrid system. The Chinese economic miracle had been ongoing for many years before private property was actually made legal in China. NOTE: I am not advocating these kinds of system as they are dictatorships. But I think they are worth pondering before people push the truthism that capitalism is so superior as an economic system and that alternatives cannot perform. The evidence seems to suggest that other systems can work and perhaps the best systems are hybrid systems.
    • imtringued 6y ago
      >Despite all this China has 3x the GDP per capita of India. All despite the fact that India had democracy, private property and capitalist enterprises in this whole period. This is a recent phenomenon that started in the 90s. China was essentially flat until 1993 (that's when India and China's GDP per capita started diverging). Remember that article about a feed processing company in India not getting a permit to build a factory because he has to rezone land because all land in India is zoned for agriculture by default? The problem wasn't the bureaucracy. It was the corruption. The founder had to go to 14 different offices and one third of them didn't even process his forms because he refused to pay bribes. He had the bribe money but he refused out of principle and that heavily delays the start of the company.
  • ajmadesc 6y ago
    Can we have a list of systems to choose from?
• solveit 6y ago
  Why do you spend time imagining how straw men think?
  • ruined 6y ago
    when people ignore moral or ethical concerns due to ideology or simply different goals, it's useful to have evidence supporting an argument that fits into their worldview, so compromise or progress is possible. that said, this straw man is pretty fleshy. there are definitely plenty of bosses who don’t care about or at least don’t prioritize the misery of their poor employees, for reasons concerning their own profit. in the absence of government action or mass labor action, i’m happy this study exists.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• imtringued 6y ago
  Why is that wrong? Even the greediest human on the planet with zero empathy for others would be forced to care about others. The real problem is that a lot of people think the exact opposite. "If I can drag others down, I can protect or increase my wealth."