4 ms·

If the history books haven't been completely falsified, it would seem that it has raised hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty.

laumars 5y ago
It has also put hundreds of millions of people into poverty. Any system that rewards winners is going to see people lose. Now I’m not suggesting we should do away with capitalism either. Just that we shouldn’t fetish over it as the perfect solution.
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  I'd be more comfortable discussing capitalism's flaws if that didn't imply I agreed with people I wouldn't want running a community garden, let alone a national economy. In fact, there's probably a linguistic divergence that predicts whose proposed solutions I'll find reasonable. What does capitalism mean to the person making the critique? To me it refers to any system involving private property and voluntary exchange thereof. I suspect people critiquing 'capitalism' are critiquing what I'd call 'growth-dependant corporatocracy' which I'm happy to critique all day long. Using 'capitalism' to refer to that indicates the kinds of solutions someone would bring forth if I decided to listen to them - and given the track record of those solutions, I feel justified in not listening.
  - jancsika 5y ago
    > and given the track record of those solutions, I feel justified in not listening. But that's one of the biggest problems with the ideology you're critiquing! I mean, what are the odds that a Frankfurt School-educated critical theorist in the 70s would be confronted with a product of capitalism that undermines one of the fundamental assumptions of both capitalism and classical Marxism? The likelihood is so low I'm sure they believed they could call it 0% and get on with their work. And in nearly all cases they probably could. Then the personal computer revolution brought the idea of zero marginal cost into the realm of practicality for most of the Western world. And the one field which claims to study hidden corner cases of the struggle for freedom and self-determination is stuck writing about the impact of zero marginal cost data only in retrospect. It's an embarrassing oversight, especially for a field that seems like it was designed specifically to illuminate (and predict!) esoteric social and technological developments that other fields would miss. E.g., the cheap, ubiquitous zero-marginal-cost factories that are our smartphones and laptops. Anyway, if your aim is to become the kind of ideologue you're attempting to avoid, by all means use your proposed filter to interpret the few interesting writings you come across as noise.
    - SuoDuanDao 5y ago
      Not sure which ideology you say I'm critiquing in this context. Frankfurt school of economics? I confess I don't know much about it beyond that the Q set thinks it's the new Illuminati. In any case I think it's a pretty good filter - 'capitalism' is used as a deliberately vague title that lets the reader fill in their own meaning. If there were genuinely interesting writings based on hostility towards a deliberately vaguely-defined concept I'd be interested to see them, but I know enough about the concept of a Volksfeind to feel justified in my skepticism. Vitalik Buterin can talk about public goods without ever mentioning capitalism because he's got actual solutions in mind. He doesn't need a malleable boogeyman to lend them gravitas. I'm sure anyone else with genuinely interesting insights would have precise enough solutions that they need more precise problem statements than 'capitalism'.
      - jancsika 5y ago
        I don't understand your position. Are you filtering on reading/hearing the stem of the word "capitalism" as written/uttered in an explanation of the problem? Or are you filtering critiques that simply begin and end with the stem of "capitalism?" If it's the former then your filter is way too broad. There are plenty of non-Marxists who by sheer coincidence probably mention capitalism in the midst of explaining quite specific policy positions. (Matt Stoller comes to mind.) For those commentators you are turning off your brain for what sounds to me like the equivalent of an intellectual drinking game. If it's the latter then the filter is useless. You'd be better off filtering on any single constant string as almost all are going to fall short of being a serious problem statement for any domain.
        SuoDuanDao 5y ago
        All right, this is interesting. How does this Matt Stoller fellow define the capitalism he speaks of?
    - imtringued 5y ago
      >I mean, what are the odds that a Frankfurt School-educated critical theorist in the 70s would be confronted with a product of capitalism that undermines one of the fundamental assumptions of both capitalism and classical Marxism? The likelihood is so low I'm sure they believed they could call it 0% and get on with their work. Well, negative yields and interest rates are a pretty good candidate. Marxism has no reason to exist because Marx assumed that communism is an utopia that follows capitalism where negative yields mark the end of capitalism. If you simply allow negative yields then reaching the abundance utopia doesn't need capitalism to end. However, the capitalists pride themselves in the opposite, that there will never be abundance nor utopia and that they will always be needed and that they must keep working forever. All of this is based on the assumption that yields cannot be negative. We are about to find out whether that is true.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    > To me it refers to any system involving private property and voluntary exchange thereof. That's just an ideal. As soon as you talk about e.g. CO2 emissions everyone talks about how voluntary exchange through CO2 taxes is preventing prosperity. Also, as soon as you talk about taxing land ownership people will go crazy. Finally, people think money is private property when it is just a relationship with other people that owe you something. People love the idea of insisting that someone else is forced to owe you something but they also love to reprimand that person for refusing this involuntary relationship. Simplified: "inflation is bad because I want to keep others in debt and never forgive that debt" The idea of money being your private property is the same as insisting that a part of another human (their time) is your private property. >'growth-dependant corporatocracy' which I'm happy to critique all day long. Well, the above is already pretty damning. Once you add morals to the capitalist economy you basically are trapped into a prisoners dilemma. Work is allocated as full time jobs even when there isn't enough aggregate demand to keep everyone employed full time. So full time employees must consume the exponentially growing production of a full time employee otherwise there is no point in working full time. What often happens is that upper middle class people and below with "too much" money want to work less and they do not work less today, they will want to retire early. They are effectively delaying their economic involvement for decades while people today need this money to be employed today. This has lead to a massive expansion in private and public debt just to maintain a semblance of full time employment for everyone. The debt itself isn't the problem, it's the fact that the people who are betting on early retirement will be forced to realize that there won't be enough young people in the labor force to take care of them by the time they retire. Let's assume 0% inflation. A population of 1000 accumulates 1000000 tokens representing one hour of work each. The working age population declines to 100. Without inflation the amount of owed work doesn't change. Each worker has to work 10 times as much to honor the token. The reality is that they cannot do 10 times the work. Maybe 4 times if automation has been progressing quickly and they work more hours per day. That means 1000000 tokens only represent 400000 hours of work. 2.5x inflation becomes necessary. Thinking of money as property fools people into believing they were robbed by inflation. In this case it is clear that the price level shifted because of a lack of workers. Did the 900 retired workers rob the elderly? Did nature rob us of our youth?
- twofornone 5y ago
  [dead]
- geomark 5y ago
  I haven't seen that. In fact, in capitalism the winners usually win by giving the masses something they want. So everybody wins; the masses all win a little by getting a little boost in quality of life and the big winners win by getting a ton of money.
  - laumars 5y ago
    It’s very easy to believe that when you’re one of the winners (as most who frequent this forum will be) but according to the 2020 US census there are 37.2 million people living in poverty in the US alone: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-273.html https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-27... There are numerous examples of where capitalistic businesses have gone out of their way to exploit their customer needs. Not “wants” but needs. Such as companies that buy up mobile home parks and then hike up the land rent forcing people out of their own house. The health sector is a biggie too. Clearly the victims of those businesses are not equal “winners” in such an arrangement. I focus on America here but that’s not fair because the rest of the world have their fair share of problems too.
malermeister 5y ago
If you define "not poverty" as earning more than $1.90 a day, like the world bank does, that might be true. If you define "not poverty" as $7.40, which the UN claims is the "absolute minimum for basic nutrition and normal life expectancy", the only place that has moved people out of poverty at scale is... centrally planned China. This claim is nothing more than propaganda by a capitalist institution fudging the numbers to make itself look good.

laumars 5y ago

It has also put hundreds of millions of people into poverty. Any system that rewards winners is going to see people lose. Now I’m not suggesting we should do away with capitalism either. Just that we shouldn’t fetish over it as the perfect solution.

SuoDuanDao 5y ago
I'd be more comfortable discussing capitalism's flaws if that didn't imply I agreed with people I wouldn't want running a community garden, let alone a national economy. In fact, there's probably a linguistic divergence that predicts whose proposed solutions I'll find reasonable. What does capitalism mean to the person making the critique? To me it refers to any system involving private property and voluntary exchange thereof. I suspect people critiquing 'capitalism' are critiquing what I'd call 'growth-dependant corporatocracy' which I'm happy to critique all day long. Using 'capitalism' to refer to that indicates the kinds of solutions someone would bring forth if I decided to listen to them - and given the track record of those solutions, I feel justified in not listening.
- jancsika 5y ago
  > and given the track record of those solutions, I feel justified in not listening. But that's one of the biggest problems with the ideology you're critiquing! I mean, what are the odds that a Frankfurt School-educated critical theorist in the 70s would be confronted with a product of capitalism that undermines one of the fundamental assumptions of both capitalism and classical Marxism? The likelihood is so low I'm sure they believed they could call it 0% and get on with their work. And in nearly all cases they probably could. Then the personal computer revolution brought the idea of zero marginal cost into the realm of practicality for most of the Western world. And the one field which claims to study hidden corner cases of the struggle for freedom and self-determination is stuck writing about the impact of zero marginal cost data only in retrospect. It's an embarrassing oversight, especially for a field that seems like it was designed specifically to illuminate (and predict!) esoteric social and technological developments that other fields would miss. E.g., the cheap, ubiquitous zero-marginal-cost factories that are our smartphones and laptops. Anyway, if your aim is to become the kind of ideologue you're attempting to avoid, by all means use your proposed filter to interpret the few interesting writings you come across as noise.
  - SuoDuanDao 5y ago
    Not sure which ideology you say I'm critiquing in this context. Frankfurt school of economics? I confess I don't know much about it beyond that the Q set thinks it's the new Illuminati. In any case I think it's a pretty good filter - 'capitalism' is used as a deliberately vague title that lets the reader fill in their own meaning. If there were genuinely interesting writings based on hostility towards a deliberately vaguely-defined concept I'd be interested to see them, but I know enough about the concept of a Volksfeind to feel justified in my skepticism. Vitalik Buterin can talk about public goods without ever mentioning capitalism because he's got actual solutions in mind. He doesn't need a malleable boogeyman to lend them gravitas. I'm sure anyone else with genuinely interesting insights would have precise enough solutions that they need more precise problem statements than 'capitalism'.
    - jancsika 5y ago
      I don't understand your position. Are you filtering on reading/hearing the stem of the word "capitalism" as written/uttered in an explanation of the problem? Or are you filtering critiques that simply begin and end with the stem of "capitalism?" If it's the former then your filter is way too broad. There are plenty of non-Marxists who by sheer coincidence probably mention capitalism in the midst of explaining quite specific policy positions. (Matt Stoller comes to mind.) For those commentators you are turning off your brain for what sounds to me like the equivalent of an intellectual drinking game. If it's the latter then the filter is useless. You'd be better off filtering on any single constant string as almost all are going to fall short of being a serious problem statement for any domain.
      - SuoDuanDao 5y ago
        All right, this is interesting. How does this Matt Stoller fellow define the capitalism he speaks of?
  - imtringued 5y ago
    >I mean, what are the odds that a Frankfurt School-educated critical theorist in the 70s would be confronted with a product of capitalism that undermines one of the fundamental assumptions of both capitalism and classical Marxism? The likelihood is so low I'm sure they believed they could call it 0% and get on with their work. Well, negative yields and interest rates are a pretty good candidate. Marxism has no reason to exist because Marx assumed that communism is an utopia that follows capitalism where negative yields mark the end of capitalism. If you simply allow negative yields then reaching the abundance utopia doesn't need capitalism to end. However, the capitalists pride themselves in the opposite, that there will never be abundance nor utopia and that they will always be needed and that they must keep working forever. All of this is based on the assumption that yields cannot be negative. We are about to find out whether that is true.
- imtringued 5y ago
  > To me it refers to any system involving private property and voluntary exchange thereof. That's just an ideal. As soon as you talk about e.g. CO2 emissions everyone talks about how voluntary exchange through CO2 taxes is preventing prosperity. Also, as soon as you talk about taxing land ownership people will go crazy. Finally, people think money is private property when it is just a relationship with other people that owe you something. People love the idea of insisting that someone else is forced to owe you something but they also love to reprimand that person for refusing this involuntary relationship. Simplified: "inflation is bad because I want to keep others in debt and never forgive that debt" The idea of money being your private property is the same as insisting that a part of another human (their time) is your private property. >'growth-dependant corporatocracy' which I'm happy to critique all day long. Well, the above is already pretty damning. Once you add morals to the capitalist economy you basically are trapped into a prisoners dilemma. Work is allocated as full time jobs even when there isn't enough aggregate demand to keep everyone employed full time. So full time employees must consume the exponentially growing production of a full time employee otherwise there is no point in working full time. What often happens is that upper middle class people and below with "too much" money want to work less and they do not work less today, they will want to retire early. They are effectively delaying their economic involvement for decades while people today need this money to be employed today. This has lead to a massive expansion in private and public debt just to maintain a semblance of full time employment for everyone. The debt itself isn't the problem, it's the fact that the people who are betting on early retirement will be forced to realize that there won't be enough young people in the labor force to take care of them by the time they retire. Let's assume 0% inflation. A population of 1000 accumulates 1000000 tokens representing one hour of work each. The working age population declines to 100. Without inflation the amount of owed work doesn't change. Each worker has to work 10 times as much to honor the token. The reality is that they cannot do 10 times the work. Maybe 4 times if automation has been progressing quickly and they work more hours per day. That means 1000000 tokens only represent 400000 hours of work. 2.5x inflation becomes necessary. Thinking of money as property fools people into believing they were robbed by inflation. In this case it is clear that the price level shifted because of a lack of workers. Did the 900 retired workers rob the elderly? Did nature rob us of our youth?
twofornone 5y ago
[dead]
geomark 5y ago
I haven't seen that. In fact, in capitalism the winners usually win by giving the masses something they want. So everybody wins; the masses all win a little by getting a little boost in quality of life and the big winners win by getting a ton of money.
- laumars 5y ago
  It’s very easy to believe that when you’re one of the winners (as most who frequent this forum will be) but according to the 2020 US census there are 37.2 million people living in poverty in the US alone: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-273.html https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-27... There are numerous examples of where capitalistic businesses have gone out of their way to exploit their customer needs. Not “wants” but needs. Such as companies that buy up mobile home parks and then hike up the land rent forcing people out of their own house. The health sector is a biggie too. Clearly the victims of those businesses are not equal “winners” in such an arrangement. I focus on America here but that’s not fair because the rest of the world have their fair share of problems too.

malermeister 5y ago

If you define "not poverty" as earning more than $1.90 a day, like the world bank does, that might be true. If you define "not poverty" as $7.40, which the UN claims is the "absolute minimum for basic nutrition and normal life expectancy", the only place that has moved people out of poverty at scale is... centrally planned China. This claim is nothing more than propaganda by a capitalist institution fudging the numbers to make itself look good.