3 ms·

> There are important differences between Denmark and the US though. On the human level, sure. On the level of "fundamental economic system" (which is, I belie

by Kamq 3y ago

> There are important differences between Denmark and the US though. On the human level, sure. On the level of "fundamental economic system" (which is, I believe, the line of discussion), there really aren't. They're both WEIRD countries with market based-economies and a social safety net. They both end up at the top of the lists on economic power (adjusted for population). The differences between them are political fine-tuning of the system to target an extra 5-10% of the population with the safety net, or to target those people in different ways. That's incredibly minor in terms of economic systems. When comparing two different economic systems, you tend to see differences on the order of "mass-famines" and "percentage of the population involved in subsistence farming".

camgunz 3y ago
There are large differences though. The US poverty rate is 2.5x higher than Denmark's (15% to 6%). Denmark's life expectancy is 6 years longer. The kinds of policies you'd need to close that gap in the US would be transformative. > When comparing two different economic systems, you tend to see differences on the order of "mass-famines" and "percentage of the population involved in subsistence farming". There are plenty of capitalist countries that do a lot of subsistence farming.
- Kamq 3y ago
  > The kinds of policies you'd need to close that gap in the US would be transformative. I disagree. When laid against things like the end of mercantilism, I don't think that qualifies as transformative. I think the effects would look pretty much like the existing US system, because Denmark looks pretty close to the current US system by the standards we're talking about. If you want to argue they'd be fundamentally different, you can make a case, but I'd like to know why they would produce different results. > There are plenty of capitalist countries that do a lot of subsistence farming. Do you have some examples? The areas I'm aware of that practice subsistence farming, don't have a long history of leaving the means of production alone in private hands for very long.
  - sudosysgen 3y ago
    > Do you have some examples? The areas I'm aware of that practice subsistence farming, don't have a long history of leaving the means of production alone in private hands for very long. This is not correct. Under, for example, the Roman Empire, privately held land was routinely leased to free men, either for a share of the produce (métayage) or for a fixed fee. This practice lasted hundreds of years. The end of subsistence farming has everything to do with technology and nothing at all to do with capitalism. In the eigth century in France, around 50% of the land was under a sharecropping-like system, too. This page, and the page in French wiki it links in the intro, give a good rundown of capitalist-like subsistence farming in antiquity and the middle ages : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metayage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metayage
    - Kamq 3y ago
      There's a fundamental difference here in that these examples exist before the state had a monopoly on legitimate violence. Or, to put it another way, the large landowners you're referring to, also had large armies, the largest armies around by definition, otherwise they wouldn't have owned that land. They _were_ the state in their area, in the modern sense. That's not private ownership of the means of production.
      - sudosysgen 3y ago
        That's completely untrue for Rome, and barely true at all for France in those days. Roman landowners did not own their land by stealing it from other citizens with large armies. They owned their land by either receiving it from the state as payment, or by buying it. The Roman state had a definite monopoly on violence. In fact, when people commanded armies to take power in Rome, what they were trying to do was to take over the state, and the vast majority of the time those weren't private armies, but State armies that they were misusing. The Roman state very very much had a monopoly on violence and roman agricultural tenants very very much were renting the landlords privately owned means of production. Capitalism doesn't magically stop subsistence farming. The advance of science and nothing else makes that possible. The Romans had little interest in advancing fundamental technology because there was no money to be made doing it, and so they never made any advances beyond the domains engineering which were immediately profitable (like weapons and aqueducts and bridges). That's why they made barely any scientific progress in a thousand years.
mindslight 3y ago
> On the human level, sure. On the level of "fundamental economic system" (which is, I believe, the line of discussion), there really aren't. One of the problems with this whole "debate" is that defenders of the status quo apply a huge motte and bailey to the definition of "capitalism". Both strawmanning any criticism of it as a rejection of all aspects claimed by capitalism, and also giving capitalism credit for systems that share some aspects of capitalism even though they haven't gone all-in and let capital run roughshod over everything else. This dynamic is so common it has become a trope - kneejerk cries of "socialism". The original link that kicked off this comment tree was basically doing the same thing in more words. The distinction between the motte and the bailey is easiest to see when aspects that we associate with capitalism end up in direct opposition to capitalism itself. For example, free markets can be directly opposed to capitalism, like in the context of imaginary property. A capital-centric view says that inventing a new form of capital out of whole cloth is the right thing to do. A market-centric view says that competition should drive the cost of information to within an epsilon of the copying/distribution cost.
- Kamq 3y ago
  > One of the problems with this whole "debate" is that defenders of the status quo apply a huge motte and bailey to the definition of "capitalism". Both strawmanning any criticism of it as a rejection of all aspects claimed by capitalism, and also giving capitalism credit for systems that share some aspects of capitalism even though they haven't gone all-in and let capital run roughshod over everything else. This is a fair call-out, given that there's so much drive-by arguing on the internet. I'm pretty sure I'm using a standard definition, but let me state the definition I'm using just to be as explicit as possible: A system is capitalist if it has private ownership of the means of production. So, to give an example, a country would be a capitalist country regardless of their tax scheme/welfare spending so long as the means of production were privately held. Another country that nationalized industries (the oil industry is a common one) would be, at the very least, a mixed-economy, regardless of how free their markets are. Given the above comments on Europe, I would argue that European countries do meet the definition of capitalist for the most part. While some European countries do completely nationalize a handful of industries, it's rare, and the majority of industries are privately owned, even if they are highly regulated.

by Kamq 3y ago

camgunz 3y ago

There are large differences though. The US poverty rate is 2.5x higher than Denmark's (15% to 6%). Denmark's life expectancy is 6 years longer. The kinds of policies you'd need to close that gap in the US would be transformative. > When comparing two different economic systems, you tend to see differences on the order of "mass-famines" and "percentage of the population involved in subsistence farming". There are plenty of capitalist countries that do a lot of subsistence farming.

Kamq 3y ago
> The kinds of policies you'd need to close that gap in the US would be transformative. I disagree. When laid against things like the end of mercantilism, I don't think that qualifies as transformative. I think the effects would look pretty much like the existing US system, because Denmark looks pretty close to the current US system by the standards we're talking about. If you want to argue they'd be fundamentally different, you can make a case, but I'd like to know why they would produce different results. > There are plenty of capitalist countries that do a lot of subsistence farming. Do you have some examples? The areas I'm aware of that practice subsistence farming, don't have a long history of leaving the means of production alone in private hands for very long.
- sudosysgen 3y ago
  > Do you have some examples? The areas I'm aware of that practice subsistence farming, don't have a long history of leaving the means of production alone in private hands for very long. This is not correct. Under, for example, the Roman Empire, privately held land was routinely leased to free men, either for a share of the produce (métayage) or for a fixed fee. This practice lasted hundreds of years. The end of subsistence farming has everything to do with technology and nothing at all to do with capitalism. In the eigth century in France, around 50% of the land was under a sharecropping-like system, too. This page, and the page in French wiki it links in the intro, give a good rundown of capitalist-like subsistence farming in antiquity and the middle ages : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metayage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metayage
  - Kamq 3y ago
    There's a fundamental difference here in that these examples exist before the state had a monopoly on legitimate violence. Or, to put it another way, the large landowners you're referring to, also had large armies, the largest armies around by definition, otherwise they wouldn't have owned that land. They _were_ the state in their area, in the modern sense. That's not private ownership of the means of production.
    - sudosysgen 3y ago
      That's completely untrue for Rome, and barely true at all for France in those days. Roman landowners did not own their land by stealing it from other citizens with large armies. They owned their land by either receiving it from the state as payment, or by buying it. The Roman state had a definite monopoly on violence. In fact, when people commanded armies to take power in Rome, what they were trying to do was to take over the state, and the vast majority of the time those weren't private armies, but State armies that they were misusing. The Roman state very very much had a monopoly on violence and roman agricultural tenants very very much were renting the landlords privately owned means of production. Capitalism doesn't magically stop subsistence farming. The advance of science and nothing else makes that possible. The Romans had little interest in advancing fundamental technology because there was no money to be made doing it, and so they never made any advances beyond the domains engineering which were immediately profitable (like weapons and aqueducts and bridges). That's why they made barely any scientific progress in a thousand years.

mindslight 3y ago

> On the human level, sure. On the level of "fundamental economic system" (which is, I believe, the line of discussion), there really aren't. One of the problems with this whole "debate" is that defenders of the status quo apply a huge motte and bailey to the definition of "capitalism". Both strawmanning any criticism of it as a rejection of all aspects claimed by capitalism, and also giving capitalism credit for systems that share some aspects of capitalism even though they haven't gone all-in and let capital run roughshod over everything else. This dynamic is so common it has become a trope - kneejerk cries of "socialism". The original link that kicked off this comment tree was basically doing the same thing in more words. The distinction between the motte and the bailey is easiest to see when aspects that we associate with capitalism end up in direct opposition to capitalism itself. For example, free markets can be directly opposed to capitalism, like in the context of imaginary property. A capital-centric view says that inventing a new form of capital out of whole cloth is the right thing to do. A market-centric view says that competition should drive the cost of information to within an epsilon of the copying/distribution cost.

Kamq 3y ago
> One of the problems with this whole "debate" is that defenders of the status quo apply a huge motte and bailey to the definition of "capitalism". Both strawmanning any criticism of it as a rejection of all aspects claimed by capitalism, and also giving capitalism credit for systems that share some aspects of capitalism even though they haven't gone all-in and let capital run roughshod over everything else. This is a fair call-out, given that there's so much drive-by arguing on the internet. I'm pretty sure I'm using a standard definition, but let me state the definition I'm using just to be as explicit as possible: A system is capitalist if it has private ownership of the means of production. So, to give an example, a country would be a capitalist country regardless of their tax scheme/welfare spending so long as the means of production were privately held. Another country that nationalized industries (the oil industry is a common one) would be, at the very least, a mixed-economy, regardless of how free their markets are. Given the above comments on Europe, I would argue that European countries do meet the definition of capitalist for the most part. While some European countries do completely nationalize a handful of industries, it's rare, and the majority of industries are privately owned, even if they are highly regulated.