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Market economy is not necessary the same as capitalism, China is capitalist in some parts but it also a heavy state subsidized economy with a regulated market a
by tored 3y ago
Market economy is not necessary the same as capitalism, China is capitalist in some parts but it also a heavy state subsidized economy with a regulated market and public ownership.
And the massive increase in living standard can be attributed to multiple factors that was all needed to make it possible, superposition as it is called in physics, e.g. a proper contracting framework, a literate and educated public, technological advances, deregulating markets from the old estates system, etc.
We can take Sweden as a good example, yes the legislative change in 1864[1] that anyone could operate a business was crucial, but where did all the talent come from that actually created all those famous Swedish companies and inventions? Many came from the Swedish Army because Sweden was an old Great Power and the army needed many engineers to be able to build fortifications and such. Two of the most famous ones would be Nils Ericson[2] and his younger brother John Ericsson[3]
But you also need qualified workers and it happens that Sweden had at the time one of the most literate population in the world because of the Swedish state church. In the old days Sweden was quite strict religiously and the Swedish state church had conducted Household Examinations since 1686[4] about general knowledge in the Bible and Luther's Small Catechism. You can't really run a modern industry with an illiterate public.
Thus attributing everything to "capitalism" is gross simplification of history.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_of_Extended_Freedom_of_Trade_(Sweden) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_of_Extended_Freedom_of_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nils_Ericson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nils_Ericson
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ericsson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ericsson
[4] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Husf%C3%B6rh%C3%B6r https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Husf%C3%B6rh%C3%B6r
- keiferski 3y agoAnswer a simple question for me: Compared to fifty years ago, are the economies of China and Poland more or less capitalist? And if the increase in the quality of life for those two places isn’t from transitioning from communist/Soviet mechanisms to more capitalist ones, what do you attribute it to?
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoYou can stuff anything in a pigeonhole if you try hard enough. Sure there are Polish and Chinese capitalism, but it's at an individual level. At other levels (corporate and services etc) it's different. And so on. Describe the whole system, or we're just making sophomoric comments which don't help with understanding. "It's really just capitalism!" doesn't begin to cover the cases.
- keiferski 3y agoI don’t think it’s that complicated of a question, and you’d be pretty hard pressed to argue that the economies aren’t more capitalist compared to their predecessors.
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoAgreed. But nothing is simple; they aren't simply capitalist now.
- tored 3y agoChina and Poland has definitely got it better with less communism, but what is "more or less capitalist"? I also notice that you completely ignored my reply.
- keiferski 3y agoI ignored the rest of your reply because I specifically used China and Poland as examples. The relevance of Sweden in the 1800s is unclear to me and you didn’t tie that to the comment chain. People on HN sometimes have this tendency to throw up a bunch of unrelated citations that have nothing to do with the main point, then expect the replies to address each one. I agree that everything can’t be summarized as a simple cause effect, but the parent comment I replied to was about comparing capitalism to communism, hence my usage of examples of states that went from communist to capitalist. In other words, this isn’t theoretical. We have examples of a capitalist state succeeding, when it was formerly communist. Again, Sweden in the 1800s is not particularly relevant here.
- tored 3y agoIt was me that was doing that comparison, agree it is not a perfect one because of many reasons, one is that communism is a political system that has an economic system (typically planned economy) and capitalism is an economic system only. Thus you can run a brutal dictatorship, like the communistic China, or benevolent democracy with capitalism. And this is what I don't agree with the reasoning in this thread, it is a comparison of apples with oranges. Many proponents of capitalism does this error, they assume that capitalism gives political rights somehow, and they typically talk about things like freedom and such. But all of those political freedoms stem from somewhere. And an continuation on that argument is that private companies a free to do what they want, when in reality private stock companies (in the West at least) has a separate legal entity and reduced liability as a guarantee from the state. Is that true capitalism? Why I made the comparison between capitalism and communism is that both proponents of those systems usually reply "That is not real communism/capitalism!" about any flaw in these systems (which of course happened in this thread as well). But if every flaw is always theorized away, does it then only exist in theory? If we look specifically at China for instance we can notice other things that has helped it, one is that greedy capitalist from the West moved industries there, China is also doing industrial espionage on Western companies, China as also aggressively spikes its currency, and it balloons it's GDP numbers by building ghost cities.