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Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

50 points by mgunes 12y ago

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
pnathan 12y ago
I find it interesting that there's this continual barrage of articles and thinkers taking swings at capitalism; often they offer some vaguely Marxist-sounding critique (not that I'm up on Marx or his intellectual descendants). Isn't there any other economic critiques of the current Way Of Things outside of using the anti-capitalist bogeyman?
- karmajunkie 12y ago
  Are you sure that it isn't just that most people are conditioned to consider anything anti-capitalist to be Marxist in nature?
  - icebraining 12y ago
    I don't know about the barrage of articles, but at least in 24/7, the author cites Marx multiple times.
    - zenogais 12y ago
      It's published by Verso Books a publisher that releases works by a wide variety of philosophers coming out of the school of thought called critical theory. These philosophers took up a task similar to that of a lot of great thinkers - to assess and critique present society in the hopes of liberating people from oppressive circumstances. Many of these philosophers based their critiques on Marx. Some went further back to Kant, Hume, and Spinoza. Others start with Nietzsche.
  - gnarbarian 12y ago
    well what else is there? We tend to think of economic systems as falling somewhere along the one dimensional axis between Marxism (no private property allowed) and Capitalism (everything is private property). What other axis are you suggesting? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_system
    - gvr 12y ago
      The way I think about economic systems is - Level of business regulation. From left wing Marx style central production control to pure capitalism. - Level of redistribution of wealth. From high taxation with redistribution of wealth and strong infrastructure for all citizens (think Sweden or Denmark) to low taxation. I believe some form of capitalism mixed with somewhat aggressive redistribution of wealth would yield the highest productivity and the most humane society. This is basically how Sweden operates.
      - gnarbarian 12y ago
        "- Level of business regulation. From left wing Marx style central production control to pure capitalism." This is about private property. Marxists deny the right for individuals or companies to own the "means of production". "- Level of redistribution of wealth. From high taxation with redistribution of wealth and strong infrastructure for all citizens (think Sweden or Denmark) to low taxation." This is also about private property because aggressive redistribution of wealth is by definition impinging on the right to accrue private property. "I believe some form of capitalism mixed with somewhat aggressive redistribution of wealth would yield the highest productivity and the most humane society. This is basically how Sweden operates." This is socialism which sits in the middle of the one dimensional spectrum of economic systems. Also how do you define productivity? Because I assure you that a sweatshop is more productive per dollar than any shoe factory in Sweden. Unless you mean maximizing the sum productivity and humanity at the expense of one or the other. But humanity is a little harder to quantify eh? :)
        gvr 12y ago
        No matter how high taxes are, if you let people in a first world country work with whatever they want, you're not going to end up with university educated professionals in a shoe sweat shop. If they work in a sweatshop in Sweden, it will be one of clothing design, software engineering, or some other line of work producing many orders of magnitude more value per hour where they can make some solid money for themselves while paying a significant amount of taxes. And yes, of course I believe that productivity and happiness are two different things and that they need to be balanced. I don't believe in trickle down economics, or that they are two different facets of the same variable on a linear axis that somehow move in unison as you slide left/right up/down. You can probably quantify humanity (like the Gross National Happiness people are trying to do) somehow, but it's of course not going to resemble true science. I do think there are some basic markers of a civilized society that I have a hard time understanding how some people disagree with though. These include public access to nature and beaches, good education for everyone, good healthcare for everyone, etc. To me, this is a separate _economical_ issue from how much the government meddles in the work life of its citizens. If it's easy for you to think of these issues on one axis be my guest, but it is not a mental model that works well for me. Cheers!
  - pnathan 12y ago
    I can't speak to most people: I'm personally aware there are multiple systems besides "Marx" and "Adam Smith". I would suspect that most people with at least a Wikipedia level of awareness of economic systems know this.
- kybernetikos 12y ago
  Well there are a lot of pro-capitalist critiques of the current Way Of Things doing the rounds too.
- tormeh 12y ago
  Well, the critique seems to really be leveled at pure capitalism, as opposed to just capitalism in general. I guess it's the lack of regulation to prevent a rat-race to the bottom of quality of life that is the issue.
- pjc50 12y ago
  Quite a lot of Marx's observations of the problems in capitalism are valid, if oversimplified and oddly phrased. The two problems with Marx are (1) he was writing ~150 years ago and things have changed in industrialisation and (de)colonisation; and (2) his proposed solutions and those of his immediate followers were found to fail badly. This does not necessarily invalidate subsequent leftwing economics. However, use of Marxist language and terminology is usually the sign of a crank. It really needs updating for the present world and modes of discussion.
  - corpselord420 12y ago
    'sign of a crank' is grossly wrong, like it or not most of the vocabulary we have to describe the capitalist system as a mode of social organization originates with marx
- Ygg2 12y ago
  > I find it interesting that there's this continual barrage of articles and thinkers taking swings at capitalism; Why is it unusual? Crises of recession and slow comeback have made people wary of it. The future, most western and/or rich states are moving towards, seem to be one inhospitable for most humans (a caste system based on money/power). If you see the current system being bad for you, why wouldn't you critique it? And why wouldn't you use/mention the oldest critique of it? Especially parts that have been validated. It's a bit like saying, "Listen I'm going to talk about Parsers, but completely ignore anything written about parsers, before 2009. I'm especially going to ignore Dragon Book."
  - pnathan 12y ago
    I'd like to see serious engagement with the subject rather than dismissal of the current state (such as you've done in your first paragraph). If it's so bad for people (it's not, in general - check out the Gates Foundation Letter from 2014), then we should be looking to improve it, not throw it out. It's also interesting that circa the '30s, the capitalist/democratic system was also being tossed into the popular junkheap in favor of centralised/dictatorish systems. I don't mean to say this is like that, but there's a fun little similarity there on the surface.
    - Ygg2 12y ago
      > I'd like to see serious engagement with the subject rather than dismissal of the current state It's not my realm of expertise, but from what I've gather the way capitalism works to maximize profit (price-cost). You achieve that by, maximizing the price or minimizing the cost or any combination of the two. If you think closely about it, replacing humans with cheaper, tireless, less error prone systems (be that robots or robot-like humans), you score a double whammy. You maximize production AND reduce the costs. > It's also interesting that circa the '30s, the capitalist/democratic system was also being tossed into the popular junkheap in favor of centralised/dictatorish systems You mean that after Great Depression (circa 1929.), people would considered an alternative system to the one that left them in crushing poverty? That doesn't strike me as interesting or surprising. It's like a man in debt going to a loan-shark out of desperation. What is interesting that around ~81 years after that episode, we have another.
- zenogais 12y ago
  There is no "anti-capitalist bogeyman", not even really sure what such a phrase means. Certainly to ignore capitalism in a critique of present conditions is to miss the facts that capitalism is (A) A fairly recent re-organization of the material conditions of existence and not something fundamental to human nature or society and (B) A direct cause in many large-scale catastrophes unfolding in the present. You can find critiques that attempt to refute (B) and look elsewhere for the source of problems (eg. the state, lazy individuals, and so on), and many have, you can look to such writers as Ayn Rand, Tim Ferris, Michael Ellsberg, for a start. Having read Marx and the later critical theorists as well as these pro-capitalist writers I can say that the case against capitalism is fairly damning and well-supported. The case for it being much weaker and always falling back on some sort of "hand of the market" type mysticism at some point from what I have seen.
  - AnimalMuppet 12y ago
    While capitalism has serious problems, it actually produces objectively better results than most of the alternatives. (Capitalism with some state socialism on top seems to be the only alternative that does as well or better.) If you dispute my statement, can you show another system that produces objectively better outcomes than capitalism?
    - the_af 12y ago
      I think the "objectively" part can be disputed, since it's very difficult to be objective about this. What are you measuring? To be truly objective you must measure outside the parameters of capitalism, otherwise you'll be measuring just what it's optimized to do (e.g. you could be measuring the ease with which one can become an entrepreneur and start a company, but why would that be the best way to measure a socioeconomical system?). How do you measure happiness of the population, self-fulfilment, solidarity, sustainability, etc? Capitalism has run its course in my very subjective opinion. Hopefully there will be a successor that is more sustainable and people friendly, and hopefully it won't involve the invisible hand of the free market, state enforced monopolies, laissez faire or unsustainable consumerism.
- goodcanadian 12y ago
  Well, you certainly generated a lot of debate. I sort of hate to be a pedantic, but I think a lot of the trouble comes from a misuse of terms. Capitalism is not the same as free market, and free market is not the same as laissez faire. Capitalism means that individuals can own the capital (land, factories, money) and can get a return from that capital. We allow this because the profit motive (greed) creates a pretty good (though certainly not perfect) allocation of resources. It does, however, lend itself to rent seeking behavior, which is pretty clearly not ideal for the economy. Anyway, my point is, when talking about the short comings of capitalism, it is important not to conflate the term with free market economics. Good capitalists will actually be anti-free market as monopolies mean they can make more money (ultimate in rent-seeking). Our system is not simply capitalist nor is it simply free market. It is far more complicated than that.
  - ArkyBeagle 12y ago
    Well said. I don't know why, but it's easier for me to think in terms of mercantilism vs. capitalism. If you're Hudson's Bay and it's 1800, you have a license to print money in the North American fur trade. And if you're G.E. , it's 1985 and the product is jet engines...
- ArkyBeagle 12y ago
  There's a school of thought that hold that what bugs us about capitalism isn't really capitalism. It has a kernel of truth while still being a "no true Scotsman" thing. We do not regularly separate profits ( which are derived from consumer surplus ) and rents ( which are not ) , which leads to much confusion. There may be less confusion this way than if we try to understand what is or is not a rent.
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  There are a lot of holes in modern mainstream economic thinking, a large number of which are actually pretty old. We've been having what are fundamentally the same economic debates for 2000+ years, largely over fairness of pricing, wages, equity, and control, as a survey history such as Roger E. Backhouse's The Ordinary Business of Life details. In the 20th century, the three major challenges to free-market capitalism as espoused by Adam Smith and his followers have been the Great Depression of 1929-1940, the environmental and oil shocks of the 1970s, and the "Great Recession" of 2007 onwards. The Depression raised the question of whether or not the free market was itself self-correcting, and the answer is generally accepted as a pretty emphatic "no". It wasn't until massive amounts of government-induced spending, partially through the New Deal, but largely as part of World War II and post-war reconstruction efforts (e.g., the Marshall Plan) that the economy really got off the ground again, and even through the 1950s and 1960s, there was concern that the malaise of the 1930s would return. What happened instead were a series of environmental and safety concerns -- Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed, and more so the question of whether or not the modern post-Industrial Revolution age was sustainable: the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth. These were immediately followed by peaking of US domestic oil extraction in 1971, and the first effective middle-east oil embargo from the recently-formed OPEC (several earlier attempts had been made, notably during the Suez crisis of the 1950s, but US domestic extraction could take up the slack). It was also a decade in which the last vestiges of the gold standard were removed from most major world currencies (the Swiss Franc continued through the 2000s), with the cancellation of the Bretton Woods agreement, unilaterally, by the US. The turbulent 1970s turned into the prosperous 1980s and 1990s, which some attribute to opening up of the North Sea, Alaskan North Slope, and offshore Gulf of Mexico to oil development. Crashing oil prices are thought to have played a major role in the collapse of the former Soviet Union, long dependent on its oil exports for hard currency. There were also massive political shifts underway. Within the US, the previously white-Democratically-dominated South was split amongst a now black Democratic and white Republic party, while moral and other issues were used to create unity amongst an otherwise increasingly class-divided Republican party elsewhere. Labor unions lost a huge amount of power both due to general decline among US manufacturing companies (particularly automobiles, steel, and other heavy industry), as well as federal action (the 1980s air traffic controllers' strike and dissolving of the union by President Reagan). While real returns on business investment were falling (look up Deloitte's Center for the Edge study "The Shift Index"), financial wealth creation was increasingly coming from the financial sector itself, and asset inflation of securities and later, real estate (itself driven by securities return demands). There has been economic growth, mostly in the BRIC nations: Brazil, Russia, India, and China, but most especially in the latter two, with growth in China quite simply blowing away any previous economic revival anywhere, including the post-WWII European and Japanese recoveries. Unfortunately for economics, the growth in India and China has come largely with an almost precise parallel growth in primary energy consumption, a huge portion of that exceptionally dirty coal (in both traditional particulate, smog, and heavy-metal pollution as well as CO2 emissions). Much of the "economic decoupling" of growth from primary resource consumption in the rest of the world disappears if you factor India and China back into the equation. Then came the 2000s: the dot com collapse, the Bush tax cuts (favoring the wealthy markedly), two unfunded wars, peak oil in 2006, the housing (asset) bubble, 2007 global financial crisis, and growing inequality worldwide. To put it bluntly, conventional economics predicted little if any of this. The models of the Limits to Growth types appear to be playing out, though with some variance (the post-oil embargo efficiency improvements and reduced oil consumption, as well as fracking and other "enhanced recovery" petroleum extraction methods have pushed back the net fossil hydrocarbon liquids by 5-15 years). The criticisms of Marx, Malthus, Toynbee, and others over the inequality of capitalism have resurfaced with a vengeance. Claims of a "new" economy or "information" economy are proving largely illusory. The Web 2.0 economy is largely funded by advertising, the bulk of which are FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) and electronics consumables themselves, as well as exceptionally liberal central bank monetary policy. And the critics of economics are mainstream: you'll find articles questioning received wisdom in the Financial Times, Economist, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and elsewhere. Critics include Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, James Galbraith, Steve Keen, Herman Daly, and a handful of others -- hardly the bulk of the profession, but some key thinkers. And as others have noted, "anti-capitalist" is at best a label of convenience applied to a system that could be characterized by a great many things. I've called it the economic orthodoxy (as opposed to heterodoxies). Salient characteristics include free markets, laissez-faire (according to some), corporatism, financialization, globalization, commoditization, computerization, automation, extraction, nonsustainability, and others. All of which tends to be a bit of a mouthful. There's also a fair bit of disagreement among critics on just what the most relevant elements of failure are (as is typically the case -- it's easy to agree that you don't like the old boss, harder to select a new boss you happen to agree on).
chippy 12y ago
As I write, another article on the front page of Hacker News is entitled: "This is what Tesla owners are doing while you sleep" http://blog.opower.com/2014/07/this-is-what-tesla-owners-are-doing-while-you-sleep/ http://blog.opower.com/2014/07/this-is-what-tesla-owners-are... "While you are in bed dreaming about how some day you too might own an electric car, many EV owners are doing something dramatic; something unusual..."
- wmf 12y ago
  If sleep is a luxury, it stands to reason that Tesla owners are getting plenty.
waps 12y ago
What does this article have to do with capitalism ? When you go right down to it communism, socialism, even mercantilism are all trying to maximize productivity and consumption. I think it's probably the one thing all economic systems agree on. Hell, even natural selection agrees on that. So is sleep an affront to them all ?
- zenogais 12y ago
  I was gonna try, but it's a lot of work to even begin deconstructing all the parts of this that are simply incorrect or ahistorical.
- crpatino 12y ago
  > What does this article have to do with capitalism ? When you go right down to it communism, socialism, even mercantilism are all trying to maximize productivity and consumption. Yes, a hundred times yes!!! > I think it's probably the one thing all economic systems agree on. There I will have to disagree. The three examples you provided are modern (post Enlightenment) economic systems. I am sure there are more examples along the world history, but it is far fetched to say it is common to all systems. > Hell, even natural selection agrees on that. Strongly disagree. Every instance of rapid growth in nature either finds a balance with the larger ecosystem or self destroys (by causing severe, though not necessarily terminal, damage to the larger ecosystem). Think cancer. Think the introduction of exotic species into isolated ecosystems. Think the depopulation of the Americas during the XV and XVI century due to European diseases. > So is sleep an affront to them all ? In a way, yes. At the end of the day, power means access to limited resources. Besides the obvious cases (access to actual raw materials), time is a limited resource for every human being. But you can expand in a way your life span by having other people do what you want instead of what they want. Ultimately, there is a hard limit on how much this vicarious life extension is available: Num_people_under_your_control * 24_hrs_per_day / biological_needs_factor. Given than people usually need in the ballpark or 8 hrs of sleep per day, this is the single largest component of biological_needs_factor. Be it a capitalist robber baron, a communist dictator, or a mercantilist king, they get more power by having their people sleep less and work more... up to a point.
  - 12y ago
kyllo 12y ago
The really important thing this touches on, IMO, is that people who are "poor," are not just cash poor or asset-poor, but also time-poor, and as a result they are increasingly sleep-poor. Because a unit of a poor person's time is worth very little money, they have to sell so much of it just to pay the bills, that it encroaches upon the time they have available for sleep. Being sleep-deprived drains a person's energy, causing them to work less efficiently, which helps perpetuate the vicious cycle of poverty.
- zenogais 12y ago
  I think that even more important is that this provides an explanation for the obsession with getting less sleep that seems particularly pernicious in start-up culture, but is noticeable elsewhere as well. It goes beyond merely worrying about the health consequences. It is human biology representing an affront to longer working days and increased productivity.
tedks 12y ago
Interesting first comment: >This caused conflicts with those who had the idea work consisted of doing as little as possible for the most finanical reward. Liberals. The idea of a "work ethic" (a contradiction in terms if there ever was one!) is so pervasive in most people's minds that they label people who have appropriate capitalist values (i.e., work is a competition between the boss and worker; each attempts to maximize value for minimal cost) by their political enemies.
- blaze33 12y ago
  Of course there's going to be conflicts when people have "appropriate" values while their "enemies" have "pervasive" ones.
  - tedks 12y ago
    Pervasive means "common". I'm not sure if this is what you meant (it does sound like "perverse" and if you're not a native english speaker I can see how the mistake could be made). But of course your statement is correct either way. Interesting how both sides see themselves as lone warriors against a sea of villainy.
erdle 12y ago
Highly recommend reading this book. It's actually a fairly quick read and is a bit of a departure from his other works and areas of interest. Also not mentioned in the article, Crary co-heads one of the best independent publishers, Zone Books. And every book is beautifully and minimally designed by the legendary studio of Bruce Mau. Disclosure: author is my wife's grad school advisor.
veganarchocap 12y ago
Well for a start, by definition we don't have Capitalism, so any article referring to 'current day Capitalism' has missed what Capitalism in its true essence is about. The simple act of free trade, property rights and self-ownership is what Capitalism is. What people refer to now as Capitalism, is in fact Corporatism, which of course has its own set of deeply serious problems. The trouble with everyone bashing 'Capitalism' now is that people draw a false parallel between 'Capitalism' and 'Corporatism' and run a mile in the opposite direction and adopt quite predictable Marxist views. If we're going to get into Marxism, this was a man who never had a real job... he mooched off of his factory owning friends (so a complete hypocrite) and took advantage of a maid working in his families service and brought about a child of whom he never cared for. He isn't a good role model, and couldn't even live by his own views.

50 points by mgunes 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

I find it interesting that there's this continual barrage of articles and thinkers taking swings at capitalism; often they offer some vaguely Marxist-sounding critique (not that I'm up on Marx or his intellectual descendants). Isn't there any other economic critiques of the current Way Of Things outside of using the anti-capitalist bogeyman?

karmajunkie 12y ago
Are you sure that it isn't just that most people are conditioned to consider anything anti-capitalist to be Marxist in nature?
- icebraining 12y ago
  I don't know about the barrage of articles, but at least in 24/7, the author cites Marx multiple times.
  - zenogais 12y ago
    It's published by Verso Books a publisher that releases works by a wide variety of philosophers coming out of the school of thought called critical theory. These philosophers took up a task similar to that of a lot of great thinkers - to assess and critique present society in the hopes of liberating people from oppressive circumstances. Many of these philosophers based their critiques on Marx. Some went further back to Kant, Hume, and Spinoza. Others start with Nietzsche.
- gnarbarian 12y ago
  well what else is there? We tend to think of economic systems as falling somewhere along the one dimensional axis between Marxism (no private property allowed) and Capitalism (everything is private property). What other axis are you suggesting? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_system
  - gvr 12y ago
    The way I think about economic systems is - Level of business regulation. From left wing Marx style central production control to pure capitalism. - Level of redistribution of wealth. From high taxation with redistribution of wealth and strong infrastructure for all citizens (think Sweden or Denmark) to low taxation. I believe some form of capitalism mixed with somewhat aggressive redistribution of wealth would yield the highest productivity and the most humane society. This is basically how Sweden operates.
    - gnarbarian 12y ago
      "- Level of business regulation. From left wing Marx style central production control to pure capitalism." This is about private property. Marxists deny the right for individuals or companies to own the "means of production". "- Level of redistribution of wealth. From high taxation with redistribution of wealth and strong infrastructure for all citizens (think Sweden or Denmark) to low taxation." This is also about private property because aggressive redistribution of wealth is by definition impinging on the right to accrue private property. "I believe some form of capitalism mixed with somewhat aggressive redistribution of wealth would yield the highest productivity and the most humane society. This is basically how Sweden operates." This is socialism which sits in the middle of the one dimensional spectrum of economic systems. Also how do you define productivity? Because I assure you that a sweatshop is more productive per dollar than any shoe factory in Sweden. Unless you mean maximizing the sum productivity and humanity at the expense of one or the other. But humanity is a little harder to quantify eh? :)
      - gvr 12y ago
        No matter how high taxes are, if you let people in a first world country work with whatever they want, you're not going to end up with university educated professionals in a shoe sweat shop. If they work in a sweatshop in Sweden, it will be one of clothing design, software engineering, or some other line of work producing many orders of magnitude more value per hour where they can make some solid money for themselves while paying a significant amount of taxes. And yes, of course I believe that productivity and happiness are two different things and that they need to be balanced. I don't believe in trickle down economics, or that they are two different facets of the same variable on a linear axis that somehow move in unison as you slide left/right up/down. You can probably quantify humanity (like the Gross National Happiness people are trying to do) somehow, but it's of course not going to resemble true science. I do think there are some basic markers of a civilized society that I have a hard time understanding how some people disagree with though. These include public access to nature and beaches, good education for everyone, good healthcare for everyone, etc. To me, this is a separate _economical_ issue from how much the government meddles in the work life of its citizens. If it's easy for you to think of these issues on one axis be my guest, but it is not a mental model that works well for me. Cheers!
- pnathan 12y ago
  I can't speak to most people: I'm personally aware there are multiple systems besides "Marx" and "Adam Smith". I would suspect that most people with at least a Wikipedia level of awareness of economic systems know this.
kybernetikos 12y ago
Well there are a lot of pro-capitalist critiques of the current Way Of Things doing the rounds too.
tormeh 12y ago
Well, the critique seems to really be leveled at pure capitalism, as opposed to just capitalism in general. I guess it's the lack of regulation to prevent a rat-race to the bottom of quality of life that is the issue.
pjc50 12y ago
Quite a lot of Marx's observations of the problems in capitalism are valid, if oversimplified and oddly phrased. The two problems with Marx are (1) he was writing ~150 years ago and things have changed in industrialisation and (de)colonisation; and (2) his proposed solutions and those of his immediate followers were found to fail badly. This does not necessarily invalidate subsequent leftwing economics. However, use of Marxist language and terminology is usually the sign of a crank. It really needs updating for the present world and modes of discussion.
- corpselord420 12y ago
  'sign of a crank' is grossly wrong, like it or not most of the vocabulary we have to describe the capitalist system as a mode of social organization originates with marx
Ygg2 12y ago
> I find it interesting that there's this continual barrage of articles and thinkers taking swings at capitalism; Why is it unusual? Crises of recession and slow comeback have made people wary of it. The future, most western and/or rich states are moving towards, seem to be one inhospitable for most humans (a caste system based on money/power). If you see the current system being bad for you, why wouldn't you critique it? And why wouldn't you use/mention the oldest critique of it? Especially parts that have been validated. It's a bit like saying, "Listen I'm going to talk about Parsers, but completely ignore anything written about parsers, before 2009. I'm especially going to ignore Dragon Book."
- pnathan 12y ago
  I'd like to see serious engagement with the subject rather than dismissal of the current state (such as you've done in your first paragraph). If it's so bad for people (it's not, in general - check out the Gates Foundation Letter from 2014), then we should be looking to improve it, not throw it out. It's also interesting that circa the '30s, the capitalist/democratic system was also being tossed into the popular junkheap in favor of centralised/dictatorish systems. I don't mean to say this is like that, but there's a fun little similarity there on the surface.
  - Ygg2 12y ago
    > I'd like to see serious engagement with the subject rather than dismissal of the current state It's not my realm of expertise, but from what I've gather the way capitalism works to maximize profit (price-cost). You achieve that by, maximizing the price or minimizing the cost or any combination of the two. If you think closely about it, replacing humans with cheaper, tireless, less error prone systems (be that robots or robot-like humans), you score a double whammy. You maximize production AND reduce the costs. > It's also interesting that circa the '30s, the capitalist/democratic system was also being tossed into the popular junkheap in favor of centralised/dictatorish systems You mean that after Great Depression (circa 1929.), people would considered an alternative system to the one that left them in crushing poverty? That doesn't strike me as interesting or surprising. It's like a man in debt going to a loan-shark out of desperation. What is interesting that around ~81 years after that episode, we have another.
zenogais 12y ago
There is no "anti-capitalist bogeyman", not even really sure what such a phrase means. Certainly to ignore capitalism in a critique of present conditions is to miss the facts that capitalism is (A) A fairly recent re-organization of the material conditions of existence and not something fundamental to human nature or society and (B) A direct cause in many large-scale catastrophes unfolding in the present. You can find critiques that attempt to refute (B) and look elsewhere for the source of problems (eg. the state, lazy individuals, and so on), and many have, you can look to such writers as Ayn Rand, Tim Ferris, Michael Ellsberg, for a start. Having read Marx and the later critical theorists as well as these pro-capitalist writers I can say that the case against capitalism is fairly damning and well-supported. The case for it being much weaker and always falling back on some sort of "hand of the market" type mysticism at some point from what I have seen.
- AnimalMuppet 12y ago
  While capitalism has serious problems, it actually produces objectively better results than most of the alternatives. (Capitalism with some state socialism on top seems to be the only alternative that does as well or better.) If you dispute my statement, can you show another system that produces objectively better outcomes than capitalism?
  - the_af 12y ago
    I think the "objectively" part can be disputed, since it's very difficult to be objective about this. What are you measuring? To be truly objective you must measure outside the parameters of capitalism, otherwise you'll be measuring just what it's optimized to do (e.g. you could be measuring the ease with which one can become an entrepreneur and start a company, but why would that be the best way to measure a socioeconomical system?). How do you measure happiness of the population, self-fulfilment, solidarity, sustainability, etc? Capitalism has run its course in my very subjective opinion. Hopefully there will be a successor that is more sustainable and people friendly, and hopefully it won't involve the invisible hand of the free market, state enforced monopolies, laissez faire or unsustainable consumerism.
goodcanadian 12y ago
Well, you certainly generated a lot of debate. I sort of hate to be a pedantic, but I think a lot of the trouble comes from a misuse of terms. Capitalism is not the same as free market, and free market is not the same as laissez faire. Capitalism means that individuals can own the capital (land, factories, money) and can get a return from that capital. We allow this because the profit motive (greed) creates a pretty good (though certainly not perfect) allocation of resources. It does, however, lend itself to rent seeking behavior, which is pretty clearly not ideal for the economy. Anyway, my point is, when talking about the short comings of capitalism, it is important not to conflate the term with free market economics. Good capitalists will actually be anti-free market as monopolies mean they can make more money (ultimate in rent-seeking). Our system is not simply capitalist nor is it simply free market. It is far more complicated than that.
- ArkyBeagle 12y ago
  Well said. I don't know why, but it's easier for me to think in terms of mercantilism vs. capitalism. If you're Hudson's Bay and it's 1800, you have a license to print money in the North American fur trade. And if you're G.E. , it's 1985 and the product is jet engines...
ArkyBeagle 12y ago
There's a school of thought that hold that what bugs us about capitalism isn't really capitalism. It has a kernel of truth while still being a "no true Scotsman" thing. We do not regularly separate profits ( which are derived from consumer surplus ) and rents ( which are not ) , which leads to much confusion. There may be less confusion this way than if we try to understand what is or is not a rent.
dredmorbius 12y ago
There are a lot of holes in modern mainstream economic thinking, a large number of which are actually pretty old. We've been having what are fundamentally the same economic debates for 2000+ years, largely over fairness of pricing, wages, equity, and control, as a survey history such as Roger E. Backhouse's The Ordinary Business of Life details. In the 20th century, the three major challenges to free-market capitalism as espoused by Adam Smith and his followers have been the Great Depression of 1929-1940, the environmental and oil shocks of the 1970s, and the "Great Recession" of 2007 onwards. The Depression raised the question of whether or not the free market was itself self-correcting, and the answer is generally accepted as a pretty emphatic "no". It wasn't until massive amounts of government-induced spending, partially through the New Deal, but largely as part of World War II and post-war reconstruction efforts (e.g., the Marshall Plan) that the economy really got off the ground again, and even through the 1950s and 1960s, there was concern that the malaise of the 1930s would return. What happened instead were a series of environmental and safety concerns -- Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed, and more so the question of whether or not the modern post-Industrial Revolution age was sustainable: the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth. These were immediately followed by peaking of US domestic oil extraction in 1971, and the first effective middle-east oil embargo from the recently-formed OPEC (several earlier attempts had been made, notably during the Suez crisis of the 1950s, but US domestic extraction could take up the slack). It was also a decade in which the last vestiges of the gold standard were removed from most major world currencies (the Swiss Franc continued through the 2000s), with the cancellation of the Bretton Woods agreement, unilaterally, by the US. The turbulent 1970s turned into the prosperous 1980s and 1990s, which some attribute to opening up of the North Sea, Alaskan North Slope, and offshore Gulf of Mexico to oil development. Crashing oil prices are thought to have played a major role in the collapse of the former Soviet Union, long dependent on its oil exports for hard currency. There were also massive political shifts underway. Within the US, the previously white-Democratically-dominated South was split amongst a now black Democratic and white Republic party, while moral and other issues were used to create unity amongst an otherwise increasingly class-divided Republican party elsewhere. Labor unions lost a huge amount of power both due to general decline among US manufacturing companies (particularly automobiles, steel, and other heavy industry), as well as federal action (the 1980s air traffic controllers' strike and dissolving of the union by President Reagan). While real returns on business investment were falling (look up Deloitte's Center for the Edge study "The Shift Index"), financial wealth creation was increasingly coming from the financial sector itself, and asset inflation of securities and later, real estate (itself driven by securities return demands). There has been economic growth, mostly in the BRIC nations: Brazil, Russia, India, and China, but most especially in the latter two, with growth in China quite simply blowing away any previous economic revival anywhere, including the post-WWII European and Japanese recoveries. Unfortunately for economics, the growth in India and China has come largely with an almost precise parallel growth in primary energy consumption, a huge portion of that exceptionally dirty coal (in both traditional particulate, smog, and heavy-metal pollution as well as CO2 emissions). Much of the "economic decoupling" of growth from primary resource consumption in the rest of the world disappears if you factor India and China back into the equation. Then came the 2000s: the dot com collapse, the Bush tax cuts (favoring the wealthy markedly), two unfunded wars, peak oil in 2006, the housing (asset) bubble, 2007 global financial crisis, and growing inequality worldwide. To put it bluntly, conventional economics predicted little if any of this. The models of the Limits to Growth types appear to be playing out, though with some variance (the post-oil embargo efficiency improvements and reduced oil consumption, as well as fracking and other "enhanced recovery" petroleum extraction methods have pushed back the net fossil hydrocarbon liquids by 5-15 years). The criticisms of Marx, Malthus, Toynbee, and others over the inequality of capitalism have resurfaced with a vengeance. Claims of a "new" economy or "information" economy are proving largely illusory. The Web 2.0 economy is largely funded by advertising, the bulk of which are FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) and electronics consumables themselves, as well as exceptionally liberal central bank monetary policy. And the critics of economics are mainstream: you'll find articles questioning received wisdom in the Financial Times, Economist, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and elsewhere. Critics include Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, James Galbraith, Steve Keen, Herman Daly, and a handful of others -- hardly the bulk of the profession, but some key thinkers. And as others have noted, "anti-capitalist" is at best a label of convenience applied to a system that could be characterized by a great many things. I've called it the economic orthodoxy (as opposed to heterodoxies). Salient characteristics include free markets, laissez-faire (according to some), corporatism, financialization, globalization, commoditization, computerization, automation, extraction, nonsustainability, and others. All of which tends to be a bit of a mouthful. There's also a fair bit of disagreement among critics on just what the most relevant elements of failure are (as is typically the case -- it's easy to agree that you don't like the old boss, harder to select a new boss you happen to agree on).

chippy 12y ago

As I write, another article on the front page of Hacker News is entitled: "This is what Tesla owners are doing while you sleep" http://blog.opower.com/2014/07/this-is-what-tesla-owners-are-doing-while-you-sleep/ http://blog.opower.com/2014/07/this-is-what-tesla-owners-are... "While you are in bed dreaming about how some day you too might own an electric car, many EV owners are doing something dramatic; something unusual..."

wmf 12y ago
If sleep is a luxury, it stands to reason that Tesla owners are getting plenty.

waps 12y ago

What does this article have to do with capitalism ? When you go right down to it communism, socialism, even mercantilism are all trying to maximize productivity and consumption. I think it's probably the one thing all economic systems agree on. Hell, even natural selection agrees on that. So is sleep an affront to them all ?

zenogais 12y ago
I was gonna try, but it's a lot of work to even begin deconstructing all the parts of this that are simply incorrect or ahistorical.
crpatino 12y ago
> What does this article have to do with capitalism ? When you go right down to it communism, socialism, even mercantilism are all trying to maximize productivity and consumption. Yes, a hundred times yes!!! > I think it's probably the one thing all economic systems agree on. There I will have to disagree. The three examples you provided are modern (post Enlightenment) economic systems. I am sure there are more examples along the world history, but it is far fetched to say it is common to all systems. > Hell, even natural selection agrees on that. Strongly disagree. Every instance of rapid growth in nature either finds a balance with the larger ecosystem or self destroys (by causing severe, though not necessarily terminal, damage to the larger ecosystem). Think cancer. Think the introduction of exotic species into isolated ecosystems. Think the depopulation of the Americas during the XV and XVI century due to European diseases. > So is sleep an affront to them all ? In a way, yes. At the end of the day, power means access to limited resources. Besides the obvious cases (access to actual raw materials), time is a limited resource for every human being. But you can expand in a way your life span by having other people do what you want instead of what they want. Ultimately, there is a hard limit on how much this vicarious life extension is available: Num_people_under_your_control * 24_hrs_per_day / biological_needs_factor. Given than people usually need in the ballpark or 8 hrs of sleep per day, this is the single largest component of biological_needs_factor. Be it a capitalist robber baron, a communist dictator, or a mercantilist king, they get more power by having their people sleep less and work more... up to a point.
- 12y ago

kyllo 12y ago

The really important thing this touches on, IMO, is that people who are "poor," are not just cash poor or asset-poor, but also time-poor, and as a result they are increasingly sleep-poor. Because a unit of a poor person's time is worth very little money, they have to sell so much of it just to pay the bills, that it encroaches upon the time they have available for sleep. Being sleep-deprived drains a person's energy, causing them to work less efficiently, which helps perpetuate the vicious cycle of poverty.

zenogais 12y ago
I think that even more important is that this provides an explanation for the obsession with getting less sleep that seems particularly pernicious in start-up culture, but is noticeable elsewhere as well. It goes beyond merely worrying about the health consequences. It is human biology representing an affront to longer working days and increased productivity.

tedks 12y ago

Interesting first comment: >This caused conflicts with those who had the idea work consisted of doing as little as possible for the most finanical reward. Liberals. The idea of a "work ethic" (a contradiction in terms if there ever was one!) is so pervasive in most people's minds that they label people who have appropriate capitalist values (i.e., work is a competition between the boss and worker; each attempts to maximize value for minimal cost) by their political enemies.

blaze33 12y ago
Of course there's going to be conflicts when people have "appropriate" values while their "enemies" have "pervasive" ones.
- tedks 12y ago
  Pervasive means "common". I'm not sure if this is what you meant (it does sound like "perverse" and if you're not a native english speaker I can see how the mistake could be made). But of course your statement is correct either way. Interesting how both sides see themselves as lone warriors against a sea of villainy.

erdle 12y ago

Highly recommend reading this book. It's actually a fairly quick read and is a bit of a departure from his other works and areas of interest. Also not mentioned in the article, Crary co-heads one of the best independent publishers, Zone Books. And every book is beautifully and minimally designed by the legendary studio of Bruce Mau. Disclosure: author is my wife's grad school advisor.

veganarchocap 12y ago

Well for a start, by definition we don't have Capitalism, so any article referring to 'current day Capitalism' has missed what Capitalism in its true essence is about. The simple act of free trade, property rights and self-ownership is what Capitalism is. What people refer to now as Capitalism, is in fact Corporatism, which of course has its own set of deeply serious problems. The trouble with everyone bashing 'Capitalism' now is that people draw a false parallel between 'Capitalism' and 'Corporatism' and run a mile in the opposite direction and adopt quite predictable Marxist views. If we're going to get into Marxism, this was a man who never had a real job... he mooched off of his factory owning friends (so a complete hypocrite) and took advantage of a maid working in his families service and brought about a child of whom he never cared for. He isn't a good role model, and couldn't even live by his own views.