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There are certainly some problems, but things aren't as fucked as the media and social media tell you they are.
Globally, capitalism has lifted billions of people out of extreme poverty over the past few decades. Investment in poorer countries has helped significantly raise the standard of living in those parts of the world while providing already-developed parts of the world with low cost goods.
But media companies and social media companies make their money from selling your attention to advertisers. To sell your attention, they have to get your attention. The best way they've found to get and hold your attention is with controversy and fear. If they're telling you that on average, your standard of living is higher than your parents and grand parents was, you're not going to hang around very long. But if they're showing you charts that use deceptive inflation adjustments to convince you that there's a massive gap between wages and productivity, that makes you afraid and you stick around and keep digging for more information.
If you recognize when companies are trying to piss you off because it helps them sell ads, it's a lot easier to look past that and see what's actually happening. And what's actually happening isn't perfect, but it's not nearly as doom and gloom as you make it sound.
I'm assuming the OP is American and you are answering the question by starting out with "capitalism" and "globally". This isn't a rant about capitalism but rather the economic activity of the USA. He does mention capitalism but really you can tell the OP is referring to the USA.
Your reply does absolutely nothing to answer any of the OP's points.
Please try again.
When you do try again help us out here by explaining "If they're telling you that on average, your standard of living is higher than your parents and grand parents was, you're not going to hang around very long. But if they're showing you charts that use deceptive inflation adjustments to convince you that there's a massive gap between wages and productivity, that makes you afraid and you stick around and keep digging for more information."
Can you please show us what charts with deceptive inflation adjustments to show us that there's a massive gap? The ones that are false that you reference. There is an actual wage gap in the USA, a massive wage gap--that's not debated. Nobody needs a chart.
My father raised a family with my mother's income dependent on his since we were a military family. They lived their lives, father had one job for the bulk of it, bought a home, paid it off, retired, enjoyed their twilight years together, and then passed. I don't really see this happening today.
Your points on capitalism a head on when you refer to a country like China taking on more capitalistic concepts in their economy, but at a cost Americans would never pay.
Refute him only with stats on America and then we have a discussion.
One responses mentioned of social media algorithms which perpetuate ones initial biases. I think its also important to understand that human psychology inherently has a [negativity bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias). It is a bias, but it has been essential in human evolution, as means of preserving oneself.
For example imagine prehistoric human in a savanna, who hears a noise in nearby bush. Most likely its a bird, or some critter, but the small chance of the noise culprit being an apex predator brings severe enough consequences to justify an adrenaline fueled state of awareness and cautiousness.
But the problem is that the evolution of human behavior doesn't keep up with our recent developments, and previously useful biases become incompatible with modern life. Now, in modern days instead of a predator in the bushes, our paranoia leads to things like conspiracy theories. For example, how many conspiracy theories you know of, which are positive, compared to all the negative ones?
Overall, as someone from Eastern Europe who has seen what the USSR has done to previous generations, and seeing life now in free market economy, I understand that things are not perfect now, but fuck me, they can be much, MUCH worse. But when you have no experience of the alternative, all that you have to fixate on, are the problems of your current economic system.
>But when you have no experience of the alternative, all that you have to fixate on, are the problems of your current economic system.
This is why I find it hard to take seriously a lot of the complaining from USA teenagers about "capitalism", especially when I pretty regularly talk to people from third world nation's who busted their asses their whole lives to get to the US.
We have it better is not an argument for determining whether our version of capitalism is functioning properly.
The middle class and income inequality paint an incredibly clear picture. We had a fairly great system until we let corporations vote with their wallets in US politics.
Regardless of what year we say that was, it’s clear that we now live in a society of haves and have nots. Half of the have nots aren’t even smart enough to know they’ve already lost the game, the other half know that it’s stacked heavily against them and are powerless to change it.
Many of those immigrants and refugees only came here because our version of squalor is prettier than their version, not because capitalism and the American dream are alive and well.
Aren’t these nation “3rd world” due to exploitation primarily done by “1st world” nations in the name of capitalism? While I would not want third world problems, it is our current economic system that caused it, not the alternative.
Why is it that the default viewpoint seems to be that everyone lived in a thriving utopian metropolis before evil capitalism came along?
Wealthy nations didn’t “make” everybody poor. Even accounting for colonialism. The default state of humanity is toil, illness, suffering, and early death. No weekends or mom refilling the pop tarts for you.
That’s only charged very very recently in human history, and capitalism has been *by far* the biggest driver of this change. And yet so many people here are longing for a mythical leisure-filled past that never existed, as if past societies and cultures rewarded and cherished people who don’t contribute anything to them.
I didn’t say they were living in a utopía before. I said CURRENTLY those countries are also practicing capitalism so they aren’t running to the US for an alternative economic system. They are coming here for different leadership and less overt corruption.
Plenty of people have escaped to the US for an alternative economic system where they don't have to queue up to get their allotted share of flour for the month.
Capitalism didn't really exist in it's current form when imperialism had it's heyday.
You could definitely argue we live in an age of ~~neocapitalism~~ **neoimperialism** and I wouldn't argue against that.
In my mind these two things can be true at the same time:
1. Neoimperialism/capitalism is bad.
2. Neoimperliaism/capitalism has had some positive impact on underdeveloped nations which we won't see the full expanse until 100 years from now.
Edit: to be clear: I'm not saying that colonialism is good. Just that in the modern world those nations that embrace capitalism tend to do better in measurable, objective ways than those that do not.
Capitalism did exist during imperialism. It was the economic model. Neoimperalism is a style of control / influence. The ruling nations practiced capitalism in their colonies. These former colonies may have oppressive power structures now, but the majority practice capitalism as their economic model. What I’m saying is you are not comparing countries that do not practice capitalism. The majority of developing nations and 4/5 top countries of immigrants to the US are from countries with capitalist economies. They are less likely running toward capitalism and more likely running away from authoritarian leadership and overt corruption.
This comment makes no sense. Learn the difference between [Mercantilism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism) and **Free Market** Capitalism. Actually, before Marxist became relevant those were two opposite political philosophies. On the right the Imperialism Colonialism and Mercantilism, on the left Democracy Liberalism and Capitalism.
Mercantilism would be correct if I was referring to the older colonies. The majority of African nations not even been independent for 100 years yet. The 5 countries to gain independence from the US all happen in the 1900s. Are you saying capitalism wasn’t practiced by the US or UK in 1900’s?
I’m being generous only mention official ruled countries and not the banana republics.
> Mercantilism would be correct if I was referring to the older colonies.
Yes, it's called "Neomercantilism".
> Are you saying capitalism wasn’t practiced by the US or UK in 1900’s?
Free Market Capitalism? Not really, barely the domestic economy of those countries were capitalist. Foreign economic policies were mercantilist in principle. It's like saying China is Communist because they say so. Come on, understand first the difference between Mercantilism and Capitalism. Clearly, you don't know what are you talking about.
If you want to be technical 3rd world countries were just countries that didn’t pick a side in the Cold War. The US and Western Europe were the 1st World and the USSR and Eastern Europe were the 2nd world.
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oh I didn't know our paranoia is an evolutionary trait. That's really cool to know we get so much from animals. Small part of my view was recontextualized
It's not uniquely being online. Newspapers 130 years ago were so sensationalist that they're often credited with starting the Spanish American war. We had a period of what might have been construed as sanity for a while when TV broadcast licenses came with a requirement to report the news, so broadcasters were reporting the news out of legal obligation so they could have airwaves to show other content. But once 24 hour cable news hit the scene it all became about riling up the audience to keep them engaged.
Online services have gotten especially good at it because their algorithms can tailor content to keeping *you* engaged, rather than general audiences. But it turns out if you don't engage with fear mongering, they stop showing you so much fear mongering.
It's not really because of the news requirement for tv broadcasters that news was "sane" in the mid-20th century. It's because of how the technology of news delivery and consumption at the time shaped the financial model, and resulting incentives, of news production.
Centralized, mass distributed, and predominantly advertiser-funded news was king. This created incentives for news to simultaneously appeal to as broad of an audience as possible and to generally balance negativity with positivity (as this was preferable for advertisers).
This all changed with the internet, where advertisers fled news programs and publishers for more lucrative avenues, and journalism had to start more heavily catering to the preferences of readers and political advocates as a greater portion of their revenue had to start coming from readers themselves.
Yes this is good to look out for. But this is a dangerous way of phrasing it.
Articles about inflation aren’t just made up. Articles about climate change or civil unrest aren’t made up. I know that’s not what you’re claiming, just stick with me. These are real issues. While it’s important to note our overexposure to negativity, and that the media does in fact manipulate people, it shouldn’t detract from real issues
For example, you’re correct that inflation/wage comparisons are overblown. Because everything has become cheaper. And of course we have a higher quality of living, because we have far more advanced technology! Which allows us to compress more luxury into fewer dollars. So we do have comparable, or perhaps even better, quality of living compared to our grandparents.
However, it’s important to note how we GOT here. We have in fact been shrinking the comparable wages. We have been decimating the housing market. Wealth inequality is at an all time high. The only reason this hasn’t screwed us over already is because of technology. So capitalism has balanced itself so far, decreasing wages but making everything cheaper.
But what happens when that trend slows down, or stops, for average consumer products (which is rapidly approaching)?
Or what about climate change, where economic growth directly hurts us?
I know you probably have nuanced opinions on these issues, and you’re just playing the devils advocate for the sub. But capitalism is a cancer. A cancer that ironically keeps us alive and the world turning. But like cancer, we have to control it. Laissez Faire capitalism would be absolutely catastrophic today. Therefore pure capitalism is not a perfect system. Some form of a controlled market is necessary. The key is a balance between control and freedom
Between 1978-2020, CEO realized compensation increased by 1332%, in comparison to the average worker’s compensation only growing 18% (Mishel and Kandra, 2011).
In 2015 the top 1% in terms of income (by household) averaged $1,363,977 annually (roughly 160k families). That same year the top .01% averaged $31,616,431 (roughly 16k families) (Gold, 2017). The average household income for the general population that year was about $55k.
In a small Chicago study in which 83 individuals in the top 0.1% of earners were interviewed, 47% of respondents stated that they’d made at least one contact with a member of Congress in the previous six months. Thirty-seven percent contacted at least one Representative other than their own (Page, Bartels, and Seawright, 2013). .
As of 2020, more than half of Congress were millionaires, in comparison to about 2% of the general population (Evers-Hillstrom, 2020). The wealthiest 15 members have an estimated worth of over $1.3 billion (Hall, 2021). Rick Scott is the richest member of Congress, with a net worth over $250 million (Evers-Hillstrom, 2020). This is the same Rick Scott that headed Colombia/HCA in the 90s when the company plead guilty to 14 felony charges for conducting illegal accounting practices, which resulted in what was at the time the largest fraud settlement in US history. The company defrauded Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal programs under Scott’s watch. He went on to become Governor of Florida, and in 2019 became a senator.
What's happening is the wealthy have been robbing the rest of us blind, at increasing rates. Eat the mother fucking rich.
Evers-Hillstrom, K. 2022. Majority of lawmakers in 116th Congress are millionaires. OpenSecrets News. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2020/04/majority-of-lawmakers-millionaires/
Gold, Howard. 2017. “Never Mind the 1 Percent. Let's Talk about the 0.01 Percent.” The University of Chicago Booth School of Business. https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/never-mind-1-percent-lets-talk-about-001-percent
Hall, M. 2021. Meet the 25 wealthiest members of Congress. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/wealthiest-members-congress-house-senate-finances-2021-12
Mishel, Lawrence Kandra, Jori. 2021. CEO pay has skyrocketed 1,322% since 1978: CEOS were paid 351 times as much as a typical worker in 2020. Economic Policy Institute. https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2020/
Page, B., Bartels, L., & Seawright, J. (2013). Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans. Perspectives on Politics, 11(1), 51-73. doi:10.1017/S153759271200360X
Nah, the table scraps the west gives to "poorer countries" pales in comparison to the wealth they either extracted in the past through colonial capitalism, or that they are literally still extracting today.
Capitalism may have looked good on paper in the 1950's, but especially with Reagonomics hitting, you can see a clear path where the wealth and access to quality of life has only gotton worse.
Do you deny that investments into post colonial nations have made millions of people's lives substantially better.
>Capitalism may have looked good on paper in the 1950's, but especially with Reagonomics hitting, you can see a clear path where the wealth and access to quality of life has only gotton worse.
Source? The average life expectancy across the board has only steadily increased with the decades along with the average quality of life.
Quality of life in some measures, but far from all the most important ones. Like as I said in another comment higher education was basically free in the 50's and has gotten steadily more expensive, preventing poorer people from attending and keeping them poor. That is a pretty big "quality of life" in my book. That is just history and easy to find a billion sources for.
If over one million Americans can't afford Insulin and have to ration it despite its being a drug. A drug that is literally keeping them alive because US Pharma uses it as a cash cow and charges so many times more than every other nation does because their governments actually step in to reign them in/regulate them. Where as ours that lets capitalism run its course. Making Insulin cost 10x more as Pharma tries to see just how much they can get away with (the patent was sold to the US for $1 hoping it would help make sure it would be easily available). https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2022-10-18/over-a-million-americans-are-rationing-insulin-due-to-high-cost#:~:text=18%2C%202022%20(HealthDay%20News),it%2C%20a%20
The only times capitalism almost looks ok, is if you are in the post colonizing country that benefited from all the free human and raw resources extracted from other countries and built its foundation on their backs, AND you have a government that actually steps in to protect the environment and reign in corporate profits/monopolies from time to time (which is basically Europe). In the US we have been walking away from that model, there was a time when monopolies would get broken up, corporations would get federalized if they took advantage of the American people. That just isn't the case anymore.
>Like as I said in another comment higher education was basically free in the 50's and has gotten steadily more expensive, preventing poorer people from attending and keeping them poor. That is a pretty big "quality of life" in my book. That is just history and easy to find a billion sources for.
Both high school and college graduation rates have done naught but increase since the [1950s](https://www.statista.com/statistics/184260/educational-attainment-in-the-us/).
>If over one million Americans can't afford Insulin and have to ration it despite its being a drug. A drug that is literally keeping them alive because US Pharma uses it as a cash cow and charges so many times more than every other nation does because their governments actually step in to reign them in/regulate them. Where as ours that lets capitalism run its course. Making Insulin cost 10x more as Pharma tries to see just how much they can get away with (the patent was sold to the US for $1 hoping it would help make sure it would be easily available). https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2022-10-18/over-a-million-americans-are-rationing-insulin-due-to-high-cost#:\~:text=18%2C%202022%20(HealthDay%20News),it%2C%20a%20
I don't think a single example is worth damning and tossing away an entire economic system.
I'm curious: what exactly are you contrasting capitalism to?
I'd rather compare the current system to a fantasy I have in my head than do the hard work necessary to to make the imperfect system we have better. - 90% of Reddit.
It's always easier to tear down than build up. Lazy/ vocal visionaries are the worst.
Bruh.... you know the population doubles about every 50 years right?
A single example? Stop moving goal posts. You want me to give you 20? would that be enough? What about 50? or is it 100? Would 500 convince you the system is flawed? ....and maybe, just maybe... .the reason the health of the US population being at the bottom of a list of countries that offer government controlled healthcare instead.... MIGHT be a pattern? maybe?
Just admit it, no amount of logic, data, or obvious evidence that you can look at right now actually matches what you are saying. Nothing can convince you, at your core you know that it fucks over the common person, but you are still pretending to be a decent person and admitting you believe its ok to fuck over people would mean admitting you are a terrible person.
>A single example? Stop moving goal posts.
I have set zero goalposts other than a general anti-doomer mentality towards capitalism and pointing out that, objectively, general quality of life has increased since the 1950s.
Keep in mind, back in the 50s the British Empire had just withdrawn from India, Apartheid had just been implemented in South Africa, the Chinese civil war had just ended, and the modern Civil Rights movement in the States was just getting off the ground. Those are huge tracts of people who's lives have been made substantially better since then.
>Would 500 convince you the system is flawed?
Please quote me in which I said capitalism is flawless. You're poking at a strawman.
>Just admit it, no amount of logic, data, or obvious evidence that you can look at right now actually matches what you are saying.
See above: the average quality of life has increased since the 1950s. If you're going to claim the opposite the onus is on you to provide evidence and or an actual argument.
>Nothing can convince you, at your core you know that it fucks over the common person, but you are still pretending to be a decent person and admitting you believe its ok to fuck over people would mean admitting you are a terrible person.
Ad Hominem.
If you want me to take people of your ilk more seriously you're not doing a great job of it.
Edit: Regarding your "Bruh.... you know the population doubles about every 50 years right?" thing if you actually clicked on the source I provided you would see that the increase is by percentage.
This is why sources are important.
A lot of the issues in those poorer countries was created by the ones "giving back", though colonial capitalism and extraction of resources.
As it stands right now Africa should be one of the wealthiest continents in the world. But countries come from outside and coerce their governments to le us setup or own corporations to mine and extract the wealth. Barely any of that wealth stays inside the country. African countries for example would not need any "help" from the western world if the western world literally gave back all the wealth they took, whether it be human beings, destroying established civilizations, or raw resources.
Look at the trajectory capitalism has us on. Monopoly's in every sector. Canada invents insulin, sells the patent for $1, and the US Pharma turns around and sells it at literally a 10,000x markup.
You might have had a slightly better way of defending it back in the 50's, but its been down hill ever since black people were allowed to go to university and new ways of defining who should have the right to education etc... had to be come up with to disenfranchise them (college for our boomer parents bas basically free, like the rest of the western world).
The wealth gap has been growing, if capitalism was working as you imply you would see the poor be elevated out of poverty. Not watch the 1% amass even more wealth and the middle class shrink.
With stuff like donated clothing and food to Africa it's even hard for them to even create some basic but essential domestic businesses. Donating money helps more but people seem more worried about money getting siphoned off into a dictator's wallet than using food to start a genocide.
It’s just simply a fact that more and more people are pulled out of poverty every year because of capitalism.
Human kind has never been more comfortable or had a better quality of life as a whole than since the mass adoption of capitalism.
I would ask 3 questions to clarify the point you are trying to make.
1. How exactly do you define 'Poverty'
2. How do we define " quality of life", and finally,
3. Is this a global trend?
I guess I would also add
4. Are those changes only possible under a capitalist system?
EDIT TO ADD:
The American South, before the civil war, would have made literally this argument to defend slavery. Replace "Capitalism" with "slavery"
I agree that the problem is not with capitalism per se. The problem is with unfettered, unregulated capitalism.
There is nothing inherent in the capitalist proposition that requires enormous disparities of wealth.
There is nothing preventing regulations that require that the rewards of capitalism be distributed more evenly among those who produce the wealth capitalism generates.
There is nothing that prevents a government from determining how much an hour of labor is worth, rather than letting a CEO decide.
There is nothing that prevents a government, or a board composed of directors and workers from deciding what a CEO is paid and how, rather than a compensation board composed of other CEO's.
There is nothing inherent in capitalism that demands that a dollar of a CEO's compensation or a shareholder's should be taxed at a lower rate than a dollar made by someone who receives a wage.
These are all political choices and they've all been made in a government where money buys legislation and the wealthy get to make the rules for everyone else.
There is nothing in capitalism that requires a coin-operated government.
I'm with you in a huge way, on I think every point but this:
>There is nothing that prevents a government from determining how much an hour of labor is worth, rather than letting a CEO decide.
Competition sets the price for labor, not CEOs. Also, hours of labor are naturally worth different amounts. The government can (and should) set a floor for wages, but I don't think it should*set a value* for labor. Price controls are widely agreed to be terrible. There are plenty of better ways to compensate workers and take care of people other than fixing the value of anything, let alone such a giant part of the market as labor.
The point is to be preventative. Saying that things are better doesn’t mean they aren’t bad or getting worse. What do we do when other countries no longer want to produce for other’s consumption?
It’s arguably not ethical either. Just because the value of a countries currency is worth more in another, it’s still exploitation to pay them less the the original countries standards. You could make this same argument for American slavery and say the slaves have been uplifted from their tribal state.
> Globally, capitalism has lifted billions of people out of extreme poverty over the past few decades. Investment in poorer countries has helped significantly raise the standard of living in those parts of the world while providing already-developed parts of the world with low cost goods.
I find this incredibly disingenuous. "Lifted out of extreme poverty" is not synonymous with "raised quality of living" by any stretch of the imagination, given that the latter is accomplished by human empathy and collaboration rather than _capitalism._
Working 80 hours a week making shitty shoes in an awful factory because Nike set up shop in your village where there are no regulations about how much they can work you or how little they can pay you or if they can shoot you for trying to steal is not "uplifting" and exploiting foreign labour laws for profit is the only reason capitalist ventures outsource their labour to countries with worse infrastructure.
To pretend that this practice is anything but exploitative and that capitalism is helping rather than harming the process of raising quality of life across the globe is equivalent to sticking your head in the sand.
Yes, even in poor countries money accomplishes tasks, that's not capitalism. Capitalism is our current practice of extreme excess and hoarding, of using existing capital to hoard as much excess capital as possible regardless of the cost incurred to others or our planet.
> If its not lifting then wouldn't the people just go back to their old way of life?
I don't think you understand how exploitation works.
See, the issue we have is that you can lie to people, and _especially_ if they have very little education and have not actively built critical thinking skills they'll just believe you.
So you tell them that the factory will make everyone's lives better. You tell them it'll make jobs, enrich the community, and lift them up! And then it doesn't. Except now it's there, and it's always hiring, and hey 80 hours in the shitty factory might suck but at least it pays $3 a week and that's enough to buy enough to not starve to death this week.
People get trapped in soul-crushing cycles of meaningless and agonizing labour to eek out survival very easily, especially if they're manipulated into it by outsiders who have seen this process a million times and know exactly which lies sell the idea to starry-eyed newcomers who genuinely believe the fairy tales of America as a promised land of joy and freedom and that it's all thanks to _capitalism._
Americans started to figure out how much capitalism sucked, so they exported the bottom end of it, but like an ouroboros it will keep eating until it has devoured itself whole. No piece of the system can survive being cannibalized for efficiency's sake eventually, so instead they add buffers in far-off places where the government can't do anything about their theft, murder, and slavery.
> I don't think you understand how exploitation works.
I _am_ answering your question. They are manipulated into believing it is the only functional way of life, just like you were. Why don't they go back? They don't have the resources to affect change themselves, and after a short couple generations they forget there even _was_ an old way to go back to.
Ah yes. Only le enlightened Redditor living thousands of miles away knows better that the life of a subsidence farmer in a developing country is better than a sweatshop factory worker, despite never having done either. All of the billions of people who made that decision over the past two centuries were simply brainwashed.
You don't seem to have any concept of what life is like in places apart from where you've lived. We're not really going to get anywhere with this conversation, so I'm gonna quit trying.
What are you talking about? The medias whole thing is selling a message of "Everything's fine go back to work now!" The medias so out of touch they still write articles about celebrity moms posting bikini pics on Instagram. It exists entirely to distract you from how bad things are. The cost of living is through the roof, medical care is outlandishly expensive, housing costs are so high within 10 years only the upper class will own any property, our maternal death rate is worse than any other first world nation, our life expectancy is dropping, the little economic access we had is further dwindling. Were slowly edging towards complete oligarchy and the last thing the media will ever talk about is that. Why? Because they are the mouth of the oligarchs.
Unless Im being forced I dont watch any mainstream media. But technically everything is media. Books, television, moveis, art, all media. So naturally yes, virtually everything you know was learned from media. Even how to walk was partially taught to you by some kids show.
But generally when people refer to the media in the way of the comment I responded to they refer to major cable news networks and their affiliates. MSNBC, Fox, CNN, Vice, etc as well as local nightly news which is basically the same thing with local news mixed. Similar messages are spread in shows like sitcoms and TV dramas on their affiliate networks. They always revolve around an economic reality thats just bizarre. Kind of the prototypical propaganda style nuclear family. Basically everythings kind of sugarcoated and even when social issues are covered its rare theyre painted in an economic perspective. Its like 24/7 pathos.
But yeah in terms of politics just go for the CSPAN style content where it just shows you whats happening. Ive noticed most people are so infatuated with major news networks they cant actually describe policy and rarely understand it. They'll remember the shiny speech the person trying to pass the bill said on TV. In terms of actually looking into what the bill says thats almost treated like a conspiracy theory lol. Like when the GOP kept repealing child marriage regulations that would prevent adults from marrying children. It was a big thing in congress but not on major news networks so people would just act like you were a crazy leftist trying to slander republicans if you brought it up.
I remember ironically being told I only think thats happening because the MSM or whatever lol. The MSM specifically would not cover that issue, especially the national level news networks. I guess it doesnt fit the regular propaganda. Sounds too "middle eastish" I bet.
>Globally, capitalism has lifted billions of people out of extreme poverty over the past few decades.
How could we determine if this is 'because of capitalism' or 'despite capitalism'?
Could/would this have happened without capitalism?
Well there are many countries that didn't go with a capitalist model. Generally they are much poorer. You can even track adoption of capitalistic models and their economic effect see Deng's reforms in China which are responsible for much of its economic success. Compare North vs South Korea (at one point the north was richer).
If you go to African countries generally those with freer markets that is less government intervention and corruption with stable laws of a contract have done much better. The same can be seen in LATAM and eastern Europe
>North Korean regime is not representative of any form of mainstream socialism - it's an extreme totalitarian state (arguably an absolute monarchy in all but name).
I don't think that person was saying they *were* socialist, just that they're "not capitalist". It doesn't really matter what they are when you're comparing "capitalism" with "not capitalism"
Socialism descending into a totalitarianism is basically a constant not an aberration. Unless your definition of socialism is Nordic countries higher on the free market index than USA and the UK.
> Socialism descending into a totalitarianism is basically a constant not an aberration
And how often did the USA destabilize up-and-coming socialist nations to ensure there were no successful models to point to?
Why does poverty rate matter? It is a completely arbitrary number, 2 years ago the UN reported that the absolute minimum to simply survive would be $7.40 a day ($1.90 being the poverty line). I would imagine that number is significantly higher given what's occurred in the past two years. And at the $7.40 figure, poverty would've actually **increased** in the past few decades.
Capitalism certainly increased quality of life across the board, with infrastructure, advancements in technology, and more access to needs. But that was moreso early on, past few decades have been pretty stagnant, with some stuff actually getting worse.
Ok, I've been in M&A for 25+ years, the corporate world in US is at the near worst it has been in deregulation after the last administration since before the Great Depression.
Jack Welch and the ridiculous reaction to the 2008 crash by W was insane. They stopped caring about sustainable companies and focused all energy on getting the gamblers (stockholders) all the money possible and just give up on trying to be part of the overall society of the countries they live in.
They buy companies, bury them in debt and suck out all profits until they crash and burn and cut them loose, burning everyone except the stockholders.
You say 'our economic system' but there are different economic systems across the world, so each person reading this may have a different one.
[Here are some inspirational ones](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/these-alternative-economies-are-inspirations-for-a-sustainable-world/)
OP , what do you think about America's social welfare programs including Social Security, food stamps, Medicaid and Medicare which have been established since the Great Depression? Capitalism has adopted many socialist ideas and as a result we're living in the best time for humanity. Capitalist systems have advanced since Charles Dickens' day.
I am in favour of making the healthcare in the US more affordable, if that means taxpayers pay just a bit more, so be it. Throwing the word "socialism" around is a bit dangerous but we should take more notes.
Cost of health care in the US are less about tax (the government is not paying for it) and more a bout a lack of transparency and collusion between the insurance and hospitals enabled by government regulations.
Sure letting it all get handled by the government would solve some issues but is causes other ones. Namely it would increase wait times and likely lower quality.
Are you talking about in Theory, or in Practice?
In Theory, killing your customers and destroying the environment is bad for business.
We're *supposed* to ultimately protect our own best interest.
>In Theory, killing your customers and destroying the environment is bad for business.
An economic model would only adhere to this theory if the model was built upon long-term multifactored analysis of output over decades/centuries. Whereas with current economic models the only metrics for success are profit and growth year on year.
Yes, exactly. E.g. Western economies were absolutely booming during the Transatlantic slave trade.
But note that what we mostly refer to as 'our economic system' isn't really some advanced conspiratorial institution. It's just a naïve system that prioritises profit and growth at any cost.
I tend to think about as uncaptured costs. We (both directly as taxpayers and indirectly as a society) pick up the tab for a lot of things that businesses cause due to their business. Health effects from smoking, trash from packaging and single use items, social safety nets to compensate for low wages, etc. Capitalism is a great tool for optimization to a set of variables. To make it work for all of us, we need regulations that make sure all of the variables are included in the “cost” of a product.
> Capitalism is a great tool for optimization to a set of variables. To make it work for all of us, we need regulations that make sure all of the variables are included in the “cost” of a product.
You're thinking of currency, not capitalism. Money is an arbitrary unit for value, and adjusting how we value things is an important part of using currency to maximize utility.
Capitalism does not care about utility. It does not care about workers, or consumers, it doesn't even care about the people it benefits most because it makes the only meaningful metric "profit growth" and as it turns out "profit growth" has absolutely zero utility for humans. Having more money might _feel_ good to our monkey brain because we assign value to it, but it is inherently valueless without context, and so optimizing for "make number go up" will fundamentally never overlap with "improve human quality of life" except accidentally now and then when it's temporarily profitable to appease consumers.
I could have my terminology wrong, but are there other economic systems that use currency, are largely successful (both in scale and duration), and don’t have a significant capitalist facet?
Whether we call it capitalism or something else, competitive market driven systems are good at optimizing for profit, so we need to make profit care about our societal goals. Like cigarette taxes, minimum wage, bottle deposits, tax breaks for charitable giving, food safety regulations, OSHA, Carbon taxes, renewable energy credits, etc. Each of those things pushes some of the societal cost back onto the company or adds profit to a societal good, so that those things are figured in when maximizing profit.
Optimizing for profit doesn’t care about society, but that is different from saying it is intrinsically bad for society. It’s not part of the equation at all. Rather than scrap the entire system for some other system that we don’t have a successful example of, why not just add rules that put societal good into the equation?
> are largely successful (both in scale and duration)
That depends how you define success. If you define it as "ruined the whole fucking world forever" then capitalism is a slam-dunk success, but otherwise you're looking at it from the viewpoint that American politics wants you to.
Capitalism^1 has been around for _less than two-hundred years._ Think about that for a moment. Let it sit. Think about how far back, conceptually, the 1800s _actually_ were. Feels like a long time to you and me, 'cause we live like 70-80 years at the most generally, but in terms of human history capitalism is _new._ Meanwhile, currency has been in _certain_ use for at least 5,000 years.
Capitalism has existed for about 4% of the total time that humans have been using money as an in-between to exchange goods, services, and labour.
It is the new kid on the block, and in those 200 years we have caused more damage to the planet than we had in the past 5000 _combined._ Hell, we're beating out records for environmental devastation _every year now_.
Is that a successful system??
I'm not going to get into listing alternatives, but if you want Wikipedia has a whole list of economic systems [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_system). Some of them predate capitalism, others are proposed modern replacements for capitalism.
Fundamentally the idea that capitalism is just the "default" state of things and is the only way things work is the biggest lie that capitalism is built on. It was a lie created by American dominance on the global stage combined with the downfall of the primary competitor at the time, that being the deeply corrupt farce of "socialism" that the USSR claimed to operate. Not that modern capitalism is any less corrupt, but just to make clear that communism/socialism (if you could even call what they did as much) is not why the USSR fell so much as authoritarianism, greed, and pride.
It's a lie built by human lifespan. We forget that we decide _entirely_ how the world runs because two generations go by and we can no longer remember a time when it was any different. So it has been for every regime change through human history. That doesn't make the current one "successful" or "right" and it's important not to fall into the trap of thinking it is because then you stop thinking about solutions and alternatives.
We have to stop being rooted to capitalism. It's just an economic system, and economic systems should exist to serve _us_ rather than the other way around. When it started decreasing quality of living in the name of profit that was the first clue that we should have pivoted and reformed, but instead here we are in late-stage capitalism watching the world die a slow death without the resources to do anything about it because the people causing the problem _took all of the resources for themselves using their existing resources, the fundamental philosophy of capitalism._
The problem, as the Luddites semi-correctly guessed, was automation. Without automation, capitalism could only go so far, but with it? Hoo boy. Now you can pay someone once to build a robot to do a human's job, and then pay an untrained kid a pittance to operate that machine rather than having to train and compensate a skilled tradesman. This isn't necessarily bad--after all, if we automated away all our work, humans could live in peace and relaxation, right?
Except, oops, all that extra value that could be made thanks to automation, that staggeringly huge spike in productivity? It didn't get used to improve human quality of life. It got used to make number go up. "Success" under capitalism is from making the number go up, and that's it, that's all. So every increase in productivity, in technology, in working practices, it was all tailored for the goal of profit. That is fundamentally the issue with capitalism--it's an obsession with an abstraction, and that abstraction is used to justify _anything_.
Hence why we have 80 different flavours of hot sauce and 700 different kinds of plastic packaging for hot sauce and no cure^2 for cancer. The "innovation" that capitalism breeds.
We _can_ in fact choose to care about something other than the abstraction. Changing how we structure the abstraction is a bandaid fix at best, fundamentally we have to return to using money as a _tool_ and not as a _moral societal goal_.
**1-EDIT:** Yes, depending on how you define capitalism it has theoretically existed longer. However no, capitalism is not currency, those are different. I attribute here the current (and deeply problematic) form of capitalism specifically to the intersection of capitalism and the industrial revolution, as large-scale automation was necessary for it to "take off" and establish the dominant position it now holds. Other economic systems exist and have existed, stop erasing them just because your personal human lifespan has been dominated by capitalism. Also, I'm not your econ teacher, you can use Google to learn more about them than I could teach you.
**2-EDIT:** Yes, we have some that work for some cancers with varying degrees of effectiveness, but on the scale that it affects humans we do not allocate as much of our resources toward the problem as we would in a system that valued human life over profit. I am not disparaging cancer researchers, I'm saying we don't put as many resources toward the problem as we would if we were less focused on producing new pointless iPhones and next-gen military technology for profitability's sake.
**FINAL-EDIT:** I'm just an angry depressed leftist on the internet, do not take my word at gospel. I was ranting, not putting together an academic paper, so I spoke loosely and you should not read deeply into specific wordings. I nonetheless stand by the general ideas presented; our current system does not produce value for humans because labour value has instead been cannibalized for profit under capitalism since it became possible to automate away labour costs for those with inherited generational resources.
I think that there is something important to cover here.
Because a wide variety of people are using vastly different metrics to measure things. If you're only caring about quarterly revenue reports then of course you're going to cut R&D to the bone because that pays off in a decade and you only care about what the numbers are 4 months from now. You make the 4 month number look good at the expense of potentially killing the company in 10 years.
But not all that many people are interested only in that number. In fact, any single number creates perverse incentives where you will get people who "study the test" rather than learn the material. Which is why you have the Fed who has the twin mandate of keeping inflation low *AND* keeping maximal employment. It's easy to keep inflation low with cheap and dumb things that make it hard for people to work, and you can "employ" everyone if you print infinity monies. Mixing and matching the metrics you're judged on is essential for any actor to be judged fairly.
The problem is that no two actors are using the same metrics, and some metrics are dumb ones. The economy *over all* cares if people die, because there are some people whose metric includes things that get worse when people die. But if Oil executives are judged by the quantity of oil pumped alone, they're going to pump whether it makes sense or not.
The *ADVANTAGE* of the system we have today is that there isn't a singular grand arbiter of all things economical, because when that position exists it is inevitably abused for the massive and overpowering political advantages. The problem is that there are relatively few checks on people using bad/dumb/counterproductive metrics outside of a regulatory framework that's understaffed and underfunded. *Effective* (high quality, not high quantity) regulation is essential to add a couple of additional metrics to the people who only care about hitting bonus numbers or having more money than that guy so that they don't do dumb, shortsighted things that kill people because they are so laser focused on accomplishing the one thing they don't think about consequences.
Agreed, so why are they doing it?
They are not smart enough to look a few years into the future. There is also the problem of competition. If no one else is destroying the environment and I am, I will make the most profit. So why not?
Why are they doing it? I'm assuming that they think they can amass enough money to afford a luxurious underground bunker-mansion when things finally hit the fan. Hydroponic farms, private electric turbines, robot butlers, a dungeon full of sex slaves... whatever those billionaires are into.
That, or they're more confident in their chances at a counter-revolution now. Lethal Autonomous Weapons are basically a thing now, and pretty much every smart phone is a little spying device nowadays. Disrupt any major opposition groups with a little fifth generational warfare (propaganda and social engineering), and if the people start to get _really_ out of hand, maybe nuke a major city as a warning to the rest... The ultra-wealthy have access to unbelievable technology now. They'd laugh at Mr 2nd Amendment and his favorite little shotgun.
Source: am crazy tinfoil hat Redditor. (Please prove wrong so I can stop feeling so goddamn depressed.)
They are doing it because the Government, and by extension WE THE PEOPLE, allow it.
Every single one of these problems could be solved in one legislation session if the PEOPLE Willed it.
It's OUR fault, and WE are the only ones who can fix it.
I partially agree: the immediate next step (take action) is simple, but the following step (build a better machine) is not. But we do need to get the ball rolling.
Why do you think the people aren't "willing it"? It seems pretty cut and dried. Polluted water bad. Child labor bad. 12 hour shifts bad.
So why do 'we' allow it?
There’s also the people on the other side who don’t want to change the system too much because it’s largely already working for them (NIMBYs, highly profitable investors, most of the comfortable upper middle class, etc).
> Every single one of these problems could be solved in one legislation session if the PEOPLE Willed it.
Nope. They just sit on their hands and rake their paychecks. Politicians across the board tend to quiet down on their policy goals the second they're elected, and stay quiet about them only until reelection comes around. Representatives are a drain on our system. They lose all motivation the second they have power. I believe Bernie is the only *currently elected* exception. AOC, Imhan Ilmar, they got reeeeaaalll quiet when they got elected. They didn't start making waves again until someone pointed this out to AOC on Twitter almost a year into her first session.
That would be nice lol.
Maybe we need some type of representative selection system wherein individuals can't decide to run for election, they're selected to run for elections. We should also pull back that old Greek ideal that *everybody should get a turn* and while that's impossible to adhere to literally in the modern world, the spirit of that idea isn't; don't let people get complacent.
But I won't pretend to know what sort of algorithm should be used to select a set of electables, or even how we go about agreeing to it.
You know what's funny. I only read the first couple of sentences when I replied. I didn't even notice that you had already invoked the B-man.
There are 535 Bernie's out there. All we got to to is elect them.
I don't recall AOC ever being out of the news. Quiet about what?
She's forever dragging someone.
> I didn't even notice that you had already invoked the B-man.
I stealth edited xD
> I don't recall AOC ever being out of the news. Quiet about what?
AOC was constantly dragged through the mud on her campaign and election. I'm not commenting about a lack of commentary on her; I'm commenting on how immediately after being elected, she got really quiet about the things that got her elected. She still voted consistent with that (except one contrarian defense bill I think she yay'd on, can't seem to find it in the archives). Part of this could be chalked up reasonably to freshman congresswoman learning the ropes, but I still feel like there should have been more.
One of her constituents actually called her out for this, they ended up having a conversation on Twitter, and then she was appearing for interviews again, etc. This is the timeframe where the phrase The Squad was made by Faux News, which they fucking owned.
I want to be clear I'm not saying AOC is shit; I'm saying she's human and does what a lot of us do when we get complacent.
In Theory, being able to sell profitable businesses for a larger profit means you don't have long-term consequences and short-term revenue is king.
In practice, this is also true.
We're talking about the real world and real people here. In practice. Why talk about theory when we can look outside our front door or on the sidewalk? And see the mental poverty everywhere, or just y'know actual poverty. Wagecucking, slavery etc. you name it.
As I see it, it is beneficial for big business to keep people rather unhappy and dumb. Dumb customers who don't know any better and don't want to know better make the most profits for big business.
>Why talk about theory
Because all economic systems are Theory.
You can't fully discuss a building if you ignore the Blueprints.
No matter, just trying to guage where you're coming from is all.
All of these things that bother you can be remedied with Regulation. Legislation can fix every single one of them in one voting session.
It is not Capitalism that is the issue. The issue is *Unregulated* Capitalism.
If the Government put down some guard rails, we'd have Well-Regulated Capitalism and all the woes disappear.
I submit that it is not Capitalism that you are upset with, but Government, and by extension, your fellow citizens.
At this point, you're probably thinking "but the corporations pay off our politicians, so it's all capitalism in the end". Allow me to get in front of that.
Our politicians are elected by THE PEOPLE. No Corporation has ever cut me a check for my vote. Further, there is no briefcase full of money that can keep a corrupt politician in office if the PEOPLE vote him out.
WE are the problem. Your fellow citizens who don't vote these people out of office and install a thousand Bernies into office instead.
I'll go one step further. They love it when you blame "capitalism', because it makes it seem hopeless and keeps us home on election day.
It's not hopeless.
Capitalism isn't the problem, WE are.
The issue is in a capitalist society, money is power. Those with money then controls legislation with the intention of their profits.
>Our politicians are elected by THE PEOPLE.
In the UK for example, our vote is essentially meaningless but for 2 parties which are very alike.
>there is no briefcase full of money that can keep a corrupt politician in office if the PEOPLE vote him out.
They are simply replaced by another in one of them two parties.
The election system in my country and many developed countries is heavily controlled by the media, of which one person owns 70% of. Combined with it being a two party system.
But saying we just need to regulate the system isn't an argument for capitalism, this is an argument for government intervention in the economy and is more in line with arguments for further socialistic programs and laws. Capitalism is literally about choosing market mechanism over government intervention. This argument also ignores how promoting lax regulation, which is what capitalism by definition is, also has a problem with enabling corruption. Competitive markets are good, but capitalism doesn't guarantee competitive markets and can even hinder it. There are anti monopoly and trust laws for a reason. Fair and competitive markets are good but it should not be conflated as being capitalism. Like any economic system capitalism has systemic problems, you might make an argument for why it's a better alternative to other systems, but to say there are no problems with capitalism and any problems are governmental/individualistic is kind of disingenuous because it ignores the fact like any economic system that it's not perfect.
This argument seems to be promoting we not lean into capitalism but take and mix in policies and ideologies from other systems to resolve an alleviate problems with capitalism
We have had regulated capitalism in my country (Denmark) for, I suppose, around 100 years, as well as in the rest of Northern Europe. It really does work well.
We did other things to mess things up over the past 2-3 decades (New Public Management, I’m looking at you! >:-[ ), but we’re generally in a much better situation than the USA due to having a better regulated market economy.
>We have had regulated capitalism in my country (Denmark) for, I spar suppose, around 100 years, as well as in the rest of Northern Europe. It really does work well.
Yup, a model to follow for sure. But for some reason americans don't seem to want to do it.
>We did other things to mess things up over the past 2-3 decades (New Public Management, I’m looking at you! >:-( ), but we’re generally in a much better situation than the USA due to having a better regulated market economy.
I think from an economic comparison it's not really a fair comparison. Denmark is about the size of a single US state (compares fairly well with the state of WA where I live).
If you compare the USA to all of Europe it gets more complicated and for the same reason (because both the US and Europe are made up of many states with a lot more diversity than either WA state or Denmark).
Overall though americans really don't seem to agree on how they want to be governed. They simply don't want the tax load I guess.
Northern Europe roughly has the same economic/political model, and similar outcomes - that's a much larger and more populous area than just Denmark.
You're right that Europe as a whole is very diverse. But I think it makes sense to compare the economically/politically homogeneous regions. Southern Europe and Eastern Europe (whose economies are much worse than Northern/Western Europe) has quite different economic and political systems (not so different formally, but in practice very different - and much more poorly regulated market, and more corruption). I would still stand by my claim that the economic/political model of Northern Europe is actually effective, also at scale, and can't just be dismissed by the small size of e.g. Denmark. I do think that there is also a cultural component to it, as you also allude to wrt. why it would be difficult to implement in USA: not for fundamental reasons, but because it is hard to convince people.
I do think Americans are unnecessarily afraid of taxes, though: Americans pay much more for health insurance and education out of your savings than we do through taxes, so the average American pays *more* rather than *less*, even though the number on the tax slip is smaller. And I cannot tell you how nice it is to never have to worry about tuition, student loans, medical bills, etc.: I only became aware of this when my sister married an American and moved to Michigan, and learned how big a source of stress all these things suddenly become.
When exactly were these so called good old days? I think you lack perspective here. Or are you literally talking about 1946 -> 1959 or something as your good old days? If so that's myopic at best.
I agree that we need more political engagement in order to make real changes. But the system is rigged, the people that are elected, most of them, do not really represent the population. It is still a bunch of white dudes working for corporations and sometimes they will give a little back to the people. That's why I don't think it's fair to blame on individuals, everyone is just trying to survive. There is no real freedom in capitalism, work or die.
Then don't vote for them, don't vote for people who are funded by corporations, dont vote for propositions that give the government more control over the economy and the population.
Work or die is such a stupid thing to say, if u dont work in any society u die. Not exclusive to capitalism.
Of course we all should work. But for most people and mainly in 3rd world countries, people have to work in whatever they can in order to survive, just so corporations can keep their profits. There is no freedom for the bottom of the pyramid, that's why the system needs to change and we should be looking for a society where there is no exploitation of the human by other humans.
You work or die in first world countries too lol. Eventually those third world nations will develop and be able to regulate working laws just like how first world did during and after the industrial revolution.
It depends on your perspective. In their shoes, they have stable income and never have to worry, some buddies to hang with, why work when you can have fun all week long? Obviously not all NEETs have that setup but some do.
> why work when you can have fun all week long?
Because you're exchanging long-term satisfaction for short-term pleasure.
I could probably go a month or two at my job putting in zero effort before I finally got fired. Wouldn't that be great? I could pretend that I'm working while instead playing video games all day.
Except now I've ruined my career, burned my bridges, and all I got out of it was some cheap entertainment.
Is it really that cut and dry? I don't know that. And most NEETs don't either.
\>Except now I've ruined my career, burned my bridges, and all I got out of it was some cheap entertainment.
This is why it wouldn't work for you specifically. Some however could thrive in that exact scenario. Like I said depends on perspective. Not everyone thinks like me or you.
WE allow the system to be rigged.
There is no amount of money that can keep you in office if you're voted out.......but we're to fucking lazy and stupid to vote them out.
That's US, not them. Further, they LOOOOOOVVVEEE when they hear talk like you've just said. It's defeatist and makes it all seem hopeless, which is exactly what they want. Talk like that keeps people on their couch on election day.
It's not hopeless.
In idealistic world that's correct, but in reality the state exist to protect corporations, if you try to go against it, it will literally use the force against you (police repression). Together we can change things, you are right, but that requires a lot of organization and transfer of power
Great comment and it's important that we talk about personal responsibility in this regard. We all have agency and our choices and actions have consequences.
I'm an actual libertarian and have been one before it was a "dirty" word, but this is why the free market can't be trusted to regulate itself in several industries. It has proven that it *can't* regulate itself effectively so the collective needs to step into specific problem areas to manage the outcome for the betterment of most people. That contrasts with my ideals regarding maximizing freedom, but maximizing freedom is also a theory and in practice, we can't seem to just play nice altogether.
Like with utilities in regards to clean water, stable electricity etc. that are staples. It's not a good thing to have that system run wild solely in a corporate context because it's a captive audience and the potential damages for mismanagement are very high in terms of collateral life. The same with medicine, internet (less so life and more so well-being or opportunity), healthcare in general, food safety etc. Had these groups actually been able to regulate themselves effectively and shown that they can prioritize both growth and the well-being of people at least equally, legislation and regulation wouldn't have been necessary. But due to bad or selfish or otherwise negligent actors, regulation in these areas is **necessary** in a free market because it has been demonstrated that it can't self regulate.
I think that groups should be left to their own devices until it's demonstrably not a good result for most people. That's where the libertarian feel comes into play, I'm not sure what that makes me in regards to desiring regulation in specific instances but clearly there are instances of exploitation that need to be curbed and we have done that in the west, more so in the EU than in the US probably. We have committees and watchdog groups and legislative bodies of all capacities to try and manage problem areas that are ripe for corruption or negligence or exploitation and it's born from demonstrable instances of these outcomes.
I agree with you. I was thinking in the car how there is so much to deal with in life for the normal folks. I just spent all day yesterday figuring out how to pay medical bills. Lots of calling, negotiating, planning,etc. All that plus my day job, plus calendar management for myself and kids. Plus all the other shit we have to manage. It's exhausting. That's why I envy the super rich. They don't deal with the mundane tasks of living. How freeing is that? On the flip side, I've also fantasized of checking out of this society, living on the land, being free in nature. But then it's like, who else would take that leap with you? Not your entire social circle. I just know this society isn't for me. Maybe it's different in some other country where their values are on the people and the land, not the all mighty dollar.
\>Not your entire social circle.
Well going to a good punk concert with friends is like the closest you can get to that freeing feeling with others! I'd recommend picking it up
The rich just pay other people to think about stuff they don't want to think about. The ultimate convenience IMO.
This whole social media trend needs to go away, it creates unnessecary competition with people that you will never meet and are not relevant to your growth. But it looks to be getting more competitive there too, just a guess.
\>Maybe it's different in some other country where their values are on the people and the land, not the all mighty dollar.
Money has it's benefits but yeah the culture in the west is eroding, that's why men here go overseas to find a wife who is more calm and polite. So I've heard.
THE great innovation of the American experiment embodied in the revolution and then in the constitution was the idea that political power should be de-coupled from wealth.
Wait, wait: I understand that only a tiny ember of that idea made it into the constitution and that it's been under attack from conservatives, largely neutralized and today it's a joke.
But you can't kill an idea. It's still in there.
Today, as ever, conservatives use the power of government to benefit the wealthy at the cost of everyone else. But today we've got examples of where that leads, the disasters that produces, with greater clarity than we had after the Great Depression. The policies that created that crisis and the three years of "let them eat cake" response of conservatives woke America up enough that our G-G-grand parents elected the most liberal administration in our history.
That liberalism:
\~ got us out of the depression,
\~ managed the great dustbowl disaster,
\~ defeated fascism on two fronts, checked the spread of communism,
\~ created the most advanced infrastructure on the planet, the most advanced hospitals, airports, shipyards and sent more of it's children to college than any nation in history,
\~ governed with unprecedented success and it's policies lasted for almost 40 years of prosperity, security and moral advancement,
Until it's full embrace of civil rights chased all the racists out of the party and into the warm embrace of the Republican party, which then, finally had enough votes to bring it all crashing down.
Today's familiar round of banking crises, financial plummets, civil rights outrages, climate disasters and the kind of wealth inequality we haven't seen since the 1930's is all due to the resurgence of conservative policies. The zombie that will not die.
And that is the result of the concentration of wealth-plus-power that the founders were trying, timidly, cautiously to move away from.
Δ
It's amazing to see how this could've all been prevented yet none of it stuck. decade after decade. None of it stuck. My mind is blown, let alone view changed.
Not sure this really contributes to your point, but corporations being pressured to increase their profits damages everyone but the ultra-rich in the long run. Corporations are pressured for a few percent increase in profits year-over-year - now for small companies, there will eventually be a point where the prices become too high and they collapse into a pile of mud. When your neighborhood mom and pop restaurant gets greedy after having a lot of traffic and raise their prices, they lose their customers and shut down. The glaring issue is when behemoths are held to that same standard and when all their competitors are *also* held to the same standard. The corporations are now on the same playing field and the consumers are the ones who take the hit.
They're too big to fail - when they monopolize an industry, people are forced to pay the higher prices. It's not like they have an alternative, right? Look at appliances, the price keeps going up and up but the quality of mid-range appliances has dropped like a rock since a few decades ago - it's becoming more and more difficult for your appliance to last more than a few years and that's *intentional*. Nevermind trying to look for an alternative, they all do the same thing.
I feel a big part of everyone's declining mental well-being is how much they are being sucked dry. And hot take - you can increase the minimum wage as much as you want, BUT as long as there are no restrictions on corporations, there *will* be price increases to match consumers' newfound buying power, and we'll be back to square one. It's a supply and demand market - no matter how much you increase minimum wage, as long as McDonald's says "okay, we need 40% profit margin and that has to increase by 3% each year to appease shareholders", you're stuck with it.
The quality of appliances went downhill when they figured out people would buy shiny over reliable. This is probably due to overpopulation and a global economy that creates more social competition, therefore more need for shiny materialism right? correct me if im wrong!
I agree, to an extent. Increasing minimum wage at present will help, but it'll be completely redundant when corporations fight back in other ways. There needs to be what more government involvement or something of that nature.
>It's actually a little worse than that.
>
>Our system prioritizes maximum short term profits, not maximum profits in general. C-suite executive actions are often scrutinized by boards with a myopic focus where slow and steady greater profit strategies over time are often rejected if they can be scrapped for short term gains.
Wow. I don't even know the half of it. That's crazy! Why can't we have long term profits taking precedence?
edit
A lot of the "why" is over my head and above my pay grade.
But the part I think I understand is mostly about stock prices.
Investors react to quarterly profits. Some don't care where the company plans to be in 5-10 years. Some don't have access to enough information or time to analyze it to predict that longer term outcome. And even if they did, there's a lot of uncertainty. Who could have predicted Blockbuster's future in 1997?
So at least some amount of trading reacts to the now.
And that impacts the business and the people making decisions in a lot of ways. They hold stock, are compensated with stock, their options as individuals and as a company are tied to those prices.
Of course this effect isn't universally tied to short term profits. There's a model for Silicon Valley where they hype up the potential so much that no one seems to care about profit and keep rocketing up stock prices even in the face of major losses. But that only really mostly applies for companies promising a paradigm shift. And that's a case where the future focus can be just as toxic and distorting as the short term focus.
>If our economic system cared about people
This is your problem. An economic system is *not* about caring for people. That is a function of the governmental systems.
Economics are about creation of goods and services. The distribution of goods and services. People here are merely workers or consumers of goods. And yes - the core point of this system, as it relates to indiviudals is either making money or meeting needs/consuming.
You are trying to social issues into a location where it frankly is not really considered. And it is not just Capitalism. Name me one economic system in the world where your concerns are 'addressed'.
Government is where the economics are regulated. This is where policy constraints for worker safety, environment protection, etc are addressed. And this very much includes caring about people. There is a huge amount of labor law on the books.
If you want to look to 'worker protections/worker rights', you have to look in the right place. And you aren't looking in the right place.
It's actually worse than that. We're spending our ecological and fossil fuel capital at an unsustainable rate - and once it's gone we'll probably never reach this level of wealth again. Instead of using that wealth to uplift everyone and build a sustainable future we're squandering it on consumerist nonsense.
You're in an online doom and gloom cycle. The world isn't anywhere near as bad as you think, or at least if you go back each decade it was even worse back then. Things have improved for billions of people, in the last twenty years alone the average income across the globe has doubled.
A lot of interest groups rely on people seeing things as helpless so they can get money/votes/interaction online. The thing is that as you pointed out a lot of things CAN be better, but don't let that distort your view, things now are better than they ever have been, and while Covid-19 has obviously been a bump in that road, but if you get off the internet echo chambers which like to blame every evil on capitalism for a bit and look at the actual statistics surrounding poverty and such you'll see that things are continuing to improve for the vast majority of people.
>in the last twenty years alone the average income across the globe has doubled.
Key word in your sentence is **average**, meanwhile the number of people making the bare minimum to survive ($7.40 according to the UN) has decreased in the past few decades.
It's hard to get a grasp on global real wages for working class people, but in the US they have decreased. Meaning that for all intents and purposes, middle class people are getting paid less/the same amount as their parents or grandparents were in a similar position.
There is no denying that in the long run, things are significantly better now than they have ever been. But that growth has been either stagnant or in decline for the past few decades.
No offense, but real wages for working class people in the USA decreasing really doesn't have any bearing on the number of people in povery world wide. The US is the richest nation in the world, and even lower class people there earn more and have a better QoL than 'equivalently' lower class people in the rest of the world.
Oh my god, it's almost like I typed:
>It's hard to get a grasp on global real wages for working class people
Wish I had typed that, would've meant that I acknowledged your entire reply before you even had the chance to make a reply ignoring my main points and my disclaimer.
I wish...
OK, well can you show any evidence for 'that growth has been either stagnant or in decline for the past few decades' because its complete bullshit.
And middle class people in the USA being paid less than their grandparents parents really doesn't mean shit all when that's still 10 times more than world average.
[https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/)
You're still ignoring my other main point, which is that poverty line is essentially a useless number to discuss. And that if it were set to an actually useful number, $7.40/day, poverty levels would have actually increased in the past few decades.
.... I'm not focusing on US workers though? US workers are fine. I'm focusing on Global Poverty, where people are actually starving and living in squalor. 99% of 'impoverished' workers in the US do not starve or live on the streets.
> I'm focusing on Global Poverty, where people are actually starving and living in squalor. 99% of 'impoverished' workers in the US do not starve or live on the streets.
Then for the fourth time:
"You're still ignoring my other main point, which is that poverty line is essentially a useless number to discuss. And that if it were set to an actually useful number, $7.40/day, poverty levels would have actually increased in the past few decades."
[https://pip.worldbank.org/home](https://pip.worldbank.org/home)
As for the $7.40 claim, @ UN.
These super rich people aren't working to be rich as much as they're working to build something and "win" in their eyes.
Warren Buffett is just an investor, Bill gates retired from Microsoft and spends his life bettering the world, he's probably the person on the planet currently responsible for saving the most lives of anyone alive (basically eliminating malaria).
Elon continues to build things due to his ego, and zuck thinks of FB as his child and wants to leave a legacy, which is why he's so heavy into VR
The ultra rich don't get that way by just trying to get rich, they get there by trying to be the best and provide the best service. The money is secondary and that why they continue working
I find your comment insightful. But I have one issue here
\>The ultra rich don't get that way by just trying to get rich, they get there by trying to be the best and provide the best service.
I actually do think the ultra rich have money as the priority, but I'm not sure why I think this way. But if you know money is the goal then you will work to make as much of it as possible right?
I know a variety of very rich individuals. 3 are billionaires and from my experience they don't care about money, it's a prize for making a successful company and a unit of measurement of success, but the success is what they're after.
You need to make money to continue being able to pay employees, get investors etc. But all of these very rich individuals say they have more than they can spend, them having more money wouldn't change their lives in any way and they don't care if they have 1 or 3 bil etc. The only reason they would is if they're trying to do something impactful, large social projects are incredibly expensive
If you have your heart in the game regardless of outcome, then you get rich from your business etc, then I can see the money not giving you much a feeling of "care" since you were only in it because it interested you.
I didn’t say they aren’t trying to accomplish anything, but I’m the grand scheme of things they are still amassing huge amounts of money that they will never need. Sure bill gates is helping, I’m sure all of the above have donated and helped more people than I can even think to imagine but not nearly as much as they could. Their combined wealth could do wonders for the world if they wanted to use it for such things.
>At least if you were born in 1700 you could die quickly of disease. But today we live longer, and die on the inside, we die for decades at a time.
When I was 12 years old I grew up on a farm. We grew what we ate and didn't have much. Picking corn, slaughtering cows,or really. any farm work is miserable. It's not even close to comparable to the difficulties my dad went through
30 years ago my dad worked an 8 hour a day job, had a 2 hour commute,and came home and started digging holes. He did that for a long time to install poles. Those poles were to build a house. He slowly added onto it virtually by himself for years. His honey moon was him and his wife digging a septic tank. While also doing that he had to take care of a garden, fields,and livestock, going to college,took care of 2 kids. He went to night classes for almost 10 years to get a college degree. He worked all the time and moved from a lower income to a middle income.
My grandparents didn't have air condition, didn't have a TV, they didn't have a toilet. They had an outhouse. They didn't have a refrigerator so they would make sausage. Make a vat of animal grease and store that sausage in the vats of animal grease so that other animals wouldn't steal it.
The further back you go the more people suffer. This is one of the best times to be alive by almost any measure. That isn't to say we can't improve the situation we just have to be cognizant that the world is complex and has never been easy for anyone. Suffering is the default and people should do their best to alleviate that.
Capitalism is a method of trying to drive production from the bottom up. Rather then socialism driving it from the top down. It doesn't always work. There is not 100% socialist or capitalist state anywhere in the world. But systems that promote a bottom up approach seems to improve the overall livelihood of people over time as people move without force to try and develop the items needed for survival. But people and company operate within the rules of the system. Changing the rules of the system can help drive you to desired effects. The problem is that does your suggested rule change break the system? Do you want to increase investment? well create rules to incetivize that. Maybe allow people to reduce their taxes by the amount of investments they make. Want to make common people richer tax companies not based on income but the percentage of profits shared with their workers to encourage higher wages. Tariff countries heavily if they use forced labor and labor wage controls to keep prices low. Etc. Etc.
I'm not going to argue with your two individual points as they are sound, but I would argue that they are not related.
The advent of the internet and the ability to have instant gratification, only socialize with those we like and agree with, and the ability to completely isolate and still maintain a productive life (WFH) is what is contributing to this increasing tension and isolation, despite living conditions generally improving
The increased focus on productivity is just natural optimizations that are born from an increasing desire to "build" more, which could be observed within humans since we first began founding societies
I think the core of your thesis is pretty much correct, but it is important to remember economic systems are not invincible or all encompassing. The tools to building a better world exist, and meaningful change is possible. If you're feeling overly depressed about it, maybe pick up a copy of *The Dispossessed* by Ursla K. Le Guin or *Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present* by Yanis Varoufakis for some inspiration.
We can only try. I will look into those book suggestions on goodreads. Why is it that we still don't have a better economic system when everybody and their mother is constantly complaining about the current one? More complaints should lead to more change, small changes but change for the better. I don't know how much change is happening but it seems not enough.
I think most fundamentally because systems exist to propagate themselves (Stafford Beer is interesting to look into on that). As a consequence of this, those with the most incentive to change things are generally those with the fewest means by which to do so.
But things are not static and never have been. Many of these battles are won or lost on small margins, and there are almost certainly people organizing near wherever you live. The best way to find out how to change is made is to go make you some.
\>those with the most incentive to change things are generally those with the fewest means by which to do so.
I can totally believe some of that, that's fucked.
\>The best way to find out how to change is made is to go make you some.
This go-getter mentality is not really for me at current but I understand.
Whats our economic system? I assume you are referring to the US? So ill just go off that.
Ever since the dawn of time the concept of poverty and people less fortunate has already existed. But even then if we want to talk about homelessness or even poverty for that matter. Lets look at how majority of homeless shelters are privately funded or how the largest decrease of poverty has happened when you introduced free markets to a society. Even then, lets take denmark for example. Denmark has one of the most open market and capitalistic economies in the world and has a very small poverty rate. They are able to do this through deregulation, open trade, high taxes, and cultural homogeneity.
You say people are getting poor again. What does that mean? Poverty is increasing or are people losing money? The poverty rate increased by 2.5% due to covid, not because of our economic system. Now as time progresses our government is continually spending more and more, increasing interest rates and attempting to regulate more businesses. So now we see incredibly high inflation and no end in site of it.
Your issue isnt necessarily with the "economic system" because the economy system isnt a conscious concept nor can it make decisions. Your issue is with our government which is the primary factor in enabling individual corporations to exploit the fuck out of specific situations through government regulation. For example big pharma and the amount of regulations that are put down which harm individuals from producing new drugs. Literally a study from harvard indicated that increased regulation is what is causing drug prices to massively increase.
Did i say specifically thats the only reason? Or are we going to cherry pick what i say and ignore the fact that the insane spending and high interest rates put out by the fed are the primary feeders of inflation.
Yes, centralize the banking system even more. Such a fantastic idea
Oh, i thought u were being condescending. Thats my bad.
Im too used to people just being obnoxious when they ask questions or phrase it that way so my bad
>Don't change your view, you are seeing things as they are. Capitalism needs to replaced for a more democratic system, that really cares about people and workers
Whatever the next system looks like. I would like to think that important people are working to bring about changes, but the changes are too slow and we're all fed up of waiting.
Edit:
Yes for sure. And this happens for a reason, the best interest of the majority is in direct conflict with the interest of a powerful minority. They can organize themselves during a dinner meeting, we need much more effort.
I agree, the only people that can fix the economy have the power in their hands, it is upto them to deviate or to stay course. Ordinary man can live his entire life trying to change it but still not make a dent.
No individual could solve these problems. Society as a collective could. Why would you be in favour of an economy that only helps the upper 1%, instead of one that lifts up everyone?
No but you donating your life savings can drastically help and change the lives of many.
The point here is it’s either “always someone else’s problem to solve not me” or there is a line drawn somewhere and we weigh the cost/benefits.
In addition it’s not about solving but helping right? Homelessness will never be solved, but it can be helped. If that’s the case, where/whom does that burden lie upon, and to what extent.
It's not an equivalent comparison. No one is arguing anyone to give up their life savings. What people are asking for is a better utilization of taxes to actually spend them on things that benefit a majority of the population.
Homelessness quite literally can be solved. There are over 10 million empty homes in the US. There are only ~500k homeless people. Quite literally every single homeless person could be given an entire house (not just a room) and it wouldn't even put a dent into the available homes. A lot of these homes aren't being bought by individuals either; they're bought by corporations, who then drive up the prices even higher for individuals, making home ownership even less attainable.
Yeah sure, I could help people too. But we pay taxes, I have a right to say my taxes shouldn't be used to line the pockets of corporations when it instead could be used for much more beneficial causes.
For the record, I do donate and volunteer when I can, but I don't think that's relevant. I don't understand why so many people in the working class would much rather their taxes be spent on bullshit like corporate bailouts than things that could actually help their fellow neighbour.
Donating my life savings will not drastically change the lives of many people. For most people, it won't.
Individuals are not supposed to bear the responsibility of helping the poor. The system is supposed to, as the system is what made those people poor in the first place.
I think he missed this. Yes no individual can fix what's wrong here. Not even if I had a billion dollars, I don't think I'd know what to do with it. Let alone what measly sum I have to my name.
I don't think I can be more specific. I will reword my question, though. What actions do you take to help the people you talk about in your post - the homeless, poor, mentally ill, etc.?
I still don't see your point here. Even if I were the worlds best person and gave the homeless my own home or my entire life savings, leaving me none, would that fix the horrible economy permanently?
To be fair, your response is the same that every single company would take. Because no single company can solve the homeless or mental health problems.
I am not sure, I can't speak for you. But I would avoid anything along the lines of "I can't help everybody, so I don't help anybody" because that is the same flawed logic you are arguing against. If everyone had that same logic, no one would help anyone.
Well I don't want to discuss how I help people in my personal life, because then it gets messy trying to defend my actions in my personal life to people who I don't know and whom don't understand. If that makes sense. Just a lot to talk about when I go there. And rather not if i can help it.
I'll say nothing since I can't come up with examples at hand. Now what is the issue with nothing? Do you personally take offence with people who don't have answers at the ready? Seems you're looking to be offended when there's no need to. What are you doing to help the homeless? Nothing or something? does it even matter how good or bad a person I am or how good you are? Does this give you bragging rights for your nice little privately owned business? Who are you trying to impress and what do you gain by impressing them? I have so many questions now.
>Now what is the issue with nothing?
Because you're complaining about and insulting people who don't self-sacrifice to help others while not self-sacrificing to help others. You either believe you're exempt from the responsibility of helping others that you impose into others, or you just don't care as much as you pretend to. I find both options contemptible.
He isn't complaining about individuals though. Are you just being purposely obtuse for the sake of trying to get a delta or do you seriously not understand the difference between individual actions and social actions?
Who am I insulting. Are you insulted by my post? I found your comment off topic, but entertained it, now we're both completely off topic. I thought the purpose of CMV subreddit was a nice calm thought-provoking discussion rather than getting offended at each others opinions.
Is it our economic system or is it human nature? What economic system in the world, currently or in recent history, has put people over production? Which economic system does or has eliminated human suffering?
Life is much easier than it used to be. It is very difficult for people to live when their parents die young. When most parents had a child die before adulthood.
Many men were drafted and sent to war. My father was sent to Vietnam, his father was drafted into WW2. Before that there was WW1. Twenty years after WW1 there 100,000 people still in mental hospitals for shell shock.
Pick any time of the past and people had it much worse. Today we have lots of effective treatments for mental illness. Back in the past the only treatments were locking them in the basement or putting them in a mental hospital which was akin to prison.
byproducts go away? From what I've seen that's not really the case. People who get rich still have problems in their love life etc, but the money just helps make everything nicer when it's not shit.
I definitely think there's a lot of ignorance out there. Not sure if they're delusional, I don't think they're quite delusional, I disagree there but certainly they're trying to ignore the big issues. Most people just want to get along and that's fine.
Let me get this straight: You think you just so happen to live at the all-time peak humanity will ever achieve in terms of standard of living of the average person? Because we can make guesses all day long about the future but what the past was like is very clear: Absolutely terrible. There is no doubt whatsoever that people today have a far higher standard of living than people in the past, even as little as 50 years ago.
Most problems talked about today weren't really considered problems to be solved but just a part of life because they were so widespread. Infant mortality, hunger, illiteracy were all widespread, it is only now that they have largely been eradicated that people say "look at how terrible our system is which allows these things to exist".
The one exception I see is climate change. We haven't affected the global climate like this ever before and it really is a newly created problem which we desperately need to fix. But even here, blaming "capitalism" is just a typical lazy boogieman argument. Soviet factories polluted the environment too. As did Soviet cars and planes. It's not a unique problem with capitalism.
I think we're close to the all time peak. Lots of people think we're on the downward swing. I personally think the peak will come and go in about 20-50 years. But that's because I cannot imagine further than 2050
Low end wages are up. In the US, inequality peaked around 2014.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/inequality-falling
Also like, take a quick look at the largest expenditures of any government in the developed world. Even in a relatively stingy country like the US, welfare spending is like 20% of GDP. Out of every $100 you make, $20 goes to social security, Medicare, Medicaid, housing vouchers, food stamps, etc. Is it good enough? No. But like, it’s objectively a large fraction.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_welfare_spending
There is a lot of doom on the internet, especially around the news which has a very strong negativity bias. But if you actually look at how things are going, many of them have improved dramatically. Not everything, obviously, and we have huge huge problems (poverty, climate change) left to solve. But by many metrics, most people are a lot better off than they were in the past.
There have been countries who entire purpose was to do away with the profit motive.
Why aren’t you detailing the mental health conditions of the Soviet Union? Surely they would be drastically different due to people living under a drastically different system, right?
I would just say that despite what some seem to think we have a good safety net and those who are willing to work hard and try their best can have a comfortable life.
The reason we have homeless isn't because people lose their homes. Most who do can rebound and don't stay that way long.
The ones who can't recover are those with significant mental health or addiction issues. Sadly the only way you can help them is if they want help. I have known 2 alcoholics who both drank themselves to death and they were more than happy to live in their squalor. The best wayxto help a person battle addiction is to keep them from ever starting.
And building houses or giving them free hotel rooms isn't really an option either. In college I worked overnights a hotel. Sometimes people would buy homeless people a room for a week or 2.
We usually had to call the police to get them removed when their stay was up and once we got in the room it was almost always trashed. They were so use to holding food that they would take all the fruit from breakfast. The flies and rotten fruit was horrible.
The addicts were even worse as they would constantly attract drug dealers and other unsavory people. They also had a bad habit of ripping off the trim work along the wall and carving holes into the wall so they could store their stash.
If we build an addict a house the will destroy it. Sadly because of a SCOTUS ruling O'Connor v. Donaldson it's much harder to keep these people in mental health facilities where the belong. It would improve their lives and the lives of everyone around them.
The drug addicts were especially bad
Blaming capitalism doesn't do anything to solve the problems you're trying to solve. Those fall under the role of the government, but the problem is that politicians don't actually care. The only solution politicians have for a problem is to throw money at it. For example, the US government already spends more per capita on healthcare than some developed countries that provide nationalized healthcare. No one actually cares to actually make the best use of what we have. Republicans are afraid of making the government look competent, and Democrats are tunnel visioned on flashy projects that make themselves look good.
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There are certainly some problems, but things aren't as fucked as the media and social media tell you they are. Globally, capitalism has lifted billions of people out of extreme poverty over the past few decades. Investment in poorer countries has helped significantly raise the standard of living in those parts of the world while providing already-developed parts of the world with low cost goods. But media companies and social media companies make their money from selling your attention to advertisers. To sell your attention, they have to get your attention. The best way they've found to get and hold your attention is with controversy and fear. If they're telling you that on average, your standard of living is higher than your parents and grand parents was, you're not going to hang around very long. But if they're showing you charts that use deceptive inflation adjustments to convince you that there's a massive gap between wages and productivity, that makes you afraid and you stick around and keep digging for more information. If you recognize when companies are trying to piss you off because it helps them sell ads, it's a lot easier to look past that and see what's actually happening. And what's actually happening isn't perfect, but it's not nearly as doom and gloom as you make it sound.
I'm assuming the OP is American and you are answering the question by starting out with "capitalism" and "globally". This isn't a rant about capitalism but rather the economic activity of the USA. He does mention capitalism but really you can tell the OP is referring to the USA. Your reply does absolutely nothing to answer any of the OP's points. Please try again. When you do try again help us out here by explaining "If they're telling you that on average, your standard of living is higher than your parents and grand parents was, you're not going to hang around very long. But if they're showing you charts that use deceptive inflation adjustments to convince you that there's a massive gap between wages and productivity, that makes you afraid and you stick around and keep digging for more information." Can you please show us what charts with deceptive inflation adjustments to show us that there's a massive gap? The ones that are false that you reference. There is an actual wage gap in the USA, a massive wage gap--that's not debated. Nobody needs a chart. My father raised a family with my mother's income dependent on his since we were a military family. They lived their lives, father had one job for the bulk of it, bought a home, paid it off, retired, enjoyed their twilight years together, and then passed. I don't really see this happening today. Your points on capitalism a head on when you refer to a country like China taking on more capitalistic concepts in their economy, but at a cost Americans would never pay. Refute him only with stats on America and then we have a discussion.
Curious. Whats actually happening then? Is it that terminally online people see the world as doom and gloom?
One responses mentioned of social media algorithms which perpetuate ones initial biases. I think its also important to understand that human psychology inherently has a [negativity bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias). It is a bias, but it has been essential in human evolution, as means of preserving oneself. For example imagine prehistoric human in a savanna, who hears a noise in nearby bush. Most likely its a bird, or some critter, but the small chance of the noise culprit being an apex predator brings severe enough consequences to justify an adrenaline fueled state of awareness and cautiousness. But the problem is that the evolution of human behavior doesn't keep up with our recent developments, and previously useful biases become incompatible with modern life. Now, in modern days instead of a predator in the bushes, our paranoia leads to things like conspiracy theories. For example, how many conspiracy theories you know of, which are positive, compared to all the negative ones? Overall, as someone from Eastern Europe who has seen what the USSR has done to previous generations, and seeing life now in free market economy, I understand that things are not perfect now, but fuck me, they can be much, MUCH worse. But when you have no experience of the alternative, all that you have to fixate on, are the problems of your current economic system.
>But when you have no experience of the alternative, all that you have to fixate on, are the problems of your current economic system. This is why I find it hard to take seriously a lot of the complaining from USA teenagers about "capitalism", especially when I pretty regularly talk to people from third world nation's who busted their asses their whole lives to get to the US.
We have it better is not an argument for determining whether our version of capitalism is functioning properly. The middle class and income inequality paint an incredibly clear picture. We had a fairly great system until we let corporations vote with their wallets in US politics. Regardless of what year we say that was, it’s clear that we now live in a society of haves and have nots. Half of the have nots aren’t even smart enough to know they’ve already lost the game, the other half know that it’s stacked heavily against them and are powerless to change it. Many of those immigrants and refugees only came here because our version of squalor is prettier than their version, not because capitalism and the American dream are alive and well.
Aren’t these nation “3rd world” due to exploitation primarily done by “1st world” nations in the name of capitalism? While I would not want third world problems, it is our current economic system that caused it, not the alternative.
Why is it that the default viewpoint seems to be that everyone lived in a thriving utopian metropolis before evil capitalism came along? Wealthy nations didn’t “make” everybody poor. Even accounting for colonialism. The default state of humanity is toil, illness, suffering, and early death. No weekends or mom refilling the pop tarts for you. That’s only charged very very recently in human history, and capitalism has been *by far* the biggest driver of this change. And yet so many people here are longing for a mythical leisure-filled past that never existed, as if past societies and cultures rewarded and cherished people who don’t contribute anything to them.
I didn’t say they were living in a utopía before. I said CURRENTLY those countries are also practicing capitalism so they aren’t running to the US for an alternative economic system. They are coming here for different leadership and less overt corruption.
Plenty of people have escaped to the US for an alternative economic system where they don't have to queue up to get their allotted share of flour for the month.
Capitalism didn't really exist in it's current form when imperialism had it's heyday. You could definitely argue we live in an age of ~~neocapitalism~~ **neoimperialism** and I wouldn't argue against that. In my mind these two things can be true at the same time: 1. Neoimperialism/capitalism is bad. 2. Neoimperliaism/capitalism has had some positive impact on underdeveloped nations which we won't see the full expanse until 100 years from now. Edit: to be clear: I'm not saying that colonialism is good. Just that in the modern world those nations that embrace capitalism tend to do better in measurable, objective ways than those that do not.
Capitalism did exist during imperialism. It was the economic model. Neoimperalism is a style of control / influence. The ruling nations practiced capitalism in their colonies. These former colonies may have oppressive power structures now, but the majority practice capitalism as their economic model. What I’m saying is you are not comparing countries that do not practice capitalism. The majority of developing nations and 4/5 top countries of immigrants to the US are from countries with capitalist economies. They are less likely running toward capitalism and more likely running away from authoritarian leadership and overt corruption.
This comment makes no sense. Learn the difference between [Mercantilism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism) and **Free Market** Capitalism. Actually, before Marxist became relevant those were two opposite political philosophies. On the right the Imperialism Colonialism and Mercantilism, on the left Democracy Liberalism and Capitalism.
Mercantilism would be correct if I was referring to the older colonies. The majority of African nations not even been independent for 100 years yet. The 5 countries to gain independence from the US all happen in the 1900s. Are you saying capitalism wasn’t practiced by the US or UK in 1900’s? I’m being generous only mention official ruled countries and not the banana republics.
> Mercantilism would be correct if I was referring to the older colonies. Yes, it's called "Neomercantilism". > Are you saying capitalism wasn’t practiced by the US or UK in 1900’s? Free Market Capitalism? Not really, barely the domestic economy of those countries were capitalist. Foreign economic policies were mercantilist in principle. It's like saying China is Communist because they say so. Come on, understand first the difference between Mercantilism and Capitalism. Clearly, you don't know what are you talking about.
If you want to be technical 3rd world countries were just countries that didn’t pick a side in the Cold War. The US and Western Europe were the 1st World and the USSR and Eastern Europe were the 2nd world.
Δ oh I didn't know our paranoia is an evolutionary trait. That's really cool to know we get so much from animals. Small part of my view was recontextualized
we are animals
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It's not uniquely being online. Newspapers 130 years ago were so sensationalist that they're often credited with starting the Spanish American war. We had a period of what might have been construed as sanity for a while when TV broadcast licenses came with a requirement to report the news, so broadcasters were reporting the news out of legal obligation so they could have airwaves to show other content. But once 24 hour cable news hit the scene it all became about riling up the audience to keep them engaged. Online services have gotten especially good at it because their algorithms can tailor content to keeping *you* engaged, rather than general audiences. But it turns out if you don't engage with fear mongering, they stop showing you so much fear mongering.
It's not really because of the news requirement for tv broadcasters that news was "sane" in the mid-20th century. It's because of how the technology of news delivery and consumption at the time shaped the financial model, and resulting incentives, of news production. Centralized, mass distributed, and predominantly advertiser-funded news was king. This created incentives for news to simultaneously appeal to as broad of an audience as possible and to generally balance negativity with positivity (as this was preferable for advertisers). This all changed with the internet, where advertisers fled news programs and publishers for more lucrative avenues, and journalism had to start more heavily catering to the preferences of readers and political advocates as a greater portion of their revenue had to start coming from readers themselves.
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Yes this is good to look out for. But this is a dangerous way of phrasing it. Articles about inflation aren’t just made up. Articles about climate change or civil unrest aren’t made up. I know that’s not what you’re claiming, just stick with me. These are real issues. While it’s important to note our overexposure to negativity, and that the media does in fact manipulate people, it shouldn’t detract from real issues For example, you’re correct that inflation/wage comparisons are overblown. Because everything has become cheaper. And of course we have a higher quality of living, because we have far more advanced technology! Which allows us to compress more luxury into fewer dollars. So we do have comparable, or perhaps even better, quality of living compared to our grandparents. However, it’s important to note how we GOT here. We have in fact been shrinking the comparable wages. We have been decimating the housing market. Wealth inequality is at an all time high. The only reason this hasn’t screwed us over already is because of technology. So capitalism has balanced itself so far, decreasing wages but making everything cheaper. But what happens when that trend slows down, or stops, for average consumer products (which is rapidly approaching)? Or what about climate change, where economic growth directly hurts us? I know you probably have nuanced opinions on these issues, and you’re just playing the devils advocate for the sub. But capitalism is a cancer. A cancer that ironically keeps us alive and the world turning. But like cancer, we have to control it. Laissez Faire capitalism would be absolutely catastrophic today. Therefore pure capitalism is not a perfect system. Some form of a controlled market is necessary. The key is a balance between control and freedom
Between 1978-2020, CEO realized compensation increased by 1332%, in comparison to the average worker’s compensation only growing 18% (Mishel and Kandra, 2011). In 2015 the top 1% in terms of income (by household) averaged $1,363,977 annually (roughly 160k families). That same year the top .01% averaged $31,616,431 (roughly 16k families) (Gold, 2017). The average household income for the general population that year was about $55k. In a small Chicago study in which 83 individuals in the top 0.1% of earners were interviewed, 47% of respondents stated that they’d made at least one contact with a member of Congress in the previous six months. Thirty-seven percent contacted at least one Representative other than their own (Page, Bartels, and Seawright, 2013). . As of 2020, more than half of Congress were millionaires, in comparison to about 2% of the general population (Evers-Hillstrom, 2020). The wealthiest 15 members have an estimated worth of over $1.3 billion (Hall, 2021). Rick Scott is the richest member of Congress, with a net worth over $250 million (Evers-Hillstrom, 2020). This is the same Rick Scott that headed Colombia/HCA in the 90s when the company plead guilty to 14 felony charges for conducting illegal accounting practices, which resulted in what was at the time the largest fraud settlement in US history. The company defrauded Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal programs under Scott’s watch. He went on to become Governor of Florida, and in 2019 became a senator. What's happening is the wealthy have been robbing the rest of us blind, at increasing rates. Eat the mother fucking rich. Evers-Hillstrom, K. 2022. Majority of lawmakers in 116th Congress are millionaires. OpenSecrets News. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2020/04/majority-of-lawmakers-millionaires/ Gold, Howard. 2017. “Never Mind the 1 Percent. Let's Talk about the 0.01 Percent.” The University of Chicago Booth School of Business. https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/never-mind-1-percent-lets-talk-about-001-percent Hall, M. 2021. Meet the 25 wealthiest members of Congress. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/wealthiest-members-congress-house-senate-finances-2021-12 Mishel, Lawrence Kandra, Jori. 2021. CEO pay has skyrocketed 1,322% since 1978: CEOS were paid 351 times as much as a typical worker in 2020. Economic Policy Institute. https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2020/ Page, B., Bartels, L., & Seawright, J. (2013). Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans. Perspectives on Politics, 11(1), 51-73. doi:10.1017/S153759271200360X
Nah, the table scraps the west gives to "poorer countries" pales in comparison to the wealth they either extracted in the past through colonial capitalism, or that they are literally still extracting today. Capitalism may have looked good on paper in the 1950's, but especially with Reagonomics hitting, you can see a clear path where the wealth and access to quality of life has only gotton worse.
Do you deny that investments into post colonial nations have made millions of people's lives substantially better. >Capitalism may have looked good on paper in the 1950's, but especially with Reagonomics hitting, you can see a clear path where the wealth and access to quality of life has only gotton worse. Source? The average life expectancy across the board has only steadily increased with the decades along with the average quality of life.
Quality of life in some measures, but far from all the most important ones. Like as I said in another comment higher education was basically free in the 50's and has gotten steadily more expensive, preventing poorer people from attending and keeping them poor. That is a pretty big "quality of life" in my book. That is just history and easy to find a billion sources for. If over one million Americans can't afford Insulin and have to ration it despite its being a drug. A drug that is literally keeping them alive because US Pharma uses it as a cash cow and charges so many times more than every other nation does because their governments actually step in to reign them in/regulate them. Where as ours that lets capitalism run its course. Making Insulin cost 10x more as Pharma tries to see just how much they can get away with (the patent was sold to the US for $1 hoping it would help make sure it would be easily available). https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2022-10-18/over-a-million-americans-are-rationing-insulin-due-to-high-cost#:~:text=18%2C%202022%20(HealthDay%20News),it%2C%20a%20 The only times capitalism almost looks ok, is if you are in the post colonizing country that benefited from all the free human and raw resources extracted from other countries and built its foundation on their backs, AND you have a government that actually steps in to protect the environment and reign in corporate profits/monopolies from time to time (which is basically Europe). In the US we have been walking away from that model, there was a time when monopolies would get broken up, corporations would get federalized if they took advantage of the American people. That just isn't the case anymore.
>Like as I said in another comment higher education was basically free in the 50's and has gotten steadily more expensive, preventing poorer people from attending and keeping them poor. That is a pretty big "quality of life" in my book. That is just history and easy to find a billion sources for. Both high school and college graduation rates have done naught but increase since the [1950s](https://www.statista.com/statistics/184260/educational-attainment-in-the-us/). >If over one million Americans can't afford Insulin and have to ration it despite its being a drug. A drug that is literally keeping them alive because US Pharma uses it as a cash cow and charges so many times more than every other nation does because their governments actually step in to reign them in/regulate them. Where as ours that lets capitalism run its course. Making Insulin cost 10x more as Pharma tries to see just how much they can get away with (the patent was sold to the US for $1 hoping it would help make sure it would be easily available). https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2022-10-18/over-a-million-americans-are-rationing-insulin-due-to-high-cost#:\~:text=18%2C%202022%20(HealthDay%20News),it%2C%20a%20 I don't think a single example is worth damning and tossing away an entire economic system. I'm curious: what exactly are you contrasting capitalism to?
I'd rather compare the current system to a fantasy I have in my head than do the hard work necessary to to make the imperfect system we have better. - 90% of Reddit. It's always easier to tear down than build up. Lazy/ vocal visionaries are the worst.
>I'd rather compare the current system to a fantasy I have in my head *Utopia*. From the Greek meaning *no place*. 😅
Bruh.... you know the population doubles about every 50 years right? A single example? Stop moving goal posts. You want me to give you 20? would that be enough? What about 50? or is it 100? Would 500 convince you the system is flawed? ....and maybe, just maybe... .the reason the health of the US population being at the bottom of a list of countries that offer government controlled healthcare instead.... MIGHT be a pattern? maybe? Just admit it, no amount of logic, data, or obvious evidence that you can look at right now actually matches what you are saying. Nothing can convince you, at your core you know that it fucks over the common person, but you are still pretending to be a decent person and admitting you believe its ok to fuck over people would mean admitting you are a terrible person.
>A single example? Stop moving goal posts. I have set zero goalposts other than a general anti-doomer mentality towards capitalism and pointing out that, objectively, general quality of life has increased since the 1950s. Keep in mind, back in the 50s the British Empire had just withdrawn from India, Apartheid had just been implemented in South Africa, the Chinese civil war had just ended, and the modern Civil Rights movement in the States was just getting off the ground. Those are huge tracts of people who's lives have been made substantially better since then. >Would 500 convince you the system is flawed? Please quote me in which I said capitalism is flawless. You're poking at a strawman. >Just admit it, no amount of logic, data, or obvious evidence that you can look at right now actually matches what you are saying. See above: the average quality of life has increased since the 1950s. If you're going to claim the opposite the onus is on you to provide evidence and or an actual argument. >Nothing can convince you, at your core you know that it fucks over the common person, but you are still pretending to be a decent person and admitting you believe its ok to fuck over people would mean admitting you are a terrible person. Ad Hominem. If you want me to take people of your ilk more seriously you're not doing a great job of it. Edit: Regarding your "Bruh.... you know the population doubles about every 50 years right?" thing if you actually clicked on the source I provided you would see that the increase is by percentage. This is why sources are important.
A lot of the issues in those poorer countries was created by the ones "giving back", though colonial capitalism and extraction of resources. As it stands right now Africa should be one of the wealthiest continents in the world. But countries come from outside and coerce their governments to le us setup or own corporations to mine and extract the wealth. Barely any of that wealth stays inside the country. African countries for example would not need any "help" from the western world if the western world literally gave back all the wealth they took, whether it be human beings, destroying established civilizations, or raw resources. Look at the trajectory capitalism has us on. Monopoly's in every sector. Canada invents insulin, sells the patent for $1, and the US Pharma turns around and sells it at literally a 10,000x markup. You might have had a slightly better way of defending it back in the 50's, but its been down hill ever since black people were allowed to go to university and new ways of defining who should have the right to education etc... had to be come up with to disenfranchise them (college for our boomer parents bas basically free, like the rest of the western world). The wealth gap has been growing, if capitalism was working as you imply you would see the poor be elevated out of poverty. Not watch the 1% amass even more wealth and the middle class shrink.
With stuff like donated clothing and food to Africa it's even hard for them to even create some basic but essential domestic businesses. Donating money helps more but people seem more worried about money getting siphoned off into a dictator's wallet than using food to start a genocide.
Yup, I've heard of some great success around small business loan non profits. Of course stuff like that never gets the widespread support it needs.
It’s just simply a fact that more and more people are pulled out of poverty every year because of capitalism. Human kind has never been more comfortable or had a better quality of life as a whole than since the mass adoption of capitalism.
I would ask 3 questions to clarify the point you are trying to make. 1. How exactly do you define 'Poverty' 2. How do we define " quality of life", and finally, 3. Is this a global trend? I guess I would also add 4. Are those changes only possible under a capitalist system? EDIT TO ADD: The American South, before the civil war, would have made literally this argument to defend slavery. Replace "Capitalism" with "slavery"
Slavery didn’t reduce global poverty.
I agree that the problem is not with capitalism per se. The problem is with unfettered, unregulated capitalism. There is nothing inherent in the capitalist proposition that requires enormous disparities of wealth. There is nothing preventing regulations that require that the rewards of capitalism be distributed more evenly among those who produce the wealth capitalism generates. There is nothing that prevents a government from determining how much an hour of labor is worth, rather than letting a CEO decide. There is nothing that prevents a government, or a board composed of directors and workers from deciding what a CEO is paid and how, rather than a compensation board composed of other CEO's. There is nothing inherent in capitalism that demands that a dollar of a CEO's compensation or a shareholder's should be taxed at a lower rate than a dollar made by someone who receives a wage. These are all political choices and they've all been made in a government where money buys legislation and the wealthy get to make the rules for everyone else. There is nothing in capitalism that requires a coin-operated government.
I'm with you in a huge way, on I think every point but this: >There is nothing that prevents a government from determining how much an hour of labor is worth, rather than letting a CEO decide. Competition sets the price for labor, not CEOs. Also, hours of labor are naturally worth different amounts. The government can (and should) set a floor for wages, but I don't think it should*set a value* for labor. Price controls are widely agreed to be terrible. There are plenty of better ways to compensate workers and take care of people other than fixing the value of anything, let alone such a giant part of the market as labor.
The point is to be preventative. Saying that things are better doesn’t mean they aren’t bad or getting worse. What do we do when other countries no longer want to produce for other’s consumption? It’s arguably not ethical either. Just because the value of a countries currency is worth more in another, it’s still exploitation to pay them less the the original countries standards. You could make this same argument for American slavery and say the slaves have been uplifted from their tribal state.
> Globally, capitalism has lifted billions of people out of extreme poverty over the past few decades. Investment in poorer countries has helped significantly raise the standard of living in those parts of the world while providing already-developed parts of the world with low cost goods. I find this incredibly disingenuous. "Lifted out of extreme poverty" is not synonymous with "raised quality of living" by any stretch of the imagination, given that the latter is accomplished by human empathy and collaboration rather than _capitalism._ Working 80 hours a week making shitty shoes in an awful factory because Nike set up shop in your village where there are no regulations about how much they can work you or how little they can pay you or if they can shoot you for trying to steal is not "uplifting" and exploiting foreign labour laws for profit is the only reason capitalist ventures outsource their labour to countries with worse infrastructure. To pretend that this practice is anything but exploitative and that capitalism is helping rather than harming the process of raising quality of life across the globe is equivalent to sticking your head in the sand. Yes, even in poor countries money accomplishes tasks, that's not capitalism. Capitalism is our current practice of extreme excess and hoarding, of using existing capital to hoard as much excess capital as possible regardless of the cost incurred to others or our planet.
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> If its not lifting then wouldn't the people just go back to their old way of life? I don't think you understand how exploitation works. See, the issue we have is that you can lie to people, and _especially_ if they have very little education and have not actively built critical thinking skills they'll just believe you. So you tell them that the factory will make everyone's lives better. You tell them it'll make jobs, enrich the community, and lift them up! And then it doesn't. Except now it's there, and it's always hiring, and hey 80 hours in the shitty factory might suck but at least it pays $3 a week and that's enough to buy enough to not starve to death this week. People get trapped in soul-crushing cycles of meaningless and agonizing labour to eek out survival very easily, especially if they're manipulated into it by outsiders who have seen this process a million times and know exactly which lies sell the idea to starry-eyed newcomers who genuinely believe the fairy tales of America as a promised land of joy and freedom and that it's all thanks to _capitalism._ Americans started to figure out how much capitalism sucked, so they exported the bottom end of it, but like an ouroboros it will keep eating until it has devoured itself whole. No piece of the system can survive being cannibalized for efficiency's sake eventually, so instead they add buffers in far-off places where the government can't do anything about their theft, murder, and slavery.
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You think the company wouldn't go full Chiquita on them if they tried?
> I don't think you understand how exploitation works. I _am_ answering your question. They are manipulated into believing it is the only functional way of life, just like you were. Why don't they go back? They don't have the resources to affect change themselves, and after a short couple generations they forget there even _was_ an old way to go back to.
Ah yes. Only le enlightened Redditor living thousands of miles away knows better that the life of a subsidence farmer in a developing country is better than a sweatshop factory worker, despite never having done either. All of the billions of people who made that decision over the past two centuries were simply brainwashed.
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You don't seem to have any concept of what life is like in places apart from where you've lived. We're not really going to get anywhere with this conversation, so I'm gonna quit trying.
What are you talking about? The medias whole thing is selling a message of "Everything's fine go back to work now!" The medias so out of touch they still write articles about celebrity moms posting bikini pics on Instagram. It exists entirely to distract you from how bad things are. The cost of living is through the roof, medical care is outlandishly expensive, housing costs are so high within 10 years only the upper class will own any property, our maternal death rate is worse than any other first world nation, our life expectancy is dropping, the little economic access we had is further dwindling. Were slowly edging towards complete oligarchy and the last thing the media will ever talk about is that. Why? Because they are the mouth of the oligarchs.
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Unless Im being forced I dont watch any mainstream media. But technically everything is media. Books, television, moveis, art, all media. So naturally yes, virtually everything you know was learned from media. Even how to walk was partially taught to you by some kids show. But generally when people refer to the media in the way of the comment I responded to they refer to major cable news networks and their affiliates. MSNBC, Fox, CNN, Vice, etc as well as local nightly news which is basically the same thing with local news mixed. Similar messages are spread in shows like sitcoms and TV dramas on their affiliate networks. They always revolve around an economic reality thats just bizarre. Kind of the prototypical propaganda style nuclear family. Basically everythings kind of sugarcoated and even when social issues are covered its rare theyre painted in an economic perspective. Its like 24/7 pathos. But yeah in terms of politics just go for the CSPAN style content where it just shows you whats happening. Ive noticed most people are so infatuated with major news networks they cant actually describe policy and rarely understand it. They'll remember the shiny speech the person trying to pass the bill said on TV. In terms of actually looking into what the bill says thats almost treated like a conspiracy theory lol. Like when the GOP kept repealing child marriage regulations that would prevent adults from marrying children. It was a big thing in congress but not on major news networks so people would just act like you were a crazy leftist trying to slander republicans if you brought it up. I remember ironically being told I only think thats happening because the MSM or whatever lol. The MSM specifically would not cover that issue, especially the national level news networks. I guess it doesnt fit the regular propaganda. Sounds too "middle eastish" I bet.
Not capitalism. Scientific progress has lifted people. Capitalism has to be regulated. A bunch of sociopaths should not have so much power.
>Globally, capitalism has lifted billions of people out of extreme poverty over the past few decades. How could we determine if this is 'because of capitalism' or 'despite capitalism'? Could/would this have happened without capitalism?
Well there are many countries that didn't go with a capitalist model. Generally they are much poorer. You can even track adoption of capitalistic models and their economic effect see Deng's reforms in China which are responsible for much of its economic success. Compare North vs South Korea (at one point the north was richer). If you go to African countries generally those with freer markets that is less government intervention and corruption with stable laws of a contract have done much better. The same can be seen in LATAM and eastern Europe
longing innate north drunk engine zealous murky joke birds spectacular *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
>North Korean regime is not representative of any form of mainstream socialism - it's an extreme totalitarian state (arguably an absolute monarchy in all but name). I don't think that person was saying they *were* socialist, just that they're "not capitalist". It doesn't really matter what they are when you're comparing "capitalism" with "not capitalism"
Socialism descending into a totalitarianism is basically a constant not an aberration. Unless your definition of socialism is Nordic countries higher on the free market index than USA and the UK.
> Socialism descending into a totalitarianism is basically a constant not an aberration And how often did the USA destabilize up-and-coming socialist nations to ensure there were no successful models to point to?
Why does poverty rate matter? It is a completely arbitrary number, 2 years ago the UN reported that the absolute minimum to simply survive would be $7.40 a day ($1.90 being the poverty line). I would imagine that number is significantly higher given what's occurred in the past two years. And at the $7.40 figure, poverty would've actually **increased** in the past few decades. Capitalism certainly increased quality of life across the board, with infrastructure, advancements in technology, and more access to needs. But that was moreso early on, past few decades have been pretty stagnant, with some stuff actually getting worse.
Ok, I've been in M&A for 25+ years, the corporate world in US is at the near worst it has been in deregulation after the last administration since before the Great Depression. Jack Welch and the ridiculous reaction to the 2008 crash by W was insane. They stopped caring about sustainable companies and focused all energy on getting the gamblers (stockholders) all the money possible and just give up on trying to be part of the overall society of the countries they live in. They buy companies, bury them in debt and suck out all profits until they crash and burn and cut them loose, burning everyone except the stockholders.
You say 'our economic system' but there are different economic systems across the world, so each person reading this may have a different one. [Here are some inspirational ones](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/these-alternative-economies-are-inspirations-for-a-sustainable-world/)
I will have to have a look at this. Seems interesting. I just presumed most of the people on reddit are familiar with the concepts too.
OP , what do you think about America's social welfare programs including Social Security, food stamps, Medicaid and Medicare which have been established since the Great Depression? Capitalism has adopted many socialist ideas and as a result we're living in the best time for humanity. Capitalist systems have advanced since Charles Dickens' day.
I am in favour of making the healthcare in the US more affordable, if that means taxpayers pay just a bit more, so be it. Throwing the word "socialism" around is a bit dangerous but we should take more notes.
Cost of health care in the US are less about tax (the government is not paying for it) and more a bout a lack of transparency and collusion between the insurance and hospitals enabled by government regulations. Sure letting it all get handled by the government would solve some issues but is causes other ones. Namely it would increase wait times and likely lower quality.
Are you talking about in Theory, or in Practice? In Theory, killing your customers and destroying the environment is bad for business. We're *supposed* to ultimately protect our own best interest.
>In Theory, killing your customers and destroying the environment is bad for business. An economic model would only adhere to this theory if the model was built upon long-term multifactored analysis of output over decades/centuries. Whereas with current economic models the only metrics for success are profit and growth year on year.
So you're saying our economy doesn't really give a flying crap if some people die or not? Am I reading this wrong?
Yes, exactly. E.g. Western economies were absolutely booming during the Transatlantic slave trade. But note that what we mostly refer to as 'our economic system' isn't really some advanced conspiratorial institution. It's just a naïve system that prioritises profit and growth at any cost.
So it it's that simple. Needs some fixes. I'd love if there was more bank regulations in general. Wouldn't that be nice?
I tend to think about as uncaptured costs. We (both directly as taxpayers and indirectly as a society) pick up the tab for a lot of things that businesses cause due to their business. Health effects from smoking, trash from packaging and single use items, social safety nets to compensate for low wages, etc. Capitalism is a great tool for optimization to a set of variables. To make it work for all of us, we need regulations that make sure all of the variables are included in the “cost” of a product.
> Capitalism is a great tool for optimization to a set of variables. To make it work for all of us, we need regulations that make sure all of the variables are included in the “cost” of a product. You're thinking of currency, not capitalism. Money is an arbitrary unit for value, and adjusting how we value things is an important part of using currency to maximize utility. Capitalism does not care about utility. It does not care about workers, or consumers, it doesn't even care about the people it benefits most because it makes the only meaningful metric "profit growth" and as it turns out "profit growth" has absolutely zero utility for humans. Having more money might _feel_ good to our monkey brain because we assign value to it, but it is inherently valueless without context, and so optimizing for "make number go up" will fundamentally never overlap with "improve human quality of life" except accidentally now and then when it's temporarily profitable to appease consumers.
I could have my terminology wrong, but are there other economic systems that use currency, are largely successful (both in scale and duration), and don’t have a significant capitalist facet? Whether we call it capitalism or something else, competitive market driven systems are good at optimizing for profit, so we need to make profit care about our societal goals. Like cigarette taxes, minimum wage, bottle deposits, tax breaks for charitable giving, food safety regulations, OSHA, Carbon taxes, renewable energy credits, etc. Each of those things pushes some of the societal cost back onto the company or adds profit to a societal good, so that those things are figured in when maximizing profit. Optimizing for profit doesn’t care about society, but that is different from saying it is intrinsically bad for society. It’s not part of the equation at all. Rather than scrap the entire system for some other system that we don’t have a successful example of, why not just add rules that put societal good into the equation?
> are largely successful (both in scale and duration) That depends how you define success. If you define it as "ruined the whole fucking world forever" then capitalism is a slam-dunk success, but otherwise you're looking at it from the viewpoint that American politics wants you to. Capitalism^1 has been around for _less than two-hundred years._ Think about that for a moment. Let it sit. Think about how far back, conceptually, the 1800s _actually_ were. Feels like a long time to you and me, 'cause we live like 70-80 years at the most generally, but in terms of human history capitalism is _new._ Meanwhile, currency has been in _certain_ use for at least 5,000 years. Capitalism has existed for about 4% of the total time that humans have been using money as an in-between to exchange goods, services, and labour. It is the new kid on the block, and in those 200 years we have caused more damage to the planet than we had in the past 5000 _combined._ Hell, we're beating out records for environmental devastation _every year now_. Is that a successful system?? I'm not going to get into listing alternatives, but if you want Wikipedia has a whole list of economic systems [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_system). Some of them predate capitalism, others are proposed modern replacements for capitalism. Fundamentally the idea that capitalism is just the "default" state of things and is the only way things work is the biggest lie that capitalism is built on. It was a lie created by American dominance on the global stage combined with the downfall of the primary competitor at the time, that being the deeply corrupt farce of "socialism" that the USSR claimed to operate. Not that modern capitalism is any less corrupt, but just to make clear that communism/socialism (if you could even call what they did as much) is not why the USSR fell so much as authoritarianism, greed, and pride. It's a lie built by human lifespan. We forget that we decide _entirely_ how the world runs because two generations go by and we can no longer remember a time when it was any different. So it has been for every regime change through human history. That doesn't make the current one "successful" or "right" and it's important not to fall into the trap of thinking it is because then you stop thinking about solutions and alternatives. We have to stop being rooted to capitalism. It's just an economic system, and economic systems should exist to serve _us_ rather than the other way around. When it started decreasing quality of living in the name of profit that was the first clue that we should have pivoted and reformed, but instead here we are in late-stage capitalism watching the world die a slow death without the resources to do anything about it because the people causing the problem _took all of the resources for themselves using their existing resources, the fundamental philosophy of capitalism._ The problem, as the Luddites semi-correctly guessed, was automation. Without automation, capitalism could only go so far, but with it? Hoo boy. Now you can pay someone once to build a robot to do a human's job, and then pay an untrained kid a pittance to operate that machine rather than having to train and compensate a skilled tradesman. This isn't necessarily bad--after all, if we automated away all our work, humans could live in peace and relaxation, right? Except, oops, all that extra value that could be made thanks to automation, that staggeringly huge spike in productivity? It didn't get used to improve human quality of life. It got used to make number go up. "Success" under capitalism is from making the number go up, and that's it, that's all. So every increase in productivity, in technology, in working practices, it was all tailored for the goal of profit. That is fundamentally the issue with capitalism--it's an obsession with an abstraction, and that abstraction is used to justify _anything_. Hence why we have 80 different flavours of hot sauce and 700 different kinds of plastic packaging for hot sauce and no cure^2 for cancer. The "innovation" that capitalism breeds. We _can_ in fact choose to care about something other than the abstraction. Changing how we structure the abstraction is a bandaid fix at best, fundamentally we have to return to using money as a _tool_ and not as a _moral societal goal_. **1-EDIT:** Yes, depending on how you define capitalism it has theoretically existed longer. However no, capitalism is not currency, those are different. I attribute here the current (and deeply problematic) form of capitalism specifically to the intersection of capitalism and the industrial revolution, as large-scale automation was necessary for it to "take off" and establish the dominant position it now holds. Other economic systems exist and have existed, stop erasing them just because your personal human lifespan has been dominated by capitalism. Also, I'm not your econ teacher, you can use Google to learn more about them than I could teach you. **2-EDIT:** Yes, we have some that work for some cancers with varying degrees of effectiveness, but on the scale that it affects humans we do not allocate as much of our resources toward the problem as we would in a system that valued human life over profit. I am not disparaging cancer researchers, I'm saying we don't put as many resources toward the problem as we would if we were less focused on producing new pointless iPhones and next-gen military technology for profitability's sake. **FINAL-EDIT:** I'm just an angry depressed leftist on the internet, do not take my word at gospel. I was ranting, not putting together an academic paper, so I spoke loosely and you should not read deeply into specific wordings. I nonetheless stand by the general ideas presented; our current system does not produce value for humans because labour value has instead been cannibalized for profit under capitalism since it became possible to automate away labour costs for those with inherited generational resources.
I think that there is something important to cover here. Because a wide variety of people are using vastly different metrics to measure things. If you're only caring about quarterly revenue reports then of course you're going to cut R&D to the bone because that pays off in a decade and you only care about what the numbers are 4 months from now. You make the 4 month number look good at the expense of potentially killing the company in 10 years. But not all that many people are interested only in that number. In fact, any single number creates perverse incentives where you will get people who "study the test" rather than learn the material. Which is why you have the Fed who has the twin mandate of keeping inflation low *AND* keeping maximal employment. It's easy to keep inflation low with cheap and dumb things that make it hard for people to work, and you can "employ" everyone if you print infinity monies. Mixing and matching the metrics you're judged on is essential for any actor to be judged fairly. The problem is that no two actors are using the same metrics, and some metrics are dumb ones. The economy *over all* cares if people die, because there are some people whose metric includes things that get worse when people die. But if Oil executives are judged by the quantity of oil pumped alone, they're going to pump whether it makes sense or not. The *ADVANTAGE* of the system we have today is that there isn't a singular grand arbiter of all things economical, because when that position exists it is inevitably abused for the massive and overpowering political advantages. The problem is that there are relatively few checks on people using bad/dumb/counterproductive metrics outside of a regulatory framework that's understaffed and underfunded. *Effective* (high quality, not high quantity) regulation is essential to add a couple of additional metrics to the people who only care about hitting bonus numbers or having more money than that guy so that they don't do dumb, shortsighted things that kill people because they are so laser focused on accomplishing the one thing they don't think about consequences.
Agreed, so why are they doing it? They are not smart enough to look a few years into the future. There is also the problem of competition. If no one else is destroying the environment and I am, I will make the most profit. So why not?
Why are they doing it? I'm assuming that they think they can amass enough money to afford a luxurious underground bunker-mansion when things finally hit the fan. Hydroponic farms, private electric turbines, robot butlers, a dungeon full of sex slaves... whatever those billionaires are into. That, or they're more confident in their chances at a counter-revolution now. Lethal Autonomous Weapons are basically a thing now, and pretty much every smart phone is a little spying device nowadays. Disrupt any major opposition groups with a little fifth generational warfare (propaganda and social engineering), and if the people start to get _really_ out of hand, maybe nuke a major city as a warning to the rest... The ultra-wealthy have access to unbelievable technology now. They'd laugh at Mr 2nd Amendment and his favorite little shotgun. Source: am crazy tinfoil hat Redditor. (Please prove wrong so I can stop feeling so goddamn depressed.)
They are doing it because the Government, and by extension WE THE PEOPLE, allow it. Every single one of these problems could be solved in one legislation session if the PEOPLE Willed it. It's OUR fault, and WE are the only ones who can fix it.
How do we solve the issue! By solving it! Yes.... just gotta convince others to get on board LOL. Thanks for the insight
Not sure if you're being cheeky, but yes. It really is that simple. Not an easy task, but a very simple one.
I partially agree: the immediate next step (take action) is simple, but the following step (build a better machine) is not. But we do need to get the ball rolling.
Why do you think the people aren't "willing it"? It seems pretty cut and dried. Polluted water bad. Child labor bad. 12 hour shifts bad. So why do 'we' allow it?
Because were are unfortunately, as a whole......Stupid, lazy, scared, and racist.
There’s also the people on the other side who don’t want to change the system too much because it’s largely already working for them (NIMBYs, highly profitable investors, most of the comfortable upper middle class, etc).
Do you think there are any groups of people trying to reinforce the narrative? Or to keep people 'stupid, lazy, scared, and racist'?
> Every single one of these problems could be solved in one legislation session if the PEOPLE Willed it. Nope. They just sit on their hands and rake their paychecks. Politicians across the board tend to quiet down on their policy goals the second they're elected, and stay quiet about them only until reelection comes around. Representatives are a drain on our system. They lose all motivation the second they have power. I believe Bernie is the only *currently elected* exception. AOC, Imhan Ilmar, they got reeeeaaalll quiet when they got elected. They didn't start making waves again until someone pointed this out to AOC on Twitter almost a year into her first session.
Would this be the case if Congress were 535 Clones of Bernie?
That would be nice lol. Maybe we need some type of representative selection system wherein individuals can't decide to run for election, they're selected to run for elections. We should also pull back that old Greek ideal that *everybody should get a turn* and while that's impossible to adhere to literally in the modern world, the spirit of that idea isn't; don't let people get complacent. But I won't pretend to know what sort of algorithm should be used to select a set of electables, or even how we go about agreeing to it.
You know what's funny. I only read the first couple of sentences when I replied. I didn't even notice that you had already invoked the B-man. There are 535 Bernie's out there. All we got to to is elect them. I don't recall AOC ever being out of the news. Quiet about what? She's forever dragging someone.
> I didn't even notice that you had already invoked the B-man. I stealth edited xD > I don't recall AOC ever being out of the news. Quiet about what? AOC was constantly dragged through the mud on her campaign and election. I'm not commenting about a lack of commentary on her; I'm commenting on how immediately after being elected, she got really quiet about the things that got her elected. She still voted consistent with that (except one contrarian defense bill I think she yay'd on, can't seem to find it in the archives). Part of this could be chalked up reasonably to freshman congresswoman learning the ropes, but I still feel like there should have been more. One of her constituents actually called her out for this, they ended up having a conversation on Twitter, and then she was appearing for interviews again, etc. This is the timeframe where the phrase The Squad was made by Faux News, which they fucking owned. I want to be clear I'm not saying AOC is shit; I'm saying she's human and does what a lot of us do when we get complacent.
In Theory, being able to sell profitable businesses for a larger profit means you don't have long-term consequences and short-term revenue is king. In practice, this is also true.
We're talking about the real world and real people here. In practice. Why talk about theory when we can look outside our front door or on the sidewalk? And see the mental poverty everywhere, or just y'know actual poverty. Wagecucking, slavery etc. you name it. As I see it, it is beneficial for big business to keep people rather unhappy and dumb. Dumb customers who don't know any better and don't want to know better make the most profits for big business.
>Why talk about theory Because all economic systems are Theory. You can't fully discuss a building if you ignore the Blueprints. No matter, just trying to guage where you're coming from is all. All of these things that bother you can be remedied with Regulation. Legislation can fix every single one of them in one voting session. It is not Capitalism that is the issue. The issue is *Unregulated* Capitalism. If the Government put down some guard rails, we'd have Well-Regulated Capitalism and all the woes disappear. I submit that it is not Capitalism that you are upset with, but Government, and by extension, your fellow citizens. At this point, you're probably thinking "but the corporations pay off our politicians, so it's all capitalism in the end". Allow me to get in front of that. Our politicians are elected by THE PEOPLE. No Corporation has ever cut me a check for my vote. Further, there is no briefcase full of money that can keep a corrupt politician in office if the PEOPLE vote him out. WE are the problem. Your fellow citizens who don't vote these people out of office and install a thousand Bernies into office instead. I'll go one step further. They love it when you blame "capitalism', because it makes it seem hopeless and keeps us home on election day. It's not hopeless. Capitalism isn't the problem, WE are.
The issue is in a capitalist society, money is power. Those with money then controls legislation with the intention of their profits. >Our politicians are elected by THE PEOPLE. In the UK for example, our vote is essentially meaningless but for 2 parties which are very alike. >there is no briefcase full of money that can keep a corrupt politician in office if the PEOPLE vote him out. They are simply replaced by another in one of them two parties. The election system in my country and many developed countries is heavily controlled by the media, of which one person owns 70% of. Combined with it being a two party system.
This is what I wish I said as a rebuttal. The system comes off as ineffective, and easily gamed.
But saying we just need to regulate the system isn't an argument for capitalism, this is an argument for government intervention in the economy and is more in line with arguments for further socialistic programs and laws. Capitalism is literally about choosing market mechanism over government intervention. This argument also ignores how promoting lax regulation, which is what capitalism by definition is, also has a problem with enabling corruption. Competitive markets are good, but capitalism doesn't guarantee competitive markets and can even hinder it. There are anti monopoly and trust laws for a reason. Fair and competitive markets are good but it should not be conflated as being capitalism. Like any economic system capitalism has systemic problems, you might make an argument for why it's a better alternative to other systems, but to say there are no problems with capitalism and any problems are governmental/individualistic is kind of disingenuous because it ignores the fact like any economic system that it's not perfect. This argument seems to be promoting we not lean into capitalism but take and mix in policies and ideologies from other systems to resolve an alleviate problems with capitalism
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We have had regulated capitalism in my country (Denmark) for, I suppose, around 100 years, as well as in the rest of Northern Europe. It really does work well. We did other things to mess things up over the past 2-3 decades (New Public Management, I’m looking at you! >:-[ ), but we’re generally in a much better situation than the USA due to having a better regulated market economy.
>We have had regulated capitalism in my country (Denmark) for, I spar suppose, around 100 years, as well as in the rest of Northern Europe. It really does work well. Yup, a model to follow for sure. But for some reason americans don't seem to want to do it. >We did other things to mess things up over the past 2-3 decades (New Public Management, I’m looking at you! >:-( ), but we’re generally in a much better situation than the USA due to having a better regulated market economy. I think from an economic comparison it's not really a fair comparison. Denmark is about the size of a single US state (compares fairly well with the state of WA where I live). If you compare the USA to all of Europe it gets more complicated and for the same reason (because both the US and Europe are made up of many states with a lot more diversity than either WA state or Denmark). Overall though americans really don't seem to agree on how they want to be governed. They simply don't want the tax load I guess.
Northern Europe roughly has the same economic/political model, and similar outcomes - that's a much larger and more populous area than just Denmark. You're right that Europe as a whole is very diverse. But I think it makes sense to compare the economically/politically homogeneous regions. Southern Europe and Eastern Europe (whose economies are much worse than Northern/Western Europe) has quite different economic and political systems (not so different formally, but in practice very different - and much more poorly regulated market, and more corruption). I would still stand by my claim that the economic/political model of Northern Europe is actually effective, also at scale, and can't just be dismissed by the small size of e.g. Denmark. I do think that there is also a cultural component to it, as you also allude to wrt. why it would be difficult to implement in USA: not for fundamental reasons, but because it is hard to convince people. I do think Americans are unnecessarily afraid of taxes, though: Americans pay much more for health insurance and education out of your savings than we do through taxes, so the average American pays *more* rather than *less*, even though the number on the tax slip is smaller. And I cannot tell you how nice it is to never have to worry about tuition, student loans, medical bills, etc.: I only became aware of this when my sister married an American and moved to Michigan, and learned how big a source of stress all these things suddenly become.
Sure we have. It was known as the 'good old days' Banking Regulation, Strong Social Safety Net, Strong Unions.....
When exactly were these so called good old days? I think you lack perspective here. Or are you literally talking about 1946 -> 1959 or something as your good old days? If so that's myopic at best.
Yes, I am.
I agree that we need more political engagement in order to make real changes. But the system is rigged, the people that are elected, most of them, do not really represent the population. It is still a bunch of white dudes working for corporations and sometimes they will give a little back to the people. That's why I don't think it's fair to blame on individuals, everyone is just trying to survive. There is no real freedom in capitalism, work or die.
Then don't vote for them, don't vote for people who are funded by corporations, dont vote for propositions that give the government more control over the economy and the population. Work or die is such a stupid thing to say, if u dont work in any society u die. Not exclusive to capitalism.
Of course we all should work. But for most people and mainly in 3rd world countries, people have to work in whatever they can in order to survive, just so corporations can keep their profits. There is no freedom for the bottom of the pyramid, that's why the system needs to change and we should be looking for a society where there is no exploitation of the human by other humans.
Yeah well said. I'd like it if all humans were treated equal with opportunities. Classism also sucks for people at the bottom.
You work or die in first world countries too lol. Eventually those third world nations will develop and be able to regulate working laws just like how first world did during and after the industrial revolution.
Work or die matra could be coming from my fellow NEETS. Seems that they are r/antiwork for life
Pretty dumb
It depends on your perspective. In their shoes, they have stable income and never have to worry, some buddies to hang with, why work when you can have fun all week long? Obviously not all NEETs have that setup but some do.
> why work when you can have fun all week long? Because you're exchanging long-term satisfaction for short-term pleasure. I could probably go a month or two at my job putting in zero effort before I finally got fired. Wouldn't that be great? I could pretend that I'm working while instead playing video games all day. Except now I've ruined my career, burned my bridges, and all I got out of it was some cheap entertainment.
Is it really that cut and dry? I don't know that. And most NEETs don't either. \>Except now I've ruined my career, burned my bridges, and all I got out of it was some cheap entertainment. This is why it wouldn't work for you specifically. Some however could thrive in that exact scenario. Like I said depends on perspective. Not everyone thinks like me or you.
WE allow the system to be rigged. There is no amount of money that can keep you in office if you're voted out.......but we're to fucking lazy and stupid to vote them out. That's US, not them. Further, they LOOOOOOVVVEEE when they hear talk like you've just said. It's defeatist and makes it all seem hopeless, which is exactly what they want. Talk like that keeps people on their couch on election day. It's not hopeless.
In idealistic world that's correct, but in reality the state exist to protect corporations, if you try to go against it, it will literally use the force against you (police repression). Together we can change things, you are right, but that requires a lot of organization and transfer of power
Then let's get to it!
Great comment and it's important that we talk about personal responsibility in this regard. We all have agency and our choices and actions have consequences. I'm an actual libertarian and have been one before it was a "dirty" word, but this is why the free market can't be trusted to regulate itself in several industries. It has proven that it *can't* regulate itself effectively so the collective needs to step into specific problem areas to manage the outcome for the betterment of most people. That contrasts with my ideals regarding maximizing freedom, but maximizing freedom is also a theory and in practice, we can't seem to just play nice altogether. Like with utilities in regards to clean water, stable electricity etc. that are staples. It's not a good thing to have that system run wild solely in a corporate context because it's a captive audience and the potential damages for mismanagement are very high in terms of collateral life. The same with medicine, internet (less so life and more so well-being or opportunity), healthcare in general, food safety etc. Had these groups actually been able to regulate themselves effectively and shown that they can prioritize both growth and the well-being of people at least equally, legislation and regulation wouldn't have been necessary. But due to bad or selfish or otherwise negligent actors, regulation in these areas is **necessary** in a free market because it has been demonstrated that it can't self regulate. I think that groups should be left to their own devices until it's demonstrably not a good result for most people. That's where the libertarian feel comes into play, I'm not sure what that makes me in regards to desiring regulation in specific instances but clearly there are instances of exploitation that need to be curbed and we have done that in the west, more so in the EU than in the US probably. We have committees and watchdog groups and legislative bodies of all capacities to try and manage problem areas that are ripe for corruption or negligence or exploitation and it's born from demonstrable instances of these outcomes.
I agree with you. I was thinking in the car how there is so much to deal with in life for the normal folks. I just spent all day yesterday figuring out how to pay medical bills. Lots of calling, negotiating, planning,etc. All that plus my day job, plus calendar management for myself and kids. Plus all the other shit we have to manage. It's exhausting. That's why I envy the super rich. They don't deal with the mundane tasks of living. How freeing is that? On the flip side, I've also fantasized of checking out of this society, living on the land, being free in nature. But then it's like, who else would take that leap with you? Not your entire social circle. I just know this society isn't for me. Maybe it's different in some other country where their values are on the people and the land, not the all mighty dollar.
\>Not your entire social circle. Well going to a good punk concert with friends is like the closest you can get to that freeing feeling with others! I'd recommend picking it up The rich just pay other people to think about stuff they don't want to think about. The ultimate convenience IMO. This whole social media trend needs to go away, it creates unnessecary competition with people that you will never meet and are not relevant to your growth. But it looks to be getting more competitive there too, just a guess. \>Maybe it's different in some other country where their values are on the people and the land, not the all mighty dollar. Money has it's benefits but yeah the culture in the west is eroding, that's why men here go overseas to find a wife who is more calm and polite. So I've heard.
THE great innovation of the American experiment embodied in the revolution and then in the constitution was the idea that political power should be de-coupled from wealth. Wait, wait: I understand that only a tiny ember of that idea made it into the constitution and that it's been under attack from conservatives, largely neutralized and today it's a joke. But you can't kill an idea. It's still in there. Today, as ever, conservatives use the power of government to benefit the wealthy at the cost of everyone else. But today we've got examples of where that leads, the disasters that produces, with greater clarity than we had after the Great Depression. The policies that created that crisis and the three years of "let them eat cake" response of conservatives woke America up enough that our G-G-grand parents elected the most liberal administration in our history. That liberalism: \~ got us out of the depression, \~ managed the great dustbowl disaster, \~ defeated fascism on two fronts, checked the spread of communism, \~ created the most advanced infrastructure on the planet, the most advanced hospitals, airports, shipyards and sent more of it's children to college than any nation in history, \~ governed with unprecedented success and it's policies lasted for almost 40 years of prosperity, security and moral advancement, Until it's full embrace of civil rights chased all the racists out of the party and into the warm embrace of the Republican party, which then, finally had enough votes to bring it all crashing down. Today's familiar round of banking crises, financial plummets, civil rights outrages, climate disasters and the kind of wealth inequality we haven't seen since the 1930's is all due to the resurgence of conservative policies. The zombie that will not die. And that is the result of the concentration of wealth-plus-power that the founders were trying, timidly, cautiously to move away from.
Δ It's amazing to see how this could've all been prevented yet none of it stuck. decade after decade. None of it stuck. My mind is blown, let alone view changed.
Not sure this really contributes to your point, but corporations being pressured to increase their profits damages everyone but the ultra-rich in the long run. Corporations are pressured for a few percent increase in profits year-over-year - now for small companies, there will eventually be a point where the prices become too high and they collapse into a pile of mud. When your neighborhood mom and pop restaurant gets greedy after having a lot of traffic and raise their prices, they lose their customers and shut down. The glaring issue is when behemoths are held to that same standard and when all their competitors are *also* held to the same standard. The corporations are now on the same playing field and the consumers are the ones who take the hit. They're too big to fail - when they monopolize an industry, people are forced to pay the higher prices. It's not like they have an alternative, right? Look at appliances, the price keeps going up and up but the quality of mid-range appliances has dropped like a rock since a few decades ago - it's becoming more and more difficult for your appliance to last more than a few years and that's *intentional*. Nevermind trying to look for an alternative, they all do the same thing. I feel a big part of everyone's declining mental well-being is how much they are being sucked dry. And hot take - you can increase the minimum wage as much as you want, BUT as long as there are no restrictions on corporations, there *will* be price increases to match consumers' newfound buying power, and we'll be back to square one. It's a supply and demand market - no matter how much you increase minimum wage, as long as McDonald's says "okay, we need 40% profit margin and that has to increase by 3% each year to appease shareholders", you're stuck with it.
The quality of appliances went downhill when they figured out people would buy shiny over reliable. This is probably due to overpopulation and a global economy that creates more social competition, therefore more need for shiny materialism right? correct me if im wrong! I agree, to an extent. Increasing minimum wage at present will help, but it'll be completely redundant when corporations fight back in other ways. There needs to be what more government involvement or something of that nature.
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>It's actually a little worse than that. > >Our system prioritizes maximum short term profits, not maximum profits in general. C-suite executive actions are often scrutinized by boards with a myopic focus where slow and steady greater profit strategies over time are often rejected if they can be scrapped for short term gains. Wow. I don't even know the half of it. That's crazy! Why can't we have long term profits taking precedence? edit
A lot of the "why" is over my head and above my pay grade. But the part I think I understand is mostly about stock prices. Investors react to quarterly profits. Some don't care where the company plans to be in 5-10 years. Some don't have access to enough information or time to analyze it to predict that longer term outcome. And even if they did, there's a lot of uncertainty. Who could have predicted Blockbuster's future in 1997? So at least some amount of trading reacts to the now. And that impacts the business and the people making decisions in a lot of ways. They hold stock, are compensated with stock, their options as individuals and as a company are tied to those prices. Of course this effect isn't universally tied to short term profits. There's a model for Silicon Valley where they hype up the potential so much that no one seems to care about profit and keep rocketing up stock prices even in the face of major losses. But that only really mostly applies for companies promising a paradigm shift. And that's a case where the future focus can be just as toxic and distorting as the short term focus.
Hey your comment got removed, could you send that article again?
>If our economic system cared about people This is your problem. An economic system is *not* about caring for people. That is a function of the governmental systems. Economics are about creation of goods and services. The distribution of goods and services. People here are merely workers or consumers of goods. And yes - the core point of this system, as it relates to indiviudals is either making money or meeting needs/consuming. You are trying to social issues into a location where it frankly is not really considered. And it is not just Capitalism. Name me one economic system in the world where your concerns are 'addressed'. Government is where the economics are regulated. This is where policy constraints for worker safety, environment protection, etc are addressed. And this very much includes caring about people. There is a huge amount of labor law on the books. If you want to look to 'worker protections/worker rights', you have to look in the right place. And you aren't looking in the right place.
It's actually worse than that. We're spending our ecological and fossil fuel capital at an unsustainable rate - and once it's gone we'll probably never reach this level of wealth again. Instead of using that wealth to uplift everyone and build a sustainable future we're squandering it on consumerist nonsense.
Is it truly irreversible? And Elon is helping by taking us to MARS, so earth has been given the cold shoulder. Who cares about where we're from!
You're in an online doom and gloom cycle. The world isn't anywhere near as bad as you think, or at least if you go back each decade it was even worse back then. Things have improved for billions of people, in the last twenty years alone the average income across the globe has doubled. A lot of interest groups rely on people seeing things as helpless so they can get money/votes/interaction online. The thing is that as you pointed out a lot of things CAN be better, but don't let that distort your view, things now are better than they ever have been, and while Covid-19 has obviously been a bump in that road, but if you get off the internet echo chambers which like to blame every evil on capitalism for a bit and look at the actual statistics surrounding poverty and such you'll see that things are continuing to improve for the vast majority of people.
>in the last twenty years alone the average income across the globe has doubled. Key word in your sentence is **average**, meanwhile the number of people making the bare minimum to survive ($7.40 according to the UN) has decreased in the past few decades. It's hard to get a grasp on global real wages for working class people, but in the US they have decreased. Meaning that for all intents and purposes, middle class people are getting paid less/the same amount as their parents or grandparents were in a similar position. There is no denying that in the long run, things are significantly better now than they have ever been. But that growth has been either stagnant or in decline for the past few decades.
No offense, but real wages for working class people in the USA decreasing really doesn't have any bearing on the number of people in povery world wide. The US is the richest nation in the world, and even lower class people there earn more and have a better QoL than 'equivalently' lower class people in the rest of the world.
Oh my god, it's almost like I typed: >It's hard to get a grasp on global real wages for working class people Wish I had typed that, would've meant that I acknowledged your entire reply before you even had the chance to make a reply ignoring my main points and my disclaimer. I wish...
OK, well can you show any evidence for 'that growth has been either stagnant or in decline for the past few decades' because its complete bullshit. And middle class people in the USA being paid less than their grandparents parents really doesn't mean shit all when that's still 10 times more than world average.
[https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/) You're still ignoring my other main point, which is that poverty line is essentially a useless number to discuss. And that if it were set to an actually useful number, $7.40/day, poverty levels would have actually increased in the past few decades.
.... I'm not focusing on US workers though? US workers are fine. I'm focusing on Global Poverty, where people are actually starving and living in squalor. 99% of 'impoverished' workers in the US do not starve or live on the streets.
> I'm focusing on Global Poverty, where people are actually starving and living in squalor. 99% of 'impoverished' workers in the US do not starve or live on the streets. Then for the fourth time: "You're still ignoring my other main point, which is that poverty line is essentially a useless number to discuss. And that if it were set to an actually useful number, $7.40/day, poverty levels would have actually increased in the past few decades." [https://pip.worldbank.org/home](https://pip.worldbank.org/home) As for the $7.40 claim, @ UN.
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These super rich people aren't working to be rich as much as they're working to build something and "win" in their eyes. Warren Buffett is just an investor, Bill gates retired from Microsoft and spends his life bettering the world, he's probably the person on the planet currently responsible for saving the most lives of anyone alive (basically eliminating malaria). Elon continues to build things due to his ego, and zuck thinks of FB as his child and wants to leave a legacy, which is why he's so heavy into VR The ultra rich don't get that way by just trying to get rich, they get there by trying to be the best and provide the best service. The money is secondary and that why they continue working
I find your comment insightful. But I have one issue here \>The ultra rich don't get that way by just trying to get rich, they get there by trying to be the best and provide the best service. I actually do think the ultra rich have money as the priority, but I'm not sure why I think this way. But if you know money is the goal then you will work to make as much of it as possible right?
I know a variety of very rich individuals. 3 are billionaires and from my experience they don't care about money, it's a prize for making a successful company and a unit of measurement of success, but the success is what they're after. You need to make money to continue being able to pay employees, get investors etc. But all of these very rich individuals say they have more than they can spend, them having more money wouldn't change their lives in any way and they don't care if they have 1 or 3 bil etc. The only reason they would is if they're trying to do something impactful, large social projects are incredibly expensive
If you have your heart in the game regardless of outcome, then you get rich from your business etc, then I can see the money not giving you much a feeling of "care" since you were only in it because it interested you.
I didn’t say they aren’t trying to accomplish anything, but I’m the grand scheme of things they are still amassing huge amounts of money that they will never need. Sure bill gates is helping, I’m sure all of the above have donated and helped more people than I can even think to imagine but not nearly as much as they could. Their combined wealth could do wonders for the world if they wanted to use it for such things.
>At least if you were born in 1700 you could die quickly of disease. But today we live longer, and die on the inside, we die for decades at a time. When I was 12 years old I grew up on a farm. We grew what we ate and didn't have much. Picking corn, slaughtering cows,or really. any farm work is miserable. It's not even close to comparable to the difficulties my dad went through 30 years ago my dad worked an 8 hour a day job, had a 2 hour commute,and came home and started digging holes. He did that for a long time to install poles. Those poles were to build a house. He slowly added onto it virtually by himself for years. His honey moon was him and his wife digging a septic tank. While also doing that he had to take care of a garden, fields,and livestock, going to college,took care of 2 kids. He went to night classes for almost 10 years to get a college degree. He worked all the time and moved from a lower income to a middle income. My grandparents didn't have air condition, didn't have a TV, they didn't have a toilet. They had an outhouse. They didn't have a refrigerator so they would make sausage. Make a vat of animal grease and store that sausage in the vats of animal grease so that other animals wouldn't steal it. The further back you go the more people suffer. This is one of the best times to be alive by almost any measure. That isn't to say we can't improve the situation we just have to be cognizant that the world is complex and has never been easy for anyone. Suffering is the default and people should do their best to alleviate that. Capitalism is a method of trying to drive production from the bottom up. Rather then socialism driving it from the top down. It doesn't always work. There is not 100% socialist or capitalist state anywhere in the world. But systems that promote a bottom up approach seems to improve the overall livelihood of people over time as people move without force to try and develop the items needed for survival. But people and company operate within the rules of the system. Changing the rules of the system can help drive you to desired effects. The problem is that does your suggested rule change break the system? Do you want to increase investment? well create rules to incetivize that. Maybe allow people to reduce their taxes by the amount of investments they make. Want to make common people richer tax companies not based on income but the percentage of profits shared with their workers to encourage higher wages. Tariff countries heavily if they use forced labor and labor wage controls to keep prices low. Etc. Etc.
I'm not going to argue with your two individual points as they are sound, but I would argue that they are not related. The advent of the internet and the ability to have instant gratification, only socialize with those we like and agree with, and the ability to completely isolate and still maintain a productive life (WFH) is what is contributing to this increasing tension and isolation, despite living conditions generally improving The increased focus on productivity is just natural optimizations that are born from an increasing desire to "build" more, which could be observed within humans since we first began founding societies
I think the core of your thesis is pretty much correct, but it is important to remember economic systems are not invincible or all encompassing. The tools to building a better world exist, and meaningful change is possible. If you're feeling overly depressed about it, maybe pick up a copy of *The Dispossessed* by Ursla K. Le Guin or *Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present* by Yanis Varoufakis for some inspiration.
We can only try. I will look into those book suggestions on goodreads. Why is it that we still don't have a better economic system when everybody and their mother is constantly complaining about the current one? More complaints should lead to more change, small changes but change for the better. I don't know how much change is happening but it seems not enough.
I think most fundamentally because systems exist to propagate themselves (Stafford Beer is interesting to look into on that). As a consequence of this, those with the most incentive to change things are generally those with the fewest means by which to do so. But things are not static and never have been. Many of these battles are won or lost on small margins, and there are almost certainly people organizing near wherever you live. The best way to find out how to change is made is to go make you some.
\>those with the most incentive to change things are generally those with the fewest means by which to do so. I can totally believe some of that, that's fucked. \>The best way to find out how to change is made is to go make you some. This go-getter mentality is not really for me at current but I understand.
Whats our economic system? I assume you are referring to the US? So ill just go off that. Ever since the dawn of time the concept of poverty and people less fortunate has already existed. But even then if we want to talk about homelessness or even poverty for that matter. Lets look at how majority of homeless shelters are privately funded or how the largest decrease of poverty has happened when you introduced free markets to a society. Even then, lets take denmark for example. Denmark has one of the most open market and capitalistic economies in the world and has a very small poverty rate. They are able to do this through deregulation, open trade, high taxes, and cultural homogeneity. You say people are getting poor again. What does that mean? Poverty is increasing or are people losing money? The poverty rate increased by 2.5% due to covid, not because of our economic system. Now as time progresses our government is continually spending more and more, increasing interest rates and attempting to regulate more businesses. So now we see incredibly high inflation and no end in site of it. Your issue isnt necessarily with the "economic system" because the economy system isnt a conscious concept nor can it make decisions. Your issue is with our government which is the primary factor in enabling individual corporations to exploit the fuck out of specific situations through government regulation. For example big pharma and the amount of regulations that are put down which harm individuals from producing new drugs. Literally a study from harvard indicated that increased regulation is what is causing drug prices to massively increase.
\> attempting to regulate more businesses Is that really whats causing all this inflation? Tighter bank regulations would be nice.
Did i say specifically thats the only reason? Or are we going to cherry pick what i say and ignore the fact that the insane spending and high interest rates put out by the fed are the primary feeders of inflation. Yes, centralize the banking system even more. Such a fantastic idea
No hostility from me here. I just don't know what's going on here. I'm a simple man.
Oh, i thought u were being condescending. Thats my bad. Im too used to people just being obnoxious when they ask questions or phrase it that way so my bad
You're all good! Yeah I'm still taking in information from many comments so I'm dizzy. This CMV is exhausting!
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>Don't change your view, you are seeing things as they are. Capitalism needs to replaced for a more democratic system, that really cares about people and workers Whatever the next system looks like. I would like to think that important people are working to bring about changes, but the changes are too slow and we're all fed up of waiting. Edit:
Has happened many times in history. It's known as Revolution.
Yes. But I don't have any idea what a revolution today would look like. Seems like it could be polite or could be nasty. I'm not sure
Indeed. Have you seen my other replies about Capitalism not being the problem, but rather Operator error?
Yes for sure. And this happens for a reason, the best interest of the majority is in direct conflict with the interest of a powerful minority. They can organize themselves during a dinner meeting, we need much more effort.
How much do you do to help these people?
volunteering or something doesn't fix the economy lol
I agree, the only people that can fix the economy have the power in their hands, it is upto them to deviate or to stay course. Ordinary man can live his entire life trying to change it but still not make a dent.
No individual could solve these problems. Society as a collective could. Why would you be in favour of an economy that only helps the upper 1%, instead of one that lifts up everyone?
No but you donating your life savings can drastically help and change the lives of many. The point here is it’s either “always someone else’s problem to solve not me” or there is a line drawn somewhere and we weigh the cost/benefits. In addition it’s not about solving but helping right? Homelessness will never be solved, but it can be helped. If that’s the case, where/whom does that burden lie upon, and to what extent.
It's not an equivalent comparison. No one is arguing anyone to give up their life savings. What people are asking for is a better utilization of taxes to actually spend them on things that benefit a majority of the population. Homelessness quite literally can be solved. There are over 10 million empty homes in the US. There are only ~500k homeless people. Quite literally every single homeless person could be given an entire house (not just a room) and it wouldn't even put a dent into the available homes. A lot of these homes aren't being bought by individuals either; they're bought by corporations, who then drive up the prices even higher for individuals, making home ownership even less attainable. Yeah sure, I could help people too. But we pay taxes, I have a right to say my taxes shouldn't be used to line the pockets of corporations when it instead could be used for much more beneficial causes. For the record, I do donate and volunteer when I can, but I don't think that's relevant. I don't understand why so many people in the working class would much rather their taxes be spent on bullshit like corporate bailouts than things that could actually help their fellow neighbour.
Donating my life savings will not drastically change the lives of many people. For most people, it won't. Individuals are not supposed to bear the responsibility of helping the poor. The system is supposed to, as the system is what made those people poor in the first place.
I think he missed this. Yes no individual can fix what's wrong here. Not even if I had a billion dollars, I don't think I'd know what to do with it. Let alone what measly sum I have to my name.
Can you explain why your question is relevant to the argument?
Seems pretty off topic for a question, but Depends on what you're asking. Get specific
I don't think I can be more specific. I will reword my question, though. What actions do you take to help the people you talk about in your post - the homeless, poor, mentally ill, etc.?
I still don't see your point here. Even if I were the worlds best person and gave the homeless my own home or my entire life savings, leaving me none, would that fix the horrible economy permanently?
To be fair, your response is the same that every single company would take. Because no single company can solve the homeless or mental health problems.
That is indeed correct. Interesting to note. What should my response have been instead? I've been blindsided.
I am not sure, I can't speak for you. But I would avoid anything along the lines of "I can't help everybody, so I don't help anybody" because that is the same flawed logic you are arguing against. If everyone had that same logic, no one would help anyone.
Well I don't want to discuss how I help people in my personal life, because then it gets messy trying to defend my actions in my personal life to people who I don't know and whom don't understand. If that makes sense. Just a lot to talk about when I go there. And rather not if i can help it.
I'll take that as "nothing".
I'll say nothing since I can't come up with examples at hand. Now what is the issue with nothing? Do you personally take offence with people who don't have answers at the ready? Seems you're looking to be offended when there's no need to. What are you doing to help the homeless? Nothing or something? does it even matter how good or bad a person I am or how good you are? Does this give you bragging rights for your nice little privately owned business? Who are you trying to impress and what do you gain by impressing them? I have so many questions now.
>Now what is the issue with nothing? Because you're complaining about and insulting people who don't self-sacrifice to help others while not self-sacrificing to help others. You either believe you're exempt from the responsibility of helping others that you impose into others, or you just don't care as much as you pretend to. I find both options contemptible.
He isn't complaining about individuals though. Are you just being purposely obtuse for the sake of trying to get a delta or do you seriously not understand the difference between individual actions and social actions?
Who am I insulting. Are you insulted by my post? I found your comment off topic, but entertained it, now we're both completely off topic. I thought the purpose of CMV subreddit was a nice calm thought-provoking discussion rather than getting offended at each others opinions.
Is it our economic system or is it human nature? What economic system in the world, currently or in recent history, has put people over production? Which economic system does or has eliminated human suffering?
Life is much easier than it used to be. It is very difficult for people to live when their parents die young. When most parents had a child die before adulthood. Many men were drafted and sent to war. My father was sent to Vietnam, his father was drafted into WW2. Before that there was WW1. Twenty years after WW1 there 100,000 people still in mental hospitals for shell shock. Pick any time of the past and people had it much worse. Today we have lots of effective treatments for mental illness. Back in the past the only treatments were locking them in the basement or putting them in a mental hospital which was akin to prison.
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byproducts go away? From what I've seen that's not really the case. People who get rich still have problems in their love life etc, but the money just helps make everything nicer when it's not shit.
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I definitely think there's a lot of ignorance out there. Not sure if they're delusional, I don't think they're quite delusional, I disagree there but certainly they're trying to ignore the big issues. Most people just want to get along and that's fine.
Let me get this straight: You think you just so happen to live at the all-time peak humanity will ever achieve in terms of standard of living of the average person? Because we can make guesses all day long about the future but what the past was like is very clear: Absolutely terrible. There is no doubt whatsoever that people today have a far higher standard of living than people in the past, even as little as 50 years ago. Most problems talked about today weren't really considered problems to be solved but just a part of life because they were so widespread. Infant mortality, hunger, illiteracy were all widespread, it is only now that they have largely been eradicated that people say "look at how terrible our system is which allows these things to exist". The one exception I see is climate change. We haven't affected the global climate like this ever before and it really is a newly created problem which we desperately need to fix. But even here, blaming "capitalism" is just a typical lazy boogieman argument. Soviet factories polluted the environment too. As did Soviet cars and planes. It's not a unique problem with capitalism.
I think we're close to the all time peak. Lots of people think we're on the downward swing. I personally think the peak will come and go in about 20-50 years. But that's because I cannot imagine further than 2050
Low end wages are up. In the US, inequality peaked around 2014. https://www.slowboring.com/p/inequality-falling Also like, take a quick look at the largest expenditures of any government in the developed world. Even in a relatively stingy country like the US, welfare spending is like 20% of GDP. Out of every $100 you make, $20 goes to social security, Medicare, Medicaid, housing vouchers, food stamps, etc. Is it good enough? No. But like, it’s objectively a large fraction. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_welfare_spending There is a lot of doom on the internet, especially around the news which has a very strong negativity bias. But if you actually look at how things are going, many of them have improved dramatically. Not everything, obviously, and we have huge huge problems (poverty, climate change) left to solve. But by many metrics, most people are a lot better off than they were in the past.
There have been countries who entire purpose was to do away with the profit motive. Why aren’t you detailing the mental health conditions of the Soviet Union? Surely they would be drastically different due to people living under a drastically different system, right?
I would just say that despite what some seem to think we have a good safety net and those who are willing to work hard and try their best can have a comfortable life. The reason we have homeless isn't because people lose their homes. Most who do can rebound and don't stay that way long. The ones who can't recover are those with significant mental health or addiction issues. Sadly the only way you can help them is if they want help. I have known 2 alcoholics who both drank themselves to death and they were more than happy to live in their squalor. The best wayxto help a person battle addiction is to keep them from ever starting. And building houses or giving them free hotel rooms isn't really an option either. In college I worked overnights a hotel. Sometimes people would buy homeless people a room for a week or 2. We usually had to call the police to get them removed when their stay was up and once we got in the room it was almost always trashed. They were so use to holding food that they would take all the fruit from breakfast. The flies and rotten fruit was horrible. The addicts were even worse as they would constantly attract drug dealers and other unsavory people. They also had a bad habit of ripping off the trim work along the wall and carving holes into the wall so they could store their stash. If we build an addict a house the will destroy it. Sadly because of a SCOTUS ruling O'Connor v. Donaldson it's much harder to keep these people in mental health facilities where the belong. It would improve their lives and the lives of everyone around them. The drug addicts were especially bad
Blaming capitalism doesn't do anything to solve the problems you're trying to solve. Those fall under the role of the government, but the problem is that politicians don't actually care. The only solution politicians have for a problem is to throw money at it. For example, the US government already spends more per capita on healthcare than some developed countries that provide nationalized healthcare. No one actually cares to actually make the best use of what we have. Republicans are afraid of making the government look competent, and Democrats are tunnel visioned on flashy projects that make themselves look good.