It's based on individual property rights, trade and reinvestment of capital accumulated due to said rights.
George Gilder: Capitalism is based on information and knowledge, not greed
31–40 of 68 posts
Re: George Gilder: Capitalism is based on information and knowledge, not greed
#32"In capitalism, the winners do not eat the losers but teach them how to win through the spread of information." This certainly casts patents in an anti-capitalist light...
I don't actually agree with that. Capitalism is ruthless. The winners do put the losers out of business. That's the moral justification for IP: without regulatory intervention, the winners are often not the generators of the IP. That has become more true in the age of the Internet, where a lot of natural monopolies are emerging, but it was probably always true. Size begets growth, coalition-building is inevitable (le…
> capitalism begets conglomeration
Not if the state actually does it's job. For a free-market to exist the state must necessarily prevent anti-competitive practices.
In the U.S., unfortunately, the notion that social democracy is necessary arose during the great depression (because capitalism clearly failed /s) and resulted in the New Deal, which was, of course, socialist policy. It was that which started our slow and steady path towards heavy government involvement into the economy and, as a result, corporatism.
Re: George Gilder: Capitalism is based on information and knowledge, not greed
#33"In capitalism, the winners do not eat the losers but teach them how to win through the spread of information." This certainly casts patents in an anti-capitalist light...
I don't actually agree with that. Capitalism is ruthless. The winners do put the losers out of business. That's the moral justification for IP: without regulatory intervention, the winners are often not the generators of the IP. That has become more true in the age of the Internet, where a lot of natural monopolies are emerging, but it was probably always true. Size begets growth, coalition-building is inevitable (le…
Michael,
I live in Silicon Valley and grew up most of my life in Israel and Europe (France). All I can say is honestly Americans don't even know how good they have it. France is doing so bad I don't even know where to start. They barely have any innovation and whatever they have comes from companies that have been in power for decades. France made it so easy to get welfare and taxes so high (40-50%) that it's better to collect welfare then actually do any work (I have friends there in their 20s actually doing this). What I love about Capitalism is NEW wealth and power is created every 10 years. Where was Facebook, Google, Salesforce and Twitter 10 years ago? (this is a short list there are many smaller multi million dollars companies created in the past 10 years in the US). I know you see this as something normal or not such a big deal, but in other countries this never happens, the same companies stay in power. What I am trying to say is that Capitalism WORKS very well, the wealth in America changes hands very rapidly and there are endless opportunities to create more wealth. Did you ever think of the impact that Facebook/twitter/reddit had on the world? Helping the Arab spring, flowing information freely etc.
I am sure you will find holes in what I said, all I can say is that I am a huge fan of what this country represents (capitalism) and if you stray away from this system that has made the US what it is trust me we will fall hard.
What I think is happening in the US is a bunch of lazy people who want something for nothing are rising up. They hate the 1% (which created a lot of jobs and innovation) for no good reason.
I hope Capitalism gets more "sexy" and gets great new representatives who defend it not retards like Paul Ryan and Romney. I think it will make everything a lot better :)
Re: George Gilder: Capitalism is based on information and knowledge, not greed
#34Flagged for being overly partisan political, and bringing little value as a launching point for discussion.
Re: George Gilder: Capitalism is based on information and knowledge, not greed
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't actually agree with that. Capitalism is ruthless. The winners do put the losers out of business. That's the moral justification for IP: without regulatory intervention, the winners are often not the generators of the IP. That has become more true in the age of the Internet, where a lot of natural monopolies are emerging, but it was probably always true. Size begets growth, coalition-building is inevitable (le…
> capitalism begets conglomeration Not if the state actually does it's job. For a free-market to exist the state must necessarily prevent anti-competitive practices. In the U.S., unfortunately, the notion that social democracy is necessary arose during the great depression (because capitalism clearly failed /s) and resulted in the New Deal, which was, of course, socialist policy. It was that which started our slow an…
> the notion that social democracy is necessary arose during the great depression
Yes, it did arise then.
> (because capitalism clearly failed /s)
Not so fast. The interesting question until recently was "why did the great depression last so long?". Remember, all previous depressions and panics ended fairly quickly.
The current answer is FDR's policies, specifically industry and production controls. (To be fair, FDRs policies were actually a continuation of Hoover's, but everyone "forgets" that Hoover was a progressive, so let's credit FDR.) The great depression didn't really end until those policies did, which happened when it became obvious that an "arsenal of democracy" had to produce lots of stuff.
Yes, Hoover started huge stimulus spending, aid progorams and the like, borrowing money, doing the whole Keynes thing. FDR actually campaigned (somewhat) against the resulting deficits. (He also campaigned against Prohibition.)
Hoover was a huge fan of aid programs. One of his big pre-presidency accomplishments was an aid program to Russia after WWI.
Also, the vast majority of congressional Republicans voted for Social Security.
Re: George Gilder: Capitalism is based on information and knowledge, not greed
#36It sure is. Sometimes this information is in the form of insider knowledge shared within the old boys network, or misinformation spread to the masses to pump and dump a stock (hello facebook), or tell everyone to buy a house with a white picket fence (take on that mortgage, it's the best investment evah), or market "derivatives" that are "too complex even for the sellers to fully understand". We also have the knowledge on how to patent stuff so the hoi polloi don't get their grubby little fingers on it...
It's all about the CONTROL of information, making use of it to enrich oneself at the expense of others.
Let's not kid ourselves, it's not about sharing sh*t. It's about doling it out piecemeal and selectively, or obsessively, to control opinion and/or maximize profit.
Perhaps not zero-sum, but there are lots of bags held by the partially informed and the less-informed.
Re: George Gilder: Capitalism is based on information and knowledge, not greed
#37The competitive pursuit of knowledge is not a dog-eat-dog Darwinian struggle.
This is demonstrably not true in the presence of Firms. Agents in the markets are hierarchies, and the internal competition in a hierarchy is very much darwinian. This second tier of this two-tiered chess game is not without consequence.
Re: George Gilder: Capitalism is based on information and knowledge, not greed
#38He gives the game away in the second sentence:
> But greed, in fact, prompts capitalists to seek government guarantees and subsidies that denature and stultify the works of entrepreneurs.
Yes, that is how real, as opposed to theoretical, capitalism works. And communism is all about selfless cooperation in theory, but in practice works out to something quite different.
Speaking of communism and information, I can't recommend too highly the book Red Plenty by Francis Spufford, which is about the efforts by very early cyberneticians in the USSR to create an economy which was managed by information without greed.
Re: George Gilder: Capitalism is based on information and knowledge, not greed
#39Not much content in this blog piece. Couple of isolated quotes from a Forbes article from a with no tl;dr on offer.
Instead of "Capitalism is...beautiful" ideology it would be worth focussing on when it works and when it doesn't. Seems that there is strong evidence that capitalism harness human nature, property rights, and incentives to enable production. That's great. There is a lot less discussion about what it takes for markets to allocate resources efficiently. Two of the bigger prerequisites are "no externalities" and "symmetric information". Capitalism has no built-in mechanism to establish these conditions. A lot of our problems today go right to those factors. We could do something about it if our politicians would stop playing to the cheap seats. Sorry capitalism, you're ok but not that beautiful.
Re: George Gilder: Capitalism is based on information and knowledge, not greed
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
In particular, [excerpts from Wikipedia] Gilder is a founder of the Discovery Institute, the leading think tank of the intelligent design movement. Gilder has written many articles in favor of ID and opposing the theory of evolution.
A lot of engineers don't get evolution because engineers tend to think there is one best way to do something. How could evolution ever discover the "answer," they think? This is endlessly reinforced in school. You get right answers and wrong answers on tests, but that's because school tests are toy problems not real problems. In reality there are better answers and worse answers and worse-is-better answers and ugly-h…
Also; engineers should be aware of genetic algorithms which work so well they are used by NASA ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna ). Anyone who doesn't understand evolution is a fact is basically being willfully ignorant at this point.