Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you're saying the US isn't experiencing slow growth and growing inequality?
I'm saying the US has some of those very same policies in place.
So who doesn't?
Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails
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Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails
#12Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
So who doesn't?
I'm not aware of any major countries unfortunately.
So the richest and most technologically advanced societies in the world, consisting of the most educated and most productive free people in the world, people who through democratic institutions can shape their societies as they see fit, are converging to the same basic model, and you want me to believe that this isn't a ringing endorsement of that model?
Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails
#14Well, yes. As more of the money is used to make more money, instead of things, experiences, or people... It losses it's correlation with the things that we actually want out of an economy. Plus, those in power (rightfully) use the power to get more power of the sort they already have. According the history books I read as a kid, this is what caused capitalism in the first place (english barons with more money than po…
> Iceland
Not clear to me the executivies were charged for anything applicable to the overall collapse
http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21577064...
3 from Iceland, 2 for stock manipulation and 1 for fraud.
Not viable institutions - that would be retirement and mutual funds with hundreds of billions invested in real estate tranches?
> older organism to gift
Not sure where all those energetic millenials would be living now if mom & dad lost their house on that HELOC and their 401K to a crushed Goldman or Fidelity.
I'm for nihilism as long as people admit they're ok with more than old corporations dying.
Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails
#15Well, yes. As more of the money is used to make more money, instead of things, experiences, or people... It losses it's correlation with the things that we actually want out of an economy. Plus, those in power (rightfully) use the power to get more power of the sort they already have. According the history books I read as a kid, this is what caused capitalism in the first place (english barons with more money than po…
Note that what Iceland did and the idea of clearing out bad capital and malinvestment are actually capitalist ideas, versus, say bailouts and central bank manipulation, which are not.
I think it's really important to make it clear that they (well, specifically bailouts really) are also not ideas of the opposing bogeymen, though. No one who even thinks of considering themselves socialist or, say, anarchist would ever say "Yeah, let's give a bunch more money to rich people!"
The tendency for power to accumulate into the hands of a few, who then manipulate the economy to their own ends, is a problem endemic to all social power structures. No system yet invented has proven immune to it merely through built-in assumptions of the model.
Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails
#16Well, yes. As more of the money is used to make more money, instead of things, experiences, or people... It losses it's correlation with the things that we actually want out of an economy. Plus, those in power (rightfully) use the power to get more power of the sort they already have. According the history books I read as a kid, this is what caused capitalism in the first place (english barons with more money than po…
Note that what Iceland did and the idea of clearing out bad capital and malinvestment are actually capitalist ideas, versus, say bailouts and central bank manipulation, which are not.
Bailouts and central bank manipulation are also capitalist ideas, or at least they were developed by capitalist economists within a capitalist framework on behalf of capitalists to try and keep capitalism afloat.
Bailing out banks and hoping they will spend it on industry just after they bankrupted themselves by gambling shows an unquestioning and total belief in the institutions of capital.
Socialists would have just lent cheap money directly to industry and full on communists would have thought it a great opportunity to dismantle the monetary system.
edit - Thinking about it, it may be a weird form of cargo-cult capitalism. As in, the political business of managing capitalist economies has been replaced by a belief in preserving the current institutions of capital, irrespective of how those institutions are behaving.
Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails
#17This is an important article, but I doubt there will be a useful discussion of it here.
The developed world has incredible productive capacity. With 1% of the workforce in agriculture and 8% in manufacturing, the US produces as much stuff as China. There are no significant shortages of any manufactured good anywhere in the developed world. Quality is pretty good across the board, too. This is unique in history.
That's great. But there's less productive work to go around. We're out of buying power. Labor is worth less because there's a labor glut. Our economic system can't cope with that. On top of this, more of what most people can do is being automated, and for less money. Automation used to be expensive. Now, if a computer can do it, it will be far cheaper than a human.
The financial system has become primarily self-serving, running on self-generated zero-sum tasks. It's part of the problem, not part of the solution. If we had a capital shortage, that might be a problem. Instead, we have a capital glut, and no place to put it that produces good returns on investment. This is "secular stagnation", as the article puts it.
Japan hit this around 1989, when their real estate bubble collapsed. Japan never came back from that. There was hope that the Japanese would figure out something. 25 years later, they haven't. They've built up their safety net and put money into infrastructure projects, so that fewer people are suffering. That's the best they could come up with.
We have no successful model for dealing with this. What capitalism gives us by default is a small number of rich people and a large number of poor people competing for a shrinking pool of low-paying jobs. Nobody really knows what to do about this, including the people who say they do.
Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails
#18It's not capitalism that's gone off the rails ... it's socialism. All of the countries with slow growth and growing inequality have heavy-handed socialist policies in place.
That is a really poor argument and can be debunked with some simple thought modeling. Imagine a system where returns on capital are higher than labor, and there are a relatively small number of people with large amounts of capital and no 'socialist' policies in place to attempt to interrupt the capital flow. After a period of time, assuming everyone is working and investing if they have capital to spare, would the income be more or less evenly distributed? This result would occur outside of socialist policies so it's very doubtful they are the cause.
Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not aware of any major countries unfortunately.
So the richest and most technologically advanced societies in the world, consisting of the most educated and most productive free people in the world, people who through democratic institutions can shape their societies as they see fit, are converging to the same basic model, and you want me to believe that this isn't a ringing endorsement of that model?
> ...the most educated and most productive free people in the world, people who through democratic institutions can shape their societies as they see fit...
I don't accept this premise. Voting is only a small input into the colossal self-propelling machinery of bureaucracy (and the government-to-corporations-and-back chain of what could be called pay-offs or bribes... ie campaign donations, to profit-increasing changes in government policy, and back again).
Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails
#20Capitalism requires growth, finite resources/demand can't always live up to it. I have always believed that the virtual economy / digital goods is really where most of the growth needs to be.
We are seeing lots of this but maybe not enough. The only limited resource in virtual worlds is imagination, storage, network and power (energy), but it takes fractions of what physical goods take. If we can pull something off like in Ready Player One OASIS or even just more participating in buying digital goods I think this is part of the solution.
Another area I think can help is loans/investments but of digital currencies. The world of funding could be revolutionized by bitcoin like systems where they are primarily for hoarding, but they are also perfect for supplying capital. Capital could be made available to the 99% out there in new interesting ways, shaking up baked in wealth of the 1% that is immovable at times of need. If there ever is a basic income, I believe it will be some sort of digital currency, a new currency might even start out that way.