Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

spiegel.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 310 posts

Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

#51

Post by radmuzom »

ef4 wrote: post #34
radmuzom wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great comment. The standard argument given by capitalists is that the "pie" will keep on growing, so while the existing owners of capital will get richer, it will also lift others out of poverty. Why is this not happening any more? Is it because earlier automation used to create "new" jobs which require labour, while now automation is removing the need for labour at all?

> Why is this not happening any more? It is happening. The average manufacturing wage in China is up 700% in fourteen years. It isn't happening in the US and Europe, but that's because the average worker here still makes absurdly more money than the average worker in the developing world. The gap is closing quickly. As it does, we'll be able to see more evenly spread growth again. But purely from a humanitarian stand…

Ok. But thinking aloud here, when and how does exchange rate come into play? The only reason I have been lifted out of poverty living in India is because of "Western" consumers - I do work for which my employer gets paid in dollars, and they give me a fraction which is enough for me to lead an upper middle class lifestyle in India. No Indian company will pay, or has the ability to pay, as much money as I am getting now doing the same work for Indian consumers. So if a large percentage of "Western" consumers don't consume as much as they used to, it directly affects my livelihood. Is it a paradoxical situation that I am probably taking away the job of someone in US thereby temporarily improving my livelihood in the short term, whereas I actually don't have a livelihood in the medium / long term?

Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

#52

Post by lotsofmangos »

ef4 wrote: post #38
lotsofmangos wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 jus…

> 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. On the contrary, it betrays deep distrust in the actual institutions of capitalism: market prices and bankruptcy. "Institutions of capital" cannot just mean "the people who hold the capital", because by that definition every oligarch si…

I was using the phrase to specifically mean the organisations that structurally underpin modern capitalist economies and have now come to represent it. Sorry if I did not make that clear enough from context.

Now you can argue that what happened was bad economic theory, however the intent behind bailing out the banks was not to steer away from capitalism, but to prop it up, so even if you think it stinks from an economic theory perspective, it was at least intended as capitalist.

Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

#53

Post by tn13 »

Capitalism has not gone off the rail. It is just the concept that has worked better than almost every other thing known to humanity.

This inequality business is a new modern day scam just like communism of last century. Some anointed people want power for themselves and want to still money from people like us who are working hard in the name of poor people nothing else.

When government creates incentives where it steals money from hardworking people like us and gives it to irresponsible people like teenage mothers in the name of "compassion", we are creating incentives for many people to remain poor. This is a perpetual poverty into which we have let the government condemn them. That is the problem.

Capitalism is a hope.

Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

#54

Post by adsenseclient »

scottlocklin wrote: post #47
RangerScience wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you for the first paragraph but then what the fuck, man? Why present a worthwhile argumentative point and then supply cans of ammo for attacking it via your character?

It's interesting that the left has pretty much given up on ideas of economic equality and inclusiveness in favor of pointing and sputtering when people say things which are not politically correct. If I were a suspicious type, I'd wonder if political correctness had corporate sponsorship; it certainly seems to have paid off for the oligarchy... To his first point, it's not really true. Many of the largest and scaries…

You must be joking. Any publically traded co these days is hardly family owned: the family members, in those rare example cases are by far the minority shareholders. Compare that with 100 years ago.

Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

#55

Post by eli_gottlieb »

mattmcknight wrote: post #27
Animats wrote: post #17

This 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'…

This is not an important article, it is a rant against people with "tacky mansions", a turn of phrase that is more indicative of the author's point of view than the other conventional points about not understanding creative destruction. I think it is this overly nationalist view of economics that needs to die, not "capitalism". There is not less productive work to go around, it's just not being done in the US. We are…

>This is not an important article, it is a rant against people with "tacky mansions"

Did you even read the article? It's a four-page, in-depth consideration of global economic issues; "tacky" does not even begin to play into it.

Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

#56

Post by eli_gottlieb »

chii wrote: post #49
psychometry wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A third of the population in the richest nation on earth lives in poverty. According to you, that's not a problem because even poorer people in Bangladesh are slightly less poor than they would be if American companies had never employed them. What kind of callous person could look around at all the suffering and think this system's working great? Or do you not look around at all, holed up in a tacky mansion of your…

> look around at all the suffering and think this system's working great? i dont think anyone is saying the system is working great. Capitalism the worst system, except for every other system tried. What do you suggest?

There have been multiple, very different systems labeled "capitalism" for political purposes. The strong-labor, domestic-demand-driven social-democratic model of capitalism worked far better than today's rentier and financial capitalism.

Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

#57

Post by adsenseclient »

easong wrote: post #48
RangerScience wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you for the first paragraph but then what the fuck, man? Why present a worthwhile argumentative point and then supply cans of ammo for attacking it via your character?

All of his comments are rants against women/minorities (including admitting not hiring a female programmer because her resume had too many mentions of "women") and complaints about google banning his adsense account for fraud. I'm sympathetic to the "faceless shareholders are poisonous" argument as well, but...yeah. It's hard to differentiate neoreactionaries from trolls.

If you do not like an argument, factually refute it, rather than labelling its author. Otherwise your ad hominem style looks too much like Lenin's or Mao's

Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

#58

Post by SwellJoe »

ef4 wrote: post #41
SwellJoe wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a purely humanitarian standpoint, it's hard to argue that it's a good thing for CEOs who make $9.6 million a year to be getting bigger raises than workers who make $37000. http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2014/0527/CEO-pay-hits-10-... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/02/ceo-pay-worker-pay_... http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2013/1212/CEO-vs.-worker-p... http://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-231-times-gr…

Agreed, but that's actually a separate problem. There are so few CEOs relative to average workers that their aggregate pay isn't enough to explain why workers in the west aren't experiencing wage growth.

Actually, in some of the most egregious examples (Walmart), management and/or owners are paid enough to make a real difference in what workers are paid. The six Walton heirs hold as much money as the entire bottom 42% of Americans combined. A pay raise of $2/hour for every non-management Walmart worker (raising hundreds of thousands of people out of poverty), and/or giving them reasonable benefits, would not change that statistic in dramatic fashion.

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/09/sam-waltons-fortune-...

It's not enough to explain it, but it is a relevant piece of the puzzle.

Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

#59

Post by eli_gottlieb »

dnautics wrote: post #4
RangerScience wrote: post #3

Well, 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.

All Austrian-school ideology is capitalist, but not all of capitalism is the Austrian school. Both ideas were capitalist: private ownership of the means of production, with production being for profitable exchange.

Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

#60

Post by l33tbro »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #55
mattmcknight wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not an important article, it is a rant against people with "tacky mansions", a turn of phrase that is more indicative of the author's point of view than the other conventional points about not understanding creative destruction. I think it is this overly nationalist view of economics that needs to die, not "capitalism". There is not less productive work to go around, it's just not being done in the US. We are…

>This is not an important article, it is a rant against people with "tacky mansions" Did you even read the article? It's a four-page, in-depth consideration of global economic issues; "tacky" does not even begin to play into it.

>Did you even read the article?

You must be new to HN ;)

Post reply on HN