Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails • Hacker News Board

Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

#201

Post by clavalle » Mon, Nov 03, 2014, 3:34 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #94

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What, precisely, do you believe poor Americans are suffering from? Well, just for starters, they're suffering from entirely treatable diseases and injuries because they don't have health insurance, or don't have non-shitty health insurance. Quite a few of of them are suffering from childhood malnutrition, leading to lifelong cognitive and developmental defects. On the lowest rung, they are suffering from homelessne…

Well, just for starters, they're suffering from entirely treatable diseases and injuries... If that were the case, the increasing access to health care should make them healthier. It didn't. http://www.nber.org/oregon/ Do you have evidence for childhood malnutrition? Once you come up with a definition of "rotting, roach-infested", feel free to check what fraction of poor Americans actually fit that definition. See ta…

So, what is the answer? Wait for poor-people parity? We can only move forward in the US if all of the other poor people in the world are at the same level?

And, if that is the case, which direction do we go? Do we push the poor people in the US down or raise up the poor people elsewhere or a combination of both?

I'd rather raise others up while helping our own. Free markets are fine as long as they don't become a race to the bottom and create perverse incentives to keep the poor poor.

As the world economic power, along with our wealthy allied nations, we need to tie positive social movement, like raising the minimum wage, access to nutritious food, clean water, medical care, social mobility etc. to access to our markets.

If the people's lot doesn't improve, their elites don't get rich. Simple as that.

Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

#202

Post by JoeAltmaier » Mon, Nov 03, 2014, 3:36 PM UTC

ap22213 wrote: post #200

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, I can't shake the feeling that if you took away all my money and property, I would be employed and back in an apartment in a month. What's a guy to think, when folks complain about how its too hard to move, to get an education, to save money, when I know I can do it? Its hard to empathize with people with an outlook so different, that they can't imagine working their way out of poverty. Because I can.

Well, we could always do an experiment to see if you're right. Let's assume that you aren't able to use any existing education or connections, you start off with significant debt, and you are located in an area with high unemployment. If you are able to be back in your apartment in a month, I'll eat this computer. Edit: If we threw the idea up on kickstarter, I'm sure that there would be more than enough support to p…

Move. Get a job, any job. Don't spend any (much) money. Work to get a better job.

And what's with the debt-but-no-education? How was that supposed to work? One or the other.

Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

#203

Post by yummyfajitas » Mon, Nov 03, 2014, 3:36 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #195

yummyfajitas wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

95% of the biggest nation in the world (or maybe second biggest, no one really knows the exact pop of India and China) lives in far deeper poverty than poor americans. Many of them experience actual suffering - not enough food, no flush toilet, no power. What, precisely, do you believe poor Americans are suffering from? The only concrete answer I usually hear is envy (I.e. "oh noes the inequality"). http://economix.b…

> What, precisely, do you believe poor Americans are suffering from? The only concrete answer I usually hear is envy (I.e. "oh noes the inequality"). Even if that was the only thing and the only source of suffering for poor Americans was relative deprivation compared to others in their immediate context, so what? Relative deprivation is an important, extensively empirically demonstrated, source of disutility. If one…

Envy is a source of disutility. So is pooping in a field because you lack a flush toilet.

If you feel that forcing more people to poop in the field in order to reduce feelings of envy among wealthy Americans is a good thing, make that argument.

Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

#204

Post by wavefunction » Mon, Nov 03, 2014, 3:38 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #50

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…

95% of the biggest nation in the world (or maybe second biggest, no one really knows the exact pop of India and China) lives in far deeper poverty than poor americans. Many of them experience actual suffering - not enough food, no flush toilet, no power. What, precisely, do you believe poor Americans are suffering from? The only concrete answer I usually hear is envy (I.e. "oh noes the inequality"). http://economix.b…

>>lives in far deeper poverty than poor americans

This is disgusting drivel written by someone who is so out-of-touch with the reality of poverty as to reduce anything they might write about the subject completely worthless and without meaning. America has populations that suffer from the same abject poverty as anywhere else in the world. They may be an incredibly small percentage of our total population when compared to those living in abject poverty in India or China, but don't you FOR ONE MINUTE peddle your disgusting drivel about American poverty consisting of "envy."

You entitled, ridiculous worthless POS!!!

Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

#205

Post by SCHiM » Mon, Nov 03, 2014, 3:39 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #170

SCHiM wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been studies that showed that the psychological problems that stem from being poor have little to do with your absolute wealth. It's more of a peer-thing. If you're the poorest man in a very rich peer-group you'll still feel miserable and less. The problem then with being poor in America is not that you're rich compared to a farmer in vietnam, the problem is that you're poor compared to the people you see…

Yes - as I said in my first post: What, precisely, do you believe poor Americans are suffering from? The only concrete answer I usually hear is envy The best solution I see to the problem of envy is directing social opprobrium towards people who exacerbate the problem (e.g., politicians appealing to envy, celebrity news publicizing lifestyles of the rich and famous).

This is not about envy, and you sound very condescending to me by calling the issues these people have 'envy'. This is about serious mental illness caused by a perception of enormous inequality. Envy is just an emotion, not a way of life.

The cause of their problems is not just from celebrity news or politics. It's the very society we live in. You can't just ban advertisements for cars, or decide that cars can't look new on the street. In other words: it's not just the things they see on tv that can spark these problems. Everything around them lets them know they're at the lowest rung of a very large ladder to the socio-economic top.

You're suggesting that we try to make the ladder appear shorter, or somehow hide the top from view. Apart from the fact that, as outlined above, this cannot effectively be done in my opinion. I also find it morally offensive that you'd rather defend a system that is likely not perfectly compatible with human nature. You'd rather try to remove the perception of inequality than the inequality itself.

If we cannot change how humans react to inequality: we get jealous, get sick, turn criminal or exhibit other negative traits. Then we should instead change our society to address the real issue: the inequality itself, and not just it's perception. Now doing that would be a whole other barrel of fish obviously.

Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

#206

Post by grinnbearit » Mon, Nov 03, 2014, 3:39 PM UTC

collyw wrote: post #149

brc wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It most certainly is not a zero sum game. Any reading or thinking that led you to that conclusion is wrong.

Like the politicians, another believer in the theory that shuffling money about "creates wealth". People working, manufacturing and creating things are what creates wealth. Not a magic money tree.

Coordination isn't free, shuffling money around is a distributed and parallel way to reach consensus.

More efficient options may exist but to the best of my knowledge none currently do

Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

#207

Post by nate_meurer » Mon, Nov 03, 2014, 3:39 PM UTC

ceronman wrote: post #166

rayiner wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should we care about people in India or China? We're entitled to shape our society the way we want, and to address the local ills we see fit to address. Our predecessors worked very hard so that we would be richer than India and China and have the luxury of figuring out how to better the lives of urban "poor" who have cable TV.

> Why should we care about people in India or China? Replace "India or China" with "Black or Hispanic" to see how sad this comment is. It still surprises me to see that we live in a world where racism is condemned but discriminating people for the place they were born in is socially accepted. Now, to answer your question, we should care about people in India or China because they're people. Human beings. The place th…

I don't think that's what Rayiner is saying. Rather, I think he's saying that making comparisons between america's poor and the poor of less developed countries is useless to this discussion. We should be able to evaluate the suckiness of being poor in America regardless of the how much it sucks to be poor in China.

Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

#208

Post by jchrisa » Mon, Nov 03, 2014, 3:40 PM UTC

RangerScience wrote: post #25

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'…

We do have a model that has successfully demonstrating certain principles which may be capable of addressing this problem: Burning Man. Bear with me for a second. I'd say (and then pointing out my lack of formal or amateurish study of economics) that the issue you're pointing at is that capitalism doesn't function well in a post-scarcity environment, which we're entering. This is because our means of determining valu…

Gift economies prevailed for longer than capitalism has, and my gut says they will again. Not because of scarcity / abundance but because now we have social software. I'm working on a speculative project to scale the gift economy.

http://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin/

Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

#209

Post by pron » Mon, Nov 03, 2014, 3:42 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #91

zanny wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is tremendous long run psychological and physical harm associated with living paycheck to paycheck in perpetual debt having to eat subpar foodstuffs because fruits and vegetables cost way more than dollar menu cheeseburgers per calorie. And if you don't have a working kitchen you can't cook farmers market produce. And that is at best. A lot of us are unemployed, and families are collapsing in on themselves as y…

There is tremendous long run psychological and physical harm associated with living paycheck to paycheck This is entirely in the control of most poor Americans. India's GDP/capita is $5500 after adjusting for cost of living, yet India has a 20% savings rate. Poor Americans could reduce consumption and save if they wished. in perpetual debt having to eat subpar foodstuffs because fruits and vegetables cost way more th…

Societies don't work like that. Individuals don't live in a vacuum, free to make their own rational choices. Each one of us is born into the world with obligations and relationships created for us by our families. Children are usually not free to choose what education they get, the level of financial (or labor) support they're required to contribute to their family, the role models they're exposed to, or the access to people who can open doors for them. These obligations, as well as opportunities -- even among those of the same income level-- differ greatly from one culture to another. For example, nominal poverty in a close-knit rural society is very different from that in urban areas.

Comparing income (even adjusted income) in one society to that of a very different culture makes little sense. This applies both to poor people as well as the rich (who buy different things in different cultures), although the differences are much bigger among the poor because they are less exposed to foreign fashions.

Even if the economy was completely fair (and it isn't -- access to education and to key contacts plays a major role in your chances for success), there are so many social pressures surrounding us (and while all of us are subject to some social pressures, those the poor experience are usually much more choice-limiting) that describing economic behavior as a free choice is completely disconnected from reality, and from everything we've learned in about a century of sociology.

EDIT: And as to your original question, what do the American poor suffer from, they suffer from poor healthcare, bad education, constant financial dread, constant encounters with the law, life in high-crime neighborhoods and probably dozens of more very serious problems that I'm lucky enough not to have experienced. Your patronizing attitude, suggestion that people not in imminent danger of starvation are not suffering (or that there suffering is their own choice) is completely ignorant. If I recall correctly, we've had a similar argument over feminism, and there, too, you've shown complete disregard and disdain to any actual research on the subject by people devoting their lives to it. You can either learn about property -- or not -- but you should know that if you don't, you're arguments stand on ignorance, which, unlike poverty, is actually your own choice.

Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

#210

Post by Zigurd » Mon, Nov 03, 2014, 3:42 PM UTC

What's really interesting about the labor glut is that the conventional wisdom about demographics hasn't been adjusted.

The CW is that the US has a great future because US population is going to climb to about 400M by about 2050. If economic growth is decoupled from labor, is that an advantage?