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'Capitalism has to become more humane': a Stanford economist on big tech

theguardian.com

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Re: 'Capitalism has to become more humane': a Stanford economist on big tech

#31

Post by Natsu »

NietzscheanNull wrote: post #8
JohnFen wrote: post #3

The problem is that, apparently, abusing people wholesale is profitable.

Drug dealing is profitable. Chattel slavery was exceptionally profitable. To allow profitability to be our measure of permissibility is to sacrifice civil society at the altar of enterprising tyrants. Economics should never be a substitute for ethics.

The problem with capitalism is that it gives people what it wants, and some people want bad things, or are at least indifferent to getting what they want despite bad externalities.

The hard part is that I'm not sure any other system really fixes this flaw. Sure, you can be less democratic and give fewer people what they want, but for some reason few people want to live in autocracies of any stripe.

And it's not always clear that there is a solution when the things people want are too diametrically opposed, either. I'm not sure many people would be happy with any of the solutions from "Three Worlds Collide" for example (a short story you can go read online if you don't get the reference).

Re: 'Capitalism has to become more humane': a Stanford economist on big tech

#32

Post by nine_k »

tao_oat wrote: post #24
simianwords wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Global south is not exploited inhumanely. This ideology called "thirdworldism" or "decolonialism" is becoming popular but it ultimately fails on any scrutiny. The west has not got rich at the expense of the global south. Both have gone up .

> The west has not got rich at the expense of the global south What timeframe are you considering in this opinion?

The post-colonial time obviously, when much of the "Global South" has become independent states, thus peers, not colonies.

Re: 'Capitalism has to become more humane': a Stanford economist on big tech

#33

Post by nine_k »

derelicta wrote: post #9

Capitalism with a human face doesn't make sense. It's like talking about Ethical Theft. It might have served its purpose, but now it's time to move on.

Any idea what would work comparably well instead?

There were many experiments; none seemed to be successful, unless you consider the current semi-capitalist China a social success.

Re: 'Capitalism has to become more humane': a Stanford economist on big tech

#34

Post by gruez »

GerryAdamsSF wrote: post #27
Barrin92 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Chattel slavery was exceptionally profitable. it wasn't. Slave economies are exceptionally unprofitable and unproductive. To take the US as an example. Liquid wealth, i.e. capital, was vastly larger in the North than in the slave owning states, the industrial output of New York exceeded the entire Confederacy and it was that profitability, wealth and mechanized agricultural production that did them in. Even Marx rec…

It was profitable for the slave owners. History is not a Paradox game where there is rational top down control.

Profitable/unprofitable is the wrong way of looking at it, because it implicitly ignores opportunity costs. Putting your money in a savings account at a big bank might be "profitable" in the sense you're getting paid some meager interest rate (eg. 0.1%), but it's definitely not the best option, like a money market fund or equity ETF. What OP probably meant was that slavery was worse than the alternatives, like putting your money in a savings account with meager interest rate.

Re: 'Capitalism has to become more humane': a Stanford economist on big tech

#35

Post by jauntywundrkind »

I feel like it would help a whole lot if the titan's couldn't keep gobbling their young.

Endless endless endless corporate consolidation. All creative energies and impulses just get swept back up into the very large companies. There's a vital energy that's just missing from the market, a competition for labor that's empty, a competition for serving the world well/competing on value that's all just... gone.

Re: 'Capitalism has to become more humane': a Stanford economist on big tech

#36

Post by doubletwoyou »

keybored wrote: post #18
NietzscheanNull wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drug dealing is profitable. Chattel slavery was exceptionally profitable. To allow profitability to be our measure of permissibility is to sacrifice civil society at the altar of enterprising tyrants. Economics should never be a substitute for ethics.

Did the Union have economic use for chattel slavery or “wage slavery” as some called it around that time? I’ve never heard of mainstream economics serving people. Maybe Keynesianism did?

The cotton picked by slaves processed by the North into textiles etc. was a large portion of the economy.

Re: 'Capitalism has to become more humane': a Stanford economist on big tech

#37

Post by gruez »

unfitted2545 wrote: post #26
simianwords wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Global south is not exploited inhumanely. This ideology called "thirdworldism" or "decolonialism" is becoming popular but it ultimately fails on any scrutiny. The west has not got rich at the expense of the global south. Both have gone up .

Wow. Tell that to the cobalt miners in the DRC.

Did "The West" cause warlords in DRC to exist? Even if you ignore the efforts by western firms to not buy cobalt from the DRC, it's questionable whether the DRC would be better if they had no exploitable natural resources. Neighboring countries without natural resources aren't exactly paragons of good governance either.

Re: 'Capitalism has to become more humane': a Stanford economist on big tech

#38

Post by periodjet »

“Capitalism” isn’t a real thing; it’s sort of like using the term “transubstantiation”. For someone outside of the religion, it doesn’t mean much.

What we really mean when we say “capitalism” is just people freely engaging in agreements together. In such a free society, people will hurt and trample on each other. The right move is to rely on the Republic to represent our interests and prevent that trampling from crossing red lines that we all decide on.

You don’t need to stop people from freely making agreements and transacting together; you just need to have a functioning system of laws. Whether or not we have one is an exercise left to the reader.

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