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

Is capitalism dead? Yanis Varoufakis thinks it is – and he knows who killed it

theconversation.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–97 of 97 posts

Re: Is capitalism dead? Yanis Varoufakis thinks it is – and he knows who killed it

#91

Post by UtopiaPunk »

oraphalous wrote: post #20

Conversations about capitalism have become pointless... I'd rather eat mud. When people start arguing one way or the other about the goods or ills of capitalism, both sides inject definitional or theoretical aspects that include an entire mountain of pre-supposition, that I barely understand what anyone is talking about. It would take hours to unpick what the hell they mean by the term... which I thought generally sh…

"the right to own property, and to trade it without coercion."

I don't think that's a good definition of capitalism. But to your point, that's why having these conversations are difficult - people don't have similar definitions for the same words.

I think such conversations can be valuable and meaningful, but when talking to someone who holds very different opinions, I think it's crucial to start with agreeing on clear definitions of words you'll be using. Sometimes that can take a while.

Re: Is capitalism dead? Yanis Varoufakis thinks it is – and he knows who killed it

#92

Post by cscurmudgeon »

resolutebat wrote: post #61
rubymancer wrote: post #13

> Approximately 80% of the income of traditional capitalist conglomerates go to salaries and wages, according to Varoufakis, while Big Tech’s workers, in contrast, collect “less than 1% of their firms’ revenues”. This doesn't sound right to me, but if it is Varoufakis has a point. Our contract, such as it is, with traditional capitalists is they employ many, produce some sort of value and keep as much profit as they…

Google's revenue in 2022 was $280 billion. 1% of that would be $2.8 billion, and Google had 190000 employees at the time. I'm pretty sure the average wage of those employees is not $14,736, so Varoufakis would appear to be off by at least a factor of 10x. On the other hand, if Google did pay out 80% of revenues, the average Google paycheck would be a cool $1,178,947.

The average software developer's cost to Google is probably in the around $500k. But let us not get facts and numbers get in the way of a narrative.

Re: Is capitalism dead? Yanis Varoufakis thinks it is – and he knows who killed it

#93

Post by cscurmudgeon »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #85
ekianjo wrote: post #17

Who takes this guy seriously? He's been going from one rant to another over the years.

Can you name a major positive political change that wasn't lead by somebody who cared passionately about something for decades? Do you similarly right off Nelson Mandela because he was ranting about the same injustice for multiple decades?

"write"

Passion is not enough, logical/ethical correctness is needed too. Mandela had that. Mao didn't have that in his passionate battle against sparrows.

Re: Is capitalism dead? Yanis Varoufakis thinks it is – and he knows who killed it

#95

Post by bryanlarsen »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #93
bryanlarsen wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you name a major positive political change that wasn't lead by somebody who cared passionately about something for decades? Do you similarly right off Nelson Mandela because he was ranting about the same injustice for multiple decades?

"write" Passion is not enough, logical/ethical correctness is needed too. Mandela had that. Mao didn't have that in his passionate battle against sparrows.

So you criticize Mao for his lack of logical/ethical correctness, not his passion.

Re: Is capitalism dead? Yanis Varoufakis thinks it is – and he knows who killed it

#96

Post by cscurmudgeon »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #95
cscurmudgeon wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"write" Passion is not enough, logical/ethical correctness is needed too. Mandela had that. Mao didn't have that in his passionate battle against sparrows.

So you criticize Mao for his lack of logical/ethical correctness, not his passion.

I think the original post was not obvious: passion w/o logical/ethical correctness is useless

Re: Is capitalism dead? Yanis Varoufakis thinks it is – and he knows who killed it

#97

Post by brnaftr361 »

jjoonathan wrote: post #87
brnaftr361 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's too much oversight that allows these sort of behaviors. Too many moats that are too deep and too wide. If GIMP could ship with the Photoshop key map and have nigh 1:1 behaviors these things become commodities and thus must compete for distinguishment. As it stands Photoshop is there almost exclusively as a product of inertia and so Adobe can leave it to stagnate.

I see "less oversight is One True Way to encourage competition" more as a conservative talking point than as a good faith anti-monopoly proposal. As a tactic, deregulation seems to be very good at reinforcing the social order (it's usually exploitable in proportion to current standing) but extremely mediocre at encouraging competition when compared to the alternatives. If you ask a business about their moats, they'll…

>it's usually exploitable in proportion to current standing

As I reckon it, standing is derived from the system. The system gives license to Apple to patent certain aspects of design, trademarks, etc. They don't have a truly market-derived end, what they have is derived from a much greater system in competition with others who've been borne similarly by systemic effects rather than market pressure. Restoring market pressures by breaking down such walls - certainly a progressive talking point - seems more likely to induce competition and thus affecting prices and priorities across the board.

I'd also make the aside here that I expect a large proportion of the businesses extant today existed in a "pre-capture" environment and made up the "post-capture" environment up for themselves, that is to say they wrote the book on what defines dumping by bribery which also bought them the lax oversight on antitrust - giving them license to subsume competition and permeate the market and expand.

That is to say take away an avenue like IP from companies like Adobe for example, and commodify their products. Conversely, giving competitors license to make bold faces copies of competitor's products results. In either case, I would expect the end to be very similar: more real competition as in driven by market pressure and selection.

With that said, such a policy wouldn't remedy conglomeration, which I would definitely submit is a problem, but ostensibly in many domains this would be a self-correcting as the barrier of entry doesn't require reinventing the wheel as a non-wheel-geometric-rolling-variation-on-a-circle-that's-never-quite right.

Post reply on HN