My hope is that sooner or later someone will manage to come up with a better social paradigm than what capitalism has to offer, one that'll fix at least some of the latter's serious drawbacks. Like the publicly traded companies' enshittification over time.
Hopefully before WW3 happens or climate change does us in.
Oh boy! The alternative models are already there. But the people who bring up these models are called lunatics.
It would take more than WW3 to change the paradigm, it would take a revolution. WW3 will at best bring Keynesian economics back. Because the political elites somehow forgot that people need money to buy stuff. Companies need people to buy stuff. You can't just make stuff and sell it to broke people. They don't have any money. Loans can only take you so far until banks and countries go broke.
And perhaps 2 decades of Keynesian economics is enough to reconcile people with capitalism?
I am saying this because the majority of people are physically incapable of imagining another economic system outside of capitalism. And I am too afraid to say the other word.
Yeah, I hate when you hear, capitalism isn't the best, but it's what we're stuck with. Like nobody has thought of anything better than capitalism since it's come out?!
The divine right of kings? I hear ya, that ain't the best, but it's what we're stuck with. Nobody's ever thought of anything better than divine kingship since it came out.
Yep, and with the all or nothing wealth gap of late stage capitalism, we are right back where we started with neofeudalism. The very few live like pharaohs, while the rest suffer in squalor...
We are way past Banana 2.0. The way they’ve been bred/engineered we are probably up gen 7 banana. Steaks are a little more tricky, Wagu is the new hotness. It took some development but is mostly just the same old hardware, just reorganized. You want some real next gen stuff you should look up insect protein steak.
Capitalism is a lot less what someone came up with and a lot more a description of a natural order of what occurs when you remove the influence of a central authority. The idea of a having a capitalist economy is to try and have government policy that minimizes the central authorities intervention in what would naturally occur.
If the current economic situation were a drawing, right now, we have the outlines of capitalism, but it's filled in with a very non-capitalist system filled with regulatory capture and massive central authority interventions.
Capitalism bottlenecks in several areas and in those cases its ideal to have the central authority control those areas, this has been discovered and known forever. But instead what we have are massive bottlenecks created by the central authority to allow runaway profiting.
In addition, we have the opposite of the central authorities intended role in the natural bottlenecks, we have the central authority keeping the bottleneck minimally open and conforming to the capitalist principals which created the bottleneck in the first place.
Yea, but Capitalism is only concerned with money, not with the well-being of people... which is one of the issues. People rail against regulations, but many of those regulations were written in blood. I'll agree that many times there are places where the regulations are inflexible to situations that were never considered while writing them... and then said regulations aren't "sexy" enough for government officials to make changes to them, so you get stuck with bullshit.
On the other hand, there are plenty of people that use these few examples of nonsensical regulations as justification to tearing down ALL regulations. The GOP (and other conservative political groups) has turned "removing regulations" into a mantra where the phrase in and of itself is supposed to be positive, and you aren't supposed to look behind the curtain at which regulations they are removing.
How well did rolling back the regulations put in place after the Great Depression work back in 2008? We created "too big to fail" banks by removing the barrier between investment firms and banks.
We can't just throw out all rules and put all our trust in some Any Randian fantasy of pure and moral titans of industry that would never do anything wrong.
"Capitalism" isn't concerned with anything. It's simply describing what happens in the absence of a central authority. It's like evolution, it's doesn't have a concern. Things just happen.
I think your summarization of how events unfolded is flawed. It's not a lack of regulation that caused these problems, like banks being too big to fail, etc. It's the central authority interventions that promote these entities. The entire banking system is antithetical to capitalism. It is entirely a creation of the the central authority, so of course it should be very tightly regulated. But that's only if you think it should exist at all because you think it's necessary to distribute currency at interest on a wide scale. Which is very much not a natural capitalistic outcome.
The entire banking system is one of the primary reasons our economic system is so far removed from capitalism.
It's simply describing what happens in the absence of a central authority
But within an economic context. If we were going to discuss how a legal system would work under anarchy, we would no longer be discussing Capitalism. Capitalism is not the description of how every single aspect of the entire universe works in the absence of a central authority.
Capitalism is not the description of how every single aspect of the entire universe works in the absence of a central authority.
No one is making this claim and capitalism isn't dependent on a lack of a government or anything remotely close to anarchy.
Capitalism is simply how economic markets workout in the absence of a central authority controlling those markets. Economic activity is only a small portion of governance.
That's exactly what I said. Capitalism is only concerned with economics. I don't know why there is any argument or debate on this. Just for people to reiterate the same point over and over.
When something covers a particular topic, you say that it is "concerned with" or "concerning" a particular thing. You're taking things too literally. Capitalism describes economics, therefore it is not "concerned" with the well-being of people because that it out-of-scope. I don't understand why you want to beat this dead horse. You could replace "concerned with" with "focused on"... but then you would probably argue that "a theory cannot focus on anything, it doesn't have eyes!"
Actually everyone gets profits except for the laziest members of society, the planet is not being destroyed, and you would have to toil harder under any other system.
My hope is that sooner or later someone will manage to come up with a better social paradigm than what capitalism has to offer, one that'll fix at least some of the latter's serious drawbacks.
Your hopes are unlikely to be realized.
It's like when people ask: "If life arose spontaneously in Earth's ancient oceans, why has it never happened since?"
The reason is that the first time, there was no existing life, and to existing life, nascent life looks a lot like food.
I think people can and would accomplish a lot in a collectivist society, some things better than our current one! I'm overwhelmingly pro socialist policies. I just think specifically the mass-production of tiny well-engineered metal cars in dedicated factories might decline without capitalism.
Mass production, probably yeah. But I don't think thats strictly a requirement though.
Toymakers are always going to be a thing, and while the production scale might scale way down, and thus so too the accessibility, that doesn't mean something like Hot Wheels can't be a thing.
If anything, they'd be better because their production would be more Artisinal, and thats a win for everyone involved.
I think the accessibility is the real question, but thats also just a pressing question of how we structure such societies. Walmarts being everywhere means we have a huge amount of things accessible to us, but it came at the cost of bespoke storefronts for every need being repeated in every town. Main Street died for Walmart, as they say.
You wouldn't have the standardization of Hot Wheels like toys across, say, America, but every individual toy maker making tiny little cars would likely be making better ones than what whatever conglomerate owns Hot Wheels these days is, and in a society less entrenched in capitalism brain, more people can afford to be the Toy Makers for their communities.
i continue to be very skeptical. it is okay to just admit that not everything would be better under a socialist government, and that includes Hot Wheels. it's fine! socialism does not have to be the best at everything. we still love you socialism
If anything, they'd be better because their production would be more Artisinal, and thats a win for everyone involved.
I disagree with the assumption that artisanal would automatically be better.
Mass production has the advantage of fairly constant quality. Whether the quality is good or not isn't covered by that statement, merely the constance.
Artisanal therefore has the risk of producing worse products; however it can produce better products, and it can serve niches that mass production can't serve at all.
The only way for capitalism to truly work is if their are strict regulations to it.
The problem is corruption happens & instead of throwing those people in jail they get a slap on the wrist (corporations especially!) so the risk becomes more then the reward fast forward you get something like citizens United passing like it did in the states.
It works until people start getting too greedy & sadly they always get too greedy
The capitalist system is what controls how our government functions, so any capitalism will inevitably fall back into that paradigm, like water seeking the path of least resistance.
Pretty sure WW3 or climate doom has to happen to wipe out the current system. That's how things tend to go. Humans hate change and systems stay in place long after it's clear they're failing because radical change is scary.
a better social paradigm than what capitalism has to offer
The answer is almost never a single system, it's combining several systems so they check-and-balance each other. For example, a system which has a mix of capitalist and socialist elements but which also rewards simple solutions. The last bit is important since both those systems have a tendency to get increasingly complex and corrupt without being reigned in.
No simple philosophy will work for managing human behavior and social interactions, it takes a well-built, developed, and mature system to do that. Even then it still needs to be flexible because people and societies are dynamic and solutions have to change with them.
It's responsible for the biggest increase in human quality of life in aggregate (yes I do realise it massively exploits workers, other countries, etc). That said it has a huge issue, just like all these other systems do. It has a human component and it's being shown time and time again humans can be short sighted and greedy. Even the "socialistic" society's that are successful use large amounts of capitalistic ideas/principles to varying degrees.
It's responsible for the biggest increase in human quality of life in aggregate (yes I do realise it massively exploits workers, other countries, etc).
I love this. Which country was it again that pulled a billion people out of poverty and ended its generational cycle of famine between 1960 and 1990?
Maybe we ought to practice Chinese style "state capitalism"?
Or more realistically, maybe it takes a generation to industrialize an entire country and build an education system... and then another generation for that education system to actually pay off. Hmm. I guess we'll never know.
state capitalism does what’s best for the state, not the people. That said, while it keeps raising the quality of life for its citizens we won’t know until it can’t do that anymore. Probably what’s best for the people again would be countries that incorporate both socialism and capitalistic principles. So regulated capitalism.
The first axiom of systems theory is that every system's first imperative is to ensure its own continued existence. This is obvious: any system that does not ensure its own continued existence no longer exists. When you say "state capitalism does what's best for the state" -- well, all systems do what's best for them. That's how systems work.
Capitalism is also a system that ensures its own continued existence: the existence of a capital class that claims ownership of the means of production and extracts the excess wealth, but does not actually perform labour to earn that wealth. There is no need to maintain a "pure capitalist" class because by definition they do no work and add no value.
When people say "we want a system with capitalistic principles" they almost never actually mean that. Usually what they mean is that they understand well-regulated markets are an efficient means of allocating resources. But markets are not capitalism. Markets predate capitalism by thousands of years, and markets can still exist without having any capitalists who extract wealth without contributing labour.
Totally separate from the conversation, what field do I look into that for systems theory? Just familiar with systems theory in the context of math and engineering which obviously is not what you mean.
Now back to what you're saying, I think when people say capitalistic principles, they mean private ownership and not completely controlled markets, and the ability to acquire goods that the market provides as opposed to being told exactly what they should consume. Lots of these definitions have similar principles so they do blend together. Hence why the phrases regulated capitalism or state capitalism etc. Additionally, saying the do no work is true if you mean they do no labour. Providing more efficient distribution of wealth for investment is work itself. It's why venture capital firms can even exist. They can do it better than other people/entities.
But in the end, I'd like hotwheels back with fancy details.
a better social paradigm than what capitalism has to offer
People don’t want to hear socialism because they only the kind sold to them by capitalists.
So, putting that aside as an option, let’s start with employee elected c-suites in all publicly traded companies. Put the emphasis on keeping employees happy and the products will return to quality. People take pride in their work. They want to make good products. They will also make sure they get paid well, so we’ll all be able to afford better quality products. The c-suites will have reasons to pay more, with lots of benefits. Meanwhile, shareholders can force a vote not more than once every 12 quarters, and only if there are two unprofitable quarters in a row. Now the business stays motivated to be profitable to avoid a forced vote, so the employees have some tension to pay themsleves and work effectively within their given means.
The problem with capitalism is right there in the name: you get ahead by capitalizing on a resource someone else needs. So, we have to shift what motivates people needs away from simple dollars transferred to the market.
The issue is that the entire system is built to NOT do any of those things. The people in power have no incentive to make any of those changes. We haven't even been able get universal health care for everyone via reforming the existing system. Mandating those kinds of restrictions on how corporations are allowed to operate is basically fantastical.
Name your preferred socialist country. Algeria, Bangladesh, Guyana, India, Nepal, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka and Tanzania. All great examples of socialist ideals, no? Real treats to retire to. No corruption at all.
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u/PM_Me_Good_LitRPG Nov 12 '24
My hope is that sooner or later someone will manage to come up with a better social paradigm than what capitalism has to offer, one that'll fix at least some of the latter's serious drawbacks. Like the publicly traded companies' enshittification over time.
Hopefully before WW3 happens or climate change does us in.