Gender: Unspecified Location: With Cinderella and the 9 Dwarves
Well the trait of having people work for to create wealth for themselves, which undoubtedly works much better than to have them work for other reasons. Wealthy people that I think made our lives enormously better? J.P Morgan, Henry Ford, Karl Albrecht, Steve Jobs.
I think our lives on average have been enormously better on account of capitalism, which very much fuelled the industrial revolution and the latter technological advancements. Sure there's a huge difference in money, but the lives of people aren't that different, many more people live much, much better than ever before.
I read an amazing essay by Paul Graham if you are interested, where he did address some of these points (I highly recommend his essays anyways): http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
It's nearly impossible to judge the value of a CEO, but the reactions of investors are important.
HP's stock fell 10% when they fired Mike Hurd.
Oracle's stock rose 6% when they announced they had hired Mike Hurd, even though the NASDAQ declined during the day.
How about social mobility? Capitalism essentially invented the concept.
Economies of scale. Without large businesses things would be massively expensive, yes part of those low costs are because of awful things they do but a lot of it is being able to make large returns on tiny margins.
Plenty of valuable things have come from capitalism. Plenty of bad things have resulted as well.
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Graffiti outside Latin class.
Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
A juvenal prank.
A man called Ben McLeish had a lecture about economics. He concludes that money only creates an incentive for people to do mundane unnecessary jobs that could be automated, such as janitors, waiters, chefs, social workers, taxi drivers, translators etc.
As you probably know, most of the people who have jobs do not like their jobs. Heck, how many people in America complain about their job(s), some to the point where they suffer from depression and subsequently spend all their money on drugs that don't work with harsh side effects that they only think they need due to the advertising companies? It's comparable to the slaves of Egypt or the old Feudal system. After all, when marketing came in, the kings and queens and lords still had the most money and the most power.
Obviously the market did us wonders 2 to 100 years ago, there was little science and technology; someone had to power the machines, and I guess we all owe the people at the bottom for the amount of work they did for us.
But I argue that capitalism, especially today is actually counter-productive. I could list examples, but it'd much easier for me to link Ben McLeish's lecture.
Gender: Unspecified Location: With Cinderella and the 9 Dwarves
I don't think that conclusion is accurate when we look at the world. I suppose you could argue that many highly functioning people also do the things because they enjoy them, but I think money has given incentive for people to do great things that are also very worthwhile for people. I can't really argue his point as I don't know what it is actually, haha.
No denying that there is a lot of automation in the world, and that it gets more and more. I worked in a factory though, and I worked for a company creating software that does exactly try to automate more things, and I can tell you we are not nearly there. We still need a gigantic number of people to work...operate and calibrate the machines for example.
I don't think it is quite comparable to the slaves of Egypt or the old Feudal system at all. People are far more free to choose, and their lives are much more comfortable. It would be nice if everyone could do whatever they wanted without any drop in the quality of life for people, and we might get there in the future. But we are not there yet sadly.
Sure people at the "bottom" doing hard work are important, too, but they are more easily interchangeable. Without the people at the top and the people doing the thinking we wouldn't be where we are, and they aren't easily changed, as their talents and abilities are highly unique.
I'll see if I can find time to watch it. Who is the man if I may ask, what qualifications foes he have?
We do however have a study of a capitalist system (west germany, with many decent social ideals, no doubt about it, but still capitalist) running parallel to a non-capitalist/communist system (east germany) which does show the extreme advantageous the capitalist ideals have brought us, and which only ended 20 years ago.
But that's on a different scale. Social mobility was non existent in the 16th century. Now it is just still tough.
I do agree, though, again, for them their life may even be better with that opportunity than it would have been without.
Yes, absolutely.
It's hard to get out of a cycle of debt that goes back generations or rise up out of poverty because you have no education and no support.
Rich people have cushions that let them ride out things that would be disasters for anyone else.
Wealth breeds wealth, poverty breeds poverty.
All of these things are true.
Before capitalism, though, moving up was impossible. In modern, developed nations the only people with no chance of moving forward are the desperately poor.
This is why the idea of the value of hard work comes from, it's a modern invention (the value not the work). There was a time when it didn't matter how hard you worked, four hundred years ago the only option was to die doing the job your father did or stage a revolution and probably get killed in the process because you were a starving peasant and the knights had swords.
Capitalism changed that. It's really hard to imagine now, we take it for granted to the point that you probably don't even think of it as capitalism. The idea that you can set out to make a better life without abandoning your old one and have any chance of success is a very valuable thing that capitalism gave the world.
Can we do better than we are doing? Absolutely, but that wasn't the question.
As am I, which is why I (and indeed most people) support having some degree of regulation on what we allow. It's not "socialism" or a "managed economy", it's just reality.
Exploitation, mind you, is not something capitalism created. We were doing that a long time ago.
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Graffiti outside Latin class.
Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
A juvenal prank.
Last edited by Symmetric Chaos on Jul 9th, 2011 at 03:39 AM
Bardock is right about the owners. Without initial investment there is basically no economic activity. People are not going to start businesses nor are they going to invest in them unless they can expect a return. The problem as I see it now is that many investors are making huge returns without any concern as to the long term well being of the companies they invest in. Short term profits are the only thing that matter.
Another problem with unrestricted capitalism today is it's global spread putting enormous strain on the earths resources. For capitalism to succeed there needs to be growth...and IMO given the earths population that model is no longer sustainable. The next 10-20 years are going to be interesting to say the least.
__________________ There are more humans in the world than rats.
Suppose winner take all capitalism is not good for America. I mean, once all the other countries were in debt, the west had to exploit the third world in the first (lower and middle classes), this is 2001-2008, between the world trade centre collapse and the credit crunch. It goes back to money created out of debt, depressions are scientifically created.
True, capitalism didn't create exploitation, but like every other world view (except a resource based economy), it uses it.
It's partly to do with having to pay off the inevitable debt from which money is created (loans), partly to do with machines replacing jobs, (wage comes from labour and a machine is obviously cheaper to 'employ') and partly due to planned obsolescence which, although allows the 'economy' to grow, it doesn't make the standard of life better. GDP's a measure of sales for instance, not a measure of health and happiness.
Politics is of course an illusion when Obama's number one financer was Goldman Sachs, and you can search google to find this, it's not a secret.
40% of the wealth, and hence power goes to 1% of the people, and 1% of the wealth goes to 50% of the people.
That's a pyramid system caused by money, and capitalism imo justifies why these people are allowed to do it.
The argument of capitalism is credit goes to those who contribute, yet I highly doubt science and technology came from stock brokers, bankers and politicians. Obama certainly has a lot of money, but what exactly did he do besides be president for having lots of money? Armstrong invented FM radio, but he wasn't credited, quite the opposite, but you can look at that in McLeish's video I posted previously.
Edit: Here's a chart of wealth based on country: (please log in to view the image)
Interesting how half of the world's wealth is just 4 countries. UK obviously got there from it's empire of trade and killing those who disagreed, America has it's corporate empire of destroying countries then rebuilding them for profit, China has it's sweatshops and Japan has it's huge amounts of advertising. Another interesting point is how wasteful those countries are as well.
Bardock, can you honestly say those 4 are the most contributing? And that USA contributed to 1/4 of the worlds goods?
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Last edited by Raz on Jan 1st 2000 at 00:00AM
Last edited by It's xyz! on Jul 10th, 2011 at 12:34 AM
because of stock traders faith in their management capacities, that does note mean their labour actually contributes with that kind of value to the total wealth produced by the company
a better way to put the question would be the followin: What benefits brought by capitalism can be truly discerned from those simply brought by the industrial revolution and techonological progress? is capitalism actually necessary to the maintenance of these benefits? can capitalism be replaced by a better economic system?
Which is why I said it's nearly impossible to judge how valuable they are. However people who's whole job is to estimate how a company will do think they contribute a lot. Good management is valuable.
Those are all entirely different questions.
I picked social mobility because it a philosophical idea that really did come from capitalism, you can't credit it simply to the advance of technology that might have happened anyway.
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Graffiti outside Latin class.
Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
A juvenal prank.
I would say social mobility in the west was enabled by the abolition of political absolutism and the establishment of liberal democracies later modified by social democracy ideals. while historically, political liberalism and capitalism have been largely associated, they are not synonimous, nor is capitalism a requirement of democracy per se
I believe so, yes. My ideas in this fields are generally consonant with mutualism and some other strands of anarchism.
as an environmentalist, I also place a heavy emphasis on the limitation of life habits and economic activity based on the ecological footprint it generates. I'll try and get a longer post in here expanding on the subject later on
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Jul 8th, 2011 11:16 PM
