My response to Hawking would be a question: Who or what is smart enough to decide how much wealth each person should have and design a efficient system to distribute it and what evidence do you have that the outcome would be better than a free market?

You're arguing against a command economy, but there are multitudes of options when it comes to creating a more equitable society than micromanaging wealth.

Why should anyone care what some physicist (even a very smart one) thinks about politics? Same deal with Noam Chomsky. Just because they're accomplished in one branch of science doesn't make them an authority on social issues.

Sometimes it even makes them less reliable on social issues.

He sounds about as qualified to opine on economics as I am to give my theory about black hole physics.

Perhaps by continuing to ignore it. Hawking has some weird (if somewhat common) opinions about AI, aliens, and I guess capitalism too. He should stick to black holes.

What annoys me is he often has the basic facts right. For example, fully general AI is dangerous (but not really because of Terminator-like scenarios); if there are intelligent aliens we should not expect them to be nice any more than mean, and there are good arguments to expect mean, and so we should be careful (but not because of the very unlikely scenario outlined in Signs); and in this case he's right that further automation of the economy will produce greater economic inequality, but economic inequality is a good thing, it's absolute wealth and poverty that's the real problem, and I'd bet on the trend of the poor not in fact getting poorer, on an absolute scale, continuing. See http://paulgraham.com/inequality.html

> He should stick to black holes.

I just want to point out the shallow stereotypicality of that remark. That's all.

Fine, physics in general, then? I mean he's still my generation's (20-30-somethings) Einstein, great thinker, but Einstein had a lot of bad ideas about socialism and governance too.

Where do people get this idea that HN is full of libertarians? If you hang around you will see most people's reactions are far to the left and libertarian answers get consistently downvoted.

By asking which alternative model you propose.

Socialism as practiced by many european countries seems to work fine. No big Googles happening over here, but generally people seem to be happier and less worried about their futures.

It's called "Social Democracy", and yes, that really is quite a different thing.

They are all capitalist economies, like it or not, that is where the money comes from. If Europeans think that their particular country is not capitalist they are confused.

> They are all capitalist economies

They're all (as is the United States, for that matter) modern mixed economies; capitalism as a dominant economic system proper has been largely abandoned in the developed world in favor of systems which, compared to the then-dominant system named "capitalism" by its critics, systems with comparatively strong redistributive and central regulatory systems, and often a wide array of directly-provided State services, all reforms directed at mitigating the problems for which the critics that named "capitalism" were criticizing it.

Capitalism remains a significant ideology (particularly, surprisingly enough, among the capital-holding class and those who aspirationally associate with that class), and adherents to that ideology often misattribute the success of modern mixed economies compared to other alternatives to capitalism as a success of "capitalism".

Really, the difference between the US and European Social Democracies is between fairly small variations in the details of the structure of a mixed economy -- variations which can have a big practical effect, and are worth discussing, to be sure.

You can certainly claim they are mixed, but they are all using capitalism, as much as it may bother some people to admit.

Richard Dawkins was a scientific hero too 'til his latest meltdown.

By quietly upvoting it while smoking some weed to quiet their cognitive dissonance.