We are very experimental at the moment, but my startup[1] is doing something along those lines: we a trying to create a toolkit for building cooperative organizations.

[1]: https://infinite.ai

It's not very clever to just post a picture, as if that makes a very compelling argument for whatever you presumably are trying to make. It's nice that less people are living off the equivalent of $1.25 a day, but according to this:

http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-sta...

50% of the world's population live off the equivalent of $2.50 a day. I guess we can cheer that 30% of the world's inhabitants have doubled their income and call it a day.

Woah! You're coming from the right direction I guess, but..

Yes, we can very much cheer for people living off $1.25 to be living off $2.50 now. The numbers might look stupid if you're living in luxury, but it quite literally means going to bed with a full stomach instead of going to bed hungry. It's a far bigger change for them and their lives than for your income to be increased by 10x (assuming $100k to $1m).

If you're all about increasing the well-being of the most people possible on the planet, then it is something to cheer for. Having that increase to $5 might be the biggest humanitarian change for the future that we could cheer for too.

Who says we're calling it a day? The rate at which capitalism is pulling people out of poverty is accelerating not stopping.

>capitalism is pulling people out of poverty

Citation needed. You have to control for other factors before you can say that.

> http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/rwss/docs/2010/fullreport.pdf

Ugh. Don't post things that you haven't read as if they proved your point. You'll find that the word "capitalism" is used 3 times in that PDF. Let's grab those paragraphs, shall we?

"Privatization has been a major part of Mongolia’s transition to capitalism. Its move to a market economy has been accompanied by increases in poverty and income inequality. More than 10 years after it began its transition, Mongolia remains one of the poorest countries in the world."

This being an example cutout within the following quote:

"After reviewing the distributional impact of privatization activities involving utilities in a wide range of developing economies, principally in Africa and Latin America, Bayliss (2002) concluded that privatization had demonstrably harmed the poor, either through loss of employment and income, or through exclusion from, or reduced access to, basic services, as the result of private firms’ principal concern with profits, prices and costs. At the same time, weak governance and regulatory capacity in many developing countries led to poor control of market abuses by private utility companies."

The next two usages of the word capitalism is in the bibliography:

"de Soto, Hernando (2000). The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. New York: Basic Books."

"Robbins, Richard H. (1999). Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, chap. 5 (“The problem of population growth”), pp. 147-178."

I'm not sure how the second citation feels about capitalism, but the first one certainly isn't positive.

So no, your link doesn't say much about capitalism, and what it does say is that capitalism is not pulling people out of poverty; on the contrary, it sounds like that document thinks capitalism is causing some poverty.

Doubling income is not the same as improving quality of life.

Capitalism suffers from a plague number of social ailments, including epidemic levels of stress and mental illness, that aren't present in "poor" cultures.

Besides, terraforming our planet to make it less, not more, inhabitable, hardly counts as a big win.

> Doubling income is not the same as improving quality of life.

LOL. Easy for you to say rich man. Go tell that to someone in Mozambique or Haiti or Nepal who is using their newfound wealth to finally be able to feed their kids a healthy diet.

Stress and mental illness.

Please.

>>Stress and mental illness.

Even if that is true. I'd rather be stressed and be wealthy than be poor and forced to make a million sacrifices a day to just merely survive.

And many subsistence fishermen were able to feed their kids a healthy diet, until commercial fishing came along.

Capitalism is pulling people out of poverty, but it is also destroying natural ecosystems. Is the reduction in poverty sustainable, or will it come back when the resources are gone?

Just wondering how to communist and socialist get food?

They pull metrics tons of food out of thin air?

Have you actually been to any of these "poor" countries and spent any time with the "poor" people who live in them?

Maybe you should try exploring some of the rest of the world before assuming you know what's best for it.

Overall, things are getting better for sure, but it's going in a trajectory that will settle into a shitty local minimum where poor people survive but are stuck with low quality of life. Getting people out of extreme poverty in the world is high priority, and we've been doing a pretty good job at that, as your graph shows. But there's a big rut after that that we need to work on removing too.

> it's going in a trajectory that will settle into a shitty local minimum

It's very hard to find evidence to support this point of view. You might hypothesize some future change in trajectory sure. But looking at the current trajectory? Pretty hard.

Based on the rut that most poor people in developed countries are stuck in.

You're correct that doubling income is not the same as improving quality of life, but I don't think stress and mental illness are particularly good examples of this.

A better example might be African countries where increased income has not led to better access to healthcare, but has instead fed a growing market for fake HIV/AIDS medications.

Why are you crediting this to capitalism?

Having worked in a nonprofit that works on obtaining foreign aid, it's my opinion that these improvements have occurred despite capitalism due to the hard work of people like me, not because of capitalism.

Even assuming that the money your spending is being put to good use (and there is at least some evidence that makes people skeptical), where do you think the money you're obtaining comes from?

> Even assuming that the money your spending is being put to good use (and there is at least some evidence that makes people skeptical)

This is a legitimate criticism of NGOs, but it's also one of the ways in which capitalism is counterproductive to reducing poverty. Many of the cases in which aid spending is misused result from corporate interests determining where the money is spent instead of the people who need aid. An ongoing example of this is the milk lobby pushing for milk in food drops in areas where nearly everyone is genetically lactose-intolerant, or water aid going to buy Coca Cola's bottled water instead of building sustainable water utilities and infrastructure. One of the reasons I left the NGO I worked at was that I felt they didn't do a good job of decoupling the aid programs they supported from corporate interests.

> where do you think the money you're obtaining comes from?

Governments, who in turn get it from taxpayers. The exact system that free market capitalists rail against. And if capitalist corporations didn't evade taxes so deftly, maybe I'd have obtained more. Certainly democratic-socialist governments give more aid per-capita than more capitalistic ones.

Instead of asking leading questions as if they proved your point, why don't you try actually making an argument? Yes, much of the revenue I've obtained is indirectly generated within a capitalist system. But if you want to argue that capitalism produces more aid than the alternatives would, that's ridiculous.

I would be curious to know what is the philosophical definition for _absolute poverty_.

Are we doing the best we can for the billions, definitely not. Are we doing the least we could, arguably not.

That trend started long before our society's current pillaging by the rich and their big businesses. The global elimination of poverty has more to do with grassroots technological and industrial development than it does with concentrating as much capital in as few hands as possible.

It doesn't seem like this chart takes inflation of the $ into account either, making it irrelevant over time. $1.25 was a lot more valuable even 30 years ago than it is today.

It does, in fact, take inflation into account. As well as purchasing power parity (PPP) across countries.

Yeah I see "PPP" in the picture but nowhere is there an explanation of how they accounted and adjusted for inflation on a yearly basis. A link to the actual study would be a lot more informative. At any rate it doesn't address the moral concerns brought up in the article.

no mention of inflation in your link, only PPP. The article author also goes on to state that this isn't enough / as meaningful as you're making it out to be...

"And making sure everyone's making at least $1.25 a day isn't the end of the fight either. The world's median income is still only $3 to $4 a day. By comparison, the poverty line in the US for a family of four is $16.61 per person per day. Once under-$1.25-a-day poverty is eradicated, the world needs to set about eradicating under-$15-a-day poverty, which will be a substantially harder task."

No

Capitalism's been 'hacked' and that's why you have consumerism and unsustainability.

The free-market is the most effective way to distribute resources in an environment, that's it. All problems come from central planning.

>The free-market is the most effective way to distribute resources in an environment

What happens when a child would rather work for food now than go to school and improve future income potential? Government ensuring that children have food and can't work so that they will focus on increasing future earning potential results in a better society than one where there is no government intervention, and thus some number of children have to work now instead of focusing on future earning potential, meaning that throughout their lifetime they will contribute less to society than they could have.

This is one example where pure capitalism is not the most effective.

Your use of the example "going to school and improving future income potential" is a very externality caused by intervention, i.e. the modern public schooling system and licensing requirements. A more voluntary society where autodidacticism, guilds, apprenticeships and decentralized democratic schooling are practical options for advancement (that a hypothetical laissez-faire arrangement would make easier to emerge) would therefore mitigate the effects of time preference, in that self-advancement would have less legislative barriers and the opportunity for market signaling would be more unfettered now that the principal-agent inefficiencies caused by formal credentialism are lowered. That is to say, employers would rely more on real signals rather than the nominal signals emitted from credentials and licensing that do not account for time and skills corrected after their acquirement, and don't suffer from disequilibrium caused by poorly thought out credential requirements.

Why would we see people expecting to train children in tasks when even today you see adults who need only a fraction of the training a child would not being trained on the job as hiring managers look for already qualified candidates?

Even if this is what society would revert to once it ran out of already trained individuals, it would be cyclic and would cause entire generations to be lost as it would always be preferable to hire some adult who has basic training over a child who needs to be built from the ground up in basics.

Consider the simple case of a programmer. Who would hire a child who would take years to train (as they would need to learn not only programming, but math and reading and writing, among other fields of knowledge)? Even if the child would work for free for those years of training (which would be problematic for other reasons, but assuming they would anyways), it is still not worth it because the cost of training other than salary would make hiring no one a far better choice.

It costs a lot to train a child from scratch and they offer no benefits except in the longest of terms, so people would always hire from elsewhere, such as children who had parents rich enough to afford them basic education costs out of pocket.

Apprenticeship would work well in today's world if you start after the basic education has been completed before specialized education begins, so that it would be quick enough to turn apprentices into employees who could produce value. But this would be later high school or early college; maybe earlier for simpler trades. It will not (and historically did not) work well for younger children with more educationally demanding jobs.

> The free-market is the most effective way to distribute resources in an environment, that's it. All problems come from central planners.

Until the resource is clean air that you can pollute for free without a central planner to limit such pollution.

Except it was American courts in the early 19th century which deviated from the Anglo-Saxon common law tradition of property rights which viewed air pollution was a tort.

Soviet rivers were some of the most polluted in the world.

A free-market has much stricter limits on pollution than any crony government agency.

What are these limits if not government regulations? Are you aware of any country that doesn't have regulations to prevent pollution of rivers or air in which free-market prevents such pollution all by itself?

I'm not aware of any countries where there exists a "pure" free market. While there is plenty written on the theory of enforcing laws and property rights sans government, I think it a stretch even with a government run court system, to refer to a court's ruling in behalf of property rights as "central planning". Even calling such a ruling "government regulation" seems pretty far from what most would consider "regulation".

> I'm not aware of any countries where there exists a "pure" free market.

Unicorns are also pretty awesome - unfortunately, they seem to suffer from the fatal defect of there not being even a single instance of such a thing in consensual reality.

By definition everything was once a "unicorn" before the resources, demand and labor were mixed into developing it. Everything must originate as a idea before it can become praxis. Modern capitalism itself was a unicorn as recently as the 18th century, but it emerged nevertheless.

>consensual reality

That sounds even move elusive than the unicorns

Good luck with the unicorns, then.

An absence of a particular primary legislation related to pollution does not imply that the economic order is therefore laissez-faire.

Government regulations are not torts.

>All problems come from central planning.

I agree whole-heartedly that the free market is an awesome, powerful, often-counterintuitively-effective thing.

But isn't there something to be said for some forms of central planning? Theory of the firm, multicellular organisms sending themselves to the moon, the empirical adaptive fitness of lumbering nation-states over freemen upon the land, etc.

I'm pretty far right, but I see a lot of problems with the free market.

None of this is to imply that capitalism has not been hacked. It is to imply that it is sometimes hard to distinguish the hacking from guardrails.

I honestly can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.

That free markets ensure a Pareto optimal allocation of resources is the first fundamental theorem of welfare economics. It does not imply any normative statement on whether the distribution is "just", as that is very difficult to qualify.

There's quite a bit of difference between pareto optimal and "most effective". In many situations, pareto optimality is actually among the worst of all possible outcomes (see the prisoner's dilemma, also local maxima). If you had used the former term in your comment it would have been more clear. As it is, it reads like a deliberate attempt to invoke poe's law.

EDIT: Oh wait, you're not the same person.

Its not sarcasm.

I come from a formerly socialist economy(India). Central planning is a scheme to create bullshit jobs which don't have to exist at the first place. This distract funds and human resources from other competing higher priority work.

Every thing is state planned starting from detergent to air planes. All services are mediocre and everything is in a state of stagnation and slow decay.

I'm not

He's most likely not. There are honestly people that believe this, rather than a more nuanced view.

Please go evangelize your religion and its anti-empirical dogma somewhere else.

Well, not all problems. Market failures like monopolies, negative externalities, and free ridership that leads to underinvestment in public goods are all problems inherent to unchecked capitalism that lead to an inefficient allocation of resources. Even Adam Smith was an ardent opponent of monopolies.

It's pretty well established that capitalism works best with a regulatory state that can correct market failures and enforce private property laws.

A market is "free" when the economic agents in the market are free. Capitalism enslaves most men, and therefore capitalism and the free market are in contradiction.

Not every firm in a capitalist / free market system is "for profit". There are already a wide variety of non-profit corporations, collectives and cooperatives, and a relatively recent trend is the rise of the "benefit corporation". All of these represent ways that operate within the context of our existing economic system, without necessarily having to obsess about "profit first".

coops are run to make a profit - its just distributed more equitably amongst the members.

Coops can earn a profit, but that's not their primary purpose, at least not the kind of coops I'm thinking of. The coops I'm familiar with exist to provide a service first and foremost (utility coops like electricity and phone service come to mind), and making a profit is secondary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative

Having worked at a well know worker coop in the UK I do know what one is. And consumer coops where the ones that came historically after worker coops - originally to provide a retail outlet for worker coops goods.

but don't they normally pay a dividend in the USA?

And you are not going to run a high capital coop like a telco or electricity company with out making a decent excess of income over expenditure to service you capital needs

Sure, and I'm not here to argue the fine details of how coops are organized. My point is only that there are elements of a market economy that differ from the traditional "profits first, maximize shareholder value, evil corporation". Cooperatives are just one example of a somewhat different model. Actual "non profit" corporations, and "public benefit corporations" are also examples of that.