You can argue its not going fast enough, but the direction is unequivocally upwards so far.
Also, the direction currently is towards stagnating wages and growing wealth inequality.
After extreme poverty ends, you get poverty to uplift and so on.
> Also, the direction currently is towards stagnating wages and growing wealth inequality.
The problem with such nice catchphrases that are repeated over and over by interest groups is that they are inaccurate, and often end up advocating for even higher inequality.
What specifically is an "inaccurate catchphrase" in what I've said?
Smartphones, safer cars, cheaper travelling. Have to be very careful to look only at nominal bills to make economic judgement.
And maybe the most problematic and expensive things americans suffer generationally, housing and healthcare, are the defacto most intervened and regulated markets of all. It is the state, in its magnificent regulatory capture, that its pushing poverty unto people.
Also inequality has always been a topic of conversation, what is new is income inequality, and its still an open problem, not something there is economic consensus about. There are other things that have economic consensus, for example, getting rid of corporate taxes. But you dont hear that coming from "high inequality and stagnant wages" guys.
>housing and healthcare, are the defacto most intervened and regulated markets of all. It is the state, in its magnificent regulatory capture, that its pushing poverty unto people.
I won't defend much of anything about the state of housing or healthcare in the US. The government is certainly a huge part of the problem, I have no issue accepting that.
Here's the thing: I don't think that all government programs are good. Some are designed to push poverty unto people like you said. But the solution isn't to get rid of all regulation or the idea that government can be used as a tool for the masses.
We need to have a government that is much more aligned with the interests of the people than the interests of large corporations and capital. To me the way to do that is to expand the limits of democracy to include how the economy is run, how natural resources are used, and what the relationship between capital and workers should be.
When democracy is used to plunder, there is no way back. It will be living for the purpose of robbing others, and the poor have never fared well in such systems.
We live in a world with relative freedom but still very constrained. Look at the US spending 25% of its GDP through the state. And european countries reach 40 and even 50%! Half of every thing produced consumed by the state. The State is the enemy. It really is.
The most positive effect I can imagine is people being stroung enough to resist the powers of states and pit them against each other. The most scary future I see is the collaboration of countries. Concentration of capital is bad, but concentration of power is the true danger. And the State garners its concentration with the power of might.
I'm suggesting that we can create a new form of governing that further decentralizes power.
Actually I don't think so. Even Marx saw that socialism was a stage of history which followed from capitalism. In the same way that feudalism's aristocracy provides the conditions which create a merchant class that eventually overthrows the aristocracy, Marx sees capitalism and capitalists as providing the conditions which create a working class which eventually overthrows the capitalists. He would probably be annoyed with the soviets for trying to skip most of a phase and he would probably be annoyed with us, modern westerners, for not recognizing where in history we are - with rising inequality, increasing productivity but stagnating wages and the general increasing returns to capital.
>Marx's reserve army doesn't hold water.
Doesn't it? With chronic unemployment persisting since our most recent crash and now that we're finally reaching low unemployment ten years later, wages haven't moved much. If you explained the idea without mentioning Marx I think most people on the street would intuitively agree.
I dont think the reserve army makes any sense in todays world. But it did in his were labor was so interchangeable that people migrated for labor in masse all the time. I dont think out of work janitors put a lot of pressure on software engineer jobs. That unemployment in general drops wages, or that full employment increases wages, is a much older concept than Marx's.
Supply and demand, after all.
Unions can only raise a workers wage in two ways: by increasing productivity (which they seldom do) or by restricting the amount of workers.
leadership that don't have the interest of the workers at heart
workers organizing together and using collective bargaining
Perhaps we might have a better discussion if you told me what it is you're actually driving at because I'm not quite sure I see it.
> large reserve of under-employed workers, or people who didn't previously participate in the labor force, is what enables the most exploitative jobs
This still holds.
No, what accounts for that is access to incredibly cheap energy, in the form of fossil fuels and electrification.
Energy is what lifted people out of poverty, not any of that other nonsense. Without coal, oil, and hydro power, most of us would still be subsistence peasants, regardless of whether or not we would live in Communism, Feudalism, Capitalism, Fascism, or some other -ism.
I don't know a ton about the economic history of these two countries, but prima facie this seems to belie your claim that it was simply energy availability.
China's a bit of a different case - but for contrast, compare it to the USSR. Despite three decades of war, civil war, near-genocidal purges, and some more war, by the 60s and 70s, it has lifted millions of people out of a similar level of intractable poverty. Again, not on the back of its economic system, but on the back of industrialization.
It's hard to stay poor (Compared to world poverty in the 1800s) when you have running water, indoor plumbing, and electricity.
[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/india/gdp-per-capita
[2] https://www.slideshare.net/ashishverma061/growth-of-electric... - Slide 16.
You are extremely confused about the history here. The British left India in 1947; WW2 ended in 1945. India and South Korea had a similar GDP/capita in 1950; they were on opposite ends of the spectrum 50 years later after 50 years of a wide GDP growth gap (during none of which time did British India exist).
I believe more than most people in the path-dependency of politics, especially with respect to things like colonialism. A lot of the sclerotic, Soviet-influenced, bureaucratic strangling of the Indian economy during this period is at least partially attributed to (reasonable) democratic political backlash against the abusiveness of the British economic system, in the form of eg labor laws that have been harming the economy for half a century.
That was James Watt's steam engine, which was efficient at turning combustion into mechanical motion, and it was happenstance that it was invented in 1780, and not 1580, or 1980. People didn't suddenly develop a need to move heavy things in 1780 - it came around then because of advances in steelwork, precision manufacturing, and general refinement of the idea (Such engines were around for over a century, but were not compact, or efficient enough to be very useful.)
All of a sudden, the labour of a coal miner was enough to feed a 10, then a 50, then a 100 horse-power engine. It was the AGI of its era.
http://www.his.com/~pshapiro/steam.engines.html
Why was there a coal mine? Why not use wood or charcoal? Why didn't the Romans go down this path? They invented a toy steam engine.
These things have many causes. Obviously watson's invention was a big inflection point.
But, as for the question "were liberal markets necessary?" my suspicion is yes. But, I don't actually know. I think the answer begins before James Watt.
Why the steam engine did not succeed because Watt, was because the same reason that tri-deck galleons and gunpowder did not exist in the bronze age. Non-trivial practical inventions require a massive pyramid of other non-trivial practical inventions, each of which requires a pyramid of other non-trivial inventions, all of which have to solve a contemporary problem - cheaply then their alternatives.
If liberal markets were necessary for the invention of the steam engine, why was it invented in England, and not in Renaissance Italy? It had liberal markets, access to capital, and was a center of technological and cultural progress for hundreds of years.
There's no particularly satisfying answer to that, other then 'happenstance.'
It's almost tautological to say that energy is behind growth, but it's also independent of economic structure, which effectively boils down to "the manner in which we convert energy to utility".
PS: The China boom looks 'good' mostly due to how terrible the country was run prior to that. Expand the time scale and compare to other countries and things don't look nearly as good.
I have tremendous sympathy for the empathic pain they had by seeing those levels of exploitation. Das Kapital's first volume is basically 50% accounts of child labor and exploitation. But they had no way to know that when the state holds the capital the results are even worse, had marx seen the soviet union at its prime he would have probably revised his own theory.
Marx's reserve army doesn't hold water. And he himself denounces that one of the most common ways of the exploitative model was precisely how much the aristocrats ignored private property rights and pushed people to extreme poverty and marginalization.
He had and still has many interesting ideas, but he was very much wrong about many of them. Which is fine, all these economists got things super wrong.
And another interesting point Marx made: Look how well America is doing! Europe should be like that.