The real problem is that we have an economic system where people would starve without sweat shops. Capitalism has this nasty little problem of all the wealth getting concentrated in the hands of the few and globalization exacerbates the problem. Unfortunately, no one's figured out a better way of distributing wealth.

And the alternatives to capitalism have an even nastier problem: absolute instead of merely relative poverty.

Incidentally, the Chinese wouldn't starve without sweatshops. They'd be peasant farmers. The reason they work in sweatshops is the same reason workers chose to work in the "satanic mills" of England in 1800: being a peasant farmer is a very hard life.

I don't know about China, and not about the satanic mills, but as I have recently about the industrial revolution: back then actually it wasn't possible for everybody to be a farmer anymore. On the one hand, there was an enormous population explosion (which had also been encouraged by Feudalism, I think, the "owners" of the people had an interest in owning more people for a while). Then Feudalism was abolished, and nobody took care of the people anymore. hence the poverty and their willingness to do awful work. In that sense, I don't think Capitalism was really to blame. I suspect a similar thing could be going on in China.

Are you implying that the Industrial Revolution was caused by population pressure? That would be an amazing coincidence, wouldn't it, if jobs in factories appeared at just the moment it "wasn't possible to be a farmer anymore."

In fact the history of every country that industrializes is the same. People work on farms till jobs appear in factories, and then they move to the cities-- not because it isn't possible to work on farms anymore, but because it's such a grim life.

And incidentally, feudalism was over in England centuries before the Industrial Revolution got started in the late 18th century.

Exactly. The guy above got it back to front. The population explosion was because of the extra wealth from the industrial revolution lowering the death rate due to the end of famine. http://www.mises.org/books/conquest.pdf

Feudalism ended in England in the 16th century, hundreds of years before the industrial revolution http://www.tiscali.co.uk/reference/encyclopaedia/hutchinson/m0006447.html

Well then it wouldn't be a coincidence, would it? I mean if population explosion was caused by the industrial revolution. I didn't mean the industrial revolution was started by population explosion, only the squalor was (among other factors) caused by it.

Sorry I don't have the books with me right now (until next week), and I didn't learn them by heart. I seem to also remember that there were machines before the "revolution" - maybe it still was a change of political circumstances that permitted the revolution (free trade between countries, possibility of ownership giving incentives for entrepreneurs etc.). Certainly several factors worked in combination, it's not like the invention of a particular machine triggered it all.

I also seem to remember that China has the fewest farmland per person of all countries in the world. I don't think anybody can simply be a farmer. I know I couldn't just be a farmer in my country.

Not to mention that wages in the mills were much much higher than in farming.

It's a myth that capitalism concentrates wealth into the hands of the few. In reality the opposite is the case: Capitalism is better at spreading the wealth among everyone than any other economic system. Look at the Gini coefficient, the freer the economy (the more capitalist) the less economic inequality there is: http://www.cato.org/pubs/efw/efw2006/efw2006es.pdf

http://tinyurl.com/2gd7ue

http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/6/64/375px-Index2006_EFCapita.gif

Also the gap between rich and poor has been essentially static for the past 50 years, and shrinking since the 80s http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2005/12/images/walton3.gif

http://www.fraserinstitute.ca/shared/readmore.asp?sNav=pb&id=859

Yet more proof is in the Economic Freedom index. All rich countries have free economies, and all poor countries have un-free economies: http://www.heritage.org/index/countries.cfm for me that's the smoking gun that capitalism works.

http://web.archive.org/web/20060111094731/truckandbarter.com/tb_images/ef_in.gif

"Unfortunately, no one's figured out a better way of distributing wealth."

There are only 2 choices in economics: Capitalism, which is really just people trading freely (and seems to distribute the wealth the best) and communism/socialism, which doesn't allow anybody to trade (and has the worst distribution of wealth). The only other options are systems which are somewhere between, and evidence (from the Economic Freedom index) shows the freer the economy the better off everyone is.

Further China isn't particularly capitalist, it's still very heavily socialist: http://www.heritage.org/index/country.cfm?id=China (although that's changing year by year). So if people are starving in China it's not really capitalism's fault.

It's also a myth that capitalism causes starvation. In fact there were no famines in the 20th century in any capitalist countries. All the famines were related to Marxism (China, Russia, Ethopia, North Korea etc.)

(This has an indepth look at famines through the ages: http://www.mises.org/books/conquest.pdf)

[ I hesitate to comment, because this is all steering away from 'startups'... ]

I think the rebuttal to rms' comment that "Capitalism has this nasty little problem of all the wealth getting concentrated in the hands of the few" is very simply this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_sum_fallacy

While some kinds of wealth are limited, it's generally not a zero sum game.

Good call.

Startups are all about capitalism though aren't they. They are capitalism in action.

Yes, I'd kind of assumed that being pretty comfortable with capitalism was a given for those using this site, even though we may all have differing views on exactly how to best run an economy/country in terms of the details. (And that discussion is most certainly best left to some other site, or preferably, over a good bottle of Italian red wine:-)

I of course recognize that capitalism is all we have. It still pains me that politics in the USA are corrupted by corporations and that a billion people live in absolute poverty. Still, the average standard of living is higher now than it's ever been.

I just can't get past this feeling that there's something horribly wrong with our society... from pharmaceutical companies keeping AIDS medication locked away to an invasion of the Middle East to take their energy. This can all be explained through rational self-interest but it's pretty horrific to contemplate. Is there a better way? Will we ever achieve real Globalization?

Can and will global poverty be solved before humanity achieves a post-scarcity economy?

"a billion people live in absolute poverty"

They live in poverty because of a lack of capitalism, not because of capitalism. You might find this hard to believe but every poor country has a lack of capitalism. Check here: http://www.heritage.org/index/countries.cfm there's not a single contradiction.

If you really care about the poor I challenge you to take a few hours to read this PDF just to hear the other side of the argument: http://www.mises.org/books/conquest.pdf

Feel free to email me at lockster 4T gmail d0t com if you feel like a friendly debate ;)

Off-topic: is there any CSS that can be added to stop long words like URLs from causing a horizontal scrollbar to appear, i.e. to force the word to be broken in two?

You can have it chop off the end of the URL with "overflow-x: hidden" and an explicit width, but the only way to have it insert a linebreak is to count characters on the server and insert a break manually.

You can use a 'zero width space' (​)in some browsers to hint a breakable point, but it might affect C&P-ability.

Some other discussion of options here:

http://gojomo.blogspot.com/2005/03/cross-browser-invisible-word-break-in.html

Thanks, 200b is was I found too after reading the CSS 2 spec.