Capitalism seems more or less benign in affluent nations which can afford to value individual life at millions of dollars. You can rest assured that the homeless people you ignore aren't going to starve, that they'll just buy drugs with the money you'd have given them anyway. It's easy to squint your eyes and believe in the system.
It's much harder to look at countries were life is much much cheaper and accept that the system is a net improver of lives rather than one of enforced stagnation. Where getting people fed, clothed and housed is a matter of politics, not logistics. Everywhere you go in the developing world, you see politics, by that I mean rich people preserving their riches, keeping the people willing to do the legwork and work out the logistics, from following through on their altruistic missions.
We need to stop pretending the system designed to make people feel better about exploiting whatever they can in self-interest is the arbiter of human worth.
Scarcity could go away tomorrow if the rent-seekers could just get out of the way.
Global living conditions across multiple facets have DRAMATICALLY improved in the last 200 years. No, I am not talking about the last 10 or 20 years, I mean over many generations: https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-condit...
The world isn't much different now than the one that caused the Buddha to leave his princely lifestyle and dedicate his life to teaching and spirituality. Those material gains over the last 200 years, sorry they just don't seem all that germane.
Wow, in the past 200 years, we've seen the eradication of smallpox, treatment for Tuberculosis, vaccines for pneumonia, all issues plaguing humanity for pretty much all of recorded history.
A rural farmer in Nigeria can access price data in real time using a cell phone, while democracy in India allows dozens of politicians from every state argue on live TV simultaneously to get their views heard.
What, pray tell, can you say that the world isn't a better place
What are you even talking about? 150 years ago a large fraction of the world population were slaves. You’re insulting them and your own intelligence if you think their lives were comparable to Amazon workers.
You go on one trip to Columbia and think your eyes are open. Meanwhile many of the people in this thread have lived their whole lives in such countries, including me.
It sounds like you saw real poverty and it woke you up to your immense wealth and comfortable existence, so kudos on that. You took the wrong leap though and decided that your life is the default state, when in fact it is in an incredible aberration of history. For millions of years every person was poor, then a few were rich, then more were rich, and now you're one of them.
You're advocating for ignoring research and data in favor of anecdotes. You're not even trying to argue in good faith.
In my experience, the people who are typically 'shocked' by this destitution are people who have lived extremely privileged lives, believe this is the default state of the world, and then see this destitution, and are so moved, that they dedicate their lives to eradicating it, while often misidentifying the cause.
Buddha is the archetypical version of this narrative, and it's no wonder -- as a rich prince, he had no idea what the world was really like.
In reality, most of the problems you see in rural areas all around the world are human-caused problems, typically where humans are interfering with individual freedom (civil and economic).
> It hits you that it's not just that part of rural Colombia that looks like that, rural everywhere does.
Except it doesn't. My parents live used to live in rural America and it was quite nice. My brother lives in the countryside and it's also quite nice. It's no less destitute than the area of Portland I live in. Have you ever been to a city? It's not like they're some model of refinement.
This is exactly what I'm trying to say. Rent-seekers are keeping the world under their callous little thumbs, just like they have been for thousands of years. I think I'm done. HN hivemind, you can have your echo chamber back.
If you're arguing that we should protect free markets in these areas, like Colombia (which would also include curtailing criminal cartels, which infringe on freedom), then sure, we can have a discussion.
If you're going to pretend that rural areas are sometimes impoverished because of 'muh evil capitalism' and that we need 'insert untried, or failed social policy here', then I don't see the point.
What a concept.
What the fuck does that mean? The same people who would complain about HFT would also probably complain that a person in the 1800's who could run fast would be doing something 'wrong' after they found out a trade ship had returned.
What is "wrong" with the fast exchange of information in that case?
> When someone wants to do something everyone knows is wrong, we don't let them.
Yes. that's called enforcing criminal law, and most people would agree with it. Although, I dunno, maybe not in the past two years, it seems more people are okay with letting criminals go.
EDIT: If your claim is that we don't put enough people in jail for breaking the law, I agree with you. I don't see the need to regulate businesses per se. For example, many complain about Amazon and Facebook and want to break it up. I can understand why. I sympathize.
However, Mark Zuckerberg ought to be in jail for conducting social experiments on people without their consent, selling our data, etc. WE don't need to regulate the activities of private enterprise and add more regulation. We just need to actually prosecute people who quite obviously have committed criminal activity.
Same with Jeff Bezos, who owns two businesses (Amazon and the Washington Post) that quite obviously form a conflict of interest. We need no new laws to prevent this kind of conduct.
We need to not leave it up to the Kalanicks of the world to change the social order, reinventing taxis for fun and profit.
It's more than a change in legal and ethical norms. We need to not fire people who speak their minds for the social good against the company, then further marginalize the already marginalized community they're speaking up for.
We need new social norms.
Why? Uber materially improved my access to taxis. Why does everyone diss on uber's business model (I understand the company itself is a bit meh), but the idea of hailing cab drivers with an app, and then encouraging people to drive (i.e., ridesharing) is a great one.
Ultimately, I'd rather leave it up to individuals to improve their and their community's conditions, then a bureaucrat.
> It's more than a change in legal and ethical norms. We need to not fire people who speak their minds for the social good against the company, then further marginalize the already marginalized community they're speaking up for.
Okay, so I assume you are against the firings of religious employees, standing up for their beliefs? How do you reconcile when a religious employee speaks out against spreading of gender dysphoria as social contagion on facebook, and then a trans employee speaks out against him?
Or is your economic system mainly meant to impose your beliefs on everyone else?
I didn't think I'd have to explain this, I thought most here already understood it. But okay. Nothing about hailing cab drivers with an app changes the economics of transportation. What changed the economics was exploitation. Not that the cab industry was really all that much better. But what's wrong with Uber and the gig economy at large is that we're letting huge companies with big budgets get away with not respecting labor norms. And so they have changed those norms, for the worse.
It's a clear-cut example of the tech industry making things better for the well-off, and worse for those trying to scrape by.
Hold on hold on. You previously blamed our current corporate system for preventing workers from owning their means of production.
Uber exemplifies the vision you seek... where individual workers own their own means of production. There is no need for a worker coop for drivers. A driver uses one car -- their own. They do not need to own some large capital investment (it's not like the owners need a factory to work). Why should driver A and B share cars together? That's the very vision of shareholding that you deride.
Uber, the company, is obviously not a worker coop, but frankly, its model is the most viable way towards a vision of worker-owned businesses. If you truly desire worker coops, instead of large corporations, then the vision of uber and the system it seeks to achieve ought to be lauded, even if the specifics of uber's implementations should be scorned.
Unfortunately, all the progressive labor activists made such small worker coops illegal. A more sensible solution would have been add a corporate structure that lets drivers band together for certain collectively purchased services (like health insurance and other benefits), without all the reporting requirements of normal corporations. Instead, they basically banned small businesses.
Sigh, sometimes I regret being a liberal rather than a leftist, because I can see all the complaints they have about us. I think I'm really done now, I've heard enough. In a nutshell, it's easy to defend the existing order when we're the one's benefiting from it.
For what it's worth, it's not like co-ops are immune to this criticism. For example, Winco had a case a while ago where employees were claiming that they were being mistreated. In a worker co-op with sufficient numbers of members, no individual member is powerful enough to effect change.
> If you think there's a viable way to get from here to there, well, I think I can get Bezos to sell you a bridge, on Amazon of course.
Except there is. Now that Uber has pioneered the model, I've seen worker co-ops pop up in my own town. I imagine these models will grow, as more people feel emboldened to take on such professions now that the model is validated. I don't see why this is such a stretch. It seems to me you have reached a conclusion, and don't seem interested in listening to alternatives.
> Sigh, sometimes I regret being a liberal rather than a leftist, because I can see all the complaints they have about us. I think I'm really done now, I've heard enough. In a nutshell, it's easy to defend the existing order when we're the one's benefiting from it.
Alright man. My family immigrated to this country, my father was working as a slave for a while, and my parents started off with nothing when we were small kids. Trust me, I've not benefited a whole lot from this system. I've probably seen it worse than you. So sick of being gaslit by people who think I'm some privileged WASP kid, and that they know better. Maybe try listening?
And I wish them everlasting health and wealth. Can we please stop pretending Uber is some kind of glorious pioneer? They pioneered an industry whose very foundation is eroding the social contract. That some people are now turning around and setting up proper collectives doesn't suddenly mean now that Uber was a good thing. It's not, it's horrible, otherwise we wouldn't have the raft of alternatives, some better than others. And all of these alternatives have to compete on the open market with Uber, who enjoys the competitive advantage of exploitative economics. Let that sink in. Worsening the social contract doesn't in any way make things better, market economics will always drive a race to the bottom until people just can't stand it anymore. This is why labor norms are enforced by laws and not by us.
> So sick of being gaslit by people who think I'm some privileged WASP kid
Please don't put words in my mouth. The logic was simple. We don't care about Uber drivers, not nearly as much as we should, because higher rates means more money paid by us. We benefit directly from the tech industry who gives us services that are cheaper not because technology makes them cheaper, but because they exploit workers harder. Every time you take an uber, you participate in this exploitative economy. If you don't take uber, bully for you, you're not participating, at least not in this particular way. If I have to take an Uber, I always tip $5 or more, that's how I deal with the quandary.
You took that and turned it into purported gaslighting. I have no idea who you are, this isn't personal. You're obviously not a leftist because you rail against standard leftist platform points. I suppose you're a libertarian then. You tell me, not that it really matters for the purposes of this discussion, that's more meta-commentary.
I’m not that person but I’ve noticed this pattern in such people. Rent-seeking is anything they don’t like. So it could be landlords charging tenants rent, it could be Apple charging developers 30% “rent”, could be Google charging “rent” on the ad space next to search results, Microsoft charging for Windows even though an additional copy of Windows doesn’t cost them more to produce.
Basically it can be as broad as you want it to be. And these delusional folks say we can stop it by “not letting it happen”. Lol.
Look, I despise amazon and facebook as much as the next guy, but I don't see why their products or their services ought to be heavily regulated. That's a dangerous road. I just want the law applied fairly, so if the case is that facebook and amazon can kick people off their multi-billion dollar platforms due to their beliefs, then it seems only right that bakers don't have to bake cakes.
Currently, the main behavior I see is that corporations seem exempt from the very laws that individuals apparently have to follow. That seems wrong, and moreover it seems illegal (to be treated differently).
Which board? What implementation of capitalism? You don't pretend that the States are running a free market or anything absurd like that, do you? The States have a Crony system at best.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for capitalism. I think humans are a rotten animal at heart and capitalism is the only way to effectively harness that bad nature for good results. But like any technical system, the implementation matters, and the implementation in the States in the last 50 years has been dreadfully short-sighted.
We have gradually whittled away at every collectively positive subsystem for generations now and are left with an inordinate number of miserable people whose day to day life would show up as, 'improved' on the Pinker style charts & graphs.
The subjective is the core of wellbeing.
Objective reality matters, certainly. But all the more so when you apply nuance to your reading of it.
Solving the abundance problem was the high priority as distribution was purely theoretical concern until we achieved abundance. It took us about 200,000 years develop the ideas, technology and to put the infrastructure in place to achieve post-scarcity for food and water.
The current system has been responsible for creating actual abundance that has vastly improved the living conditions of the vast majority of people. Scarcity is the default state, not artificial.