"Of course, the fact that no countries have followed advanced capitalism with communism might suggest that capitalism is good enough that people don’t want to switch."
Unironically, yes.
Another thing to grapple with is that the "global poor" are far, far poorer than the poor in any advanced industrial country (what's more nationalistic than a social program helping the poor in one country?). So unless you want to jump straight to global communism, somehow, implementing full on socialism in any rich country very well might hurt economic growth in impoverished countries.
Capitalism + safety net can be done without wrecking market mechanisms, misaligning incentives, or killing the Golden Goose of technological progress, increased productivity, and economic growth. Web3, er, I mean neoliberalism solves this. Be growth-focused, not redistribution-focused, and you tend to get the (realistically) best of both.
If you haven't read it, Tyler Cowen's Stubborn Attachments is probably the best explanation of this I'm aware of.
I think the issue is relative versus absolute measures of poverty. Yes, there is a bottom 20% in the United States. But that bottom quintile still owns color televisions, mobile phones, Play Stations and XBoxes, etc. And it is a 20% that doesn't have to worry about starving to death, although hunger can still be a concern.
The United States and the rest of the modern world is already Star Trek in terms of abundance. And I think you can argue, as Freddie seems to suggest, that once you reach the level where everybody has an Android or iPhone that people are comfortable enough that real change becomes very difficult.
" Why would we let anyone go hungry or cold when we have this kind of productive capacity?"
This is indeed the important question, which is partly answered by another question:
Is there any lifestyle one can choose to live such that one deserves to be poor?
Drinking, taking drugs, gambling, giving away all of one's money, and not being willing to work, for example?
There are "deserving poor", who deserve help.
Are there undeserving poor, who don't deserve so much help?
How much should society give to those who choose to live in a way that anything given to them is either consumed or given away, such they they always remain lazy, non-working, video-game playing or drug taking, dirt poor?
I think we should be offering a job, like a national service job, to all. And food. But not a middle class life.
I have a background as a corporate IT executive. I remember driving home from work one day depressed after a meeting with a division head that wanted a new multi-million dollar computer system that would be funded by the savings it would derive in a reduction in workforce. I was literally working in a discipline to reduce the number of jobs in corporate America.
Currently I own and run a couple of small businesses. One of them is a non-profit that provides financing to small business with a mission to grow jobs in the communities we serve (a tonic to my previous professional job-destruction role). Both of my businesses have seen personnel costs and other costs rise, primarily because of the constant increase in regulatory compliance, fee and taxes and dumb policy moves... with the fees and taxes going to government... government that keeps expanding and with government employees that are all paid significantly more than their private sector peers in total compensation.
In the other business, which is a food product manufacturing operation, we needed a piece of equipment to support a task that was significantly difficult manual labor. The equipment was only made in China and Canada... even though the design of the equipment was originally made in the US and produced in the US. The Canadian version of the equipment was not a good fit for our application (they were targeting larger operations). So I had to purchase a Chinese version. The installed equipment freed up my employees to do more valuable labor.
I would have paid 2x or 3x the cost of the Chinese equipment to purchase USA-made equipment.
However, it is not made here. It is not made here for several reasons.
1. It requires welders, and welders are in short supply in the US.
2. The business to make the equipment is industrial and the US regulations for starting an industrial business are complex, costly and restrictive.
3. The energy costs for an industrial equipment manufacturer are extreme in many parts of the US.
4. US parents have sent their kids to expensive liberal arts schools and the kids don't want to work at any physical labor.
5. The parts of the country where these jobs would be welcome are a mess with drug problems and crime. And the education system sucks so bad that there the number of people that can be trained to do the jobs required to manufacture the equipment are too few.
Today there are millions of unfilled jobs, and plenty of opportunity to start and grow small businesses that would provide more jobs. However, the Marxists know that they are better served to push these narratives of automation causing the need to approve Universal Basic Income.
One last point. Collectivism does not work. It sucks in any form. You cannot pay people to not work and expect human needs will be met. We are better off subsidizing work as needed to get more humans doing productive things. We are entering an anti-work cultural shift that is terrible and will be the end of us if it continues.
Just from the standpoint of human nature I have to wonder: wouldn't a "worker's revolution" be driven not by abstract concepts of fairness but rather by deep discontent with one's own station in life and/or some substantial level of privation?
If capitalism has made everyone fat and lazy then doesn't that mean such a revolution is impossible? In fact what would cause the masses to rise up is anger when economic conditions take a downturn and the standard of living decreases.
"But I will say this: I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t agree with the system of universal abundance in Star Trek, given the conditions in Star Trek. This isn’t a joke: I mean that, if you present people with a society where technological progress is so advanced that abundance for everyone is possible, even the most ardent capitalist will concede that it would be immoral to perpetuate a system that did not allow for the distribution of abundance to everyone."
I have. I don't disbelieve you. But I've met people who believe humanity needs the threat of misery and death hanging over individuals if they don't shape up in order for civilization to survive. There are only ever the gods of the copybook headings, these people believe, even if they're self-identified Christians:
Back in 2019, Matt McManus published a short piece on why some self-identified libertarians / classical liberals were attracted to the alt-right and why some weren't. He pointed out that for some, the attraction of free markets was less the freedom than the competition, competition to reward the superior and punish the inferior: both carrots and sticks.
Many libertarians acknowledge that generally free market paired with a modest, simple welfare state would still offer plenty of carrots to reward superior performance. Others, though, worry that not enough stick will be the death of us all. They might, if forced to choose between more freedom and more stick, choose more stick.
Forget just libertarians. That people need the pinch of scarcity for good moral development still seems a pretty common opinion in general. Societies that can afford otherwise risk "decadence".
The thing about cost disease is it'ds hard to imagine our economy without it. If we could somehow reduce costs, I imagine data professionals like me would be cut. Like, the promise of a white collar professional life seems to depend to some extent on exploding bureacratic costs.
Is there anybody in the country who doesn't have a smart phone who wants one? How do we know that we're not in the age of Star Trek now and what you see is what you get?
Really too bad that apparently all the Marxists who seized the means of production were anti-capitalists instead of post-capitalists.
"Of course, the fact that no countries have followed advanced capitalism with communism might suggest that capitalism is good enough that people don’t want to switch."
Unironically, yes.
Another thing to grapple with is that the "global poor" are far, far poorer than the poor in any advanced industrial country (what's more nationalistic than a social program helping the poor in one country?). So unless you want to jump straight to global communism, somehow, implementing full on socialism in any rich country very well might hurt economic growth in impoverished countries.
Capitalism + safety net can be done without wrecking market mechanisms, misaligning incentives, or killing the Golden Goose of technological progress, increased productivity, and economic growth. Web3, er, I mean neoliberalism solves this. Be growth-focused, not redistribution-focused, and you tend to get the (realistically) best of both.
If you haven't read it, Tyler Cowen's Stubborn Attachments is probably the best explanation of this I'm aware of.
As a pro-capitalist, I'd say that capitalism's successes argue for a robust social welfare state, including UBI.
I think the issue is relative versus absolute measures of poverty. Yes, there is a bottom 20% in the United States. But that bottom quintile still owns color televisions, mobile phones, Play Stations and XBoxes, etc. And it is a 20% that doesn't have to worry about starving to death, although hunger can still be a concern.
The United States and the rest of the modern world is already Star Trek in terms of abundance. And I think you can argue, as Freddie seems to suggest, that once you reach the level where everybody has an Android or iPhone that people are comfortable enough that real change becomes very difficult.
" Why would we let anyone go hungry or cold when we have this kind of productive capacity?"
This is indeed the important question, which is partly answered by another question:
Is there any lifestyle one can choose to live such that one deserves to be poor?
Drinking, taking drugs, gambling, giving away all of one's money, and not being willing to work, for example?
There are "deserving poor", who deserve help.
Are there undeserving poor, who don't deserve so much help?
How much should society give to those who choose to live in a way that anything given to them is either consumed or given away, such they they always remain lazy, non-working, video-game playing or drug taking, dirt poor?
I think we should be offering a job, like a national service job, to all. And food. But not a middle class life.
This is exact Marxism.
I have a background as a corporate IT executive. I remember driving home from work one day depressed after a meeting with a division head that wanted a new multi-million dollar computer system that would be funded by the savings it would derive in a reduction in workforce. I was literally working in a discipline to reduce the number of jobs in corporate America.
Currently I own and run a couple of small businesses. One of them is a non-profit that provides financing to small business with a mission to grow jobs in the communities we serve (a tonic to my previous professional job-destruction role). Both of my businesses have seen personnel costs and other costs rise, primarily because of the constant increase in regulatory compliance, fee and taxes and dumb policy moves... with the fees and taxes going to government... government that keeps expanding and with government employees that are all paid significantly more than their private sector peers in total compensation.
In the other business, which is a food product manufacturing operation, we needed a piece of equipment to support a task that was significantly difficult manual labor. The equipment was only made in China and Canada... even though the design of the equipment was originally made in the US and produced in the US. The Canadian version of the equipment was not a good fit for our application (they were targeting larger operations). So I had to purchase a Chinese version. The installed equipment freed up my employees to do more valuable labor.
I would have paid 2x or 3x the cost of the Chinese equipment to purchase USA-made equipment.
However, it is not made here. It is not made here for several reasons.
1. It requires welders, and welders are in short supply in the US.
2. The business to make the equipment is industrial and the US regulations for starting an industrial business are complex, costly and restrictive.
3. The energy costs for an industrial equipment manufacturer are extreme in many parts of the US.
4. US parents have sent their kids to expensive liberal arts schools and the kids don't want to work at any physical labor.
5. The parts of the country where these jobs would be welcome are a mess with drug problems and crime. And the education system sucks so bad that there the number of people that can be trained to do the jobs required to manufacture the equipment are too few.
Today there are millions of unfilled jobs, and plenty of opportunity to start and grow small businesses that would provide more jobs. However, the Marxists know that they are better served to push these narratives of automation causing the need to approve Universal Basic Income.
One last point. Collectivism does not work. It sucks in any form. You cannot pay people to not work and expect human needs will be met. We are better off subsidizing work as needed to get more humans doing productive things. We are entering an anti-work cultural shift that is terrible and will be the end of us if it continues.
Just from the standpoint of human nature I have to wonder: wouldn't a "worker's revolution" be driven not by abstract concepts of fairness but rather by deep discontent with one's own station in life and/or some substantial level of privation?
If capitalism has made everyone fat and lazy then doesn't that mean such a revolution is impossible? In fact what would cause the masses to rise up is anger when economic conditions take a downturn and the standard of living decreases.
"And I have zero problem with ascribing that growth to capitalism, as long as people get on board with a more humane stage to come."
Very well put!
Generally greed wins, and the poor suffer.
"But I will say this: I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t agree with the system of universal abundance in Star Trek, given the conditions in Star Trek. This isn’t a joke: I mean that, if you present people with a society where technological progress is so advanced that abundance for everyone is possible, even the most ardent capitalist will concede that it would be immoral to perpetuate a system that did not allow for the distribution of abundance to everyone."
I have. I don't disbelieve you. But I've met people who believe humanity needs the threat of misery and death hanging over individuals if they don't shape up in order for civilization to survive. There are only ever the gods of the copybook headings, these people believe, even if they're self-identified Christians:
https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_copybook.htm
Back in 2019, Matt McManus published a short piece on why some self-identified libertarians / classical liberals were attracted to the alt-right and why some weren't. He pointed out that for some, the attraction of free markets was less the freedom than the competition, competition to reward the superior and punish the inferior: both carrots and sticks.
https://merionwest.com/2019/05/26/conflating-classical-liberals-and-the-alt-right/
Many libertarians acknowledge that generally free market paired with a modest, simple welfare state would still offer plenty of carrots to reward superior performance. Others, though, worry that not enough stick will be the death of us all. They might, if forced to choose between more freedom and more stick, choose more stick.
Forget just libertarians. That people need the pinch of scarcity for good moral development still seems a pretty common opinion in general. Societies that can afford otherwise risk "decadence".
Capitalism is going great, therefore we need to change to an economic system that has only produced starvation and misery. Because equity. Pass
The thing about cost disease is it'ds hard to imagine our economy without it. If we could somehow reduce costs, I imagine data professionals like me would be cut. Like, the promise of a white collar professional life seems to depend to some extent on exploding bureacratic costs.
Is there anybody in the country who doesn't have a smart phone who wants one? How do we know that we're not in the age of Star Trek now and what you see is what you get?
This came to mind after reading Freddie's post.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/most-radical-in-60866169?