* crickets * (after 40 min on the front page, but it's there!)
How does HN, a hotbed of libertarian free-market worship that also reveres smarts and science, respond to this?
How does HN, a hotbed of libertarian free-market worship that also reveres smarts and science, respond to this?
What annoys me is he often has the basic facts right. For example, fully general AI is dangerous (but not really because of Terminator-like scenarios); if there are intelligent aliens we should not expect them to be nice any more than mean, and there are good arguments to expect mean, and so we should be careful (but not because of the very unlikely scenario outlined in Signs); and in this case he's right that further automation of the economy will produce greater economic inequality, but economic inequality is a good thing, it's absolute wealth and poverty that's the real problem, and I'd bet on the trend of the poor not in fact getting poorer, on an absolute scale, continuing. See http://paulgraham.com/inequality.html
I just want to point out the shallow stereotypicality of that remark. That's all.
They're all (as is the United States, for that matter) modern mixed economies; capitalism as a dominant economic system proper has been largely abandoned in the developed world in favor of systems which, compared to the then-dominant system named "capitalism" by its critics, systems with comparatively strong redistributive and central regulatory systems, and often a wide array of directly-provided State services, all reforms directed at mitigating the problems for which the critics that named "capitalism" were criticizing it.
Capitalism remains a significant ideology (particularly, surprisingly enough, among the capital-holding class and those who aspirationally associate with that class), and adherents to that ideology often misattribute the success of modern mixed economies compared to other alternatives to capitalism as a success of "capitalism".
Really, the difference between the US and European Social Democracies is between fairly small variations in the details of the structure of a mixed economy -- variations which can have a big practical effect, and are worth discussing, to be sure.