A majority of millennials now reject capitalism
washingtonpost.com
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This is really not generally true. I would gladly take socialism in the Czechoslovakia over capitalism in some third world country (say Pinochet's Chile). Capitalism worked very well in the West after the WWII, but that system had strong elements of socialism, too. But it's important to realize that for many third world countries, capitalism was not a success.
On the other hand, what was generally successful was democratic governance (maybe with exception of India and China). This is often conflated with (real world) capitalism (and dictatorship with socialism). But they really are pretty much orthogonal ideological axes.
>>On the other hand, what was generally successful was democratic governance (maybe with exception of India and China).
As an Indian, Let me tell you. It is actually quite successful in India. Issues in India have more to do social-cultural set up of the society than anything else. You don't change these sort of things with change in governance and economic systems.
Free market/Communism/Socialism aren't panacea. One needs to stop looking them as hammers and all problems as nails.
Isn't more the definition of classical liberalism rather than capitalism as an economical system ? Because you could argue that China's economy is capitalist yet there is virtually no difference between the state and most of the Chinese industry.
The only thing that can break monopolies naturally is technologicall progress, because only new technologies can make older monopolies obsolete. But then again, relying on a constant stream of innovation to keep our economy from collapsing seems like a losing battle. And also, lately technology is all about making rich people richer and poor people poorer. So much for hope.
Bing only survives because Microsoft has deep pockets, a result of their monopolies and huge war chest of course. It now powers Yahoo's Search (since their own search engine is long dead) and DuckDuckGo. You see, DDG is nothing more than a glorified UI over Bing's infrastructure.
And no, competing with Google Search isn't possible, unless you're Microsoft and like to play pretend.
Remember 1999-2001 when Google unseated Yahoo from the king of search? It was a feat that seemed impossible when you had established search engines like Lycos, Ask Jeeves, Excite, DogPile, etc. all competing in the space.
As with most industries and its enterprises, you'll always have an event horizon and then singularity until markets are saturated and the industry becomes irrelevant to the consumer.
But here's the problem: in 2000 there was no dominant design for search engines, so the market was still open for competition. The biggest problem is that right now Google Search is the dominant design. Google won because they changed how a search engine looked, felt and functioned. Nowadays though, people want and expect Google for searches. It's a verb you know. Then webmasters in turn are optimizing their websites for Google's crawler, which in turn ensures that Google always has an edge. And you can't beat them at their own game, because they have the mindshare and the resources to keep ahead.
> ...until markets are saturated and the industry becomes irrelevant to the consumer
I don't think search will ever be irrelevant, but that was my other point. Technological innovation is the only natural force that breaks monopolies, but relying on constant technological innovation means our economy, our way of life, isn't sustainable.
Citation needed, as they claim they pull in from a number of sources, one of them including Bing. "A glorified UI over Bing" seems like a bit of a stretch, but if that's actually true, it would be good to know.
If natural monopolies are left unchecked to grow in power, how can you be sure that they won't become powerful enough to use force to protect their or their cartels' interests?
A better question would be "how can I be sure that capitalists and government won't cooperate for establishing monopolies"? For that, I don't have an adequate answer. At least, in capitalism, there are competitors lobbying against it, creating some virtual political market. Full government monopoly is generally much worse.
A natural monopoly could, without any government interference or help, exert a lot of the same coercive tactics a government-supported monopoly can. With a large enough size, a natural monopoly could make the barriers of entry for any potential competitor so insurmountable that it would have the same effect as making competition illegal.
The screwed up train system in the UK is a natural monopoly under lax regulation. It means we face high fares, bad service and low investment.
This is possible because railroads are hierarchical, and all other means of travel are point-to-point. Networks always win against hierarchies.
It doesn't help that much of the written record on which belief in the existence of coercive monopolies was based came from the Hearst newspapers - which were a sort of monopoly ( or at least a rather large amalgamation ).
While this essay is not without merit, I doubt that Lenin can be counted as the expert on what capitalism is.
"Lenin had that idea and Lenin was a bad guy" isn't a real argument on why you disagree with the idea. Please explain why, I'm actually interested in understanding your point of view.
So, Lenin was right in that capitalism can easily evolve into government cronyism if left unchecked. But then it isn't capitalism anymore.
This is precisely what British East India Company did in India.
>>So, Lenin was right in that capitalism can easily evolve into government cronyism if left unchecked. But then it isn't capitalism anymore.
Capitalism or Communism, the issue is accumulation of a lot of power in a few hands. Once that happens, things are basically done for the benefit of a few banks/dictators/rulers and then things start going downhill from there.
A corporation is just the convenient legal form to aggregate earnings and liabilities from cooperative action.
Is capitalism simply the state of affairs of contemporary Western society?
In that case, capitalism includes things like labor unions, state regulations, corruption, etc. So the word refers to a very dynamic and tumultuous process involving constant struggle between opposing forces.
That's never going to be a "perfect system" of course. What we think of as opposition to capitalism is then a big part of how the system regulates itself.
But maybe capitalism is more correctly thought of as a certain set of forces and structures operating in the larger state of affairs.
For example, capitalism is whatever is advocated for by those who own and manage concentrated capital. Then, too, opposing this should be natural for anyone who doesn't belong to that class and doesn't expect to.
I'm just saying that the concept "capitalism" deserves analysis if we want to talk about whether it's good or bad and to what degree "we" should oppose it or try to change it.
So it seems.
Also remember nearly much of the economic progress in the west is the direct result plundering the wealth of other countries by colonizing them.
If they had to play by the same rules as everyone else. Things would be way different.
What is the best sorting algorithm? Is it the one that sorts a random list in the shortest time? Or the one that uses the least memory? Most likely we'll pick by balancing a few important metrics, which leaves us with "optimal". Far from perfect.
If we're discussing Capitalism vs Socialism, instead of criticizing the opposition for ignorance (like every comment below the WashPo story), let's accept that different groups are optimizing for different goals. And there are so many competing objectives: efficient distribution of wealth, national economic growth, safety net for unlucky/disadvantaged, protecting shared resources (environment), etc etc etc.
From the article http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbli...
> They are, in fact, two different things: capitalism is a system of ownership; markets a method of exchange. Although the two have sometimes gone together, this need not be so. Crony capitalism in which a few monopolies or cartels run much of the economy gives us capitalism without markets. And market socialism would give us markets without capitalism*.
In economic theory, capital is that which can be combined with labour to produce money. It is the "means of production". It isn't just any money, or just any accumulation of goods.
In a socialist free market, the vendors can set their prices, and the consumers can choose which prices they'll accept, and/or negotiate a better deal, just like any normal free market. The only (necessary) difference is that the capital - i.e. the means by which the goods being traded were produced - is communally owned.
One possible policy is all consumers get the same basic income, and vendors - in the form of worker collectives - are given control over capital by lot or election. Profit would be reinvested in the capital, and/or returned to the state to be redistributed.
The consequences are similar. With enough vendors and consumers, prices would tend to the marginal cost of goods. Vendors who consistently fail to sell their goods at or above cost will, rather than running out of capital, have their control over the shared capital taken away by the state/community (e.g. via a recall process).
In other words, if the state placed restrictions on capital accumulation, then there wouldn't be a need to restrict the "financial industry" as such a thing would cease to exist. Just like how a fish market wouldn't be possible without any fish left on earth.
There are other ways, too.
"National interests" don't care about public welfare. They only care about outcompeting other nation states, both in wartime and peacetime. Public interests are routinely sacrificed by governments for the sake of such competition.
As for "what caused the crisis of jobs and industrial society", the answer is of course automation (this is one thing where Marx was right). The full-blown crisis was imminent 100 years ago (which is why socialist regimes appeared), but it was delayed by two world wars (there are no unemployed in wartime), the Cold war, and rise of the clerks / bureaucracy.
Socialism was Marx's answer to the idea of automation of production, but it didn't work out 100 years ago. It will not work now as well. We have to think of something new.
The rest, including healthcare, road building and launching spaceships, can be safely handed by private sector.
Whilst that's a variant of an older quote there is generally an expectation that 19/20 year olds are going to be more revolutionary than their elders. As a 30 year old who grew up during the 90s capitalism had vanquished communism and was rapidly improving quality of life around the world. Economic growth was assumed and student radicalism went through one of its quieter patches and began to focus much more on equalities and access rather than economic issues.
Today's youth are perhaps returning back to a more traditional model of rebellion against their parents. Be it the 1930s elite becoming communist at Cambridge, French students in the 60s or US students in 1970.
Capitalism did a lot of good and then in order to really juice it for everything it had, we let it run wild. Now we're seeing the pendulum swing back. So we agree there, but I don't think it's a matter of youthful rebellion. It's the only logical stance for our generation to take.
A right winger can dislike how it makes markets lazy through government protection, and making entry and exit difficult.
A left winger can criticise the inefficiency of outcomes in monopolistic markets, and the unfairness of outcomes based on initial endowments.
The current status quo is very traditional: those in charge take every opportunity to enrich themselves either legally, illegally or by rigging the law.
Seriously though, as others have pointed out, what we have in the US isn't so much capitalism as crony capitalism: privatized profit with socialized risk. Much of the anti-capitalism/pro-socialism crowd fails to make that distinction, or equates all capitalism with cronyism. Another overlapping portion simply live in a world entirely of theory (social theory, not economic theory), and are historically naive and uninformed about the fact that radical socialism has been tried many times, and had considerably worse failure modes than capitalism has shown thus far.
It'd be surprising to me if a majority of polled youths did support "capitalism" given the state of affairs (impending climate doom, eternal crisis, unemployment, corruption, inequality).
I'd love to see some references to this statement. A quote from a 19th century Swedish king is hardly compelling evidence.
I think you might be confusing socialism with activism in general.
In a surreal turn of events the east coast of communist China has the strongest "pure" form of capitalism currently in existence. This has a lot to do with their scant regard of imaginary property, what westerners insist on calling "intellectual property". Capitalism only work when information flows freely. When people can make decisions based on facts. This cannot happen when information is hoarded as a so called competitive advantage, not in the long run anyway, not any more. Ad to this the degree of rent-taking on all levels and its clear that capitalism as we know it a spent vein.
Ironically it is (a distorted version of) Keynesian economics that is used to justify inflationism as public policy
Schumpeter would add, the middle class will then reject capitalism (presumably instead of placing the blame where it truly ought to lie).
- Sent from my iphone
- Sent from Comcast
Municipal ISPs work just fine. Governments already provide (or contract with private businesses to provide) mail, electricity, water, sewage, garbage collection, roads, etc.
In an area that already has adequate service competition and coverage I don't see any reason they would want to run a municipal ISP. But state-wide laws that inhibit municipal ISPs, in order to protect the current ISP duopoly status quo, don't make sense either.
It's not like it's something that requires new taxes to run. And many utilities already have to run their own networks anyway.
Just like DHL (also owned by the German government in majority) has shown the same.
You can certainly have capitalism and an unfree market at the same time. Guess that's called crony capitalism. It's a very different beast from a free market.
I once read something about how traffic works best when 100% regulated or 0% regulated. Everything in the middle is sub-optimal. That's what we seeing with capitalism at the moment. Everything is half-regulated. There are many people who got a big part of the global wealth and many of them inherited it from people that had it before the world switched away from kings and queens.
If this didn't happen so pervasively I don't think millennials would be that mad about capitalism. To fix this, bring back real democracy in the US (and I mean that as a generic "People's voice must be heard" term, not as direct democracy or mob rule, as many often misconstrue such comments).
Relevant:
In my opinion people are not questioning the efficiency of democracy, but the legitimacy of the capital accumulation mechanism.
Seriously, this is stupid. It's a poll about words, not really about politics.
I'm sure almost all would agree that either complete capitalism or complete socialism would be bad. Everyone actually agrees that there needs to be a balance.
The problem we have now is to establish a new system (or systems), to deal with abondance, or at least greatly reduced scarcity. If the stakeholders of the old systems don't prevent us, eg. by declaring a very destructive WWIII.
WWIII, really?
a: "not in the way it treats engineers as 'resources', and cronies, friends and relatives as 'management' as but in principal yes"
q: "i need a yes/no answer"
a: ".."
q: "so i'm putting down no"
a: "whatever".
fun fact: If the fortune 500 were a country it would have the second largest GDP in the world.
Most of you here reject or would like to run away from that institutional form of capitalism anyway to a good startup.
I'm an instinctive libertarian, but how can you look at the current state of affairs and expect anything else?
US version of the same i guess is "If You Are Not a Liberal at 25, You Have No Heart. If You Are Not a Conservative at 35 You Have No Brain"
Personally, at 43, born and grown in socialist USSR, having lived through transition to wild capitalism in 199x in Russia, and living in US for 16+ years, i'd rephrase Churchill - "capitalism is the worst economical system, except for all the others".
But the answer has to be a balance – one which Social Democracies have shown to be quite stable.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2016/03/24/...
Nothing to see here.
Krugman is advocating increasing budget deficits and printing more money to increase aggregate demand. There is a very obvious increase in the amount of money in circulation in the economy in this case.
Also - something to realize about Europe: The poor in the US are RICHER than middle class in much of europe.
"A person at 60% of median income in the US still has a larger income than the median household in Chile, Czech Rep., Greece, Hungary, Portugal, and several others. And the poverty income in the US is very close to matching the median income in Italy, Japan, Spain, and the UK."
https://mises.org/blog/poor-us-are-richer-middle-class-much-...
And if you take the cost of health care and university out of the US statistics, do you think they would remain higher?
back of the envelope math says no:
Its less than 10 thousand dollars higher, US health care is estimated at 5k per person on average. Given that these are household incomes youd have to multiply that by average family size, which is like 2.3 people
Its 2.3*5000 more expensive to have healthcare per family in the US
That already has wiped out the entirety of the 10k gap.
If you include free university it is even more one sided.
And that sort of capitalism wouldn't be possible without colonialism.
Communism is Full State capitalism
Most of the world have a State sponsored Capitalism system.
Let's just say that what I call communism is what happened in Russia. And that it was supposed to be an intermediary step toward socialism. The idea was State owned means of production ==> totally democratic ownership everyone is free no need for a state bliss
For a lot of people, "communism" is little more than a synonym for "authoritarian kleptocracy".
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As the phrases are actually used in Leninist theory, the goal was stateless communism. Socialism was an intermediary stage between capitalism and communism accurately described by Lenin, who invented the concept, as "state capitalism".
A "dictatorship of the proletariat" would take over capitalism's economic and political infrastructure and support the citizenry until a transition to true communism was possible. To the surprise of nobody who owned a history book, it turned out the dictatorship came to be corrupted by a ruler with no real interest in communism, but plenty of interest in being a dictator.
It's worth noting that Marx didn't advocate any particular method of transitioning from capitalism to communism, because Marx wasn't, precisely, a revolutionary. He regarded the transition as simply an inevitable consequence of capitalism's failings.
There is "socialism" in Belarus and "capitalism" in Ukraine.
There is "socialism" in China and "capitalism" in Indonesia.
None of these comparisons obviously make sense.
I was born in USSR. Socialism there meant that private business ownership is definitely not allowed. As many other things, too. It was impossible to buy and sell real estate, for example.