We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17498676 and marked it off-topic.
For what it's worth, I do my part in criticising capitalism, spreading the works of those who also criticise it, and prompting people to think of alternative modes of production. I think that not only has capitalism saved a great many lives, but it's improved a great many too. That doesn't mean that it should be here to say, nor that its evils can be ignored. To use an analogy, capitalism is the boat one can use to cross the river; you don't carry the boat with you once you've finished.
In another system you refer to capitalism as simply being "freely trading labour and goods". To me, this shows your ignorance of the history of capitalism, and what it is today. Have you read "The Origin of Capitalism"[0] or any contemporary critiques, such as those of the Frankfurt School?
In short, capitalism requires a lot of separation and very strange ideas of liberty, which all rely on quite a neat subjectivist-individualist approach.
[0] https://www.versobooks.com/books/2407-the-origin-of-capitali...
You implicitly posed an interesting moral question. Can history justify the deaths of 3.3-6+ million (Holodomor), 4+million (dekulakization), 5 million (1921 famine, admittedly coincident with the civil war) when compared to the planned atrocities of the Nazis if we credit those deaths with greatly contributing towards the defeat of the Hitler and the NSDAP?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anti-capitalist_and_co...
The introduction to the article even makes this clear:
> Of the 66 states listed here, 9 of them are republics ruled by a socialist, communist or anticapitalist party, five of them are official socialist states ruled by a communist party, of them four of them espouse Marxism–Leninism (China, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam) while the fifth (North Korea) espouses Juche.
You are probably looking for the current article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_state#List_of_curren..., or the historical article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_states.
Thanks for the links, they are a much better jumping off point. I cross-referenced [0] with the tables on [1] and population data from [2] to build this list for further analysis:
Country *ist since Total wealth (USD) Mean wealth/adult (USD) Median wealth/adult (USD)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
China 1 October 1949 29,000 billion 26,872 6,689
Pop 2017: 1.386 billion Pop 1949: 542 million* Pop growth/year: 12.41 million
Laos 2 December 1975 22 billion 5,662 1,382
Pop 2017: 6.758 million Pop 1975: 3.042 million Pop growth/year: 88,476
Vietnam 2 July 1976 358 billion 5,391 2,235
Pop 2017: 95.54 million Pop 1976: 49.81 million Pop growth/year: 1.12 million
Bangladesh 11 April 1971 263 billion 2,612 1,587
Pop 2017: 164.67 million Pop 1971: 66.42 million Pop growth/year: 2.14 million
Guyana 6 October 1980 2 billion 5,345 2,510
Pop 2017: 777,859 Pop 1980: 780,153 Pop growth/year: -62
India 18 December 1976 4,987 billion 8,976 4,295
Pop 2017: 1.339 billion Pop 1976: 635.77 million Pop growth/year: 17.15 million
Nepal 20 September 2015 40 billion 2,392 1,151
Pop 2017: 29.30 million Pop 2015: 28.66 million Pop growth/year: 320,000
Portugal 2 April 1976 750 billion 89,437 38,242
Pop 2017: 10.29 million Pop 1976: 9.4 million Pop growth/year: 21,707
Sri Lanka 7 September 1978 68 billion 4,802 2,448
Pop 2017: 21.44 million Pop 1978: 14.53 million Pop growth/year: 177,179
Tanzania 26 April 1964 22 billion 858 510
Pop 2017: 57.31 million Pop 1964: 11.34 million Pop growth/year: 867,358
*https://countryeconomy.com/demography/population/china?year=1949
Missing data for: Cuba, North Korea
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_state#List_of_curren...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...
[2] https://data.worldbank.org
[3] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.KD?location...
[4] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.PP.CD?locat...
For example, there's plenty of communist countries that had industrialism but failed to grow economically as much as capitalist peers as examples. I'm unaware of many (any?) examples counter to this.
--edit--
Note that I thought this comment chain was at max reply depth, this comment was a reply to scotty79 not the parent.
Your link provides a nice graph [1] showing that USSR and many countries that were capitalist had similar GDP per capita in 1913, but diverged wildly over the following years. I suspect academic has such a graph including more countries along with some rating of how the underlying economic system worked. It would be interesting to see that. I am aware of a decent amount of economic literature that does credit capitalism as a major force for pulling billions out of poverty.
Your page seems to back up my point, does it not?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Soviet_Union_USSR_GDP_per...
I believe that the graph does in fact support your conclusions.
I imagine if someone could accurately answer your question they'd win a Nobel Prize. But there is little doubt free market economies vastly outperform centralized economies. Plus free markets are about exercising freedom over how your labor and assets are used. So yay freedom.
You're of course correct that industrialization has an outsize positive impact initially. But it's pretty silly to ignore the eventuality of "and then Bill Gates donates money to make the world better!"
This (more than literally anything else) has made a staggering improvement in the lives of hundreds of millions of people over the last few decades.
That said, I wouldn't call purchasing cheap clothes "promoting capitalism".
I'm still interested in user merpnderp's answer.
It's probably the biggest, most important claim of the millennium. And it is really, really good for hundreds of millions (maybe billions).
These two are pretty good start points. [1] [2]
In short, globalization converted hundreds of millions of would-be Chinese farmers into middle class urbanites in about one generation.
It is the most massive improvement of quality of life in world history. It is staggering to consider how much life has improved for so many people in such a short amount of time.
This is basically step one of "how do we save the world". First get everyone to a baseline standard of living, then instill ideas of sustainability and environmentalism, then try to boost everyone to a more than bearable standard of living sustainably.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/the-sto...
[2] https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/how-has-globalization...
"More than half the world’s supply of cobalt comes from the DRC, with 20% of cobalt exported coming from artisanal mines in the southern part of the country. In 2012, Unicef estimated that there were 40,000 children working in all the mines across the south, many involved in mining cobalt."
"Adult miners dig up to 600ft below the surface using basic tools, without protective clothing or modern machinery. Sometimes the children are sent down into the narrow makeshift chambers where there is constant danger of collapse.
"Cobalt is such a health hazard that it has a respiratory disease named after it – cobalt lung, a form of pneumonia which causes coughing and leads to permanent incapacity and even death.
"Even simply eating vegetables grown in local soil can cause vomiting and diarrhoea, thyroid damage and fatal lung diseases, while birds and fish cannot survive in the area.
"No one knows quite how many children have died mining cobalt in the Katanga region in the south-east of the country. The UN estimates 80 a year, but many more deaths go unregistered, with the bodies buried in the rubble of collapsed tunnels. Others survive but with chronic diseases which destroy their young lives. Girls as young as ten in the mines are subjected to sexual attacks and many become pregnant.
The cobalt "ends up in smartphones, cars and computers sold to millions across the world, by household brands including Apple, Microsoft and Vodafone"
"Car maker Tesla – the market leader in electric vehicles – plans to produce 500,000 cars per year starting in 2018, and will need 7,800 tons of cobalt to achieve this. Sales are expected to hit 4.4 million by 2021. It means the price of cobalt will soar as the world gears itself up for the electric car revolution, and there is evidence some corporations are cancelling their contracts with regulated mines using industrial technology, and turning increasingly to the cheaper mines using human labour."
[1] - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4764208/Child-miners...
[2] - https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/jan/19/c...
If the overall trend is to bring prosperity and increased standards of living to an area (which it generally appears to be), then globalization is a net win.
That doesn't mean it's a win for everyone all the time.
But over time, these sorts of humanitarian concerns melt away as countries grow richer and start behaving more humanely because they can afford to.
Rich nations tend not to have child labor. It's not because they're more moral, per se. It's just that they can afford a reasonable standard of living without child labor.
GDP per capita in DRC is $500 per year, so, yeah, parents are going to do what they have to to survive.
Africa also has lots of special problems like corruption that don't result from globalization and capitalism.
Capitalism is also farm subsidies, tax breaks and other corporate handouts given by rich nations that destroy the farming industries in poor countries. Capitalism (as currently practised, or in its purest, unregulated form) is not an untarnished 'good' by itself.
This is without considering how capital is leveraged to the detriment of anything protecting poor people in order to extract more profits (by lobbying, quid-pro-quo deals, or threats to stop investments). See the recent insane row over breastfeeding vs. formula at the UN, and what force was brought to bear on Nicaragua.
The optimistic narrative that I adopt hopes/assumes that we'll somehow become more sensible on these issues as time goes on.
Capitalism is the distribution method enforced by the military by the rent-seeking ruling classes. Like democracy, it sucks but it's better than what was tried before.
Or is it?
Second, unless you are a diplomat or a policy maker (er, removed), I don't think you're promoting capitalism more than the rest of us.
India and China were doing fine until the Europeans came and subjugated them. There was some upheaval when the Europeans left and created a power vacuum. Shockingly, being conquered and ceded and the related civil unrest could also be blamed for (for example) strongman dictators that happened to come into power and cause famines, or genocide and sectarian strife. A lot of that conquering was done in the name of capitalism. (The British East India company, specifically).
Capitalism is fine, it serves the purpose of obtaining a local optimum in certain trade situations. But it is a completely amoral theory. All it tells us is if this, then that. It is a set of formulas.
Sometimes it creates net good, because it causes us to have more efficient and liquid markets, overall creating more wealth for those allowed to participate in the market. But other times it tells us, these people should starve or go homeless, because they don't create economic value. (In true, unbridled capitalism, a lot of marginalized people would simply die). The number of people who don't create economic value will clearly increase if automation of 'work' continues.
And how is freely trading your labor and goods for other's labor and goods an immoral system? I would call capitalism the most moral system we've ever devised. I assume you would think some central authority should decide who gets and does what, in some system that graph theory quickly shows runs into O2 complexity with node to node interactions swamping any decision making authority. FYI, having an authority tell people what they can and can't do with their labor sounds suspiciously like slavery, or exactly how the majority of people in India and China lived most of their lives pre-contact - as serfs, just like the rest of the world.
GP said "amoral" not "immoral". Morality is only a factor in capitalism in so much as it informs the decisions of the actors involved. Both truly moral activities and truly immoral activities can coexist in a capitalist system.
Not immoral, amoral. Capitalism as a system doesn't make moral judgements. Guns, child sex-slaves and heroin follow the same principles as wheat and butter. We make moral judgements about them, but the market does not. It just weighs.
I understand the complexity issue fine. Complex markets are likely NP hard. As I said, capitalism (specifically free trade) is an okay heuristic for reaching a local optimum, but it is certainly possible that we could do greater good under a different system with a better heuristic that actually takes into account what good is.
Anyway, it doesn't deserve to be your primary compass for making the world better. Following the maxim of bettering capitalism at all costs can lead you down some decidedly twisted paths.
If anything, Adam Smith's most famous work on free trade was a critical moral point in ending English slavery, which dovetailed nicely in with reformed Christian beliefs against slavery.
And free trade capitalism is just a tool, but a tool so powerful it lifts billions out of poverty even when they're ruled by totalitarian governments. Or would you argue that the US's efforts to reform Chinese communism were more effective than it's efforts in engaging in free trade, in helping alleviate the suffering tens of millions? We should all support freedom and democracy, but lets not kid ourself about the power of free trade markets to improve people's lives faster than simply advocating for the vote and free speech.
> I'm enslaving you and stealing your capital in the name of a free market system which believes every person is the owner and price arbitrar of their own labor.
Capitalism is a practical theory, you can't create your own utopian free market system where people's 'rights' to property are magically enforced.
There's no rule or capitalist ethos saying that I can't simply take your stuff if I have the resources to do so. In fact, as far as I can tell, the objective is for me to take your stuff. If I can trade nothing of mine for everything of yours, I'm simply maximizing my profits. Pat on the head for me! You need an outside theory to understand property rights, courtesy of someone like John Locke.
But saying Indians or Chinese didn't have a system of property rights or government before the Europeans saved them with capitalism, is wrong and a bit racist. As if everything in the rest of the world was awful before the white-man came and created civilization to save the savages.
> And free trade capitalism is just a tool, but a tool so powerful it lifts billions out of poverty even when they're ruled by totalitarian governments.
This is a rhetorical platitude. I'm supposed to believe it because you believe it, and you keep repeating it, but you haven't provided evidence that it's actually true.
> Or would you argue that the US's efforts to reform Chinese communism were more effective than it's efforts in engaging in free trade, in helping alleviate the suffering tens of millions?
I think the US has had little to do with China solving it's internal problems. (Which arguably, it still hasn't entirely solved, my pessimistic view is that it has simply taken a break). Also, let's talk about those factories with subhuman working conditions in Shenzhen where people commit suicide and make iPhones. Free trade, yay.
> We should all support freedom and democracy, but lets not kid ourself about the power of free trade markets to improve people's lives faster than simply advocating for the vote and free speech.
I'm not saying free trade is bad, but what I am saying is that it is terrible as a #1 guiding principle. You need something more substantive than that.