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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Capitalism has been a miracle for everyone, not just a few. It’s true that inequality has increased over the last 30 years: https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/bangladesh/income-distribut.... The income share of the top 10% has grown from 22% to 28%. And the share of the bottom 20% has dropped from 10% to 8%. But 8% of a number that’s 6x bigger is way better than 10% of a number that’s 1/6 the size.

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Focusing at the bottom end, a 20% wealth hit is a really big problem for poor people. And just because they're well-off compared to other countries or previous periods in history is meaningless if they have solvency issues in the present. Being flat broke in our advanced technological society is a serious hardship and can not be measured in simplistic absolutes.

It’s not a 20% reduction in wealth. It’s an 8% share of an income pool that’s six times bigger versus a 10% share of an income pool that’s much smaller.

As if the effects of that fall in income won't compound, and as if you were factoring in purchasing power parity and negative as well as positive externalities. Stop with the baby arguments Rayiner.

10% of $1000 is $100.

22% of $1000 is $220.

8% of $6000 is $480.

28% of $6000 is $1680.

$480 > $100.

There's also a Rawls-esque thought experiment, which is "What rough archetype of a person/family would be better served by being teleported back to pre-capitalism if they got their ~current status in the old order, and everything that comes with it?"

This is a really brutally difficult game to play in a developing nation because one of capitalism's achievements is "Half your children don't die." (In the last 30 years in Bangladesh early childhood mortality is down ~14% to 3%.)

> Capitalism has been a miracle for everyone, not just a few.

Capitalism has had demonstrably terrible effects for many people all over the world without the luck of being born in a country or even a social class with enough economic clout to dictate favourable terms in trade agreements.

The conflict and genocide in East Timor was driven by capitalist Indonesia (a US ally) and colonial greed. Of course this conflict was ignored at the time because it was more important to focus on the Khmer Rouge, so the US and its brand of capitalism could save face:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_invasion_of_East_Ti...

As was the privatisation of water supply in Bolivia that led to conflict and massacres:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochabamba_Water_War

Plus the US-backed militias and crackdowns in various South American nations to prop up and entrench its business interests:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars

These are just three examples. There are countless other examples of the destruction and death caused by capitalist policies all over the world. This kind of greed, corruption and harm is not limited to totalitarian states, they're just less reported on by western media. Deliberately so.

Calling it a 'miracle for everyone' is an obscenely narrow-minded claim.

Your examples are terrible. East Timor is a classic case of conflict based on language and religion (Indonesia is Muslim, East Timor is Portuguese-speaking and Catholic.) Your water example involves a private company being forced to raise rates to pay for a dam that it was forced to build as part of a government I funded mandate.

My examples are so bad that you had to deliberately mischaracterise the first and third, and completely ignore the second.

Kudos.

We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle and ignoring repeated requests to stop. As I've explained many times, that's not what this site is for. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

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The "language and religion" bit bugs me: How do you know if any collection of individuals' prejudices has ever caused war when it could be the invisible hand of capitalist economics? It's invisible.

If I claimed slavery in the early US was all about racist animus and had nothing to do with economic efficiency that would be silly. Businessmen enslave because it makes great wealth, and the specific racisms emerge in parallel to justify and perpetuate the profit. Where do we draw the line for which conflicts we can say definitely starts with the moral flaw of a person/group, and which starts with the forces of economic incentive?

Conflict over language and religion predates capitalism by thousands of years. If a conflict looks similar to those pre-capitalism conflicts, and the situation in Indonesia does, it’s probably linguistic and religious conflict, not capitalistic. (You also seem very confused about what “capitalism” means. “Capitalism” doesn’t just mean business or profit seeking. Feudal lords and mercantilists made a profit. Capitalism by definition requires voluntary exchanges, which don’t happen in master-slave relationships. Again, slavery and serfdom predate capitalism by thousands of years. This is a definitional aspect of capitalism. Indeed, Adam Smith’s wealth of nations was expressly a critique of the then-prevalent system of mercantilism.)

My point was that lot of leftists/anarchists will say that economic forces, including before the capitalist market economies, can create situations where ideological extremist groups will gain power. They will appear out of nowhere and anyone can say "this looks like social animus just happened to win here", but the underlying cause was some group's will to extract resources from a place or population.

I don't know the history and the geopolitics at all but ideas like "Western powers destabilized Indonesia and East Timor to ensure profitable trade situations for them" are not mutually exclusive with "Indonesia and East Timor are in linguistic and religious conflict"

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