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Comment by SolaceQuantum | Hacker News Reader

"The author is casting aside decades of economic growth, peace, and innovation."

What about things like healthcare costs, lifespan estimates, mass shootings, addiction rates, cost of housecare, and economic movement?

EDIT: Wait, decades? Are you sure? Wasn't the 2008 recession just over a decade ago?

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Plenty of market economies with similar corporate structures to ours have not seen out-of-control healthcare or housing costs, and have seen growing lifespans, etc. Indeed, that's true even within the U.S. In Iowa, housing costs are low and have remained stable, and the homicide rate is similar to Belgium or Canada. Unemployment peaked at under 7% in the recession, and is just 2.5% now. Separately, life expectancy for Asians in the U.S. exceeds that for Asians in countries like Singapore or Japan.

Corporations are more or less the same everywhere, but different places within the U.S. have vastly different housing policies, social challenges, etc. It strains credulity to conclude that corporations are somehow to blame for your laundry list of problems, rather than the specific policies that directly address those issues.

I don't see how they're any less related to peace and innovation.

> What about things like healthcare costs, lifespan estimates, mass shootings, addiction rates, cost of housecare, and economic movement?

What do any of these things have to do with corporations?

It sounds like your gripe is with something else.

Healthcare costs, housing costs, and economic movement have a great deal to do with corporations.

Well, let's break it down:

healthcare costs, lifespan estimates, mass shootings, addiction rates, and cost of housecare are all basically just the same thing from different angles: the healthcare industry

The healthcare industry is extremely successful if your goal is to maximize shareholder profit. It's a complete failure if your goal is to maximize consumer value, however.

It has a lot to do with corporations given that corporations actively lobby for policies that have adverse affects on the general public, collude with each other to fix prices/wages, and monopolize industries to push out competition, among other things. All of this due to them carrying out their "fiduciary responsibilities".

The depth of the 2008 recession was still better overall than the heights of previous decades. Things were down a little only compared to a couple years before.

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