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Comment by throwanem | Hacker News Reader

I've heard this claim before, but I've never seen it substantiated. Would you like to do so?

It depends entirely on how you define poverty- typically these claims are based on a figure of $1.90 per day as the threshold for "extreme poverty", and you can use the World Bank's calculator to verify that they are true here: http://iresearch.worldbank.org/PovcalNet/povOnDemand.aspx

But it doesn't tell the whole story. Could you survive on $2 per day? The implication of this claim is that you are not in "extreme poverty" at that threshold, but I'm not sure many people would agree.

The next natural step is to ask where the line really should be drawn? For many reasonable numbers, we can see that number has been rising in the past few decades. You can set your own inputs on the linked calculator based on where you believe the poverty line should be drawn and decide for yourself.

The difficulty is going to be around definitions. There are claims that communism has killed X million people, where both the definition of communism and what constitutes cause are very loose. On the flip side you have people who advocate for communism who claim it's never been tried and everything that has ever called itself communism wasn't true communism. You'll face the same issue with capitalism.

The confounding factor I see here is what do we call China? They've experienced an incredible increase in wealth under their communist system but is what they have really communism? It certainly has lots of attributes of both theoretical capitalism and western capitalism as practiced mixed in with communist concepts. Whatever it is, China, for better and worse, is a very different country than it had been because in part due their hybrid economic system.

Chinese people only became wealthy after major economic reforms that abandoned anything related to communism except for the name and aesthetic

For some definitions of communism... in the US, many would have us believe that universal health care is a key component of communism and China still has plenty of that.

China doesn’t have universal healthcare free at the point of use.

The UK, a capitalist country, does.

I'm not sure how this relates to my claim

I don't think capitalism is incompatible with government run services. Some services are so fundamental that everyone needs them and thus demand is very easy to predict. Adding profit incentives to basic needs just adds friction and inefficiency since the transaction is involuntary.

Private industry is really, really good at innovation (e.g. discovering new drugs and treatments) and providing optional goods and services but most people just want a basic level of service and they want a funding structure that does not misalign incentives.

For example, optional basic health insurance doesn't work because poor people will quit the insurance program while they are healthy and then only unhealthy people will stay and bear the full cost. This raises the cost for poor unhealthy people and then they quit insurance and get denied access to care. Finally only the wealthiest people will have health insurance.

Capitalism is just a tool that's used to achieve certain outcomes. It just happens to work more often that it fails. Nothing more, nothing less. If a different tool works just as fine or better then it can be used selectively in areas where it's superior. Blind faith to any tool is stupid.

Communism on the other hand tends to fail by default and because it requires external forces to make it work, it breeds authoritarianism and then everything goes bad.

Completely agree with you. I was just pointing out that the public discussion of universal healthcare in the US tends to demonize it as a path to Leninism or Maoism, in contrast with the claim that China now has nothing resembling communism. At no point was I advocating for communism (or any other economic system).

Generally the last few decades as capitalism has swept the globe poverty has dropped dramatically in the poorest countries. https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/globalization-reduced-po...

Western Europe vs Eastern Europe, N Korea vs S Korea, Colombia vs Venezuela, USA vs Russia - its pretty standard that the workers in the Capitalist countries have a better quality of life than those in the Communist ones.

It's not so much capitalism as much as having good economics. Communism was economically advantageous to serfdom. Capitalism was economically advantageous to communism, which is why China's economy boomed after they started to embrace a market economy.

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