Hacker News Reader

Comment by vishnugupta | Hacker News Reader

I recently read an excellent short book on this topic, titled “Capitalizing in crisis” [1] in which the author traces the path that lead to today’s situation where a large portion of profit across all companies in the US is through financial activities.

It’s an excellent read, albeit repetitive at times.

[1] https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674066199

View on HN

The more radical theory I've comme across is that Capitalism is always in crisis. It is not bad step or a shortcoming of some kind but rather a fundamental feature. Capitalism works best in crisis because it is more inventive an flexible, it re-invents itself to endure the chaos it creates, may that be social unrest, environmental degradation, financial collapse, wars, etc.. This was Marx mistake (well, one of them at least), Capitalisme will not crumble because of its internal contradictions. The contradictions lead to crisis which only gives it more strength.

In that sense, finance is but one of the problem, which might have a central position in the current run of crisis in technical terms but only insofar as that it is the the most powerfull tool the capitalist has to extend its reach. Even if the financial system were to be sanitized overnight, it would not imply the end of crisis for Capitalism.

i don't think instability (aka crisis) is a fundamental feature of capitalism, but rather, of complex (human) systems in general. early writers on capitalism like adam smith and marx had identified the likeliest first-order instabilities pretty clearly, and provided reasonable safeguards against them. but these were not popular with wealthholders/powerseekers, so were weakly instantiated to begin with and weakened over time so that we now have a corporate fascist form of capitalism taking hold in countries like the US.

for capitalism to work, we need to put all of our regulatory energies into creating fair and transparent markets incentivized toward productive activity and against rent-seeking (these are among the most important of those first-order instability guards for capitalism).

I understand the point you're trying to make, but frankly I'm not convinced that monopolies/oligopolic collusion aren't an inevitable end result of any ostensibly "competitive" market environment. Given that capitalism on a fundamental level is about profit maximization, and monopolies/vertical integration/oligopolies and other similar situations are the inevitable most effective way to achieve this, how do you avoid this sort of thing in any system that can be described as capitalistic? I'm thinking especially of situations like telecoms, where the barrier to entry is impossibly high and so new players in the market just aren't a thing that happens (easily).

i'd posit that very few markets have natural winner-take-all characteristics (even infrastructure can be market-based, with the right conditions, e.g., tokyo public transportation), and consolidation (vertical or otherwise) is not an inevitable outcome in free and fair markets because you'd need to obviate them away in the course of leveling the playing field.

for instance, look at many of the markets of the 70's, just before trickle-down ushered in decades of greed-driven regulatory disembowlment. markets work best when there are 7-9+, if not dozens of, mostly mid-sized competitors. outsized profit conditions are meant to be fleeting, as a temporary reward to encourage constant exploration, risk-taking, and creation (and creative destruction).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com