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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

Capitalism doesn’t set any goals, people do that. It just recognises and guarantees individual ownership rights and economic freedoms, but what people do with that is up to them. It’s just that achieving any material goal takes capital, whatever your economic system. Elon Musk is as capitalist as you can get, but his goal isn’t to accumulate as much capital as possible, it’s to build a civilisation. Bill Gates is a capitalist and is busily giving away as much capital as efficiently as he can.

This is of course all about goal setting. I think those fearful of maximisers are being rational, but if we’re going to build AIs then we need to make them part of our community. The things that stop us as individuals going off the rails and taking everyone else around us down with us is respect for community, for others rights and interests. The need to seek consensus and consent. Figuring out how to implement that is the real challenge.

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I would urge you to take a closer look at Elon, Gates, or any other billionaire who pledges to have any goal other than "accumulate more."

For example, Elon's personal spending and the structure of his compensation. If he just wants to go to mars, why does the stock price and his share thereof matter so dang much?

Or Bill's net worth, which has curiously increased despite his mission of giving it all away.

The stock price matters because it affects SpaceX ability to raise capital, and going to Mars takes a lot of capital. His share of the stock matters so he can retain control, so that he can make sure SpaceX remains focused on going to Mars, as against anything else. If it was just about making money for himself he'd float the company.

Capitalism is a system that rewards capital accumulation, the richer you are, the more power and freedom you have. Therefore, it incentivises capitalistic behaviour. People can break with those incentives, but I'm not critiquing people's ability to have good goals - I'm critiquing capitalism.

Capitalism does optimise for property rights, that's true - but if you're taking a utilitarian perspective (as all good rationalists should) then you have to ask what the material outcomes of that are. What we see is accumulation of massive power in the hands of a few, many of whom are doing active harm to the planet (just look at oil billionaires' behaviour). Supporting them is a worldwide underclass of people working in sweatshop conditions or actual human slavery. Maybe optimising for private property isn't providing very good outcomes.

What we actually see is broad wealth generation that is relatively widely spread (albeit not perfectly uniformly spread) lifting billions out of the crushing malthusian poverty that has been the fate of 99% of humanity, and the creation of social orders in which the rich, while they are rich, have strict limits on their abilities to control the lives of the majority.

That broad wealth generation isn't caused by capitalism, it's caused by technological innovation. Capitalism is just the means by which the rewards are distributed. If we start a company together that increases grain yields, it could either be capitalistic and whoever "owns" the company just pays everyone else wages while keeping all the profit, or it can be cooperative where the rewards are decided democratically and everyone who works there "owns" the company. The latter example is not capitalism, even with the presence of markets!

I'm pretty sure that the way it worked is the vast majority of wealth accumulated with the King and 7-10 people close to the King. Everyone else... was not important to the King. Capitalism is simply an economic system where regular people can own the means of production. It is not about distributing rewards. That is the language of a feudal economy.

A system can distribute rewards just as a person can. If acting in the capitalist economy incentivises specific behaviours, that economy is distributing rewards based on those incentives.

Systems are operated by people, which is why many great ideas on paper devolve into dictatorships, oppression and death in real life. See Ukraine for an example.

Putin's dictatorship is operated by a person, but capitalism is not - it's made of people. Nobody runs the markets, they run by themselves based on people's participation, governed by rules. Invisible hand and all that.

You are correct about Putin.

But as a matter of fact, that's not what happens. What actually happens in the actual real world is:

1. The owner of the company doesn't keep all the profit -- they share out the vast majority of it. (Look at the retained profits vs gross margins of any company you can think of. Look at the wages that you, yes I bet you yourself, are paid).

2. When we don't do it this way, we don't actually get the innovation. The thing that incents people to solve the problems of bringing new products to the public (the very large problems, the problems they can spend the majority of their lives attacking) is the possibility of reward.

1 depends on the industry, some industries are low-margin while others are high-margin. Either way, why don't the people who generated the profit, the workers, get to decide how the profit is divided?

2 isn't true. Not only is most innovation funded by taxes and conducted by public institutions, but it's the market that drives iterative and combinational improvement on new inventions and you can have markets without capitalism. Capitalism is the division of people into capitalists who own the means of production (traditionally factories but nowadays increasingly IP), and workers who work them for a wage. The first step in moving in the right direction, IMO (I'm keen on incrementally and cautiously implementing improvements) would be to ratchet up the number of cooperatives operating within the economy. They're more likely to survive than corporations and they're more empowering for workers.

Half my family is Chinese. Expansion of the capitalist sector of the economy has transformed that society and raised hundreds of millions out of grinding poverty and into the middle class, including my wife's family and relatives.

Why did this not happen in India, a country which had many advantages over China starting from 30 years ago? It's because the Indian commercial economy is strangled by socialist inspired bureaucracy and anti-competitive special interests. For all the China claims to be communist, it's commercial sector is cut throat capitalism of a particularly raw form. Much rawer that I would like, Chinese people suffer from some of it's excesses, but nevertheless it's produced an incredibly powerful and dynamic economy.

I don't know whether what you say about India is true, or what socialist-inspired special interests are given that socialism is about removing class distinction and thus special interests, but yeah I agree that Maoist policies were a disaster and market reforms were an improvement. But that's not a surprise to anybody, including Marx - who very clearly said that capitalism was better than dictatorship (or monarchy/feudalism, the only kind of dictatorship prominent at the time). It seems to me that India is just full of corruption given they have both billionaires and crushing poverty at the same time.

My primary political concern is reducing suffering. Capitalism leads to less suffering than dictatorship, but also leads to things like 996 and Chinese factory conditions, and thus should be either moderated or replaced with market socialism.

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