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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

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For Hayek's sake, would you please stop it with the generic ideological flamewar comments? I don't want to ban you and you're making it seriously hard. How many dozens of times have we asked you not to do this at this point?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: actually your recent comment feed is so full of this that it seems you've stopped using HN for anything else. As that is not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, I've banned your account. 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. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

It's a mixed economy, with massive government inference in markets, just like literally every single country on the planet.

it's moving away from being one of the worst examples of central planning and bureaucracy

Didn't China (https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...) and the USSR (https://borgenproject.org/tag/poverty-in-the-former-soviet-u...) do similarly?

Your second link refers to poverty being reduced after the fall of communism, when former Soviet states instituted capitalist reforms.

There was a massive drop in living standards in the former Soviet Union after the introduction of capitalism in the 90es. Average life expectancy dropped something like 10 years, corresponding to millions of dead.

>There was a massive drop in living standards

that tends to happen when the government runs resources down to near-zero, forcing the new system to start from scratch.

had the conversion occurred earlier, when the USSR was still a reasonably successful state, I suspect it would have gone nicer.

It also coincided with massive increase in the supply of available alcohol.

And that’s an issue of capitalism, not impotent economy that has been drained by decades of poor planned economy of communism?

The millions dead in the Holodomor and the Great Leap forward certainly don't have any need for money anymore.

Both of those articles demonstrate that the improvement happened after those countries allowed market economies.

Most communists and socialists will refer to both the USSR and China as capitalist projects on accelerated timelines. They were trying to speed-run from feudalism, through capitalism, to communism.

At least that's what comes up when you mention the problems that these countries have.

China's unprecedented generational explosion into the middle class happened only after Deng Xiaoping instituted market reforms. Economically, China is certainly more socialist than the west, but far more capitalist than it was in the 1970's.

Same with USSR/Russia, post-communism.

At least currently, Russia is far below USSR median PPP income, inflation adjusted.

Life has gotten worse for the average person in Russia in the last 40 years, not better - by almost every measurable metric.

And that's with all the low cost tech they can import - like $20 cell phones and pirated Hollywood movies.

If China is on one end of success, Russia is on the other.

Market reforms are not intrinsically capitalist.

Yes but these were. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_economic_reform#:~:tex....

Only after they gave up a planned economy.

The west is shooting itself in the foot with socialism while Asian countries are lifting people out of poverty at an unprecendented rate.

Inequality is a feature, the pie grows larger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtJwAYJ9B08

Instead of lifting poor class upwards, the west wants to pull everyone else down. Reducing quality of life and regressing in every metric of progress. The future is in Asia, places like Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, Malaysia, Singapore. Socialism is so easily captivating to average IQ voter class in USA, it is a fight every generation has to go through. Countless examples of failures won't convince people.

The likes of Greta Thunburg have changed their tune from climate alarmicism to just destroy Capitalism all together: https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/15885879870379786...

Capitalism branding has been damaged by equating it with crony-capitalism which is what most people think it is.

A tweet to a writer of a book with bad faith arguments (https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/07/review-bad-scienc...) and a youtube link to a talk by the president of the Ayn Rand institute does not an argument make.

PS: You might find this information on how her old was financed amusing (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ayn-rand-social-security/). I know I did.

Maybe I should have listed Milton’s books. Just because professor is part of Ayn Rand institute, you're not arguing about the points presented in the lecture, but instead discarding his credibility by association. There is a massive amount of 200+ years of history of Capitalism that's difficult to succintly address here.

Here is Alex Epstein's Google talk about climate alarmicism that aligns with Shellenberger's post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6b7K1hjZk4

Shellenberger's book review (first one that shows up on google search) is just following the same tropes of Climate catastrophization. The article doesn't steelman Shellenberger, but instead reduces it down to "… yet bad science, strawman arguments, cherry-picking facts, and ad hominem attacks on scientists, media, others"; ofcourse written by folks at Yale "Climate Connections" blog.

Here are a couple of alternative reviews: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/apocalypse-never-the-...

https://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?id=...

Climate arguments have no counter balance. The media routinely ignores the otherside of the equation and never provides a balanced view of how we can tackle it. Instead, the zeitgeist created by progressives for last 50 years is that we should depopulate, regress, and reduce quality of life and ultimately become state dependent. The same group of scientists and environmentalists that also ran the campaign against nuclear energy.

It has nothing to do with capitalism, it's all about strong government, strong institutions and the people who understand and pursue a common goal i.e: a synchronized society

If anything, capitalism wins at: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-11/india-s-d...

Not OP, but I think what he's referring to is communism declining a generation ago:

> Following liberalizing economic reforms in the late 1980s and early 1990s, India is now one of the world's fastest growing economies, as well as the second most populous.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110520002800/https://www.ers.u...

This is exactly what i'm saying, without the people deciding one the policies and the tools to use, it's nothing

Otherwise we see other kind of societies:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/cartel-capitalism/

It's not hard, really, given that you will need to make only $1.90 per day to automatically become declassified as poor [1]. If anything, capitalism makes this harder to do achieve [2] which probably explains why the limit is set so low.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/international-poverty-l...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X2...

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