Only in the sense that modernity produces a lot more wealth than any other system humans have come up with.
> What many see as prosperity, is irreconcilable with sustainability.
No, it isn't. What might be is allowing people to accumulate wealth by playing zero sum games, siphoning wealth out of other people's pockets into their own, instead of producing more wealth.
Wealth, as measured in GDP. A metric that has proven itself a poor predictor for happiness and fulfilling lives, and we do all this at the cost to our environment https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2022/09/death-by-hockey-sticks/.
> No, it isn't.
Our economies, political systems and culture are all built on the concept of infinite growth. Argue as much as you want, physics makes that impossible in a universe with limited resources.
Not really, everything could work exactly the same as now even when growth stops. The current system did bet on growth continuing for 40 more years, but there is no infinite there, other than those bets failing there is nothing in current society that demands infinite growth.
The reason is straightforward - people take care of things that they own, they don't take care of things they don't.
For example, which is threatened with extinction - ocean fish, or cows?
Are you more careful with your boss's money, or your money?
And so on.
"you'd be hard pressed to find a system more effective at destroying our world"
Ecosphere destruction is tied to that sort of wealth https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2022/09/death-by-hockey-sticks/. You grow one, you grow the other.
That's not true, unless in very basic technical sense - like, we need energy to exist, turn on our computers, etc. But resource extraction and energy production is not the dominating source of wealth for many years now. Look at the current market's magnificent seven: Alphabet (GOOGL; GOOG), Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL), Meta Platforms (META), Microsoft (MSFT), NVIDIA (NVDA), and Tesla (TSLA). Not a single of them does resource extraction or sells energy.
It's not true socially either. If someone wants to get rich, they go into finance, high tech, entertainment maybe. Not in oil prospecting or gold digging (not that there aren't money in it - there are, but it's not what the society considers to be a lucrative business anymore). It's not 1849 now.
I recall reading after the USSR collapsed that Poland was the most polluted country in the world. All due to the rush to industrialize and to heck with the environment.
Chernobyl is another case about communism giving short shrift to environmental considerations.
Lest we forget when that paragon of free market capitalism, the United States, prior to the creation of the EPA and its glorious burning Cuyahoga River.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/cuyahoga-river-caught...
Communist governments simply have to, as starving people tend to revolt.
Free market economies generated enough surplus that they can afford to be clean. Communist economies cannot even feed themselves.
I'm glad we see that the inevitable outcome of free market deregulation is destruction.
BTW, dignity comes from within. It is not imposed by external influences.
The power the workers have in a free market is the power to say "no" and walk away.
Guess what? The free market didn’t provide one either. It doesn’t actually provide a lot of things needed for a robust society.
It’s almost as if Wall Streets communism vs capitalism is a giant canard to distract from very basic, proven, and effective socioeconomic reforms.
Look at the sky in any given photograph of china.
Do you think Lindberg brought a port-a-potty along with his Spirit of St Louis? I remember the opening sequence in a Jeff Bridges movie where he pulls over in his car and dumps his pee bottle.
P.S. My dad was a B-17 navigator in WW2. I asked him what did they do when had to go. He said an empty ammo box was used. What was done with the full box? "Extra bombs over Germany!"
I'd rather live in a world where Amazon employees have time to pee on the job and Jeff Bezos has $10M less. Iterate until Jeff Bezos only makes ~10^2 what the median Amazon employee makes instead of ~10^6.
Heck, during the recent pandemic, all the public restrooms were locked closed.
What do you think people do when they go hiking?
Carbon taxes. Water prices reflecting scarcity. Compensating people living in rain forests to not cut down their trees.
Capitalism is still the best tool we have for setting prices and incentivizing efficiency. Just needs to be guided to place appropriate prices on externalities.
The problem is not enough water. You can't make water by taxing it.
All you're doing is making it less accessible for people lower down the hierarchy - which makes it even scarcer, because people at the top of the hierarchy end up hoarding it and/or profiteering.
Which is why price signals are one of the dumbest of all possible ways of managing resources. They're a political non-solution to a physical problem.
You may try to argue that "incentizing efficiency" means more water is produced. But that is empirically false.
The only real competition is capitalism is for shareholder cash. Customers are thrown overboard if their interests conflict with that goal.
None of this solves the physical, tangible problem of providing a stable water supply.
If you're having trouble understanding this, ask the people in Flint MI how making imaginary money game tokens more important than providing a usable utility has worked out for them.
You might also want to look into why the UK's water companies are currently dumping raw sewage into rivers. Hint: because they can, and because it's more profitable than filtering it first.
Au contraire; distorting or ignoring price signals is the dumbest of all possible ways of managing resources, precisely because you let people pretend that the underlying realities don't need to be contended with.
> Water prices reflecting scarcity are not a solution for water scarcity.
I assume the GP is referring to things like how agricultural water is dirt cheap in arid parts of the US. By making those prices better reflect reality (of scarce water in those regions), water-intensive agriculture will need to happen elsewhere, freeing up water for residential consumption, for example.
> why the UK's water companies are currently dumping raw sewage into rivers. Hint: because they can, and because it's more profitable than filtering it first.
So you agree that price signals would fix this problem?
You either accept that infinite growth in a universe with limited resources is impossible, or you're stuck loosing the rhetoric battle against physics.
I think the only sustainable way forward is to divorce our concept of wealth from growth, and ever increasing exploitation of resources.
Capitalism requires a philosophical split between labor, productivity, and capital ownership
A market is simply a price clearing mechanism in the context of known exchange rates of commodities, you don’t even need money for it, and says nothing about the ownership composition of the actors making trading decisions
I’m not sure what this proves though
Again the concept of a market is independent of capitalism, they are not mutually excluding