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Comment by afpx | Hacker News Reader

About 1.5 billion people were raised out of extreme poverty over about 30 years arguably because of capitalism. Similarly, large global middle classes have built up over that time. It feels like we should keep doing what we've been doing?

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I think that's some of what's captured by the idea of "late stage capitalism". That is to say, capitalism worked when companies where competing on quality, word of mouth was important, and mechanisms like social norms and unions promoted a balance of power between capitalists and workers.

However, capitalists have increasingly figured out ways to compete via regulatory capture, walled gardens, planned obsolescence, financialization, etc. Increasingly sophisticated marketing makes it easier to bypass the need for word of mouth sales. The 1% are increasingly insulated from the opinions of everyone else and unions are much weaker.

As a result, capitalism no longer works particularly well. At least without policies to correct for market failures; e.g. social democracy.

If you define wealth as having money, maybe, but if you define it as having food, shelter, and mental health, then less so. The middle class is collapsing, so maybe we should do things a little differently?

It doesn't make sense when the major health problem in the US is obesity.

Always these childish and clueless economic takes on this board.

What does obesity have to do with anything? People are eating unhealthy?

> Always these childish and clueless economic takes on this board.

"Avoid swipes" and "Please don't create new accounts regularly."

Obesity is certainly a factor holding back certain communities here in the USA. But I agree it's a tangential issue. On the issue of whether or not "the middle class is collapsing," I hear lots of arguments (as usual very polarized) on both sides of that debate. Does anybody have strong empirical studies to share (ideally non-partisan!) on how this statement holds up? I have googled and probably found the obvious stuff but I would love to read up more on this.

Here are a few sources[1][2] (oops, [1] is from 2020) but I don't have anything special. I think there was an article on HN that showed this well, but I can't find it. Basically, kids today have extremely limited chance to do better than their parents.

Homelessness is at an all time high.[6]

The following are loosely related to the economy, in that the cost of dealing with the problem is growing, and they prevent well adjusted growth.

There's also a mental health epidemic[3] from the Surgeon General[4].

Also consider the possible extinction level climate change issues[5].

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...

[2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/fewer-americans-are-makin...

[3] https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2023-05-02/loneli...

[4] https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-soci...

[5] https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/02/skyrocketing-ocean-t...

[6] https://www.npr.org/homelessness-affordable-housing-crisis-r...

Be careful how you measure that. Extreme poverty was defined as less than a dollar per day. Are you measuring progress or inflation?

It's a power law. The middle class also grew, less substantially. 86% of the world's population are wealthy enough to afford to own a smart phone. To me, that's pretty amazing.

I think that it is fair to attribute some of the ubiquity of smart phones to capitalism. However, I think that technological development is also a big factor. Even the least capitalistic/industrialized parts of the world are dramatically more technologically advanced than they where 100 years ago.

I think the point is that capitalism drives that technological innovation.

No, you see, only the bad parts of our current society are attributable to capitalism. /s

That's what I was trying to get at. It would be unfair to not give capitalism any of the credit for the advances that we have made (after all, people certainly blame it when things have stagnated), but it's probably also not fair to give it all of the credit. There were technological advances long before capitalism and many (most?) basic research takes place outside of capitalism in academia.

But there's a pretty long way to go from basic research to usable technology for regular people. Of course advancement would happen without capitalism, but would it happen at a similar pace? Society socialism didn't seem to be able to keep up (eg computers).

The Nordic countries do a lot of research & product development and they are social democracies which is a moderate form of socialism.

Doesn't china account for like at least half of that? And even there but also everywhere else it has stalled or even reversed since 2020?

Which is not even getting into the problem that "extreme poverty" is defined by organizations operating from within wealthy countries, who have their own interests, incentives, and constraints around these figures and their boundaries.

If you want to argue for it all being capitalism go ahead, so far you've just stated it.

way more than half. the world bank says at least 75% of the reduction has been in china alone and some other stats show that globally, excluding china, poverty has gotten worse in recent decades

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