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Comment by yareal | Hacker News Reader

Imagine looking at tech and saying, "this is a problem with tech companies, not a systemic flaw in capitalism itself". The tech companies are bad, but only uniquely bad in that they are efficient at what they do.

You think Boeing, General Mills, or ford wouldn't want you to be a dev if they could figure out how to do it?

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What does it have to do with devs? Those are business models devised by business people, some of them devs, some of them not.

The article mentions enshittification. BMW is offering heated seats on a monthly subscription [1]. If an average teams of devs was asked to implement that as a practical joke, they would certainly be able to do it. Some of them can't quite make the jump between that and the fact that companies do expect to make a profit out of it.

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/14/business/bmw-subscription...

Just because developers aren’t coming up with the business models doesn’t mean they bear no responsibility. You can’t go to work every day for a company that makes bad things, as someone making bad things at that company, and claim no responsibility for their existence in the world. This is especially true when employee mobility is so high in software. Surely if developers had a mature sense of professional ethics and strong personal values they would be sure they worked at a company that they felt aligned with them, or admit that they have compromised their values for a larger paycheck.

That BMW article is from 2022. They don’t offer that anymore[1].

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/7/23863258/bmw-cancel-heated...

That is not how I interpreted GP's point. It sounded to me as if they were saying that anyone in tech could move to other industries and make big bucks if the points in the interview were true.

Thing is, even if the points in the interview are false, that would not apply, as devs are not the ones making the shots.

Edit: btw, thanks for the heads-up about the heated seats subscription thing. I hope it doesn't make the point moot.

The devil is in the details, and nuanced. A broadly capitalistic structure in the right place and time for the right society and with the right regulation, can be good.

A state stricken with, say, ethnic factionalism that, while holding fair elections, oppresses their minorities, has a problem. Is it a problem with the majority race? Is it a problem with the presence and lack of ethnic minorities in this particular state? Is it a problem with democracy in general that it is perhaps not suitable for some states?

Here the author makes the point that broadly speaking, the details of how capitalism used to be organized did not have these feudalistic aspects that aren't good, but they do now.

> Boeing, General Mills, or ford wouldn't want you to be a dev if they could figure out how to do it?

You do in fact agree with the author. He calls this subspecies cloud capitalism. In another time or place, cloud capitalism would be materially impossible, and capitalism of another flavor might still be appropriate.

You disagree with the author in that they are silent on other types of capitalism, but you are considering this to be a flaw with capitalism at large, from what I can tell.

> The devil is in the details, and nuanced. A broadly capitalistic structure in the right place and time for the right society and with the right regulation, can be good.

Same can be said for a communist structure. No?

Pretty much any structure, you can say the same thing lol. True capitalism has never been achieved!

I would rather say it is a synergi between technology and capitalism, both are needed to create the current state.

Technology has always been a double edged sword thru human history, it is just that the sword keeps getting bigger and bigger.

Capitalism can then take that sword and use one of the edges and make money out of it and that in turn wields political power.

It's not the capitalism per se, but lack of free markets and overregulation. Humanity hasn't found yet a better way for resource allocation that capitalism.

Capitalism = the system where the ownership of the capital is by private persons. (as defined by the dictionary)

Is there a systemic problem that your auto dealership is not owned by government? May be the problem is that you can't open a new one, because of zoning laws or minimum wage or something else? No markets are free, but only in countries where markets have some degree of freedom you can have the abundance (and corresponding waste of the system).

Check all centralized systems of resource allocation - from socialism, highly centralized authoritarianism, theocratic monarchies or very large companies. No competition = more waste.

Any owner of a small business understands that there is no "flaw in capitalism" itself, because you can't force your clients to buy from you. You can only do that if you have cornered the market. You can't corner the market if you play by the free market rules. But if you need a "licence", "certificate" or other non-market tool to sell your goods to the customer this is the way to kill your competition.

Varoufakis has been wrong soo many times since Greece default that it's not even worth mentioning all his predictions.

btw, auto dealerships are like that because territorial exclusivity by the large companies, not the "capitalism".

because of capitlism, there are >1 auto dealership ...

>btw, auto dealerships are like that because territorial exclusivity by the large companies, not the "capitalism".

The auto world is cut-throat competitive. There are dealers everywhere, and most cars and features are commoditized. In every class and price range there are easily substitutable vehicles. Tech people like to talk about the auto industry like the market is scandalous.

The problem is access to the tools by independent auto shops. There is a whole industry of alternative tool providers who are sniffing and reimplementing the protocols, because of the vendor lock-in.

Yeah I continue to not understand the “late capitalism” label of current events. Very little of what we have today can be called capitalist in the original, competition-focused sense of the term. Most markets are very regulated and anticompetitive.

Capitalism in the original, competition-focused sense of the term has never existed in the real world, any more than Communism in the purely egalitarian stateless and classless sense. Late stage capitalism refers to the inevitable end-state of what capitalism actually evolves into, which is essentially oligarchy, preceding collapse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_capitalism

The fact that a pure thing never existed doesn’t mean that something more pure didn’t / can’t exist.

That’s also not what late stage capitalism, the term, generally refers to.

If a key part of capitalism is competition, then clearly whatever we have now is not very capitalist. The primary reason this term (late stage capitalism) is used is because people lack knowledge about economic history and can’t seem to operate on anything more complex than good-bad, capitalist-communist, private-public.

A key part of capitalism is rhetoric about competition.

Oppressive monopoly is the inevitable outcome of "competitive" capitalism.

The point is so obvious it's trivial to model mathematically. I believe there was even a board game invented to make the point.

What do you think anti trust laws are? And do you think we have an abundance of them now?

Ineffective and barely enforced.

Competition isn't a key part of capitalism - it only exists where governments force markets to optimize for "fairness" over efficiency. Left to their own devices, corporations will tend towards oligopoly and monopoly, so they can control the most capital with the least risk.

Which capitalist theorists say that competition isn’t crucial for the success of capitalism?

It’s entirely integral to the proper functioning of the system. What you’re describing is that not being followed, which is exactly the point I’m making.

> Which capitalist theorists say that competition isn’t crucial for the success of capitalism? > > It’s entirely integral to the proper functioning of the system. What you’re describing is that not being followed, which is exactly the point I’m making.

Well, what's good for the system is not necessarily the optimal state for any given individual actors in the system. I'm sure that you'd agree that from a profit perspective, monopolistic market dominance would be the ideal state, since you wouldn't have competitors to force prices down. Or would you argue that these kinds of companies want competition and that they wouldn't choose total market dominance if given the chance?

This, meanwhile, would not be good for the system as a whole, which is why you get competition and also things like anti-trust laws to make sure that this kind of thing doesn't happen, or that even if a natural monopoly, things are still functional.

The idea of late-stage capitalism is that if you create a system that prizes monetary gain over all else and allow companies to become sufficiently large and powerful then in the process of optimizing for maximum profit those companies are incentivised to capture the state and wield its power.

That may be the case, but it’s not capitalism as defined by any classical theorist or economist. As in, the people that actually defined the term. What you’re describing is more like profit-maximizing corporatism. Classical capitalist theory explicitly puts competition as the solution to this.

This is like the difference between communist theory and communism as it was actually practiced in the late USSR. The former had many good intentions but no real mechanism to ensure that it wouldn’t rapidly devolve into the latter. With capitalism we even have enough economic theory to understand why businesses are incentivized to move away from the ideal competitive environment, and to undermine the political mechanisms (like anti-trust) that should keep them there.

And then the solution would be …increasing competition and anti trust legislation. No?

I’m fairly certain that most people using the term late capitalism aren’t advocating for more competition, they’re advocating for more state control.

Anti-trust regulations are a form of state control though. Are they the only good sort of control?

Capitalism is not equivalent to anarchism. It’s perfectly reasonable to think that state control which incentivizes market competition is desirable, whereas state control that prevents such competition is bad.

I recommend that anyone with these views should test them in the real world.

For example, by going to an Amazon warehouse and telling the people who work there that their wretched conditions are the result of government overreach.

The response to this is to point out that Amazon has very little competition and that in a more competitive environment, other companies would treat workers better. See: Henry Ford’s treatment of workers compared to competitors.

> You can only do that if you have cornered the market.

How does capitalism address the fact that so many companies have cornered their markets not on merit but on resource access inequality, and have now accumulated enough resources to engage in lobbying and legal harassment for a long time even if free-market "reforms" are eventually passed? Should these companies be closed based on their past record?

> You can only do that if you have cornered the market.

Which happens over and over because we humans are flawed, thus every system we create will also be flawed.

If capitalisms only works in theory then it is as good as communism.

Capitalism (or more specifically, elements of it like private ownership and the market economy) has resulted in the largest increase of living standards in history.

See: China, India, ex-USSR countries like Poland.

Market economy is not necessary the same as capitalism, China is capitalist in some parts but it also a heavy state subsidized economy with a regulated market and public ownership.

And the massive increase in living standard can be attributed to multiple factors that was all needed to make it possible, superposition as it is called in physics, e.g. a proper contracting framework, a literate and educated public, technological advances, deregulating markets from the old estates system, etc.

We can take Sweden as a good example, yes the legislative change in 1864[1] that anyone could operate a business was crucial, but where did all the talent come from that actually created all those famous Swedish companies and inventions? Many came from the Swedish Army because Sweden was an old Great Power and the army needed many engineers to be able to build fortifications and such. Two of the most famous ones would be Nils Ericson[2] and his younger brother John Ericsson[3]

But you also need qualified workers and it happens that Sweden had at the time one of the most literate population in the world because of the Swedish state church. In the old days Sweden was quite strict religiously and the Swedish state church had conducted Household Examinations since 1686[4] about general knowledge in the Bible and Luther's Small Catechism. You can't really run a modern industry with an illiterate public.

Thus attributing everything to "capitalism" is gross simplification of history.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_of_Extended_Freedom_of_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nils_Ericson

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ericsson

[4] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Husf%C3%B6rh%C3%B6r

Answer a simple question for me:

Compared to fifty years ago, are the economies of China and Poland more or less capitalist? And if the increase in the quality of life for those two places isn’t from transitioning from communist/Soviet mechanisms to more capitalist ones, what do you attribute it to?

You can stuff anything in a pigeonhole if you try hard enough. Sure there are Polish and Chinese capitalism, but it's at an individual level. At other levels (corporate and services etc) it's different. And so on.

Describe the whole system, or we're just making sophomoric comments which don't help with understanding. "It's really just capitalism!" doesn't begin to cover the cases.

I don’t think it’s that complicated of a question, and you’d be pretty hard pressed to argue that the economies aren’t more capitalist compared to their predecessors.

Agreed. But nothing is simple; they aren't simply capitalist now.

China and Poland has definitely got it better with less communism, but what is "more or less capitalist"?

I also notice that you completely ignored my reply.

I ignored the rest of your reply because I specifically used China and Poland as examples. The relevance of Sweden in the 1800s is unclear to me and you didn’t tie that to the comment chain. People on HN sometimes have this tendency to throw up a bunch of unrelated citations that have nothing to do with the main point, then expect the replies to address each one.

I agree that everything can’t be summarized as a simple cause effect, but the parent comment I replied to was about comparing capitalism to communism, hence my usage of examples of states that went from communist to capitalist. In other words, this isn’t theoretical. We have examples of a capitalist state succeeding, when it was formerly communist.

Again, Sweden in the 1800s is not particularly relevant here.

It was me that was doing that comparison, agree it is not a perfect one because of many reasons, one is that communism is a political system that has an economic system (typically planned economy) and capitalism is an economic system only. Thus you can run a brutal dictatorship, like the communistic China, or benevolent democracy with capitalism.

And this is what I don't agree with the reasoning in this thread, it is a comparison of apples with oranges. Many proponents of capitalism does this error, they assume that capitalism gives political rights somehow, and they typically talk about things like freedom and such. But all of those political freedoms stem from somewhere.

And an continuation on that argument is that private companies a free to do what they want, when in reality private stock companies (in the West at least) has a separate legal entity and reduced liability as a guarantee from the state. Is that true capitalism?

Why I made the comparison between capitalism and communism is that both proponents of those systems usually reply "That is not real communism/capitalism!" about any flaw in these systems (which of course happened in this thread as well). But if every flaw is always theorized away, does it then only exist in theory?

If we look specifically at China for instance we can notice other things that has helped it, one is that greedy capitalist from the West moved industries there, China is also doing industrial espionage on Western companies, China as also aggressively spikes its currency, and it balloons it's GDP numbers by building ghost cities.

Consider that USSR was always a capitalist country, we didn't really have socialism in a lot of places, we mostly had Marxist-Leninist state capitalist states that nationalize means of production, still leaving for example the wage work relation intact.

It works not in theory, but in practice. And the main reason is the freedom inherit in swapping goods for money by the 2 sides by their own will. The freedom to choose where to invest your money gives the capitalism inherently more freedom that any other centralized system of distribution.

Communism can't work because economic inefficiency kills the system. Look at Russia and Ukraine now, during Soviet times after 1970 they imported grain, now they're one of the biggest exporters. It's not only technology, it's the "capitalism" at work.

In USSR, only 3% of land produced almost all fruits and vegs in the market, because the collective farms were given the permission to allow private land use and selling of produce on the market. They needed to give the collective farm a certain percentage of the crops, but what they kept they could've sold. Again capitalism at work... Efficiency was trough the roof.

Sure, if we two meet in the forest and I swap my piece of fur for some dried meat it is a win. But the problem with capitalism is that in the long run it starts to centralize in a similar manner as communism for efficiency and thus goes against the "Local knowledge problem"[1]

As a result what typically happens is that general quality goes down and that is what we observe can right now.

Please also read my other response in this thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39978645

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_knowledge_problem

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