Hacker News Reader

Comment by bad_username | Hacker News Reader

> Late Capitalism: Check check fucking check.

I think the author would stop blaming capitalism after seeing the atrocious sofas of the late socialist Soviet Union, which wete not only worse than anything, but also the only choice.

View on HN

That's correct, the only two conceivable possibilities are "everything exactly the way it currently is" and "everything exactly the way it was in Soviet Russia".

Those sofas were about the same as what you'd buy at IKEA today, maybe even a bit more sturdy. And they basically were an IKEA kind of product: cheap and mass produced.

Interestingly, a Soviet-era sofa in good condition is now worth quite a bit for its retro properties.

Doesn't remove the fact that we had good sofas 40 years ago.

Perhaps capitalism is only good while it's kept in check by the menace of communism.

He paid somewhere between 3 and 4 thousand dollars for that couch in 1999, which is probably over $6k in today's money. Sure a $999 leather couch from Ikea may not be the greatest, but is it really so impossible to get a good quality leather couch for $6500 today? That sounds ridiculous to me actually, I'm certain that you could find many great options at that price. And I don't believe that mere availability of cheaper options is somehow a bad thing.

Exactly. I bought my couch and chair $4400 (CAD) on sale (about 40% off list) in 2008. I recall some people thought I was insane for spending so much money on a couch. I thought the price was fair after doing a lot of research, and the sale at the time was awesome. Also, a 20 year warranty on the frame.

Today, buying a couch and chair on sale for $6300 sounds like a lot of money, but I imagine I'd need to budget at least as much. Not from the same company though, they now sell shit couches for $2500 and people complain the quality is garbage and capitalism is failing. Or.... maybe you are just a cheap SOB.

I still have the same couch and chair, now super comfy, though it took years to break in. Leather is in excellent condition.

I am sorry, but the late socialist Soviet Union is a really bad example here - you want to compare 2 democracies with different economic attitudes, like the US and Germany (today).

The Soviet Union had a lot of problems that prevented the people there from the life they deserved. There were many monkey businesses from the US side, too.

Gorbachev tried to fix it and steer the system from a shitty corrupted communism to a more western socialism. Unfortunately for him the russians and honestly the rest of the world, he failed.

Remember it's never either this or that. The best system takes the good part from every attitude. The rigid, dichotomic attitude of the last century is the root of the problem, not communism or capitalism.

I imagine that is why he called out "late capitalism" rather than "capitalism".

The twenty-first century did not invent cheap goods of dubious quality.

That's correct. It invented expensive goods of dubious quality. If you want a cheap good and you buy a cheap good and it's cheap, that's all fine. More power to you. Problems come when the quality level you want is possible to manufacture, even profitably, but isn't manufactured because market said no.

I think you underestimate how expensive goods of good quality used to be. I have no good source for that though; just an impression that things used to be pricier.

It's easy to criticize his conclusion when you leave out all the evidence for said conclusion:

> But the subtext is drearily familiar. Globalization: Check. Cheap-labor arbitrage: Check. Tax engineering: Check. High profits: Check. Flat-packing: Check.

Do you deny that any or all of this is happening, today, under capitalism? Do you deny that there are incentives for any or all of this under capitalism today? Do you deny that these things would lead to the inevitable quality decline he's lamenting? Let's not have any more of your straw man attacks. Attack the real issue instead.

He spent $1100 CAD getting his sofa reupholstered, and the sofa itself cost over $3,000 CAD in 1999 according to the article (so about $5,000 today).

Cheap things are cheaply made isn't news. But being able to have them at all, is for a lot of people, very valuable.

What is not in the article is what would $5,000 buy him today? He doesn't know because he didn't go looking. The linked article in the article is someone talking about reupholstering a $1,000 sofa.

EDIT: I mean hell, that article wants to talk about a $300 1965 Sears Sofa... In 2024 USD that's almost $3,000.

He does have some idea what $5k would get him. He mentions that a new, well-made, leather-upholstered sofa would run 5 figures, so, at least $10k. That makes re-upholstering the economically rational choice over both a new $5k sofa and a hypothetical, same quality version of the 1965 Sears sofa.

I don't see what your point is.

That the entire context you posted for the conclusion doesn't seem to be based on even an attempt to understand whether the market has truly changed.

For that matter, it's also not clear if his sofa is particularly well made (we never see the frame in the article) or just expensive enough that it's worth re-holstering for the price he was quoted...because the article in question is someone who's $1,200 sofa would distinctly not be worth paying $1,100 to re-upholster.

This is just whataboutism. Maybe you don’t know this but there are many alternatives to both neo-capitalism and authoritarianism.

Tim is not blaming capitalism. Without wanting to put words in his mouth, I think he’s blaming unfettered capitalism and its winner-take-all bullshit where the majority of the participants in the economy fail to benefit from it.

My next business will - very intentionally - be a lifestyle business, but it’s been really hard to find a niche where I can build a quality moat against massive players. The odds are stacked against us smaller players because of an accumulation of capital which is unnecessary and less efficient than alternatives.

You can blather on all you like about capitalism being better than communism but the kind of capitalism we’re getting is no better for us than the kind of communism we’ve fought against.

To quote someone on HN some years ago - I apologise that I didn’t keep the URL - “The US government's democracy is at most the same as the Soviet Union's communism, merely something to cover the way that those in power divide the loot.”

The world is not binary.

Would you honestly prefer someone calling it en-sit-ification, combining "cleverness" with a Doctorow meme?

Right. I didn't think so.

Also, the sofas of the USSR are not relevant to the conversation any more than pre-capitalist couches are.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com