Comment by big-green-man | Hacker News Reader

Comment by big-green-man | Hacker News Reader

The USSR tried it already.

This is literal communism dressed up as science.

> Strategies for development should not pursue capitalist growth and increased aggregate production as such, but should rather increase the specific forms of production that are necessary to improve capabilities and meet human needs at a high standard, while ensuring universal access to key goods and services through public provisioning and decommodification.

Literal. Communism.

The abstract embodies, I suspect unironically, literally every gripe, criticism, fatigue and disdain people feel for both the current scientific and academic establishment and the plethora of Malthusian narratives that permeate our public discourse today. If you don't understand how people can be "anti science" when it comes to climate change and the like, just read the remainder of the abstract after my quote. The last two words of it are "global south". These issues and these terms, once viewed as legitimate with genuine concern, are now viewed as nothing more than the dog whistles and manipulative strategies of ambitious tyrants to most people. Double down if you want to lose what little credibility you have left.

So your argument it’s simply not possible to feed and maintain decency for 8B people?

Communism tried it, failed therefore not possible.

The global west hyper-capitalism doesn’t seem to be fixing the problem either, and as there isn’t a third way possible.

QED.

Good to know, I’ll go on partying like there is no tomorrow.

Thanks to large corporations, shareholder interests and various other self-interested minorities, there will be no third way since that would imply the rich would have to give some of the pie away to the poor.

Now what part of the current destructive systems haven’t we got under control? Or better asked, what parts of the system are god given and can’t be changed? Are we making societal rules, norms and laws or are these given to us by the universe - unalterable?

The fact is that this entire mess is self inflicted. But it’s the best we can do and therefore we’re stuck with it.

Lack of imagination and courage to do something different could also be a cause.

It's a highly disturbing sign of the times that "this is just communism" no longer works universally as an argument. That it needs to be qualified now, suddendly, even here on a forum for startups -- even though almost everybody over the age of 30 knows it does not work like they know that the sun rises in the morning.

Of course, it's no less alarming that there's also a growing population who is incapable of understanding "that's nazism dude, don't do that".

I didn't make an argument. I simply made an observation. But I'll make one now: it's not possible with communism. This has been empirically tested, at the expense of millions of human lives. I'd say in light of that that there is no need for further hand wringing on this topic.

Is it possible some other way? I don't know. I do know that life expectancy worldwide has been going up since the 70s, as has quality of life and quality of nutrition. Maybe what we are already doing works?

I think the problem is that the words "communism" and "capitalism" are too big and mean too many inter-twingled things all at once. Also that they tend to mean different things to different people.

Despite purported differences in ideology, US and Chinese government expenditure is roughly the same as a % of GDP.

Most societies are running a mix of private and government directed production and most taxes are spent on communal goods like health care, education, welfare and defense.

I think discussions of social policy are a lot more productive if we stick to the pros and cons of specific initiatives and policy (e.g. universal single payer healthcare, or UBI at level X) without invoking complex labels that trigger knee-jerk reactions.

Personally I don't see why nationalised production of certain basic essentials should be completely outside the overton window. To me it just seems like another tool you could use to achieve social policy.

I don't necessarily disagree with you. But the word "communism" is synonymous with state directed production, and often it is in the name of state determined living standards for the sake of improvement of those standards. That's always been the pitch, and that's always been the methodology.

This "study" is exactly that, verbatim. It's communism dressed up as science, as blatant as I think it can be done.

Now, we can talk about policies that might make something better or worse, pros and cons, whether the state should direct or influence certain industries for whatever reason, all that. But this article isn't doing that. It's recommending straight communism as a solution to all the worlds ills, that's all it is doing.

Ok I read the article carefully and you're right.

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