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Comment by abdullahkhalids | Hacker News Reader

There are none. But I don't want the economic system to be judged by its ability to do resource allocation. I want my economic system to be judged by its ability to improve metrics of human well being - and not even the median well-being, but the well-being of say the 10% percentile person in society.

Sure, resource allocation can be a instrumental to those goals of human well being, but not the directly optimized metric. So, for example, I care very little gdp/capita when you can just as easily measure life expectancy or food stress levels.

On such counts, capitalism has a mixed record. Today, for example, a lot of countries that are "more capitalistic" than others have poorer metrics of human development than those that are "less capitalistic".

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>There are none. But I don't want the economic system to be judged by its ability to do resource allocation. I want my economic system to be judged by its ability to improve metrics of human well being - and not even the median well-being, but the well-being of say the 10% percentile person in society.

That requires resource allocation as a prerequisite and a functioning democracy that values this metric. Blaming the first one for not having the latter is a choice, but a strange one.

Not so strange. Just like communism slips to oligarchy, capitalism slips to plutocracy, and as such actively undermines democracy. It doesn't that campaign budgets are capped when you have the right media owners on your side.

People decide on resource allocation, period. It is as "efficient" as choosing human laws versus natural selection, the latter being exactly the model capitalism is copied from.

One issue with capitalism — and every alternative system would have its own variant of this problem — is rent seeking. Players become so powerful within the economic system that they no longer play by the rules, but rather write the rules to their benefit. This allows them to extract value instead of creating value.

This is a run-away positive feedback loop which is kept in check by regular revolt and redistribution of wealth (see eg. the labor movement).

Yes. The obvious solution is to either design your politico-economic system that big players never emerge, or are such that they don't have incentives to corrupt (eg. SOE).

Another example of the latter, is that large companies should always be majority owned by their employees in a 1/N fashion. The idea being that even if such players try to rent-seek, at least the rent is being extracted in favor of normal people rather than a small class of rich people.

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