Why do you care about either of those questions?
It's absolutely best allocator of human effort there is. It has some problems but compared to alternatives it's almost perfect.
It absolutely does if you look at facts and not "vibes". There are less people starving now than ever now and it's a giant, giant difference. We are tackling more and more diseases thanks to big pharma. Even semi-socialist countries such as China have opened markets. Basically the only countries that do not implement capitalist solutions are the ones you'd never want to live in such as North Korea or Cuba (funny thing - even China urged Cuba to free their markets).
I see no reason to attribute that to capitalism. Capitalist and non capitalist societies had famines, and capitalist and non capitalist societies industrialized and improved people's material conditions - by raw number of people, non capitalist societies did this for more people.
The PRC indeed has opened their markets, and now has capital allocation issues - their initial chip development programs failed because of market viability issues, and for whatever reason their government didn't put the communism hat on and just nationalize the entire industry like it's done for other ones. More evidence against the supposed increase efficiency and outcomes of privatization and market based R&D and incentives.
North Korea seems to be failing less because of its economic system and more because the entire nation is a cult with a horrifying political system.
It seems quite literally all economic strife in Cuba is due to American sanctions - and in spite of these they still have a lower infant mortality rate than the Americans and make breakthroug medical discoveries.
So again, given the evidence, it seems capitalism is, at best, equally viable to whatever the Soviets and PRC did, in terms of allocating resources and lifting people out of poverty.
Given that we probably all will run out of ways to justify our existence under capitalism through selling our labor within our lifetimes, it seems like a very good time to start considering alternatives. Capitalism has no answer to the question, "what do you do with people when you have an 80% unemployment rate?"
That's completely false. Please take your time to verify it, I hope that getting your facts straight will make you reconsider your position (and not get mad at facts).
> The PRC indeed has opened their markets, and now has capital allocation issues - their initial chip development programs failed because of market viability issues, and for whatever reason their government didn't put the communism hat on and just nationalize the entire industry like it's done for other ones.
Don't you think that this argument does not make much sense? If the solution is that easy and has been done numerous times, why would they not do it again? Maybe the real answer is that it's just hard problem, and hard problems take time and serendipity.
> It seems quite literally all economic strife in Cuba is due to American sanctions - and in spite of these they still have a lower infant mortality rate than the Americans and make breakthroug medical discoveries.
But why would they need global trade? Isn't that one of inventions and consequences of capitalism? I don't think global trade is possible without free markets at all, so if global trade is necessary for prosperity, then so is capitalism. Also note that Cuba has approximately 25% higher infant mortality rate (I ask you again to look at the data; note that Cuba has higher infant mortality even though it has been criticized for artificially reducing their stats, e.g. by reclassifying part of infant deaths to fetal deaths) and their medical breakthroughs are nowhere near what US (or China, which now beats US because they... made market for pharma more free) is doing.
> So again, given the evidence, it seems capitalism is, at best, equally viable to whatever the Soviets and PRC did, in terms of allocating resources and lifting people out of poverty.
Again, that's completely false and PRC has seen biggest reductions of poverty AFTER implementing market reforms!
So instead, how about trying to answer the question that capitalism can't, within the confines of capitalist incentives - what do you do with people when your unemployment hits 26%? 50%?
Dogmatism towards the current system blinds perspective. One could easily grant that capitalism was the best industrializing mechanism, it still wouldn't presuppose it as the most humane framework for an industrialized world.
No, getting our facts straight is more important than construed arguments and imaginary scenarios.
Yes, precisely, because capitalism can't select for things that are useful for people, but unprofitable for capital owners.
There’s something else out there that nobody has the imagination to personally figure it out and get alignment toward it.
It can also be true that capitalism is transitory to get to a place where much of the capital one needs is invented.
Of course there are in-between approaches like industrial policy in mixed economies, for example the South Korean shipbuilding industry. But those tend to work with the grain of capitalism, not against it.
(Of course, those problems are on another plane than this one.)
These are absolutely worth studying, but being what they are, nobody should be dumping massive amounts of money on them. I would not find it persuasive if researchers used LLMs to solve the Collatz conjecture or finally decode Etruscan. These are extremely valuable, but it is unlikely to be worth it for an LLM just grinding tokens like crazy to do it.
That's not to say that there aren't benefits to tertiary education, for many people in different contexts. It's just not the golden path that it's made out to be.
Many people currently in college are just wasting their money and should enroll in trades programs instead.
Meanwhile, nothing about being in or out of school is mutually exclusive to using LLMs as a force multiplier for learning - or solving math problems, apparently.
This is after the fact justification. You are arguing that because a thing (number theory) showed practical applications we should have dumped a lot more effort into it. There is no basis for this argument whatsoever; it also seems to involve inventing a time machine. Number theory had no practical applications until the development of public-key cryptography, but you cannot make funding decisions based on the future since it’s unknowable.
Once we get something working, sure, you can justify more aggressive investment. This is not to say that we should not invest in pie-in-the-sky ideas. We absolutely should and need to. Moonshot research or even somewhat esoteric research is vital, but the current investment in AI is so far out of the ballpark of rational. There’s an energy of a fait accompli here, except it’s still very plausible this is all unsustainable and the market implodes instead.
You are completely missing the point. The point is that we should invest in pure maths because it has always been an investment with very good ROI. The funding should be focused on what experts believe will advance pure maths more (not whether we believe that in 100 years this specific area will find some application) and that's pretty much what we are doing right now. I think it's just your anti-AI sentiment that's clouding your judgement and since AI succeeded in proving pure maths results, you are inclined to downplay it by saying that well, pure maths is worthless anyway.
This is so wrong I don't even know where to begin. Modular arithmetic, numerical integration, pseudorandom number generation, error-correcting codes, predicting planetary orbits (!), etc.
A lot of applications just required a lot more computing power to be practical. This all starts to happen around the same time (unsurprisingly) and if you’re going to make hay that Reed-Solomon coding was invented in 1960, I think it’s worth pointing the first big use of was on Voyager because the computing power was finally able to make these work. It’s not like people hadn’t started to notice some of this decades earlier.