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Comment by erdeibit | Hacker News Reader

Capitalism optimization: make the rich richer making the poor poorer

You live in the most privileged period in human history.

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/poverty-explorer?tab=li...

You’re posting this like it’s a counterpoint, but it further highlights how disgusting the situation is. We have people becoming trillionaires while 10% of the world’s population is considered to be in extreme poverty. It’s ‘less bad’ than in the past but it’s still absolutely horrifying.

How much of that trillion is liquid? If people stopped buying a Tesla, would that somehow help the poor?

Making electric vehicles more mainstream seems like a net-positive to the world.

Possibly. If they invested their money into something more societally productive and/or the government took their money to do that or they weren’t allowed to accumulate enough surplus wealth in the first place. Of course the last two options have been a bit problematic historically.

And yet we are also living in some of the strongest wealth inequality in the last 100 years at least.

https://ourworldindata.org/economic-inequality

This seems to apply much more to certain nations like the US while it drops worldwide in recent decades.

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/inequality?tab=line&cou...

I would call that holding steady worldwide in the last decade, which honestly is still unacceptable with how much more wealthy the world has gotten

So what? Inequality is not inherently bad.

Inequality is inherently bad but a certain level is needed as it comes with non-inherent good, like promoting useful economic activity.

Some people will say "what about the people with one leg? Should we cut off everyone's left leg so we're equal?" - it is bad that they have one leg while everyone else has two, but nobody except a certain satirical film actually suggested doing that.

That's a pretty strong assertion just throw out like it's obvious

So what? That seems entirely tangential. Unless your point that economic inequality inherently accelerates technological progress (which seems valid at least to some extent)?

You don't think capitalism played a role in eliminating poverty?

No, I implied it did.

I actually think that free market competition has been the main driving force behind human progress for quite a while now. The issue is that the “winning condition” of capitalism results in the complete subversion of that process. So it’s always a balance.

Free market competition is the opposite of capitalism though. Free market competition means that markets are free, but capitalism means that markets are controlled by the richest.

They inseparable, though? i.e. every market participant is incentivized to accumulate as much “capital” in any way they can. Competitors keep them in check which leaves a bigger share to consumers. Historically that has not been a stable system and at some point one or a couple of companies end up winning and there is no one to prevent them from doing anything they want.

It's only been a stable system as long as the richest were only rich enough to keep doing what they're doing in the marketplace, and not rich enough to buy or become the marketplace. That is one reason excessive inequality is destructive to society.

It is no problem if the best snack vendor can afford to buy the biggest snack truck. In fact that should be encouraged so we can have more of the best snacks. It's also no problem if he can afford a mansion. He deserves it for working so hard on snacks. It's bad if he can do anything that negatively affects his competitors, like buying the adjacent stands to leave empty, buying up all the snack ingredients so nobody else can get them, bribing the market manager, or making a law that all snacks must be french fries.

Has it? If you take a global perspective since the Industrial Revolution it seems some parts of the world excelled at the cost of some other parts (through exploitation and expropriation of land, people and goods). Poverty may have been effectively eliminated in the west and north, not so much in the east and south.

How privileged is a period?

Influence will be distributed similarly, regardless of political system: (Pareto Principle) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

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