Hacker News Reader

Comment by augment_me | Hacker News Reader

How about non-production issues:

Land, energy infrastructure, mineral deposits, grid capacity, etc.

Who gets to live in the nice parts of the world? Who has a national park as a neighbour? Who gets to be ravaged by hurricanes every year? Who gets to have more energy production closer to then? Who will own the land that has the finite resources that are used to create abundance? Where will people with the most power live?

There are so many reasons beyond production why certain areas fare better than others inherently, I have not seen any answer to this apart from that all rich people will just fold and we will all be moved into soviet skyscrapers which I find improbable.

View on HN

I think everyone having the same standard of living any time soon is an unrealistic expectation. I expect standards to be sustainably raised, not for people to have all their problems solved.

This is more an organizational/political problem than a technology problem.

Our current oligarch-capitalist system (wherein most of the world is dictatorship or plutocratic) is not capable of equitable resource distribution. However, future, better systems of organization will likely provide better mechanisms for distrubtion.

Capitalism is an old and dying system. It is clearly unfit for the 21st century. It's best thought of as anachronistic, like feudalism. Once it's been excised from our societies, we'll be able to answer your questions.

Any planned economy is inherently built upon a bias and ideology that is culturally specific to the creators of it. There is no way that the US will accept a planned economy ran by China, or by India. However these countries followed by Africa will be the most populated areas of the world, so some would argue they should have more to say about this planned economy.

Meanwhile capitalism bases itself on game-theory and evolutionary selection. You compete with power, sexual selection and resources. It's sadly a system more aligned with the natural order of things. If you strip away all banks, hedge funds, etc, you are again going to get people who want to mate with the hottest fit partner, get the most resources to ensure survival of their offspring, etc.

The organizational/political problem I mention above with the land use land in the same bucket. Who gets the best land, etc. Historically this has just been decided by war and killing each other. Maybe you're right and that's where we end up, but that is very far from the utopias talked about in the comments above.

There’s no reason a priori to think capitalism more efficient or better for common utility functions (growth, human wellbeing, planetary sustainability).

A “planned economy” is very vague. Usually people imply a central committee deciding what to do. Our economy relies on plutocrats to decide what to do. At what point of plutocratic concentration would you call the US economy planned? My point is all these terms are fuzzy.

My point is that capitalism as is practiced in America is a failed ideology. From the vantage of the present day, it appears painfully antiquated. A pathetic vestige of a less civilized world.

It’s interesting because America had the opportunity to lead the journey to the next organizing principle for socio-economic, but instead decided to get stuck in the past. Pathetic, but standard course. I think it’s because our leadership is in their 80s.

When making this statement, you need to provide answers for the resource allocation question that both comment above didn't answer. What concrete institutions/principles would allocate resources better while remaining robust to the same human incentives that undermine capitalism today?

While you can't do this, capitalism is not failed, outdated, or antiquated. Which country gets what, who gets to live where, why, etc.

> When making this statement, you need to provide answers for the resource allocation question that both comment above didn't answer.

Why? Do movie critics need to be directors to critique? Obviously not.

> While you can't do this, capitalism is not failed, outdated, or antiquated.

Why? Capitalism is clearly failing the world. Being outdated is I suppose a relative perspective. I view it as outdated because it doesn't meet the needs of our current technology. Remember that economic systems are a function of available technology: they exist only in a social context. Our technology has already reached the point where capitalism is counter-productive.

I would love to have a replacement system ready to go. My hunch is it will require a lot of compute.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com