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Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

I would be very interested in having you explain that further, because it makes no sense to me at all.

Capitalism is bad because it lets us grow too quickly? I don't understand. Are you talking about market bubbles? Like that have been going on for four hundred years or more? If so, that's called a feedback loop: the system overgrows and then contracts. When you make a mistake and correct it, there's some adjustment involved. Surely that's better than no adjustment at all, right? I mean, to have everything perfectly valued would only happen in a fantasy world.

Or perhaps I misunderstood.

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Aneurysms are made possible through a weakness in the blood vessel. Meteoric growth in a capitalist economy, as the post I was originally responding to mentions, is the result of a weakness in human psychology -- greed.

I do not believe judging a phenomenon as a success due to an effect of a weakness is rationally sound.

I would say capitalism is not as good an economic system as one that enables steady, predictable co-existence of human society and synergy with the earth above meteoric, unsustainable growth, which on the downside causes pain, suffering, misery, death and perhaps the decimation of spaceship earth.

Meteoric growth in a capitalist economy is just as much about need as it is greed. The beauty of capitalism and markets is that they only provide signals and incentives - reacting to those incentives which are a direct reflection of immediate need/want can come as a result of altruism or greed but in the end, the result is implicit cooperation.

Besides, the one driver of commerce and every little transaction isn't and can't be greed anyway - it's trust. It is silly to blame this recent bubble on capitalism and markets when it was just as much driven if not started by state actors. As for the rest - "unsustainable growth, which on the downside causes pain, suffering, misery, death and perhaps the decimation of spaceship earth" - bullocks.

Capitalism and markets have resulted in less pain, suffering, misery, and death than any of the alternatives. Indeed it has been a central driver in alleviating many of these problems by ensuring need is reflected in the incentives. Growth in the longer run means innovation and that more needs are being met and more suffering is being averted - and that, at least to me, is a good thing.

> the result is implicit cooperation.

Right. The implicit cooperation. The implicit cooperation by the wealthy few that ultimately best serves the moguls' already grotesquely large fortune.

Just because I sell you an apple for a dollar doesn't make me an evil mogul and you an oppressed worker.

As an aside, we should really teach Marx better in modern schools. We teach the brilliance of his insights without then following it up with the many ways he was mistaken. I think sometimes Marx is being taught by the Humanities department and not Economics professors.

"more needs are being met and more suffering is being averted" If by suffering you mean the feeling of inferiority someone gets when they don't have leather seats in their caddy and a 12v 2litre engine, don't have the latest iPhone, can't cross the world in 20 hours.

Capitalism magnifies inequality as those with money get richer and those without toil to that end.

That view seems rather inconsistent with history. People in markets that are more free (there really isn't any market we can define as being "free" as yet though countries like HK and the US are closest) find that their people get wealthier at all segments than those that don't. Yes there may be greater inequality but you have to ask yourself if we should make sure that we avoid "the feeling of inferiority" by banning leather seats, 12v 2litre engines or the latest iPhone or by making it unaffordable for everyone.

To varying degrees, societies make a value choice (whether implicitly or explicitly): that people to live unequal but wealthier or equally poorer. There really isn't much of a middle ground - or at least not that yet exists. I find it curious that those of a certain ideological persuasion focus more on the inequality rather than income mobility which is, what at least I believe to be more important and why many of us here seek to create and build our own businesses.

We have only one planet. We already use up more resources than it has. More economic growth equals destruction on a planetary level.

destruction on a planetary level

Surely you can't believe the planet itself is going to explode or something, can you? I mean, what you're really saying is that more growth will make the planet into a state that you find offensive and hard to live with -- dirty skies, polluted water, etc.

If that's the case then I'm with you. Glad to talk about how clean we want to make things and what kind of rules we want to put on ourselves so the world meets our ascetic approval. (offline, of course)

I don't think you believe the planet itself is going to be destroyed. Life will continue, right? It'll just get ugly and uninhabitable for poor people -- which is not an acceptable option, by the way, but it's not destruction.

Or are you somewhere in the middle, thinking that somehow the planet will manage to kill just us and the rest of the ecosystem (or what's left of it) will continue?

When you use words like that, you really still need to explain yourself some more. I'm just grasping at straws here.

Hardly. One form of economic growth is increased efficiency.

Which will hardly be able to cope with the looming scarcity of resources, considering the numbers of population growth rate.

That's rubbish. Economic growth is not simply more of the same. The next 20% will not be like the last. The 20% before that was also different.

If we can get twice as far on a litre of petrol with no other costs (worse car, etc.) that is economic growth.

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