
What If ‘Capitalism’ Isn't the Problem? [audio] - ojarow
https://musingmind.org/podcasts/julie-nelson
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Barrin92
It's not a productive word really because it almost poisons every discussion
based on whether someone's broadly sympathetic to 'capitalism' or not. Even
when people actually agree this can cause meaningless confusion.

What I think is very valuable within our system is markets _as a tool_.
There's no functioning replacement yet for allocating resources through
something like a market at large scale. Even socialism sympathetic economists
like Oscar Lange recognised this a long time ago.

What's wrong with the status quo I think is markets as an ideology, confusing
social ends or larger objectives with the outcomes markets or capital produce.
There is too little coordination in society, too little forward thinking and
planning at a high level. It shows in the covid pandemic into which we
stumbled like fools despite knowing it would happen at some point, the way
we're screwed every time a wildfire breaks out despite we know it'll happen. I
think it's glorifying capitalism as a way of life rather than a tool that
produces these failures.

~~~
nickff
I don't think anyone denies that omniscient, well intentioned planners would
be very efficient, but subjectivism and the calculation problem mean that you
will never have the former, and political economy explains why you will not
acheve the latter.

Spontaneously ordered systems are also better at dynamic adaptation to
exogenous changes (such as technological ones).

~~~
Barrin92
How can political economy explain away something that's already succeeded?
It's how Singapore moved from the third world to first, in the words of LKY,
how Taiwan and South Korea got rich, how China has dragged people out of
poverty, arguably also how the US navigated a huge portion of the cold war, by
strategic thinking and determining clear goals, and then leaving the _how_ to
less centralised systems to figure out.

The 40s to 70s broadly were an era in which there appeared to be a pragmatic
balance between strategic planning and decentralized execution, in which
markets where tools, serving national interest. It's also probably the era in
which we saw more technological progress than at any other point.

Bringing up 'political economy' in this context is what produced the old
saying 'Economists are the sort of people that see something work in practise
and ask if it works in theory', it's exactly a symptom of the dogmatism that I
think is plaguing us.

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philips
I can't listen to the podcast at the moment. But, along a similar theme
Doughnut Economics tries to imagine adjustments that are required to
traditional economic models from the 19th and 20th century that are required
to keep the biosphere productive for humans.

[https://www.kateraworth.com/doughnut/](https://www.kateraworth.com/doughnut/)

An idea that stuck with me is that markets are powerful tools that need to be
embedded into other systems but arent self regulating systems all by
themselves. It seems too often in debates on big problems the argument is
simply we need a market solution not how is the system designed to best
utilize a market.

~~~
bjo590
> It seems too often in debates on big problems the argument is simply we need
> a market solution not how is the system designed to best utilize a market.

"We need a market solution" is politician for private interests want to change
laws so that they can expand their businesses.

~~~
throwaway894345
While I agree, it’s kind of throwing the baby out with the bath water. Carbon
taxes are also a market-based solution which aligns well with public
interests, for example.

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sbmassey
Capitalism's basic meaning is that the means of production are owned by
private parties.

Putting them under government ownership instead doesn't seem like the solution
to anything, unless you are very sure that the government will follow your
ideological beliefs, not be corrupted by its newfound direct power over
peoples lives, and not get taken over by populists.

~~~
epistasis
One problem with the term "capitalism" is that it means such different things
to different people. For example, feudalism is not generally considered
capitalism by those that are anti-capitalist, but feudalism was still private
ownership of the means of production.

Or, in the Democratic primaries, Bernie Sanders railed against capitalism,
whereas Elizabeth Warren embraces the term, and they both had very similar
policies. They were talking in different ways to appeal to different crowds
that have different definitions of capitalism. And it creates tribal responses
for some supporters.

~~~
sudosysgen
Feudalism was not private ownership of the means of production.

Indeed, uner feudalism, the means of production were not commodified, and de
facto the lord did not have the right of ownership to the land, because he was
only allowed to use it in one very specific way. Therefore, lacking the right
of exclusive control, feudal property does not fulfill the definiton of
private property.

This is why feudalism is universally understood not to a form of capitalism.

~~~
epistasis
Well that's a very different definition than "private control of the means of
production," however. People focus on different aspects of the myriad
definitions of capitalism, and the term becomes meaningless unless some part
of the conversation first defines what sort of definition or aspect of
"capitalism" one is talking about. However, people often experience a
tribally-motivated response to the word before the meanings can be focused on.
I'd doesn't make the word "capitalism" useless but it does make it difficult
to start a discussion with a general group of people when leading with the
word rather than the specifics that one would like to address.

~~~
sudosysgen
I agree, we do need a very specific and structured definition of capitalism
which analyzes it as a social and political system. Which has been done and
achieved consensus almost two hundred years ago, but now it's become almost
taboo to mention :)

But yes, confusion about these definitions is due to the fact that we haven't
had a serious _remise en question_ of the social order in the anglophone world
since the end of WW2.

As for my definition of private control of the means of production, I think
it's fairly uncontroversial to say that if someone may not decide how to use
something then they are not owners of such a thing, but merely hold a license
to it. It's the same argument for why you can never own a copy of proprietary
software, only own a license to it :)

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nickthemagicman
Two alternative viewpoints I have that are radically opposed:

What if government regulations warp capitalism and give protectionism and
favoritism to certain companies while excluding the rest and not allowing for
the free market to work?

What if unregulated capitalism has cannibalized itself and destroyed the free
market by way of big fish eating up all of the small ones and now we're left
with a bunch of huge corporations with outsized power and no threat from
competition?

~~~
fallingfrog
The first usually happens as a direct consequence of the second.

~~~
arrosenberg
This is the correct answer. Look at what happened at the end of the Wilson
administration when Andrew Mellon took over as Treasury Secretary as a prime
example.

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lefrenchy
> Rather, she targets ‘economism’ - a particular set of economic theories and
> assumptions, plus a layer of incentives we’ve built atop them. Neither
> updating our theories to better match reality, nor redesigning the incentive
> structures that underlie economic outcomes require an exit from capitalism.

While that may be true, I think the reason we got here is because Capitalism
inherently incentivizes those types of theories, assumptions, and incentives.
You can argue that an ethical Capitalism is possible sure, but that would
require labor power and a strong state to prevent the erosion that we have
seen in the last half decade.

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satisfaction
Capitalism is not the problem, the problem is that people continue to do
business with companies that operate with disregard for the long term
consequences of their business practices.

~~~
losteric
If humans are innately short-sighted and tribal/selfish creatures, any system
of organization that assumes otherwise is problematic. That seems to be the
case with capitalism.

A society with a strong education system that perpetuates cultural values of
long-term sustainability could get by with less explicit regulations, but I
don't see us getting from here to there.

And even if we got there, such a utopian capitalist society would be fragile
and prone to corruption towards over-exploitation. Other systems are needed to
maintain balance -taxes, political advertising regulations, labor laws, etc

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herghost
For Capitalism to work properly the government needs to be be empowered, and
properly able, to enforce rules that prevent any one organisation from
becoming so powerful that it corrupts and undermines the whole system. We
don't have that today.

~~~
phaus
Its important to prevent individual companies from doing it but its also
important to prevent groups of companies and even entire industries from doing
it.

~~~
kaibee
It really is this simple. Unfortunately simple isn't the same thing as easy.

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dqv
I'm not far into it yet, but this isn't the first time that I've heard this
thought from Zen practitioners - that the practitioner should not blame
capitalism for their problems. It makes me want to look further into Zen to
see what leads people to this line of thinking.

~~~
freehunter
It’s the same reason why libertarianism is so popular in Silicon Valley.
Billionaires want and can afford complete freedom from the government.
Including taxes, including regulations, including responsibility for the
consequences of their actions. So they will seek out any teaching that (if
corrupted far enough) will justify those desires and actions. But they’re just
as happy to enforce all the things they hate on you, because their belief is a
corruption of libertarianism. They don’t actually believe it, it’s just an
excuse to not pay taxes.

Like libertarianism, SV has a way of taking exactly what they want from Zen
and leaving the rest of the beliefs lying in a pile behind them. The Zen
teacher Les Kaye famously said about Steve Jobs that he understood “the art,
not the heart” of Zen.

If SV really cared about Zen, would we have unskippable ads? Would we have
“like” buttons? Would we have auto-playing Netflix movies while you’re merely
sitting still in a menu?

They don’t care about Zen. They never have. What they care about is making
themselves feel better about the horribly un-Zen-like things they inflict on
their audiences. Zen is just a coping mechanism to stroke their ego a little
more.

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RocomRitmore
Big government is the problem.

With a growing size of government, every conversation becomes a conversation
about your life.

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evo_9
Capitalism when balanced is near perfect.

Capitalism taken to its fullest extreme is greed out-of-control. This is where
the US is right now.

~~~
fallingfrog
What we are experiencing now is reversion to the norm. The post-ww2 period was
a special moment when a lot of things lined up to produce a capitalism that
was relatively egalitarian, but that was the result of the USA being the only
intact industrial economy left, and owning the world reserve currency, and so
on. It was never going to last, and it will never happen again. We’re already
bringing back sweatshops and extreme inequality.

~~~
iterativ
In 1949 (just after WW2), Einstein wrote: "The economic anarchy of capitalist
society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil."

Einstein was not a sociologist, but it's an indication that about "egalitarian
capitalism" is not exactly true.

~~~
thrwway34
Judging that just several years ago Soviets managed to starve another million
of their citizens, I'd say Einstein was utterly naive.

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socialdemocrat
The problem isn’t capitalism as such but the mindless worship of capitalism.
The belief that more capitalism is always better than less.

In particular in America capitalism has become a holy cow. If you suggest
ideas from socialism you are labeled a dangerous radical and taken off the
air.

The so called “liberal media” are bastions of capitalism. One can only look at
the scathing criticism and scare mongering about Bernie Sanders.

When it comes to capitalism there is unfortunately a lot of pearl clutching.
You are not say something negative about capitalism and positive about
socialism in polite company.

