The Rich and Powerful Who Abuse the System: the contempt topic

[Heartofice]

21 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

15 hours ago, mcbigski said:

 

The problem is that the evidence that material prosperity is, in fact, a zero sum game, is tremendous

Lol, the mercantilists called, they want their ideas back 

[Rippounet]

9 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Lol, the mercantilists called, they want their ideas back 

Good one. Now kindly remind us what proved the mercantilists wrong.

[Heartofice]

9 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

Good one. Now kindly remind us what proved the mercantilists wrong.

I’d say massive improvements in quality of life globally and enormous decreases in poverty around the world might make the mercantilists scratch their chins a bit

[Rippounet]

5 hours ago, Heartofice said:

I’d say massive improvements in quality of life globally and enormous decreases in poverty around the world might make the mercantilists scratch their chins a bit

Would it, now? After the end of mercantilism, there was an accelerated development of the countries... that were already quite ahead economically in the first place (Britain being the case in point). And then, when other countries joined the club, it was generally thanks to protectionist measures, the best example of that being China, the country single-handedly credited with about half of the reduction in extreme poverty in the 20th century.
Trade may not be a zero-sum game in itself, but it has obviously had difficulties benefiting all partners equally. Now that we know that the "massive improvements in quality of life" that have been concentrated in a minority of countries as a result may have had a massive global environmental cost, one has to wonder whether the organization of labor that they championed was that much of a gift, and perhaps take a second look at what allowed some good to come out of it.

 

[Conflicting Thought]

1 hour ago, Rippounet said:

that we know that the "massive improvements in quality of life"

and lets not forget that they did that by colonizing and stealing all the resources, i mean easy to say capitalism works when you steal all our shit

[Heartofice]

5 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Would it, now? After the end of mercantilism, there was an accelerated development of the countries... that were already quite ahead economically in the first place (Britain being the case in point). And then, when other countries joined the club, it was generally thanks to protectionist measures, the best example of that being China, the country single-handedly credited with about half of the reduction in extreme poverty in the 20th century.
Trade may not be a zero-sum game in itself, but it has obviously had difficulties benefiting all partners equally. Now that we know that the "massive improvements in quality of life" that have been concentrated in a minority of countries as a result may have had a massive global environmental cost, one has to wonder whether the organization of labor that they championed was that much of a gift, and perhaps take a second look at what allowed some good to come out of it.

 

If prosperity is a zero sum game, how can global prosperity have ever gone up by the enormous amounts it has, almost across the board. The global poor have got much better off at the same time that the rich have gotten richer. The zero sum idea is a nonsense and would be laughed out by even school level economists. 

[SeanF]

12 hours ago, Rippounet said:

The problem is that the evidence that material prosperity is, in fact, a zero sum game, is tremendous.

lol, no. Early-stage capitalism is even worse than neo-liberalism.

Look, it's not rocket science. If you have a system that has profit as the main objective and self-interest as a principle, then obviously the system won't give a shit about the common interest. Duh.

If it were zero sum, we’d still have 89% of the world’s people living in absolute poverty, as was the case 200 years ago.  It doesn’t matter if capitalism is amoral, so long as it delivers higher living standards.  And, social market capitalism is better than the alternatives that have been tried out.

The world of 200 years ago was not The Shire.

 

Edited September 17, 2023 by SeanF

[Heartofice]

36 minutes ago, SeanF said:

If it were zero sum, we’d still have 89% of the world’s people living in absolute poverty, as was the case 200 years ago.  It doesn’t matter if capitalism is amoral, so long as it delivers higher living standards.  And, social market capitalism is better than the alternatives that have been tried out.

The world of 200 years ago was not The Shire.

 

If it was zero sum then almost everyone would have gotten poorer in the last 200 years , including previously rich people, for the current rich people to be wealthy. That this hasn’t actually happened really makes the mercantilists look rather silly, luckily for them they are all dead 

[Mentat]

14 hours ago, Conflicting Thought said:

Capitalism is or produces  all of those things

What Capitalism is or isn't depends on how you decide to define it, but most of the things I mentioned predate capitalism by more than a thousand years. Our worse traits seem capable of finding a cosy nook in any economic or political system.

14 hours ago, Conflicting Thought said:

Not obvious at all, as i mentioned the invention of capitalims and ellen meiksins  wood's the origin of capitalism are must reads

 

Edit /Sorry for all the posts

I haven't read either of those books, but while I might appreciate the recommendation, they won't make your argument for you. If you're arguing capitalism was designed by someone then you need to explain who, when and how.

[Rippounet]

3 hours ago, Heartofice said:

If prosperity is a zero sum game, how can global prosperity have ever gone up by the enormous amounts it has, almost across the board. The global poor have got much better off

We'd need a working definition of prosperity to see if it has "gone up by enormous amounts" and identify what the reasons for that were.

Same for the global poor being "much better off": how are they "better off" and how is "capitalism" responsible?

3 hours ago, SeanF said:

If it were zero sum, we’d still have 89% of the world’s people living in absolute poverty, as was the case 200 years ago.  It doesn’t matter if capitalism is amoral, so long as it delivers higher living standards.  And, social market capitalism is better than the alternatives that have been tried out.

The world of 200 years ago was not The Shire.

The world 200 years ago wasn't as bad as you imply. There's huge progress made between the 14th and 17th centuries (as between the 11th and 13th, or between the 16th and 19th ), and what is now considered to be a series of "agricultural revolutions" during such periods. And we know that for a fact, because the industrial revolution was based on labor that couldn't have been available if food production hadn't already increased by several factors! Obviously, neither capitalism nor industrialization are responsible for the end of absolute poverty.

By the way, affirming that the world of 200 years ago was not the Shire is kinda funny, because the pastoral tones in Tolkien didn't come out of nowhere. You can find them in English fiction going back centuries, and the entire romantic movement celebrates the English countryside by opposition to the industrial cities. If we compare fiction to the data we have, there's every reason to believe that by the 19th century, the English countryside was in fact quite literally the Shire before the "great capitalist transformation" took place. By contrast, the 19th century industrial cities covered in smoke were the basis for... Mordor, and we have lots of historians (not to mention primary sources) confirming that industrial workers of the time were initially treated as well as orcs.

So next is the idea that capitalism delivers higher living standards. Again, we know for a fact that is not true of early-stage capitalism. The re-organisation of labor of early-stage unregulated capitalism is basically wage slavery, and its mass production pollutes the air, the water, and the soil, making life expectancy go down. For instance, life expectancy in 19th century British industrial cities could dip below 20 years. And if you look at industrial cities in developing countries, well, they're not exactly reknowned for their high living standards, are they?

So how come an immoral economic system could deliver so much when logic and observation tell us that it's really not that good at delivering much on its own, and that everytime it is implemented somewhere people have to resist it as if they were fighting Sauron?

Well, it didn't. It's all a narrative, that rests on few facts and a huge fallacy: the idea that without capitalism, we'd have remained stuck in the 18th century. So everything good that's happened in the last 250 years magically becomes credited to capitalism, and thus all its evils are somehow justified. For some people, it's as if capitalism was the only thing making time go forward .

Going back to this:

3 hours ago, Heartofice said:

If prosperity is a zero sum game, how can global prosperity have ever gone up by the enormous amounts it has, almost across the board.

Agricultural innovations (including the use of renewables!) and improvements in collective organization starting in the XIth century or so and continuing all the way up to the 20th, major medical and scientific discoveries that improved life expectancy (like vaccines and hygiene), improvements in construction and urbanization... etc, etc.
The list is quite long, and I wouldn't be able to write it alone. I mean, at some point you need books to explain all this.

And no, capitalism can't be credited with "innovation" either, because that movement also started before capitalism.
The heart of the matter is that we know, we really do know, that an intellectual and scientific movement began in our "second millenia" and then started to accelerate exponentially in the 18th century. But to credit capitalism with everything that's happened since then is as silly as crediting capitalism with everything good happening today.
It's more accurate to say that capitalism piggy-backed on what was happening, benefiting from movements that were already under way and taking credit for as much as it could - almost as if it was more of an ideology than an economic system . The organization of labor under capitalism was in fact promoted as "scientific," but the reality is that it was science that eventually turned industrialization into a benefit (by allowing for actual improvements in the quality of life of the masses, which capitalism didn't give a shit about) just like it was science that had made industrialization possible in the first place.

You can see the impact of this in the very words used on this forum. SeanF saying that capitalism is "amoral" is another way of claiming it is "scientific," that it just is, and that its point is the common good. But can that claim be verified? It seems just as credible to argue that capitalism is an immoral system concentrating wealth in the hands of the few at the expense of the many, and that it was able to use science to mitigate (or claim to mitigate) its worst consequences.

The truth? We always knew that industrialization had a cost: we can mention the "Shire" precisely because people were well aware of that cost from the start. Nothing is exactly new, save the fact that the environmental crisis makes the defense of capitalism more ridiculous than ever.

3 hours ago, Mentat said:

I haven't read either of those books, but while I might appreciate the recommendation, they won't make your argument for you. If you're arguing capitalism was designed by someone then you need to explain who, when and how.

Not a jab at you, but that's asking a lot.
The problem of these discussions is that simplistic narratives that were consciously designed to defend capitalism and business interests (see the Powell memo for instance) will be presented as fact, and it almost literally takes entire books to demonstrate that they are bullshit. We can see it as a variation of Brandonlini's law, according to which the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
For instance, It took me over 30 lines to try and debunk SeanF's 3, and I doubt I even did it convincingly.

A good way to go around this is to demand that people trying to defend capitalism by crediting it with... basically, progress, should prove their extraordinary assertions with logic and data. While taking into account that we now know that any progress that requires the destruction of the environment is not actual progress.
I'm not even sure it is possible, so I look forard to reading the attempts.

[SeanF]

6 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

We'd need a working definition of prosperity to see if it has "gone up by enormous amounts" and identify what the reasons for that were.

Same for the global poor being "much better off": how are they "better off" and how is "capitalism" responsible?

The world 200 years ago wasn't as bad as you imply. There's huge progress made between the 14th and 17th centuries (as between the 11th and 13th, or between the 16th and 19th ), and what is now considered to be a series of "agricultural revolutions" during such periods. And we know that for a fact, because the industrial revolution was based on labor that couldn't have been available if food production hadn't already increased by several factors! Obviously, neither capitalism nor industrialization are responsible for the end of absolute poverty.

By the way, affirming that the world of 200 years ago was not the Shire is kinda funny, because the pastoral tones in Tolkien didn't come out of nowhere. You can find them in English fiction going back centuries, and the entire romantic movement celebrates the English countryside by opposition to the industrial cities. If we compare fiction to the data we have, there's every reason to believe that by the 19th century, the English countryside was in fact quite literally the Shire before the "great capitalist transformation" took place. By contrast, the 19th century industrial cities covered in smoke were the basis for... Mordor, and we have lots of historians (not to mention primary sources) confirming that industrial workers of the time were initially treated as well as orcs.

So next is the idea that capitalism delivers higher living standards. Again, we know for a fact that is not true of early-stage capitalism. The re-organisation of labor of early-stage unregulated capitalism is basically wage slavery, and its mass production pollutes the air, the water, and the soil, making life expectancy go down. For instance, life expectancy in 19th century British industrial cities could dip below 20 years. And if you look at industrial cities in developing countries, well, they're not exactly reknowned for their high living standards, are they?

So how come an immoral economic system could deliver so much when logic and observation tell us that it's really not that good at delivering much on its own, and that everytime it is implemented somewhere people have to resist it as if they were fighting Sauron?

Well, it didn't. It's all a narrative, that rests on few facts and a huge fallacy: the idea that without capitalism, we'd have remained stuck in the 18th century. So everything good that's happened in the last 250 years magically becomes credited to capitalism, and thus all its evils are somehow justified. For some people, it's as if capitalism was the only thing making time go forward .

Going back to this:

Agricultural innovations (including the use of renewables!) and improvements in collective organization starting in the XIth century or so and continuing all the way up to the 20th, major medical and scientific discoveries that improved life expectancy (like vaccines and hygiene), improvements in construction and urbanization... etc, etc.
The list is quite long, and I wouldn't be able to write it alone. I mean, at some point you need books to explain all this.

And no, capitalism can't be credited with "innovation" either, because that movement also started before capitalism.
The heart of the matter is that we know, we really do know, that an intellectual and scientific movement began in our "second millenia" and then started to accelerate exponentially in the 18th century. But to credit capitalism with everything that's happened since then is as silly as crediting capitalism with everything good happening today.
It's more accurate to say that capitalism piggy-backed on what was happening, benefiting from movements that were already under way and taking credit for as much as it could - almost as if it was more of an ideology than an economic system . The organization of labor under capitalism was in fact promoted as "scientific," but the reality is that it was science that eventually turned industrialization into a benefit (by allowing for actual improvements in the quality of life of the masses, which capitalism didn't give a shit about) just like it was science that had made industrialization possible in the first place.

You can see the impact of this in the very words used on this forum. SeanF saying that capitalism is "amoral" is another way of claiming it is "scientific," that it just is, and that its point is the common good. But can that claim be verified? It seems just as credible to argue that capitalism is an immoral system concentrating wealth in the hands of the few at the expense of the many, and that it was able to use science to mitigate (or claim to mitigate) its worst consequences.

The truth? We always knew that industrialization had a cost: we can mention the "Shire" precisely because people were well aware of that cost from the start. Nothing is exactly new, save the fact that the environmental crisis makes the defense of capitalism more ridiculous than ever.

Not a jab at you, but that's asking a lot.
The problem of these discussions is that simplistic narratives that were consciously designed to defend capitalism and business interests (see the Powell memo for instance) will be presented as fact, and it almost literally takes entire books to demonstrate that they are bullshit. We can see it as a variation of Brandonlini's law, according to which the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
For instance, It took me over 30 lines to try and debunk SeanF's 3, and I doubt I even did it convincingly.

A good way to go around this is to demand that people trying to defend capitalism by crediting it with... basically, progress, should prove their extraordinary assertions with logic and data. While taking into account that we now know that any progress that requires the destruction of the environment is not actual progress.
I'm not even sure it is possible, so I look forard to reading the attempts.

Well, we could all try living on $2.65 a day, or less, as 89% did in 1820, as opposed to the typical $150, and then decide for ourselves if our lives were better or worse, as a result.  

A big driver of innovation is the desire to make money.  That’s what the agricultural improvers, inventors, manufacturers were doing, back in the day.

[Rippounet]

1 minute ago, SeanF said:

Well, we could all try living on $2.65 a day, or less, as 89% did in 1820, as opposed to the typical $150, and then decide for ourselves if our lives were better or worse, as a result. 

Yes yes, I'm sure without capitalism, we'd still be in 1820.

By the way, 2,65$ of 1820 are about 70$ worth of purchasing power today, while seven in ten people live on less than 10$ a day today. I don't know where you got your numbers from, but they don't even support what you're saying.

1 minute ago, SeanF said:

A big driver of innovation is the desire to make money.  That’s what the agricultural improvers, inventors, manufacturers were doing, back in the day.

And yet, funnily enough, when you look at the most important innovations that improved humanity's lot, stuff like vaccines, or antibiotics, or even -gasp- the internet, it turns out the key innovators did not profit from them financially, and many of them even made a point of refusing to.
In fact, if you look at the history of innovations, there's a case to be made that the desire to make money prevents rapid large-scale implementation of  important innovations. First, because safety regulations and workers' rights have been almost systematically opposed by capitalists. Second, because by definition, making money means you're asking people to pay for what you offer.
There was a debate about that problem of capitalism over the Covid vaccines remember?

So again, logic and data do not seem to support the idea that "A big driver of innovation is the desire to make money." Again, a piece of a narrative that should be examine critically.
If this is true, it shouldn't be too hard to come up with a long list of innovations or inventions that undoubtedly helped humanity and that only appeared because the innovator was after profit. And of course, for the claim to be valid, that long list will have to be longer than the innovations or inventions that were not done for profit.

[SeanF]

13 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

Yes yes, I'm sure without capitalism, we'd still be in 1820.

By the way, 2,65$ of 1820 are about 70$ worth of purchasing power today, while seven in ten people live on less than 10$ a day today. I don't know where you got your numbers from, but they don't even support what you're saying.

And yet, funnily enough, when you look at the most important innovations that improved humanity's lot, stuff like vaccines, or antibiotics, or even -gasp- the internet, it turns out the key innovators did not profit from them financially, and many of them even made a point of refusing to.
In fact, if you look at the history of innovations, there's a case to be made that the desire to make money prevents rapid large-scale implementation of  important innovations. First, because safety regulations and workers' rights have been almost systematically opposed by capitalists. Second, because by definition, making money means you're asking people to pay for what you offer.
There was a debate about that problem of capitalism over the Covid vaccines remember?

So again, logic and data do not seem to support the idea that "A big driver of innovation is the desire to make money." Again, a piece of a narrative that should be examine critically.
If this is true, it shouldn't be too hard to come up with a long list of innovations or inventions that undoubtedly helped humanity and that only appeared because the innovator was after profit. And of course, for the claim to be valid, that long list will have to be longer than the innovations or inventions that were not done for profit.

No, it's not $2.65, adjusted for inflation.  It's $2.65.  

Our World in Data, on the other hand defines absolute poverty, as $1.9 per day.  Here are there numbers, which are close enough to those I gave earlier.

 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extreme-poverty-absolute

The OECD likewise:

https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/e20f2f1a-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/e20f2f1a-en

Steady, boring, compound, growth in real incomes, of 1-2% p.a., over the course of a couple of centuries, produces a gigantic growth in the median standard of living, by the end of that period. 

Intelligent capitalists (those who don't want to be strung up, or who recognise that workers earning decent salaries can afford more in the way of goods and services) are well aware that are there benefits to themselves in having the mass of the population having a stake in the system.  That's why legislatures dominated by wealthy people in the 19th century ended up passing so much legislation to improve safety and workers' rights. Dying in the ditch to oppose such measures would not have benefitted them.

People who profit, or who seek to profit, from innovation are probably not motivated solely by the desire for profit, but it's a part of their motivation.  The inventors of railways, motor vehicles, aircraft, hard drives, electricity, most drugs have all sought to profit from their work.  And, since you mention vaccination, Jenner finshed up making £30,000, a colossal sum back in the early 1800's.

[Spockydog]

I am innovating to:

1. Raise up me and mine.

2. Help others while we're at it. 

3. Leave a legacy, as I have no kids. 

 

[Conflicting Thought]

1 hour ago, SeanF said:

Well, we could all try living on $2.65 a day, or less, as 89% did in 1820, as opposed to the typical $150, and then decide for ourselves if our lives were better or worse, as a result.  

A big driver of innovation is the desire to make money.  That’s what the agricultural improvers, inventors, manufacturers were doing, back in the day.

Nvm

Edited September 17, 2023 by Conflicting Thought

[Conflicting Thought]

43 minutes ago, SeanF said:

That's why legislatures dominated by wealthy people in the 19th century ended up passing so much legislation to improve safety and workers' rights. Dying in the ditch to oppose such measures would not have benefitted them.

Riiight, way to rewrite history. I guess there wasnt a social pressure, a lot of blod shed from the working class to pass legislation , fought every step of the way by the wealthy class who wanted kids as young as 5 to be working the factories.

Damn this is infuriating.

[SeanF]

9 minutes ago, Conflicting Thought said:

Riiight, way to rewrite history. I guess there wasnt a social pressure, a lot of blod shed from the working class to pass legislation , fought every step of the way by the wealthy class who wanted kids as young as 5 to be working the factories.

Damn this is infuriating.

There was plenty of social pressure.  Which was why the wealthy preferred to make concessions, rather than go to the guillotine.  

[Rippounet]

21 minutes ago, SeanF said:

Here are there numbers, which are close enough to those I gave earlier.

 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extreme-poverty-absolute

The OECD likewise:

https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/e20f2f1a-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/e20f2f1a-en

The key finding of both the first and the second link seems to be:

Quote

This reduction, however, is not distributed evenly throughout the period. It took 136 years from 1820 for our global poverty rate to fall under 50%, then another 45 years to cut this rate in half again by 2001. In the early 21st century, global poverty reduction accelerated, and in 13 years our global measure of extreme poverty was halved again by 2014.

So, again, how the fuck does this prove that capitalism is responsible for the reductions in extreme poverty?
How does this prove that capitalism itself does not tend toward a zero-sum game?

You show correlation without even attempting to go into causation. And even the correlation is obviously quite limited. I personally have explanations for key evolutions of the curve, but I'd be at a loss to explain it entirely with a single dimension. In all honesty, anyone looking at the data and saying "this is why," as if it could all be boiled down to a single factor, would be a bit of a dumbass.
What is certain is that, based on some specific criteria, there was an overall positive evolution in the last two centuries, but if you can't demonstrate causation, it's just as easy to say capitalism prevented this evolution from being evenly distributed than it is to say that it was responsible for it.
And we do have considerable evidence that capitalism concentrates wealth rather than distributing it, so there is very good reason to doubt its ability to lift people out of poverty, of all things.

34 minutes ago, SeanF said:

People who profit, or who seek to profit, from innovation are probably not motivated solely by the desire for profit, but it's a part of their motivation.

Possibly. But how then could you possibly establish causality? If we agrre that profit is only part of most individuals' motivations, why would we say that a profit-seeking system is responsible for innovation?
Logic dictates that a profit-seeking scheme would mostly be producing some kinds of innovations: those that can be sold well to make a profit, and conversely, that it would stymie social progress that can't generate profit.
Which is pretty much what has been observed throughout history.

[Conflicting Thought]

1 minute ago, SeanF said:

There was plenty of social pressure.  Which was why the wealthy preferred to make concessions, rather than go to the guillotine.  

they didnt want to make concessions, allot of people died and suffered to win minimum rights, fighting wealthy people at every turn. i mean if the wealthy have to fear for their lives to do the minimum then something was and is very fucking wrong

[Rippounet]

11 minutes ago, SeanF said:

There was plenty of social pressure.  Which was why the wealthy preferred to make concessions, rather than go to the guillotine.  

But that's a massive change in the narrative. If the driver is social pressure, then neither the capitalists nor capitalism are responsible for improving safety and workers' rights!!! FFS.