It's not so much capitalism that unleashed human potential. It's money. Read Jack Weatherford's book: The History of Money. He explains why money and banking transformed human life. — frank
Money is a useful technology and has an interesting history, but it's one out of many such technologies. — boethius
I'm not poo pooing the wheel. — frank
Since this thread is on socialism and communism, I'd be interested if the author you cite, writing on the history of money and capitalism, is aware that, at least as how you phrase it as "unleashing human potential", seems an example of the fetishism Marx was talking about; does the author deal with this idea? — boethius
My argument against capitalism is that progress in human development doesn't happen fast enough, fairly enough, or securely enough, and ties us all into a system of endless toil and precarity. — jamalrob
My view of capitalism, or just modernity in general that would include soviet communism, is that it is akin to ever increasing doses of cocaine; there are short term "good effects" but at a massive long term cost; the short term "life improvement" is an illusion. If you have ever argued with someone in the honey moon phase of cocaine or other stimulants who think it's great and made their life better, you get the exact same structure of argument as the myth of progress (it's seems pretty good right now bro) and my argument against capitalism and modernity is exactly the same as you will be trying to make cocaine.
Yes, productivity has gone up (just like cocaine) but if it a dynamic that moves towards ecological collapse (cardiac arrest) then the goodness of this productivity is wholly illusionary (just like cocaine addiction).
[ ... ]
I do not view improvements that are not sustainable as improvements, ... — boethius
I also haven't considered myself to be a libertarian socialist since around 2015, or since whenever I read Mariana Mazzucato's book, The Entrepreneurial State. — Maw
That's the matter I'm taking issue with. I don't see how it makes any sense to say something is an improvement "in itself" where, by that, you mean "when ignoring certain other factors inextricably connected with it" . — Isaac
You're saying that the preference of the householder for having a washing machine has been shown (and so is a reasonable factor to include in the judgement), but the associated environmental and social problems have not (and so it is reasonable to exclude them from the judgment)? — Isaac
It does make sense. If I lost my washing machine (income) and didn't have access to a launderette (infrastructure or economic development, not part of the HDI but significant for my example), it would make my life worse. To measure things at all requires the isolation of specific metrics. The ones we choose to measure here are based on the things we all value; they are factors that contribute to freedom, opportunity, health, leisure, and so on. — jamalrob
My position is that there have been associated problems, and that recent climate change and other environmental problems are caused by economic growth, but that the two things are not inevitably linked — jamalrob
I believe that the primary aim of policy should be to improve people's lives and that the best way to do that while also solving the associated problems is more economic growth — jamalrob
if I'm going all-out to argue for this I'll have to do a lot more, but I'm not sure I want to get into one of those statistics-drenched debates, and I hadn't really intended to get into it when I first entered this discussion--so if I decide to chicken out, I apologize. — jamalrob
capitalism might not be the best way to solve these problems, but so far it is the best way we've found to achieve quick growth — jamalrob
I disagree with this, I don't see how, on the face of it, more of the same could possibly be a cure for the problems the previous growth caused. — Isaac
I think this is more myth-building. Its the only way we've found because it's the only way we've really tried. That's not much to commend it. For a start, economic growth does not seem at all to depend on how capitalist a country is. Some very socialist economies are doing very well, some extremely free-market economies have done very badly. If the degree, or proportion, of capitalism in an economy does not correlate well with human development, it seems, on the face of it, quite unlikely that its capitalism that's responsible — Isaac
there are technological solutions, such as clean energy — jamalrob
So the solutions you talk about obviously seem like solutions now. We're in the same situation now as the early fossil-fuel enthusiasts were in 200 years ago. What happens when we find out the Indium in solar panels causes devastating damage to microbes, the disruption to air streams caused by wind power results in damaging weather pattern changes, the habitat loss from converting to biodiesel is worse than the fossil-fuel it's replacing... These are all real concerns by the way, just not well researched enough to provide any concrete worries yet. The point is our optimism about growth blinds us to the historic fact that virtually everything we thought was going to be some brilliant development turned out to be shit, in terms of some (usually long-term) undesirable consequences. — Isaac
What makes you so confident that, unlike almost every development in the past, today's 'solutions' won't just end up being tomorrow's problems? — Isaac
I'm not arguing for capitalism but for growth. — jamalrob
I've answered all this already. — jamalrob
We choose to measure specific metrics because they're the things we value, the things we want more of. — jamalrob
It's reasonable on this basis to describe their increase as improvements, and this doesn't entail ignoring the context. — jamalrob
Socialism is the golden mean between the benefits of progress and prosperity that competition entails under capitalism, whilst preserving the benefits of the proto-communist state through high taxation and redistributive policies. — Wallows
When I look at what is described when people mean by de-growth, you have to practically abolish the global market economy as it is to make it happen. — Saphsin
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