This is so bad it makes my brain hurt trying to respond to it. We should be upset that our society has managed to put in our pockets supercomputers connected wirelessly to the world's knowledge? Ah, I see, they'll turn us into "fat miserable drooling zombies".
Luckily, in this world of "skyrocketing" poverty, surely only the top 1% can afford such indulgences, right? It's not as if innovation and a growing economy have put them in the hands of more than a hundred million Americans. Oh dear, I guess the zombie apocalypse is nigh.
This guy's Twitter feed[1] is more or less a constant stream of invective directed at "billionaires", like this:
The billionaires believe the greatest threat to freedom is society. But a free society's great threat is billionaires.
Let's say you had THREE BILLION DOLLARS in the bank. Would you really give a fuck if it was...2.75? That's like counting toilet paper!
He's a clown, and it's embarrassing that HBR thinks he's valuable as a contributor.
>We should be upset that our society has managed to put in our pockets supercomputers connected wirelessly to the world's knowledge?
Sure we should, if the tradeoff required to create a society that can produce such devices is that the vast majority of people have no say in the workings of the system, or spend their whole lives teetering on the edge of insolvency, or transfer huge environmental and economic burdens onto people either close to home or far away.
It's like watching the movie Soylent Green and coming away asking "we should be upset that their society managed to feed everybody consistently and inexpensively?" Ends can't be judged independently of the means used to achieve them.
Do you think that was really the tradeoff? How are we better off as a society if Apple, Google, Samsung don't put powerful, usable smartphones in the hands of a few hundred million people?
The beauty of "CapitalismStan" (God, even Tom Friedman would too embarrassed to coin that one...) is that each and every one of us gets to decide if parting with $200 and a monthly $80 bill is worth the benefit. I certainly think it would be a bargain at twice the price.
The entire point of my comment was that the total price to society of the device can go well beyond the "$200 and a monthly $80 bill" that the individual pays to acquire it.
> How are we better off as a society if Apple, Google, Samsung don't put powerful, usable smartphones in the hands of a few hundred million people?
Respectfully, you're again arguing the merits of ends without discussing any means. Making the argument into "smartphone or no smartphone?" is like asking "candy or no candy?" Which do you think people will choose? But even free candy has costs; put the person who receives it on a scale a week later and you'll see them.
One can certainly point to societal costs that the information economy has imposed that go beyond the costs of individual products. When Marc Andreesen says that "software is eating the world," what he's saying is that it takes wealth that used to be held by people outside Silicon Valley -- travel agents, booksellers, and recording artists, to name a few -- and transferring it to people inside Silicon Valley. And since software requires no human intervention to do the same thing over and over again, the number of people who are on the receiving end of this wealth transfer is naturally much smaller than those who are on the other; once you've got an algorithm for picking the best airline flight, say, money that used to provide a living for tens of thousands of travel agents can all flow instead to one guy -- the guy who owns the algorithm. So that one guy becomes crazy rich, while the travel agents lose their livelihood.
Does the inegalitarian result of that wealth transfer outweigh the benefit to society at large that the algorithm provides? I'm guessing from your comments that you would say it does not, and I would probably agree with you on that. That's a more complicated question than whether or not people would prefer travel sites or no travel site, but it at least attempts to take into account the costs such sites create beyond what the individual user pays for them.
That's a useful argument to have. I'd respond that all that wealth wasn't "transferred" to the SV capitalist. It was generated because millions of people saved a few dollars on airfare. Some of those savings went to the capitalist, but they can't all have: His price then wouldn't be any better than the friendly travel agent down the street. The rest of those savings stayed with the consumer, who can now afford that much more air travel or that many more organic carrots or whatever. In aggregate, when it becomes cheaper and easier to do X, there's more money or time to spend on X or Y or Z, and let the most valuable products and services win.
But all of this is somewhat beside the point. This article doesn't try to spur these kinds of discussions. If it were trying, it wouldn't use phrases like "fat miserable drooling zombies". It's agitprop, and there are much better uses of HN readers' time.
> Luckily, in this world of "skyrocketing" poverty, surely only the top 1% can afford such indulgences, right? It's not as if innovation and a growing economy have put them in the hands of more than a hundred million Americans.
American consumer debt is at $11.15 trillion [1]
and 76% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck [2]
By definition, the masses can't afford those indulgences, they're just putting themselves into servitude for the rest of their lives.
I think Umair is Pakistani, he's referring to racist tension he feels at some places. As an Asian, I can actually also attest to racism (though of a more subdued variety) against brown people in hipster'ish cafes.
Incidentally, I do want to comment on the hasty and acerbic reaction to this piece on HN: wow, this got emotional fast, I was hoping for an informed and intellectually honest discussion, not going into people's twitter history and finding all sorts of tidbits. If you guys are finding him at fault for saying things that are actually not that out of line with this very article's sentiments, how do you reconcile with -- for example, the Zuck openly inviting his friend to let in on people's private information and calling FB users "dumb f---s"?
I see.. I looked for that tweet to find context but couldn't find it. However I did find two others in which he claims that white people having beards is racist, or something: https://twitter.com/umairh/status/393721183197483008https://twitter.com/umairh/status/393722734918004737 As an occasionally bearded white guy, this is distressing news; I was planning on growing a beard in December after "Movember", I hope I don't offend anybody...
Maybe he's got a point in the cafe case, but honestly it seems like from the other posts he is just an purposely inflammatory troll. That seems to be his schtick, which probably explains the harsh reaction on HN. It's the sort of reaction he was looking for.
> "...how do you reconcile with..."
I'm not sure what needs to be reconciled. Can you explain this more?
People are rejecting Umair's piece, in part, by what he's said elsewhere informally and casually. Somehow people continue using FB, and defending it, despite Zuck having said fairly nefarious things. To be clear, my question wasn't charged against you specifically.
I did not find these tweets to be racist or strange at all. Maybe you're missing the context of what he's like as a person -- maybe that crucial information of tone is lost in pure text. I read it as more casual teasing. Considering he's a Pakistani-American, and probably associates big beards to religious Muslims in his mind, he's drawing some parallel between the two, maybe making note of the dissonant juxtaposition. But I do think he should be more careful with his wording, and make some due effort in not sounding offensive.
In one of those tweets he seems to think that beards are problematic because they are some sort of Muslim culture appropriation (bizarrely ignoring the long history of beards in Europe...). In the other tweet he isn't talking about cultural appropriation or referring to any sort of Muslim connection, he seems to be taking offense to beards on white people because he thinks the beards emphasis their whiteness.
The fundamental incompatibility between those comments leads me to believe that in neither case is he being sincere. He is just out to piss people off. He's 'trolling'.
(Also, I suspect that most people who both know the "dumb fucks" quote, and think that it is significant, do not use Facebook. Facebook users probably mostly consist of people who have never heard the quote, have heard the quote but don't believe it, or don't think that the quote is relevant to Facebook today. Personally, I trust Zuck, so when he says I'd have to be a dumb fuck to use Facebook, I believe him...)
Do you really think he is simply out to 'piss people off'? I'm genuinely interested in your answer. I personally don't think there are many people like that. I think the word 'troll' is overused, very, very few people out there are trolls. When I think 'troll' I think about people who join multi-player games only to cause havoc, people who join IRC channels to paste nazi ascii's. I think people who have unorthodox, or radical beliefs often mistakenly appear intentionally inflammatory, but they really aren't. So, I really don't think Umair is a troll in the traditional way. He's probably (at least in his mind) making a good faith effort to explain something, he's clearly misguided in his ways of elucidation of complicated ideas, but reducing him to a 'troll' just takes the direction of discussion down a confrontational and unproductive path.
Yes, he is ignoring the long history of beards in Europe, instead focusing how beards are viewed today by specific subsets of people, and I think that's probably the source of his errors.
Maybe "piss people off" is a bit strong, but it really seems like he is trying first and foremost to "get a rise out of people".
I don't think he simultaneously thinks that white people with beards are trying to "emphasis their whiteness" and a thinks that white people with beards are trying to appropriate/mock Muslim culture. Those two assertions, while fine (if not a little loony) on their own, are contradictory and expressing both of them tips his hand. He doesn't believe either; he is being intentionally inflammatory.
Had I not read both of those comments, I would have been strongly annoyed (indeed, I necessarily read one before the other, and was strongly annoyed until I read the other). Having read both comments, I can only be bemused. I'm onto his game now, so I'm not going to let him get to me.
This is my understanding of what the word "troll" traditionally meant. People on IRC who get people upset by making absurd flamebait statements and pretending to defend them ("Lunix is for communists and virgins", being a prototypical troll in my book).
I think he's out to get attention, and one way to do that is to be controversial, something which he seems to have honed to a fine art. I think he must be bright to have gotten so good at it, but it does not strike me as being all that productive, either.
With all due respect, I think that is just a strange conspiratorial type of thinking.
Did he basically find himself to the top, being a writer for HBR by just being purposely controversial?
Maybe it is a strategy, but it's clearly not the end goal. It is maybe just a means to an end, that is conceivable (although unlikely, in my view).
I think the way to go in instances like these is just to engage specifically only on the points presented by the author -- not raise suspicions about their motives. Incidentally I think in this case the evidence points to the contrary: I think his motives are good. I actually happen to be concerned about capitalism in much a way Umair is, and I can promise you that I have good motives: I want my childhood friends (who I know are not doing well, they're living in poverty) to be doing well, in many respects I see them as victims of the current system. If I were to write a long piece of political commentary, criticizing the current system, I know that it would hurt me to be labeled as an "attention-seeker". I would, on the other hand, welcome any and all responses that go directly at my arguments.
The important take-away from your statement, though, is that these people are still getting food. The fact that developed nations have the basic survival necessities taken care of to the point that everyone has time and money to spend on things as seemingly frivolous as smartphones (and the fact that something as insane as a smartphone is even affordable) is a testament to capitalism, not a point against it.
Sure they may be getting some food, but just barely.
"...for 1 in 6 people in the United States, hunger is a reality"
"These are often hard-working adults, children and seniors who simply cannot make ends meet and are forced to go without food for several meals, or even days"
http://feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/hunger-facts.asp...
Would you agree that "very low food security" translates to "hunger"? If so then the number is close to 1 in 18. In my opinion this is still a high number.
One person in hunger is too many, as I'm sure many politicians before me have said. But there's a massive difference between 1/6 and 1/18, and if we can't be accurate about just how bad things are, how can we know if we're improving? (And of course, we are: Hunger was a much greater problem among the poor decades ago).
What pains me is that some of the people I personally know who are affected by this have jobs. Heck, some have two jobs! Several causes: minimum wage, part-time jobs pay too little, having two or three kids is expensive, housing is relatively expensive, some people prioritize luxury goods like iPhones and cable over necessities like food and savings.
everyone has time and money to spend on things as seemingly frivolous as smartphones
Smartphones are cheap in both time and money. You can have an iPhone in the US for twenty dollars a month, and all you have to do is recharge it every so often.
Food costs a lot more each month. This testament to capitalism is that people can't afford food but that's okay because they can have something that costs less; a phone.
You're picking apart my example of a luxury, not the argument. People aren't forced to spend money on iPhones. If they spend money of iPhones that they need for food they otherwise couldn't afford, then that's their problem, not the world's. Substitute 'iPhones' for any other luxury item. Plus, the agriculture industry is highly regulated, while the cell phone industry is relatively free, which I think has a strong impact on this price discrepancy.
My point is that capitalism allows a significant majority of people to have the basic necessities of life taken care of in exchange for some other contribution to the world.
My point is that capitalism allows a significant majority of people to have the basic necessities of life taken care of in exchange for some other contribution to the world.
Fair enough. My point is that something is going very wrong, as here we are in what is apparently some kind of recovery yet in the United States, one of the richest nations in the world, more people need food stamps than before. Luxury? A phone is cheap. It's not a luxury. Food is becoming a luxury. This didn't happen last time, or the time before that.
If it's that bad I wonder what its doing sitting on the very top of HN right now.
I think what he says cuts through the bullcrap and feels viscerally true. Imagine if, instead of him making these points, it was Obama or RMS or whoever you ideal is, making these exact points. You'd react very differently.
That said, I'm not really sure what the alternative is.
> our society has managed to put in our pockets supercomputers connected wirelessly to the world's knowledge
As a grad student, I remember when the university got access to a supercomputer. Our professors were quite ecstatic & said we could now solve massive problems....as if it was the lack of supercomputers that was holding them back. That was 15 years ago & the university is in the same place in the rankings. All that happened was a bunch of students wrote some parallel processing code & got a thesis & graduated & moved on.
Things are no different today. If you datamine the vast majority of queries run by the general public on wolframalpha, they wouldn't be far off from "2+3 = ?" It isn't like the common man is jumping up and down because he can finally crack Goldbach's conjecture. He could care less.
Imagine if, instead of him making these points, it was Obama or RMS or whoever you ideal is, making these exact points. You'd react very differently.
I wouldn't: I had no idea who this guy was before reading this piece, and only decided to learn more about him because I was invited at the bottom of the article to follow him on Twitter.
But it really does make my day that anyone would assume that President Obama or RMS would be just the folks to sell this drivel to me! Much as I disagree with both of them, they're each capable of making far better arguments.
> Luckily, in this world of "skyrocketing" poverty, surely only the top 1% can afford such indulgences, right? It's not as if innovation and a growing economy have put them in the hands of more than a hundred million Americans.
Most of the article's criticism was directed at the USA, with a contrast to the social democracies in, e.g., Scandinavia. Regardless, if you want to think about the global impact, smartphone unit sales are likely to hit 10^9 this year.
Right. I'm appalled to the ignorance (intentional or not) of the parent to the externalized costs of putting millions of phones in the hands of americans.
The nerve Umair Haque's writing touches in me is that it is handwavy ranting and raving. A lot of his arguments, when looked at closely, seem kind of hollow. They're ... intellectual junk food - they have some flavor when you're chewing them, but there's not much substance, and there are a lot of additives that aren't that good.
That seem quite hypocritical since you write quite long rambling text yourself. At least show other people, who did upvote it, the respect of reading the article before you flag it.
Rambling? Perhaps. But I would hardly say that tokenadult is known for "handwaving". Quite the opposite actually, his long posts are typically the best researched and cited posts on this site.
It's not about "handwaving" per se, there are numerous reasons I don't enjoy tokenadults posts. All of which are irrelevant since many other people do. I simply ignore most of them and expect the same respect in return.
But if you're a five year member, I'm in the mood and you're breaking basic rules of HN like "don't comment that you flagged" I reserve the right to call you out. Even if I wasn't technically correct about not reading the article this time.
I DID read the article first, and then saw that other participants here had already identified the handwaving. So there is no hypocrisy here on my part.
I see about three participants making the argument of handwaving. One of them breaks one of the rules of HN in his opening sentence, the other is name calling and the third has made up his mind years back. I also see a couple of dozen decent comments discussing the article. Take from it what you will.
I'm always willing to change my mind if I see anything different, but Umair articles are pretty formulaic.
Also, if a bunch of us are pointing to a problem, maybe there is a problem.
Ideologically, I suspect that I have different ideas and opinions than tokenadult. Maybe I have some common ground with Umair. But I cannot stand the hand wavy, ranty approach.
> So maybe, then, it’s time for you and I to leave this cult...The cheap, plastic junk that surrounds us probably isn’t worth what we paid – not just in cash (or, more likely, credit) to get it, but in freedom, time, and tears.
This strikes a chord with me at a very deep level.
A few years back I was completely disillusioned with living and working in a big city, basically just to buy more stuff. It still boggles my mind we all go to work 40 hours a week then come up with more and more creative ways to waste that excess of money, rather than just work less and have more time.
I sold everything, quit my job, and spent 2 years driving from Alaska to Argentina, living in my tent and cooking on my little travel stove.
My perspective on the world has changed immensely, and I now live in the very far north, grow and hunt/fish my own food, and only go to work enough to have the quality of life I want. That's usually around 2-3 days a week, depending if I want a new toy that month (rifle/camera/etc.)
I highly, highly recommend people take a break from consumerism for an extended period of time and see how fulfilling your life can be without all that stuff. Some of the happiest people I've ever met in my life have nothing by North American standards.
The posts about how "wonderful" it is that everyone has fridges and smartphones make me cringe. These people have satisfied themselves going a few convolutions further than the lowest common denominator- ie: romanticizing the noble savage- so then they go around regurgitating this idiotic reactionary 'wisdom' about being happy with what we have.
What we have is an ideologically broken, personally unfulfilling, extremely resource-intensive society, and indoctrination quips like "it's the best thing other than all the other things that have been tried" and "our luxuries rise other poorer people out of poverty" shouldn't cut it.
> Some of the happiest people I've ever met in my life have nothing by North American standards.
Some of the happiest people I've met in my life have everything by North American standards. Material things are tools for happiness, not happiness itself.
We all go to work for 40 hours a week so that we don't have to live in a tent, cook on a travel stove, and hunt/grow our own food, which suggests a very day-by-day, unstable lifestyle. If that's what makes you happy that's great, but I don't think it's fair to call it "consumerism" when really it's just reaping the benefits of technological advancements. Many people would rather work 40 hour workweeks for (essentially) guaranteed food, water, shelter, and leftover purchasing power, which I think is perfectly reasonable.
> Material things are tools for happiness, not happiness itself.
Absolutely.
> We all go to work for 40 hours a week so that we don't have to live in a tent, cook on a travel stove, and hunt/grow our own food
You can ensure that by only going to work 20-30 hours a week.
> Many people would rather work 40 hour workweeks for (essentially) guaranteed food, water, shelter, and leftover purchasing power
But they're not getting that grantee. McDonald's just told it's full-time employees to go on food stamps. Wal-Mart has tens of thousands of employees working full-time equivalent hours with no health care and being forced to get a second and third job to make ends meet. Hundreds of millions of Americans have crushing debt, and still go to work full time. This just out today: most Americans are accumulating debt faster than they're saving for retirement[1]. What does that say about the future?
I don't deny that people aren't spending their money wisely, but no one forces people into debt. It isn't hard to practice financial responsibility.
Also, wait: you can ensure better living quarters than a tent, presumably with a stove, and be able to purchase food while working 20-30 hours a week? Or are you not guaranteed to be able to have shelter, food, and water working 40 hours a week? Your two statements seem contradictory, unless I'm missing something.
I'm actually somewhat envious of your lifestyle. I'm just bothered by the elitist attitude I often hear from people who live it (not you in particular! many others though). While you may be a perfectly fine hunter, happy to live off the land, etc., many people aren't and would prefer the comfort of a desk job and steady paycheck. It's all preference, I don't think one way is superior to the other, morally or otherwise.
The point of my original post was not to say "My way is best, everyone should do what I'm doing".
The point was simply to point out there are perfectly valid alternatives to working 40 hours a week for the vast majority of your life. I meet thousands of people (in life and online) that have no idea you don't actually have to do that if you don't want to.
Actually, it isn't that hard. Canada pays for healthcare costs out of taxes. That's a bargain I like. Canadian society explicitly does not let you opt out. I don't hear masses of people saying this is tyrannical. Basic necessities should be ensured by the govt IMHO.
But you are only able to participate on Hacker News from your distant perch, after enjoying a two-year road trip, because of the consumerism (what the author I guess means when he says "growthism") that provided the infrastructure you used on that trip and for your current Internet connection.
It's an outdated system which is not relevant anymore. Luckily you and many people like you are increasingly duscovering this life does not equate to happiness and in many cases actively avoids reaching happiness (e.g. 9-5, office hierarchies and debt)
I would like to point out that going to work only 2-3 days a week and hunting/growing your own food is likely to get stale very quickly if you ever decide to start a family.
The exact opposite is true. The whole point of having a family is to spend time with your family, which you can do when you're not at work all the time.
The very vast majority of people up here living the simple life are families.
You have to practice negotiating, and work with your boss. A couple of quick suggestions:
1. Just step back to .9 or .75 or .5 time. Tons of people at my company do that.
2. Go on a contract.. that way the company doesn't have all the overhead costs for sick and leave days, health care, etc. etc. and your hourly rate will be much higher than it is as a salaried employee
3. Job share with someone for 6 months of the year so you do 6 months on 6 months off
4. Work from home.
If your current job won't hear any of that, start looking elsewhere until you find one that does!
How do you account for illnesses / Old age / injuries / a reasonable setup for your children etc. on this forest living?
The main problem with romanticizing the unabomber life style is what it misses: All the benefits of regular society. I would rather be inclined to a good pitch for smaller footprint living (Make X money - live on it for the rest of your life doing OSS / charity).
How do you account for old age in your current plan? Sock away some money to pay for hospice care at ~$4000/mo./ea. and hope you time your death accordingly?
Or, create an environment that will support your family indefinitely. Give your children space that they own. (I'd be ecstatic if my teenager wanted to build their own house on the property.) It is, of course, possible that they'll all move away, too.
Thinking about my parents, it's very likely that they end up on my property, living in their own space, with family close-by to care for them. I'm not going to abandon them to caretakers, but I do realize that it's unrealistic to expect that lifestyle to work in a suburban tract home setting; everybody needs their space.
You're welcome to keep waiting for that one big gig that sets you free financially. I've got my own hopes for that, too, but I'm not about to let it stagnate my life.
Think about what happens to the stock price of a company once it stops growing. It falls through the floor. It could be making enough money to pay all of its employees, and making the world a better place, but if it doesn't grow, then if it has already gone public, the stock price sinks, and all of the employees who hold stock lose a lot of money. If it hasn't gone public, then the VC's get really upset. An example of such a company was Cygnus Support, which was in no danger of going out of business, and it was supporting a hundred or so engineers and their families, which were producing high quality open source code (such as GCC, gdb, etc.) so it was certainly making the world a better place. But it was considered a failure because it didn't give the VC's a lucrative exit. That's growthism. Fortunately for Cygnus's VC's, finally Cygnus got bought by Red Hat many years later.
But Red Hat is going to end up in a similar boat; as a public company, if it can't figure out a way to sustain an significant growth every year, forever, the stock price will get punished. And of course, the problem is that companies can't produce a sustained compounded growth forever, because sooner or later compounded growth will cause the company's required revenues to exceed the world's GDP. So the trick is to stay on the rocket ship as long as you can, and then sell the stock to a greater fool before it tips back towards earth. And that's growthism, too....
> Think about what happens to the stock price of a company once it stops growing. It falls through the floor.
I don't entirely agree. Companies which can earn stable profits and distribute those as dividends remain healthy stocks. Their stock prices might remain flat, but with dividend payments there's always a natural floor at which a stock will fall to, and no one's really holding them to make a profit on the sale of the stock (the stock price is more of a safeguard in case the companies cut dividends or you decide to liquidate to move your money). The key is finding companies which can sustain profits and those are often businesses with pricing power to keep up with inflation and competition. Here's a great blog:
His posts go back for years, and he's very focused on researching companies which have paid strong dividends for years/decades. It's an enlightening blog, especially after being surrounded by tech companies which rarely pay dividends and have stock prices based on growth potential (but Oracle, Intel, MS, etc. have transitioned to dividend paying companies).
I think you do not understand how stocks work. A stock in a stable, cash-generating company would never "fall to the floor" when it stops growing. Its stock would simply fall to its present day value. That inflated stock price you saw fall was based on future earnings. We then classify that stock as a "value stock" which means it has limited growth but maintains a stable price and perhaps yields a nice cash dividend that is paid from the operating profits. The company should still seek to enhance efficiency and productivity as well as keep its products/services fresh and relevant but growth would be modest at best. These companies are plentiful in the stock market and very important to any stock investors portfolio.
Granted your world view of stocks is probably limited to top tier tech stocks which have huge growth potentials (apple, amazon, google) and have huge price swings based on the latest tech conference or article.
Of course the stock will get punished, since the price of a stock is mostly based on future earnings. If a company had a growth trajectory of A and now it's a lower trajectory of B, the stock price should drop.
So then isn't the sustainable option to grow until you can, then leave the last stages of "grow, crash, burn" to some fool and then start the exact same company but with a different name (i.e. RougeChapeau) and recapture your old market by doing exactly what you used to do, but now you're in a growth position compared to your old self that crashed and burned?
I am endlessly amused by people pointing to features that the socialists who came up with the word "capitalism" to name the system they were criticizing criticized capitalism for and saying "this isn't capitalism".
But, no, the features that are being complained about as "growthism" -- the idea of being "willing to sacrifice everything for more growth" -- is exactly a feature of capitalism that those 19th Century socialists who coined the term "capitalism" were criticizing.
It's like the quote by Henry Spencer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Spencer) that "those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly": Those who do not understand Marx are condemned to rewrite him, poorly.
One could make the argument that free marketism inevitably brings about capitalism which inevitably turns into growthism. Much like Benjamin Tucker's argument that Marxism inevitably ends in Stalinism (he made this argument as a contemporary of Marx, so this wasn't hindsight). I happen to actually believe Schumpeter's model better (that capitalism turns to gas and water socialism turns to growthism).
It is, however, telling, that there are plenty of free-marketers who espouse essentially the same argument as Mr. Haque, for example the Austrian school of economics (which is full of kooks for other reasons). Chris Martenson (who called the 2008 crash) is another.
> One could make the argument that free marketism inevitably brings about capitalism which inevitably turns into growthism.
I wouldn't make the first part of that argument, because I'm not convinced that "free marketism" is even a real thing, much less a precursor of capitalism. It seems to be position presented as a rhetorical defense of capitalism, but doesn't seem to exist independently.
But what this article calls "growthism" is one of the core features of capitalism called out by the people who named it. Capitalism doesn't inevitably turn into growthism, it is (or, at least, includes as an essential feature) growthism.
> Much like Benjamin Tucker's argument that Marxism inevitably ends in Stalinism (he made this argument as a contemporary of Marx, so this wasn't hindsight).
Stalinism -- or, more to the point, Leninism -- requires both Marxism and an environment that is unlike the ones described by the descriptive elements of Marxism in a particular way into which one attempts to translate the prescriptive elements. Given those ingredients, I'd agree that its pretty much inevitable that something like Leninism will at least be attempted.
Marxism itself doesn't inevitably become Leninism/Stalinism, but its existence makes the existence of such a system quite likely.
> I happen to actually believe Schumpeter's model better (that capitalism turns to gas and water socialism turns to growthism).
I would argue more that the empirical evidence is that capitalism plus the existence of socialist ideas leads fairly usually (even if not inevitably) to a variety of mixed systems that feature a basically capitalist structure with socialist elements (including growthism), of which "gas and water socialism" is an example.
Again, Tucker made his argument from first principles, in a non-hindsight fashion (he was writing when Lenin was a teen). So it would be hard to argue that it's not inevitable, because it was empirically shown and in a prior fashion mechanistically predicted (this is the minimum bar for creating a law in the physical sciences), unless you can point out exactly what needs to happen differently from how Tucker envisioned it.
> Again, Tucker made his argument from first principles, in a non-hindsight fashion (he was writing when Lenin was a teen). So it would be hard to argue that it's not inevitable
The conclusion does not follow from the premise. That an argument was made "from first principles" doesn't make it hard to argue against.
> because it was empirically shown
I would disagree with the claim that what Tucker actually predicted was empirically shown, but this whole discussion is widely afield from the point.
>It seems to be position presented as a rhetorical defense of capitalism, but doesn't seem to exist independently.
It definitely does. This may be a relatively modern development, but a simple google search of "capitalism is not free markets" will demonstrate swaths of people who make a clear (if subtle) distinction between the two. It's even in the wikipedia page for free markets.
> This may be a relatively modern development, but a simple google search of "capitalism is not free markets" will demonstrate swaths of people who make a clear (if subtle) distinction between the two.
There's a clear distinction between capitalism and free markets -- largely, IME, drawn by people, often socialists, who are pointing out the inaccuracy of the "free market" rhetorical defense of capitalism -- but I don't see as much evidence that free marketism is a significant ideological viewpoint outside of its use as a rhetorical defense of capitalism, and certainly not a precursor to capitalism.
"center for a stateless society"
"foundation for economic education"
"ReasonTV"
Hardly socialistic enterprises. The clear distinction between the two is mostly a self-identification that tends to emanate from libertarian and anarcho-capitalist groups.
No one who understands what capitalism and free markets are about would suggest that they focus on the idea that one should sacrifice everything for more growth. The idea of growth as it's being talked about in the article - in the macro sense - is of no concern to capitalists because it's individualistic.
Imagine you're in high school and you want to get A's: do you want A's because you want to school to look good and improve, or to boost your transcript and have more opportunity? If you are fine with C's or F's then that's fine too - it's whatever each person wants to do (obvious caveat about natural ability, access, etc. whatever it's an imperfect analogy).
Similarly, no capitalist is greatly concerned about economics at the macro level, because they're simply focused on their own success, however they define it. This macro-level growth obsession is an invention of the government's attempt to control the economy by influencing certain metrics. This is where crony-capitalism comes in, since they are obviously incented to influence how the government manipulates the economy, but that is not a fault of capitalism but rather government intervention into markets and the subsequent incentives it creates. People often mistake that for capitalism when it's not.
> Similarly, no capitalist is greatly concerned about economics at the macro level, because they're simply focused on their own success, however they define it.
And if they run a company whose equity is traded in the public markets, they quickly discover that those markets define success as... growth.
Obviously...what's your point? Of course they're concerned with the growth of their own company. They don't care if other markets are shrinking though. That's why I specified macro level.
My point was that there's no need to assume any kind of "macro-level" direction at all. If the logic of the system drives individual "micro-level" actors inevitably toward growth, you'll get a macro-level orientation toward growth just from the aggregation of all those individual decisions.
Except growth doesn't just happen at the will of a company. Companies grow because people buy their products and use their services, which means they wouldn't grow unless people wanted them to. So how is growth a bad thing when it's what people want?
I had difficulty parsing your first sentence, even though I was pretty sure I got its meaning. Perhaps some punctuation helps:
I am endlessly amused by people pointing to features that the socialists - who came up with the word "capitalism" to name the system they were criticizing - criticized capitalism for and saying "this isn't capitalism".
What's bad is if growth is achieved by irrevocable destruction of the environment, or deterioration of the human condition. It's not growth itself that is the problem, for there are many kinds of growth.
Growth in physical inputs? Energy use? Labor? Outputs? Value (GDP)? Some of these counter-balance the other.
If efficiency goes up (productivity), there is less need for labor, but it could also mean less physical inputs required, less energy, etc, so good for the environment. Also, the increased surplus means that labor can enjoy more fruits of its produce (in theory).
And growth in value is another thing entirely, because it is a human value assigned by our minds, not an objective physical quantity. Just take virtual/digital goods, someone can make one awesome piece of software, or a game, that the whole of humanity values tremendously high, but which has O(1) marginal costs to produce for each person, and which took relatively few inputs. If I suddenly uploaded the entirety of humanity into the Matrix, all of a sudden, value can continue to increase, without continued use of environmental resources beyond the energy needed to run it. Today, if I make a piano, I have to cut down trees and use tons of energy, so for everyone on the planet to own a piano would be very bad. But if I make a virtual piano, everyone on the planet can have one at relatively low cost, and then the question simply falls to how good the simulation can be.
I'd analogize Capitalism to evolution in an ecosystem. The entities within the system can grow, change form, multiply, and die. If they grow too much too fast, they can deplete their resources too quickly to sustain their population. They must have wild swings between mass die-offs and mass growth, or they might have a relatively stable pattern with low volatility, but while growth is slowed, they still have competition, they have not "switched off" evolution.
I don't think growth is bad if it comes from increasing efficiency, or an increase in value because of completely new inventions. Perhaps same physical inputs that could produce a device in 1950, produces something in 2010 that I value a lot more. It is the organization of matter, it's pattern, the information content of it, that can grow with infinite variation and which we can continue to demand.
It seems like economic growth is the only variable being optimized in an uncertain world with many other important objectives and constraints. We could seek to maximize the median income of citizens, happiness, life expectancy, or many other factors. Yet, the goal of Government, Industry, and Academia is to maximize economic growth while mostly ignoring the human beings that should be served by the economy.
> What's bad is if growth is achieved by irrevocable destruction of the environment, or deterioration of the human condition. It's not growth itself that is the problem, for there are many kinds of growth.
Non sequitur. The notion of economic growth is tied to environmental and human labor exploitation, at fundamental levels.
A large portion of any nation's GDP comes from mining, pumping oil, cutting forests for crops, and activities that produce a lot of waste, on which the rest of the economy relies on. Another large portion comes from the financial sector, which profits on the disparity of income by providing credit. These activities are only profitable because the environmental and social costs are externalized. Without that, other endeavors wouldn't even make sense cost-wise, making economic growth grind to a halt.
> I'd analogize Capitalism to evolution in an ecosystem.
I realize many people think like that, and it's a fallacy. Capitalism is not some sort of natural law, it's entirely arbitrary human invention, and in practice it's nothing like this pure, theoretical meritocracy that allows the best solutions to strive. Quite the contrary: it fails to address many concrete, contemporary problems, like ever increasing economic disparity, social welfare, research funding and environmental destruction. And don't come tell me it's because we don't have enough capitalism, that markets are not free enough... this is the same argument used to explain why communism failed (it wasn't pure enough). If we keep looking at it as some theoretical ideal, we will never tackle it's shortcomings in practice.
Capitalism is based on trade, which IS a natural law. It seems pretty natural to me that people want to trade what they have for other things they need (for example, a musician trades their music for food&shelter).
A better way to phrase this is that natural law (of rivalrous goods) is based on possession, not ownership. "Ownership" or property is a human invention.
When a lion possesses a carcass, the hyena's don't respect it's property rights, they respect it's possession (unless they can over take the possessor), but the lion cannot leave dozens of killed carcasses stored around for future use.
Our notions of capitalism are based on concepts of property rights which are human inventions. One could reasonably be expected to defend one's own immediate possessions, home, or farm, but the invention of property allows an individual to control a vast amount of possessions, backed up by the power of the state.
When free marketers say "capitalism is natural", I think what they're really saying, is that market forces are natural, and by that they mean, individuals have demands, and are willing to trade possessions for them, and do not need a state or other framework for this 'bottom up' system to work. But that's a gross simplification, by taking a huge mental leap from a barter economy on the small scale to a modern capitalist economy. The modern market of trade bears little resemblance to the small scale microcosm thought experiments.
Reality is, our modern system is based of hundreds of years of evolved civil institutions, common law, political structures. It's the reason why a 'free market' in some countries is a "failed state" of misery, and not a paradise.
>Non sequitur. The notion of economic growth is tied to environmental and human labor exploitation, at fundamental levels.
Umm, no, that's not a non-sequitur. Our measurements of economic growth are mathematically tied to gross domestic product, whose definition doesn't demand anything about what that product is. The fact is, GDP is a human concept, not based on objective physical quantities in the real world, but on human demands and how we value them.
>A large portion of any nation's GDP comes from mining, pumping oil, cutting forests for crops, and activities that produce a lot of waste, on which the rest of the economy relies on. Another large portion comes from the financial sector, which profits on the disparity of income by providing credit. These activities are only profitable because the environmental and social costs are externalized. Without that, other endeavors wouldn't even make sense cost-wise, making economic growth grind to a halt.
That's what the current mix is, but there is nothing fundamental in the definition of GDP that would prohibit a society from which the majority of value is not derived from steady-state or virtual goods once all basic requirements of civilization are taken care of.
Also, the implication that all profit in the system has come about externalities aren't accounted is unsupportable. I'd like to see your calculation on this, showing that the enormous profits gains in productivity over the entire industrial and green revolutions are cancelled out by these external costs.
>I realize many people think like that, and it's a fallacy. Capitalism is not some sort of natural law, it's entirely arbitrary human invention, and in practice it's nothing like this pure, theoretical meritocracy that allows the best solutions to strive. Quite the contrary: it fails to address many concrete, contemporary problems, like ever increasing economic disparity, social welfare, research funding and environmental destruction. And don't come tell me it's because we don't have enough capitalism, that markets are not free enough... this is the same argument used to explain why communism failed (it wasn't pure enough). If we keep looking at it as some theoretical ideal, we will never tackle it's shortcomings in practice.
You just proved my point. I said capitalism is like an ecosystem, you say it's a fallacy, but then go on to say it's not addressing disparity, welfare, environmental destruction, but nature ecosystems don't address these either. There's no social welfare for mothers of calves eaten by apex predators.
You're jumping over into strawman land, I said nothing about capitalism being pure enough, I'm a progressive pragmatist, not an anarcho-capitalist.
My point is, the issue isn't some abstract notion of "growth" or "debt". I'm all for carbon taxes, and government R&D, infrastructure, public health and education, and all that jazz. "Growthism" in this essay is just sloppy sloganeering just like "Corporatism". It gives populists something to rail against, but it's wishy washy terminology.
If the author wanted to say that GDP is a bad measure of the health of society, the planet, or an economy, he could have said it a lot better. As it stands, the rant preys more on the emotions of the audience it is directed to, much like a Rush Limbaugh sermon, it's not going to sway many people, because it offers few if any specifics.
> Also, the implication that all profit in the system has come about externalities aren't accounted is unsupportable. I'd like to see your calculation on this, showing that the enormous profits gains in productivity over the entire industrial and green revolutions are cancelled out by these external costs.
Just one report puts the top 100 companies in the primary sector at $7.3 trillion / year in externalized costs related to the environment [1]. Still, measuring these things in capital doesn't capture the problem, since you can't buy back environment and it has far reaching consequences. This doesn't account for social well being either.
> You just proved my point. I said capitalism is like an ecosystem, you say it's a fallacy, but then go on to say it's not addressing disparity, welfare, environmental destruction, but nature ecosystems don't address these either. There's no social welfare for mothers of calves eaten by apex predators.
I see you're back at analogies. Social welfare for calves... what are you talking about anyway?
I'm talking about capitalism not providing the best solutions to concrete problems the society faces, despite being - in theory - a system that allows the best solutions to strive. In practice, we know it's parasitic, and the solutions that strive are the ones that move the economy itself forward, in detriment of society.
>Just one report puts the top 100 companies in the primary sector at $7.3 trillion / year in externalized costs related to the environment [1]. Still, measuring these things in capital doesn't capture the problem, since you can't buy back environment and it has far reaching consequences. This doesn't account for social well being either.
Well, if you want to account for externalities like that, then we need to account for positive externalities not captured by these corporations either, as GDP or profit figures do not adequately capture the difference between a $200 smartphone and a $200 feature phone.
>'m talking about capitalism not providing the best solutions to concrete problems the society faces, despite being - in theory - a system that allows the best solutions to strive. In practice, we know it's parasitic, and the solutions that strive are the ones that move the economy itself forward, in detriment of society.
Capitalism does not promise to solve global optimization problems which are not priced in or demanded, that's the whole point of having a democracy in order to set the constraints of the game, a negative external feedback system.
And best solution to what? If you have an optimization algorithm, you have to set up the constraints so that it optimizes for what you want. Market competition optimizes for the demands of individuals, not for the demands of society. If you want capitalists and entrepreneurs to do this, then the incentives have to encourage a gradient in that direction. If you want more fuel efficient cars, than tax carbon and pollution, the capitalists will quickly find that their profits are dropping as their cars get more expensive and will seek out alternatives. Tax an incandescent lightbulb, and the market will start competing on LEDs and CFLS.
You're making the same fallacy people make when talking about "survival of the fittest" in an ecosystem, they think natural selection is optimizing for a certain kind of creature, rather than just the creature that can reproduce the best in that ecosystem. Capitalism is undirected evolution, and if we want it to solve global problems, we need to guide it via political feedback in a mixed economy.
You started this thread by trying to criticize the analogy of capitalism to natural selection, but nothing you've said has debunked it. You've criticized capitalism for not solving global first or second order costs, but a market can't solve these problems if there's no price signals for them, in much the same way that species have naturally gone extinct in the past, because individual selection doesn't necessarily select for health of the group.
If there's one criticism of capitalism, it's that the 'best' product or service doesn't always win (assuming you can objectively define best). Sometimes superior marketing wins out, sometimes superior execution wins out, and sometimes underhanded tactics win out, especially if it involves political favors.
No one's denying that, but you're criticizing a strawman of a pure, perfect capitalist system. I am not, nor has anyone here, asserted such a perfect system,
My point is simple, capitalism, for all it's flaws, is a useful system to have to optimize productive capacities along the lines that we want (in contrast to top-down centralized control), and that we should have a mixed economy, where political decisions adjust costs to factor in externalities, and to ensure that the capitalists are working on optimizing the problems that we want solved as a society. It needs to be managed for costs, for transparency, for corruption, but there isn't any real alternative to the current mixed systems we already have, we just need to work on them to improve them.
That's it, nothing more. If you came to do battle with Ayn Rand, you're in the wrong thread.
> Well, if you want to account for externalities like that, then we need to account for positive externalities not captured by these corporations either, as GDP or profit figures do not adequately capture the difference between a $200 smartphone and a $200 feature phone.
Please...
The whole point is those companies in the primary sector, which are the backbone of the global economy, would be operating at a loss if they weren't offloading costs to future generations or this generation's poor - and in the other hand, economy as it stands today would be unsustainable if they were taxed proportionally.
It's not a game of numbers as you want to put, as if the uncaptured value between a phone and a shinier phone "balanced out" the problems behind it's means of production.
> Capitalism does not promise to solve global optimization problems which are not priced in or demanded, that's the whole point of having a democracy in order to set the constraints of the game, a negative external feedback system.
It has worked out great so far right? I don't think the US, which is a highly functional democracy, optimizes for those problems (environmental, social) rather than accumulation of wealth.
The problem is that a government's primary objective turns into maintaining economic growth, at all costs, even by use of force. This is the core of the criticism in the article.
>The whole point is those companies in the primary sector, which are the backbone of the global economy, would be operating at a loss if they weren't offloading costs to future generations or this generation's poor - and in the other hand, economy as it stands today would be unsustainable if they were taxed proportionally.
The study says that the majority of those costs are CO2 (38%) and water (25%). Can you prove that it is impossible to run those 100 companies any more efficiently, that sustainable energy and efficient use of water can never be made profitable?
Your original assertion was "The notion of economic growth is tied to environmental and human labor exploitation, at fundamental levels." You have fundamentally not proven that assertion with this evidence, that it is impossible to have economic growth in a sustainable way. What you have done is point out our current inefficiencies, not that the laws of physics preclude it.
>It has worked out great so far right? I don't think the US, which is a highly functional democracy, optimizes for those problems (environmental, social) rather than accumulation of wealth.
Right, because you have evidence of problems in the current system, it means it is irrevocably broken? To be replaced with what? What is your alternative than, Marxism? This sounds a lot like the rhetoric of the right who point to government failures and then make a logical leap that government can't be improved.
>The problem is that a government's primary objective turns into maintaining economic growth, at all costs, even by use of force. This is the core of the criticism in the article.
The government's primary objective is to stay in power. If it's primary purpose was purely economic growth, they'd be going crazy on Keynesian spending, as many eastern countries do to prop up growth. The US government hasn't done much at all in the last 6 years to prop who growth at any cost (unless you count grid lock and inaction as "at all costs"). And European nations wouldn't be implementing austerity policies if their goals were growth at any cost. This is a vast simplification of the motivations of the political. If you want to see "growth at any cost" look at Chinese domestic spending.
The Western electorate is far more sensitive to unemployment, inflation, or benefit cuts than it is to abstract notions of "growth". Throughout most of the "great recession", GDP growth has been positive, yet no one is happy, because voters don't vote based on quarterly GDP growth, and attempts to maximize that variable hurt others that politicians care about.
That's why the Federal Reserve is now doing nomimal unemployment targeting instead of only fighting inflation.
I mean, I fail to understand what your primary philosophy is. Growth is bad? We are doomed? We should give up our modern lifestyle because you think it is impossible to sustain it? That technology and politics can't save us?
Oh, you mean the strawman that "growth must be accomplished at all costs" without even defining what growth is?
What human action does not produce costs and benefits? If growth must be accomplished at all costs, why do we have any regulation or social safety net at all? Clearly, there are some costs we are not willing to pay.
Yes, some people don't believe in any regulation because it hurts economic growth. But call what we have in the West 'growthism' making straw. You think the Chinese who are suffocating in super-smog storms in Harbin right now aren't in favor of regulation?
People on the Right make the same mistake. They take any regulation or social programs and call it "socialism".
I think these "isms" are bad for studying the problem. We have a complex, mixed economy and boiling it down to bumper sticker isms isn't going to help understand what our problems are.
China isn't lacking regulations or controls. The Chinese Government has dictatorship-like control over all aspects of the economy. They can literally do what they want, when they want. They're lacking enforcement, which is a very different problem from not having regulations on the books.
Companies bribe their way out of enforcement. That's why their cities are suffocating from air pollution. It's the way business is done in China.
It's the way business is done everywhere. My perception is that in the US the 'bribes' aren't paid at the bureaucratic level but at the campaign 'contribution' level. That way the 'regulation' is hobbled before the legislation is passed. And if big business somehow gets hung up in a regulatory/legal issue, a la the banking industry or the oil industry, they pay their fines and it's back to business as usual.
I've started a small business without bribing anyone. Well, I did have to pay a remittance to the IRS to get nonprofit status. Which, is still being processed.
"That is the great mistake growthism makes. But growth is not an end. It is a means. A means to, at best, expanding eudaimonia; the capacity to live meaningfully well. And a means, at least, to expanding human freedom."
clearly he doesn't think growth is bad. What i believe he thinks is bad is forcing growth. To try to force it as an end.
you're defending the author for wishy washy terminology. This is no different than someone who writes a screed against socialism, or affirmative action, and then pivots around and says "not all of it is bad"
Who is going to determine what growth is good and which is bad. Is growth in food output bad? Growth in HackerNews readership? Growth in tablet or smartphone usage? Growth in the number of people on the internet?
You can't just rail against growth and then hand-wave an exit from the argument. Specifics are needed.
I think you're mistaken. The author is very careful in his use of the term growthism versus growth. He doesn't at any point explicitly define what growthism is, but that's because the whole point of the essay is to introduce the concept to a new audience, so most of the essay is given over to (an admittedly diffuse) description of what, exactly it is.
your point that the essay seems ranting, is valid, and definitely a weak point.
Complicated argumentation != incoherent. I was astonished by the level of subtlety here. I honestly couldn't tell where the author would fall politically for half the article, but I still wanted to read it. And I didn't feel cheated at the end. I read your incoherent as "too long, couldn't read."
Capitalism is itself based on constant growth. There is a fundamental misunderstanding with this article (and most of our society) and that is the conflation of capitalism and a free market. A truly free market is not necessarily capitalist, and actually capitalism doesn't lead to free markets. This confusion is messing up everyone's thoughts. What we like is the free market, the natural bottom-up interactions that help determine prices and such. Free markets have nice features.
Capitalism is about profit and growth and the instant you think it isn't going to fail, everyone might as well speculate like crazy (why not? if it isn't going to fail…). The only way for capitalism to work is for everyone to realize that it is inherently unstable and likely to fail. And that realization is true also.
We can still advocate for market freedom without advocating capitalism.
That's not quite true. Capitalism is based on the principle that "the accrual of wealth (capital) is a virtue unto itself". This does not entail any level of growth.
Free-marketism is a bit lighter, based on the principle that "making a profit is an indicator that you are providing social goods efficiently".
It's really neoliberal capitalism (largely via neokeynesianism - but notably not what Keynes said himself, necessarily) that has espoused growthism. The austrian school does the best at presenting a critique of this neoliberal capitalism, but unfortunately the ranks of austrianism are also populated by people who don't believe in limited resources and environmental catastrophe, and don't talk enough about how growthism really screws over the poor via inflation. And also the austrian school is polluted by crazy goldbugs, who have the story half-right but run like hell with the wrong half.
No, constantly increasing profits or shareholder value are based upon constant growth. Capitalism does not require constantly increasing growth of profits to be "capitalism".
This "corporations must constantly grow" is, along with "corporations must, by law, sociopathically seek profit", the major reason that American style capitalism isn't viable. It eats it's young.
There's other structural issues beyond just legal obligations of corporations (which are a problem). A debt-based economy, especially a debt-based currency, requires a constant level of growth to stave off economic catastrophe.
Of course, these are really one and the same: The unifying principle is that if inflation is to be maintained, we must provide an easy avenue for average joe to feel secure against the rolling treadmill, so we create legal entities like 401ks and mutual funds and IRAs and the like - which, in order to maintain a return, require the government to create legal obligations on the corporations, and when they DO fail, pump up the corporations whose stocks, and so on and so forth (and this pumping is financed through inflation), and so we have unsustainable spirals and the periodic retrenchments which, of course, hurt the poor harder.
Capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and capital goods, and the production of goods and services for profit in a market economy.
Not sure where you got this idea on "constant growth," considering that production is dependent on raw resources, and raw resources are finite, and this fact itself is within the system of capitalism, which increases prices practically in a mechanism you may know as the supply/demand curve. As price increases, demand decreases, thus slowing growth inline with diminishing supply.
If you want to discuss any other elementary-level economics in a condescending tone that treats the reader like a misbehaving child, just reply with a comment that ignores everything about the article or the thread's content, and continue building up the conceptual walls to buttress your ego, preferably with sweeping, general statements spoken as if indisputable fact.
I see this type of thinking a lot, sometimes even within myself. I don't think the problem is Capitalism (or "Growthism") - it's that we don't do much as we could to counter act the negative effects. Instead of worrying about the rich/poor divide, we could instead try to improve conditions for those on the bottom (food/shelter/health are all good starting points).
> I don't think the problem is Capitalism (or "Growthism") - it's that we don't do much as we could to counter act the negative effects. Instead of worrying about the rich/poor divide, we could instead try to improve conditions for those on the bottom (food/shelter/health are all good starting points).
To the extent you are doing something to counteract the negative effects, the system is not capitalism.
But the point is that "trying to improve conditions for those on the bottom" will never pan out, because the effects of growthism on the poor are compounding, i.e. exponential, and at best those things you are trying to improve the lot of others, scale linearly. Things get really bad when you do things like government welfare, which provides a linear benefit to the less fortunate while enriching the rich and polticially connected far more (indirectly, through deficit spending).
That's false. In the limit, you could have 100% of the population unemployed, robots manufacturing everything and have the robots and robot factory owners taxed at 99.9% FICA, paying social security to everyone at birth.
This scenario has been covered by quite a few "post-work" authors, who look at humans returning to a hunter-gather society. See Hans Moravec in _Mind Children_ for example.
We used to walk around and these marvelous automated machines produced everything for us: nuts and fruits from trees, free for the picking. In the future, we'll walk around, and robots will be churning out the equivalent of fruits and nuts from factories.
The modern concern of labor arises from the industrial revolution.
It's not a growthist system, though, if previously accrued tax receipts are used to pay out the welfare you're describing.
What would make it growthist, is if the welfare is paid for by borrowing, which would require compounding interest to pay it off. That the payback requires interest (which compounds, i.e. grows) implies growth in the overall productivity of the system to continue functioning.
Moreover, if you consider these post-work humans to be "poor" something strange is going on in your head. It's easy to conflate "unemployed" with "poor" because that's generally the case in our society. But I wouldn't consider the humans in your "limit case" (with my growthist modification) to be the poor people being screwed over by the growthism. It's the robots.
Borrowing to pay for welfare is one problem, borrowing to smooth out fluctuations in production is another. If the robots are to be efficient, they'll produce exactly what is demanded for equilibrium, but the economy cannot be in equilibrium, because people's demands are constantly changing. If for example, there's a revolutionary new product, suddenly the factories tooled to produce the old product need to be converted to make the new product. So, either the people must suffer shortages in supply, or the robots borrow to expand, meet demand, and then pay back the borrowed capacity.
And in fact, if you arrange things right, the robots who have the product that is no longer in demand can lend their unused capacity to robots making a product that is in higher demand.
My point is, borrowing from the future isn't always wrong, it depends on the context. If Western civilization had never invented banking or finance, we would have been far worse off.
> What would make it growthist, is if the welfare is paid for by borrowing, which would require compounding interest to pay it off. That the payback requires interest (which compounds, i.e. grows) implies growth in the overall productivity of the system to continue functioning.
Strictly speaking, it requires growth in the overall rate of production, which is not the same as growth in productivity (which is production per unit of some input consumed, usually labor-hours.) If, for instance, the rate of population growth were greater than the interest rate on the debt, you could have constant productivity with employment levels without a problem.
> Instead of worrying about the rich/poor divide, we could instead try to improve conditions for those on the bottom (food/shelter/health are all good starting points).
As robots and computers take over more of what humans once did, we'll have to deal with this problem (see various articles by Kevin Drum). Unless you're fine with a "Mad Max" scenario, some kind of welfare state or minimum guaranteed income is probably the least-worst option.
"Mad Max" is probably the wrong analogy - 2000AD's Judge Dredd (85%+ unemployment, riots against automation, and so on) would be the dystopian sci-fi you're looking for.
Vonnegut's Player Piano also comes to mind: society is divided into a management class and an underclass. Nearly all jobs are performed by machines, so no one in the underclass has to work, but everyone is assigned a meaningless job. It's partially about the seductive nature of technology, and how human ingenuity is capable of engineering us into irrelevance.
The beautiful part of CapitalismStan is that no one becomes rich unless they in turn enrich the lives of others. Aka they produce a good/service that consumers want to freely purchase.
He can rant about twisted incentives that government imposes on the free market but I can never understand why anyone can lambast capitalism when only people who produce value for everyone else make money. Billionaires would be celebrated as national heroes in CapitalismStan.
Lastly, this author lambasts our current capitalists for producing goods that make us "zombies" well they should look in the mirror because capitalism only are delivering the goods that the consumers want to buy.
I agree with most of this article except for the main point; I think that "Growthism" and capitalism are synonymous. Growthism seems to be a scapegoat for the very real short comings of capitalism. Fact is that capitalism requires constant growth or it will fail. The real issue is valuing private property over the sacred right of life and that is what CAPITALism means.
no, captialism is valuing the accrual of property as a virtue in and of itself, not necessarily above or even competing with valuing human life. That growth is required as a part of the economic model is actually a rather modern concept that post-dates the development of capitalist philosophy, and accompanies the emergence of secular inflation as a matter of public policy.
If you would like to understand how growth is "built in" to the economic system as a matter of policy and structure (and has nothing to do with capitalism per se), I would strongly recommed three resources:
1) Zeitgeist takes a left-ish perspective, and unfortunately is diluted by a lot of conspiratorial nonsense, but importantly its description of the money system is more or less correct.
2) Chris Martenson's "crash-course" is centrist, and very very good, but also very long and tedious.
3) Hidden Secrets of Money (video 4 in particular) takes a more right-leaning approach, and is tainted by the fact that the guy is obviously trying to sell you gold and silver, but the description of the money system is spot on and he strongly makes the point that growth is required. It's also the most concise and well-produced of the three.
> captialism is valuing the accrual of property as a virtue in and of itself
Accrual: The act or process of accumulating; an increase.
Am I missing something? How is that not "growth"? If someone has more and more, the number of things they own has to keep growing. [I put growth in quotes because I think there is a world of difference between a tree or a person growing, and bank accounts or "places to put stuff" (see Carlin et al.) growing.]
> not necessarily above or even competing with valuing human life
I would argue that even the focus on property - owning things just for the sake of owning them, as opposed to making, using and sustaining things (not just objects, but also ideas and living beings) for the sake of furthering life - goes against the humanity and aliveness of the person subscribing to that view.
Moreover, since we're nowhere near being able to turn energy into matter, to conjure property out of, say, the energy that gets hurled around space by suns and such, property often has to come from somewhere. Not strictly necessarily, but quite often in practice, it means taking things that someone else owned, or could potentially own; wherever we're dealing with finite resources, amassing property must make the rest poorer. Sure, that's not an objective in itself, "just" an unavoidable side-effect. Kinda like alcoholism is "just" wanting to be happy/drunk, not wanting to feel miserable or making others miserable. 10 for noble intentions, 0 for intellectual honesty.
Yes, it is theoretically possible for such an addiction (to own more for the sake of owning more) to at least harm no other beings than the ones suffering from it. We may get there some day. We're not there, at all.
> Am I missing something? How is that not "growth"?
Because it's an individual value; there is no imposition that society as an aggregate MUST do so. That imposition is "growthism".
goes against the humanity and aliveness of the person
This smacks of the naturalistic fallacy. What constitutes "humanity"? One could argue, that being the only species that appears to have conjured up property rights, propertization is quintessentially human. When animals fight over scarce resources, they get bloody. When humans fight over scarce resources, they shout words at each other and ultimately go to court (in most cases). Occasionally blood is shed, but it's much rarer.
>the focus on property - owning things just for the sake of owning them
That's not the typical capitalist property rights model - most capitalists justify property rights via the Lockean model; that something comes to be your property so that you can transform it into something else, ideally useful to others for future trade. This is exactly opposed to the growthism model, where the investments are less made to promote the product being made (and score a bit of a profit in the meantimes), and more made for the purposes of securing your future against the treadmill of inflation.
I'm sorry, but it appears your views on what constitutes capitalism are exactly the caricature of capitalism that have come about because of growthism.
Just to clarify: I don't personally subscribe to any of these views, I take more of the free market position, which takes no position on property and has a weaker value associated with profit - by weak, non-profits are not to be stigmatized, and in fact I'm running a non-profit myself. Futhermore, my personal philosophy on property is that propertization is a social right (not an individual one) that is justified pragmatically as a means to avoid the tragedy of the commons.
Irregardless of your political ideologies there are two roots to this issue which the author of this blog post seems unaware of:
1 - Government policy
2 - Central bank policy
Your 401k, pension fund, home, are all dependent on prices increasing in order for you to retire or be financial secure. It just happens that if you did really well with your investments someone who has more investments than you did even better.
If leverage is involved, not only do you fail to get a positive return on your investment you not only lose that asset but potentially everything else you have.
Some of this policy extends beyond government subsidized lending toward things that are very looked down upon by modern Western society such as colonialism and genocide.
As a civilized individual imagine yourself playing a computer game like Civilization. What strategies are you going to implement to grow bigger, get a better score, and continue playing the game?
Is capitalism failing at being the best possible means
of organizing human work, life, and play?
We've seen so many examples of market failure that it should be obvious that the market system is not a good answer to every problem.
And when other nations chart a different course and deliver better outcomes for their citizens, that should trigger some critical questions.
Failing to examine the beliefs and assumptions that public policy is built on, in the face of overwhelming evidence that those beliefs are false, really is magical thinking and cultish.
This is something I've been wondering about for a while:
To what extent are our economy and stock market merely ponzi schemes that require continued population expansion? If growth slows down/reverses/stops, is the era of easy profits finished?
Or in other words, what will happen to my total-market ETF shares if population growth slows/stops? Is this an argument for investment in the developing world?
My first thought when I saw the article title was "I bet this is by Umair Haque," and I was right. This is sort of what he does. How to fix the world is interesting, though http://howtofixtheworld.org/
It's not Growthism per se but the lack of acknowledgment that growth needs to be taxed in a way that it still benefits society without taking the incentives away.
That balance is lost in the US and people gets rich way beyond their risk.
It can be fixed but it will require different taxation system IMHO.
Interestingly, the article appears behind a registration-required modal window, but you can read the whole article by scrolling down and leaving the window in place.
Luckily, in this world of "skyrocketing" poverty, surely only the top 1% can afford such indulgences, right? It's not as if innovation and a growing economy have put them in the hands of more than a hundred million Americans. Oh dear, I guess the zombie apocalypse is nigh.
This guy's Twitter feed[1] is more or less a constant stream of invective directed at "billionaires", like this:
The billionaires believe the greatest threat to freedom is society. But a free society's great threat is billionaires.
Let's say you had THREE BILLION DOLLARS in the bank. Would you really give a fuck if it was...2.75? That's like counting toilet paper!
He's a clown, and it's embarrassing that HBR thinks he's valuable as a contributor.
[1] https://twitter.com/umairh
EDIT: And in case there was any question about where he actually stands on capitalism, from a whole three days ago:
So now the fashion establishment calls designers with real vision, like Westwood, "eccentric". Ah, capitalism. Fuck you so much.