I said this the other day, but this is because capitalism is society optimizing for the wrong values.
It makes perfect sense if you’re optimizing for profit. It makes terrible sense if you’re optimizing for peace, health, and safety.
Profit-seeking is capitalism doing exactly as it’s meant to. I don’t place any blame there. Every time capitalism optimizes for the wrong benefit, is detrimental to society or its citizens or its fixture, the blame is entirely on those who establish and maintain the market. A profit-seeking healthcare industry is not a failure of capitalism, but a failure of regulators to focus capitalism on positive outcomes, or a failure of regulators to establish a beneficial market. In that case, the existence of the market itself may be the root failure, but capitalism can’t fix that, only those who should be regulating that market
People assume capitalism is all powerful, but it’s not. We have extensive systems in place to establish fair markets for capitalism to act within: where are they? Who do they serve? Who benefits? We keep forgetting capitalism is just a tool, not a goal itself
I don’t even think it’s that we’re optimizing for the wrong value. Optimizing for maximum profit is probably fine – everyone gets the best utility possible. The problem is in the algorithm being a greedy approach where every individual personally chooses the best option for themselves. Greedy algorithm settles on a local maximum but drastically overshoots the global maximum.
Maximizing profits is why America still has slavery. Ever heard of prisoner leasing? It’s also why we exploit other nations and pay them 1/100th of what we would Americans. It’s also why countless other tragedies happen.
Optimizing for profit IS the evil.
No, being greedy is why America still has slavery, technically. As a whole they could get a ton more profit and save on costs if the system cared to develop prisoners, reduce prison populations and make them more productive members of society.
Individual and short-term profits are gained through this exploitation. The fix isn’t to eliminate profit “waste money” then everybody loses. The solution is to address the externality in the market, thereby making it so that everyone can profit.
I assume you’re making the argument that a motivated worker does better work and if they do better work they’re more productive and thus make more profit. However, a motivated worker also costs more so really the profit maximum is somewhere between worker production and how much you’re paying for the worker. Now imagine how little the prison worker is paid. Different sources give different numbers but all of it ends up in the ballpark of $1/h. The federal minimum wage is $7.5/h. That means a minimum wage worker would have to be at least 7 times more productive than the prison laborer and that’s just the floor of what you’re legally supposed to pay. If we talk about the average american we’re talking about needing to be around 10-11 times for efficient than a prison worker.
Slave labor is the most efficient way to make a profit. because you’re effectively paying nothing to produce something that you could sell at market value.
Optimizing for max profit is always the wrong answer, because it can only lead to this state. Eventually, capital takes over government to get even more profit, at the expense of everything else.
People seem to think that you’re saying “just like now, but tweaked”
As I see it to aim at max global profit we would need a whole different economic system, or at least a new way to direct capital at businesses toward the global max
it might be worth mentioning here that the reason greedy algorithms don’t generally find local maximums is because they’re “too short-sighted”, and are always focused on making the best possible short term decision, while failing to consider any long term implications.
so in that way the greedy algorithm is a pretty good description of many of our current problems
capitalism is society optimizing for the wrong values
There’s an argument that clean energy and efficient supply of health care and a conservative regional defense strategy more invested in reducing violence than instigating it all create virtuous profit-cycles for the economy at large and for individual business units.
I’d argue that what we have is an echo of the WW2 economic boom. Not necessarily the product of capitalism, per say, but the result of capitalist expansion running through the grooves built out a century beforehand. Water following the course of least resistance, decade after decade, until the institutions are impossible to shift due to its sheer size and depth.
It makes terrible sense if you’re optimizing for peace, health, and safety.
It makes sense if you’re simply chasing the last economic wave. The automotive industry compounds on itself because we build cars and the cars need roads so we build roads and now we have demand for more cars. Go over to Japan or Spain or China or NYC, where they’ve invested heavily in rail and you have the opposite dynamic - rail infrastructure snowballs because that’s where the money already is.
Similarly, countries that aren’t heavily invested in the MIC - Japan, Mexico, South Africa, India - have thrown their GDP into non-military applications at a far more voluminous rate. Taiwan keeps reinvesting in their chip fabs because that’s where their revenue comes from. France keeps throwing more and more money at vineyards and airplanes and nuclear energy.
Profit-seeking is bad and creates all sorts of moral hazards, but there’s no reason you’re forced to profit-seek through these explicitly destructive methods.
Americans again confusing “america” with “every single country in the world”
If you want to do something about it … step one is to stop using corporate social media
Once you stop hearing, watching, listening to constant propaganda and social manipulation … then you’ll have time to think for yourself and to actually want to do meaningful things to change yourself and the world around you.
It’s not just social media. It’s main stream media, which is mostly (if not completely) owned by billionaires who manipulate what we see.
The thing is, if everyone (or at least a large enough majority of everyone) left corporate social media, they’d likely end up bringing the shills, astroturfers, and other bad actors with them.
You could also say that we ditch MSM, but there are so many “independent” “news” sites that peddle worse garbage than MSM.
The thing is that these bad actors don’t play by any rules or sense of decorum. Most people who spread misinformation are not “evil” people (there are those that I’d say are genuinely evil, but most people ignorantly parrot the talking heads of their choice because they don’t know any better).
The fediverse is not the bastion of truth everyone wants it to be. It has its fair share of problems too. The difference is that the fediverse kitchen is much bigger, and there are many more cooks who have the opportunity to become men-in-the-middle of the information we see.
Can’t afford affordable housing, it would destroy the real estate market.
And we definitely can’t have education because that would destroy the oligarchy.
Who is the “we” in “we can’t afford”? Let those industries be destroyed.
Let them? How do you propose we let them? Stop going to our jobs? Stop getting healthcare?
And how exactly do we let the government stop selling weapons? That’s not really a ‘let them’ situation since that’s exactly the opposite of what they want to do.
Oh if only we could successfully organize an entire nation not going to work for one day, on the same day… that would be epic.
When almost half the nation lives paycheck-to-paycheck, a day without work could mean a day without food for your kids. If they don’t fire you entirely and replace you with some MAGA faithful. Because there’s no way that the entire nation will go with the “capitalism is bad” thing considering who got elected president.
You’re right on each count, and unfortunately that is what will keep us in this endless cycle.
Genuinely lasting change is hard because it means making hard sacrifices. We as a country have become very complacent and afraid of sacrifice. We’ve been whipped so badly over the decades/centuries, that either we drank the kool-aid, or are too scared of our world ending (hint: it won’t).
It’s an incredible task to get a whole thousand people workplace to go on strike when it’s clearly in their interests
I can’t imagine how you’d get a whole nation’s people to stay home
Capitalism is a tool, and the tool can be used well or it can be used badly. Companies are supposed to only care for their profits, but the governments are supposed to make the framework, the rules around that. In America the governments are obviously failing to do that in a lot of places. Perhaps in Europe and Asia too, but in a lot less harmful way.
The evil in the system is incompetence and a general lack of political philosophy and principles.
Yeah, Adam Smith was very explicit when he said monopolies had to be illegal and one person owning everything would ruin the whole system. It was always supposed to be regulated.
Society can have either unlimited wealth and control of the world and all humanity … or long term survival
But not both
Mm hmm. But we can replace droves of workers with robots, AI, and H1B visas?
It’s not the “industry” in danger, it’s the executives. “God” forbid they have to learn a new trade. They might actually have to make an effort.
I will die on the hill that one of the biggest mistakes Hillary made was announcing that her Presidency would dismantle the oil & gas industry, as opposed to focusing on creating new, better paying opportunities for current oil & gas workers who were already feeling pressured. The industries would have still have opposed her, but she gave the GOP easy-to-use sound bites to make the blue collar workers think she was coming to take their livelihoods away. She focused on hanging a carrot in front of progressives - who were already in her side - instead of hanging one in front of conservative voters.
You say this, but all I hear (at least on Lemmy) is that the reason Hillary (and Kamala) lost is that they were appealing to conservatives too much, trying to pull their votes instead of unifying democrat voters.
Kamala might have.
Hillary is an economically conservative, socially liberal, pro-business politician, like her husband. Very center. Her loss was different from Kamala’s; Hillary actually won the popular vote, and lost only because the electoral college is weighted so heavily in favor of the GOP. If she’d not have made a couple of pretty major gaffs (the open mike SNAFU did her no favors and the aforementioned comment about destroying the oil & gas industry among them) she could have been the first woman US president.
Kamala’s problems were different. Geopolitics worked against her, and by then the GOP had their playbook down pat. She had a hard time really solidifying the left, and maybe she’d indeed have done better if she’d focused more on appealing to progressives, instead of taking them for granted. She was never going to pull votes from Trump’s base; all that was just wasted energy.
I strongly disagree with any statement that Biden’s and her positions on Israel did her any harm. What votes she’d have picked up from the anti-genocide folks would have been swamped by the utter destruction the AIPAC would have wreaked on her. Just the sheer number of dollars they’d have poured into attack campaigns, and while I know that a lot of Jewish folks in the US don’t agree with what the Israeli government is doing, I suspect that, as a block, the majority still leans heavily in support of (or defense of) Israel.
I honestly don’t know why Kamala lost; it was her race to lose, and she did. Maybe if she’d leant more left it’d have helped, but I don’t know.
And you can’t gauge anything political by what you see on Lemmy. With a few notable exceptions, Lemmy leans far left, by a large, vocal majority. Of you’d have bet on this last election based on the sentiment on Lemmy, you’d have list your shirt; despite being critical of the pro-Israel stance, only trolls argued that Trump would be a better outcome for Palestine.
So how did pollution, sickness, and war happen before capitalism?
The past having problems does not invalidate criticism of our current system
Did they?
Before the Industrial Revolution, pollution was extremely localized to a single property or maybe a city; the biggest impact I can find any reference to is the burning of soft coal in London causing thick smogs from the 1200s through the 1900s, but even that only affected a single city. Since the Industrial Revolution, all large-scale pollution has been caused by a capitalistic endeavor, with the possible (debatable) exception of Chernobyl.
And sickness? The Black Death–still the largest pandemic ever–was likely caused after a conflict between Mongols and Genoans over trade routes led to the Battle of Caffa, where the Mongols deployed Bubonic plague as a biological weapon to overwhelm the city. Fleeing ships then spread the plague throughout Europe. Capitalism started the Black Death.
War is also a common bedfellow of capitalism; by some estimates, most wars are waged in pursuit of economic gain (or territorial gain, which is just economic gain with extra steps). Even if the stated reason for a war is religion or defense, oftentimes behind the curtain you’ll find economic or territorial gain as the true reason for the war. Capitalism starts most wars.
Capitalism has been defined as a lot of different things, but at the end of the day it’s people with a lot of money trying to protect that money or increase it. That, coupled with a latent sociopathy (or at least an empathy deficit) can lead to some pretty awful things.
That’s an entirely different world. There’s barely any comparison to modern-day problems.
Yes, it’s the fault of the financial system and not the shit politics of one country… Most countries exercise capitalism without having the dystopian conditions Americans are used to.
Don’t worry, we’re catching up at an ever increasing rate.
