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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

World Bank estimates that global poverty fell to less than 10% for the first time in history [0]. Perhaps this wasn't solely caused by capitalism and globalization, but considering those two idea were probably the driving forces of the last century, I believe they are instrumental in reducing global poverty.

I just don't buy the argument that absolute livings standards have always been increasing due to capitalism but eventually when we get to a certain point it will all turn into disaster. That's similar to the argument that luddites have always made and they have always been wrong.

[0] http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2015/10/04/wo...

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>That's similar to the argument that luddites have always made and they have always been wrong.

Industrial revolution resulted malnutrition and deterioration of absolute living standards. It took almost hundred years from the start of the industrial revolution before real wages started to grow. You can see it from the historical records. The height of enlisted men in Britain decreased. Luddites were mostly right. They were not fighting against technology per se btw, they were fighting against losing their jobs.

The real benefits from industrialization were realized after hard political changes were made and capitalism was limited. It was very violent struggle. People were shot or beaten. Economic history teaches us that technological changes require political changes. What you attribute as triumph of capitalism ignores the fact that capitalism changed a lot. You don't create middle class from mid 18th century society.

Summary:

capitalism + technology + political change == benefits for everyone.

The industrial revolution needs to be understood in the context of land enclosure laws.

Workers had no choice. That is what allows employer exploitation: work for me or starve.

This is why the USA had slavery - there was abundant land. In the UK the UK was the plantation with land enclosure.

This is why now we feel exploited by "capitalism". Banks are flooding the world with fiat money as private debt primarily against land. Don't want to work for the man? You have no choice. Take out your banker debt for education and land and then pay them part of your salary as tribute.

This isn't capitalism.

http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/enclosure-acts-indust...

When we have access to land we have a choice. Presently we must all toil away to maintain access to living space via a death pledge (mort-gage).

In a capitalist world money is the medium for the message. If we aren't financially free we aren't free.

The US inherited an existing slave regime from the Caribbean. It entailed exactly the same cognitive dissonance required of soldiers in the British Empire as described by Orwell in "Burmese Days". So it looks Mercantilist to me.

I don't hold that debt is inherent to what we consider capitalism. I run the risk of a "no true Scotsman" fallacy with this, but debt is something we have because of path dependence, not because it's shown to be inevitable or optimal.

The fact that debt cannot be easily retired indicates that we haven't finished this as an institution. At the level of a debt holder, of course you can't do this. At the level of a general person living in society, the un-retire-ability of debt creates a common, sort-of pubic goods problem because it slows growth.

Classical and pre-Classical societies held debt jubilees. Could we? I don't know.

Debt jubilees would be directly contrary to the capitalist conception of property; insofar as it features them, a society has broken with capitalism.

Debt is an artifact of finance, not of capitalism. If some genius tomorrow announced a way to have money creation without the attendant debt overhang, we'd do that instead.

Capitalism would still be exactly the same. Debt precedes capitalism by... the entirety of human history.

The map is not the territory and accounting and finance are technologies that attend to productive enterprise, not the enterprises themselves.

> Industrial revolution resulted malnutrition and deterioration of absolute living standards.

What? Capitalism did not create poverty or famine - it inherited it, and then swiftly solved it. The industrial revolution, if anything, obliterated it from the Western world. Compared to the centuries of pre-capitalist starvation, the living conditions of the poor in the early years of capitalism were the first chance the poor had ever had to survive.

Have you actually read any muckrake pieces of that time? The industrial revolution brought about the redunancy of weavers who were skilled workers that were brought to poverty[1].

1. http://webs.bcp.org/sites/vcleary/ModernWorldHistoryTextbook...

And everyone who was not a weaver (most of the population, and mostly not skilled workers) could now afford unthinkable luxuries in their daily life, like a second or third shirt (lightly used).

I think this has been posted around here before: http://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-l...

I think the main problem is workers lacked choice due to access to alternative means of employment due to land enclosure laws.

Had they been able to choose between say farming and working 12 hour shifts in bad conditions they would have looked at the risk/reward. As it was the choice was work or starve. Wages are therefore set at subsistence levels rather than at the floor set by the alternative.

Land enclosure created unemployment. Employers were not bidding against one another to secure workers, they were in a dutch auction with labourers to "save them".

Similarly today due to very high land prices we cannot work selectively (unless you earn a lot). Were land prices to be suppressed I think we would see people choose to work less which would put pressure on employers who would have to hand over to workers a greater share of the value they produce.

Would that be a capitalistic move to suppress land prices?

Land value tax. It's actually extremely capitalistic in my opinion. It trims the fat of speculators, forces people to use land effectively or pay the price and in general cuts out dynastic wasters.

http://www.landvaluetax.org/what-is-lvt/

Can't reply to you - one of the mods has disabled my ability to post (haven't posted in an hour and get "you're submitting too fast").

Or perhaps the thread has been closed down. Who knows.

I think you've mistaken "capitalistic" for "good"; each of your points is a way in which LVT is not capitalistic, even if it is a way in which it is desirable.

Of course they were brought to poverty. They were obsoleted by technology.

The link you provide proves my point readily:

> Since population was increasing in Great Britain at the same time that landowners were enclosing common village lands, people from the countryside flocked to the towns and the new factories to get work.

At the time, Europe's population was increasing 300% per century, whereas in prior eras the population increase was around 3% per century.

Why was the population increasing so rapidly? Because capitalism was enabling the disenfranchised poor to survive for the first time. Obtaining household goods was becoming less of a struggle, people were living beyond the age of 40, and famine was no longer a daily reality for most.

The societal changes that occurred due to the industrial revolution were significant and immediate; of course there were issues dealing with this change. It was the most potent moment of change the modern world has ever seen - a culmination of the ideology of the Renaissance paired with the technology of the times.

Your claim is that capitalism solved poverty and didn't create any instances. I'm pointing to an instance where people became impoverished because they were rendered redundant from capitalism. That's all I'm saying. You seem to be arguing against something that isn't my point.

I think it's pretty obvious they meant poverty as a whole, in which case you're just being pedantic.

> Because capitalism was enabling the disenfranchised poor to survive for the first time.

Capitalism? Or just plain technological progress?

Malnutrition, abysmal living standards, etc certainly have not been "swiftly solved" or obliterated. These are battles we are still facing today, even in Western societies.

The concepts of malnutrition and abysmal living standards, on their own, are proof to the contrary. Prior to the industrial revolution, most human beings faced these realities. Today, a tiny fraction of individuals deal with these issues.

Sure, relatively speaking but in considering the population explosion since the industrial age, there are more people in absolute numbers living in poverty. As shown by the demographic economic paradox, poverty and overpopulation are closely related in a negative feedback cycle of exponential proportions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

I'm not suggesting that progress has not occurred or that many of us are not better off, but to definitely say that we've swiftly solved or obliterated mass poverty, malnutrition, etc is ridiculous and callous to say the least. Again, these are issues we are still fighting today.

Perhaps you're referring to the malnutrition observed in people (particularly youth) on food stamps and other forms of state assistance? I'm sorry, but I do not buy the idea that this is an issue we're still fighting today, when the problem stems directly from our own policies towards the poor. The problem is not malnutrition, but rather the so-called 'solution' to it.

You should study more history dude, that's a very broad point to be making for a period of 300 years against 5000 years that comes before, it's quite clear you haven't given the rest much thought. Stop being shallow, please. From yesterday: http://quillette.com/2016/02/15/the-unbearable-asymmetry-of-...

LOL. Just because you put 'please' at the ass-end of your sentence doesn't forbid it from being useless, out of place, idiotic, or rude. Did you miss the population rates I leveraged in my other response? I've actually provided evidence for my claims, though they should have been well-understood already by this audience. What's your excuse for not offering a shred of evidence for or against what I've written here, besides calling it 'shallow'?

The article you're quoting, if anything, works towards my point not against it. Academia has run rampant with the false belief that capitalist events like the industrial revolution were on their whole exploitative. Entire sub-genres of academic study exist to explore on micro-levels events of injustice which often times are greatly exaggerated. Did you ever conceive of that being shallow?

I'll phrase my posts whatever way I see fit, thanks. Who is being rude here again? I saw your population growth rate, I also saw that you completely ignored what is in the quote you yourself highlighted, that the rich landowners were enclosing the common land, which was land that was not private before then, this being a relevant factor in why one could argue that their means of subsistance were taken from them and given to the already-powerful, if this is true so then is this a micro-level event of injustice or a relevant event for modern history and to capitalism itself? See, you are shallow. If you haven't, take a read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure then read a lot more, thats it. Give me a break on the "academia conspiracy" at least untill you've actually studied what is their view, they've been studying this shit since before, while it was happening so to just brush them off like this stupid since there's tons of hours of intellectual work and research that went into that and you'd like to dismiss it because you don't like the conclusion. I don't have enough time to go through this really, so whatever, believe in what you most like.

What greatly reduced Western poverty was not capitalism, which made it worse, but the 19th century reaction against capitalism which made it so that the modern mixed economy replaced capitalism everywhere in the West. (The industrial revolution provided the capacity for reducing poverty, but under capitalism that capacity was directed elsewhere.)

Conversely, the move in the last few decades years back toward capitalism in the US has pretty much killed improvent in conditions for most of the working class, while radically accelerating gains for the narrow set of hypercapitalists at the top of the system.

I disagree. Poverty increased because mortality rates dropped precipitously, leading to an unprecedented uptick in demand. Whereas most people would have simply died, capitalism and particularly its industrial revolution allowed these people to actually live. Supply could not possibly be increased quickly enough to handle the new strains placed upon nations by these successes.

My estimation of the 19th and 20th century reactions against the protection of property rights is that it led to a diminished capability of private industry to rationally and reliably deal with the issues posed by this great expansion of human procreation.

The Industrial Revolution is a very large, complicated suite of changes. If we hold as a spectrum capitalism in one direction and mercantilism in the other direction, on a single line ( for simplicity's sake ) then most of the excesses attributed to capitalism begin to look more like mercantilism than actual capitalism.

People like Henry Frick just didn't know any better because it was all new.

Capitalism works well at eliminating production as a bottleneck. The rest is up to us. There's generally another bottleneck. Much of the 20th Century was about logistics.

But it's sort of dangerous to say that "capitalism was limited" - the thing that limits capitalism is economic busts. It's dangerous for two reasons. One, it's extremely hard to do at all, much less well, and two, you have to ask yourself if it ever actually was done to start with.

Peter Whybrow has a very good presentation on one of the CSPANs using Adam Smith as a yardstick for what may be wrong with capitalism today.

> It took almost hundred years from the start of the industrial revolution before real wages started to grow.

Even the most pessimistic view suggests that real wages grew, especially after the conclusion of the Napoleanic Wars. [1]

> The real benefits from industrialization were realized after hard political changes.

The real benefits of industrialization were immediately realized via mass production of widely desired and previously unobtainable goods. This should be clear from migratory patterns: workers abandoned the countryside en masse (in spite of city living/working conditions) for a reason. Enclosure laws were not a major factor until 1845.

> You don't create middle class from mid 18th century society.

Of course you do. The rise of the managerial and professional classes is a direct consequence of the Industrial Revolution.

[1] http://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/users/Allen/unpublished/pessimi...

>Of course you do. The rise of the managerial and professional classes is a direct consequence of the Industrial Revolution.

Not without political changes. Nobody is saying that industrial revolution did not bring middle class or reduce poverty. It's just that whole society must change and that includes new politics, new laws protecting their new rights, etc.

Some examples:

- 1819: Factory Act limited child working hours to 12 hours per day.

- 1832: any man owning a household worth £10 or more was allowed to vote,

- 1867: some working men were allowed to vote.

- 1874: Maximum weekly working hours per worker: 56.5 hours per week.

- 1918: all men over 21 and women over 30 were able to vote.

And that brings us back to the issue. Automation changes things and laws, rights and whole society must change.

Can you provide some further reading on the industrial revolution resulting in malnutrition, and during what periods and regions did this occur?

Also, it's worth noting that "real wages" is not as important as compared to what those wages can buy. Sure, someone from 100 years ago could have "real wages" much higher than mine, but it doesn't mean much to me if I can't use the wages to purchase modern indoor plumbing, air conditioning, safe travel across the world and a very high likelihood that my wife won't die in child-birth.

You've got to also factor in that someone from the industrial revolution era didn't even had the concept or living for the clock, working for wages or consumerist society, if you had your house and fields and chickens and some pigs plus your wife/you had took an extra-income of manufacturing and selling products in your own place, with time left for leisure and family and you were not starving, even though you worked a lot you were doing it for yourself and your subsistence means were actually yours, you could be somewhat happy and feel free with that, no? And then instead of buying goods directly from you you're now told that you'll be inside a factory producing for x hours for income just enough to sustain yourself, how is this any so much better? Plenty of people at the time thought that was not much different from being a slave, land meant freedom.

You're confusing "more consumption" and "organised work that produces profit for shareholders" with "higher living standards."

If your definition of living standards is broader and includes overall welfare and social mobility, the point becomes debatable.

As for a Malthusian crash - denying the fact that ecosystems have a carrying capacity is irrational and counterfactual.

Logistic collapse has been observed time and again in natural populations. It's also been observed in human populations.

See e.g. among many possible examples:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3925430/

So it's factually wrong to claim that disasters have never happened for environmental reasons - because they certainly have happened in the past.

Being unaware that something has happened isn't a justification for claiming that it can't be possible.

> eventually when we get to a certain point it will all turn into disaster.

William F. Buckley liked to quote a friend that, "The problem with socialism is socialism. The problem with capitalism is capitalists." Socialism is the force meant to keep capitalists from becoming the totalitarian rulers of us all. The responsibility of voters in a democracy is to keep the forces of capitalism and socialism in check so that neither one dominates us and brings on disaster.

Understanding this fact that America and all other functioning democracies are a balance of socialism and capitalism has made me realize I am a Noam Chomsky-style anarchist. He observes that one cannot be an anarchist without also being a tempered socialist, because without some socialism to constrain the capitalists, they would quickly oppress us all in a tragedy-of-the-commons scenario [1].

[1] https://chomsky.info/state01/

There is absolutely no law of economics that says that wages can't decrease. Wages are based on the supply and demand of labor, and there is no question that robots will affect that. If the wages fall below minimum wage, or even what it is feasible to survive on, then you get unemployment.

Most human jobs for most of history have been unskilled work. Things anyone could be trained to do, not requiring high intelligence, and involving physical or repetitive work. The industrial revolution moved unskilled laborers from farms to factories, but there were still jobs.

But with near future tech, there will be very few things, if anything, unskilled humans can do that robots can't. We are just starting to see AI good enough that it can match humans in visual recognition tasks - which 10 years ago was unthinkable, and progress incredibly slow. This level of AI has been the main limitation to robots. We've had decent robots, but AI wasn't good enough to use them for anything interesting. Now it is.

Soon robots will take over almost all existing jobs. From truck drivers to shelf stockers to the mail man.

Of course there will be jobs that AI can't do (for now.) E.g. computer programmers or doctors. But realistically, what percent of the population can actually do those jobs? What percent of unemployed truck drivers are actually going to be able to retrain as computer programmers?

I think the world is a disaster right now. Maybe not for Silicon Valley, but many people around the world are

* living under repressive and/or dangerous regimes * lacking access to good nutrition & medical infrastructure * living in over-populated, under-maintained cities

Currently larger percentage or countries are democratic than ever before. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Number_o...

Smaller percentage or world population is malnourished than ever before. http://ourworldindata.org/data/food-agriculture/hunger-and-u...

Your last point is true in some sense, because more people live in cities than ever before. And you can say any city is under-maintained if you put your standards high enough. Due to this effect, there are mixed results in global sanitation trends. Access to clean water is improving, but I can't say for overall picture.

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