Billionaire Hedge-Fund Manager Warns a “Revolution” Is Coming | Hacker News Reader

Billionaire Hedge-Fund Manager Warns a “Revolution” Is Coming

vanityfair.com

67 pointspaulpauper9 comments

Around the time of Occupy Wall Street I was predicting that we would either see populists start winning elections and/or a violent uprising sometime in the next couple decades.

I still think we’ll continue headed in that direction until we start to heal some of the fractures in the US and start to find some common ground and work toward common benefit rather than strictly towards short-term selfish interests.

Each country will experience what you said, even both sometimes or one being the cause of the other.

Look at France with the Gilets Jaunes ( uprising ) and the soon to be followed populists winning the elections ( I sincerely hope not ).

Altho' I don't think capitalism is at cause here but definitely part of the problem and the solution.

The term 'populist' used to just mean popular. It was synonomous with democracy. We've somehow repurposed it to mean something that's closer to authoritarian and bigoted.

His linked essay is the real thing, the Vanity Fair article is basically worthless, except insofar as it provides this link: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-how-capitalism-needs-refo...

Hedges mentioned that when capitalism is in doubt, the panacea "answer" that often turns into a wedge-issue is whether to replace the previous socioeconomic order with more fascism or more socialism. Anomie and angst get channeled into convulsions leading towards yet another civil war along these lines; dividing-and-conquering on the similar issues and concerns as almost a century prior. Paraphrasing what someone once said: history is doomed to repeat itself about every 90 years. I feel like we're repeating the late 1920's, to a degree, with growing nationalism and hate directed at minorities.. which inevitably leads to World War if not civil war.

Where are you writing from? I should hope it's not from Milwaukee, WI

...in the USA. The essay is very US-centric, and confuses the economy of the US with capitalism to the point that it's not clear to me which of the points apply to capitalism, and which are just a critique of the US system.

> The essay is very US-centric, and confuses the economy of the US with capitalism to the point that it's not clear to me which of the points apply to capitalism, and which are just a critique of the US system.

Well, first off, the US system among the most capitalist, if not the most capitalist, of the mixed economies of modern developed countries. Any critique of capitalist relevant at all to the modern world as it exists is naturally going to be especially applicable to the US and often less applicable to most other modern “capitalist” economies which are, by and large, mixed economies with more distance from capitalism than the US.

But second, the essay itself explicitly is not about “capitalism” but about the specific manner he has seen “capitalism” evolve to work in America.

And, finally, the specific evolutions he points to are all evolutions in the American mixed economy in the direction of capitalism in the narrow sense, that is, toward he behavior of the dominant economic system of developed industrial economies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries against which the broad evolution to the modern mixed economy throughout the developed world throughout the 20th century was a reaction.

The article quotes directly that the essay is USA-centric:

“...seen capitalism evolve in a way that it is not working well for the majority of Americans...”

There are at least a half-dozen other times that it specifies America.

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