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Comment by kelseyfrog | Hacker News Reader

Funny word choice - apocalyptic. The end of capitalism does seem like the end of the world. What does that mean?

Does that mean the world didn't exist before capitalism? I think the world did exist.

I don't know how the world would change if capitalism was very rapidly removed everywhere, but certainly the human condition today (7 billion people, highly mechanized distribution of heating/cooling/water/food, with long elaborate supply chains) is much more susceptible to rapid economic changes than in ages past. We're likely to see a lot of starvation >1% due to supply disruptions caused by war over the next 12 months in any case.

Maybe centrally planned economies could be made to work?

Maybe currency and investment could be directly controlled?

What fraction of the population would be allowed to starve and die?

You don't need capitalism to deliver anything, you need competent organization and people who will do the organized work. Tell me how many of the people working in those supply chains (truck drivers, ship mates, Amazon warehouse workers) think the system is working for them under capitalism. Joint stock / pooled risk and profit, and abstraction of ownership in a way that mirrors cash as an abstraction of value, were innovations for sure. Other innovations or adjustments maybe difficult to make in today's brownfield world.

My take is that central planning's problem wasn't one of where the planning took place, it was one of data quality (freshness, accuracy), inadequate data, and problems in the agenda for using it. Integrated macro- and micro-planning will still suffer from the central-agenda issue, depending on the motivations and means of the planners. But coordination up and down, for purposes that are not exclusively for the generation of cash, seems worth exploring.

Discussion today in one paper about prescribed burns in Yosemite held up due to air quality laws, but no mention of jailing Mother Nature for the air quality violations of a major forest fire. I suspect the long-term sustainable carrying capacity of the Earth for humans is rather less than the number outstanding today, but starve and die seems worse than options we could engineer if we wanted to. Fight in battles and die will be a lot of them too if things swung the wrong way.

We need economies that allow nations to distrust each other, and in the USA at least allow every individual to distrust every other. Socialism seems to work best for those who buy into a social contract and the USA is losing those people left and right, egged on from within and its adversaries.

Commmunism never worked. Util we develop artificial superintelligence it will not work. Billions of people making decisions involves ridiculous amounts of data and processing power. Human brain has around 100 trillion synapses and there is around 8 billions of humans.

But social market economies do work right now.

Can you do it with a steelman instead of a strawman?

Social market economies exists and do fine - Nordic countries, even China.

That's the only version of "communism" I can see as a steelman.

Communism as a centrally planned economy can not work until central planning system will be as smart and knowledgeable about peoples needs as the people themselves.

Communism had the problem of the centralized agenda run by a few power-hungry humans, which isn't very communal. That was the agenda problem. As you get more people into it the communal aspect got weaker.

The world doesn’t exist now, and hasn’t since 2012.

No, the world didn't exist before capitalism. Just like the world did not exist before evolution through natural selection.

If you imagine apocalypse today like a nuclear war, that would still not be as bad as humans had it when only barter was known. The very poorest parts of the world are still beter off than most of the people before 1700. Only 200 years ago 4 out of 6 children were dying before they were 10.

Sure, if you're the kind of person that thinks more broadly about the world and its history. For everyone complaining about a sh*t job today, there was working in a meatpacker circa 1905 to make you not complain now. But most people just compare themselves to the Joneses right now.

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