What you could not make to work for the past 100 years will surely work now.
Maybe it's time to accept we won't be able to make capitalism work?
Is there a difference between capitalism and communism?
Yes, in principle. With capitalism, man exploits man. But with communism, it is precisely the opposite.
Do you really think there was less suffering 100 years ago? By what metric specifically?
Over the last 100 years poverty rate has been steadily decreasing, hunger rate has been steadily decreasing, life expectancy has been steadily increasing. All over the world.
Capitalism uplifts both rich and poor.
Hundreds of millions have been displaced by floods in Bangladesh this year alone. Forests everywhere are on fire. We have "draughts of the century" every year now. Hurricanes are more destructive than ever.
Meanwhile, sweat shop workers building the cheap junk we've gotten addicted to are committing suicide because they can't bear their conditions, a problem so out of hand factories are putting up nets to catch window jumpers.
We're rapidly racing towards the edge of the cliff. If we don't change something drastically, we're all doomed. That's not a system that's working out by any reasonable metric.
And socialist/communist exploitation somehow has doesn't lead to the same consequences?
Isn't China exploiting the same way? Wasn't USSR exploiting the same way? Just don't tell me those aren't true Scotsman.
> sweat shop workers building the cheap junk we've gotten addicted to are committing suicide because they can't bear their conditions
I asked for a metric, not for emotions. Same people were living beyond poverty and dying of hunger 100 years ago. Now a small fraction of those are committing suicide.
Is it perfect? Of course not.
Did it get drastically better in the last 100 years? Absolutely.
Unlike socialism, capitalism doesn't pretend to be a utopia.
You cannot put a value on a singular human due to the unique ability to grow everlasting on a mental health level.
To ignore the emotional component in this argument and asking for raw numerals in this case, does this really show cause for an argument of growth because the pathos argument is ignored in it of itself?
That doesn't make any sense in my eye. Why use logos to defend mass slavery overseas for production of goods? Isn't that inherent to the actual problems with the capitalistic system? Aren't we as a race beyond Social Darwinism yet?
Your logic I feel is showing cause for the emotional problems we have with capitalism and quite frankly I could care less about any singular country's GDP to begin with in this argument because every country has to help get our earth to net zero carbon by 2050 and quite frankly the world's nations are doing a piss poor job in this. Especially the United States.
I find our current system of capitalism to be no better personally than an unbalanced video game that hasn't been patched in years and is needing serious re-balancing. But what do I know? I'm just another "emotional" human. Meanwhile every nation is equally responsible for the consequences on this on a scale that to me far exceeds "economics."
Emotions allow your biases to manifest, letting you focus on thousand suicides and turn a blind eye to famine for millions. And even feel virtuous while doing that. Utterly disgusting.
Pot, meet kettle.
Neither of those are green, degrowth systems like the one described in the article. Sure, you can say no true Scotsman, but it's a fundamentally different framework.
>I asked for a metric, not for emotions. Same people were living beyond poverty and dying of hunger 100 years ago. Now a small fraction of those are committing suicide.
Do you have a metric for that? Because it's true that a lot of people were lifted out of poverty in the past 100 years.
However, three quarters of that happened in China, which is explicitly not Capitalist. [0] To call this a triumph of Capitalism is cynical propaganda.
> Did it get drastically better in the last 100 years? Absolutely.
It did. But not because of Capitalism, despite it. The one country that made a difference self-defines as Socialist.
[0] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...
You do realize that reforms that led to poverty reduction in China were deeply capitalistic?
Allowing privatization, reducing state control over trade and pricing, reducing state ownership and central planning, opening up markets, allowing foreign investments, etc.
How on earth those reforms were "despite capitalism"?