Comment by bigbadfeline | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bigbadfeline | Hacker News Reader

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> I think the real issue is that people don't like change;

People like positive change - better standard of living, cheaper and high quality goods & services. They get the opposite and they don't like that, there's no mystery here.

> the original sin of capitalism is change over time

It was never supposed to be negative change, and calling what we have now "capitalism" is quite a stretch, the meaning of that word is now so vague as to render it meaningless.

> The thing is right now we don't have a completely clear picture of what the future is.

The future is what we make it and we have a pretty clear picture what actions lead to what consequences, it ain't exactly simple for everyone to understand but that's not necessary either. The problem is, the media and politicians only muddy the waters instead of elevating the valuable insights and proposals.

> the walls of the environment are closing

Poetic but misleading. The environment is a systemic function of multiple factors, it's really unhelpful to make it a political issue for the purpose of peddling more sacrifice from those on the losing side of wealth inequality.

No, no, you can't get away with saying "calling what we have now "capitalism" is quite a stretch, the meaning of that word is now so vague as to render it meaningless"

This is just simply not true. There are too many young people that want to be lawyers or ivory tower word architects, but the time for "winning arguments" because you're narrative is to make people believe untrue things, just does not work anymore.

"Capitalism" was a word coined by its critics just a few years before Marx wrote Das Kapital. People who actually like Capitalism tend to resist drawing some boundary around it and would rather have it be that thing that Maggie Thatcher and Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton say "there is no alternative" to. In particularly they are loathe to even say it might be something that has some good aspects and some bad aspects and refusing to define it is necessary to keep that game going.

In particular it's hard to draw a line between many "communist" countries and capitalism. I mean, Stalin's great legacy was very rapid industrialization and technology development from 1920-1970 or so which was initially funded by starving farmers to buy machines from western industrialists to build factories. Post-Mao China has been out-capitalizing everybody else, which is the biggest problem people seem to have with them.

I'll argue that "capitalism" is about transforming society across time by deploying large amounts of capital so when somebody says "Facebook developed in a harmful direction because of capitalism" I'm going to argue that a system that wasn't fundamentally capitalist would never have made the investment to develop advanced microprocessors, the internet, social media, and all of that. You could have a different kind of capitalism which is kinder and gentler but if you didn't have capitalism you would not have 8 billion people on Earth because nobody would have made the investment to build all the fertilizer plants, etc.

First off, a great comment, I enjoyed reading it. Bringing some clearity to the meaning of "capitalism" is indeed a pressing necessity.

> I'll argue that "capitalism" is about transforming society across time by deploying large amounts of capital.

That definition of capitalism doesn't seem to clearly separate it from socialism though. If we combine it with this quote:

> Stalin's great legacy was very rapid industrialization and technology development ... Post-Mao China has been out-capitalizing everybody else

we reach the conclusion that capitalism can be practiced in socialists settings, indeed "deploying large amounts of capital" is quite normal for socialism. The only variables are the amount of capital available for deployment and the goals and professionalism of its managers.

So, the definition has to be augmented with something about the functioning of the market and the effects of that on distribution. I can't tell you what exactly because I don't burden myself with defining capitalism, or socialism for that matter, I view them more as points on a continuum, multiple points for each.

Particular changes have positive and negative aspects for different people. E.g. almost everybody was better off circa 1980 producing steel by the basic oxygen process and arc furnace except steel makers who had built open hearth furnaces 50 years ago and they had political power to maintain tariffs for a long time.

See also AI —- there will be positives but this site and all the others I am on have a lot of users who are afraid of losing their job or losing the joy in their job or being overwhelmed with AI slop.

There are certain systematic ways things break: in terms of politics the instinct is always to protect incumbents because they know it is a negative change for them and are already organized whereas the new entrants for which it is a positive change don’t even exist yet.

See also systematic biases in planning: like the “luxury apartments” that get built and are then unrented because there is no market for them…. Yet they were seductive to investors because they were sold with attractive but false numbers… and subsidized “affordable” housing is built on the same template and has been failing the same way ever since https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green_Homes

I was talking to the systems engineering prof about “why are nuclear plants always late and over budget” and concluded that the vendors were basically dishonest and knew they quote an unrealistically low price and like a game of poker the customer would keep raising so as not to lose their sunk costs.

> Particular changes have positive and negative aspects for different people.

There are also the statistical notions of majority, median and average, not to mention Pareto optimality. How we measure the social effect of changes is another topic but it's more than clear that it can be measured.

> the vendors [of nuclear plants] were basically dishonest and knew they quote an unrealistically low price

I'm not sure why the vendors have to determine the honesty of the bidding process, that's not what contract theory would advise.

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