My view is that it makes very little sense to debate the merits and demerits of "capitalism" without specifying what sort of alternatives you have in mind, and/or along what dimensions you're imagining making the economy less capitalistic. Self-described socialist regimes we've seen in history don't have a particularly good record on the environment. China right now is burning a lot of coal. Talking about how capitalism leads to this or that bad consequence doesn't cut much ice if you can't describe a realistic, non-capitalist alternative that stably avoids that bad consequence.
To illustrate the point with an example with opposite political valence, Curtis Yarvin was just praising monarchy in the pages of the NYT. By my lights (not original) he says far too little about how to make sure the monarch/ceo will be picked so as to ensure that they have the positive features he sees in, eg, Tim Cook. Benevolent dictatorship might be great, but there's no known social technology for ensuring dictators stay benevolent. By the same lights, if you imagine some socialist alternative to capitalism that will avoid the various failure modes of capitalism, I think it's incumbent upon you to say something about what sort of institutional arrangements will make that happen.
I agree: Venkatesh’s outline of the alternative was a little thin on the ground, so I left that question up in the air. I think his claim, wrt climate change, AI risk, etc., is that there are democratic reforms that would incentivise politicians to think more about long-term stuff, and that politicians so incentivised will impose the necessary controls. (Wasn’t clear only why that would require socialism, though, but I take his point that it might require less wealth inequality since inequality correlates with businesses having too much political sway or whatever.)
We actually do accept this argument in certain domains already, the main one being education. I think one of the main counterarguments is just that you can do all the longtermist stuff without dismantling capitalism - you just need a government that provides public goods and uses regulations to avoid market failures and protect furture people's interests, which is already the kind of government we have.
Another counterargument is that capitalism actually does encourage caring about the future to some extent - the entire system is built around people investing their capital for greater gains in the future, which will come because they expect their capital to be put to good use in the long-term, similar to the tree example. Sure, this still doesn't give you an infinite time horizon, but no economic system does. For the argument to be effective, it would need to show that some alternative system does longtermism better than capitalism.
I understand that this is not the central point of your article, but the Glass Jar example is an interesting and instructive one. Even if the harm to the child is uncertain, the irreversibility of the potential harm makes it morally wrong to smash the jar. Present or future harm, if equally likely, is no different. The small cost of avoiding harm (not smashing the jar) is vastly outweighed by the severity of the potential consequences. With global challenges, irreversibility similarly creates a compelling case for precautionary measures, central to the Guardian Principle I have developed elsewhere. The cost of taking action now is small compared to the irreversible devastation that might occur if we fail to do so. Again, it’s not when it happens but its irreversibility that is critical.
Maybe this is my own misunderstanding, but I don't see how socialism would better serve the interests of future people, either. For example, I don't see a reason why people would care more about climate change under socialism, because the fundamental problem is still the same: there are benefits to certain economic actions with negative externalities.
Just because an economy is socialist, I don't see why they would want cheap energy in the short term even if it is to the detriment of future generations, for example.
1) It seems like, in the longer run, capitalism will be more incentivized to be much better for future people. Using technology (which capitalism is pretty good at), we can probably do tons of things that we’re bad at now (prevent climate change, alt proteins, etc). I agree that there are vulnerable world hypotheses stuff to be said in opposition, though.
2) I think the likely worlds under the non capitalist models need to be thought through more-- namely, given where we are, what does it look like, and how does it avoid these issues. It’s not clear that people will be more subservient to long term interests under socialism -- a reason why this doesn’t seem super likely -- its not like we saw a huge rise of veganism in socialist/ communist countries (according to my brief google search, but I could be wrong here).
but the alternative considered in this article is democratic socialism rather than socialism with a benevolent, animal-loving dictator. Why should we believe that average people will care more about future people and animals than capitalists? They show themselves to care little everyday. It’s not as if “the capitalists” force us to eat meat and pollute the environment. We have chosen to!
You literally have socialist philosoher of religion Dustin Crummett as a good friend, asshole. Why the fuck don't you ask him his view of socialism and his reasons for it?
Also, Matt Bruenig is pretty good, you wool british boy.
yes. Amos is my friend by the way. So, you can chill. Keep up the dark progressive work though, asshole. I like some of the weird shit you write and sometimes I wonder what the fuck is this guy's views!
I second the Bruenig recommendation. Very philosophically competent and if you're looking for someone who can deliver the goods on the technocratic/economic/policy side of things, there's no one better.
Yep. Now that this yank "Ethan" also recommended Bruenig, you absolutely have no excuse, wool British boy.
Also, keep up the good work, yank. Your joke about Steven Bonnell Gooner The Second and us forgiving him for his bad actions so far if he donates some decent amount of money to shrimp welfare is actually literally true in my view. I would forgive him (for his crimes so far) if he does donate some decent amount of money to the best animal welfare charities.
The familiar problem with this criticism of capitalism is that it sounds more like a criticism of the human condition.
Socialists can hope that centralizing the ownership of production goods will help them solve these problems, but this remains to be demonstrated. Should we care more about future people than we do, or aspire to? Is it clear that we know how best to benefit them? We aren’t even that good at pleasing ourselves and raising our actual children. This looks like a problem that existed before capitalism, in a variants (good and bad) of capitalism, and any plausible alternative to capitalism.
Neither markets nor bureaucracies are good at delivering pure public goods; the feedback mechanism is too weak and indirect. And that applies to public goods we can consume immediately. Adding the further complications that the public goods will be delivered in the remote future to people we do not understand makes it seem like an insoluble problem.
We can either assume our preferences are a good proxy for future persons, in which case worrying about our future selves, children, and grandchildren seems to accomplish as much as can be hoped for; or we can assume our interests are in conflict, in which case if these future people will eventually exist at all, they are likely to be incredibly rich and privileged compared to us, in which case they should look after themselves.
The only leak in that analysis is the risk that humanity is facing some sneaky existential risks that we might be able but unwilling to avoid. Climate change comes to mind, and is perhaps illustrative. Those who are at all skeptical of the more extreme predictions should be horrified by the result of politicizing the issue. And those who believe the predictions should be horrified by the inability of political systems to deal with it. I suppose a socialist might wish to blame this on capitalism, but socialists like using energy and having enough to eat, too. Abolishing capital markets won’t change the basic difficulty.
I don’t want my children or grandchildren living in a crappy world. That is sufficient as basic motivation. Unfortunately, that motivation is not sufficient to guarantee that political institutions, existing or imagined, will handle the problem. And if the motivation becomes more urgent, that will still not make it a good idea to switch to some untested (or well tested and uniformly failed) alternative.
Time preference in the market is the best argument against capitalism. Hence why I believe we should tax pollution, not just according to immediate harm (harm to your lungs today) but according to accumulated intergenerational harm (harm to your grandchildren's lungs). Eventually, with your glass example, the rain will eventually soften the edges of the glass and make it no longer sharp; the glass will be carried down by rain and snowmelt into rivers, which will smooth the glass. Similarly with pollution, there is a rate of degradation when the pollution is no longer harmful.
Unfortunately for PFAS and other "forever chemicals," this rate of degradation is extremely long (hundreds of years). Yet we don't take account for this when we pump PFAS out into the environment. Only socialism can take account for this harm and have the capacity to regulate these known agents of harm. This is true even if capitalism were the optimal system for maximizing the happiness and health of living people.
I understand you don't think you're an anti-capitalist, but since you do not consider profit the highest good, in long-term effect, you are not a capitalist.
Also you don't own any land or any productive enterprise, which makes you literally not a capitalist. Sorry.
“since you do not consider profit the highest good, in long-term effect”
Ok, I get the second point (“capitalist” is polysemous between a believer in capitalism and a businessman), but I don’t get this: like, have all capitalist intellectuals in the history of capitalism thought that profit is the highest good?
Look, man, I turned on to you because I used to be very much into Ayn Rand, so it's possible that my definition of what a capitalist values may be slightly askew
"If one single businessman had had the courage, then, to say that he worked for nothing but his own profit—and to say it proudly—he would have saved the world." -Atlas Shrugged
I think the strongest arguments against capitalism would be stuff like conspicuous consumption, the hedonic treadmill and whether or not growth is net good, especially in the industries mentioned. Although even then I wonder what his views on wild animal suffering are, and if his alternative system could effectively tackle such a problem.
But nevertheless a lot of long termist suggestions seem silly in light of fertility decline, that even holding modern TFRs constant just results in very rapid exponential decay in generation sizes, with like 400B Amish in 400 yrs or something stupid. One might look at fertility decline as a failure of capitalism, but even if true historically most of the compelling solutions do involve fixing the market failure of future ppl valuing their own lives in dollar terms more than the cost to the parents of having them, by better establishing property rights and such a Coasean solution does seem very capitalistic. On the other hand Coasean solutions to over fishing can increase wild animal suffering.
My view is that it makes very little sense to debate the merits and demerits of "capitalism" without specifying what sort of alternatives you have in mind, and/or along what dimensions you're imagining making the economy less capitalistic. Self-described socialist regimes we've seen in history don't have a particularly good record on the environment. China right now is burning a lot of coal. Talking about how capitalism leads to this or that bad consequence doesn't cut much ice if you can't describe a realistic, non-capitalist alternative that stably avoids that bad consequence.
To illustrate the point with an example with opposite political valence, Curtis Yarvin was just praising monarchy in the pages of the NYT. By my lights (not original) he says far too little about how to make sure the monarch/ceo will be picked so as to ensure that they have the positive features he sees in, eg, Tim Cook. Benevolent dictatorship might be great, but there's no known social technology for ensuring dictators stay benevolent. By the same lights, if you imagine some socialist alternative to capitalism that will avoid the various failure modes of capitalism, I think it's incumbent upon you to say something about what sort of institutional arrangements will make that happen.
I agree: Venkatesh’s outline of the alternative was a little thin on the ground, so I left that question up in the air. I think his claim, wrt climate change, AI risk, etc., is that there are democratic reforms that would incentivise politicians to think more about long-term stuff, and that politicians so incentivised will impose the necessary controls. (Wasn’t clear only why that would require socialism, though, but I take his point that it might require less wealth inequality since inequality correlates with businesses having too much political sway or whatever.)
Amos:
Here is a beautiful illustration of how capitalism structurally incentivizes everyone to consider the interests of future generations.
So as you can see, if capitalism serves the interests of future generations, that will largely be a happy accident.
Lol
We actually do accept this argument in certain domains already, the main one being education. I think one of the main counterarguments is just that you can do all the longtermist stuff without dismantling capitalism - you just need a government that provides public goods and uses regulations to avoid market failures and protect furture people's interests, which is already the kind of government we have.
Another counterargument is that capitalism actually does encourage caring about the future to some extent - the entire system is built around people investing their capital for greater gains in the future, which will come because they expect their capital to be put to good use in the long-term, similar to the tree example. Sure, this still doesn't give you an infinite time horizon, but no economic system does. For the argument to be effective, it would need to show that some alternative system does longtermism better than capitalism.
There’s also the risk that capitalism might self-destruct via the appearance of Trump-like populists. @mon0 and I had a whole exchange about this: https://substack.com/@theodoreyohalemshouse/note/c-88832672?r=31obph&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
This was mildly interesting. Take up @Daniel Greco's challenge and debate alternatives.
We're gonna win you over Amos Wollen
I understand that this is not the central point of your article, but the Glass Jar example is an interesting and instructive one. Even if the harm to the child is uncertain, the irreversibility of the potential harm makes it morally wrong to smash the jar. Present or future harm, if equally likely, is no different. The small cost of avoiding harm (not smashing the jar) is vastly outweighed by the severity of the potential consequences. With global challenges, irreversibility similarly creates a compelling case for precautionary measures, central to the Guardian Principle I have developed elsewhere. The cost of taking action now is small compared to the irreversible devastation that might occur if we fail to do so. Again, it’s not when it happens but its irreversibility that is critical.
Maybe this is my own misunderstanding, but I don't see how socialism would better serve the interests of future people, either. For example, I don't see a reason why people would care more about climate change under socialism, because the fundamental problem is still the same: there are benefits to certain economic actions with negative externalities.
Just because an economy is socialist, I don't see why they would want cheap energy in the short term even if it is to the detriment of future generations, for example.
Eh, I don’t love this argument.
1) It seems like, in the longer run, capitalism will be more incentivized to be much better for future people. Using technology (which capitalism is pretty good at), we can probably do tons of things that we’re bad at now (prevent climate change, alt proteins, etc). I agree that there are vulnerable world hypotheses stuff to be said in opposition, though.
2) I think the likely worlds under the non capitalist models need to be thought through more-- namely, given where we are, what does it look like, and how does it avoid these issues. It’s not clear that people will be more subservient to long term interests under socialism -- a reason why this doesn’t seem super likely -- its not like we saw a huge rise of veganism in socialist/ communist countries (according to my brief google search, but I could be wrong here).
but the alternative considered in this article is democratic socialism rather than socialism with a benevolent, animal-loving dictator. Why should we believe that average people will care more about future people and animals than capitalists? They show themselves to care little everyday. It’s not as if “the capitalists” force us to eat meat and pollute the environment. We have chosen to!
You literally have socialist philosoher of religion Dustin Crummett as a good friend, asshole. Why the fuck don't you ask him his view of socialism and his reasons for it?
Also, Matt Bruenig is pretty good, you wool british boy.
this level of hostility seems optimal for encouraging open-mindedness
yes. Amos is my friend by the way. So, you can chill. Keep up the dark progressive work though, asshole. I like some of the weird shit you write and sometimes I wonder what the fuck is this guy's views!
I second the Bruenig recommendation. Very philosophically competent and if you're looking for someone who can deliver the goods on the technocratic/economic/policy side of things, there's no one better.
Yep. Now that this yank "Ethan" also recommended Bruenig, you absolutely have no excuse, wool British boy.
Also, keep up the good work, yank. Your joke about Steven Bonnell Gooner The Second and us forgiving him for his bad actions so far if he donates some decent amount of money to shrimp welfare is actually literally true in my view. I would forgive him (for his crimes so far) if he does donate some decent amount of money to the best animal welfare charities.
The familiar problem with this criticism of capitalism is that it sounds more like a criticism of the human condition.
Socialists can hope that centralizing the ownership of production goods will help them solve these problems, but this remains to be demonstrated. Should we care more about future people than we do, or aspire to? Is it clear that we know how best to benefit them? We aren’t even that good at pleasing ourselves and raising our actual children. This looks like a problem that existed before capitalism, in a variants (good and bad) of capitalism, and any plausible alternative to capitalism.
Neither markets nor bureaucracies are good at delivering pure public goods; the feedback mechanism is too weak and indirect. And that applies to public goods we can consume immediately. Adding the further complications that the public goods will be delivered in the remote future to people we do not understand makes it seem like an insoluble problem.
We can either assume our preferences are a good proxy for future persons, in which case worrying about our future selves, children, and grandchildren seems to accomplish as much as can be hoped for; or we can assume our interests are in conflict, in which case if these future people will eventually exist at all, they are likely to be incredibly rich and privileged compared to us, in which case they should look after themselves.
The only leak in that analysis is the risk that humanity is facing some sneaky existential risks that we might be able but unwilling to avoid. Climate change comes to mind, and is perhaps illustrative. Those who are at all skeptical of the more extreme predictions should be horrified by the result of politicizing the issue. And those who believe the predictions should be horrified by the inability of political systems to deal with it. I suppose a socialist might wish to blame this on capitalism, but socialists like using energy and having enough to eat, too. Abolishing capital markets won’t change the basic difficulty.
I don’t want my children or grandchildren living in a crappy world. That is sufficient as basic motivation. Unfortunately, that motivation is not sufficient to guarantee that political institutions, existing or imagined, will handle the problem. And if the motivation becomes more urgent, that will still not make it a good idea to switch to some untested (or well tested and uniformly failed) alternative.
When I read the title, I thought "I should send this to Nikhil". Good thing I read it first!
Time preference in the market is the best argument against capitalism. Hence why I believe we should tax pollution, not just according to immediate harm (harm to your lungs today) but according to accumulated intergenerational harm (harm to your grandchildren's lungs). Eventually, with your glass example, the rain will eventually soften the edges of the glass and make it no longer sharp; the glass will be carried down by rain and snowmelt into rivers, which will smooth the glass. Similarly with pollution, there is a rate of degradation when the pollution is no longer harmful.
Unfortunately for PFAS and other "forever chemicals," this rate of degradation is extremely long (hundreds of years). Yet we don't take account for this when we pump PFAS out into the environment. Only socialism can take account for this harm and have the capacity to regulate these known agents of harm. This is true even if capitalism were the optimal system for maximizing the happiness and health of living people.
I understand you don't think you're an anti-capitalist, but since you do not consider profit the highest good, in long-term effect, you are not a capitalist.
Also you don't own any land or any productive enterprise, which makes you literally not a capitalist. Sorry.
“since you do not consider profit the highest good, in long-term effect”
Ok, I get the second point (“capitalist” is polysemous between a believer in capitalism and a businessman), but I don’t get this: like, have all capitalist intellectuals in the history of capitalism thought that profit is the highest good?
Look, man, I turned on to you because I used to be very much into Ayn Rand, so it's possible that my definition of what a capitalist values may be slightly askew
Ayn Rand thought your happiness was your highest good!
"If one single businessman had had the courage, then, to say that he worked for nothing but his own profit—and to say it proudly—he would have saved the world." -Atlas Shrugged
I think that’s about the virtues she thought were often concomitant w/ succeeding in business
I think the strongest arguments against capitalism would be stuff like conspicuous consumption, the hedonic treadmill and whether or not growth is net good, especially in the industries mentioned. Although even then I wonder what his views on wild animal suffering are, and if his alternative system could effectively tackle such a problem.
But nevertheless a lot of long termist suggestions seem silly in light of fertility decline, that even holding modern TFRs constant just results in very rapid exponential decay in generation sizes, with like 400B Amish in 400 yrs or something stupid. One might look at fertility decline as a failure of capitalism, but even if true historically most of the compelling solutions do involve fixing the market failure of future ppl valuing their own lives in dollar terms more than the cost to the parents of having them, by better establishing property rights and such a Coasean solution does seem very capitalistic. On the other hand Coasean solutions to over fishing can increase wild animal suffering.