whythawk ratings: measuring effective development

By: Walton on 12 July 2007

This is disingenuous. While 'anti-capitalism' is a very broad term, most people who call themselves anti-capitalists are united by one thing: their belief in economic democracy. Our biggest critique of capitalism is that it controls lives without giving us a say.

Organisations like unions are a corrective.

Mugabe is a dictator on his last legs, trying to shore up support. To attempt to link this to anti-capitalism is dishonest.

But I recall that you don't have a very clear understanding of these things: aren't you the nut who proposed, a while back, that capitalism was the same as air? That we could no more live without capitalism than we could without air?

Since you don't even know what capitalism is (a particular economic system largely characterised by the concentration of economic power in the hands of the few), I hardly think you're in any position to write about it.

By: Gavin Chait on 12 July 2007

Walton, it's been a while. Here's a definition for you from dictionary.com: capitalism is "an economic system based on private ownership of capital". None of this "the concentration of economic power in the hands of the few" doodoo that you bang on about.

There is a great new book you'd do yourself a favour to read. "Good capitalism, bad capitalism" by William Baumol, et al (Yale University). They identify four types of capitalism:

1) State-guided - government "guides" the market; so France and Germany with their state "champions"
2) Oligarchic - where the bulk of the power and wealth is held by a small number of individuals and families; Russia
3) Big-firm - most of the economy exists in a few large corporations; South Africa
4) Entrepreneurial - most of the economy is controlled by small firms; er, no-one actually, maybe the UK

Countries have some blend of two. Russian moving from oligarchic to state-led. The US moving from entrepreneurial to big-firm. Oligarchic tends to be the worst performer and possibly the one you don't like. It really does act to concentrate wealth in the hands of the few.

To keep it brief, the best performer is a balanced big-firm/entrepreneurial economy. It allows for easy market access for new firms and new ideas, as well as rapidly removing dead-wood large firms cluttering up the place.

The reason the US has done so well and dominates the world economy is because they're in this category (although, the writers suggest that they do themselves no favours by moving towards an unbalanced big-firm economy). China is using a mix of State-guided and entrepreneurial and is rapidly catching up.

If anti-capitalists want to be part of the conversation on the shape of future markets then they need to learn the language. Tramping through 1960s world-communist jargon is equivalent to discussing genetics from the point of view of Lamarck's theory of acquired inheritance. Mostly it's just an oddity.

By: Walton on 15 July 2007

Fuck sakes, Gavin, let's not haggle over semantics. You know as well as I do that the world economy is ovcerwhelmingly controlled by a very small minority of it's people. This is the problem.

If you look at the performance of the dollar, you'll see the US is not doing so well. The reason they dominate is because they have the military power.
Current US dominance owes a lot to both World Wars, where European economies were destroyed and countries borrowed from the US.

By: Gavin Chait on 15 July 2007

Walton, you'll find no disagreement from me that poverty is outrageous. That 60% of the world's population, 4 billion people, are poor, is disgusting. What makes it more disgusting is how easy it is to fix.

If you would, for a moment, consider who I am and what I do for a living, instead of the fact that I'm a capitalist, you may realise that I am significantly more angry about poverty than you could ever comprehend.

Where we disagree is that you seem, somehow, to have arrived at the conclusion that poverty is the fault of the rich and that they got rich through some form of unfairness. Like rich people stole all the poor people's iPhones.

This article is about Zimbabwe. A few short years ago Zimbabwe was one of the wealthiest nations in Africa. Did they get poor because of rich Americans or government corruption and failed economic policies?

Rich people have no interest in poor people. Rich people make money by selling stuff; like microwave ovens, refrigerators, television sets, playstations and music videos. The destitute cannot afford these things.

The only people making money out of the poor are the morally bankrupt leaders who claim to represent them, and the NGOs who follow around picking up the pieces and blaming the rich.

The truth about wealth-creation is that it takes hard work. No-one hired you, Walton, directly out of school and made you CEO. Why not?

Because no matter how much of genius you may be you need to work you way up. Same goes for wealth. You may not like all the intermediate steps mucking about on the way up, but that's the way it works.

Consider China which has, over the past decade, taken 300 million people out of poverty. That is quite an astonishing number.

The reason the dollar is losing its importance, the reason the US economy is looking less dominant is NOT because Americans have gotten poorer, but because of the immense amount of new wealth that has entered the world's economy because of the astonishing growth in India and China.

Walton, you are watching a miracle taking place right here, in our lifetimes. Hundreds of millions of people are working their way out of poverty without the help of NGOs or peculiar ideas of centralised, state-controlled economies.

The only place in the world that steadfastly seems incapable of changing is Africa. The reason is because every bad idea that faux academics and political scientists come up with gets dumped here. Instead of sharing best practice, Africa gets idealism and morality plays.

The madness must be stopped. And that's why I'm here, and you're in Scotland.