A lot of progress has been made, e.g. the abolishing of child labor. There’s this weird thing of taking whatever we have now as a baseline, thus ignoring all historical achievements.
Is this a serious question? Because there’s a shit ton of examples.
You don’t have to be a fan of China to acknowledge that their government lifted hundreds of millions (nearly 1 billion by some reports) of people out of extreme poverty in the last 40 or so years.
Social struggle is political struggle. The civil rights movement was a political struggle. Socialist revolutions were political struggles. When people say politics matters, we aren’t saying that the capitalist state can be bent to help working people. We are stating that it is through social engagement that real victories are won.
“Do politics” in this case refers to talking about anything that can be perceived as political.
Obviously people need to be willing to talk about issues before we can fix them, instead of everyone with privilege choosing to ignore it until they personally are affected.
We don’t have a system that optimizes for quality of life or satisfaction for the many.
Money “solves” things in favor of money, not in favor of people, which is why houses are so fucking expensive right now - young adults see most of their income taken away to pay for housing so they even have fewer children, whilst those who already have the most money make even more money with their realestate investments.
It’s also the reason for enshittification - the competition of free market capitalism definitelly optimizes the system … for making more money for those who own the companies and investments, not for higher quality or cheaper products: if a market is bound by high barriers to entry (say, memory or water supply), you get cartels and even monopolies and those won’t don’t need to make better products at a cheaper price to compete, so instead they try and extract as much money from costumers as possible with the cheapest possible production costs.
Capitalism only ever improves things for anything else than capital as a side effect of improvings things for capital: companies pay betters salaries only ever when otherwise they would not have the workers that create the wealth that investors capture, they make better and cheaper products only ever when otherwise they would be making less money by selling inferior and more expensive products and services. Unsurprisingly, were a market’s structure herds customers and/or keeps away competition - marketing shapes consumer choices much more than quality or price, networking effects pull people to a handful of providers, physical constrainst make it harder or even impossible for competition to enter the market - it invariably ends up expensive and enshittified.
I asked chat gpt what system it think would produce a system where most people are happy and it suggested the same system as in nordic countries:
If the objective is high average living standards while keeping poverty, insecurity and extreme concentrations of power relatively low, one model worth looking at closely is the social-democratic mixed economy used, in different forms, in the Nordic countries.
It is still a market economy: people can own companies, become wealthy, invest, compete and make profits. But the market is constrained by institutions designed to spread the gains more broadly:
private enterprise and competitive markets for most goods and services
strong unions and collective bargaining, so workers have negotiating power rather than relying entirely on employers
universal healthcare, education, pensions and social insurance
relatively progressive taxation and substantial redistribution
unemployment protection and retraining, so losing a job is less catastrophic
regulation of monopolies, workplace conditions and environmental damage
publicly provided infrastructure and services
usually some combination of public,
cooperative and private ownership rather than insisting everything must be privately owned
There is empirical support for several of those mechanisms. OECD research finds that taxes and transfers substantially reduce market-income inequality, although the effect differs considerably between countries.
research finds that greater collective-bargaining coverage is associated with smaller wage disparities, and that labour-market institutions can counteract some of the inequality created by concentrated employer power.
Nordic tax-and-benefit systems have historically produced comparatively low poverty and inequality after taxes and transfers, together with high employment.
I mean, the definition of “poor people” has shifted somewhat over time. I don’t think there will ever not be poor people, but is nice that poor people often have access to healthcare etc these days… at least in any country that has sane politics
When did politics make it better for the poor? We still seem to have alot of poor people.
If the solution was politics, wouldn’t the problem be solved?
A lot of progress has been made, e.g. the abolishing of child labor. There’s this weird thing of taking whatever we have now as a baseline, thus ignoring all historical achievements.
Comparing our information age society to feudalism is not the win you expected.
What do you mean by that?
Is this a serious question? Because there’s a shit ton of examples.
You don’t have to be a fan of China to acknowledge that their government lifted hundreds of millions (nearly 1 billion by some reports) of people out of extreme poverty in the last 40 or so years.
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience
That’s true. China is impressive!
Social struggle is political struggle. The civil rights movement was a political struggle. Socialist revolutions were political struggles. When people say politics matters, we aren’t saying that the capitalist state can be bent to help working people. We are stating that it is through social engagement that real victories are won.
I agree with that, and we see that in history very clearly too.
“Do politics” in this case refers to talking about anything that can be perceived as political.
Obviously people need to be willing to talk about issues before we can fix them, instead of everyone with privilege choosing to ignore it until they personally are affected.
I think we live in a world where money decides everything, and it’s very rare that we don’t have solutions to our problems.
Its just not profitable.
We don’t have a system that optimizes for quality of life or satisfaction for the many.
Money “solves” things in favor of money, not in favor of people, which is why houses are so fucking expensive right now - young adults see most of their income taken away to pay for housing so they even have fewer children, whilst those who already have the most money make even more money with their realestate investments.
It’s also the reason for enshittification - the competition of free market capitalism definitelly optimizes the system … for making more money for those who own the companies and investments, not for higher quality or cheaper products: if a market is bound by high barriers to entry (say, memory or water supply), you get cartels and even monopolies and those won’t don’t need to make better products at a cheaper price to compete, so instead they try and extract as much money from costumers as possible with the cheapest possible production costs.
Capitalism only ever improves things for anything else than capital as a side effect of improvings things for capital: companies pay betters salaries only ever when otherwise they would not have the workers that create the wealth that investors capture, they make better and cheaper products only ever when otherwise they would be making less money by selling inferior and more expensive products and services. Unsurprisingly, were a market’s structure herds customers and/or keeps away competition - marketing shapes consumer choices much more than quality or price, networking effects pull people to a handful of providers, physical constrainst make it harder or even impossible for competition to enter the market - it invariably ends up expensive and enshittified.
I asked chat gpt what system it think would produce a system where most people are happy and it suggested the same system as in nordic countries:
If the objective is high average living standards while keeping poverty, insecurity and extreme concentrations of power relatively low, one model worth looking at closely is the social-democratic mixed economy used, in different forms, in the Nordic countries.
It is still a market economy: people can own companies, become wealthy, invest, compete and make profits. But the market is constrained by institutions designed to spread the gains more broadly:
private enterprise and competitive markets for most goods and services
strong unions and collective bargaining, so workers have negotiating power rather than relying entirely on employers
universal healthcare, education, pensions and social insurance
relatively progressive taxation and substantial redistribution
unemployment protection and retraining, so losing a job is less catastrophic
regulation of monopolies, workplace conditions and environmental damage
publicly provided infrastructure and services
usually some combination of public, cooperative and private ownership rather than insisting everything must be privately owned
There is empirical support for several of those mechanisms. OECD research finds that taxes and transfers substantially reduce market-income inequality, although the effect differs considerably between countries.
research finds that greater collective-bargaining coverage is associated with smaller wage disparities, and that labour-market institutions can counteract some of the inequality created by concentrated employer power.
Nordic tax-and-benefit systems have historically produced comparatively low poverty and inequality after taxes and transfers, together with high employment.
Its so nice when people label their comment as AI in the first sentence. I appreciate you saving me the time it takes to read it.
Thank you. Sincerely, no sarcasm.
Should be a Lemmy tag for comments from AI so people can just skip those maybe. :)
The Nordic countries are declining like the rest of the capitalist world, and like other western countries rely on imperialism to begin with.
If I wanted word salad from a statistical parrot I would ask for it myself.
Thanks for actually proving the lack of intellect I suspected from your previous post having such a simpleton take on Economics.
Ok :)
I mean, the definition of “poor people” has shifted somewhat over time. I don’t think there will ever not be poor people, but is nice that poor people often have access to healthcare etc these days… at least in any country that has sane politics
Here where we don’t have sane politics, it’s not the availability of medical care that is the problem, it is the cost.
Also most practitioners do not want to deal with anything that is out of the ordinary.