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 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.
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 :)
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. :)