Not really. I’ve always thought of regulation as a more potent form of customer feedback from customers who otherwise would have no power to influence corporate behavior. Is some moral right/wrong reflected in regulation, probably, but mainly it serves to make sure society doesn’t implode.
Also, the renewable energy examples are poor as well. Germany is making a capitalist bet that renewables are good long-term investment in terms of financials, the environment, and international dependency (not paying off financially so well in my opinion in the short term if you look at their power price history, but it’s their country). Costa Rica is an island with no real natural resources, so renewables are cheaper than trying to barge in coal and fuel oil. Hawaii has high solar penetration for the same reason. And since it’s the price differential on these islands and bets like Germany’s that is inciting investment into renewables and technology advances that will eventually be taken to scale and have cost reductions elsewhere, you’re sort of proving that capitalism works alright. It’s not like these are non-capitalist societies.
Yes, we solve one problem, see what the next one is, and then get to work on it because problems create financial incentives. Also, I’m pretty sure air quality is better in the US than it was in the 70’s and pretty sure London’s air quality is better than it was during the industrial revolution, so yeah, capitalism seems to have ok feedback mechanisms.
No one says capitalism is perfect, it’s just that there’s no better system yet available that is actually implementable on a practical level.
The market has stabilized at a reasonable quality level, but right after divestiture there was a lot of cheap crap out there. Sales at AT&T stores went down then came back up as people abandoned the cheap crap. I got a discount so I never bought the cheap stuff.
My point in all this was that capitalism does not maximize quality, it optimizes the quality/cost tradeoff for different market segments.
Not really. Regulation is more about leveling the playing field (like not making each person do deep research into drug safety) and preventing companies from outsourcing damage and expense to society at large, like regulations against pollution. It may be true that it is unethical to pollute, but I don’t think that is the major reason for the Clean Air Act.
Regardless of whether they’re liars or not, the plant was rated for slightly better than a 9.0 earthquake and, if that’s all that had hit it, all indications are that it would have survived. But it was only rated for a 5 meter tidal wave, and it was hit with a 15 meter tidal wave. So regardless of how forthcoming Tepco is in general, for the two metrics that are important to this discussion, both metrics seem to be proven factual. The plant will survive a 9.0, as it was engineered to do, and it will not survive a 15m wave, as it was not engineered to be able to do.
If you had taken the publicly available information about the plant, in 2010, and ran it against the metrics of the Tohoku Earthquake, your prediction would be that the Fukushima Daiichi plant would be taken out.
To be sure, if you’d asked Tepco’s customer relations department, in 2010, whether the plant would survive, they’d probably have blustered a bunch about how no such tidal wave could ever occur and that the engineers are certainly being cautious with their numbers and that the plant is actually tougher than the safety rating its been given. I am quite willing to believe that they would, as businessmen do, ignore the engineers and lie their asses off. But none of that has anything to do with the official ratings given to the plant. And if you’re listening to the salesman instead of looking at the data, then I’d say that the fault is yours for believing them, to at least some extent.
And, to bring the topic back to that of the thread: Yes, business men lie. But so did Lords. So did peasants. So do beggars. Kings lie, actors lie. We all lie for our own petty and selfish reasons. Capitalism can and does reward it, but that’s because life in general rewards it. Money was meaningless in the USSR, and yet the sociopathic, alpha liars were perfectly capable at bargaining their position into more favors, a better lifestyle, and more sexual partners. Arguably, their ability to be conniving and deceitful was more important in a communist society than a capitalist one because in a capitalist economy, over time, businesses which are deceitful and which get bad press will lose customers. In a capitalist country, business dealings and trade are allowed to take place in the public, and consequently are more open/prey to oversight, so you can’t keep your underhandedness secret for all that long or to such a great extent. Backroom shenanigans in oldendays’ high courts or communist black markets are a lot harder for individual consumers to keep track of and protect themselves against.
By no means is capitalism perfect. But like democratic republics, it’s the least worst system we’ve yet invented.
Everyone wants the best quality of everything. With limited resources they allocate their money to what they see as their own best interests. What it seems to mean for most people is getting lots of items that meet the minimum criteria rather than a few items that truly excel. Price is always a factor.
Not many people need a $300 professional grade Milwaukee cordless drill, but lots of people have a $30 Black and Decker drill in the house. It’s certainly not at good as the Milwaukee, and it’s going to break down in a few years if you use it often, but it does the job they need at the price they are willing to pay. If they can’t afford the $300 Milwaukee then what good does it do for them?
Plenty of companies are in the $30 drill market; there’s competition and some brands are better than others. None are perfect but they do the job they are asked to do most of the time. If it’s possible to make a $30 drill that lasts a lifetime and make money doing so then someone will make it. But I don’t see why that should be expected to happen.
I mostly agree with this. I can’t tell you if a new car is better or worse than the same model 2 or 3 years ago, but it’s WAY better than the ones of 20 or 30 years ago. I also can’t tell you if this is the result of capitalism, or other things like the rise of regulation or even product liability litigation. Now a company can lose tens or hundreds of millions in a courtroom if their shitty product starts killing people.
There’s more than jut regulation at work, though. People just expect better cars.
As it happens I read your post in a place I can see cars going by. For the hell of it I watched them go by, on a busy street, for another three minutes; at least 100 cars have gone by. I have not seen a single car go by with visible rust on the body, not one. New, old, cheap, nice, they’re all rust-free. I stress I live in Ontario, where cars are bombarded with snow, ice and road salt all damn winter.
When I was a kid, all cars had rust. Rusting was a big deal, a common problem with cars that car owners worried about. My first car, a 1985 Pulsar, was rusty. But cars just don’t rust anymore. On the rare occasions they do it’s considered a significant design error, whereas not long ago it was just an accepted risk that grew in likelihood as your car aged.
Cars are just so much better than they used to be it’s ridiculous, and it’s at least in part due to capitalism. The major shifts in car manufacturing are on one hand safety regulation, but on the other hand foreign competition; when the Big Three were faced with serious threats from Honda, Volkswagen, Toyota and the like, they had to up their game, and those companies had to up their game just to break into the market. Now with the Internet it’s way easier to find out what cars are lemons and what cars are actually worth your money.
And some people want a $150 consumer-grade Makita. The market caters to all of them.
The big difference is that back in the day, there was NO lower-cost option. For example, a Kenmore toaster cost $21 in 1958. And I doubt Kenmore was a super-high-end version back then; if anything, they were the value brand.
That $21 toaster would cost $173 in today’s dollars, while toasters today range from a low around $12-15 to highs near $173, with most sitting somewhere around $20-30.
Did anyone sell a $5 toaster back in 1958? I doubt it. That 1958 model may have been built like a tank, and probably would have worked until 1990, but you paid for it.
Sorry, I didn’t make clear that the other reasons I gave weren’t instead of capitalism/competition, but in addition to. I have no idea how much of this improvement is due to which of these or even other factors.
I see what you’re saying. Capitalists must unethical, in order to succeed. And government regulations are the only way to stop them, for example, from poisoning the air and water.
It’s not the only way, but there are cases where market forces will tend to push companies into a race to the bottom. Of course, there are other instances where market forces do the exact opposite, like encouraging the use of technology instead of slaves, back in the 19th century.
And unlike Communist governments we (most western social democracies that use a Capitalist economic system) at least generally FOLLOW the freaking regulations. In the USSR and China, for instance, many of the regulations aren’t worth the paper they were written on and you’d be better off wiping your ass with them than thinking they will be followed in any sort of coherent way (maybe they will, or maybe they won’t until an example needs to be made).
You are railing against the human condition, really, not ‘Capitalism’…HUMANS are basically unethical without some sort of structure and a society at least marginally accountable. Capitalism isn’t ethical, any more than any other economic or social system…PEOPLE and a rule of law are what make society ethical or not, in the end.
No. I’m making a distinction between labor and capital.
People who work for a living (labor) make most or all their money from working.
Capitalists, on the other hand, make most or all their money by owning.
Here’s a documentary helps make the distinction. It’s free.
Many people may believe in capitalism, but that doesn’t make them capitalists. In fact, capitalism requires most people to work for a living. If everyone was a capitalist, there would be no one left to do the work.
The first two sentences of The Wealth of Nations are:
The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniencies of life which it annually consumes, and which consist always either in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations.
According, therefore, as this produce, or what is purchased with it, bears a greater or smaller proportion to the number of those who are to consume it, the nation will be better or worse supplied with all the necessaries and conveniencies for which it has occasion.
He also wrote: Labor was the first price, the original purchase money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labor, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased.
One of the great insights of Adam Smith is that it is not gold (or money) that creates wealth, but labor. Ownership may allow you to live a better lifestyle than workers: but in itself, it produces nothing.
Many people got rich of Enron. Some of them got caught, and some of them didn’t. Pornograpy is one of the largest industries in the world. So is drugs. Before the government stopped them, corporations dumped so much toxins into waterways that rivers burned, and acid rain fell from the sky. You seem to be saying getting rich naturally makes the world a better place. I’d argue the opposite is often true: Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
The number of wars that have been, and are being, fought over control of oil, water, land, diamonds, etc. would fill volumes.
Yet millions in shacks with no heating, while others live penthouses overlooking Central Park with rooms they’ve never been in.
It’s true, and the analogy is particularly apt because both capitalism and democracy are imperfect systems that can become dysfunctional if not properly managed. If capitalism isn’t properly regulated it can become a thieving tyranny of a powerful oligarchy, in which the customer is a victim and no competition can flourish. Ironically if democracy isn’t properly managed, government can become much the same, in which the ordinary citizen is the victim. A proper democracy requires, among other things, an informed and engaged electorate and responsible media. The best society is one that balances capitalism and government, and moreover that understands that society’s needs are not always best served by free enterprise.
Nitpick: I wouldn’t necessarily limit my description of democracy to a democratic republic. Constitutional monarchies work just fine, too.
Cars are certainly better in many countless ways, last longer, and are less prone to rust. This is partly the result of competition, much of it from overseas. It’s also worth a certain manufacturing cost not to have the negative advertising of a rusting example of your brand on public exhibit. But they are hardly “rust free”. I see rusty cars all the time, some of them not really all that old. And while the stigma of “planned obsolescence” is not nearly the plague it once was, cars still eventually develop so many problems that they are no longer worth repairing.
So true. Which is why effective government and regulation is a critical component of functional capitalism.
Depends on the monarch (presuming you’re referring to countries where the monarch has meaningful powers of governance and actually uses them). Thailand’s monarchy, for example, has been pretty up-and-down.
I was thinking more of the UK, Australia, and Canada where the parliamentary system is built around a constitutional monarchy. The monarchy has little real power except in rare situations, but it’s nevertheless deeply entrenched in parliamentary procedure. We can argue til the cows come home about whether or not this is superior to a republic, but my only point is that both forms of democracy work pretty well. Personally I like the idea of a head of state who is graciously non-partisan and above common political bickering.
If you ever had the misfortune to be subjected to quality training, you’d know that quality is more complicated than lasting longer. Quality is about a fit of a product to customer needs. A person with enough money to buy the expensive drill but only the need to use it three or four times a year will find the cheaper drill a better fit to their needs.
Plenty of people who can afford more expensive stuff won’t buy more expensive stuff because they don’t want it.
That’s true in a strictly practical sense, but quality is also an aesthetic. Not always, and not for everyone, but often. It’s why some people spend millions on original art, or on finely crafted furniture or machinery that doesn’t necessarily perform any practical function any better than cheaper stuff.
If your constitutional monarchy makes the monarch a figurehead and vests the power of government into a democratically elected body of representatives…
sigh
Alright, I had hoped you were going somewhere interesting with your nitpick. Yes yes, good job. You’re correct and I was remiss not to have mentioned it to begin with.
Until or unless downsizing would increase profitability. Or moving profits overseas. Or doing basically anything that would increase profits for the owners, regardless of its effect anyone else.
I’d argue that “ethics” itself means that you’re doing something for someone or something other than yourself. Often it means sacrificing your own interests for someone or something other than yourself.
Louis CK tells a joke about sitting First Class and watching a soldier struggling by to go sit somewhere in the back of the plane. It says something about our society that we call them heroes. We just don’t let them sit in the front part of the plane.