IME, it’s more like they themselves are coughing, and everyone around them is telling them it’s nothing, but the coughing gets worse and they are growing weaker. Maybe it is nothing. Maybe we’ll get better. But it feels very wrong, and it’s hard to trust anyone who dismisses that.
As I understand the term it is when markets mature so that everything either goes towards monopolistic / oligopolistic pricing model or that of a commodity. There is no longer competitive markets. This also applies to labor, you either are a CEO or making minimum wage and if it’s the latter you have no real value and are replaceable. Anticompetitive practices and buying political influence keeps the status quo going, and in practice is no different than communism where the rich control the government and access to the market. The ‘robber barron’ days are such an example of approaching late state capitalism along with our current time.
I think the Gilded Age was more “early stage capitalism”. If you think work sucks now, you should see what life was like building the Lincoln Tunnel, the Brooklyn Bridge, or working in a company mining town.
That said, my concern is we are approaching a sort of late stage capitalism where capitalism no longer delivers on the wants and needs of the people but instead only serves to focus on growing and maintaining capital. Examples would be the growth of the financial services industry, including ever increasingly complex financial instruments. Investment in apps that mostly serve to disrupt existing industries or commodify and gamify human interactions, The current AI gold rush to replace human workforces with bots. Cryptocurrency. The current state of social media, which serves little purpose other than to capture attention with nonsense.
At least the robber barons built railroads and steel mills.
From the current Harper’s Index
Estimated percentage of corporate spending in the 2024 election that came from the cryptocurrency industry
44%
January 2025 • Source: Public Citizen (Washington)
Percentage of Americans who own cryptocurrency
7%
January 2025 • Source: U.S. Federal Reserve Board of Governors
When I first heard “end stage capitalism” being used a lot, it gave me hope, as I supposed there would be no smoke without fire. (To extend the metaphor, maybe it was vape that only looked like smoke.)
It’s been a few years, enough for me to wonder if “end stage capitalism” might not be simply wishful thinking.
Unsurprisingly, @msmith537 has nailed it 3 posts up from here. Which post explains in more detail the idea that I think @Little_Nemo was trying for here which @Babale scoffed at. IMO wrongly.
Unrelated to the above …
It is a truism that anything that is unsustainable will come to an end. Eventually.
The problem is that “eventually” can not only exceed the attention span of modern humans, it can exceed the lifespan of modern humans.
I expect I won’t live long enough to see major disruptions to our underlying economic system and I hope to last at least 30 more years. Will there be crises, wars, recessions, and booms? Sure. Will we fundamentally alter how money and society work together to feed us all most of us? Hell no. I doubt my hypothetical grandkids will live to see it.
Well, we have this problem in the US (and probably elsewhere) where capitalism is treated as a religion. Which is to say, it’s taken on faith that capitalism, as practiced here and now, is and always will be the ultimate economic system. Furthermore, in my experience, people seem to think capitalism is effectively an enshrined right in the constitution.
Why this matters: Because no matter how out of whack things get in terms of the Uber Capitalists controlling things, articles of faith must not be challenged.
I tend to agree with this and think it’s a great way to say it. Capitalism worked when it’s goals were also incidentally helping deliver on the wants and needs of the people, but the goal of capitalism as of late, as the wants and needs of the people seem to be more and more divergent and becoming in opposition to each other. Where once capitalism incidentally helped out a free society, it is now causing more bondage of the people to these corporations, limiting choice and opportunity and absorbing people’s disposable income in a way that is making the society poor.
The way I’ve put the same sentiment is that capital is nutrients to business like good soil is nutrients to plants. More capital, like an IPO and bond issuances, is like fertilizer to plants. Added in reasonable proportions, it increases the growth rate and/or crop yield at no harm to the plant. All good.
Financialization, the stuff @msmith537 speaks knowledgeably about, is like cocaine to a business. It’s one hell of a boost to apparent output, a lot of fun, but it sows the seeds of its own imminent destruction. There’s no safe climb-down once you’re hooked.
As financialization spreads from something KKR-style robbers do via LBO to a few flabby has-been corps, to become the raison d’être of all Corporate America, it’s quickly becoming a party where everyone is snorting everyone else’s cocaine.
There will be a day of reckoning and one hell of a hangover. But as I said in my last post, “eventually” can be a long time. Meanwhile … “SNORRRRRTTTTT!!!11!!1!”
I still don’t see the issue.
At the end of the day, what matters in an economy is the resources that get pulled out of the ground, the capital necessary to convert those raw materials in to the various things we all consume, the ability to transport goods around, the logistical system to organize all of this, and of course, the labor necessary to do all of the above.
As we have developed technologically, the amount of resources that we can extract and transformed has increased exponentially, without a similar increase in the amount of labor necessary to do these tasks.
However, a new challenge arose. Our modern society is of immense complexity. There is an endless variety of products and industries spread out across the globe.
The finance industry isn’t merely “pushing papers around”. It plays a key role in a free market economy. Those pieces of paper are used to fund businesses that build real things out of crap they pulled out of the ground, and that employ thousands of people in doing so. In a market economy, the financial sector plays a large role in the system’s ability to make decisions.
(They aren’t necessarily decisions that benefit society as a whole, which is where I’m a proponent of strong regulatory systems that guide the market towards desirable outcomes).
I don’t see how that follows.
How do you define “financialization” as different from normal investment in capital? And what makes it inherently disastrous?
We live in an ever more complex society, with an ever
more complex economy… Wouldn’t it be entirely sensible to expect that our financial instruments would also grow more complex?
I don’t see this as some kind of harbinger of doom.
First, I would argue that most apps being developed aren’t intended to disrupt existing industries; but you don’t hear about them, because unless an app disrupts a major industry and changes your world, you aren’t going to notice.
Second, why is disrupting an existing industry a bad thing? If a new app can do that, they’re presumably doing something better or more competitively than existing solutions? That sounds like a win.
I think it is a mistake to think of AI replacing humans. Until we get true general AI capable of agency, that simply won’t happen.
What will happen is that one person will be able to do the work of twenty, or a hundred. So we will have fewer individuals working in a given job in order to do all of the necessary work of that type for society as a whole.
So, you know… The same thing that’s been going on since the Neolithic, as fewer and fewer of us need to work in food production to avoid starvation.
As in every prior case of labor saving innovation, this will raise our overall standard of living and give us the opportunity to come up with new jobs to take up our time.
Is a bullshit fad, there we agree.
That might be the current state of political posts on social media, and it certainly has a toxic impact on our culture; but the far more prevalent use for social media among the people I know in reality is to connect with other people that they know in the real world over mundane, pointless stuff.
And the toxic stuff is hardly new. Remember Yellow Journalism, the Maine, the Spanish American War?
We don’t work for economic systems. They work for us. And if the people don’t feel the system is working for them, it isn’t. This goes back to what I said earlier, which is that a large number of people literally treat capitalism like a religion. It’s the best system we’ve worked out, as far as I can tell, but nothing says it must always be thus.
Meaning, if people feel there are no un-enshittified choices (and in some cases there are not) then they have every right to demand a system that de-shittifies things. And yes, I’m stretching that term beyond its original definition.
That’s all well and good if the people apply reforms to make the system work better. Less so if they toss out the system, implement a planned economy, and five million starve.
There’s a difference between treating capitalism as a religion, and asking you to present at least a hint of a viable alternative before we leap.
Leaping without a viable alternative seems like the more “religious” path. A leap of faith, trusting in the God of Capitalism Bad to save you.
Then by all means, present your alternative.
In basic terms, stocks are shares of ownership in a corporation.
What happens when shares of ownership in a corporation are bought and sold? Does it change the corporation? Does the corporation expand its facilities? Does the corporation begin producing more goods? Does the corporation lower its production costs? Does the corporation hire more employees?
This is the difference between industrial capitalism and financial capitalism.
“Late Stage Capitalism” is a trendy buzzword used by college students who purchase anti-capitalist T-shirts from for-profit (capitalistic) companies.
I don’t think the real boogeyman here is capitalism itself, but the way that things have changed over time. Capitalism is neutral.
And I’m a bit confused with what you mean with “bondage of the people to these corporations”? Could you explain that? It sounds a bit strange, to put it mildly.
The difference is what I and other people have described. In industrial capitalism, the plan is to invest in the creation of new assets. In financial capitalism, the plan is to invest in the buying and selling of existing assets.
Financial capitalism is not inherently disastrous. But capital that’s being invested in financial capitalism is capital that isn’t being invested in industrial capitalism.
If we want a healthy growing economy, we should be encouraging industrial capitalism. And part of encouraging industrial capitalism is discouraging financial capitalism.
Environmental laws either a) prohibit a lot of industrial capitalism, or b) make us unable to compete with countries that do not have stringent environmental laws.
If you think saving the environment is expensive, wait until you find out the cost of the alternative.