I think the main problem with Capitalism today is that it is not Capitalism. When you remove the ability to fail from Capitalism, when companies like Goldman-Sachs can lose tens of billions and then be bailed out by the government with tax payer money, then you remove the feednacl controls from capitalism that prevent catastrophic collapse. Ironically, given that preventing catastrophic collapse is the ostensible purpose. (Though I think the real purpose is to help out one's friends in those companies).
Britain's decline - is money holding us at ransom?
- Thread starter Pawnless Endgame
- Start date
I think the main problem with Capitalism today is that it is not Capitalism. When you remove the ability to fail from Capitalism, when companies like Goldman-Sachs can lose tens of billions and then be bailed out by the government with tax payer money, then you remove the feednacl controls from capitalism that prevent catastrophic collapse. Ironically, given that preventing catastrophic collapse is the ostensible purpose. (Though I think the real purpose is to help out one's friends in those companies).
Soldato
- Joined
- 21 Apr 2007
- Posts
- 6,637
I don't really consider what we have today true capitalism, I mean surely if we followed it true to it's meaning the banks would have been left to fail.
Sink or swim, free enterprise and all that...
Crony capitalism maybe?
Sink or swim, free enterprise and all that...
Crony capitalism maybe?
"more productivity, more efficiency, more innovation and more economic output" means less paid work, so it's part of that problem rather than the solution to it.
The choice is going to be wealth distribution or population reduction. There simply won't be a need for a mass of peasants to do the crap jobs. Those days are well on the way to disappearing. The capitalist approach of a pyramid of wealth is unsustainable even in the partial form that can exist in a civilised society. So it's either change the approach or remove the majority of people. Somehow.
We should be aiming for population reduction regardless. The planet is over-burdened. Malthus was wrong - but he wont be forever. The most effective way of population reduction, happily, isn't totalitarian at all. It's greater education and employment opportunities for women. This has held up time and again as a way of reducing the population. Best of all it is voluntary and has a positive effect on a nation's productivity. Look at what has happened in the West - the main reason our population is so high is because of high immigration. Left to ourselves we would have stabilised. Even in Italy, where Catholicism dominates with its prohibitions against contraceptives and emphasis on child-rearing, the rise of female employment and opportunity was accompanied by a corresponding fall in number of children per family. Contrast that with the developing world where women will have five, maybe more, children each. Unsustainable. And I guarantee it's not because those women find it oh-so-fulfilling to be pregnant and surrounded by screaming **** machines. Schools that include girls, pressure to reduce sexism in the developing world and the Middle East, will ease population pressure there and the resulting immigration pressure on us and inclination to war amongst themselves. In short: Westernise Africa and the Middle East in terms of sexual equality, and we can start bringing down the world population over the next several generations. A billion people on this planet would be plenty to keep culture, art, science, space programs all going well. We could stop referring to people as consumers and start calling them people again. I guarantee, faced with the choice of an interesting career and a year or two break in it to have a couple of children, or sitting in a house juggling five infants or teenagers - most women want the former.
Or we could go the other way - invest in getting people off this planet - we could be doing a lot more to utilise the rest of the solar system and maybe even beyond. Obviously no trivial task but something we seem to be lacking real interest and limited progress in but logically its the next step.
It can be two things.
But realistically, we would have an EASIER time colonising Mars if we ALSO reduced our local population in the manner stated. We are increasingly spending resources on simply keeping our heads above water. Do you think we'd be more able to invest in Space Programs and the post-graduate levels of education for people to work on them if we had the world's resources divided amongst four billion rather than seven? With the corresponding reduction in pressure for war and welfare? I do. The only risk would be if reduced population pressure here dimmed the desire to colonise Mars. But I don't think so. We're not talking about sending hundreds of millions to Mars - which is what we'd need to do to make a marginally visible difference to world population pressures - but handfuls of intrepid pioneers. And there will always be those for as long as we are human. Colonising Mars is a means of ensuring species survival and diversification. It's not, anytime remotely soon, a means of alleviating population pressure. A woman in Ghana having the choice between working or marrying a guy and having five kids by him, however, is.
EDUCATION EDUCATION EDUCATION.
We are at the pinnacle of trickle down economics, which has been taught by economists since Reagan and Thatcher.
There is no alternative, so either suck it up or start hoarding guns and ammo as only a revolution will cause a seed change.
I am all for a bit of revolution, starting with all the media outlets.
We are at the pinnacle of trickle down economics, which has been taught by economists since Reagan and Thatcher.
There is no alternative, so either suck it up or start hoarding guns and ammo as only a revolution will cause a seed change.
I am all for a bit of revolution, starting with all the media outlets.
As someone said earlier, it's more to do with the distribution of wealth.
Very wealthy families have generally accumulated wealth over generations - the saying of having more money that you can spend in a lifetime applies. That money just gets handed down and down. When you look at the top wealthiest in this country, and what they spend in their lifetimes versus how much they earn, it's a very small percentage.
Now imagine if we had a state where once you've died, your money is divided up amongst the countries population. I suspect for most people they'd actually be better off, dividing up trillions will probably net you more of a share than what you'd initially inherit from the current system.
Obviously that will never work as you want everything you've worked for to be passed on to your children, not onto other people who may not have worked as hard for it.
Very wealthy families have generally accumulated wealth over generations - the saying of having more money that you can spend in a lifetime applies. That money just gets handed down and down. When you look at the top wealthiest in this country, and what they spend in their lifetimes versus how much they earn, it's a very small percentage.
Now imagine if we had a state where once you've died, your money is divided up amongst the countries population. I suspect for most people they'd actually be better off, dividing up trillions will probably net you more of a share than what you'd initially inherit from the current system.
Obviously that will never work as you want everything you've worked for to be passed on to your children, not onto other people who may not have worked as hard for it.
Soldato
- Joined
- 1 Dec 2003
- Posts
- 3,533
true, we have nothing to gain from caring for anyone else in this money driven society. greed rules
i think the government should take back more control of housing. one of the single biggest barriers to people having any money at the end of the month. when landlords buy up everything and rent for stupid money you've nothing left for anything else
On one hand you aren't wrong but IMO that underestimates what could be achieved if we had a lot of people dedicating their efforts to the task of resource gathering and then colonising off earth and developing the technologies, etc. required rather than as now where its fragmented, largely underfunded/relatively small numbers working on it and just generally not a priority.
And indeed why would you work hard to provide for your children knowing it would be taken away from you? And why make it even harder than it already is on children who lose a parent young by saying: "yeah, they would have spent their savings on your throughout your life but now you're even more disadvantaged against children whose parents lived to old age.". In fact, you've basically just massive disincentivised serious saving because the only way to make certain your money goes where you want is to put it there whilst you live. Additionally, and this is key, you're setting up a system in direct opposition to the most basic of human needs - to care for one's children.
It does not underestimate what could be achieved. It's optimistic. I wrote that to make even a marginal difference to population pressure on Earth by relocating people to Mars, you would need to relocate hundreds of millions. That's not viable on any current time scale no matter how hard we try. The cost of getting a single person into orbit is huge. Getting them to Mars is many times that. Getting them with sufficient supplies to live and begin a colony more again. Doing that in the millions, incalculable. Closest you could get would be to build a Space Elevator. We don't yet have the materials to do that (though we're getting close). Such a project alone would be enormous and even then would not enable the sort of numbers that would make a measurable difference to all the things resulting from over-population we currently have.
I'm sorry. I'm very enthusiastic about Space exploration and colonisation of Mars. But I'm talking right now about something that is affordable, realistic, proven to work and simple to understand - get the developing world to provide the same career opportunities and education that women can get in the West and you will see the world's chronic overpopulation not only slow, but begin to fall. This is demonstrated and doable science. And you're replying to me with ******* crazy dreams disconnected from any familiarity with the numbers or costs involved and making baseless assertions about what would happen if we 'try hard'. Colonise Mars - sure. We should. But don't remotely put it on the same level as what I'm talking about.
I'm not - you seem to have misunderstood the angle I'm posting from. I'm quite well aware of the numbers and cost and technology hurdles involved but most perspectives on that are limited to how things are now, not how they could be if we made such a priority as a species - we are nearly 50 years behind where we should and could have been on that path and in the long run that is going to bite us in the rear.
I think colonising other places is a good idea, but not for population reasons.
1) It's not practical for that purpose without massive scale teleportation devices. You'd need to be able to move millions of people per year to somewhere else in order to have any effect on the population of Earth and millions per week to have any significant effect.
2) It's not practical for that purpose without somewhere else that can support very large numbers of people. A colony wouldn't be enough - you'd need an entire planet that was completely terraformed or an artificial structure that could support a planet-sized population. If, for example, we somehow made part of Mars habitable and somehow sent enough resources there to build a couple of cities and somehow transported people there to live in the cities...that would reduce the population of Earth by a few million, which would reduce the population of Earth for a couple of weeks. This hypothetical staggeringly immense Martian terraforming and city-building project wouldn't reduce the population of Earth for long enough for the Martian settlers to even get to Mars.
3) It does nothing to address the problem. At best, it's a very brief temporary reduction bought at massive cost.
It's a good goal, but not for population reasons. Those need to be addressed seperately and the best method seems to be to try to make more people less poor and to have less sexism. Those things stablise population sizes at a more sustainable level...and would free up resources and will to do massive projects like colonising other places.
Soldato
- Joined
- 22 Jul 2014
- Posts
- 3,929
- Location
- Oxon
More and more of the super rich are now deciding not to leave anything to their children.
The mega wealthy who've benefited from inheritance over generations probably haven't worked very hard in their lives either.
Theres a difference between people working hard to provide for their families and people with millions doing very little continuing to accumulate wealth. Those are the people who would be targeted by any attempts to redistribute - dead money that isn't benefiting anybody really.
I mean, are you really suggesting that Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, etc got to where they are today just because they wanted to provide for their families generations from now and if they knew that once they'd started earning more than £x million a year it would be redistributed by the government they wouldn't have bothered? Really? The only people who would be discouraged are exactly the type of awful parasites who've got us into this situation in the first place. A lot of the worlds greatest inventions didn't make their inventors rich at all. That wasn't the point. I'd argue most of the worlds businesses aren't created solely to make as much money as possible at the expense of everything else... which is the problem we've got now.
Obviously the point at which the government started to redistribute your wealth would be such that for all intents and purposes it didn't matter any more. Who needs more than say £10 million? Even to leave to your children that's a huge amount that will make them richer than 99% of the worlds population.
Last edited:
Exactly. I'm well in favour of colonising Mars and have said so. And I agree with Rroff that we are way behind where we could be with this. It's entirely an appropriate thing to argue for in its own right, but not as a solution to over-population. Not only is transporting a sufficient number of people unfeasible, but it does nothing to slow the rate of re-population. Even in an environment that isn't resource rich (the developing world), humans breed more than is necessary for merely maintaining populations. In fact, it's in the resource rich West where they DON'T. Even where in the West you do get large families, look at which ones are doing so - those where the woman of the house doesn't have career or educational alternatives to simply having kids. I have no objection to someone arguing for colonisation of Mars. Simply to someone raising it as "Or we could go another way..." It's not remotely comparable to what I'm saying which can be done right now for a fraction of the cost and has large productivity and humanitarian benefits as well.
The self made super rich, yes they are deciding to leave little or nothing to family.
Its not them you have to worry about, its the older families whose wealth was not built on hard work but the persecution/slavery/ill treatment of people no matter the human cost. These are the ones that need a bullet.
Every nation has them.
Its not them you have to worry about, its the older families whose wealth was not built on hard work but the persecution/slavery/ill treatment of people no matter the human cost. These are the ones that need a bullet.
Every nation has them.
Soldato
- Joined
- 1 Dec 2003
- Posts
- 3,533
true dat