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zakruti.com » Knowledge, science, education » TED-Ed
Is capitalism actually broken?

Is capitalism actually broken?

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Rating: 4.5; Vote: 2
Explore the different types of capitalism, how they operate, and how they impact issues like climate change and rising inequality. People have become increasingly worried that the threats we face today, like climate change and rising inequality, can t be solved by a capitalist economic system. So, is that true? And if it is, can we fix capitalism or do we need to tear the system down and build a new one from scratch? Explore the different types of capitalism and the role it plays in our society.
Date: 2022-11-01

Comments and reviews: 14


Ok, just a minute in, and I already found something disingenuous in the video, in my opinion. They suggest two poles: authoritarian governments owning the capital on the one hand and private citizens owning the capital, aka capitalism, on the other. But these are not the only two options, and they are not opposite poles at all, for they have more in common than what is being admitted here.
When they say capital is owned by the citizens, they make it sound like all the citizens have capital and can participate. But in reality, the top 1% have more than the rest in many capitalist countries, so everyday people don't have a say. Wealthy capitalists can choose where society should go to benefit themselves and their families. In doing so, they change the lives of millions, and everyday people can't be represented or vote on the direction these wealthy individuals put society in. So, just a few chose the destiny of millions with few repercussions and non-opposition from people. This is the case even though the rich's decisions are making many's lives miserable to maintain their power. In this regard, oligarchs are the same as authoritative regimes because they own everything and can choose how millions of people will live; and those choices are for their own benefit, even if it means letting millions live miserably.
The actual opposite of that, in my opinion, is a democracy, in which the people own the means of production and distribution through a government in which they are actually represented to ensure a dignified standard of living for all.
Economics is not a science. This field may borrow terminology used in actual sciences like psychology or evolutionary science, but ultimately it's not based on fact but on made-up rules, like a video game. Rules that obviously were created by the people with power. Does it make sense to be suspicious if these rules were made to benefit those in power? I think yes. So, it is disingenuous to say that the only alternative to capitalism is authoritarianism when they are, at the end of the day, the same.

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What capitalism - the economic model - does not consider is
- big business role in influencing governments (e. g. how usa gov broke the chile socialist gov that resulted in a coup & the resulting installation of an autocrat / dictator)
- corruption (how TLCs buy & sell favour that can drive out competition, buy votes, greece the wheels, manipulate markets etc
- control of the creation & disposal of waste (e. g. in many countries around 30 - 40 % of food produce is wasted, while millions starve because they can't afford food due to profiteering.
The 4th, 5th & 6th dials? Ideally these should be in the off position, but almost never are.
Also, I have no problem with pure capitalism for non-essential goods, but have a MASSIVE problem with private companies essentially owning survival imperatives, e. g. food system, energy, education, healthcare, affordable & social housing, common national assets (such as community land, biodiversity, ecological systems, processes & services, urban mobility (such as public transport) - essentially things humans & biodiversity needs to survive & thrive. We can use the tools of a country's national assets to create wealth & prosperity - e. g. cheap energy to create goods & services and transport them where needed, or affordable food products (e. g. food crops, not necessarily grapes for wine etc) to create restaurants & hotels, food products, catering industries etc. In the uk private companies are dumping sewage into rivers (free) instead of treating it (costs money) so they can make big profits for shareholders impacting other industries such as fishing & tourism etc. The tax payer then has to pay to have the enviro cleaned up diverting funds to other sectors such as urban services, social services, infrastructure etc.
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Yes. Here is an example, let me switch dollars with seconds:
A million seconds is eleven days,
A billion seconds is thirty-one years.
Millionaires are considered rich compared to 95% of the population anywhere.
Yet we live in a world with a lot of billionaires.
While most of us are fighting to save a second every week.
We started a movement against this upper-di-uppest class. We wanted fairness, we got rainbows.
Our social media was suddenly weaponised by the owners, algorithms started slicing up society and setting them up against each other so they would stop looking up.
Television these days is mostly propaganda with hollowed out scripts and empty platitudes. Marvelous. Politicians openly follow money and not principles. Propaganda is literally legal again.
Electricity, food, transport, housing. Everything is suddenly too expensive for the working class unless they are propped up government grants only used to pay for the unreasonable price hike.
Working class bank accounts are used to funnel money into the hands of these corporations. They increase prices, your taxmoney is used to help you pay them (because increasing wages properly hasn't been an option in decades. They can dodge or bribe their way out of paying their share of taxes. Its theft with extra steps while making the victim compliant in the process.
Government should be fighting for the masses against these giants, but they capitulated so long ago we all grew up indoctrinated this is the normal way of life. Be glad with the wealth we get. The scraps.

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This is like blaming gun violence on guns. If anything is broken here, it's the Morality of human beings.
Broken can also mean something has excessive major advantages. Like, 'the main character's power in this manhua is broken. ' To a large extent, it is good for the character, and to some degree, becomes wish fulfillment that provides 'escapism' for the reader. However, the story itself can suffer, as there can be no conflict with any meaning when the stakes are lowered by the 'broken' element, which protects (in this example) the main character from any serious danger, limiting character development.
How 'we' fix something depends on how the problem is identified. The World Economic Forum is framing the problem and becoming the lens, which looks away from the WEF itself, and all the orginizations that participate in it.
Individual responsibility and level of awareness are also both 'broken. ' We can blame the social environment that encourages people to fall in line, conform, and consume approved media entertainment, but ultimately each person's life and being are their own.
Human ambition has been largely curbed, because the 'broken' common sense implies that opportunity doesn't exist anymore, like the WEF indicates for the listener to infer in this video.
Be very mindful with such eloquent monologues accompanied by colorful and snappy animated visuals. Critical thinking is broken, and they know it.

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please could you stop with communism is when the state does things? Also this video has some benevolent misunderstandings of capitalism. The inequality in capitalism is essential to capitalism. The further exploitation of mankind and nature is the only way capitalism can prevail. No regulation can change this fundamental fact. Also making this video without talking about how there are boom bust cycles that mean that capitalism is supposed to fail at its main task every few years at the cost of millions, who suffer through those crises. Look at how many people are without a safe shelter, food or water security, access health care etc. in the richest country on earth. Look at all those people in overexploited countries that are denied the most basic needs and are kept in constant conflict so that the imperialist core can extract more and more ressources from them for the cheapest price possible. And all of this while we overproduce food. Those ressources aren't scarce at all. (Some are finite but atm not scarce)
And no capitalism isn't broken, capitalism works as intended. The elites get the money as intended. The state serves the interests of the elites instead of the poulation as intended. Nature and people are exploited as intended. The poor exist to feed the rich as intended. Capitalism works, just not for us.

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Part of the problem is the culture and values that come along with it. There's no necessary reason why private ownership of businesses should lead to environmental devastation or a lack of investment in the things that really matter, but people are spellbound by consumerism and for too many, their self-esteem and concept of self revolves around what they own and what they consume, and a comparison to other people. When I think about what's actually valuable, what I actually need, it's health in all its forms, a healthy body, healthy environment, a healthy society of intelligent, good, flourishing people, and of course enough of the essentials. If private ownership of capital can help with that, then fine, but the current way of doing things is neglecting too much of what's actually valuable, and that puts a lot of people in survival mode where the fixation on accumulation of wealth and consumption as a form of ego gratification is justified through appeal to its necessity (think rappers who grew up poor and are permanently in that mode despite having plenty of money. At the very least, we could break this cycle and have better balance like the Scandinavian countries, where a substantial investment is made in every person so they can grow to their full potential and benefit everyone else in the process.
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Capitalism never claimed to be charity or focused on the benefit of those that can't compete, so that's why it's silly to say that inequality resulting from capitalism shows a flaw in the system. Capitalism isn't unfair, life is. The only question is what benefits the entire society more, and a free market can be more productive and give a country more resources at its disposal. Almost nobody starves in the US despite people owning exponentially different amounts of money for that reason. The real question is how we are going to use our resources produced to do the most good, and I think government welfare could use major reform to better benefit people and give them the tools they need to get themselves out of difficult situations rather then be stuck taking handouts. The public school system is also a massive money pit for lobbying with studies showing that it will cost millions just to fit old schools with air conditioning which shouldn't be nearly that expensive. This can lead to lower quality schools hurting people's career opportunities. We should focus on these issues before tearing apart a system like the free exchange of goods that has always existed, and be cautious when adding new regulation to make sure it really is beneficial to society.
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I think this vid is actually a little too generous. I don't agree with the stated premise that everyone is wealthier than they otherwise would be. Relative to costs, people's incomes are going down, and this is due to very insufficient regulation on compensation. Further, I think we could have made gains around equal, possibly even greater, without having let the invisible hand determine which new products would get funding and which ones wouldn't. Betamax might have defeated VHS, given its universally recognized superiority, had there not been wealth behind the alternative. New medications are already funded largely by public investment, and going full public wouldn't cut the private investment out, it might even increase the share of dollars currently being horded by the wealthy which go toward medical innovations by way of rendering those resources public, to be used in the public's interest, rather than private, to be used as wealthy individuals see fit. And lets not forget, the rich then demand enormous compensation for their assistance funding that research, rendering the cost of those medications prohibitively expensive for a great many.
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Thing is there s no viable alternative in forseeable future. I believe climate change is an unnavoidable challenge despite the economic system becarse it has more to do with value creation itself than how factors of production are allocated. I m not saying that dealing with it is equally hard for different systems.
The other thing that is relevant to get the full picture of inequality is to measure its effect on life quality. Is it really bad that 1% is getting richer faster than the remaining 99% if everyone is getting better? Again not saying it is the case in e US, but it should be noted income inequality is not bad per se and always should be analyzed within the societal context. When the rich get richer and the poor get poorer is problematic.
Also in centralized economies such as the Soviet Union the equivalent to the billionaires were state bureaucrats that could enforce their almighty power everywhere.
This power imbalances are natural to any form of civillizatory organizations. So it is shallow to view inequality as something inherently bad. It s like to be against gravity.

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Not much of a video. Doesn't even definitively answer it's own title question. More of a conversation starter than an actual video analysis. But still, at least it's focusing on a subject that needs addressed.
Is capitalism in it's modern format broken?
Depending which country we focus on, answers may vary, but on the whole I'd say, not quite, but almost. And without serious new legislation it will be completely broken within the next two decades.
But then. Maybe that's just my opinion?
Generally speaking, no version of capitalism is capable of eliminating the lower class. So if you consider that to be a vital goal then you must conclude that all versions of capitalism are 'broken'. In my own opinion, some level of wealth inequality is acceptable so long as the distribution is fairly level and the top and bottom tiers are both approximately equal in size and no more than 20% of the population each. By that standard, modern capitalism in the US, Canada, and UK is pretty close to broken. Fixable still, but not without effort.

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Capitalism needs HEAVY regulation or it will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Capitalists are often blind to the damage they cause, willfully or not, living places where their damage is invisible to them, not seeing people whose lives they destroy, etc.
So long as there is a singular drive for anything, in this case the 'bottom line', things will be broken to maximize that. see the AI problem WRT making people happy or making paperclips. but capitalists will fight, tooth and nail, using underhanded tactics, treachery, violence, whatever they can get away with (or often allowed to get away with, while others who do the same are harshly punished because they don't have lots of money, including controlling democratically elected politicians either overtly bribing them or through gift intensive lobbying, to wring that chicken's neck, thinking they and they alone exist in the world, that future generations don't matter nor do people 'over there'.

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You can solve climate change with capitalism. What you need to do is commercialize environment. Put a value to environmental well-being and health. Carbon credits and renewable energy certificates are a good start, but they are not broad enough and only tackle very specific problem.
When environment is given a high enough value, as it should be, then capitalism will do its trick again. But like the video said, you can't rely on the invisible hand. A recognised global body needs to be the one to define the metric for measuring environmental health, and be the one to set a value to it.
In an ideal world, the dials of capitalism ought to be controlled by a benevolent dictator (not the masses, cause the average person ain't too bright. But in reality, you can never count on such a person to always be in leadership. So the best alternative is not democracy, but a Artificial Intelligence dictator that has been programmed to be benevolent.

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Capitalism only represents a wide range of possible systems if you don't know what Capitalism is. It's just a term Marx used because he didn't like the term free market. You don't have a range of free market, we are either free or we are not. The whole premise of this video is flawed, in first assuming that governments already should be dialing in the knobs. How about your knobs are themselves violations of human rights. Utilizing any of your knobs violates the free part. You can't construct an engineered environment, then say oh look, it's broken, you need us to fix it.
Some day we will have a reformation akin to the protestant reformation, wherein we forever after have a separation of state and industry. After that day human prosperity and freedom will make massive leaps ahead and poverty will only exist voluntarily. Until then, lets at least be smart enough not to listen to knob turners explaining why they need more knobs.

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Humans and commerce must part ways. The present system has many with nothing and the few with almost everything. It must be changed out. The one and only solution is to establish a global system of governance admininistered by a computer generated monolith that ensures equality for all - a technocracy. There are no wages no commerce no money markets. Food, shelter, clothing, transportation, education, and health care are all provided. People go to work to make it work. The motto is Bring what you have take what you need. This is going to happen but it will take the collapse of civilization to achieve it. Social ills of violence theft addiction and many others will diminish or disappear completely. This is the great reset. It is imminent. No one can stop it. It is the evolution of humanity. We must break away from commerce driven societies and focus on self growth and relationships and authentic ways of being. 2025.
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