Comment by virtuabhi
10 years ago
Its Communism/Socialism. Just to give two examples (from India) about how it ends up (1) Min. days employment guarantee to people in rural areas: Build a kutcha (made of mud, temporary, no asphalt) road. And build the road again after it rains. (2) Give everyone a job: Ten people operating a ferris wheel.
There is a reason why capitalism, competition, and corporations have managed to pull more people out of poverty than any other scheme. Of course a set of regulatory policies, socialist schemes, and worker protection laws are required to make sure that the focus is on the people.
(1) Min. days employment guarantee to people in rural areas: Build a kutcha (made of mud, temporary, no asphalt) road. And build the road again after it rains.
Sounds like a good thing in my book if the alternative would be higher unemployment and having no road at all.
And yes, in many cases, that would be the alternative. Even the US lacks infrastructure spending despite being one of the richest countries in the world.
Of course, in an ideal world, you'd build a proper solid road once, and afterwards pay people to do other kinds of work that are higher on the hierarchy of needs. But you can't just blindly criticize something for looking inefficient without properly considering the alternatives.
I don't think you'd find much purpose building the same road every week just because the state needs you to do something. It's not better than not working at all.
No, science has pulled people out poverty. Capitalism, like other forms of terrible economy systems happened to exist at the same time.
Economists have looked at this and concluded that the spread of market institutions like private property rights has accelerated poverty reduction, because of the effect it has on capital allocation and incentives.
Science isn't generated in a vacuum, and in any case, science alone doesn't generate goods/services. I strongly recommend you look at the evidence presented on the causes of global poverty reduction:
https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-bill...
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-glo...
Engineering produces solutions to the problem the economy presents it. Its only going to solve the problems of poor people to the degree they can afford to pay for the goods and services designed. This could be a benefit of BI, redirecting some engineering focus from earners to non earners, who tend to live more economically sustainable lives by necessity.
5 replies →
For that to be true all the socialist or communist states that have failed, or generally to live up to expectations, would have to be devoid of science. Which I'd posit isn't the case.
What I find best about these discussions is that when socialist or communist states fail, it's because of socialism or communism. When capitalist states fail, it's because of something else.
1 reply →
Socialism is when workers own their means of production. What you described isn't socialism nor communism.
"workers owning the means of production" is neither necessary nor sufficient for socialism.
The only people who advance this peculiar definition are members of the American left, presumably as a way to define themselves out of being "socialist"!
French Wikipedia has a better definition: the elimination of inequality and social classes.
> The word "socialism" covers a very diverse set of currents of thought and political movements, whose common purpose is to seek social and economic justice. The original goal of socialism is to achieve the social equality, or at least a reduction of inequalities and, particularly for Marxists, to establish a society without social classes.
I guess you could say "socialism" is a label and not a description.
It's unclear where you got the impression that collective ownership of the means of production is a definition of socialism invented by the American Left. The idea originates with Marx and Engels, the latter elaborating that it is both necessary and sufficient for the elimination of social classes:
"...said Marx, what we observe historically is that only one class of persons has always owned or monopolized the means of production throughout history. This condition of ownership over the means of production is the single most fundamental fact of the materialistic theory of history since it is this that leads to the division of society into economic classes." [Morrison, Marx, Durkheim, Weber: Formations of Modern Social Thought, p. 44, paraphrasing Marx, The Germany Ideology, pp. 8-13.]
"...it was seen that all past history, with the exception of its primitive stages, was the history of class struggles; that these social classes warring with each other are always the products of the relations of production and exchange -- in a word, of the economic relations of their epoch; that therefore the economic structure of society always forms the real basis, from which, in the last analysis, the whole superstructure of legal and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period is to be explained." [Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, p. 72.]
"The proletariat seizes state power and to begin with transforms the means of production into state property. But it thus puts an end to itself as proletariat, it thus puts an end to all class differences and class antagonisms and thus also to the state as state." [Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, p. 93.]
tl;dr--In the analysis of Marx and Engels, ownership of the means of production is what divides economic classes; economic relations are the basis upon which are founded all social and political relations in society; in the struggle between those who own the means of production and those who do not, it is by the proletariat seizing the means of production that class differences are eliminated in society.
> French Wikipedia has a better definition: the elimination of inequality and social classes.
So "ownership of means of production" is simply the next step, an answer to an inevitable question that would arise from French Wikipedia's definition.