Comment by kodemager
3 years ago
I think it’s hard to look at what capitalism has become today and say much positive about it.
I say this as someone who works in investment finance where we sell semi-rich semi-professional investors the opportunity to become richer by building solar and wind power plants, and selling them when they are fully operational. Which is about as positive as it gets in capitalism in my experience, considering we’re actually helping the world move in the right direction as far as climate change goes.
It is, however, still contributing to the inequality in the world. I had a lot of experience from the Danish public sector digitalisation before joining my current company, and I have a second job as an external examiner for CS students, so it is fair to say that I’m likely in the top 10% of paid developers in my region. If you invest with us, you can make 10 million Danish kroner into 20 million Danish kroner in 5-10 years, and while you do so by fighting climate change, I make around 1 million Danish kroner in savings over 10 years, as one of the better paid non top-level managers in my country.
As you’ve probably guessed I’m Danish, and we’re probably famous for our take on society in that all our political parties are basically a different colour of social democrats, and we have been like this since what is essentially the dawn of modern Denmark, so equality is a big part of our society, as in, if a private company builds an apartment complex in the most attractive part of our city, they are required by law to make at least 10% of those apartment available for rent to the “common people” at the cities disposal. That’s how much we care about equality, and the best example of capitalism we have is making rich people much richer by basically doing nothing.
Another thing we are famous for is community ownerships. The best example is that we have two major supermarket chains, one is owned by investors the other is owned by the people who shop there. Guess which one has been driving positive change forward, repeatedly been reinvesting in its own business and it’s employees and under covid sent 100% of its profits on things like clothes on to small clothing stores that were closed due to lockdown?
Now I’ve ranted for a while, and it may sound like I’m getting somewhere, but I’m actually not. Because the issue with co-operative ownership is that it makes it very hard to start something new. The big co-operative ownership organisations we have typically came to be by a lot of smaller organisations joining together after they were established. The solar farms we build are a good example of this in play. We’re going to build a couple of thousand of them over the next five years and while non-profits movements have certainly helped made it a profitable area, no one outside of private investors are going to build even close to this amount. So how do you change the world without capitalism?
The answer is probably in taxing the rich, but good luck with that.
I'm a foreigner with a Danish job and I very much like the country. It's refreshingly different. Money is still very important but I think infinitely less so compared to the states; it isn't what motivates people.
It's also interesting to note that Denmark has negative interest rates and anyone with more than 100k DKK is really quite punished for keeping it in the bank. I'm glad that your company provides a vehicle for the upper middle classes to use their wealth well. What's it called? And what's the name of the two supermarkets you mentioned (is one of them Føtex?)
I’m not going to name my employer, but I agree that it’s an excellent vessel for the upper middle class to invest their money.
I wish more entrepreneurs saw the value in semi-professional and maybe even small time investors and green energy investment. Exactly because it gives people more opportunities when they rank up the 100k Danish kroner to reach the negative interest, and green energy is still in a place where everyone can have an impact and see nice returns.
- Could be https://www.obton.com/ he’s working for. - Coop, they have Fakta, Kvikly, Super Brugsen and a couple of others.
I think one should not forget that Denmark's society is mostly homogenous. When you have a vastly dominant, culturally homogenous group, it's relatively easy to trust and support one another.
In a highly diverse country like the US, where the average New Yorker or new immigrant will have a completely different culture and world view from the average Joe in Missouri, and that's just two examples out of many, it's very difficult to build a culture of mutual trust, especially in comparison to the level of support Scandinavian countries offer to their communities.
I hate hearing this argument. Simply because I'm living proof of the opposite: I'm not a native Swede, I immigrated here, I integrated into society by looking at its values, identifying with most of them and sharing those forward. I became a Swede and it has nothing to do with being born Nordic or into a homogeneous culture.
This hand-waving argument on why America is exceptional is really misplaced. America has issues because it has a big population and manages everything in terms of money. Money is the religion of the USA, it's the ideology of the country and when the only metric you use to gauge anything is on how much will be spent and how much return it will give in monetary terms, you end up with a deeply fractured web of perverse incentives and misplaced cooperation to juggle one metric: money.
America was built in a culture of mistrust, it came from inception and it never fought it. Distrust from centralised government, distrust in others (hence having guns, you don't trust you'll be protected from others so you need to take matters into your hands), distrust in commercial relationships, in personal relationships. It makes society feels fake and shallow, like everyone is just playing a part. There is just a lack of communal sense in everything regarding American culture, it's all about individualism and the self.
Sweden may be seen as a communal society but it's really not that simple, I like to say that Sweden is the most communal individualistic country I've been to, people still value self-reliance and individualism, while also keeping in mind a holistic view of society.
I wish Americans could see past this exceptionalism and move towards building something based on trust, it'd be a force to be reckoned with. Right now it's just a huge waste of bickering and pettiness all around, every single issue in America is amplified by this huge egoistic mindset.
You make some fair points about money and mistrust but the parent's argument is not unfair. You mention that you "became a Swede" by adopting Sweden's values. America doesn't have one unified set of values due to being so big. Sweden is smaller than Ohio by population. Ohioans generally share some values, but they are quite different than people in Massachusetts or Mississippi. America is closer to the EU's scale, and the EU has plenty of idealogical differences between member states. Do the Greeks trust that the Germans are looking out for their best interests?
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I realize this is just proving your point, but it also demontrates why the US doesn't really see the current culture as an issue:
GDP per capita:
USA: 63,543.58 USD
SWE: 51,925.71 USD
(for reference) UK: 40,284.64 USD
These are all for 2020.
The reason the US does nothing about climate change, privacy, inequality, etc. is lack of homogeneity? I'd like to see some evidence of the connection. Most of those policies are opposed by the same political grouping. The US has accomplished plenty of things in the past.
Homogeneity depends on the definition of the groups. Most people in the US speak English, have a smartphone, etc. The US has long unified behind ideas - democracy, liberty, civil rights, and opportunity for all, a more perfect union, but that same political grouping has significantly abandoned them (i.e., the 'for all' aspect, which is all that matters). When we look at 'ethnic' heterogeneity (often based on little but bias) the US has always been heterogeneous. For example, Italian and Polish, Protestant and Catholic, etc. used to be very separate groups. The definitions of the groups has always been flexible and convenient.
Finally, the parent argument implicitly accounts racism to the conditions, rather than to the people choosing it - a convenient cover for personal behavior. It also fits a popular trend saying that negative outcomes and human evil are inevitable. It's not inevitable at all; we certainly have good and evil in us, and we have the free will to choose which we do - an ancient belief of the Bible, the Enlightenment, etc. Racial division is a choice. There is nothing more inevitable about it than Protestants hating Catholics. Humans have done good things and bad things, and democracy - overwhelmingly the most successful form of government in history - has succeeded by depending on the good in people. You can do it right now.
Why would people look for arguments that success is impossible? We have accomplished incredible things and have much more to do.
I wasn't referring to climate change, etc. when I replied to the nice Danish fellow. I was mostly referring to his note regarding the sense of community and equality in Denmark.
My point is that cultural dissimilarity creates a lot of mistrust and frustration. If I don't have the same common goal as my neighbor, and we have a completely different style--our chances to be in conflict are a lot higher, and so my likeliness of wanting to help him out are much lower.
I'm from Israel, and even if you look just at the Jewish demography, the differences between the different groups, are huge -- even though we all speak Hebrew, part of the Jewish culture/religion in some way, etc. The life goals of a secular Jew in Tel-Aviv, could be almost the complete opposite of a religious Jew in Jerusalem -- you can imagine the conflict to be quite immense, and hence the sense of community greatly eliminated.
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>The reason the US does nothing about climate change, privacy, inequality, etc. is lack of homogeneity
I don't agree with the general point, but I do think the GOP funding class uses the US's heterogeneity as a wedge to distract from those issues (or anything else that would cost them money). See all of the culture wars.
What's the one big thing congress passed during the Trump years? The tax cut. That's not a mistake.
I used to think this, but I'm not sure the evidence actually supports it. The UK has similar levels of immigration and overseas-born citizens as Scandi countries, but nowhere near their levels of social cohesion/social democracy.
We were more similar < 1980, but I think the rhetoric from right wing corporate and billionaire-owned press, and now the internet, has eroded it to a large degree.
> According to 2021 figures from Statistics Denmark, 86% of Denmark's population of over 5,840,045 was of Danish descent, defined as having at least one parent who was born in Denmark and has Danish citizenship.
> The most recent Census in 2011 highlights that in England and Wales, 80 per cent of the population were white British > from 2001 to 2011, the percentage of the population of England and Wales that was White British decreased from 87.4% to 80.5%
And I imagine that white British population has gone down in the past 10 years.
Denmark is one of the most homogeneous country in Europe.
But to support your claim, Italy is even more homogeneous than Denmark, around ~91% of the population is "Italian" and yet we can't even agree that southerners and northerners are the same people.
I think that in Denmark a small population living in highly dense cities with high homogeneity helps.
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The UK is like Sweden, but Denmark (and Finland) are much more homogenous. And Sweden only retains social trust because it was still homogenous 20 years ago, most people don't realize they essentially live in Rio.
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Rather, the media monopolies prior to 1980 suppressed nationalistic viewpoints.
I am convinced that the way to change the world (not necessarily towards some altruistic nirvana but at least to avoid a dysfunctional, environmentally and socially disastrous dystopia) is by raising our education / communication game towards more honesty and transparency when discussing socioeconomic challenges and less obfuscation inane, monkey chest beating like conflicts.
Already any discussion that centers around "capitalism" is deeply problematic as it invariably takes enormously complex sets of laws, conventions and behavioral attitudes that varies materially (both historically and regionally) and forces it into a binary yes/no universe. You can't solve complex problems with random hammer blows on each others heads.
All of the constituent components of what we term "market democracy" must be examined not as what they say on the label, but what happens in practice. Just as a simple and single example: when politicians routinely enter revolving-door appointments to serve private interests how can we even pretend this is a feature of "capitalism".
The true underlying behavior is cooperating private gangs marauding the commons. It doesn't matter if it happens in ultra-capitalist US or "communist" China.
> So how do you change the world without capitalism? The answer is probably in taxing the rich, but good luck with that.
That would work for a year or two, until you had egalitarianized the money so everybody had the same amount. Then what? And what would be the effect of that?
Everyone wouldn’t have the same money. 80 years ago we taxes the rich around 80% on their over all income, then thatcher and regan paved the way to the world we have now, which is obviously having issues.
I may have come off overly negative toward capitalism because I posted early in the morning, but my general point was that it’s the only economic engine that works.
It sort of breaks down when it’s not regulated though, which is why I think we’re seeing so many issues tied to financial inequality in the world today.
I don’t think the solution is for everyone to have the exact same amount of money, but I struggle with how you can look at the current state of the world and think that it’s great. We need to help poor people get better opportunities, without ruining the systems we have for everyone else. I mean, history has shown us again and again what happens if we don’t.
>> So how do you change the world without capitalism? The answer is probably in taxing the rich, but good luck with that.
> That would work for a year or two, until you had egalitarianized the money so everybody had the same amount. Then what? And what would be the effect of that?
The only way to tax wealthy people is to remove all differences in wealth??
People who bash capitalism after the last century of expansion should just be considered negationists at this point.
Sure it is not perfect but it's infinitely better than any other economic model available.
That was sort of my point, but I may have drowned it in a little too much negativity.
I do however think we should work with capitalism as a model though. It’s quite obvious to me that it needs a strong political regulator to make sure it doesn’t run amok. I’m not against inequality for the sake of being against it, but I do recognise that too much inequality and too few opportunities for a lot of folks is potentially dangerous.
people who defend capitalism on the face of the last century's (and ongoing) environmental disaster should just be considered negationist at this point.
Sure is not all wrong but it's infinitely worse than any economic model that actually secures a sustainable future
Yes, good thing we had USSR and still have China that were (is) very environment-conscious!
So capitalism is infinitely worse than the one-child policy?
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> I say this as someone who works in investment finance where we sell semi-rich semi-professional investors the opportunity to become richer by building solar and wind power plants, and selling them when they are fully operational. Which is about as positive as it gets in capitalism in my experience, considering we’re actually helping the world move in the right direction as far as climate change goes.
Isn’t this also exactly what causes crony capitalism. How many of these semi-rich investors, have friends in politics making regulations that will benefit these.
The fact that this is a thing ensures that a percentage of our politicians pimping climate change are not doing so because they care about the environment but because they’re pimps exploiting those below them for their own profit.
Otherwise we’d welcome and fund even fossil fuel nuclear, and gas, technologies alongside the green technologies. The modern car IC engine, is proof that there are even gains to be made while still not being fully green.
But they need to make it super scary, so they can profit more. One day I hope we can see all the money they made in roundabout ways from these green companies (and big pharmaceutical with covid by the way)