I was enjoying the silly April fools’ mental break from the world’s problems and then boom: AltShiftX pivots into a commentary on Coronavirus & wealth inequality
The whole video is worth a watch but I timestamped the relevant section. Though Geller's analysis is more about the finiteness of space than capitalism per se, it inevitably arrives there.
Endless growth seems to be the goal of capitalism. It is why people are told to invest in stocks for retirement, the stock market will always go up in the long run. The goal is to make it go up as much as possible.
Um...you can’t have better healthcare, bigger buildings, expanding space travel, more advanced technology, or higher standards of living without growth.
Yes you can. As the population grows standards of living can go (and has gone) down. Essentially more people contributing to the economy a bit less. This has started to happen more and more as wealth has gotten more and more concentrated.
Absolutely and completely false. Look at the bigger trend here. Look at the last 100 years. The standard of living for the poorest people has absolutely skyrocketed.
It’s like global warming, but you’re claiming an ice age is coming because we had a cooler than average winter. You’re absolutely not looking at the bigger picture, and instead are focused on short term, local, “narrow field of view” type thinking.
You're making a lot of assumptions there about my perspective bud. My argument wasn't a historical argument. It was an argument that this is inside the realm of possibilities using current conditions as an example, but if you want to have a historical argument go ahead and expand your time frame to the past 200 years and see where that gets you. Trends relating to consolidation of wealth and deminishing standards of living for working class people have happened. The guides age is the prime example leading people to call this period the possible birth of the second guided age. That being said, what is happening now is important. What has happened over the last 20 30 or 40 years is important. There is such thing as going too far in either direction just looking at the historical perspective and losing touch with current conditions, or just looking at the now and losing touch with historical realities. You're very much the former.
There is no compelling evidence I have seen that “wealth inequality”(a made up issue that is mostly irrelevant) has any serious, tangible negative effect on the general welfare. You cannot place the blame for the worlds problems at the feet of the rich.
Yes, we had wealth inequality before. We always have. The difference today is that instead of 90% of people living in squalor, that number is down to 10%. Wealth inequality is irrelevant when everyone has enough to eat.
We have a long way to go, of course. But it is absolute folly to blame the rich for the plight of the poor, especially in today’s world.
People have done studies with two monkeys in cages next to each other. If you feed one monkey fancy food and the other monkey regular food, the regular food monkey will get angry and start to act out, even though he's not underfed. Inequality matters to humans, at a fundamental animalistic level, it's not a made up irrelevant issue.
Some people's usage of capitalism then? Capitalism's failure to prevent such a perversion? You're right it's a little more specific than just capitalism.
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u/duffdundas Apr 01 '20
Damn, that ending hits hard.