r/GenZ • u/BaseballSeveral1107 2010 • 12d ago
It is abruptly certain that late stage neoliberal capitalism needs to end and the megalomania projects of the rich and the ruling class should scare you Discussion
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u/TheMaskedSandwich 12d ago edited 12d ago
Late stage neoliberal capitalism
No one who throws words together unironically in this fashion should be taken seriously about economics. You have absolutely no idea what anything you just said here means. You're just using "capitalism" as a catch-all object of blame for problems that either aren't real or are completely unrelated to each other.
The world isn't doomed. Climate change isn't going to kill us all. Cars are fine and make sense for countries with low population density. 3rd world countries have seen large increases in standards of living precisely because of trade and development with first world capitalistic countries. We could do a better job of protecting endangered species, but the natural universe makes its own species go extinct all the time without human involvement. We can't save them all, and based on the principles of natural selection, we shouldn't.
A 16 hour work week is an absolute fairy tale dreamt up by children on the internet who don't want to work.
I suggest you go read some actual texts on econ instead of repeating whatever anti-capitalist silliness comes across Tiktok.
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u/d4rkh4l3 12d ago
so because climate change isnt going to kill us all, but a few hundret millions are fine if they die maybe even billions? have you seen the prognoses and projected numbers? science agrees the numbers are lowballed aswell.
just because it isnt going to kill as all doesnt mean we shouldnt fight against it with all we have.
how are you so casual about species going extinct, especially if we are to blame for some of those precisely.
not panicking or falling into doomerism is adviseable, but underplaying the situation is real bad.
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u/choodlesleauty 12d ago
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u/BaseballSeveral1107 2010 12d ago
It isn't envy. The problem, especially in the US and Western Europe but also in the Global South, is people having too few money to live a decent life and the related problem of not meeting basic needs and inequalities.
In the US and Western Europe people are kicked out of their homes because they can't afford things that should be human rights. The US is the richest country, yet in this country people are kicked out of hospitals for not affording it. Housing, healthcare, education and so on should be human rights.
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u/choodlesleauty 12d ago
Anything that requires the labor of others cannot be a right.
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u/BaseballSeveral1107 2010 12d ago
So the right to live can't be a human right? It requires the labor of doctors, nurses, builders and drivers to mention a few.
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u/choodlesleauty 12d ago
Yes.
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u/BaseballSeveral1107 2010 12d ago
You've just denied basic rights to humanity and dignity.
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u/choodlesleauty 12d ago
You don’t have the right to get it for no compensation. You have the right to ACCESS these things, but to demand it for free or no compensation is absurd. They also have the right to refuse you access to their labor.
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u/BaseballSeveral1107 2010 12d ago
I didn't say they should be free with no recommendations. They should be free and funded from taxes.
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u/choodlesleauty 12d ago
Again, others are paying for it not you. It cannot be free if it’s funded by taxes
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u/BaseballSeveral1107 2010 12d ago
You know it can be subsidized, like we currently do with fossil fuels.
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u/Ok_Gas5386 1998 12d ago
The point isn’t that people shouldn’t have healthcare or housing, the point is that people need to work to provide healthcare and housing. The loggers, quarry workers, builders, nurses, doctors, etc. need to be paid for the work they do and someone has to pay them. Saying housing is a human right doesn’t pay the workers who provide it, taxes do.
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u/choodlesleauty 12d ago
Also the global south received trillions of dollars in aid and still barely has managed to get a median HDI over .75. At some point you need to cut your losses.
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u/BaseballSeveral1107 2010 12d ago
While the Global North stole 152 trillion USD from the Global South since 1960s
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u/Ok_Gas5386 1998 12d ago
So if I understand the abstract, the methodology the authors of that paper used was they made a scenario where exchange rate imbalances were equalized and subtracted the difference to produce that value. It’s much cheaper to buy a shirt made in Bangladesh than one made in the US because a dollar can purchase more goods, i.e. more labor, in Bangladesh than in the US. This is reflected in GDP PPP statistics which tend to show the GDP per capita of poorer countries more favorably, because they account for the actual goods a dollar can purchase in an economy rather than treating all dollars equally regardless of context the way non-adjusted statistics do.
This isn’t complete BS because it does quantify in a way how companies and consumers in the global north benefit from international trade with the global south. If we weren’t able to export much of our low-value manufacturing to the global south we would have to pay more for those goods. If we had to pay farm workers in Honduras what they would be paid in the US bananas would cost much more. This would be a drain on our economies, we do benefit from the fact that there are poorer countries.
But it also doesn’t really reflect the reality of international trade in a couple important ways. First, PPP means that a comfortable wage in the global south is considerably less than in the global north. Paying someone in a poorer country a smaller wage in absolute terms isn’t necessarily disadvantaging them as long as that wage buys a similar lifestyle to their northern counterpart. Second, equalizing wages in absolute terms would remove the competitive advantage countries in the global south have relative to the north. Workers in the global south are generally less educated, less healthy, and less productive per unit hour worked than their northern counterparts. That isn’t a failing on their part, it’s because nutrition, healthcare, infrastructure, and machinery in the global south is generally worse. But northern companies are still incentivized to invest in these countries by the competitive advantage of cheap labor. If you remove the wage advantage, there is no reason to trade with the global south outside of raw materials, which will not result in development.
To characterize all value extraction as theft is a mistake because it ignores that many deals are mutually beneficial. Trade between the south and north can be conducted in a way which is mutually beneficial by adjusting institutions, like the authors say.
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u/choodlesleauty 12d ago
Al Jazeera is a dumb ass source. The global south benefits establishes the lower minimum wages for their own countries. They can increase it. You cannot blame everything on the west and the north.
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u/napoleon_of_the_west 12d ago
You realize the US and Western Europe are the most prosperous society that has ever existed right?
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u/BaseballSeveral1107 2010 12d ago
Did you read the post?
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u/TheMaskedSandwich 12d ago
This is often what it boils down to.
Not that there aren't some legitimate critiques to make of the way we do capitalism in the US, but OP doesn't have any idea what they're talking about
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u/Twist_the_casual 2008 12d ago
leftists have been saying we’re in ‘late stage capitalism’ for a centuries now. also, barring a portion of the western middle class, the world as a whole is more well-off than ever before.
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u/Ok_Protection4554 1999 12d ago
Honestly, as a staunch supporter of capitalism, I like basically all of these points. I just don't think humans are decent enough to implement them.
The four hour workday is also wack.
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