Cornell men's assistant basketball coaches named

[Rosey]

Furthermore, one would hope your premise, about capitalism being responsible for human advances over the past few centuries, would always be open to examination and revision.

Absolutely. I think you're reading too much into a rejoinder. The best way to interpret my statement is more simply, "You (meaning Al) are likely to have a problem with any source I am able to cite expressing in any way the viewpoint that capitalism might be a tremendous force for the improvement of living standards over time." Which is probably overstating things, but given how he parachutes in to lob a few bombs at people he doesn't like and then disappears, I've no actual evidence to the contrary.

[Ken711]

Didn't think there would be this much interest about Cornell BB assistant coaches. :-D

[Towerroad]

"although one might want to consider if industrialization under a different set of social relations might have been similar albeit perhaps a bit slower."

The alternative systems that have been tried socialism, national socialism, communism, imperialism, all produced positive results at a slower pace but also produced far far greater negative results.

Free market capitalism requires markets, markets in return require well established systems of property rights and the ability to enforce trading rules. That system of rights and rules happens in a social context driven by the norms of the particular society they exist in. For most of human history the owning and trading of human beings was considered perfectly normal (still is in some cultures). Capitalism was not responsible for slavery, the social norms were responsible for it. Capitalism and markets just provided a mechanism for trading. (I am not defending slavery just dealing with facts). Even after the US made it illegal to import slaves slavery and slave trading went on because it was an accepted social practice.

[Swampy]

The alternative systems that have been tried socialism, national socialism, communism, imperialism, all produced positive results at a slower pace but also produced far far greater negative results.
[/quote

I don't believe this is entirely accurate. IIRC, both the Soviet Union & China industrialized at a rate faster than most capitalist countries. We can't always use England as the benchmark, since it was perhaps the most rapidly industrialized capitalist country in the world. I'm not talking about the human cost of industrialization, which high in all three instances. But, for example, Germany, France, and Italy industrialized at a much slower pace than China and Russia, and if we start to consider other capitalist countries like Guatemala, there's absolutely not comparison.

Then you have a place like Cuba, which has not industrialized so successfully (albeit more so than Haiti or Jamaica), but its health care and education systems are probably the best in Latin America. There's more than one way to measure social progress. It's not all about industrialization and producing commodities.

Free market capitalism requires markets, markets in return require well established systems of property rights and the ability to enforce trading rules.

Well again, historically, even in England, markets and capitalism developed unevenly. And then there's the issue of exactly what we mean by "markets." It's not as if King George abolished all the crown's rules, and poof! there were markets, so now there could be Manchester. Enclosures, for example, were neither markets in the sense we usually mean, nor industrialism. But they were absolutely central to the formation of labor markets in England. BTW, TANST as "free market capitalism." Certainly not if you introduce norms into the picture, as you've already done.

Capitalism was not responsible for slavery, the social norms were responsible for it.
[/quote

I'm not sure why you're bringing this up. Just to be clear, when I wrote about Atlantic capitalism and slavery, I was putting the causality the opposite way. The authors I was referring to maintain that without slavery, there would have been no capitalism, or at least a very different one than what developed around the Atlantic. From this view, capitalism was literally built on the backs of slaves. Think King Cotton and Manchester.

Capitalism and markets just provided a mechanism for trading. (I am not defending slavery just dealing with facts).

Well your facts are very incomplete. How can you leave wage labor out of any definition of capitalism? And when you introduce wage labor, don't you also introduce certain social classes?

Even after the US made it illegal to import slaves slavery and slave trading went on because it was an accepted social practice.

I don't disagree vehemently with this, but I do think it's a gross over-simplification. It's sort of like saying heroin trafficking happens today because its an accepted social practice. Racism, the antebellum Southern economy (and its complementary outposts in New York, Newport, London, and Manchester) where much more complicated (and materially connected) than simply by what was considered good manners. People's livelihoods depended on the institution. Of course they had a way to justify it, or they naturalized and thought it was just part of the order of things, just as today coal miners think burning coal is perfectly natural and predatory lenders justify predatory lending.

[Towerroad]

" both the Soviet Union & China industrialized at a rate faster than most capitalist countries" - This is not really a valid comparison. It is always faster to play "catch up" than it is to do something new. Now, if you were going to compare the capacity to slaughter their own people then the communists are in a league of their own. Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, and the rest even pass the Nazi's in their ability to torture and kill.

I am not sure that Cuba's health care and education system is better than Chile's which is the only Latin American country in the OECD (ie they are a first world country). Chile adopted free market/capitalist principles and prospered.

As for capitalism being built on the backs of slaves, there may be an element of truth in that but so were a lot of other systems built on the backs of slaves. The slave trade existed millenia before modern capitalism. Capitalism in the US (as opposed to industrialization) can be traced to the rail roads, the first enterprises that required more capital than could be raised by a simple partnership. That was not built on the back of slaves. (The backs of poor day laborers is a different thing).

If you want to lead the world in prosperity, free market capitalism is the horse you want to ride.

[Scersk '97]

[Railroads were] not built on the back of slaves.

Buzz!

[Towerroad]

Well, I guess you have exposed my North Eastern elitist bias. That statement was based in my reading "The First Tycoon" by T J Stiles, the biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt (an excellent biography by the way). Vanderbilt, at least in the US, was the pioneer in developing modern corporate capitalism, selling stock in a corporation to raise sufficient capital for projects (eg the NY Central Rail Network) that were too large to be funded by traditional partnership arrangements. These Northeastern/Midwestern rail networks were not built by slaves.

It is interesting to compare the density of rail networks in the North and South at the time of the Civil War.

http://railroads.unl.edu/maps/map1lg.jpg

This is the functional equivalent of looking at the Korean Peninsula from space at night and a comparison of 2 economic systems:

http://www.gamefishin.com/threads/map-of-korea-at-night.39167/

[Swampy]

" both the Soviet Union & China industrialized at a rate faster than most capitalist countries" - This is not really a valid comparison. It is always faster to play "catch up" than it is to do something new.

OK, then. Compare China with India before China adopted its neoliberal reforms. Or, during 1920-1940 compare the Soviet Union with China or Poland or during 1950-1975 compare the Soviet Union with any Latin American country. Or, for that matter, compare Japan or Korea between 1960 through 1990 with just about any country that was similar at the start of the period. Neither Japan nor Korea employed "free market capitalism." In both cases, their development was both heavily directed by the state.

Now, if you were going to compare the capacity to slaughter their own people then the communists are in a league of their own. Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, and the rest even pass the Nazi's in their ability to torture and kill.

That's why I put in a caveat about the human cost. But even so, I'm not certain how much of this was a necessary part of the economic development strategy versus political oppression or plain vicious pig-headedness by Stalin or Mao. I'm just trying to say what's so, not to be an apologist for atrocities.
 

I am not sure that Cuba's health care and education system is better than Chile's which is the only Latin American country in the OECD (ie they are a first world country). Chile adopted free market/capitalist principles and prospered.

First, some more history. Cuban Revolution was in 1959. Chile was ruled by the conservatives from 1958 to 1964. Then by the Christian Democrats (CD), until 1970. Then Allende until the coup in 1973. Until then, Allende was the first socialist president of Chile. Then after the U.S.destabilized the economy, Pinochet led the coup on September 11, 1973 ("The Other 9/11" ). The Chicago Boys, trained under Milton Friedman, devised Pinochet's economic policy, which led to an economic collapse in 1982. This in turn fueled the opposition, eventually leading to elections in 1988 and the end of the military dictatorship. The CD returned to power from 1990-2000 (actually a coalition -- all Chilean presidential elections involve coalitions). Then the Socialists returned to power under Lagos, and he was followed by another socialist, Bachelet, until 2000. The first rightist since Pinochet, Piñera, was president until 2014, after which Bachelet was reelected.

Meanwhile, bear in mind that with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, Cuba went through a "Special Period" of extreme economic hardship. It wasn't until around 2000 that the Cuban economy adjusted to this shock even remotely near today's normalcy.

Althogh analogies are hazardous, the CD's politics is sort of like the U.S. Democratic Party, and the Socialists (and their coalition) starts with politics like those left-wing parties in Europe (democratic socialists) and move to the left from there, including Greens, etc.

So bear this in mind when you view the following life-expectancy data. I don't know how to do tables in this forum, so I'll just give a series of triples like this: (year, Cuba's international rank, Chile's international rank). Here they are: (1960, 43, 69), (1970, 27, 68) -- Hoo Ha!, (1980, 15, 51) -- double Hoo Ha!, (1990, 27, 34), (2000, 30, 27), (2010, 35, 38), (2013, 39, 31). Source

I'll leave it to you to do morbidity. ::burnout::

But oh, BTW. Since you brought up Stalin and Mao's murders, for consistency wouldn't you also need to mention Pinochet's?

As for capitalism being built on the backs of slaves, there may be an element of truth in that but so were a lot of other systems built on the backs of slaves. The slave trade existed millenia before modern capitalism. Capitalism in the US (as opposed to industrialization) can be traced to the rail roads, the first enterprises that required more capital than could be raised by a simple partnership. That was not built on the back of slaves. (The backs of poor day laborers is a different thing).

If you want to lead the world in prosperity, free market capitalism is the horse you want to ride.

Again, reread your history books. Rome did have slaves, but it got them through conquest. IIRC, something like 50,000 slaves captured in the Judea war died building the Coliseum. Slave TRADE, did exist but was relatively minor until early modern times, and I don't think anything in history rivaled the scale of the Atlantic slave trade. (I may be wrong about this. The Mongol Empire certainly had slaves, but I'm guessing that was through conquest more than trade.)

I don't see how your map refutes my points. Southern slavery was primarily agrarian, and the Southern elites had little use for rail lines, except to ports where cotton and tobacco could be shipped. Northern capitalists, OTOH, used rail for shipping their manufactured goods. But this doesn't mean the textiles they shipped didn't directly depend on slave labor (think of all the New England mill towns), or that the money Northern bankers loaned to Southern plantations didn't get repaid with interest from slaves. Or that the money Northern capitalists accumulated by trading slaves did not go into other investments. Brown University was funded by money from the slave trade.

[Towerroad]

"But oh, BTW. Since you brought up Stalin and Mao's murders, for consistency wouldn't you also need to mention Pinochet's? "

As bloody as Pinochet was, he was a minor league player when compared to Stalin & Mao (or Pol Pot or the various Kim's). The death toll under Pinochet was on the order of 10,000. Stalin racked up between 7,000,000 and 20,000,000 (not counting WWII) and Mao (generally considered the Babe Ruth of murder) killed somewhere between 18,000,000 and 70,000,000 (nobody really knows, they are all dead).

You can't complain about the real problems that result from Capitalism, and then even remotely suggest that Communism produces better results.

"The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of one million is a statistic." - Stalin

[Swampy]

While I agree with your basic point about scale, one has to take the overall size of the population into account. Chile's population in 1973 was about 10 million, whereas China's in, say, 1955 was about 60 times that. So scaling up Pinocet's estimated murders would be 600,000 in a country China's size. Not on the scale you cite for Mao, but still an atrocity.

Also, as you rightly point out, nobody really knows how many were murdered in these countries. But Russia and China both had revolutions and civil wars, which themselves account for many dead. Moreover, once the question of power was settled, the new regimes had to enforce their power while building a repressive state apparatus from scratch. In Chile's case, one branch of the government -- the one most capable of quickly morphing into a repressive apparatus -- overthrew the other branches (and had clandestine economic and military support from the US). So Pinochet consolidated his power in a few weeks rather than years or decades. Had Chile entered into prolonged civil war after the coup, as many had predicted, Augusto's scorecard would have been much higher.

To be consistent, you would have to apply your earlier point about norms. Here history is unkind to your thesis. Both Russia and China had long histories of autocratic, repressive governments. With regard to ruthless oppression Stalin and Mao did not fundamentally break with what the tsars, emperors, or Kuomintang had previously done. But in 1973 Chile was the longest-standing democracy in Latin America. So, if your thesis about norms have merit, one would suppose norms constrained Pinchet's regime, both in the sense that its members had internalized certain norms about murder and in the sense that even the regime's strongest supporters would be appalled by murder on a scale similar to Russia and China. It is relevant that Chile's most right-wing party at the time, Patria y Libertad, had "liberty" in its name.

Your statement about "Communism" is a red herring. First, until just now, I've never used the word in our debate. I think it's a misnomer when applied to the 20th century regimes that most often wore the name. Second, nobody has presented any argument that one kind of system NECESSARILY breeds these kinds of atrocities, and the fact that we so readily attach the names of individuals to them is testimony that the sources of the atrocities were ruthless dictators rather than the social system itself. Third, my points have never been to champion the superiority of the Soviet or Chinese systems. In fact, my point has never been to champion any system's blanket superiority. Instead, my point has been to criticize the blanket celebration of capitalism, especially when it is based on myth and quasi-religious faith.

[ugarte]

The only point I would like to add here is please shut up everybody.

[KeithK]

The only point I would like to add here is please shut up everybody.

It's the offseason, there's no news about bball coaches. Let 'em talk.

[ugarte]

The only point I would like to add here is please shut up everybody.

It's the offseason, there's no news about bball coaches. Let 'em talk.

I wasn't limiting myself to eLynah.

[Scersk '97]

Your statement about "Communism" is a red herring.

[Swampy]

Your statement about "Communism" is a red herring.

+1