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multifoliaterose comments on (One reason) why capitalism is much maligned - Less Wrong
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Yes, I agree, there's always economic inequality, what I was trying to say was something like "without capitalism, we wouldn't be living in a world where some people make 10 million times as much money as other people." (Maybe I should edit my post accordingly?)
Thanks, I'll check it out.
Yes. But there's also another reason for this that you don't touch on: Large scale inequality requires large scale success. If the only thing to go around is a 1000 chickens, then no one is ever going to have millions more of anything than anyone else does. You can only have things where people have such stark contrasts in wealth and resources when large quantities of wealth exist.
Or large number of people to steal from. This argument doesn't quite work.
In order for that to occur one needs large numbers of people surviving. The current human population would not be remotely sustainable without capitalism. Even many very poor countries are only able to keep their near starving populations from completely dying out due to this.
What's your point? Your argument has a problem, not necessarily your conclusion. You argue that your conclusion is right, but I don't disagree, my comment was about the specific argument you used.
My point is that you can't have large numbers of people to steal from unless there's already a lot of wealth in the system, so your criticism of the argument doesn't work.
It's a coincidental and not obviously correct consideration. There could be enough people on whole Earth, however they live. There certainly can be many people living under non-capitalistic system (China at the appropriate epoch). If there weren't enough people, there could be if Earth was bigger.
That's a good point. I withdraw my argument.
If Earth was bigger, those additional people would be further away and thus unavailable to steal from.
I edited my post to add "severe" but feel that there's no need to add a qualifier about how large scale inequality requires large scale success. It seems fairly likely that large scale success by 2010 AD would not be have been possible if the governments had intervened in economic affairs to a much greater degree than they did.
There is some evidence (p25) that economic inequality isn't correlated with economic system; specifically, that the share of income going to the poorest 10% is uncorrelated with economic freedom. As Friedman put it, the pay multiple between boss and worker in the USA and USSR were the same; the difference was that the American boss could only fire you, whereas under communism, you could be shot.
Secondly, comparing the wealth of Americans with the residents of chad is a bit tangential, unless all live under one economic system. If Chat doesn't operate in the same system as America, the same comparison could simply be evidence for the superiority of the American system. The inequality within America is a more relevant piece of information here.