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Vaniver comments on Smart, (young), ambitious and clueless -- what to do to maximize goodness? - Less Wrong
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I am presuming that the individual in question "wants" to make the world a better place in that they get warm fuzzies if their neighbors think better of them and get offended when you ask them about trade-offs- because they're really not willing to trade off all that much. I'm also comparing capitalist systems to non-capitalist systems, where interactions between people are much more zero-sum (but not entirely so). Making almost all interactions positive-sum does an amazing amount to improve the world and works with average people.
[edit] Now, you could argue that those gains already exist (in the developed world) and that if they want to make the world a better place than it is now, they can't just institute capitalism again. I would argue in turn that the developed world has strayed pretty far from capitalism and a lot could be done to bring it back, and that they also have the option of moving to the developing world and making it more capitalist.
In what respects would you say that the developed world has strayed from capitalism that it suffers for?
I'm extremely skeptical of the idea that "almost all" interactions in capitalist systems tend to be positive sum. Of course, my area of study (environmental science) is one where examples of negative sum interactions crop up on a continual basis, so I may be biased by exposure, but I think economists tend to be more optimistic about the positive influence of free markets than evidence warrants.
China should be the best example of what even moderate levels of capitalism can do.
The Communist bloc aren't know for their environmentally-friendly outcomes or even policies.
They're not, but I never said that Communism does well, only that Capitalism doesn't do as well as it's given credit for.
If China is moderate capitalism, one shudders how would extreme one looks like...
Well, moderate as in they don't have rule of law etc. What I meant to say was that even this level of capitalism has worked wonders in dragging hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Contrary to decades of Western foreign aid.