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eli_sennesh comments on Taking Effective Altruism Seriously - Less Wrong Discussion
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If by that you mean, "capitalism does not generate utility for any particular human individuals" and so on, yes.
Does that not create a bit of a problem, then, given that capitalism is one of the best things that humanity came up with during the last few centuries?
I don't take that as given, particularly since taking such a statement as given tends to involve packing all the nice things about modernity into the word "capitalism" while simultaneously shoving all the nasty consequences of capitalism into some other word.
I'll agree with that, if you agree it's also one of the worst.
I think the claim is that capitalism increases (something like) total wealth but this does not necessarily entail increasing the wealth of each personal individually. In fact, most people could see their wealth decrease under capitalism, and some such as Piketty would (I think) say that this is the limit we are heading towards.
While I agree that capitalism is responsible for quite a few good things, at the end of the day it's just an (extremely stable) economic system, and figuring out realistic ways to deal with some of its shortcomings seems like an incredibly important problem, though not one I know how to solve.
Perhaps, but it does increase the wealth of nearly each person individually. The average American today, heck even the bottom 1% American today is wealthier then a rich ring ~200 years ago.
Heh. It's just the system which achieved this :-)
The rich getting ever riches doesn't sound stable to me, since the poor periodically get fed up and hang the rich. Capitalism+redistribution could be stabler though.