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capitalism, everybody
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this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
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And you don't see the problem with that?
Neither had to eat the shit.
GDP is just a statistic, economies of all types have it and that won't change unless people all together stop interacting with each other. It's flaw is that it's often the only measure of stength for a country's economy, but that's not a problem with capitalism. Nicola Sturgeon has a wholeass TED talk on this and why she had Scotland use other ways to measure their economic strength.
If anything, there's a lot more info that should be captured by GDP like home chores, growing your own food, maintenance you do yourself, etc. This is one of the benefits of UBI.
There's a lot of unexpressed demand due to people just being too poor to afford things. Imagine everyone gets a steady check, and this distributes income more equally. It can make society more efficient.
Imagine a food delivery person who can pick up and drop off food more efficiently than each customer picking up the food themselves. If customers have less money, they will just use their own cars to pickup the food. If they have a few extra bucks, they will just pay for delivery. Delivery is better for the environment and uses fewer people to do the same work. Overall, it's cheaper.
Grocery stores all used to deliver your groceries and had "credit" before credit cards were invented. It was more efficient to just send the delivery boy to your house and settle the bill at the end of the week/month.
That's an excellent point. Another argument in my arsenal in favor of UBI! Thank you.
As for grocery on credit, it wasn't that long ago lol. There was a local grocer that did that in my town up until the 70s iirc. Of course they were run out of business by a chain who now have a local monopoly. Fuck you Safeway/Albertsons. Reminder to everyone that there's a possible merger with them and Kroger's that would make grocers in the US a big fucking joke.
and this is basically what a planned economy is, instead of letting the market stumble around and hoping to god the solutions people arrive at are good, we just sit down and think through how we want things to be done and then organize people to implement it.
Yes, planning is a tool governments can use to influence the economy. Similarly, markets and monetary policies are tools as well. The trick is using the right tool for the right job, not creating religions out of hammers or chainsaws.
You forgot the part where everyone starves to death under the planned economy.
Planned economies don't necessarily kill everyone one, but they are bad because they disguise the price signals even more. Meaning that, GDP is bad because it only includes certain things and excludes others ( household labor). Planned economies have no price signals, so you don't know if what you're doing works.
Planned economies only measure quantities of goods, not quality. So you will see statistics like tons of wheat or steel produced. What quality wheat? What quality steel? That's what prices tell you.
This is just asserting things as fact with no reasoning behind it, why would you need prices to determine if things are working? Do you use prices to determine if your food tastes good?
You're not going to read this, but I might as well explain it.
You are asking me to give a reason for the sky being blue, without looking outside. Just think about it for a minute. In general, higher quality things are more expensive. This isn't about "taste" but higher quality products that the average buyer would agree on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_signal
What you think tastes good doesn't matter. Imagine there's a shortage of something (oranges for example) due to a poor crop harvest. The price of oranges will rise when the market learns this information. This helps compensate farmers who lost part of their crop and signals to the average consumer that they should buy fewer oranges.
In a normal competitive market, these prices decrease when supply increases to normal. The price signal tells the consumer they can buy more oranges again without them needing to consult a crop report.
It also tells the producers and the government what people think about purchasing that product. If they like it, they pay for it. These signals can be distorted by lack of competition or market access issues, but are better than asking everyone "does the food taste good?"
As opposed to all the people starving now under capitalism.
Yes, exactly. No good systems available for large-scale economies, planned is just the worst one.
[citation needed]
Whether they like it or not.
That's the thing about capitalism. It always claims to be voluntary. You don't "have" to work at starvation wages. You don't "have" to take whatever work you're given. You don't "have" to endure abuse from your bosses.
And your bosses don't have to pay you, and your landlord doesn't have to rent to you, and the grocery store doesn't have to feed you, and the police don't have to protect you. So you either work "voluntarily" under whatever conditions "the market" sets, and earn enough money to afford food and housing and security, or you starve and die.
But the point of the joke is the bullshit metrics capitalism invents to pretend capitalist nations are prosperous, not all the other ways capitalism abuses people, society, and common sense.
But MY POINT is that GDP, as a stat, is useful in many contexts and isn't just a propaganda piece just because it's what capitalists focus on. It's also been much easier to gather accurately compared to other stats.
We live in the 21st century. We have no reason to solely rely on GDP for developed nations because we have the ability to accurately gather the data for many different metrics. This doesn't mean we throw the baby out with the bathwater and never touch GDP
If you think there's a problem with that, you don't understand what GDP measures and what it is used for.