The future of the environment, capitalism & human rights

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Re: The future of the environment, capitalism & human rights

Post by Woodchopper » Sun Nov 24, 2019 11:08 am

First, to stay on topic, it looks like higher levels of wealth do correlate with doing less unpaid domestic labour. However, the effect over time since 1975 is much less than the overall level of economic growth. People in 2000 were a lot richer than in 1975, but they didn't do a lot less unpaid domestic labour.

Second, men don't pull their weight around the house.

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Re: The future of the environment, capitalism & human rights

Post by discovolante » Sun Nov 24, 2019 12:16 pm

bolo wrote:
Sat Nov 23, 2019 10:44 pm
discovolante wrote:
Sat Nov 23, 2019 10:17 pm
we're doubling the price of your washing machine!
I don't really believe this bit, unless you're not adjusting washing machine prices for overall inflation.

Here, for example, is a 1962 washing machine for $184.95, which is the equivalent of more than $1500 in today's money. As it happens, my washing machine just broke, and I'll be having a new one delivered on Monday for about half that. Not to mention it will be a lot more energy and water efficient than the 1962 one, with more settings and features.
Damn you got me. Well in terms of appliances I guess they got cheaper because we found ways to exploit workers even more cheaply.

I think woodchoppers point about democracy sticks. Bit of a mammoth task though.
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Re: The future of the environment, capitalism & human rights

Post by Woodchopper » Sun Nov 24, 2019 12:55 pm

discovolante wrote:
Sun Nov 24, 2019 12:16 pm
Damn you got me. Well in terms of appliances I guess they got cheaper because we found ways to exploit workers even more cheaply.
Technology also played a part in decreasing costs of production. Outsourcing to areas with lower wages is in there as well.

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Re: The future of the environment, capitalism & human rights

Post by username » Sun Nov 24, 2019 1:39 pm

The data appear to have wide margins depending on where you look; this (ugh) thing in the (ugh) Daily Fail suggests more than half;

This Pew thing seems to say around half.

I haven't found the n power study to see what it looks like although Pew is usually daily solid.

There are factors which mess up the bare time statistics as well. In the same way that people sometimes do more dangerous things when you make them safer, when you free up some time previously doing chores it is used doing other new chores- not spending 27 hours a week doing laundry in 1965 becomes (oversimplification alert) spending 7 hours doing laundry and 20 hours in traffic driving the little monsters from school to karate to the library to Jimmy's house etc. in 2020.

Some of these new activities will be fairly neutral in terms of consumption (being services rather than goods) some will be resource hungry.

Tangentially Brave New World talks a little about new sports activities; there is a minimum quality of kit required for new activities to be approved in order to keep consumption rate inflation. 1932.
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Re: The future of the environment, capitalism & human rights

Post by username » Sun Nov 24, 2019 1:51 pm

Woodchopper wrote:
Sun Nov 24, 2019 12:55 pm
discovolante wrote:
Sun Nov 24, 2019 12:16 pm
Damn you got me. Well in terms of appliances I guess they got cheaper because we found ways to exploit workers even more cheaply.
Technology also played a part in decreasing costs of production. Outsourcing to areas with lower wages is in there as well.
Absolutely this; even before shifting production overseas huge advances in mechanical and computerisation lead to increases in production efficiencies which reduced both labour and production costs. There were benefits and detriments to domestic populations as a whole as a result.

Moving production overseas likewise; industrialisation no doubt brings both benefit and detriment to the countries moving from away from being largely (small scale) agrarian societies.
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Re: The future of the environment, capitalism & human rights

Post by username » Sun Nov 24, 2019 10:50 pm

Oops.
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Re: The future of the environment, capitalism & human rights

Post by secret squirrel » Mon Nov 25, 2019 6:41 am

username wrote:
Sun Nov 24, 2019 1:51 pm
Absolutely this; even before shifting production overseas huge advances in mechanical and computerisation lead to increases in production efficiencies which reduced both labour and production costs. There were benefits and detriments to domestic populations as a whole as a result.

Moving production overseas likewise; industrialisation no doubt brings both benefit and detriment to the countries moving from away from being largely (small scale) agrarian societies.
The relatively comfortable lives many people lead in the West isn't an inevitable consequence of industrial capitalism. People had to fight and often die for the rights we take for granted. Arguably the presence of the Soviet Union played a role too, by encouraging the Capitalist powers of the day to throw something of a bone to their workers (whatever the conditions for the lower classes inside the Soviet Union at the time). Also, there's a tendency to just not count the experiences of poor people in rich countries when assessing quality of life*. The US, for example, 'feels' tremendously wealthy from the outside, but it has a huge incarcerated population, largely drawn from an effectively criminalized racial underclass, and it exploits this population for slave labour (this to me deserves, possibly unfavourable, comparison with the treatment of Uyghurs in China, but that's another story).

Also, currently developing countries cannot expect to 'come through' the difficult period of industrialization and become wealthy with a standard of living similar to the West. First because the currently wealthy countries have a first-mover advantage as far as control of finite resources goes. Second because developing countries are firmly discouraged (at rifle point if necessary) from taking the kinds of steps that might result in significant economic progress (i.e. tell the IMF to f.ck off, nationalize natural resource industries, protectionism, state involvement in economic planning - see literally every country that has gone from poor to rich in the 20th century). Third, of course, the unfolding climate catastrophe, which will be very profitable for people positioned to take advantage of it, will crank up the pressure on poor countries to unbearable levels.

*Means vs medians etc. E.g. Jeff Bezos walks into a slum, and the average person becomes a multimillionaire.

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Re: The future of the environment, capitalism & human rights

Post by username » Mon Nov 25, 2019 10:06 am

secret squirrel wrote:
Mon Nov 25, 2019 6:41 am
username wrote:
Sun Nov 24, 2019 1:51 pm
Absolutely this; even before shifting production overseas huge advances in mechanical and computerisation lead to increases in production efficiencies which reduced both labour and production costs. There were benefits and detriments to domestic populations as a whole as a result.

Moving production overseas likewise; industrialisation no doubt brings both benefit and detriment to the countries moving from away from being largely (small scale) agrarian societies.
The relatively comfortable lives many people lead in the West isn't an inevitable consequence of industrial capitalism. People had to fight and often die for the rights we take for granted. Arguably the presence of the Soviet Union played a role too, by encouraging the Capitalist powers of the day to throw something of a bone to their workers (whatever the conditions for the lower classes inside the Soviet Union at the time). Also, there's a tendency to just not count the experiences of poor people in rich countries when assessing quality of life*. The US, for example, 'feels' tremendously wealthy from the outside, but it has a huge incarcerated population, largely drawn from an effectively criminalized racial underclass, and it exploits this population for slave labour (this to me deserves, possibly unfavourable, comparison with the treatment of Uyghurs in China, but that's another story).

Also, currently developing countries cannot expect to 'come through' the difficult period of industrialization and become wealthy with a standard of living similar to the West. First because the currently wealthy countries have a first-mover advantage as far as control of finite resources goes. Second because developing countries are firmly discouraged (at rifle point if necessary) from taking the kinds of steps that might result in significant economic progress (i.e. tell the IMF to f.ck off, nationalize natural resource industries, protectionism, state involvement in economic planning - see literally every country that has gone from poor to rich in the 20th century). Third, of course, the unfolding climate catastrophe, which will be very profitable for people positioned to take advantage of it, will crank up the pressure on poor countries to unbearable levels.

*Means vs medians etc. E.g. Jeff Bezos walks into a slum, and the average person becomes a multimillionaire.
My suggestion is it's better than the agrarian alternative, not that it's perfect. :)
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Re: The future of the environment, capitalism & human rights

Post by shpalman » Mon Nov 25, 2019 11:53 am

secret squirrel wrote:
Mon Nov 25, 2019 6:41 am
... currently developing countries cannot expect to 'come through' the difficult period of industrialization and become wealthy with a standard of living similar to the West. First because the currently wealthy countries have a first-mover advantage as far as control of finite resources goes. Second because developing countries are firmly discouraged (at rifle point if necessary) from taking the kinds of steps that might result in significant economic progress (i.e. tell the IMF to f.ck off, nationalize natural resource industries, protectionism, state involvement in economic planning - see literally every country that has gone from poor to rich in the 20th century). Third, of course, the unfolding climate catastrophe, which will be very profitable for people positioned to take advantage of it, will crank up the pressure on poor countries to unbearable levels...
Another issue is that if everybody comes up to the same "wealthy with a standard of living similar to the West" there'll be nobody left to exploit to make cheap stuff for us and/or to "offshore" jobs to. (Well ok this assumes that the cost of living in the places which the west currently exploits for cheap labour will rise and therefore wages will rise with it, it's probably a bit more complicated than that... but remember when it was "made in Japan" and then "made in Korea" and now it's "made in China"?)
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Re: The future of the environment, capitalism & human rights

Post by username » Mon Nov 25, 2019 12:46 pm

Yes, it is very complicated. I'm not very up on Japanese economic history, did they offshore industrial jobs or automate in order to reduce the relative labour costs?
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Re: The future of the environment, capitalism & human rights

Post by El Pollo Diablo » Mon Nov 25, 2019 2:27 pm

If population growth becomes population decline, how will capitalism work? If we need to consume less in order to save the world, how does that fit with an increasingly wealthy population, who have access to all the latest gadgets?
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Re: The future of the environment, capitalism & human rights

Post by Bird on a Fire » Mon Nov 25, 2019 2:37 pm

El Pollo Diablo wrote:
Sat Nov 23, 2019 8:37 am
The world is overpopulated, humans are doing untold damage to the earth just by existing, our insatiable appetite for more and more stuff, all the time is leading to incredible ecological harm, pollution, and extinction, and moreover there doesn't really seem to be much of an idea what to do about it. I could list here a very wide array of ways in which humans are destroying the earth, from global warming to plastic pollution to Chinese traditional "medicine" to rainforest destruction to ocean acidification to overuse of concrete and now even to SpaceX ruining the night sky just so we can have some internet. Moving to electric cars as a species means we use up precious metals, and we're really not that good at recycling them.

Lets be honest, much of the drive for this is capitalism. It has given us untold freedom in our communities, but it - at least in its current incarnation - requires growth to be maintained over time, so that means more consumption, more people, more damage.

Is there any way at all that we can come through the next century with the world not being dead? How would capitalism need to change (or should it be discarded in favour of something else)? How does capitalism changing affect human rights? Do we need a worldwide one-child policy, for instance? Restrictions on consumption, or stronger incentives against it?
My take for what it's worth is that environmental justice is one pillar of broader social justice. Capitalism as a system does not have any form of social justice built into it, and evidence suggests it does not generally just emerge unbidden. Social justice of all forms requires (as secret squirrel points out) that people fight against the system for it.

The ability to impinge upon other people's welfare normally derives from an imbalance of power, be it physical, political or financial. As we all know, the latter to are inextricably linked. As a feature, capitalism concentrates wealth - and therefore power - into ever-decreasing numbers of ever-increasingly powerful people. See Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century (or summaries thereof) for a data-driven demonstration. Inequality is nested, with conflicts between classes within countries, between urban and rural areas, between rich and poor countries, and so on.

Environmental problems chiefly affect the poor, whether we consider air pollution, fisheries collapse, soil erosion or changing weather patterns. Preventing or responding to those problems will require deliberate political action, not complacently expecting markets to fix it.

What the market is generally excellent at is optimising over a given parameter space. Our job as a (global) society is to dictate what those parameters are. For example, a well-designed carbon market would go a long way to addressing the problem of CO2 (and equivalent) emissions.

However, a lot of environmental problems are direct results of poverty. Huge areas of primary forest, including within nominally protected areas, are destroyed every year for cash-crop farming. The capitalist system drives down the price paid to farmers, necessitating expansion just to maintain their very low incomes. The dependence of capitalism on a continued increase in productivity can create problems if rules and enforcement don't keep pace.

Addressing environmental problems requires long-term thinking, and valuing the future over the present. The capitalist system's dependence on continually increasing surplus value in order to spit out dividends is antithetical to this. Increasing workers' ownership of natural resources would encourage long-term thinking. One of the frequent 'justifications' of capitalism is that people are inherently selfish: in order to protect what needs protecting, therefore, we could harness this natural selfishness by transforming workers from exploiters to owners.

As for democracy. I think part of the failure of modern democracy to address environmental issues boils down to two things, short-termism and alienation. We vote every few years for what we want to happen over the next few years, and after that politics is largely out of our hands. Most people are too busy to keep track of the 24-hour rolling parade of distractions (which is no doubt a deliberate tactic), and so they become alienated from the machinations of the system. At the same time, the 'environment' is something ~waves arms~ over there somewhere, and until your home catches fire or fills with floodwater it's easy not to give a sh.t. I think a truly democratic solution would involve giving people more of a day-to-day stake in how natural resources are managed.

Capitalism isn't the only system that can produce injustices of course, and both the USSR and China have been responsible for environmental catastrophes in their quests for increasing production (for instance dessicating an entire sea). Whatever alternatives are employed to reduce the many forms of injustice produced by capitalism will need to have environmental justice built in alongside other forms of social justice.
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Re: The future of the environment, capitalism & human rights

Post by dyqik » Mon Nov 25, 2019 3:18 pm

username wrote:
Mon Nov 25, 2019 12:46 pm
Yes, it is very complicated. I'm not very up on Japanese economic history, did they offshore industrial jobs or automate in order to reduce the relative labour costs?
Much of China's economic advantage is due to later and more effective automation rather than wages per se - generally developing your economy later means that your capital has been put into more recent and more efficient development, and the less capital and facilities you have tied up with older less efficient automation.

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Re: The future of the environment, capitalism & human rights

Post by Martin_B » Tue Nov 26, 2019 12:18 am

username wrote:
Mon Nov 25, 2019 12:46 pm
Yes, it is very complicated. I'm not very up on Japanese economic history, did they offshore industrial jobs or automate in order to reduce the relative labour costs?
Japan still has a good industrial sector, and they mix automation with manual labour, so the bright gleaming factories full of only robots and no people whatsoever aren't generally in Japan themselves (or rather, they may have some as examples, but the very low population factories are for the Japanese company factories set up in foreign countries!)

Japan doesn't have a significant welfare state, so they do provide some very menial-style jobs to people which add very little value (traffic marshals who stand at junctions in the middle of nowhere with <50 cars an hour passing, to make sure that traffic jams don't happen!)
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Re: The future of the environment, capitalism & human rights

Post by secret squirrel » Tue Nov 26, 2019 2:55 am

shpalman wrote:
Mon Nov 25, 2019 11:53 am
Another issue is that if everybody comes up to the same "wealthy with a standard of living similar to the West" there'll be nobody left to exploit to make cheap stuff for us and/or to "offshore" jobs to. (Well ok this assumes that the cost of living in the places which the west currently exploits for cheap labour will rise and therefore wages will rise with it, it's probably a bit more complicated than that... but remember when it was "made in Japan" and then "made in Korea" and now it's "made in China"?)
Yes. I think a lot of production currently done by people in poor countries could be done with automation, and would if that became the most profitable way to do it. But there are several ways the standard of living in many countries is propped up by cheap labour from other countries, e.g. the service and construction industries in the wealthier countries of SE Asia and elsewhere. Even in Thailand, which is only middle income, the construction boom in Bangkok and elsewhere is driven by cheap labour imported from Cambodia/Laos/Myanmar.

However, the countries that became 'developed' in the 20th century (e.g. Japan, S. Korea, Singapore) did so by developing key industries with state support (sometimes even state ownership) and protectionism. These days, organizations like the IMF don't like that kind of thing, and are pretty good at shutting it down. The industry in a lot of developing countries comes from foreign companies. This is a problem for them because, while they provide jobs locally, they have no incentive to develop the host country. In fact, it's in their interests that things there stay the same. So we shouldn't expect the the current crop of 'developing' countries to develop out of the 'providing cheap labour' phase any time soon, because they're not even on the path to doing that (and that is probably not entirely an accident).

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Re: The future of the environment, capitalism & human rights

Post by jimbob » Tue Nov 26, 2019 8:51 pm

Woodchopper wrote:
Sun Nov 24, 2019 12:55 pm
discovolante wrote:
Sun Nov 24, 2019 12:16 pm
Damn you got me. Well in terms of appliances I guess they got cheaper because we found ways to exploit workers even more cheaply.
Technology also played a part in decreasing costs of production. Outsourcing to areas with lower wages is in there as well.
Indeed the cost of manufacture has dropped.

And not just in the obvious ways as with computers, but what the associated technologies enable.

First in the assembly - if you had a lots of hand-soldered components on a circuit board, that would take a lot longer than surface-mount components with a pick and place machine (which requires reasonable machine vision) and also cut down the number of employees.

Secondly in the bill of materials - as the cost comes down, you might be able to replace parts of the circuit boards with cheap integrated circuits - reducing the number of parts and overall size.

Then you get to the replacing of electromechanical systems with electronic ones - maybe a photosensor to replace a float-type switch or solid state switches to replace relays - all possibly integrated into a single driver block, instead of separate.

And then there's the cost reduction in driver circuitry for brushless motors - which when coupled with lithium batteries have enabled the growth in drones and cordless tools/appliances.

You can also get more efficient voltage conversion in smaller spaces, again reducing cost.

Think of how complicated a good watch is compared to a cheap digital watch. All the complexity is hidden in the electronic chips.
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Re: The future of the environment, capitalism & human rights

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed Nov 27, 2019 12:54 am

Do people still buy watches now that everyone has a phone in their pocket at all times? (Outside of special use cases like sports or fieldwork)
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Re: The future of the environment, capitalism & human rights

Post by username » Wed Nov 27, 2019 1:57 am

Yeah I've bought a couple of watches in recent years, and I know other members here have too.

Wrt this
So we shouldn't expect the the current crop of 'developing' countries to develop out of the 'providing cheap labour' phase any time soon, because they're not even on the path to doing that (and that is probably not entirely an accident).
I was rather under the impression that precisely this kind of development was underway; obviously shifting from one type of society to another takes time (albeit less than the hundreds of years it took in many western countries) but is there evidence of the degree of emerging market/economy stagnation that's being suggested?
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Re: The future of the environment, capitalism & human rights

Post by secret squirrel » Wed Nov 27, 2019 2:25 am

username wrote:
Wed Nov 27, 2019 1:57 am
So we shouldn't expect the the current crop of 'developing' countries to develop out of the 'providing cheap labour' phase any time soon, because they're not even on the path to doing that (and that is probably not entirely an accident).
I was rather under the impression that precisely this kind of development was underway; obviously shifting from one type of society to another takes time (albeit less than the hundreds of years it took in many western countries) but is there evidence of the degree of emerging market/economy stagnation that's being suggested?
Well, which countries are, in your opinion, on a path to developing gout of the 'providing cheap industrial labour' phase? The only one I can think of is China, which is in a very special category all on its own. History has shown repeatedly that 'market reforms' as pushed by the World Bank don't work (for the the majority of citizens in the countries where they implemented that is), but the developed world continues to apply considerable pressure to get 'developing' nations to adopt them. It's really not mysterious. It's not an inexplicable failure of a well intentioned process. The developed world knowingly loots the 'developing' world on an industrial scale, exploiting both resources and labour, and the relatively small number of people whose opinions count have no interest in changing this state of affairs. Quite the opposite.

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Re: The future of the environment, capitalism & human rights

Post by shpalman » Wed Nov 27, 2019 8:49 am

username wrote:
Wed Nov 27, 2019 1:57 am
Yeah I've bought a couple of watches in recent years, and I know other members here have too.
Buying the Kronaby seems to have nudged youtube into suggesting me channels about guys who go on about mechanical and automatic watches; they're actually quite interesting channels, and the watches are lovely things even if I'd probably never actually buy one. Meanwhile there's a massive trend for "fashion watches" i.e. those brands you see on Instagram which go on about "our story" and "we cut out the middleman" and then sell you a Japanese quartz movement in a cheap Chinese steel case with a glass crystal for way more than such a thing is actually worth. (One brand however went Swiss-made, with what seems to be a noticeable improvement in quality; it's also possible to get well-made watches from China, as some micro-brands do.)

But this isn't a total derail: there are "Swiss watch" brands which are actually made in the Italian part of Switzerland, by Italians, so that they can put "Swiss made" on the dial while paying wages at the Italian level rather than the Swiss level. So in this case it's the Italians who provide cheap labour for the Swiss. I expect it's not just limited to watches since there are so many "frontalieri" doing this that they get their own lane at the border control. The Swiss complain about being undercut by Italians of course.
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Re: The future of the environment, capitalism & human rights

Post by username » Wed Nov 27, 2019 10:16 am

secret squirrel wrote:
Wed Nov 27, 2019 2:25 am
username wrote:
Wed Nov 27, 2019 1:57 am
So we shouldn't expect the the current crop of 'developing' countries to develop out of the 'providing cheap labour' phase any time soon, because they're not even on the path to doing that (and that is probably not entirely an accident).
I was rather under the impression that precisely this kind of development was underway; obviously shifting from one type of society to another takes time (albeit less than the hundreds of years it took in many western countries) but is there evidence of the degree of emerging market/economy stagnation that's being suggested?
Well, which countries are, in your opinion, on a path to developing gout of the 'providing cheap industrial labour' phase? The only one I can think of is China, which is in a very special category all on its own. History has shown repeatedly that 'market reforms' as pushed by the World Bank don't work (for the the majority of citizens in the countries where they implemented that is), but the developed world continues to apply considerable pressure to get 'developing' nations to adopt them. It's really not mysterious. It's not an inexplicable failure of a well intentioned process. The developed world knowingly loots the 'developing' world on an industrial scale, exploiting both resources and labour, and the relatively small number of people whose opinions count have no interest in changing this state of affairs. Quite the opposite.
There are lots of lists with varying criteria kicking around. This is one investment example from Morgan Stanley's Emerging Markets tracker fund.
Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Qatar, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, and United Arab Emirates
Naturally countries can regress as well as advance- Venezuela, for example, and Brazil is not looking great right now.
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Re: The future of the environment, capitalism & human rights

Post by individualmember » Wed Nov 27, 2019 10:21 am

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed Nov 27, 2019 12:54 am
Do people still buy watches now that everyone has a phone in their pocket at all times? (Outside of special use cases like sports or fieldwork)
I haven't worn a watch for probably twenty years for this reason, plus generally not caring about personal adornments, plus I don't even have to look at my phone much because the time is on my computer screen.

I do own a watch that is a memento of a special occasion thirty-odd years ago, but I can't honestly remember the last time I wore it.

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Re: The future of the environment, capitalism & human rights

Post by secret squirrel » Wed Nov 27, 2019 12:50 pm

username wrote:
Wed Nov 27, 2019 10:16 am
There are lots of lists with varying criteria kicking around. This is one investment example from Morgan Stanley's Emerging Markets tracker fund.
Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Qatar, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, and United Arab Emirates
Naturally countries can regress as well as advance- Venezuela, for example, and Brazil is not looking great right now.
Why should we give any one of those lists any regard? The Morgan Stanley one, for example, is interested in investment opportunities. That is, shareholder value for foreign investors. Every country that has ever become wealthy in a way that benefited at least a reasonable proportion of its population did so by developing local industry with state support and protectionism. Which countries are currently doing that? The neoliberal line that opening up to foreign investment is the way forward is just a lie. A lie, but hugely profitable for people positioned to take advantage of it, which is why it has so much traction in the popular imagination. Even if you care about GDP, which, really, you shouldn't, at least, not very much, neoliberal policies perform worse than socialist leaning ones (I'm not talking about full command economies here). The policies imposed by organizations like the IMF have been a disaster everywhere (except for foreign investors and well placed local bigwigs). This is not an accident.

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