[camgunz]

There are large differences though. The US poverty rate is 2.5x higher than Denmark's (15% to 6%). Denmark's life expectancy is 6 years longer. The kinds of policies you'd need to close that gap in the US would be transformative.

> When comparing two different economic systems, you tend to see differences on the order of "mass-famines" and "percentage of the population involved in subsistence farming".

There are plenty of capitalist countries that do a lot of subsistence farming.

[Kamq]

> The kinds of policies you'd need to close that gap in the US would be transformative.

I disagree. When laid against things like the end of mercantilism, I don't think that qualifies as transformative.

I think the effects would look pretty much like the existing US system, because Denmark looks pretty close to the current US system by the standards we're talking about. If you want to argue they'd be fundamentally different, you can make a case, but I'd like to know why they would produce different results.

> There are plenty of capitalist countries that do a lot of subsistence farming.

Do you have some examples? The areas I'm aware of that practice subsistence farming, don't have a long history of leaving the means of production alone in private hands for very long.

[camgunz]

> I disagree. When laid against things like the end of mercantilism, I don't think that qualifies as transformative.

That may be your benchmark but it's not mine. I think permanently pulling 30m people out of poverty in the US would be a multi-trillion dollar multi-decade endeavor on the scale of combating climate change (you need housing reforms, education reforms, health care reforms, criminal justice reforms, etc). That may not qualify for you, but it definitely does for me.

> Do you have some examples? The areas I'm aware of that practice subsistence farming, don't have a long history of leaving the means of production alone in private hands for very long.

Besides being something of a no-true-scotsman, examples are India, Brazil, and Mexico.

[sudosysgen]

> Do you have some examples? The areas I'm aware of that practice subsistence farming, don't have a long history of leaving the means of production alone in private hands for very long.

This is not correct. Under, for example, the Roman Empire, privately held land was routinely leased to free men, either for a share of the produce (métayage) or for a fixed fee. This practice lasted hundreds of years. The end of subsistence farming has everything to do with technology and nothing at all to do with capitalism.

In the eigth century in France, around 50% of the land was under a sharecropping-like system, too. This page, and the page in French wiki it links in the intro, give a good rundown of capitalist-like subsistence farming in antiquity and the middle ages : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metayage

[Kamq]

There's a fundamental difference here in that these examples exist before the state had a monopoly on legitimate violence.

Or, to put it another way, the large landowners you're referring to, also had large armies, the largest armies around by definition, otherwise they wouldn't have owned that land. They _were_ the state in their area, in the modern sense.

That's not private ownership of the means of production.

[sudosysgen]

That's completely untrue for Rome, and barely true at all for France in those days.

Roman landowners did not own their land by stealing it from other citizens with large armies. They owned their land by either receiving it from the state as payment, or by buying it. The Roman state had a definite monopoly on violence. In fact, when people commanded armies to take power in Rome, what they were trying to do was to take over the state, and the vast majority of the time those weren't private armies, but State armies that they were misusing.

The Roman state very very much had a monopoly on violence and roman agricultural tenants very very much were renting the landlords privately owned means of production.

Capitalism doesn't magically stop subsistence farming. The advance of science and nothing else makes that possible. The Romans had little interest in advancing fundamental technology because there was no money to be made doing it, and so they never made any advances beyond the domains engineering which were immediately profitable (like weapons and aqueducts and bridges). That's why they made barely any scientific progress in a thousand years.

[Kamq]

> The Roman state very very much had a monopoly on violence and roman agricultural tenants very very much were renting the landlords privately owned means of production.

I call BS here. The Romans basically never had this. During the Republic, you had literal private armies.

And once you get past the Diocletian reforms, the large land owners have enough arms to shield locals from Roman military service. Generally in exchange for service to themselves in agriculture (I believe this is the basis for Europe's system of serfdom).

The type of modern state (or even the concept) we're used to doesn't really emerge until the treaty of Westphalia.

> Capitalism doesn't magically stop subsistence farming.

No, it doesn't. Of course it isn't magic. It just provides an incentive for people to improve things, usually via new technology.

Incentives are surprisingly powerful.

[sudosysgen]

> I call BS here. The Romans basically never had this. During the Republic, you had literal private armies

If you can't recognize that the Roman state had a monopoly on violence for the vast majority of its duration I can't help you. Obviously, it got weaker during its terminal decline - that's how state decline works. As soon as the monopoly of violence weakened the Empire started imploding, and indeed when it was healthy the state did enjoy it's monopoly.

The bucellarii, the private armies which were able to rival the Roman state, only became a thing in the late 300s. Rome fell only a hundred years later. For the vast majority of Roman history armies belonged to the State, and any mercenary formations were negligible - the regime you're describing was due to the Empire crumbling and is indeed what led to feudalism.

> The type of modern state (or even the concept) we're used to doesn't really emerge until the treaty of Westphalia.

Westphalia formalized the modern Eufopean state. But there were a great many similar states before, with a monopoly on violence, a defined political system, since ~4000BC. They just didn't bother formalizing what being a state meant.

> No, it doesn't. Of course it isn't magic. It just provides an incentive for people to improve things, usually via new technology.

Technology maybe, and only in the most basic sense, and Rome is the example. In 1100 years of Roman history, not a single basic scientific discovery was made, because it was completely unprofitable. Technology advanced, yes, but soon enough it was limited by the extremely primitive scientific understanding they had, so they barely made any progress for hundreds of years.

> Incentives are surprisingly powerful.

Practical technological is incentivized in every political economy.

Incentives are surprisingly powerful.