[KnuthIsGod]

China going capitalist ( while remaining authoritarian ) has helped lift 800 million out of desperate poverty.

I hope that India too can emulate this in my lifetime. I was born in Kerala and would love to see Indians live in a country that is as wealthy per capita ( PPP adjusted ) as Singapore or failing that even as wealthy as the USA.

Capitalism has it's problems. But you struggling with rent is entirely your self-inflicted problem...

[autoexec]

> But you struggling with rent is entirely your self-inflicted problem...

Yeah, that one guy and 70% of the country https://www.yahoo.com/news/videos/70-americans-struggle-pay-...

[ivewonyoung]

So why aren't those people lining up to try and emigrate to non-capitalistic countries for a allegedly better life?

Instead for the past century we have almost everyone in the world wanting or not minding moving to the hypercapitalist USA.

Ironically almost all the countries with emigration controls and exit visas in the past century were noncapitalistic countries trying to stop their people from fleeing to capitalistic countries.

[autoexec]

I don't know what you would define as "non-capitalistic" or why you'd limit your options to only those countries, but the idea that people can just pack up and go to live wherever they feel like is incredibly naive.

The reasons Americans don't just move to whatever country they think they'd enjoying living in the most are often the same reasons most people all over the world don't. They have a life here. Family, friends, jobs and other ties to their community that would be hard to leave behind.

Uncertainty and fear also keep people from moving their lives to new countries. Especially when they're going to a place where they don't have friends and family to help them with things like expenses and childcare.

Americans in particular are unlikely to speak anything other than English and while English is often understood to some extent many places overseas it can't be assumed to be avilable everywhere. Understanding the local language is often a requirement for getting citizenship in a country and not being fluent will be a hindrance even where it isn't explicitly required.

It's also very expensive to move. You'll need to have enough money to live somewhere and feed and clothe yourself the moment you step off the plane. You'll need to store all off your things someplace until housing can be secured and that can take a lot of time. Countries can require thousands in fees to apply for citizenship and people struggling with basics like food and housing aren't going to be able to afford that. About half the country doesn't even have a passport and the expense of getting one (along with the needed documentation) would be an additional burden.

Other countries don't necessarily want you. Immigrating is difficult. Unless you can demonstrate that you've already got someone willing to hire you (and effectively vouch that you won't be a financial burden) or you have some much needed skill or one that a native citizen cannot perform you may not be welcome. No nation is obligated to accept responsibility for you just because you want to live there.

It'd be great if everyone everywhere could just pack up and leave to start a life wherever they felt like it, but there are many reasons why that just isn't realistic. There are tens of millions of people America right now living in places without safe drinking water because of heavy metal contamination. Why do you think they don't just pack up and move to cities with drinkable water? What about the tens of millions of Americans who live within one mile of toxic waste sites that have been linked to infant deaths, cancers, and other serious long-term health issues? Why don't they just move? Forget about America, how about all those starving Africans just move to somewhere with lots of food? The world just doesn't work that way.

[WalterBright]

Some countries have walls to keep people in, some have walls to keep people out.

> the idea that people can just pack up and go to live wherever they feel like is incredibly naive.

That's how America was populated. In the last 5 years, millions of people walked from South America to the US. Walked!

The tax increases in New York, California and Washington have resulted in an exodus of wealthy people.

[autoexec]

America was populated by giving people land in exchange for doing the hard work of settling the country so that the government could expand farther west. The land wasn't empty before then, but it wasn't populated like it is now either. It was hard work and bodies were needed so immigration was strongly encouraged. The existence of illegal immigration today is another thing entirely.

I have absolutely no problem with wealthy people who refuse to pay their fair share of taxes leaving. Good riddance. If they want to act like parasites let them leech off the people some place else. Eventually those people will wise up and ask them to pay up or get out too. It's that or bow down and spend their lives in serfdom to their rich lords and masters. I prefer freedom over robber barons.

[ivewonyoung]

> Good riddance. If they want to act like parasites let them leech off the people some place else

That's a reactionary emotional reaction that many countries started with and failed and led to people fleeing and the govts banning people leaving. Examples include East Germany, North Korea, the eastern bloc etc.

History has shown again and again that chasing away high earners with super high taxes like doctors, tech workers, small business owners etc. leads to worse outcomes for everyone because they already pay a large share of total taxes. Also, they may quit and just collect the welfare off the high earners tax income. At the federal level the top 1% pay 40% of federal taxes, that's not even counting the jobs they create. Imagine a place trying to serve 99% of the people with only 60% of the tax revenue. They're either going to increase the taxes till there's no one left to overtax or reduce govt services which reduces govt employment leading to lower tax collection and even more welfare spending.

Taxes on things discourage the use of things, that's why high taxes on smoking and alcohol work. Supertaxing economic productivity and rewarding people sitting around not working will and has led to lower economic productivity.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c6521/c6521.pdf

I got a lot of downvotes making these comments and ran into posting limits. HN isn't a place for debates like this, you win, socialism is amazing, everyone upvote me now.

[ivewonyoung]

Those factors apply to non Americans wanting to move to the US but it's apparent that there is heavy demand to the extent of millions taking dangerous trips and breaking laws just to get a foot into the USA. You cant find such latent demand to the same extent via surveys or visa applications in the other direction.

[autoexec]

Those factors apply to everyone. Even, as I pointed out, within America itself. There are Americans living in places that are literally killing them. They aren't happy about, but they also can't just leave either. Learn about them and their lives if you really want to understand why.

[ktallett]

I would be curious to see those stats that show they are no longer in poverty, as poverty is relative, aka when rent goes up many still can't afford it. Just because they have more money coming in, it doesn't mean they aren't poor. Wealth per capita in the UK, US, Germany, and so on is good but there is still rampant poverty in each where people struggle to afford food, housing, and utilities. The wages don't match the outgoings.

[ian_j_butler]

> But you struggling with rent is entirely your self-inflicted problem...

The funny thing about this is that practically every single person in the US between the ages of 25-45 was an early adopter and a big fan for some (or all) of FAANG in the early days, and clearly saw the importance. The fact that they aren't filthy rich and far wealthier than older people tells a story. Not a story of lattes and avocados, but a story where housing and education costs guaranteed that as a group they couldn't save, never had a chance to invest, still can't invest. With certain adjustments the story isn't so different for much of the western world.. maybe education was cheap/free but their domestic labor market was weaker, whatever. They were and are still pretty much guaranteed to be on the outside. Luck, timing, and good connections are nice at any time, but the last few decades it's everything. In another timeline maybe wealthy youth is landlording it over the impoverished oldies, but in the best timeline we'd split the difference.

Even worse, it's a uniquely bad time to be smart and hardworking, because that's the type of attitude that could stick you with a lack of resilience at just the wrong time. People who've coasted may do much better than ones who are striving. Would you rather be a university grad with new debt right now, or be a certified HVAC tech for the last 5 years? If you were a mechanic, would you want to own the shop with loans to pay off in this economy and tariffs to deal with, or would you prefer to be a simple employee that can just bounce once the company goes under? I've met phd's who are delivering pizzas to make ends meet. Blue collar folks not only have better job security at the moment, but going back some years, if they got a mortgage at the right time and place with that stable job maybe they could do normal life stuff like kids, retirement one day.

What lessons do we think young people will take from all this? Nothing against anyone who is lucky, but a stubborn belief in mythical meritocracy or the legendary American dream is absolutely stone-cold crazy these days. There's just the insiders and the outsiders and there's not much rhyme or reason to any of it.

[sokoloff]

> it's a uniquely bad time to be smart and hardworking

I think the next decade will be one of the single greatest times to be smart and hardworking. I think we’ll see AI-powered tools evolve to give hardworking humans significantly more leverage than they’ve been able to individually harness before and coupling that with smart (meaning high and good judgment on how to use them) will be an incredibly powerful combination.

[hackyhacky]

> But you struggling with rent is entirely your problem...

Who said anything about struggling with rent? Sounds like you a grasping for a straw man.

> I hope that India too can emulate this in my lifetime

I, too, hope the best things for the people of China and of India. But India, by any metric, is already a capitalist economy, where its wealth is concentrated in the hands of a very few.

To the extent that China has been successful is distributing its wealth among many people, I'd say it's the authoritarianism, rather than the capitalism, that has been instrumental. The state sets agendas, quotas, and salaries specifically to produce that outcome. Top-down government control is not a feature of unbridled capitalism.

So we have two large industrializing economies, both capitalist. One (the authoritarian one) has succeeded in drastically reducing poverty; the other has not. And yet you think that capitalism is the driver of equality?

Capitalism produces wealth. You need some other system to distribute that wealth fairly.

[F3nd0]

> Who said anything about struggling with rent?

The person they replied to, in the very comment they replied to…?

> > > The amounts of money circulating whilst some of us struggle to make rent ...

[everforward]

China also does massive amounts of investment in new technologies and local companies. One of the reasons capitalism concentrates wealth these days is that it’s cheaper to generate enormous capex to prevent paying for labor than to deal with the opex of labor. Ie the road to wealth requires either wealth or investment from the wealthy.

In capitalism, the wealthy provide the capex and reap the profit. In China, the government provides a lot of the capex and claims a lot of the profit (either directly or indirectly). They can then re-invest that, use it to set salaries free from market forces, etc.

The US could do more of that without getting into the contentious issue of raising personal taxes. Ie the government could control the flow of GPUs into the country, asserting that it had the right of first purchase, distribute them to a tightly controlled private company (think power or water company, with margins set by law), and probably make a profit on the cheaper hardware because they’d be a massive purchasing block. We won’t, though, because Google, Amazon, Oracle, etc are currently posed to make a _ton_ of money off doing basically the exact same thing.

[throw3452]

China wound not have a ton of billionaires that are living and fleeing China if they had their wealth distributed well

[WalterBright]

> capitalism is the driver of equality?

Nope. It is the driver of opportunity, though. It's up to individuals to take advantage of the opportunity, or not.

[joe_mamba]

>It's up to individuals to take advantage of the opportunity, or not.

The problem is that after decades monopolies consolidated and you have massive offshoring of labor to cheap countries and offshoring of profits to tax havens, there's not much opportunities the working class individuals can take, as all the opportunities are now geared towards the asset owning rent seeking class.

[WalterBright]

There are endless businesses you can start with little to no capital.

[hackyhacky]

> There are endless businesses you can start with little to no capital.

Well, that's good news. I guess the cause of poverty must simply be laziness.

That's convenient, because it allows me to demonize the lower economic classes without having to address the systemic inequality that rewards capital ownership over labor.

[WalterBright]

My dad told me I wasn't afraid at all of hard work. I had no problem lying down next to it and going to sleep.

Value is created by some combination of 1) working 2) taking risks.

Entertaining as it is, participating on HackerNews is not a path to making money.

[joe_mamba]

If you count being a Doordash or Uber eats self employed sole proprietorship as "endless business opportunities", then yeah you could be right.

[WalterBright]

I had a paper route as a boy. It was definitely a business, as I contracted with the newspaper publisher for it. I bought the papers from the publisher, delivered them, and collected money from the customers. How much money I made was a function of how many customers I could sign up for delivery. I made enough to buy a car.

Real estate agents operate in much the same way.

[tardedmeme]

Like what? Will they be profitable?

[WalterBright]

I started my own software business with no capital.

[tardedmeme]

Capitalism incentivizes risk taking because the payoff is enormous - the most successful risk takers get to own the world 50 years later.

The problem: there's a second phase 50 years later, where the risk takers from 50 years ago own the world and do their best to prevent further rewards flowing to new risktakers. We are in that phase now.

The other problem: when the reward is so great, you do everything to get ahead, even illegal things, because the expectation value (winning*P(winning) + prison*P(caught)) is still positive.

[WalterBright]

> the most successful risk takers get to own the world 50 years later.

Musk creating wealth has taken nothing from me. How about you?

> there's a second phase 50 years later, where the risk takers from 50 years ago own the world and do their best to prevent further rewards flowing to new risktakers. We are in that phase now.

Did you know that Hackernews is run by wealthy people who fund startups?

What illegal things did Bezos do to get rich? Jobs? Gates? Musk?

[hackyhacky]

> Musk creating wealth has taken nothing from me. How about you?

That's exactly what he'd like you to believe. Where did that money come from? Did he just print it himself?

> Musk creating wealth has taken nothing from me. How about you?

Considering that billionaires are actively involved in writing the laws that ostensibly apply to them (see also: regulatory capture), I hardly think that legality should be highest bar that we hold them to. After all, the lords of medieval France acted "legally" when they executed their tenant farmers for failing to pay rent after a bad harvest.

[WalterBright]

> Where did that money come from?

The value created by his company. That value can be turned into money by selling shares of it (stocks), or by borrowing against it (bonds).

Money is created by banks. When banks loan you money, that money is created by a notation in the bank's ledger. But they only loan money on collateral, which would be in this case the value of the company. The money gets destroyed (!) when the loan is paid off. But the value of the collateral remains.

[platevoltage]

"while remaining authoritarian" implies that Authoritarianism is an exclusive trait of Communism, which is the most absurd thing I've ever heard. Use any Capitalist country with an Authoritarian leader as an example.

[WalterBright]

There have been 20,000 communes set up in the US. None were authoritarian. They all failed anyway.

[platevoltage]

I don't know what this has to do with anything I said.