[jmathai]

I agree with everything the article says. I think there are two questions that we should be asking.

1. Can we point to a time when Capitalism peaked in terms of a balance of maximal benefit for as many people as possible? In my lifetime, it was somewhere in the late 1990s and early 2000s. No singular answer but something better exists than where we are now.

2. How do we rewind capitalism to that point?

[Telaneo]

I have very little faith that it will be very possible to rewind to that point. Not because the technology of today is different, or even the legal landscape, but simply due to the cultural landscape being different. Pandora's box has been opened, and it cannot be closed.

To me at least, there seems to have been some cut-off point where nothing but money mattered, and someone realised that consumers will just take the abuse and you won't actually be punished that much, at least not to the point where it's not worth it if money is all you care about. I'm sure there were industries that behaved like this before (tobacco comes to mind), but now it's everywhere.

The aura of 'they'll screw me over for pennies' is ever-present. Even if there were legal recourse for stuff before, you didn't need it, because the threat alone was enough to keep companies in line. Similarly, the threat of a boycott could be enough for a company to switch course. Now they've discovered that for every person willing to take a stand, there are 1000 more who'll stick around, or be swayed by ads, or whatever else.

The idea that you're doing business to provide actual goods and services which does some good in the world seems to have disappeared. Now that is nothing more than a means to an end: the money. You don't open a business because you want to get into the whatever-business. You do it to earn the most money you can. I'm sure the ever worsening socio-economic climate has something to do with it.

We can introduce more consumer and worker protection laws to bring back some breaks on all this. Make the former theoretical punishments to businesses come back as actual punishments, which will hopefully make them behave. Doing it properly is hard. The culture of loopholes isn't going away any-time soon.

[ericd]

I think more penalties involving "you aren't allowed to operate until this is fixed" rather than fines would help.

Also, this is a pretty good take on a lot of related topics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTmpwVCC2So

[jmathai]

Tobacco is a good example. Legislation that you could not smoke inside or nearby buildings did a lot to curb usage.

What’s challenging now is that corporate interest in government seems to have increased rapidly. It’s unclear if legislation is viable.

[Timon3]

You know, it would be interesting to apply this to the whole company. Want to vertically integrate everything? Sure, but be ready for any infraction to bring everything to a halt.

[dTal]

1. No. It was always awful for an unacceptable number of people. It's just your turn to feel the pinch. I suspect you'd get a different answer if you asked someone from China.

2. We have to look forwards, not backwards. Yesterday contained the seeds of today. Today contains the seeds of tomorrow. No point rewinding unless you want history to repeat.

[berdario]

I think that the concept of "Capitalism going wrong" is silly and ahistorical.

Capital and capitalists ("capitalism" was initially not the focus) is a concept which appeared in the last 17th century with the Dutch East India Company, and became a lot more prominent in the 19th century with the Industrial revolution.

Capitalism is not market economy, mercantilism or the accumulation of money (all of that was already a thing during feudal economies, and before the industrial revolution)...

Capitalism is about the means of production, their ownership, the profits (or plundering of resources, in a colonial context), the sharing thereof.

It has *always* been uneven, and unpleasant if you're not in the class which actually has ownership of the means of production.

"Maximal benefit for as many people as possible" is not a goal that the people who hoarded the means of production (people who hoarded capital) ever had in mind. I understand that you didn't explicitly say it, but it's still implied in what you wrote. Maybe the implications is that capitalism fortuitously happened to encourage that "maximal benefit", but even that is misleading: what actually happened is that whenever you have a "blue ocean" to move to, whenever the market is expanding and growing (by the introduction of new productive technologies or the growth of population), there are more spoils that can be shared and enjoyed more widely across the population.

But the rate of profit tends to fall, there are fewer profits to share, and unless encouraged by the point of a bayonet, those who own capital don't have any reason to divest themselves to share more of it with society.

A sibling comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48871234 ) already hinted at the fact that it depends a lot on which group and at which time is benefitting...

One obvious example, are the exploited people during colonialism: despite benefit from spoils being abundant in the west, one shouldn't expect that the colonies' benefit was ever a priority.

Another example is you suggesting

> somewhere in the late 1990s

A lot of the profits that you've witnessed in the west, are due to the markets of the former socialist republics opening up to western exploitation. Depending on the kind of investments or economic assistance that had been provided, some countries fared better than others... No one would've claimed that capitalism brought benefits for the many in the late 1990s in Russia, for example.