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Better and more qualified folk than I have talked about capitalism. But I've been reading a lot of good fantasy lately, with working economies in, and reading some about medieval and early modern economies, and I've been down home and seen again the economy that actually runs there, among family and old-fashioned people.
What I want to talk about - and this is more thinking out loud than any kind of finished writing, comments and contradictions appreciated - is Quality and Quantity, two places where I feel capitalism falls down, albeit in opposite directions.
First, Quality. There isn't enough of it, and it's down to the bottom line. If your aim is to make money - and that's the aim that capitalism fosters - then you will not succeed by producing quality products. You may get there by providing a quality service, but I doubt that; look at budget airlines for a strong counterexample.
My father is a craftsman. He's a Master Craftsman, in a sense that few enough people reading this will understand, but let me just say that he's really really really good at what he does. I'm good at what I do, and by contrast with my father, I'm a hack. He produces quality products. In school, I was once asked "Your father manufactures furniture, doesn't he?", and even then, I could say, no, he makes furniture.
By the reasoning of capitalism as it's taught to us - hard work makes you rich, good work makes you richer - my father should be very very rich. He's not. He's not, because he cares much more about his work than he does about the money, much more about the quality than the number at the end.
There's Quality there, and success a-plenty, but there's not much money. By all standards of capitalism, my father is a failure. By any other standard - respect, reputation, skill, experience - he is a very definite success. There's something wrong with a system that says he's a failure.
Second, Quantity. Rich people become richer, under capitalism, such that it's very hard not to become richer once you're rich. There are people in this world who have, in their own personal fortunes, more than a billion euros. Bill Gates has approximately $48 billion dollars. To bring that into focus, if he were to divide his personal fortune among the population of Ireland, everyone would get $12,000. He can't use all that money. He can't ever use all that money. But because he has it, more keeps accumulating. That, too makes no sense - it's a waste, under any sane way of thinking.
But under capitalism, Gates is a winner, and not just A Winner, he's THE winner.
I think if you check, you'll find my father does better work, though.
What I want to talk about - and this is more thinking out loud than any kind of finished writing, comments and contradictions appreciated - is Quality and Quantity, two places where I feel capitalism falls down, albeit in opposite directions.
First, Quality. There isn't enough of it, and it's down to the bottom line. If your aim is to make money - and that's the aim that capitalism fosters - then you will not succeed by producing quality products. You may get there by providing a quality service, but I doubt that; look at budget airlines for a strong counterexample.
My father is a craftsman. He's a Master Craftsman, in a sense that few enough people reading this will understand, but let me just say that he's really really really good at what he does. I'm good at what I do, and by contrast with my father, I'm a hack. He produces quality products. In school, I was once asked "Your father manufactures furniture, doesn't he?", and even then, I could say, no, he makes furniture.
By the reasoning of capitalism as it's taught to us - hard work makes you rich, good work makes you richer - my father should be very very rich. He's not. He's not, because he cares much more about his work than he does about the money, much more about the quality than the number at the end.
There's Quality there, and success a-plenty, but there's not much money. By all standards of capitalism, my father is a failure. By any other standard - respect, reputation, skill, experience - he is a very definite success. There's something wrong with a system that says he's a failure.
Second, Quantity. Rich people become richer, under capitalism, such that it's very hard not to become richer once you're rich. There are people in this world who have, in their own personal fortunes, more than a billion euros. Bill Gates has approximately $48 billion dollars. To bring that into focus, if he were to divide his personal fortune among the population of Ireland, everyone would get $12,000. He can't use all that money. He can't ever use all that money. But because he has it, more keeps accumulating. That, too makes no sense - it's a waste, under any sane way of thinking.
But under capitalism, Gates is a winner, and not just A Winner, he's THE winner.
I think if you check, you'll find my father does better work, though.
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From:
no subject
I think that capitalism fosters a "race to the bottom" because of the priorities that it sets. Quality, in itself, is not a capitalist value; it is only valued to the extent that it encourages sales or reduces maintenance costs. Many others have likened capitalism to cancer, whose priority is growth and efficiently garnering the resources available.
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And of course your father is just a case in point - quality is lacking in so many things. I've not even lived in an era of quality, but I still miss it.
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Part of the equation that you're leaving out is that people have to want to buy what you sell them. Your father's work may be extraordinary, but there comes a point where extraordinary climbs out of the price equation. He may make the best dang chairs in existence, but most people aren't willing to pay $7,000 for a chair no matter how above-the-line it is.
If they're not willing to pay it, then your father is doing excellent work by a quality standpoint, but not from the standpoint of capitalism.
From:
no subject
The guy charging $7000 for a chair isn't really doing quality work as quality work, he's using quality as a tool to get at the bottom line.
the marketplace decides what's good work, not your father
... and that's the problem, pretty much. The marketplace is an idiot, concerned with a number, not the product.
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I don't think the marketplace is an idiot; I think that it's overly-concerned with consistency, and quite often values cheapness over other items, but I understand that from a paycheck perspective.
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I mean, how much money would have Drew's father earned if he had spent a million euros in ads?
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Firstly, sorry to hear about your loss, and I hope the family connections and general paying-attention-to-kin thing works out for you. I'm sure it will.
So, to the subject at hand; writing software isn't what Gates did to get rich. Writing software, having enough legal knowledge that he could judge what they could get away with in "licensing" it, and ignoring the whiff of bad ethics that licensing inspired among their peers--all three combined--are what Gates did to get rich. Ignore any one of those three, and he'd just be another bourgeois today.
Quality work is valued in the "system" (and I would argue that ascribing systematicity to it is a bit of a stretch), but it's valued within the context of your peers, the people you're competing with. A very good classical musician will earn more than a very mediocre one; a very good investment banker will earn more than a very mediocre one, but each investment banker will probably earn more than the musicians combined. Gates' true peers--those who did the three things above--did get rich. Not as rich as him, because they didn't have Compaq et al to do all their marketing and sales (which is not something Gates had any control over), but rich.
A corollary; since people who are good at writing software started doing the bulk of the coding in Microsoft, the standard of sofware coming out of their has been raised immeasurably. XP is a thousand times better than anything that has a line of Gates' code in it (and may Windows ME die quickly.)
Wealth is a social artefact--"the creation of wealth is the movement of goods from lower-valued uses to higher-valued uses," says PJ O'Rourke--and what is value? What the market will pay, and the market is millions of people following their prejudices and gauging what the prejudices and judgements of everyone else will be. And those people judge that selling programs and hardware that do the job of a 18,000 p.a. research assistant for 1,500 will be [judged by everyone else as] more valuable than making well-crafted staircases.
One way to fix that is to increase the value of well-crafted staircases--viz. the thousands of dollars people pay for a proper kimono in Japan--but changing society's values is a lonely furrow to plough. Ask Van Gogh.
From: (Anonymous)
no subject
But only in my darker moments.
Capitalism doesn’t have anything to say about hard work. You’re mixing it up with a protestant work ethic. It’s about private ownership, free association and reinvestment of profits. It underpins modern democracies. It is the engine that keeps us free.
It has wrought many changes on quality and quantity. The quality of life has improved unrecognisably in the last 100 years. This has been down to private enterprise. Ever do a family tree? Check how many children were dead before 3 80 or 90 years ago. It doesn’t happen on that scale anymore. Drugs, hospitals, electricity, communications, all have played a part in that.
In products and services capitalism delivers an almost bewildering array to us on a scale unthinkable even 30 years ago. Much of it maybe useless or unnecessary or destroy the quiet contemplation of life, but its our choice.
I was brought up in the village of Rathgar. I still remember the deserted house no one could sell. And the expectation that I would have to move abroad to earn a living. I didn't understand why things were like that. Joe Lee's book Ireland 1922-85 helped me. The world around me was run by a select few who gouged every one around them for as much as they could. It was a private club that only professionals could join.
Now, Rathgar is now one of the richest areas of the city, like Ranelagh. And I get to see the corrupt few named in Stubs gazette every quarter (Tax defaulters register).
As for Bill Gates, he has figured out a way to spend all of it. Bring universal health care to those earning under a dollar a day. He won’t be able to afford that, but it’s a start.
Please also note that in the 1930's the Rockfellers could pay for all the American Governments spent for 4 to 6 months. At his best Bill Gates could pay for 2 weeks of the American current account (Day to Day spending, no assets). The super rich are getting poorer.
Capitalism is the best system because we a re all involved in it. It is has been around since the Romans and evolving since them. It communicates what is needed, where and when and then does its best to get it there. I prefer this world to the previous generations.
JOG
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no subject
That's not necessarily true. You won't succeed by creating the perfect product in terms of quality, probably because it will take you too long to get the product to market. Efficiency and effectiveness play a greater part in success under capitalism.
However, selling shoddy products doesn't work either. We can bitch about the quality of Microsoft's products, but if you compare them to some shareware and freeware available, you can't say that M$ are shoddy.
Not to say that I disagree with your sentiments. I'm a tester, I deal with having to compromise quality for commercial reasons every week.
From:
contradiction
I love quality. But I can't afford to fly business class.
And as to rich getting richer give me a mathematical model for this not happening. And Billyboy, asshole that he is is still donating 50% of his income for charity, making him the biggest benefactor on the planet by a huge margin.
As to alternate systems, none of them have achieved anything even close. the preceding systems were well, preceding. Socialism failed miserably. If we want to work with human beings as they are we need to take their weeknesses into acount and not start off by saying "first we need to change humanity", that only leads to inhumane systems.
yes, capitalism by using man's weeknesses (like greed) also reinforces them. we still seem to have been getting over the last century and a half.
And today I witnessed a grand result of applied capitalism: the X-prize.
sorry, I'll stick with it and defend it.
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what we've seen is not a marriage of the small and the large, as was supposed in early days. What we've seen is the systematic dying off of all of the small craftsmen (and women), because they simply have a tough time competing with wal-mart - when they're even competing, because life isn't a race like that, and individuals of the craftsman caliber don't often follow the credo that capitalism does. Beat the other guy. Push him down and take his stuff (sales). Be king of the hill. You must only buy from me. I'd wager gw's papa doesn't give a damn whether or not people buy his stuff, at least not to the extent that the execs at walmart care if you buy the latest crap in aisle 4 only from walmart. i bet he likes what he does, though, an awful lot, cause he found something he's good at or because he worked towards it and became that way.
i've played the capitalist game, and jesus fuck but i'm sick of it. i just want some honesty and adventure in my life, not the constant lies of sales and marketing. it's infilitrated every aspect of my, of our, lives, and has even seeped into our social conventions. now we lie to ourselves and others every day on a personal as well as a business level.
ask yourself the next time you're at work interacting with your boss or a customer or whatever, or when you're out at a bar or whathaveyou. whenever you open your mouth, ask yourself, am i being honest?
i'm saving up for my passport to come visit, gw. thing is, how do i get a custom chair on an airplane back? think they'll let me drag one up in an aisle? :)
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And for what? for more, cheaper, badly designed and made goods that in the making and the selling drive almost everyone involved further into poverty?
I suppose we are getting the culture that we show we value by way of our spending habits...
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no subject
And btw why don't you post some pics of your father's work? I'd love to see them :D.