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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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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.