Thread by @SarahTaber_bww on Thread Reader App
threadreaderapp.com@SarahTaber_bww: More wheat stats. My personal favorite Misleading Wheat Stat is "Ukraine/Russia grow 25% of world wheat exports." Why's it misleading? It's technically true, but doesn't mean what people think! Miss...…
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Just another reason to bend us over at the cash register for a loaf of bread and a box of pasta.
removed by mod
classic capitalism
I think it’s a more fundamental economic behavior. Humans are pretty good at teasing out the truth about shortages, anecdotal/gossip communication exchange ferrets it out. Then people do what people do during a shortage… they hoard. It’d be dumb not to hoard. But collectively, that means the shortage is exacerbated not reduced.
The correct solution isn’t “abolish capitalism”, it’s “abolish shortages”. Capitalism is pretty good at doing the latter, given a chance. The tricky part is when the product is food, as economies can’t really wait on the sort of turnaround time it requires.
The problem can’t be solved under capitalism precisely because it leaves it up to private industry to do the right thing, and that obviously never happens. There is a conflict of interest between making profits and providing necessities. People who are in most dire need are often the ones who can least afford what they need. It blows my mind that people have hard time understanding this.
It doesn’t leave it up the capitalists to “do the right thing”. My god, we’d be extinct as a species were that the case.
It leaves it up to them to be greedy. Which I’m sure you’ll agree is something they’re at least passingly competent at. Why is greed important here? Because if there is a shortage, greedy people can earn obscene profits providing the goods in shortage. The more goods they have, the more than obscenely earn. If they don’t have enough, they are compelled to get more… as efficiently as possible.
This mechanism isn’t without its bizarre failure modes. Take fishing, for instance. As some fish or another becomes rarer, its scarcity causes prices to rise… so instead of doing the right thing and letting populations recover, the temptation becomes ever more irresistible. Don’t let capitalism get anywhere near wildlife preservation, or if you do, study the implications (and perverse incentives) carefully first.
There is very little conflict there. You make x profits if you sell y goods. If you sell 100y goods, you make 100x profits. And so on. Sometimes it’s not even linear, so the larger you scale the more you profit per unit.
This is why even the poor in such countries are often obese. Capitalism could be said to over-provide more often than it under-provides.
This mode of production results in incredible waste with huge quantities of goods being destroyed to keep up the prices, planned obsolescence, modes of failure you describe, as well as many other kinds of idiocy.
However, even more importantly, this doesn’t actually help with solving the problem of delivering goods to people who actually need them because those are who can least afford them.
Around half the food produced under capitalism is thrown away while people are literally starving on the streets. Thanks to the wonder of capitalism roughly 3.5 million people die from lack of clean water, 1.5 million people die from vaccinable diseases, and 9 million people die from hunger each and every year. That’s over a 140 million deaths every decade.
http://horizons-newspaper.com/index.php/2020/02/27/tallying-capitalisms-death-toll/
Not to mention the millions of people who die from pollution. EDIT: By this I meant air particulate pollution. If you are looking at pollution in general, this is caused by all life forms. The comments below were referring to the claim above as it was originally stated.
Thankfully, the Soviet Union was a pollution-less utopia, eh?
I never said that. All I said was that under capitalism, millions of people die from pollution, which is true.
EDIT: Here is my source: https://doi.pangea.de/10.1038/s41467-021-26348-y
EDIT 2: This statement as written is not true, and the source does not mention anything about pollution in general. However, if I instead said that “millions of people die from air particulate pollution,” then I believe that statement would be true.
Then you don’t have a point at all. All human cultures and ideologies are, at their fundamental core, polluters. Capitalism holds no special place on that spectrum. Millions dies from pollution everywhere.
There were two economic systems in countries that industrialized: soviet-type socialism (where the means of production are controlled by a state) and capitalism (where the means of production are controlled by corporations). Of the countries with soviet-type socialism, none of them are democratic. This effectively means that none of the countries that industrialized had a means of production controlled by the community. While all human cultures and ideologies could very well have pollution at their core, we do not know this is true. I think the problem is that the rich can deal with pollution and the poor cannot. Since the poor outnumber the rich, with the poor actually in control, maybe pollution can be solved. This might not be the case, but we will not know unless we try.
Go look up the word “midden” and get back to me.
Yes, if you are looking at all forms of pollution, you are indeed correct, as all life forms have to excrete waste. An extreme example of this is cyanobacteria likely causing a mass extinction.
However, I was referring to air particulate pollution, as shown by my source. I apologize for not being clearer. I have updated the original comment, but yes, you are indeed correct that all human cultures and ideologies have pollution at their core if you are looking at pollution in general.
I’m not sure the distinction is worth mentioning. If you want to limit to air pollution, that only absolves those cultures which haven’t reached an industrial age. Any that has, pollutes the air.
Maybe it’s time to switch back to your No-True-Communism fallacy or something.
Renewable energy has little to no pollution. EDIT: Excluding biofuel which is not a solution to pollution or climate change.