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A Majority Of Millennials Now Reject Capitalism, Poll Shows (washingtonpost.com)
A new poll shows that a majority of young people do not support capitalism. The study was conducted by Harvard University, which polled young adults ages 18-29. It found that 51 percent of those polled rejected capitalism, that is to say, they did not support it. Only 42 percent said they support capitalism -- there was a margin of error of 2.4 percentage points. When asked what alternative system they would prefer, there wasn't a clear winner. Just 33 percent said they supported socialism. When talking about politics or economics, it can get complicated and the poll does little to shed light on what parts of capitalism young people dislike or what parts of socialism young people like. It does appear to suggest young people are frustrated with the status quo and are more focused on the flaws of free markets.
All of a sudden, they will 'support capitalism', whatever that even means.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
People only see and evaluate their experiences; what they have lived. If you put these same college students into another system for a couple months they might change their tune.
All it takes is a trip to Eastern Europe for any American to realize their world is pretty darn good. But given modern politics we might have to bring the Post-Soviet style problems to America firsthand before they can realize the situation.
The ability to invest in yourself so you can produce more is good. I like the free spirit of working in what business you want. Capitalism doesn't have as much waste as another system where everyone gets rationing they may or may not want. Where Capitalism falls short is if you can't get a job at all or can't start your own business. There is no sympathy for those who can't do well. There is no cushion for rock bottom other than hopefully a supportive family. Fix that while also having people still want to work dirty jobs, and you're on to something.
God spoke to me
A majority of American millennials, without even the most basic political culture after decades of disinformation, propaganda, christian fanaticism infecting the schools, and a strong focus on technical skills to create generations of workers, surprisingly don't know what they are talking about when asked basic economics and politics questions.
News at sunset.
At a guess I would imagine the part where they don't get a job, can never buy a house, have a huge student debt loaded on them before they start their careers, and if they say anything bad about their situation, get called greedy and lazy by the people who have rigged the system to ensure they and their privaledged offspring own everything.
This probably means that a majority of them don't know what capitalism is. Their college professors taught them it was cronyism, fascism, patriarchy, etc., and K-12 probably didn't put it in a good light either. They're ripe with the kind of cognitive dissonance that buys a Che Guevera T-shirt from a vendor and doesn't put 2+2 together.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Free market != Capitalism.
I wouldn't call the current unchecked, government-supported oligopoly anywhere close to "free".
Just like traffic laws exist to make sure the sociopaths don't have free reign, the equivalent of economic "traffic" laws need to exist.
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Adam Smith was never writing about what's called the "free market". He envisioned small-scale peer-to-peer reputation-driven interaction, not what we have.
We need to stop calling Wall Street crony-ism a free market. It's a rigged market working for a few. How many of you out there have chance to not be haggled down to the very minimum that can be paid? How many people are routinely being awarded bonuses, and are they really contributing that level of worth to society? There you have it - resources divided not by merit, but by political and economic clout.
In other words, we have an unjust power differential, the same problem with the state-collectivized system that we refer to as socialism, but there are very different types of socialism out there and they don't all work like the totalitarian state-collective system of Stalin and Mao. Kerala's example of "land to the tiller" redistributes private ownership to guarantee ownership of the minimum tools and resources necessary to be self-sufficient. European social democracy may have problems, but many of those countries do have a stronger middle class and take for granted people in the USA only wish for. Again, the term is glossing over a lot and leaving key pieces out of the USA's public discourse, quite to the advantage of the ownership class who would keep anything demonized that would loosen their chokehold on the nation's wealth.
The key differences in any society, if you were to ask me, are the levels of equality in distribution, and representation in policy, and of accountability - meaning that corrupt officials and representatives who listen to lobbyists instead of constituents would get kicked out of office. Equality, representation, accountability - not capitalism versus socialism.
In those terms, people don't get hung up over whether government is big or small but whether it's in the public interest. Oligarchy in the form of Wall Street or a Communist party gets identified as oligarchy whatever the label. We remember that the real deal is that the people are in charge and can stop their government from going out of control.
So please, let's start talking in actual useful terms instead of red herrings.
Only 42 percent said they support capitalism -- there was a margin of error of 2.4 percentage points. When asked what alternative system they would prefer, there wasn't a clear winner. Just 33 percent said they supported socialism.
Of course there wasn't a clear winner, they are rejecting what the schools and media have told them to reject, but frankly most of them have no bloody idea what they are talking about.
It's ok, they'll grow up and learn.
In my experience dealing with anyone under 30 years old, most of them have absolutely no idea how the economy works, how money works, what the difference between capital investment and expenses are, and so on. What it takes to turn raw materials into a $2 cheeseburger is completely lost on anyone who hasn't actually studied it.
What we have is corporatism, not capitalism.
It usually tries to defend itself by appropriating the NAME of capitalism, which is eroding capitalism's credibility, but it's not capitalism any more than an alien cockroach wearing an Edgar suit is actually Edgar.
The pundits have weighed in with their disdain for uninformed millennials - but don't seem to grasp the basic question their generation is confronted with - how does unbounded inequality lead to equality of opportunity? - a central paradox at the heart of Capitalism.
The reward/optimisation function in capitalism is greed - why act surprised when the end-game is inevitably an oligopoly? All this yada yada about crony capitalism is just a facile rationalisation from people who are unable to provide a clear-cut answer to this simple paradox inherent in a capitalist system. Millennials are seeing through this - and they are seeing through the fact that most ideologically driven systems that fail to take real-world evidence into account, inevitably lead to injustice.
Capitalism can mean different things to different people, and the newest generation of voters is frustrated with the status quo, broadly speaking.
can you blame them?
* the two party political system is really just one party with caveats
* their voice in the election has been snuffed out by super delegates
* laws are purchased via bribes aka "campaign donations"
* billions are being funneled into government defense contracts that we don't need
* taxes are being used to subsidise the fossil fuel companies that are destroying the planet
* they are being enslaved by hoisting debt on them before they even get out of college
* a whole lot of bankers just stomped on the global economy and were then bailed out of a problem they created
* multibillion dollar companies dodging paying billions in taxes
* H-1B fellows are being used to replace them in the workforce
* 0.01% of the population has 40% of the total wealth
this isn't a favorable outcome for anyone but aging psychopaths, so it's understandable that they are unhappy.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The last war and/or global economy crisis that truely leveled the playing field is roughly 70 years - two full generations - ago. The market is completely staked out and capital sucktion is rampant. For millenials the game has been rigged from the beginning.
The efficiency of capitalism as we now it continues to decline. Any millenial feels this instictively. To be honest, I have grown more sceptical myself throughout the decades.
To anybody with a brain to think capitalism as we know it has run it's course. When even billionaires, or especially them, start calling it out, you can be sure that your strange feeling somethings wrong is spot on.
My 0.02 Euros.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
This is why these surveys are pointless, most people (and more so young people) group whatever they don't like under an "isim" without any real idea of what it means. Since at least WW2 the US public has worked on the simple minded dogma that "capitalism = good, socialism = bad", neither classification is true or false, but that's what you get when you treat politics as a team sport.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
What the GP fails to understand is that "voluntary exchange for mutual benefit" inevitably leads to corporatism, as controlling the market is benefiting to the owners and managers of the largest corporations; a "free market" does not survive for long when people act in pure self-interest.
Pure capitalism is a pipe dream as theoretical communism, depending too much on the good will of its participants to comply with the rules required to keep the system working (such as ensuring that voluntary exchanges are trully benefital to both parties, and not extortions from the strongest party that "can't be rejected").
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Maybe it's because I've been raised in what the Americans would call a 'socialist' country (Finland) but it always irks me to see capitalism and socialism thrown about as some sort of polar opposites, or capitalism in general being talked about as if it's some single clearly defined ideology.
There are many versions of capitalist economies, and some of them are socialistic. In fact, most all of them are that to a degree, as even the US has a large public sector. Capitalism at its core means nothing more or less than the private ownership of the means of production. If the question was framed "Do you support the right of individuals to own goods provided they pay their share of taxes on them?", the answers would look quite different I reckon.
So the problem is not capitalism as such, the problem is they paying of the fair share of taxes. Neo-liberalism and the fact that the US sliding to the right continuously for the past decades has created this tilted landscape in which gigantic corporations and massively rich individuals have been uplifted to a status in which they're quite openly above governments: bribery and outright buying of bills via lobbying has been made legal (and relatively cheap compared to the profits of these companies), taxes can be circumvented easily if you're wealthy, and megacorps are allowed to wreck havoc to the environment and cause global economic meltdowns without any risk of anyone facing any jail time or even significant fines. They're given fines which are slaps on the wrist compared to the kind of money they can make by continuing illegal operations. To them, it's just a cost of doing business, and the cycle repeats.
So is that capitalism? Well, yes, yes it is, but it's not the one and only true implementation of capitalism, in fact I'd argue it's one of the absolute worst implementations of it possible. It's a corporatocracy/plutocracy. And unless you happen to be one of the chosen few who actually benefits from such a system, there's no rational reason for anyone, on the right or on the left, to support such a model. Even a true conservative should realize that the government allowing legislation as well as elections to be sold to the highest bidder skews the market as it means whoever has the most cash can dictate the rules. That's not how a fair market is supposed to operate, regardless of what one thinks of socialist income redistribution policies.
The tittle would be more appropriately stated: "A majority of millenials now oppose free market/laissez-faire capitalism." And that's only a good thing.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Vast majority of people also do not know what any of these things are at all.
Capitalism - private ownership and operation of property.
Free market - market free from government regulations, absence of income and wealth taxes.
Socialism - redistribution of wealth and income based on the politics of the mob, state control of the individual, partial central planning.
Fascism - redistribution of wealth and income based on the politics of an authoritarian party, state control of the individual, partial central planning.
Communism 1- state controlled means of production, central planning, absence of individual initiative or means of production.
Communism 2 (Marxism) - absence of state control, international socialism based on some ideal 'new consciousness'.
What the millenials are actually rejecting: current mix of fascism and communism 1.
What they are made believe they are rejecting: free market capitalism.
Ignorance may be bliss but eventually it kills you.
You can't handle the truth.
Most people who claim to support capitalism would reject it as defined by Adam Smith (who also coined the word, long before Karl Marx used it). How many capitalism advocates, for example, would be in favour of a 100% inheritance tax (i.e. not allowing any inheritance of wealth)? The problem with modern capitalism is that it cherry picks the parts of the system that benefit the rich and ignores the rest. A system of socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor is not sustainable long term, but that's what we've ended up with.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
In my opinion, capitalism is the only market form that works reasonably effective and ensures progress and freedom, but it absolutely needs to be combined with moderate egalitarianism and effective laws to prevent monopolies and cartels.
People discussing these topics often base their arguments on false dichotomies, although it's kind of obvious that a reasonable middle ground needs to be found.
Why? Well, regarding the first point, we can always discuss how much wealth should be transferred and in which way, but that there should be universal agreement that some transfer is necessary. You can show that to almost anyone by explaining the Gini index and asking that person at which point society becomes unjust - people will only disagree about where the point lies, but nobody will honestly and sincerely defend a country with index 1. Insane differences between highest and lowest incomes like we have them now in most industrialized countries (the gap has widened dramatically everywhere in the Western industrialized world, not just in the US) are not in the interest of anyone, and particularly not in the interest of people whose own microeconomic theory predicts that monetary transfers from the rich to the poor always increase overall value due to the diminishing marginal utility of money. Nobody who has reached a certain amount of wealth actually needs more money - the idea is patently absurd. But that doesn't mean you need to deny that differences in salaries can be an important incentive that needs to be kept. A reasonable middle ground is called for.
Regarding the second point about cartels, many so-called markets nowadays do not have enough participants to be free markets. If there are only two telecom companies or two major chip makers who magically have the same price structure, then this does not constitute a real market but rather a quasi-monopoly, for example, and something has to be done about such situations. If somebody claims that this is not necessary, this tends to be based on a lack of understanding of economics and how and under which conditions markets work (or it is based on hidden egoistic motives and ideology, and these two don't count in a general discussion of how society should look like). Again, too much regulation is obviously bad while not enough regulation will lead to cartels and hinders progress by blocking small, innovative companies from emerging. A reasonable middle ground is needed.
These things are not very complicated and far less controversial than they are often portrayed in the media and by politicians. Most of the fighting and arguing in fact results from the ideologization of these topics by political parties and interest groups.
My 2 cents.
The problem isn't really capitalism in itself but the case that there is too much corruption involved.
Just look at the Wall Street feeding Hillary Clinton - there is a reason why that happens.
Republicans are today pretty weak - more focused on anti-abortion than the real issues that has to be managed. Ever wondered why Trump is so strong? Well, that's because he actually lifts up stuff people really care about, and that's not only the Mexican Wall he promised but a lot of other stuff too. Bernie Sanders is also an example of politicians really trying to change what's going on. Hillary is stronger because she's a woman and backed by Wall Street.
Don't get me wrong, I still think that the whole field is pretty weak this time and holds mostly sandbox level.
- Bernie Sanders - Grumpy old man (Grumpy cat maybe). Not going to win any election unless Hillary gets kicked out on a technicality.
- Hillary Clinton - Probably one of the most corrupt candidates we have seen in a long time.
- Trump - Pretty rude, shaking up the field by alienating everyone and may alienate most people he meets. But may have the force to actually kick out some of the parts of the government that blocks everything.
- Cruz - Too much interested in promoting the stagnant republican agenda.
- Kaisch - Not significant in this election, he's just in to get his name on the lists for the next election.
You won't get the president you need, probably the president you deserve.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Neither perfect capitalism nor perfect communism have been achieved in reality, but attempts at the former have generally had better success than attempts at the latter. A perfect capitalist system requires a little government intervention in the marketplace to enforce transparency, break up monopolies, etc. A perfect communist system requires the government to *be* the marketplace, which turns out to be rather difficult in practice.
Note also that failures of capitalist systems in which corporations control the market are frequently the result of anti-capitalist principles practised by the government. Regulatory capture, for example, in which the regulations on an industry becom controlled by the major players in that industry, depends on the presence of extensive regulation that would not be present in a more purely capitalist system.
Bernie Sanders - Not going to win any election
He polls 7-9 points better than Hilary vs Cruz and Trump.
Hilary only has a margin of 3 points on Cruz. That's just way too close for comfort.
Furthermore, pure capitalism is leading to its own death because progress is undermining some of the basics of capitalist economy, such as scarcity. Capitalism works because money is valuable. Money is valuable because you can buy stuff with it. Stuff is valuable because there's not enough to cover demand. In a society where basic needs are covered essentially for free, money accumulation becomes much less important. In a society where basic and luxury needs are given for essentially free, money accumulation is way less interesting or compelling to anyone. This, in the short term, leads to a society with an inflated artificial demand. Did you not notice the amount of ads you are subjected to? Yeah, that's why. Of course this is only a temporary solution to a structural problem. Market forces will make sure ads are minimized, and this is something which has a marginal cost of zero, so it will eventually be free for all, which is exactly what is happening with adblockers, and adblocker-blocker blockers. After that, demand will collapse and eventually we will move towards an economy of abundance, not of scarcity. I don't know what that will look like, but certainly it won't be capitalism or communism.
My Stack Overflow user
The problem is capitalism doesn't ensure progress and freedom. It might ensure it for some, but for society as a whole, capitalism left to its own devices is inherently dangerous. We only have to look back to the beginning of the industrial revolution for some great examples, and continuing forward where companies move quicker than regulation and end up screwing customers over by abusing their market share, etc.
What we have is corporatism, not capitalism.
I think the better term for this is Mercantilism, which is pretty much what Adam Smith argued against in The Wealth of Nations. The government makes laws & regulations which appear to be for the purpose of protecting consumers, but actually make it more difficult for other actors to enter the market, thereby reducing freedom of economic choices.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Nothing ensures progress and freedom. ;-)
However, I take it as a fact that capitalist societies have lead to more technical progress and freedom of choice than any other type of system. But if you're talking about the current US, I somewhat agree. IMHO, you've got a big problem. Lobbyism and the more or less fixed two party system have subverted your democracy and its proper division of power. I was thinking about capitalism in a slightly saner system, one that has a number of parties with changing coalitions, stricter laws against corruption, a fairer justice system, stronger anti-cartel laws, a better electoral system, ...
Socialism ensure no progress and no freedom. There is absolutely no real life example where socialism has succeeded to promote progress, innovation, increase global wealth and freedom.
Achille Talon
Hop!
I'd love to see those answers. And then ask if they support it.
Apples and oranges. You can have a corporatist system that is perfectly capitalist. You can even have a completely corrupt perfectly capitalist system.
"Free" is not part of the technical definition of capitalism. All it means is individual ownership of industry for profit. In the vernacular, people try to impute all sorts of magical properties to capitalism, giving it some quasi-religious sense of moral rightness and justice, but at the end of the day, it just means that the money goes in some guys' pockets, even if it's just a very few guys.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Adam Smith did not support a 100% inheritance tax. He rejected it, and such a tax would be antithetical to capitalism. He was opposed to any inheritance tax on children who still lived in their father's household when he died (because "[t]hat tax would be cruel and oppressive"); he wrote that inheritance tax on "emancipated" or "forisfamiliated" children -- independent adults with their own means and families, with established households -- would be as sustainable as any other tax. Almost all capitalists you'll find today agree with that.
Cruz might come across as a reasonable choice for many if he wasn't such a raving Jesus freak throwing bibles at everything.
The stagnant political agenda based on religious right-wing rules like anti-abortion (which should never be a political issue).
Another issue is that the republican party want to get rid of the network neutrality regulations put in place by FCC.
It's time to clean up the act and adapt in order to make it possible for any citizen to be prosperous, not just those that have rich parents. The middle class is dying and the republican party isn't even admitting it's a problem.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Sure, that's called socialism. Ultimately, I think capitalism needs to pragmatically move above its limitations. It generates monopolies -> put pressures into the economy to fight back against them.
The trouble is, socialism generates the worst thing ever seen -- single gigantic monopoly. Instead of companies that sometimes loose markets to new players, sometimes face fierce competition, sometimes go belly up because of internal stupidity and get replaced by many other competitors, etc you've got huge monopoly called Socialist Government. It decides what's better for you, but resources are always limited and then suddenly you wake up in USSR with "free healthcare", when free means you have to know right people and bribe them to get real treatment.
Single monopoly of Socialist Government on basic things is much, much worse that monopolies generated by capitalism. I don't understand people who are afraid of monopolies and yet welcome the worst possible monopoly...
Either you believe in property rights or you don't. If you believe in property rights, a 100% inheritance tax (and even a 1%) is totally unacceptable. If you believe in property rights you have the right do decide what to do with your own property, like, for example, giving it to your designed heirs.
You either believe in false dichotomies, or you don't.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Lazy? I know people who are working more than two jobs a week, with 2+ sharing a one bedroom apartment just so they can pay rent and get food on the table.
Lets be real here: The millennials I know work damn hard just to try to survive. It isn't a work ethic or lack of ambition. It is a system that has stopped working for them, and the system blames the millennials for it.
Times are changing, and not for the better. The high paying manufacturing jobs are now in China and Mexico. The jobs for development and IT are being offshored, if not, H-1Bs hired because of the tax benefits and the fact that an H-1B knows he gets deported if fired, so will do anything in his/her power (ethical/unethical) to keep working. On the low end, illegal immigration has slowed down because it is easy to get a H-2B for seasonal work. The only growth sector in the US is corrections officers, and even that is stagnant right now.
I do call bullshit on the taxes. My income tax is a fraction of what it would be under Reagan. In fact, it would be nice if more taxes were collected from corporations before they stash their gains overseas. In times past, companies paid their fair share. Now, the tax burden is on the poorer people who can't afford the biggest loopholes. In fact, I actually pulled tax burdens of people I know and compared them to publically released forms of politicians. Why the hell is someone making minimum wage paying far more taxes than someone making 6-7 digits a year, and paying $0 to Uncle Sam? This isn't "let's soak the rich", but "lets get people to pay their fair share."
tl;dr, I don't blame millennials. Everyone tells them they are fuck-ups, but they work harder than any generation previously, and can barely survive. It is no wonder why they don't like a game they can't win, or even succeed at. Because there isn't any real hope of earning even near what their parents (much less grandparents) did, and for their generation the political system gives them nothing but a middle finger, it is no wonder why seeds from toxic ideologies from Daesh or other extreme sectors are growing fruit, when before 2008, it wouldn't even have been thinkable.
Except that the large drug companies spend only a small fraction of their budgets on R&D, and spend more on marketing. It's small companies and universities that develop half of all new drugs in the US, despite raking in far lower profits.
As for the military, has it ever occurred to you that most of us actually don't want there to be a giant hegemonic power (you) throwing around your military weight in the world?
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
You should read that Wikipedia link you gave, because Mercantilism wasn't what you described it as. The intention (apparent or real) had nothing to do with protecting consumers
You misunderstood what I wrote.I didn't say mercantilism had anything to do with protecting consumers. I'm saying that our current government system passes laws & regulations under the claim of protecting consumers when the reality is that it protects big business by shielding them from competition. McDonald's & Walmart can afford a minimum wage hike, mom & pop corner stores operating on low margins can't. Almost every form of licensing and regulation helps to give the existing players an advantage over those who are considering entering the market.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
"I don't like capitalism!" he typed on his iPhone or Android phone, and pressed send, where it went out wiressly to a router or a 4G connection, and from there into the massive lightning fast backbone of the Internet. He then settled down to play Tom Clancy's World of Assassins Creed on his X-Station 760 PC with the new 980 graphics card, all of this developed over the past 30 years with trillions in private investment.
"Shall we meet at McDonald's for lunch?" came a message. "Nah, how about Cheepotl or whatever it is?" "Sure. Cya soon."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.