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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.
Where than can take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week.
But all the decision of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting.
By a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs,-- but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more--
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.
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.
maybe you need to visit the socialist countries of norway, finland, sweden, germany, netherlands ...
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.
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.
Okay, so they take a trip to Eastern Europe. On the way they go through Western Europe, and come back convinced even more that they're being fed a rotten load by their predecessors.
Questions they might have:
Why are we expected to take on so much debt for college?
Why am I expected to fund my own retirement when my predecessor got a defined benefits package that I'm paying for?
Why is healthcare so expensive?
Why can't companies show a little bit of loyalty to us?
etc...
I don't read AC A human right
get your head out of your ass. capitalism is the United States of America right now. all the government corruption in the name of money, that's capitalism. letting people die because it's cheaper to pay a few dozen grieving families than a 50 cents more for a switch, that's capitalism. fucking over the global economy so that you can get rich while the world burns, that's capitalism. capitalism is greed and corruption.
your imaginary world where psychopaths wouldn't kill you then sell your children into slavery does not exist.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
How do you double the value of a Trabant? Fill the gas tank!
Socialism is powerful, powerful stuff. So powerful it managed to spread laziness, poverty, and hideously poor engineering in a country populated entirely by Germans.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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
If you're going to quote Marx, I'd recommend getting right to the end of the books. In a Marx-style communist society, there is very little government because everything is owned locally by the workers. Some of the earliest purges in the Soviet Union were of people who subscribed to Marx's vision and opposed the trend towards central control that people like Stalin were pushing.
Oh, and if you're going to argue 'socialism is scary because Marx viewed it as a step on the road to communism' then you might try going back a couple of chapters and remembering that Marx also argued that capitalism was a step on the same road, in between an agrarian economy and socialism.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
They were taught that what America has today is capitalism. What they see today makes them sick, and rightly so. If you don't want capitalism flushed, you better help it clean up it's act.
This comment is just the high point of a string of unreflective comments in this thread.
Marx's communism is about empowering the disenfranchised, not making them powerless to resist. While we can argue (and many do) about how useful his ideas actually are, pithy jokes and total misrepresentations don't help us find out what's wrong. In the US, the problem is certainly not communism.
This thread is chock full of people scorning millenials, while ignoring the true and actual problems that exist in our society. It's people who only think in sports teams instead of political discourse: "Go to Eastern Europe to see what socialism does" as if Eastern Europe today is not a product of 25 years of capitalism far less regulated than in the US. "If anything bad is happening, it's not capitalism", the same argument can be made for communism. And while government may create a share of problems, free markets tend to monopolies and rip offs just fine without government intervention. Market failure is part of the vocabulary of capitalist economists for a reason...
Have you ever lived of "government cheese" ? It's not much, you often have to be very very creative to survive on it.
You don't always get it neither: you're not handicapped enough, you have inherited 1/16 of family property (which you can't sell) or have a significant other with a high paying fulltime job.
And if you do finally manage to get it, it binds you to another exhausting set of rules and restrictions.
For me it was eventually just easier to get a job than to plough through all the bureaucracy and this is in socialist paradise (Belgium).
But there are people out there who are discarded by the social system and have to "mooch" of their relatives because
their papers don't have the right stamps or they can't make heads or tails of this always-changing process.
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.
Millennials just expected the same thing that their parents and grand-parents and great-grand-parents had. Consider that their parents were probably doing well in the 80s when they were kids. House prices were booming, the move towards taking on massive debts to buy stuff was in full swing and a lot of people did really well for themselves. My own parents bought a house which more than doubled in value in two years.
Of course it couldn't last. Things started going wrong in the 90s and came to a head in 2008. By then the previous generation had already set themselves up with assets and wealth, and the millennials took the brunt of it. The education that their parents got for free or at low cost is now going to put them in massive, long term debt. Unpaid internships are common, and wages are low. Property prices are insane and now everyone is talking about controls on debt and public spending and polluting because it was always a bad idea, but of course they aren't going to hand back any of the benefits they got out of it during the good times.
Millennials are the first generation in nearly a century to be economically worse off than their parents. Unlike the great depression that affected most people, this time the boomers have managed to largely protect themselves. It's no wonder there is a feeling of resentment.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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, ...
Which is of course horseshit, the countries with the highest standards of living and least inequality are the socialist northern European ones.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
How much experience do you have in Eastern Europe?
I am an American, slightly older than a millennial, but also not a Gen-Xer, and I went to Eastern Europe, and I've stayed there (going on years 8 now).
I earn a 1/3 of what I earned in the US for a similar programming job.
Jobs are plentiful, and there's more demand for developers than there are available people.
I don't need a car, and unlike the cities in the US where you can get away without a car, I'm not paying a premium to live there.
When I need to use a taxi, I rarely spend more than $15 and that's for a 30-40 minute ride to the airport.
If I'm just going around town, it's usually between $2 - $8.
When I rented I paid about $500 month for an apartment in the city center + about $100 for utilities and internet (120 Mb/s).
Now that I own my own property with the money I saved on my Eastern European wages, I spend about $200 a month on taxes and utilities.
My monthly grocery bill for 2 people is between $150 - $200, and we eat well. Because my wife prefers it we get mostly organic veggies and fruits, and high quality cuts of meat. If we wanted to we could cut this bill between 1/4 and 1/2 if we didn't shop at the fancy markets.
If we go out to a restaurant in the touristy part of town that caters to expats, we're hard pressed to spend more than $20 a person on dinner and drinks.
My tax rate is about the same as it was in the US (24.5%).
I have both "free" healthcare and private health insurance (I pay less than $50/month pre-tax for that),
When I need to go to a doctor, I just show them my ID card, I've never had to pay money for anything, not even a deductible (this includes 1 time that I had to have for surgery). Normally I can see the doctor the next day, at most 3 days (and it's a bit longer for me, as i need an English speaking doctor, as I'm not fluent enough for them to allow me to visit a native speaker, to make sure there are no misunderstandings).
The time I needed surgery it took 3 weeks total to arrange.
When my kids are ready for university, it'll be free.
My wife decided to change careers and went back for another Master's degree at the best university in the country for free, Actually better than that, since she was doing very well, she earned a stipend after her first year, and we also received a number of discounts on things for her being a student.
After all of my bills are paid, my left over is 2 - 4 times as much as I was able to save in the US, despite making a lot more money.
So I'm not sure if a visit to Eastern Europe will have quite the impact on their thoughts about how things in the US are going as you think it will.
I can't blame them either.
I think the only reasonable system possible is one which has private ownership, free and competitive enterprise, and a government providing basic services, ensuring security and regulation, and promoting fairness and equality by e.g. making sure everyone has access to health care and education.
If this is 'capitalism', I'll take it. You can also call it the Rhineland model or social market economics, or whatever you want. I want it :)
What we're seeing now is: .5% per annum), while average income increased by 100%. In other words: the economic growth since the seventies has almost entirely gone to the above-median earners: the top 1% share of income jumped from 10% in the seventies to over 20% now, with a large part of this increase going to the top 0.1% (i.e., not us).
- wage share of income falling relative to capital's share [1]
- real median income stagnant for the past 20 years even though real average income has increased by 25% [2]. Over 50 years median income increased by 25% (not even
- governments are unable to provide basic services because the rich don't pay their fair share of tax [4]
- governments are unable to provide basic services because they are unable to reform entitlement/welfare systems which are in fact transferring money from the relatively poor young to the relatively well-off old [5]
- markets aren't acutally well regulated, especially in the US, and too many industries have (near-)monopolies, causing profits to be historically way too high [6]
In Europe, 'capitalism' means that old people have either permanent contracts with generous benefits, or are already enjoying their equally generous retirement which they entered between 55 and 65. Young people have temporary contracts at stagnant wages, are unable to buy a house because of (1) inflated prices due to government meddling (green belts, mortgage interest deductability); (2) they don't have a permanent contract; and (3) new lending regulations means banks are a lot more stingy than even 10 years ago; and will not retire before 67 on a defined contribution scheme, which is pretty bad news especially given the essentially zero interest rates and government bond yields. In the US (and increasingly the UK), added to this is a nice pile of student debt. If I were young(er), I'm not sure I would think this is such a good bargain...
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
2) https://research.stlouisfed.or...
3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
5) http://www.economist.com/news/...
5) http://www.economist.com/news/...
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.