Kolya on 6/11/2012 at 09:39

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No, I wasn't trolling. I didn't expect anyone to side with the view offered in this article either. Because it is an outside view and rather simplified which I would attribute to the limited space these columns usually get. And last but not least it deals a lot with the general public opinion here which as I mentioned tends to favour Obama. So it was to be expected that you would have better knowledge and a more differentiated view.
Nevertheless it was on these forums that I heard someone make an interesting distinction about where capitalism works and where it stops to work. The latter being in all things that are of common societal interest, and the example given was energy supply particularly.
Now I don't know why you were freezing in Paris dema, but your figure of 90% of European buildings having no heating made me laugh out loud. Goes to show that clichés work the other way as well. ;)
Does "end of an empire" mean anything? I think that's a pretty common view over here that the US have lost a lot of their financial, political and moral superiority.
Of course no one should live in bunkers, but you would expect a society that can afford such military equipment to have reached some general prosperity in society. These two aspects differing a lot is generally a sure sign of a developing country.
And the thing with the power cables is: In European cities power cables are generally dug underground. I know that isn't the case in other definitely-not-third-world countries either (Tokyo comes to mind). Though I don't really know the reason for this (In Tokyo I at least have an idea with its constant reconstruction, but that isn't the case in NYC). In any case large scale and long time power outages seem to happen a lot more in the US than they do here. Or is this like our supposed lack of heating? ;)

Kolya on 6/11/2012 at 09:54

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Yes, that's part of the same Spiegel issue which deals with the American decline ("The American patient"). What I linked was a short political comment (opinionated by nature) by an outspoken left wing writer and this is a journalistic article stretching over several pages. I'll read it when I get back home. Just wanted to stress the different formats.

hopper on 6/11/2012 at 10:27

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Lol wut? :weird:



Hardly much better than London. My wife spent a semester in Sydney during uni, arriving in July and living in a suburban house with no heating or insulation. Froze her ass off with single-digit temperatures at night. Living without heating in winter is something Europeans don't do.

demagogue on 6/11/2012 at 10:59

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I wanted to give a good lul with some sensational nonsense to counter whatever the point it was responding to (something about people living like third-world hobos in the US). I stole the shaking-like-a-hobo point from a editorial on differences between life in the US & UK... But I thought even when I read it (only a few months ago) that it was already probably dated by more than a few decades (the author was rather old). (Edit: Also I didn't mean they don't have any heating. They don't regularly have "central heating". There's a difference. Well that was the claim of the article I read anyway.) I did live in Geneva during the famous 2003 heatwave, and it was very uncomfortable that many buildings did not have air conditioning. That's my only personal experience. But in fairness it was the biggest heatwave in a Century.

Honestly though every country has its third-world moments. Japanese houses don't have insulation and it's rare to find a dryer in a house. New York had central heating (too much of it), and places routinely blast freezing air in summer, but there were streets where it was downright Middle Eastern, the smells, the looks, the Arabic script on signs...

There are definitely issues with market forces and, e.g., electricity, and dozens of other examples. In another life I actually worked for the congressional guru on energy deregulation, Joe Barton, and even while I was working for him California was having brown-outs and I laughed to myself how obvious the connection seemed between deregulation and the brown-outs. I wouldn't chalk up problems like that to "Capitalism" writ large, but to the way economic forces work generally. Basic principle of reality: market forces do not cope well with public goods -- i.e., goods where you cannot exclude the supply from anyone, and the public shares the benefit, like the electric grid (well electricity isn't really public, since they'll still cut power if you don't pay; but everybody has to share the same grid and it's a basic service like water people can't just not have, so it has a quasi-public aspect to it)... Actually it's more like a natural monopoly, which markets also have a problem with for similar reasons (there's just the one electric grid, and there's a huge entry-barrier for newcomers). Markets will consistently undersupply public goods & natural monopolies if left to themselves, and electricity has aspects of both. So it's natural you'd need some regulation. That doesn't mean "Capitalism the ideology doesn't work on this". It means market forces don't cope well certain things and you need some regulation in the boundaries of a liberal democratic system. If you can build some market mechanisms even in the regulation that work all the better. Putting an ideological spin on it is drumming up shit for no good reason is no good when it's better just to get to the technical issues -- what do market forces do well, what do they not do well, and how do we balance it all to get the most efficient regulation. FFS we're trying to keep people's microwave ovens and television sets working. We don't need some debate about the hegemony of capitalist imperialism just to regulate a power company and get electricity service to the public, or whatever it is.

But thanks for the input anyway. :)

Edit: Also, considering I'm living in an actual developing country now, and working with one of the least developed countries in the world, Burma, the entire trope that life in rich countries could be anything remotely like what I'm living in now is laughable. So it was easy for me to flip off the whole line of thought, which is part of what I was doing. I mean I crap in a hole and pour water into it to make it "flush". I take cold "showers" every morning (I can hardly remember what hot water was like) with water bucketed out from a large sink. I have another bucket from which I do laundry by hand every week. And my bed has a mosquito net over it because people do get malaria around here. I've gotten very familiar with what life is like in a real developing country, and nobody can claim the US or Europe could seriously approach that and pass the not-lmao test.

faetal on 6/11/2012 at 11:15

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The trouble with our recent model of capitalism is the legal obligation to serve shareholders beholden to any traded company. It is literally against the law to not do everything within your power to achieve continual growth, which ignores any kind of natural ceiling and completely smashes any notion that there is an equilibrium between people and business where both do well.

Just look at the increase in Gini coefficient to see why the US is seen as being so divided. The richest country on earth doesn't look after its people. Before Obamacare, medical debt was the leading cause of personal insolvency in the US and an estimated 85% of those people HAD insurance. It remains to be seen if the AHCA will truly fix that, but it's better than nothing.

Capitalism as is, demands that the rate of money going up to the top must increase year on year and the rate trickling back down must decrease.

Cost of living vs. average salary has been on an unfavourable curve since the '70s, but only for people below a certain income bracket.