Podcast on "Techno-Fixes", Scientism and apocalyptic thinking (incl. "singularity")

[auroraglacialis]

The duration of any economic system is limited by the circumstances - political mostly. Modern capitalism (the whole thing about consumerism, infinite growth, fractional reserve banking, etc) plus the lack of taxation and regulation for those who are wealthiest are rather short lived actually. Since the economy as we know it was installed in the 1940ies, it went rather well for about 20-30 years (fueled by cheap oil and coal plus economic imperialism), then it started to level off. Same thing on the other side of the iron curtain. In 1989 then, the "other side" collapsed, leaving people only one option. This led to a short rush and in the 1990ies it was going rather ok again, then in the later 1990ies it was levelling off again. In many aspects it is in decline since the 1970ies. True per-capita income (measured in what one person can afford, not in how many $$ one earns as this is of course subject to inflation) is in decline. The time spent at work is on the rise. In 1970, one man could feed a family with a 39 hours a week job and provide them with a home, he was (at least in Germany) sure that he will get a state-funded pension when he gets 65. They had good health insurance and the kids will have free education up to university level. Now it is the norm for people to work more than 40 hours, 35% of the people work regularly on the weekends, another 33% do so occasionally, usually both parents have to work to provide enough money to rent a home and get low quality food from discounters. The pension age is up and state pension is going down, people are expected to invest money to save up funds for old age. Health insurance is divided in private and state health insurance with private insurances being too expensive for most, but providing a lot more services.
So I think that capitalism seems not to be working all that well anymore, after only 50 years. And clearly it was only working well under conditions of immense growth, when in the 1960ies a lot of factors grew exponentially - population (demographics), energy resources, food. Capitalism cannot deal with a situation that is not strongly growing. Hence it certainly is not possible to keep that. But market based economies existed before capitalism and even the Soviets did have some sort of markets in their economy. Certainly most pre-industrial economic systems had markets in them and many of them had little growth. There were times when people were miserable for sure, but those originated in wars, famines or epidemics, not in economic failure. So while many thigns were unstable, the economy seems to be something that was holding up rather ok in those historic times that lasted for much longer than the 30-50 years of capitalism as we know it.
By the way - interestingly the time capitalism as we know it started to not work well anymore, the 1970ies and 1980ies was also the time when the neoliberal agenda ("free market economy") was pushed, taxes for the wealthy was cut down from 90% in post-war USA to next to nothing in comparison in our days now. So in a way, capitalism does not even work well with "free" markets itself. That is because clearly, the combination of capitalism and "free" (e.g. unregulated) markets is a recipe for a boom-and-bust economy with a minority making huge profits and the rest staying near the bottom. Also it is a recipe for war, bubbles and inefficiency, because these are classical examples of overproduction crisis. It is so funny how well capitalist theories of Marx from over 100 years ago still is valid. The whole housing bubble is a textbook example of an overproduction crisis in which capitalism needs tomake a profit by production, so it produces stuff, tries to keep the price up, but eventually produces too much of that product (houses) to the point where the price cannot be artificially held up and the excess production has to be destroyed. There was no war to destroy these houses and there was no other good reason to destroy them on purpose (e.g. new building regulations), so that crisis was not averted and eventually ended up in "inefficiency", meaning a lot of homeless people and a lot of empty houses.