2024 LC Thread

Calls for a graph

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https://x.com/bp22/status/1805288666241065472?t=4QLXk2mWop3aMb5AZxkSWw&s=19

Sorry, too late to add that. Could probably have gone with the invention of USA football.

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Or you know, the 14th Amendment, which I guess straddled 1867.

Central governments breaking up markets and imposing egalitarianism sounds like communism.

Fine, call it industrial capitalism. I think most historians would say feudalism, mercantilism, then capitalism. History of capitalism - Wikipedia Brad DeLong’s recent book Slouching Toward Utopia puts the elimination of malthusian economic scarcity at 1870, with massively increased economic growth since then.

It’s hardly a surprise that Marx/Engles were writing around 1840s Manchester, ground zero of industrial capitalism with widespread immiseration, where wages were stagnant and life was brutal. Did this result in a proletariat revolution? No, it lead to political reform and a more managed economy, like every other developed country. The only place communism took hold was in the backward-ass serf-filled Russia after it lost WWI, anarchy reigned, and psychopaths took over. That’s because communism is a false economic theory based on a bad philosophical foundation, Hegel, and it takes a dictatorship to force a pretend economic system on society.

Maybe Charles Darwin and/or Louie Pasteur invented increased life expectancy in 1859?

https://x.com/jmhorp/status/1704969287637795242?t=Hlk2L-Ae-jW9b17GbZAEGw&s=19

It was scientific and technological changes which snowballed and were not the result of one particular method of banking or finance or ownership of the means of production. It wasn’t markets. It wasn’t finance. It wasn’t banking. If it was “industrial capitalism”, it was the industrial part, which was a long list of inventions which rapidly built upon each other and were motivated and financed in a variety of ways, but were largely an inevitable chain of breakthroughs.

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Lol. Maybe it wasn’t the Russian Reds, but the Cincinnati Reds. They started about that time too.

Russia was on the allied side in WW1 (WW2 also)

Life expectancy increased by 35 years in Russia between 1915 and 1965.

That accounts for about 60% of spending today. People don’t save anywhere near 40%. Where’s the rest? Largely taxes, I reckon.

And slavery. Via the triangle trade.

Is slavery capitalism?

Plenty of profit motive baby!

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It entered the 20th century. It’s easy to catch up when you trade natural resources for goods made by more advanced societies.

The Reds somehow managed to lose the war despite being on the winning side.

Well in the following civil war there were quiet few european troops involved to support the “Whites” but in the end the Bolsheviks won.

I guess they somehow managed to win WWII despite starting out as allies of the Nazis too. I guess the moral is that communists are tricky fellows.

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I’ve been waiting to see how you would even attempt to answer the posts addressed to you above, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it was easier to ignore them.

Fwiw, supporting profit motive in the pharma industry is monstrously evil. I get that you’ve been primed to “believe in your company”, as you said about your pharma sales reps a couple days ago, but you are part of the tobacco industry my friend.