https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/well-being/
edit: philosophy is so ugly Discourse won’t even give a page preview.
I’ve been reliably informed that these are all essential qualities of human beings.
So don’t you dare tamper with them.
With the exception of a couple years during the Spanish Revolution and maybe early days Israel, present day Germany is maybe the closest thing to industrial socialism the world has ever seen. Certainly it’s a better example than the USSR.
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If Spain breaks up Catalonia would probably qualify. I don’t know much about current day Andalucia but with its anti-Castilian history it would probably be a candidate too.
The gulf in Overton between Europe and the US is obvious when you consider that the ruling party in Germany is (and has been for a long time) Conservative.
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Maybe anticapitalists don’t mistake correlation for causation?
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This arbitrary line going up proves all my points and disproves any of yours. Q.E.D.
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Well, we know the widespread distribution of industrial capitalism correlated with massive gains in life expectancy. We also know that life expectancy in places like China became much higher under capitalism than whatever their non capitalist system was.
Would similar progress be reached under some as yet unknown system, even if such gains were as much knowledge-based (Drs should wash their hands) as material, I guess, but no system tried anywhere in the 20th century, from the Amish to the USSR, seems like a candidate.
The libertarians would probably claim they would have done just as well. Let them produce real world examples.
I think you should compare pre and post-revolution Cuba’s life expectancy if that’s your metric of choice.
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First off, infants are still people.
Beyond that nittery, this still isn’t true and is way over correcting the mistake you identified. People over 90 have tripled since 1980 in the USA for example.
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This talk about life expectancy only has two people who are clearly wrong: the person who says this is all capitalism and the person who says this isn’t capitalism at all. It’s clearly something in between and I don’t really see discussion productive as there’s no clear answer and no way to really test your hypothesis.
My reaction on seeing that graph was just that life expectancy has sure gone up a ton in the last 100 years while the people have suffered under the yoke of liberal capitalist oppression.
A bit more oppression like that and we’ll be stylin.
It’s also a reminder that politics operates at longer scales than the daily outrage, at least i hope.
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Quick aside, in order to help capitalism defenders.
Anti-capitalists are not criticizing the production of goods and services, or the exchange of those goods and services, or competition. Those things exist outside of capitalism. Production, trade, and competition existed before capitalism, and they’ll exist after capitalism. Also, anti-capitalists are not utopians imaging a world without greed, as it too existed before capitalism, and it will exist after capitalism is gone.
Anti-capitalists are against the hierarchical and parasitic relationships that capitalism codifies, some of which are:
+Employer-employee
+Landlord-tenant
+Debt holder-debtor
+Slave owner-slave
Chattel slavery has been abolished. Contrary to the “wisdom” espoused by slave holders during the era of legal chattel slavery, it’s now obvious to everyone that the slaves did not in fact need the slave masters.
The challenge for capitalism defenders, if they actually want to engage with the criticisms of capitalism rather than strawmen, would be explain why it is that a parasitic owning class expropriating and extracting wealth from the working class via the remaining relationships is necessary in order for humanity to benefit from the things that the working class creates.
The goal of capitalist propaganda is to convince us of a similar type of “wisdom” that the slave holders advanced in their day: that the wealth extraction by the owning class is a necessary and positive addition to the equation. Like all rent-seeking behavior, the math actually works out the other way.
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Capitalism + regulation + redistribution can work. There are many countries that do it pretty well. The United States isn’t one of them.
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“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
They’re all complicit with their bullshit jobs and bougie lifestyles.
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Everyone likes to blame the fattest of cats, but the biggest absentee owning rent seeking takers and not makers are just 401kers.
See financial capitalism.
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And home owners. Average home in orange county appreciated like $15/hr last year. (Obviously not “rent seekers” but that’s nice appreciation that can be monitized).
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b-b-but they’re STONKS!11!11!!1!
I think it’s still accurate to say that the bulk of progress with respect to change in average life expectancy is due to the decrease in infant mortality.
Life expectancy in the US before the Civil War was approx. 40 years old. Childhood deaths were cancelling out the people who lived to 60+.
I didn’t think this was a controversial opinion.
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wat