While your mom’s situation is obviously her own unique situation, this does make me thing about how cardiac stents and bypass grafts is one of those we fucked up things in medicine. It’s actually a pretty interesting rabbit hole to jump into.
e class="onebox allowlistedgeneric" data-onebox-src="https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2019/11/invasive-heart-treatments-not-always-needed.html">
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A large, international study led by Stanford and New York University found that invasive procedures are no better than medications and lifestyle advice at treating heart disease that's severe but stable.
Cliffs are that stents/bypass are good in people who aren’t stable, and not good in those that are.
I don’t think anyone would deny that lifespans have gradually increased across the board due to technology, medicine, etc.
It always felt important to emphasis childhood mortality when dealing with morons who would say, “Well, two hundred years ago not many people lived past forty.”
I don’t think she was stable. Went to the ER after a heart attack that no one recognized as such for a few days, heart rate was 188 or something, everyone went nuts, day or so later she had one or more stents.
A point here - a little googling tells me (I actually didn’t know this) is that most calculations of “life expectancy” are an estimate of the mean age of death. We all know that mean calculations are usually a poor choice when working with social variables. What is interesting to me is that “age at death” is the rare example of a left skewed distribution in demography. That is, most people actually outlive their life expectancy - and the higher the rate of infant mortality, the larger the percentage that exceed it. Median age at death would be a more representative statistic and I would assume that the chart of it would be somewhat flatter.
Scandinavia isn’t just regulated capitalism anymore than it’s just regulated socialism. Like providing universal child care is not a regulation on capital, it’s a service provided by the state.
The average life expectancy of a human born in 1900 was only ~33 yrs old? I realize it’s a worldwide stat, but that seems way lower than I would have guessed. It is just due to a bunch of infants dying? I guess I’ll buy that.
Edit: OK, just read rest of thread. Looks like it is babies dying.
These impacts are in fact something actuaries measure to stress test stuff like insurance policies. We model the cost impacts on the book of business or the pension plan if, say, cancer is eliminated in 10 years. Its fun!
Some of that may be true. May not. It may be that at least some of those things you mention are not actually generating wealth. I don’t think it’s obvious one way or the other. But I don’t think it’s really been tried and I’m not sure it’s even possible to try. Just because I say the world might be better without one or all of those things you mention, doesn’t mean I think it’ll happen. The world would be better without organized crime too. So make it illegal! But, non-capitalist things do happen sometimes and sometimes they are done as alternatives to landlording, corporations and investment banking and sometimes the results have been really good. The economy of revolutionary Spain has been studied and productivity has been estimated. But, then organized crime moved in. (ie government) It can be hard to get rid of organized crime.
Sure, I’d like the nicest possible rulers if I must have rulers. But, where possible I’d like No Rulers.
The/A main thrust of Wealth of Nations was very anti-financialization. You measure the wealth of a country in corn and specifically not in gold. Spain was dumb and tried to get all the gold. England was smart and grew corn (they called all grains corn at the time) and built stuff (they also killed people who didn’t buy their stuff or tried to sell their own stuff).
They still call all grain corn and it drives me bonkers. I’m currently reading SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by English historian Mary Beard and she keeps writing about issues with the corn and every time I yell at the book “THEY DIDN’T HAVE CORN IN ANCIENT ROME IT’S A NEW WORLD CROP” but she already knows this and doesn’t care and keeps calling it corn. I hate her.
This always annoys me because it’s the socialist equivalent of the “taxation is theft” argument in libertarianism in that it advances a moral argument that only operates if you already buy in to the underlying premises. What your description of capitalism leaves out is the question of what we should produce and how we should produce it, key questions without which the working class “making things” is liable to be pure waste. The advantage of the market is the way these decisions are made in an automated, decentralised fashion. Replacing this with centralised decision-making risks underproduction, overproduction, inefficiency, corruption and the use of the allocation of goods as a tool of political control, all of which have been frequently seen in socialist regimes.
I’m not actually interested in a long debate about whether a command economy can replace the market, I’m just pointing out that if I believed the market could be wholesale replaced by centralised decision-makers I’d already be a socialist, and that going over and over this moral argument about a “parasitic ruling class” etc is thus just an irrelevancy. It’s like pointing out the manifold problems with democracy as a system. The only relevant question is whether you have a better system that can replace it, otherwise enumerating its moral drawbacks is just rhetorical theatre.
Edit: Just thought I’d mention that as a social democrat, I think some goods (healthcare, education, transportation, etc) are best produced via socialist means and some (consumer goods, basically) are best produced via capitalist means, but the point is that any description of political economy which leaves out the decision of what to make and how is useless.
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