“The market economy gives me and my preferences 200 times the voice and weight of his. If that isn’t the biggest market failure of all, I don’t know what your definition of market failure could possibly be.”
"There’s someone in Bangladesh who would almost surely be a better economics professor than I am and is now behind a water buffalo,"
Poverty and under-develppment are not a result of the market economy. In fact the market economy has been key in fighting poverty and under-development since the industrial revolution.
> There’s someone in Bangladesh who would almost surely be a better economics professor than I am and is now behind a water buffalo,” he told me.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History (1980)
Couldn't you apply this to anyone really? Perhaps people of equal talent of Einstein became drug dealers, or became addicted to gaming, or became plumbers. You can't predict the future, it's like saying well what if X sportstar from the 1920s played now how good would they be? There's just too many factors to take into account.
Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution have produced many astonishing successes. Even Communist China bought into it after looking at the Asian success in Korea and Japan. I don't think many would disagree with this. There are anti-capitalist people but I'd like to hear more about their successful alternative systems.
What's being said, I think, is that we could do even better
It is this same economic growth that has fueled the global rise in quality of life. This article (2016) shows improvement in quality of life over time:
> we managed to create a society that allowed Einstein to exist
What society was that? Germany under the Kaiser was a very mixed bag running the gamut, for sure. Einstein spent a lot of time living in his own mind rather than in the world around him. He found it preferable to leave his native country behind more than once. We don't know which changes to society would give us more like him and which fewer.
> But my problem with what you quote and what I replied to is the anti-capitalist, if not anti-imperialist/anti-western, undercurrent.
I followed a few links here and there on this topic, and somewhere I found DeLong suggesting that he used to be a little closer to the thoughts you defend, something like 'the world keeps looking more like what the lefties said it was than like what I thought it was.' It's a rare person who can update their thoughts based on such observations.
I can't accept that DeLong is anti-capitalist. He identifies the creation of corporate research labs as one of the very important new factors producing the sharp rise in prosperity starting around 1870. Not all who walk their dogs on leashes are anti-dog.
DeLong is an economist, a student of the problems of humanity's production and distribution of goods and services. He sees, in retrospect, a system that has succeeded spectacularly at production but not equally well at distribution, to the point where the distribution problems are producing side-effects and conflicts that are impairing and may ultimately reverse the benefits to production.
> make it happen in their own country and in their own way
Except that one of the other very important new factors producing the sharp rise in prosperity after 1870 was globalization. The advantages of globalization have made self-sufficiency a fool's errand. International cooperation, organic or hierarchical, has too many advantages to be tossed away according to principle.
>My take on this quote is the contrary: it is testament to the success of the Western/capitalist/free market economy system
We are on the verge of ending capitalism, so close to land value taxes and negative interest rates that will prevent the special interests of capital to distort the market and yet at the same we are so far away, scared of ending the endless rat race of outcompeting each other to death amidst a sea of prosperity, because we believe power should breed more power and everyone else should lose power until they end up with nothing.
The solutions are already there, the third way beyond capitalism and communism had already graced the planet and we just need to take a step, it isn't even a big one.
I like that you are talking about market economies because capitalistic market economies are a wash. Some of them do well, others extremely poorly, see Russia.
The spirit of the free market is not a market without regulations that lets existing power structures entrench themselves, yet capitalism is all about entrenching the power of capital and forcing the rest of society to obey. It would be more appropriate to call the market we need a liberated markets by that I mean liberated from special interests, monopolies and other forms of market distorting powers that take wealth without creating new wealth.
But more realistically, there's numerous obscure unknown Americans scattered across the country who would make better leaders than anyone has ever seen. But these leadership positions are so lofty that unless all elements of good fortune are sequentially in place along with some recognized basic qualifications, over a career-defining number of years, no one else aspiring to such a position has very much of a chance to show what a naturally higher performer could accomplish the more there is at stake.
The potentially better leaders who have not benefitted from many, or any at all, of the milestone selective opportunities needed for rapid advancement over a single lifetime, or those who have suffered bad fortune instead, might as well be behind a water buffalo their dang self.
Even if they are regular ordinary Americans, quite comfortable by international standards, with not a foot in the rice paddy. Their chance is still nil.
And I'm talking about the virtual handful that could truly walk right into a top position and outperform the status quo hands down.
When it comes to economics, children having a natural ability to derive equations without training are just as likely to be born into an uneducated family background at the same rate that such a background or culture exists at the time.
Even without education some people whose ancestors have always been behind a water buffalo since ancient history are still around. Among them always have been those whose brain fills with complex concepts more advanced than most PhDs anyway, these can just be different concepts to a good extent.
