It's not superstitious, it's a measure of caring. The superstitious in this case care very strongly about not having black doors, and they vote with their wallets. The other folks do not give a damn either way, and so shops stop painting doors black.
Imagine a small subgroup decides they really, really love black doors. They will pay double price for a black door because they are so hard to find. Shop owner will satisfy that demand or lose that market to a competitor who's willing to step over that line.
Capitalism is an elegant system for resource allocation, really. I wish more people understood it.
> Capitalism is an elegant system for resource allocation, really. I wish more people understood it.
It heavily depends on who you are and the type of capitalism in question. The present implementation in many places seems less than elegant.
For example CEO pay has been skyrocketing compared to worker wages precisely because as companies have more and more resources, they don't have a reasonable means to distribute them fairly, so they just dump the majority of the proceeds on the top management as a lazy hack.
I know it's not perfect, but that really misses the forest for the trees. I for one agree we need to find a way to redistribute that wealth, but what exactly generated all of that ridiculous wealth on the first place?
And people have access to more advanced goods and services than ever at unprecedentedly cheap prices. Again, I agree we need to lift up our lower class right now, but by many metrics, it's better to be impoverished today than to be middle class 50 years ago, and I think people forget that or don't want to admit it.
I am not saying capitalism as such is terrible, or that we should abolish it etc. What I do think we need is to have a more healthy mix of properly regulated capitalism, higher taxation of top earners, closing loopholes and corporations storing cash overseas and healthy social programs, infrastructure development etc.
As for " it's better to be impoverished today than to be middle class 50 years ago", there was certainly less access to all kinds of goods, but there was much more job security as well, (you could work for a single company all your career), there was also more opportunity to own a house at a younger age and move higher up the ladder with lower education and less debt.
What you also need to look at is things like student debt, 50 years ago, higher education was free at the point of use. Now, it puts you into dept at an enormously young age, before you even fully realize what it all means.
Well, if I understand correctly, you are arguing against the phrase, "Capitalism is an elegant system for resource allocation". But I still haven't parsed what your argument actually is, beyond, some people have gotten left behind, which is certainly true.
I also don't understand the mindset that it's somehow somebody else's fault when a person accumulates student debt. Like, I'm sorry you made a poor choice, but nobody physically twisted your arm and made you take this loan. Protecting people from their own bad decisions is not, in my mind, proper regulation of capitalism. It's the infantilization of grown adult citizens. Butt I'm open to having my mind changed.
> some people have gotten left behind, which is certainly true.
Yeah, which probably shouldn't happen in an 'elegant' system, you know?
> I also don't understand the mindset that it's somehow somebody else's fault when a person accumulates student debt. Like, I'm sorry you made a poor choice, but nobody physically twisted your arm and made you take this loan.
That's a grossly simplistic view of the matter. I am saying that if your parents did not have to take out a loan to get higher education, why should you? If capitalism is so elegant why? It should elegantly allocate resources so that it's not necessary.
As for nobody twisting your arm, you're of course right in the literal sense, but many higher paying jobs require candidates to have a higher education, so if you want to get on that economic ladder at all, in many cases you're forced into it by societal expectations. But even if it weren't so, what 'elegant' system makes progress by allowing the next generation to grow within it to obtain less free education than their parents? That doesn't seem like progress to me.
Moreover, student debt is a problem for the broader society as well, because if young people cannot participate in the economy to the same degree as their parents, be ready for some stagnation.
Oh, and as for student debt, maybe it's possible that a human economic system where nobody has to do grunt work, heavy lifting, manual labor, or exist lower on a hierarchy than anybody else is completely unsustainable. In fact, I question why anyone _would_ think that would be sustainable.
Except that's not what am advocating for. Predatory capitalism or sci-fi communism aren't the only two possibilities. Your comment is absolutely irrelevant.
Just because you don't see how something is relevant doesn't mean it actually is irrelevant.
What I'm saying is, we've built a culture and society where it's expected that everyone should have access to higher education, and so families go into debt to achieve it. In reality, our economy will get completely hollowed out if everybody is in debt for higher education, the jobs to support all that debt don't exist, and meanwhile plenty of jobs (trades, manual labor, service) go unfulfilled because nobody wants them. This isn't science fiction, it's what's happening now.
Did it ever occur to you that perhaps more and more people want to get into higher education, because the manual jobs don't pay what they used to?, (wages have not generally kept up with inflation and productivity rises). You know when the higher education option was also free to boot?
Elegant: (of a scientific theory or solution to a problem) pleasingly ingenious and simple.
I'm not implying any of the characteristics you think I am. Capitalism is simple and effective, and IMO beautiful in the way it works at a systemic level.
That doesn't mean nobody gets left behind, not by a long shot. You know what else has been an elegant an unmatched algorithm/system for making life better? Evolution. In all of its brutal beauty, it leaves behind many in its path with premature mortality or failure to reproduce. And yet it's culminated in the human race. It wasn't mysteriously directed by some higher force, it just worked.
Hmm, I see what you're saying, but many would argue that evolution is not particularly elegant, in fact rather crude. However let's go with your assumption anyway. I still don't think present-day capitalism works elegantly, the quite regular boom-bust cyclest are a testament of that.
It "works" because it has to, when it doesn't we do bailouts and then it "works" again etc. in other words anything works if a society is organized in such a way that it doesn't know or contemplate anything else. If you only know one style of music, that music "works" for you, because it sort of has to.
My point is, capitalism as it is today is one that even The Wealth of Nations doesn't agree with.
Now that doesn't mean every aspect of capitalism is bad etc. No, in fact when it works as intended it can indeed be quite elegant. the problem is it often doesn't work as it was envisioned. We therefore need to look at other systems, pull some positive aspects from them, tweak the current capitalist system so that it works more like it was supposed to, that's all am saying.
Some would say it works in spite of our interjections, not because of them. If we didn't bail out bad actors, they'd likely go bankrupt and the system would work around them. I'm not saying there's no pain involved. In fact, there can be quite a bit for individuals. But at the system level, there's a reason capitalism had beaten out any other competing economic system, from the industrial to the information age.
Imagine a small subgroup decides they really, really love black doors. They will pay double price for a black door because they are so hard to find. Shop owner will satisfy that demand or lose that market to a competitor who's willing to step over that line.
Capitalism is an elegant system for resource allocation, really. I wish more people understood it.