You guys do spout some drivel.

Firstly, blaming an elected politician for creating a new culture materialism is utter tosh. Thatcher was elected because people already had the materialist impulse.

Big business doesn't have to do anything to encourage this impulse, other than supply new stuff. Apple is the biggest business, because it does this best. What proportion of the people on this forum who whinge about consumerism are also purchasers of Apple's consumer electronics?

Your sense of historical proportion is also lacking. Consumerism started with mass production, and the advertising of products and brands direct to consumers. It didn't start with TV after the war, or Walkmans in 1981, it started like this

We didn't import consumerism from America, we taught them how to do it.

Capitalism hasn't delivered 60 years of growth, it has delivered around 250. Nobody promised centuries of uninterrupted growth, you get a few bad years here and there. Try to retain some perspective though; the fact that you have free time to sit in front of a computer and have your little existential crises tells us not that we have gained nothing from capitalism, it shows how much progress we have made. Without the benefits that capitalism delivered, you would be a subsistence farmer, the only source of true wealth would be land, an infrastructure like the internet couldn't be built or maintained, and you would have no leisure time anyway.

Furthermore, before we had joint stock companies and exchanges; capital investment, freeing up labour from agriculture and menial manufacturing roles; and an investment infrastructure that could roll out giant engineering projects, you know, all those things that you guys are so annoyed to have, we had riots. We also had inflation, and we had economic cycles with regular recessions, and then the poor couldn't eat. One important thing has changed though, the British poor no longer die every time there is a recession.

You guys talk as if capitalism is the genesis of these evils, you couldn't be more wrong.

I'm with many of the Chief Inspectors on CCTV, it's pretty useless in the grand scheme of things. Sure it may help with some convictions but you could prevent more crime by using all of that money on extra Police on the beat.

While Michael Moore has a very large chip on his shoulder, and a huge axe to grind, I would suggest anyone who thinks capitalism is entirely wholesome really ought to watch his film "Capitalism: A Love Story".

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1232207/

No - they voted for the Tories because Callaghan lost a cote of no confidence in the Houses of Parliament, and the Tories had got the idea that they could use advertising agencies to help them win. Labour were not thinking that way.

Thatcher did import a form of economics which, until then, was only being used in Southern American countries. She based the economy on Milton Friedman’s theories - which ensured that there was little or no regulation, allowing the market to self-regulate. The UK was the first democracy to adopt his economic theories http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman

It’s worth noting now that Thatcher and successive governments have pretty much stuck to this model, and the light regulatory touch has done little to help. If your target is to get people rich by ensuring economic growth and the accumulation of cash, then it’s kind of working. However, crank back to the 1940s and 1950s, and you will find a richer society. People helped each other more, there was less chasing after consumer goods. I’m not saying it was all nice and wonderful, because it wasn’t, but speak to someone who lived in those times, and you’ll hear of a closer-knit society.

It is well worth reading The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. It will give you a bit of background and some things to think about.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Shock-Doctrine- ... 707&sr=1-1

Available to view on-line, for those of the "Now Generation" who can't wait: http://dai.ly/d8WIi9

To be honest, TL;DW

Yes but deregulation has already crashed our economy once, yet there is not even a hint of re-regulation. I fully expect the euro crisis to crash our banks again within a year or two and those free banks shares the government were thinking of giving you will be worthless. As for wealth since 2003 the average person has not had a real wage increase so all the gains from the economy have gone to the top earners. That is why our income disparity is growing so much. Most people have only got richer because there was a huge property bubble. In that case it hardly takes investment genius to become richer.

Really? There was no wider malaise with a left wing government unable to reach a valid compromise with eternally angry unions involved? No years of trying to manage a troubled economy with a doomed system of pay restraint?

It's not that unusual that Britain in particular would take to Friedman, his ideology fits right in with Britains classic free trading model, and our most influential thinkers on both economics (Adam Smith) and social ills of the nanny state (JS Mill).

I'm not here to defend Thatcher's policies, if she were not senile I'm sure she would be first to agree that deregulation has been pushed too far. But a quick look at Greece and Italy will show that over-regulation leading to closed shop professions can go too far as well.

Kind of? It's worked already. As a society we have amassed such riches that continuing to aim solely to amass more can only be vulgar. We are so rich that the health problems associated with poverty all relate to excessive consumption of something, everyone has healthcare, we have access to goods and services that collectively we can afford way in excess of any possible need. Capitalism gave us all that. It did not give us greed, selfishness and an amoral willingness to hoard shiny crap while willfully ignoring the plight of those abroad who cannot even eat. We brought that to the table for ourselves and it is a mistake to project them onto an impersonal economic model.

The achievement of capitalism was that it provided resources enabling us to redeploy labour from subsistence farming to manufacturing. Then it provided capital to develop new processes to make manufacturing less labour intensive, and infrastructure to make transport of goods less labour intensive. All the while it provided the means for us to use less people in the pursuit of these basic essentials, so that more people could move into professions that improve quality of life (doctors, teachers, pop singers, footballers, whatever).

The continuing advancement of capitalist society cannot be about trivial consumption, we already overconsume. It's about having fewer and fewer among us doing menial stuff like making things or growing food. Archeologists, astronauts, social workers, chick lit authors, tv producers and ballet dancers are its proper output.

Yeah, little bit of idealised nostalgia going on there. If these communities were so awesome, how did Thatcher manage to turn them all into heartless rapacious consumer zombies? The answer is that they weren't, and she didn't. People now have access to more goods and services, some of that comes through opening up credit markets, but more of it comes via economic growth; better manufacturing; and the development of new products - three closely related things.

The history of social change is much too nuanced to be described by economics. Countless other factors are involved; weighing the importance of changing communications technology, wars, novels, plays movies, works of history philosophy and political analysis against declining industries whose very decline was influenced by those and other factors requires massive multi-disciplinary effort.

Speak to someone who was a single mother, or gay in those times, and you'll hear of a judgmental, often nasty society. Speak to someone who lived through the blitz and you'll hear about crowds looting bombed out houses. Read a newspaper from the 50s and you'll see lots of commentary about how society has already fallen apart, and how much better it was in the Edwardian era when people knew their place. And let's not forget that before there was "Labour's not working" (1979?), there was "If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour." (1964)

Intriguing, I saw the list of adoring reviews, and my first thought was: I wonder actual economists said about it.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexch ... wn_roundup
Maybe I'll get round to reading it one day, but don't expect a Damascene conversion. If the background is packed with sample bias and strategic omission, I don't really need her thinking points.

Well [LIFTED] me. A conversation. Here. About stuff that actually matters.

Mr Waffle, I find myself wanting to tip my hat to you, sir. I'm still digesting what you've said, but I feel the need to ask what you're presently doing with your life and why I'm not reading your book right now?

Ok, watching it now, let's see what we get.

I have to part of your premise though, I never said capitalism is wholesome, it's a system and therefore what you get out depends entirely upon what you put in. Communism is no doubt a very nice idea, but when they tried it a couple of times they found they needed tyranny to persuade people to join in, so tyranny became the primary output. If you have greed as the primary input of capitalism (which seems to be Moore's claim at this stage of the movie) then greed is going to effect the output. This greed though is not inflicted on us by the capitalism, rather it reflects from us into it.

Early on, I have to say hiss comments about the difference between American car makes and their counterparts are predicated too much on an obsession with the middle class, and his conclusion (that they went bust because they laid off too many assembley line workers) is incoherent gibberish. Bad start for mister Moore.

Oooh, now I'm asked to believe that capitalism caused a boy to be sent to prison for throwing a small piece of meat at the dinner table., and that this represents a victory for capitalism. No effort is made to explain why capitalism wants children imprisoned for no reason, nor is there any regard to the obvious difference between the needs of capitalism, and those of a single corrupt capitalist. I've made it to 34 minutes, I can't see myself sticking through 2 hours of this.

39 minutes. He's talking about the effect on airline pilots, and again, I can see gross errors in his analysis. Worldwide the airline industry makes tragically low profits, the reasons for this are well known, and they are not a failing of capitalism, but of politics. The airline industry has needed to consolidate for decades, but governments don't want their flag carriers to get swallowed up by foreign competitors, so they use subsidies to prop up failing airlines - mostly these are in the form of monopolies over certain routes or airports. This causes huge overcapacity, reduced capital to invest in newer plant, and after a while the truly abysmal stinkers like Alitalia still need bailing out.

Ooh, next up. A company has a life insurance policy on their employees. A document says that their policies are based on an attrition rate 50% higher than the actual and uses the words "this problem". Moore of course decides this means they want their staff to die faster. Anyone with actual intelligence would see that the problem is that they are paying too high a premium. It is insane to take someone seriously when they rail against capitalism as if they are some kind of expert, but show no understanding of what insurance is (spreading out risk). Then he asks "which companies are profiting from these insurance policies?" The sheer scale of his analytic failures here is incomprehensible. He's not even considering whether the company views the employee as a valuable asset (something that should be insured), he's just declaring that they view him as expendable meat to be consumed.

Now, having just been shown a $1.5m dollar policy pay out to a bank who lost a middle aged employee, we are informed that Wal-Mart had a payout for a 26 year old. This is the most valuable kind, because companies love it when we die young. How much was the payout? $0.081 million.Then it turns out that the bank actually insured the guy for $5m. Great maths mister Moore. What did the company do to help this woman die in the full bloom of her youth? Time to move on, we don't need to answer that question.

The bit where they try to explain the derivatives market is quite amusing, but that's no different to what you would get if somebody was put on the spot and told to explain the search for the Higgs boson to him. So Michael steps in, the Higgs boson is nothing more than a bet, and bets are bad. All investments are a bet, including the ones made by the democratic engineering company. So to remain consistent, he is required to declare those immoral too. The insinuation that being complicated is proof of badness is lazy inverse snobbery.

Now I'm on to the "scam to swindle people out of their homes". Apparently if I lend you money secured against your house, and you fail to pay it back, I have swindled you when I take the collateral instead. Debtors have no responsibility for their decisions. We must therefore replace capitalism with something entirely consequence free. It's a shame that the illiterate can be given access to loans they can't possibly afford, and scandalous to do so without explaining the full costs. But this failure of regulation is again political, not inherent to any system. It is depressing that Obama has fought for a new agency to govern consumer credit, but timidly allowed Congress to withhold the necessary funding for it to do the job, this is how American politics often works though.

I think half of this film is all I'm sitting through. The lesson to be learned here is about how to analyse properly and honestly. Moore lacks this skill. Capitalism isn't a moral thing, nor a political one, it is a means of moving resources around. How we use capitalism is the moral and political question. We've been limiting the right of companies to exploit people for centuries through health and safety laws, abolishing slavery and child labour, and countless other things. If the mood of the people is to create new restrictions, then that's fine, this is why we have voting. But it is advisable to retain a sense of the differentiation between the system and its uses, otherwise we won't see the full benefit of these actions. There are after all, still things we want capitalism to do for us, as well as things we want it to stop doing to us.

Lol, When lighting the blue touch paper on my ego, it is wise to retreat to a safe distance.

But next year I am planning to finally pen my First Great Novel. The murder victim is a spartist leftie parody of myself, and for the sake of intellectual vanity I will take as my great theme the tension between our concepts of justice, free will and fairness. My book will be morally hazardous to all who read it, and may have absolutely no plot (or publisher) at all.

I apologise for the mega-posts, but we are touching on subjects that have long vexed me

I did think it might seem a little sycophantic, but whilst I want to argue some of what you say (and were it not my one and only day off and I wasn't super relaxed, I might) I find your central argument incredibly persuasive.



This strikes a massive chord with me and I therefore ask this:

If all systems are dependant for their outcome, on the people who implement them (which seems reasonable to me for now), should we attempt to modify the nature of people implementing capitalism, OR modify the system in place to better suit the people?

It's people that need modifying. There is no perfect society without perfect subjects. Eugenics FTW.

I don't have a coherent riposte to your review of Moore's film. I don't know enough to even begin. Still, at least you began to watch, and while I didn't think it would change your mind at all, I thank you for that.

I'm not knowledgeable enough to really continue in this discussion. I can see something has gone terribly wrong with western society, but the answers as to what has caused it are not necessarily as clear cut as I, or many politicians I'd wager, would like. I suppose the level of how well something is working depends to a great deal on where you are in relation to it.

I think it applies to all societies in different ways.

We're at the start of an interim stage, we're not a 'civilised' species yet. We can't go from an aggressive ape like creature to a well rounded being in such a short period of evolution.

The only thing I can see doing that is an understanding of the larger universal picture that puts our little lives in perspective and collective goals that we wish to attain as a species.

That's not going to happen for a long time, if ever. I can't ever see it happening while the world is ruled by money and religion.

Nonsense. What happened to Socratic reasoning? Questions, and the ability to think, are all we need. I posed a question to which JJ had a delightfully short answer. Anybody else?