> when it was really capitalism infected by the shareholder-theory-of-value and fictionalization pursued by really smart and rational people focused on their personal self-interest.
That's one factor, sure. Another factor is the widespread rejection of mainstream science and consensus reality in favor of conspiracy theories that feed into populism and authoritarianism.
For all of capitalism's faults, you can at least have an educated society with technological and scientific progress under it. You can't have any of that when people who don't believe germs or real or who do believe wildfires are caused by Jewish space lasers are allowed anywhere near positions of power. When belief in imaginary satanic pedophile cults swing elections but actual pedophiles face no consequences. It doesn't seem entirely wrong to me.
>> when it was really capitalism infected by the shareholder-theory-of-value and fictionalization pursued by really smart and rational people focused on their personal self-interest.
> That's one factor, sure. Another factor is the widespread rejection of mainstream science and consensus reality in favor of conspiracy theories that feed into populism and authoritarianism.
I think you (and Sagan) are getting the causality backwards. Unrestrained capitalism doesn't serve people, it serves money. "Widespread rejection of mainstream science and consensus reality in favor of conspiracy theories that feed into populism and authoritarianism" is a reaction to an economic system that doesn't serve the common person and is very resistant to change.
Can you explain what it means for capitalism to "serve money"? That sounds exactly backwards to me; money serves capitalism, that is, it is the breath expelled when people speak the language of prices to understand each others' values.
I think it's also worth dilating on this notion of "unrestrained capitalism". Capitalism is after all a product of restraints, namely the enforcement of property, contracts, and the validity of money.
> Can you explain what it means for capitalism to "serve money"? That sounds exactly backwards to me; money serves capitalism, that is, it is the breath expelled when people speak the language of prices to understand each others' values.
Capitalism doesn't work to satisfy the wants and needs of the people in a society, generally. It works to satisfy the wants and needs of the people who have money, in proportion to the amount of money they have. If you don't have money but need something, Capitalism says "kindly FOAD." If you desperately need something, but a rich guy kinda-sorta wants it, rich guy gets it if he's willing to pay more.
So as inequality increases and wealth gets concentrated, a capitalist ceremony (without more restraints that we have) will increasingly neglect the needs of a large fraction of the people in society.
A lot of capitalism apologists assert capitalism is there to meet people's needs, generally (usually just lazily generalizing from US vs. USSR circa 1980), but that's only true under certain conditions which are not guaranteed. That goal is not part of its programming.
> If you desperately need something, but a rich guy kinda-sorta wants it, rich guy gets it if he's willing to pay more.
I share this concern about access to scarce goods, though I'm not sure what these scarcity catastrophes look like in practice. To generalize your example, if there is some scarce resource, at most some number N of the wealthiest demanders (which can include corporations such as unions or communes, not just individuals) can access it. I certainly agree that this is a failing of a capitalism, but it's not clear to me how you would propose adjusting it's tenets to recover these drawbacks, and at what additional cost. Like, if the issue is we want to ensure everyone can get what they need to survive, I imagine you can't allow buyers and sellers to negotiate prices, there has to be some neutral third party to do this. And if this modification to prices disincentivizes extraction, production, or delivery of these goods how you would force people to do those jobs.
I hope this doesn't sound like a strawman, I'm just honestly unclear on what should replace what are seemingly basic and natural rights, namely property, physical autonomy, contracts, whatever. I won't pretend that in e.g. the US these rights haven't been abridged whilst the sky remains suspended above us, but my imagination fails me on the question what it looks like when we shave away more of those rights, versus restoring them. Though I'd also imagine that your policy prescriptions would probably include both abridgements and restorations of these rights, so don't let me speak for you.
> A lot of capitalism apologists assert capitalism is there to meet people's needs,
An apologist here. "Capitalism" is a legion - a near continuum of systems - some of them can meet people's needs quite well.
> but that's only true under certain conditions which are not guaranteed. That goal is not part of its programming.
It's not an intrinsic part of its popular tradition but there's noting preventing us from adding it to the program in some sensible manner. The lack of guarantees isn't mandatory either, such can be added within the framework of capitalism.
That's one factor, sure. Another factor is the widespread rejection of mainstream science and consensus reality in favor of conspiracy theories that feed into populism and authoritarianism.
For all of capitalism's faults, you can at least have an educated society with technological and scientific progress under it. You can't have any of that when people who don't believe germs or real or who do believe wildfires are caused by Jewish space lasers are allowed anywhere near positions of power. When belief in imaginary satanic pedophile cults swing elections but actual pedophiles face no consequences. It doesn't seem entirely wrong to me.