Raphael wrote: ↑Sat Oct 26, 2024 3:33 pm
Ares Land wrote: ↑Sat Oct 26, 2024 3:15 pm
In both our countries, a lot of the economy was planned (or at least regulated) 20 years ago -- in ways you sometimes don't really notice. I think the big push towards deregulation actually started in the late 80s/90s, but in 2004 it may still have been too early to see the consequences.
I don't know how to explain the US though! One thing I don't understand, for instance, is why the Silicon Valley used to be able to turn out good products in the 2000s and 2010s -- Gmail, Google Maps, even Twitter (which, surprising as it may seem, was an interesting place and not a huge troll farm back in the days). Now we get good stuff once and again, but let's admit it, it's mostly drivel.
I'd say capitalism, whatever else you might think about it, can be quite good at providing things we use in daily life
as long as the average capitalist is content with running a business on razor-thin profit margins. That used to be the case, but it no longer is, or at least not to the same extent. More and more, capitalists insist not just on profits, but on
constantly growing profits, or at least constantly growing revenues. This means that they have basically forgotten how to run a saturated market.
If you start out with a business that is profitable, but just barely so, and you want to turn it into a
very profitable business, your only options are either cutting costs, which inevitably hurts quality, or rising prices, which hurts your customers, too. Unless you're an established luxury brand, the only way to run a business that is very, as opposed to barely, profitable is to sell overpriced crap.
(In theory, when businesses do that, they should lose market share to competitors who
don't do that, but in practice, if
all the businesses are run by the same kind of person, with the same personality type and the same set of priorities, this particular corrective mechanism stops working.)