The simple math of the Yard-Sale Model shows that if everybody started out with equal money in a fair economy, the outcome tends toward one person holding all of the money. The cool graphical simulations on this page demonstrate why.
I’ll share this here - my explanation of why capitalism inevitably leads to fascism
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I’m afraid that it is absolutely inevitable - let me explain why
Basically, the issue with capitalism is that the more wealth you have, the easier it is for you to make more money. And since money can be used to buy goods, services and influence, there is always a way to use money to gain more political and social power. With that political and social power, you can push society and the legal system in the direction you want to go. So you can use your wealth to gain power, and then you can use your power to change laws and society so that you can make even more wealth and power. It’s a positive feedback loop.
Obviously, though, if the billionaires and ruling class are accumulating more and more of our society’s wealth, that inevitably means that there’s less for everyone else to go around - therefore, working class people feel poorer and poorer. Meanwhile, the economy is going absolutely great for rich people, so inflation continues to go up - everything gets more expensive, but wages don’t increase. The wealthy just keep more and more of the wealth for themselves. To accumulate more and more wealth, they change the laws so that they can avoid paying taxes, so public services collapse. Politicians are lobbied to ensure that public funds are diverted away from where it is most needed - housing, healthcare, transportation, infrastructure - and instead into industries where their class interests most benefit from it, such as weapons manufacturing and extractive industries such as fossil fuels and mining.
The working class are bound to notice that their lives are getting shittier and shittier, and if that situation is left unchecked, the working class would realize that the ruling class are fucking them over, rise up, and overthrow their rulers. Obviously, the ruling class need to do something about this, but there’s no solution that the ruling class can offer. They’re causing all of the problems, to fix them they’d have to give up some of their wealth and power - and that’s not something they’re going to do. So they need to find someone else to blame the problems we have in society on. Unfortunately, though, no matter who they blame the problems on, and no matter what they do to “fix” it, the issue will continue to persist, because the material conditions underlying the issues are, very intentionally, never addressed.
So, the conundrum returns: The ruling class said that minority A caused all of the problems, minority A is persecuted and oppressed, but society doesn’t actually get any better. Either the problem wasn’t minority A, or minority A just hasn’t been oppressed enough yet. So the ruling class can either escalate the oppression, or they can shift the focus to another minority group. The division continues to escalate in terms of how vitriolic and extreme it is, and it also continues to divide the working class into smaller and smaller groups.
To get the working class to buy into this hateful message, they need to take advantage of our worst instincts, and one of those instincts is the in-group bias. The majority are manipulated into being suspicious, then intolerant, then hateful, then violent, then genocidal, towards whatever the targeted minority of the day is. Anything that can be used to divide the working class - sexuality, nationality, immigration status, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender identity, age, all of these will be used as wedges to keep the working class split apart and not working together, because they know that if the working class actually unite against them, they are completely and truly fucked.
That’s exactly how fascism manifests. It’s because it’s possible for people to accumulate power through wealth. This is why capitalism must be abolished. If we do not abolish capitalism, fascism will always return. It’s just a matter of time.
Theft is the reason for wealth inequality.
This article is unbelievably stupid and completely divorced from reality.
I assume that you mean theft of the surplus value of labor by capital owners? If so, that’s exactly what the Yard Sale Model captures: One party to every transaction ‘wins’ and one ‘loses’.
Take a factory as an example. The wealthy owners can afford to gamble on paying less than the full value of labor as wages because they’ll survive if widgets don’t get made and they can’t buy a second yacht. The workers can’t afford to gamble on holding out for better pay, because it could mean their families starving in the street. Thus, they’re forced to give up the surplus value of their labor in order to survive.
The YSM just aims to simplify complex, real-world situations like this into a clean mathematical construct that’s easy to use for computer simulations.
I don’t think this is as good a model as you or the oop seem to think it is. Nobody is under the impression that you can make even by buying and selling random things. And gambling your money against other people isn’t something people can afford to do unless they already have money to live comfortably. Real people have fixed needs they have to buy and usually a fixed value they can create to make money.
I don’t think a model that doesn’t share any similarities with the system can be used to prove that inequality is baked into the system. I don’t mean that it isn’t, but I couldn’t in good conscience claim so based on this alone. Please keep your standards for evidence high yall.
Also the article completely misses the reason why wealth accumulates in the model. It has nothing to do with compound ratios being confusing or the amount one can afford to wager. This is simply a normal distribution with flipped axes and a bottom cap of 0. Inequality arises even if you change the game so that richer people give more when they lose and receive less when they win.
If it’s not a good model, then you are welcome to pick it apart. However, the study that applied it for the 2017 paper in Scientific American found that it matches observed data about our economy stunningly well when applied.
As the author of that study was quoted here saying, the simple Yard Sale Model here can’t begin to explain a complex economy, but its function is like an X-ray to cut through the complexity to see the bones of the thing.
In any case, we know empirically that Trickle Up is the actual effect of the capitalist system. If there’s a model that can explain the mechanism more accurately, I’d be happy to hear it.
Scientific American isn’t an academic journal and there’s no paper about this published in 2017. There’s a Scientific American article about it written in 2019 though. I think you’re referring to the part in the article that says it matched real world data remarkably after they modified it in 2017.
I don’t think this model is an x-ray that reveals the bones of the system, as its premise about how it works is plainly inaccurate. Maybe scientists can gain actual insight by studying it further but I don’t think drawing conclusions such as the title on social media is healthy.
At best the model teaches why gambling is a bad idea even if the chances are perfectly even. At worst someone looks at this and decides all anti capitalist evidence must be flimsy
Edit: Nvm found the paper you were talking about. Once again, it is based on this but it is not this. Either way it doesn’t conclude that since it is similar it must be the underlying reason.
Yes, I misrembered the year. And while Scientific American is not a journal, at least the article explained the work in some depth and provided evidence. Here, you’ve given your opinion which boils down to, “No, it doesn’t.” Totally valid, as opinions go, but not very edifying to us readers.
It is not an opinion that people don’t earn money by randomly trading with others, wtf are talking about??
I’m actually triggered about this
