The Economist reviews Michael Moore's new film

http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14585631

by MikeCapone • 17 years ago

39 52 17 years ago

I suspect JD Lasica was right when he said it should have been called: "Greed: A Love Story"

masklinn• 17 years ago

Greed is pretty much inherent to capitalistic systems, which reward greed and treat it as a virtue (along with profiteering and selfishness).

jerf2• 17 years ago

I don't think that's really the right way to think of it. Capitalism acknowledges greed, and builds a system that can survive and bring virtue in spite of it, and to some extent, because of it.

While it's OK to decry greed, it isn't OK to build an economic system based on the idea that people aren't greedy. They are. There are billions of year of history behind the greed of humanity, and I'm not exaggerating. If you build an economic system based on something that is, fundamentally, not human, you will get bad results.

That's where other systems tend to fall down, and why for all the "failures" of capitalism, the worst off in a modern capitalistic society is better than all but the best off in almost any other society.

I'm willing to listen to other economic systems that also acknowledge greed. I recommend the book "Accelerando" for a half-decent exploration of the question of whether there is something better once you have pervasive computerization. But the solution to the problem of greed isn't trying to build a system based on the belief that there is some way to make people not greedy.

Greed is not capitalism's fault. Greed is, ultimately, traceable back to the fact that for every live form that survive to reproduce, there are thousands that don't. Greed may look odd in the incredibly, utterly strange place we currently find ourselves in where we have more resources than we know what to do with, but this is the strangeness, not greed.

I'm pretty skeptical of every other system I've ever seen, including socialism and communism, because they are basically built on the idea that we'll take control away from the greedy, shortsighted people and give it to the enlightened, ungreedy ones who will run things better. There is of course the (perfectly correct) argument that the information flow of such a system can't be made to work with the tools we have, but there is also the even-more-fundamental problem that the "enlightened, ungreedy" class of people doesn't exist. There are only people claiming to be the enlightened, ungreedy class. Until you can build a non-capitalist system that isn't based on this fundamental failure, it's not going to do well.

(That said, I'm only a little-l libertarian and I acknowledge that the government does have a place. I'm talking economic system here, not whole society system. Just as capitalism harnesses greed, instead of denying it, a government should harness capitalism, instead of denying it.)

jamesbritt• 17 years ago

How so? Or, how so in comparison to other economic systems?

febeling3• 17 years ago

There is this theory which states that there are only three kinds of economic (or societal) systems: family-tribe-base ones, command-base ones, and property-base ones. In the first you will be supported unlimitedly by your family tribe, so you generally maximize the number of relatives. The second one (feudal, socialist) there is a small special group instituting an arbitrary distribution (may be good or bad, historically mostly bad). In that setup head-count of the whole economy in general is maximized, and that is why people would not be allowed to travel if they were serfs or living in socialist countries. Thirdly, there is capitalism, which leaves everyone on his own, expecting him to live off his own possessions and produce. And in that system, clearly property maximization is the way to wealth.

For me, with this basic distinction, everything fell into place. Also it assumes that it is not necessarily people who are prone to be greedy, but that the community rules makes them behave in specific patterns that hardly come as a surprise, once you see the benefit structure.

gaius• 17 years ago

It's more subtle than that. Capitalism aligns the interests of individuals with society. Famine is unknown in the West not because of altruism, but because we pay our farmers well. Famine is common in Communist countries because the farmer is required to act against his own best interest to feed the country (e.g. countryside starving so cities can eat).

Therefore in a properly configured Capitalist system, the "greedier" people are, the better off society is as a whole. I am fully aware that the Western economies are not correctly configured - but they're the least-worst in the world by any reasonable measure (such as, percentage of the population that starved this year).

uriel• 17 years ago

Greed is pretty much inherent to human beings. Capitalism unlike any other system, actually extracts productive value from greed.

Other systems treat greed as much as a virtue or more, but provide much more harmful ways to satisfy such greed.

kiba• 17 years ago

"Well first of all tell me, is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed? You think Russia doesn’t run on greed? You think China doesn’t run on greed? What is greed? Of course none of us are greedy. It’s only the other fella that’s greedy. The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The greatest achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn’t construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn’t revolutionize the automobile industry that way. In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty that you are talking about, the only cases in recorded history are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worst off, it’s exactly in the kindof societies that depart from that. " -- Milton Freidman

araneae• 17 years ago

Capitalism has its foundations in reciprocity. Instead of "I scratch your back, you scratch mine," we have "I give you money and you give me a service which I desire." All capitalism does is make a barter and trade system more efficient, allowing you to trade with someone for something you want even if you don't have anything they want. Calling that evil is sort of... dumb.

AndrewDucker• 17 years ago

That's a tad simplistic. Capitalism rewards the externalising of costs - so, for instance, decreasing your unit costs by increasing your pollution is more profitable. You need external regulation to make sure that decisions are not made solely on a capitalist basis, because that would make them entirely heartless.

DavidSJ• 17 years ago

All systems reward the externalizing of costs, by definition.

ABrandt• 17 years ago

I find Mr. Moore no more altruistic than the various "evils" that he frequently attacks. His methods are equally as dubious as his opponents--the difference is he masks himself as a benevolent crusader.

btilly6• 17 years ago

My point of view is this.

Capitalism is the most effective way known of getting people to do what it gets them to do. However you have no control of what that is.

Therefore if you want to have clean water supplies, universal education, national defense, police, unproductive people not starving in the streets, etc then you need to divert some resources away from capitalism. This is the justification for taxation and government.

The justification for Michael Moore's point of view is that he wants to see those things happen, and capitalism doesn't do that very well.

However be very careful about using government to try to direct capitalism to meet your goals. Because well-meaning interventions regularly fail spectacularly due to unintended consequences. One of which is that any influential group that is regulated by government will try (and eventually usually succeeds) in getting control over their regulators.

fauigerzigerk• 17 years ago

Your view is basically the consensus in western democracies. However, the more radical left claims that this kind of balance between a democratic state and capitalism can never work because capitalism will always be able to corrupt the state.

It's this reasoning that allows them to put the entire blame for the current crisis on capitalism in spite of the fact that it's the governments and central banks of the world who inflated the credit bubble by providing easy money for so many years.

teamonkey2• 17 years ago

> In spite of the fact that it's the governments and central banks of the world who inflated the credit bubble by providing easy money for so many years

Yes, but they're doing that to profit - capitalism at its most pure :)

WinterAyars• 17 years ago

Well, i think we could do a better job of protecting government from corruption than we currently do. It would make a big difference if we had, for instance, publicly funded elections.

lionhearted• 17 years ago

The problem is the word "capitalism" - it implies just for-profit enterprises. But capitalism is really just how Marx branded "free enterprise."

> Therefore if you want to have clean water supplies, universal education, national defense, police, unproductive people not starving in the streets, etc then you need to divert some resources away from capitalism.

Capitalism - free enterprise - handles all of those pretty well except national defense and maybe policing. Charities are part of capitalism. Infrastructure's not so bad for government to build. In wealthy countries, charities vastly outperform government in alms and welfare because it doesn't create power structures that people try to hijack and lobby.

As for government in education, it corrupts education completely. Look at the standard American middle school and high school curriculum - very little of practically important things (scheduling, personal finance, establishing habits, interpersonal skills, critical thinking, problem solving), and a lot of nonsense. They teach algebra fairly well in American high school and almost nothing else. I can't believe that any educator would be in favor of government-run education: It sinks to a very low level, teachers are handcuffed by bureaucrats and public opinion in their teaching methods, honest perspectives on history, ethics, and civics become impossible to learn, bad teachers don't get fired, good teachers with non-traditional backgrounds don't get hired... like, government doing a lot of stuff is a relatively new idea, and it's a nice idea, but it usually doesn't work so well in practice.

btilly6• 17 years ago

Please do not confuse efficiency of directing money with being able to realistically address the problem.

I grant that well-run charities are much more efficient than government. However not nearly enough money is voluntarily donated to charity to realistically address the problems that exist. Based on http://www.givingusa.org/press_releases/releases/20080622.ht... we collectively donate about $300 billion per year. That's about $1000 per year per person.

But to bring up one example, about 1% of the population gets schizophrenia, and about a third of those we do not have effective treatment for. In a country with 300 million people that's about a million people with an untreatable mental illness that is very expensive to deal with. At a minimum that would take 10-20% of the total available for charity for a cause most people haven't even heard of. Once you take out all of the money donated to causes donators care about - such as museums, cancer research, third world poverty, and a million splinter causes (such as the Electronic Freedom Foundation), there simply isn't enough left to address a lot of very real and expensive needs.

Moving on let's look at your claims about education. I won't disagree with any of your criticisms. I've said the same and worse before. However I'm aware of one fact that you are probably not. Which is that, after controlling for parent's socioeconomic status, students who go to public schools in the USA do better on tests measuring their academic performance than students who go to private schools. (If you don't control for the large correlation with parent's socioeconomic status, public schools come out worse.) So as bad as the public option is, the private one seems to be worse!

Not to mention that the big problem the public option solves is delivering education to those who are poor enough to not afford it for themselves. Not doing that would limit how much of an educated workforce was available in the future, to the detriment of everyone.

But why does private education deliver a worse product? Part of the problem is that parents aren't as good of judges of the quality of their children's education as they think they are. So private schools are incented to do things that make parents think they are doing a good job at the cost of actually doing a good job.

Incidentally education isn't the greatest illustration of the problem. Public health provides much better ones. For instance patrons of a restaurant are not in a position to judge whether sanitary procedures are being followed in the kitchen. Residents are unable to judge how good the water they receive is. Which is why public health was one of the first areas where economists came to understand why the invisible hand of the market didn't do a good job of provisioning the need.

radu_floricica• 17 years ago

> very little of practically important things (scheduling, personal finance, establishing habits, interpersonal skills, critical thinking, problem solving), and a lot of nonsense.

That's the best description of what's wrong with education I heard in a loong time. Just, congratulations.

jaytee_clone2• 17 years ago

As side from definition, I think of capitalism as an algorithm with no inherent moral obligation. It's neither good or evil. Thus it's critical to apply capitalism only where it fits.

When a business's profit is proportional to the well being of the mass, then capitalism is great.

Problem arise when profit is proportional the degradation of the public health, the number of wars being waged, and the amount of people being imprisoned.

Then of course we have to "regulate" it.

Some may say capitalism is "in-efficient" when it's regulated. I completely agree, in the sense that any algorithm is in-efficient when there is more over heard.

It may be easier to think of the task of improving the state of the world as a global optimization problem in computation. Experienced computer scientists will tell you that the hardest part of an optimization problem is defining exactly what is to be optimized - Think fitness measure in a genetic algorithm.

This make sense. We can make an algorithm as efficient as possible, but if we are optimizing the wrong thing then all the work are pointless.

As complex as the world is, I can't bring myself to believe that profit alone is enough as the fitness measure. That's why people have proposed adding other measures such as carbon emission credit to be traded in a capitalistic algorithm. (Maybe we should even add more measures such as health and education credit.)

Some may call this "regulating" capitalism. I personally think it's just redefining the fitness function, which is a very sensible thing to do in terms of computation.

mkn• 17 years ago

As for government in education, it corrupts education completely. <snip> [Government-run education] sinks to a very low level, teachers are handcuffed by bureaucrats and public opinion in their teaching methods, honest perspectives on history, ethics, and civics become impossible to learn, bad teachers don't get fired, good teachers with non-traditional backgrounds don't get hired... like, government doing a lot of stuff is a relatively new idea, and it's a nice idea, but it usually doesn't work so well in practice.

What an incredibly simplistic analysis! 'Analysis' is too strong of a word; this is mere polemic. It is clearly not the case that government completely corrupts education. It is further untrue that any of the consequences described can be attributed entirely to the fact that government runs public education.

The parent merely asserts that government 'corrupts' education and then lists a bunch of alleged educational maladies. Many of these maladies are clearly due to the fact that schools are institutions and that they serve pluralistic communities. The point about bureaucracy is especially vacuous. Can we even imagine a school or school district, public or private, without imagining an attendant bureaucracy? Another poster mentioned Marx; is it lost on the parent that Marx talks about, iirc, alienation due to private bureaucracies as well as government ones?

The real causes of problems in education will not turn out to be so simple as 'government.' The real problems will turn out to hinge partly on the peculiar aspects of government bureaucracies vs. private bureaucracies for sure, but will also stem from economic issues like poverty and hunger, social and socio-economic issues like the amount of time parents spend away from home working, and cultural issues like the value placed on education and civic responsibility by contemporary culture, and many other possibly irremediable causes.

Finally, the form of the original 'argument' offered is this: There is an overly simple problem, it has an overly simple cause, and the solution is simply to remove that cause. The truth is that both the causes and effects of real-world situations are both more complex and more intractable than that. That any adult should fall for such a blatant oversimplification is perhaps a clearer indicator of the trouble with current corporatist culture than the addled mind of Michael Moore could ever conceive.

projectileboy• 17 years ago

Perhaps Mr. Moore's arguments would be made stronger if he would disclose his net worth, and where he keeps his money?

weegee2• 17 years ago

sure, you can start and we'll just go down the line.

who CARES what the guys net worth is? Why does it matter? Can not a successful film maker speak for those who are in the down and outs? Just because his films are good, does that make him less worthy to call out the greedy bankers? Who are you, Sean Hannity?!

bliving• 17 years ago

reminded me of the line in "Roxanne":

"Oh, ho, ho, irony! Oh, no, no, we don't get that here. See, uh, people ski topless here while smoking dope, so irony's not really a, a high priority. We haven't had any irony here since about, uh, '83, when I was the only practitioner of it. And I stopped because I was tired of being stared at. "

dsil• 17 years ago

I hate this argument against Michael Moore, especially when there are legitimate ones. He's not being hypocritical or ironic - you can play the game well and still think the rules should be changed.

andrewvc• 17 years ago

Next up on HN: Cats give their opinion on long baths

rms• 17 years ago

Please don't take Michael Moore too seriously. He is an entertainer, just like Rush on the right. The difference is that Michael Moore has talent. With Roger and Me, he invented a new style of documentary filmmaking.

Go see the movie if you want; you will be entertained. There isn't much to discuss here though. Yes, Moore is a hypocrite. Yes, capitalism is the best thing we have. It's still healthy to raise awareness of some of the worst excesses of capitalism.

uinuibui• 17 years ago

The economist doesn't like Mr Moore's attack on capitalism?

Tomorrow - the Catholic News review of Dan Brown's latest.

natmaster• 17 years ago

I don't see how Moore can blame Capitalism for big government intervention (bailing out banks) led by his Democratic friends. Seems more like a hit on central banking. (But maybe that's too Jeffersonian for Moore.)

The Economist reviews Michael Moore's new film

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