Yet another L from Sabine Hossenfelder
Yet another L from Sabine Hossenfelder
Hossenfelder just posted a video titled "Capitalism is good. Let me explain.", and it's about what you'd expect.
Some societal advancement happened under a capitalist system? Well then capitalism must get the credit. She also conflates "capitalism" and "markets" pretty often.
Hossenfelder contends that markets need to be regulated to not be abused by those in power or fuck up the environment, but insists that despite these regulations this is still a free market, and therefore free markets/capitalism are good, we just need to "set it up properly".
She only makes passing remarks about Greta Thunberg and Marx as opponents of capitalism whom you should pay no attention to, and does essentially what economists in the 1800s did: Philosophize about what non-existent "completely rational" consumers and corporations might do, and not look at any actual data.
The like/dislike ratio and the comments tearing into her do give me some hope though.
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I haven't yet watched the entire video (in fact, I didn't pass two minutes) but right off the bat she assumes that economies were originally (and always) sustained by a bartering system, a presumption as old as capitalism. Many scholars prove that this was not the case. This repetitive anecdote only serves to create an imaginary problem to justify the necessity of capitalism later on.
I might edit my post as I watch the rest of the video.
Edit: "but that's another story," a story which she will actively avoid because it overturns the entire mode of production on which she a priori built her fantasies.
Edit 2: her conflation of capitalism and "progress" is very problematic in its own right. She's basically saying that without capitalism there could be no "progress", no "innovation" and no "civilization". The only way to progress is through capitalism. I am reminded by what Mark Fisher wrote on capitalist realism, which is a "widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it."
Edit 3: she writes in the description that "[t]his video is a brief summary of a dip I did into microeconomics literature in a dark hour of my life." It shows.
This paper basically debunks everything she said in her shitty video since productivity mostly equals technological advancement, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169