Name: When Capitalism is Great and Not-so-great
Uploaded: 2014-05-10T07:28:09.000Z
Duration: 13 min 49 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

and even China's migration to a market-based economy--

Reflexive pronouns

even though they call themselves Communists,

their economy is now, essentially, capitalist--

there's been a general consensus around the world

And just to put my bias out there, right from the get go,

But what I want to do in this video is do a little bit more

Because I feel like there has been-- especially here,

that even has a whiff of the government getting involved

So I want to think more about what are we

trying to achieve with the capitalist system.

we don't want to achieve if some of the aspects of capitalism

are allowed to go on without any type of controls

I just want to give, maybe, a framework for thinking

So you ask any capitalist, including myself, you

You can use that to improve your standard of living.

I'm not saying that everyone is motivated purely

I think there's plenty of people in the world who are motivated

for the desire for social good, for elevating mankind.

But the general census in a lot of parts of--

is that those type of things are specific to certain domains.

But, in other domains, if someone's running a trucking

company, it's not clear that someone would run a trucking

company optimally just for the good of mankind.

Maybe they would run some type of nonprofit that way.

So in general, you have a good incentive structure.

There's also this notion in a capitalist economy

around this because a meritocracy, in my mind,

Because even if you talk to us-- almost everyone

Even the communists were a fan of a meritocracy.

more authority within the communist regime.

So a meritocracy is something that everyone lays claim to.

And actually a lot of socialists or communists

would claim that extreme forms of capitalism, when the wealth

disparity becomes two extreme or where you have inherited

wealth, actually goes against the idea of meritocracy.

So let me actually put meritocracy here as well.

That if the incentives are good, if capital

gets in the hands of people who are most deserving of it

because they've somehow earned it, they've somehow innovated,

that can also lead to innovation because the right people

Now, if we go to the socialist side of things,

they'll say, well, look, there's a social cohesiveness to this.

claim what I'm going to do in this video is comprehensive

I just want to give a little bit of nuance to the discussion.

you have a gazillionaire sitting behind a walled compound

right on the other side of that walled compound starving

And these people don't even, necessarily,

view themselves as part of the same society,

that they somehow have a responsibility to each other.

And that is happening in some parts of the world

where you have severe disparities in wealth.

The rich people don't even view themselves

as the same species as the poor people or even vice versa.

And I'll put it in quotes because one could say,

well, it's fair if you make more, if you work harder,

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When Capitalism is Great and Not-so-great

situation

people

person

work