Atheist Indian writes:
In my personal observations of South East Asia, societies that lean towards free market capitalism put far less value on the human aspect of our existence as people while the socialist leaning societies are more tolerant and humane.
Nothing I could put in words would illustrate it better than a visit to region, especially South and North Vietnam. If you are a Laotian or a North Vietnamese, you are likely to have a more dignified, sane and contended life than the Thais or South Vietnamese, who could sell anything, including their soul, for the goodies that money can buy.
As far as AI’s second paragraph, I think this is something that is little discussed when talking about the debate of socialism versus capitalism.
All we hear is that all manner of socialism is a failure, and all manner of capitalism is a success. Why is that? Well, we get a ton of economic growth, “wealth,” per capita income, and other crap thrown at us. A bunch of numbers. Numbers about what? Numbers about money! Money and stuff. That’s all that matters in capitalism – money and stuff. People? They can all just die or go to Hell or whatever. They’re simply not important at all besides the all powerful value of wealth, material and otherwise.
I am told over and over that Chile is the richest place in Latin America.
Chile, with horrible slums and with one of the most vicious class systems on Earth, a society riven to the core with sheer and homicidal class hatred, one of the most unequal societies on Earth, where the rich live behind walls topped with barbed wire as the poor prowl into the rich neighborhoods every night to redistribute things one way or another. Where the poor and working classes engage in violent riots with stunning frequencies (recently schoolkids have been tearing up the teargassed streets).
Where the public schools are literally collapsing (as in the ceilings falling in) because the rich all send their kids to private schools and won’t pay for state schools. Where the social security system has been privatized with disastrous results. Where the Indians and less White Latin Americans like Peruvians are treated with ill-disguised and fanatical racist hatred due to their Indian heritage.
Where even more upper class “Left” Chileans I have talked to harbored a class contempt for lower classes that would almost physically appall most Americans (the sort of thing you might at a Hamptons country club if anywhere). Where environmental regulations do not exist. Where the rich pay almost no taxes, and all the tax burden falls on the poor and the workers. Where the Pinochet miracle was nothing but mass income transfer from the bottom 2/3 (the working classes – who all lost money) to the top 1/3 of society (who made out like bandits).
You know what? Chile is a shithole! In my humble opinion. I don’t give a damn how rich that country is! I don’t want to live in a nightmare society like that.
We need to judge countries and societies on metrices other than money and stuff. Like what kind of a place is it anyway? Is it a decent society, or is it something else, something chaotic, amoral and Hobbesian?
I have almost no opinions on Asian culture as I know little of it. But, I have discovered Korean film industry and some great series that have given me at least an insight how their own TV industry views their culture (some of the stuff I watched from the 70′s) and some really engagin stuff. Hulu has a nice free selection…under the forgein language choices. Although the historical drams are fantastic (a bit formulaic) the more recent stuff dealing with issues the new generaions face is really interesting.
Flower Boy ramen shop is one that comes to mind (I think taken froma Japanese hit by same title?)
Pingback: Musing on socialism vs capitalism: Chile
what do you make of this?
http://news.yahoo.com/lowlands-indians-abandon-bolivias-president-175309329.html?.bZ1BJyMCtOD4U9Bqc2gjZlIHu7MD1yqmGHGB0dElvZlCI4qr5R&bcnv_s=e&uh_id=e248cb4k5i8s1bgsjds55pgt534bo&ugc_scnv=1&ll=2
Capitalism, socialism, state-run enterprises, neoliberalsim….
Economics is too complicated to reduce it to a one principle.
Is being healthy a matter of diet or exercise or rest or avoiding intoxicant abuse? All of them.
A society shouldn’t have too disparate an income distribution (the underclass becomes a blight) or too flat (it’s the wealthy who do most investing). You don’t want too much government oversight (stifles innovation) or too little (you get the criminal type of innovation).
Can’t reduce the complexity of it all to a single overarching doctrine.
Dear Robert
I certainly don’t want to defend the economic policies of Chile since 1973, but Chile is not exceptionally unequal by Latin American standards. Several Latin American countries have Gini coefficients above 50. They are Bolivia 57, Brazil 54, Chile 52, Columbia 58, Costa Rica 50, Guatemala 54, Honduras 58, Mexico 52, Nicaragua 52, Paraguay, 52. For comparison, Sweden’s is 25.
If Chile is no more unequal than, say, Bolivia or Guatemala but has higher per capita income, then maybe the poor in Chile are better off than those in many other Latin American countries.
Since 1982, when Chile was hit by a depression in which unemployment rose to 25%, Chilean economic policies have been less neoliberal than those from 1973 to 1982. Extreme neoliberalism always leads to an economic crisis. The state then has to intervene.
In 1982, the Chicago boys were forced to nationalize the banks, an obvious confession of neoliberal failure.
Regards. James
What makes Chile’s extreme wealth disparity and class tension all the more bizarre and disgraceful is that Chile is a very racially homogenous country. Almost everybody is a Euromestizo except for people of recent immigrant stock. There’s very little of the colorism or racism you see in Brazil or Mexico. The unmixed indigenous population is very small. The racially charged class issues that face other Latin American countries are minimal in Chile. Chile is more like a Latino version of some European country circa 1800′s-early1900′s.
Good point. I saw that decency in Slovenia, which I described recently.
>>>If you are a Laotian or a North Vietnamese, you are likely to have a more dignified, sane and contended life than the Thais or South Vietnamese,
South Vietnam has been united with North Vietnam in one country, Vietnam, since 1975. South Vietnam is as socialist as the Vietnamese Communist party can make it. Is Atheist Indian making stuff up?
Atheist Indian, unlike yours truly, happens to have frequented Vietnam in flesh and blood and doesn’t live in the corporatist ‘matrix’ known as ‘the land of the free’.
The South Vietnamese, in spite of living in a so called communist country are laissez faire capitalists. This is best understood by a visit to the cities Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh as well as a few trips to the countryside. Ho Chi Minh, like any typical neo-liberal paradise, is all about money, money and more money. From the swarthy thongsuk driver to the corrupt officials at Tan Son Nhat airport, everyone cares about squeezing max cash out of you and nothing else.
Hanoi, on the other hand, is a more traditional city, with character, culture, warmth and decent people. It is the only city where as a visitor, you’d feel safe approaching the police or authorities for help, knowing that they are less likely to be corrupt and less likely to demand under-the-table ‘payments’. If you get ripped by someone in Hanoi, do a little homework and chances are, he/she’d be from the South (‘down country’ as the North people call them).
If you really want to understand the social effects of socialism vis a vis ‘anything goes’ capitalism, Vietnam would be the best case study. And the CIS.
Well, if Saigon is a corrupt, degenerate, dishonest and capitalist, whose fault is that? The communists have had nearly 40 years to run the place. This is 25 years longer than the maximal asserted American involvement.
It is Ho Chi Minh, not Saigon. It stopped being Saigon after 1975.
We are not on a fault finding mission but discussing the effects of laissez faire capitalist ideals in a society vis. a vis. a socialist society. The idea that communists could change how people think is utterly simplistic view of how society works.
Communism is a system of governance, not a mind control technology. The Communist Party of Vietnam are neither the world’s most accomplished social engineers nor have the kind of multi-billion dollar corporate propaganda machinery that your country does.
You are clearly too ignorant and simple minded for me to waste my time arguing. I will comment no more. Go back to watching Fox News.
For whatever it’s shortcomings Chile has the lowest crime rates in Latin America. That seems like a model of success to me cuz everywhere else in the region you get the same conditions along with rampant crime. At least Chile’s poor aren’t being victimized by MS-13 style street gangs or Zetas type drug cartels.
To Atheist India:
The South Vietnamese, in spite of living in a so called communist country are laissez faire capitalists. This is best understood by a visit to the cities Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh as well as a few trips to the countryside.
I have been to both Hanoi, HCM City, and multiple cities throughout Vietnam
and know quite a few Vietnamese immigrants to the US. I would suggest perhaps that the differences are less about the inherent socialism of the Northerners or capitalism of the Southerners (After all most of the Southerners who didn’t flee in the 70s or 80s were farmers…) but more a side effect of capitalism.. specifically the influx of foreign money into the South, first from relatives outside of the country and then from mostly male Viet Kieu (Vietnamese expats who return to the country..) interesting in investment and/or partying and acquiring “girlfriends”. (The latter has heavily corrupted Thailand in my opinion which I will discuss in another post..)
Basically starting in the early 90s you had Vietnamese people, especially from the US travelling back to (mostly Southern, few Northerners went directly to the US..) Vietnam. Often times they were of modest income, sometimes working multiple jobs. They would save money for a few years, living with fellow Vietnamese immigrants and spending little. They would go back for a month and spend thousands of dollars on their relatives, friends, “girlfriends” etc. They would show photographs of themselves in front of nice houses and/or cars. (Rarely was the car or house theirs..) Basically they wanted to show everyone in their home village that they had made it big. It only took a few thousand people like this to massively drive up expectations of people in Southern Vietnam.
In one example of the after effects of this.. I traveled with a friend of mine to Ca Mau.. a city at the Southern tip of Vietnam. (Which incidentally was control by the Viet Cong for many years before the South fell to the North, so presumably formerly an area that gave support to Marxist thought ..) My friend had no interest in trying to show off to his relatives. He gave them a modest amount of money but was very honest about his financial situation (he had to support himself and his mother on $40,000 a year..) To make a long story short they didn’t believe him and basically stabbed him in the back over money. Their attitude basically was that all American Vietnamese were loaded to the gills with cash and if they were not getting some of it then they should steal it.