This reminds me of (and this could purely be urban legend and not real) of a company that pitched the idea of a DNA test to see if your baby/child had a chance at success in life, and the rebuttal was “I can do that today with just your zip code”.
I would think identifying the 20% who die before age 70 would not be too difficult, frankly. Income, education level, and zip code would probably be a high correlation to start with.
No, I’m talking about identifying the “percent that dies before age 70” in the top 10% of the income/wealth pyramid. These folks have already passed the barrier of income, education, etc. (I certainly live in a zip code well below my means because I don’t see housing as a wise investment), so I’d be an outlier in that category.
The only differentiator most of us have is a confirmed medical diagnosis with a limited life expectancy – and even then, medical science continues to advance, “foiling” a confirmed diagnosis.
intercst
Which also led a lot of Americans to toys with it during the Great Depression. If capitalism was so great, then why were all these people starving, getting kicked off their farms, facing financial ruin? That, 20 years later, would lead to the “Are you now or have you ever been a communist?” rhetoric which has become so famous. A lot of people were swept up in that, and because they merely visited a meeting found themselves in trouble a couple decades after.
Of course the word “communist” didn’t have the same taint then as it does now, after almost a century of relentless propaganda (and reality: see: Joe Stalin). But now it’s becoming fashionable to be a “Democratic Socialist”, which is not the same thing, but it surely not “a Capitalist”.
You can’t really blame people for looking at alternate ideologies if what they’re being handed isn’t working for them.
Unfortunately, we seem to be running short on Democratic Capitalists. If my only choice is Autocratic Capitalism or Democratic Socialism, I choose democracy. Under democracy there’s a mechanism for course corrections. Under autocracy, all bets are off.
Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, talks about his new book at https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-on-books/author-talks-martin-wolf-issues-a-wakeup-call-on-the-state-of-democratic-capitalism
My new book is called The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism . In essence, what it says is that our system, which is about the marriage of democracy with the market economy, is failing. It’s failing economically, and because it’s failing economically, it’s failing politically. That has left us open to profoundly antidemocratic forces, and we have to reverse this before it’s too late.
Tell me how any Democratic Socialist wants to see the state ownership and direction of the means of production. (for example, would never demands shares in, oh, Intel). I’ll wait.
It was the autocrat who did that. Democratic Socialists, from what I have seen, seem to only nationalize (or whatever is the relevant top level of government) a few more things than we have already nationalized and are perfectly comfortable with.