Capitalism wins again! Better than trillions in government and UN dollars. Only productive enterprise and real business activity can lift hundreds of millions out of poverty - there is no substitute.
For Hayek's sake, would you please stop it with the generic ideological flamewar comments? I don't want to ban you and you're making it seriously hard. How many dozens of times have we asked you not to do this at this point?
Edit: actually your recent comment feed is so full of this that it seems you've stopped using HN for anything else. As that is not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, I've banned your account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
China's unprecedented generational explosion into the middle class happened only after Deng Xiaoping instituted market reforms. Economically, China is certainly more socialist than the west, but far more capitalist than it was in the 1970's.
There was a massive drop in living standards in the former Soviet Union after the introduction of capitalism in the 90es. Average life expectancy dropped something like 10 years, corresponding to millions of dead.
Most communists and socialists will refer to both the USSR and China as capitalist projects on accelerated timelines. They were trying to speed-run from feudalism, through capitalism, to communism.
At least that's what comes up when you mention the problems that these countries have.
Instead of lifting poor class upwards, the west wants to pull everyone else down. Reducing quality of life and regressing in every metric of progress. The future is in Asia, places like Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, Malaysia, Singapore. Socialism is so easily captivating to average IQ voter class in USA, it is a fight every generation has to go through. Countless examples of failures won't convince people.
Maybe I should have listed Milton’s books. Just because professor is part of Ayn Rand institute, you're not arguing about the points presented in the lecture, but instead discarding his credibility by association. There is a massive amount of 200+ years of history of Capitalism that's difficult to succintly address here.
Shellenberger's book review (first one that shows up on google search) is just following the same tropes of Climate catastrophization. The article doesn't steelman Shellenberger, but instead reduces it down to "… yet bad science, strawman arguments, cherry-picking facts, and ad hominem attacks on scientists, media, others"; ofcourse written by folks at Yale "Climate Connections" blog.
Climate arguments have no counter balance. The media routinely ignores the otherside of the equation and never provides a balanced view of how we can tackle it. Instead, the zeitgeist created by progressives for last 50 years is that we should depopulate, regress, and reduce quality of life and ultimately become state dependent. The same group of scientists and environmentalists that also ran the campaign against nuclear energy.
It has nothing to do with capitalism, it's all about strong government, strong institutions and the people who understand and pursue a common goal i.e: a synchronized society
Not OP, but I think what he's referring to is communism declining a generation ago:
> Following liberalizing economic reforms in the late 1980s and early 1990s, India is now one of the world's fastest growing economies, as well as the second most populous.
It's not hard, really, given that you will need to make only $1.90 per day to automatically become declassified as poor [1]. If anything, capitalism makes this harder to do achieve [2] which probably explains why the limit is set so low.
