As far as I'm concerned, Welch turned GE from an industrial behemoth that more than lived up to its name, to a pale shadow of itself that has sold off almost everything. "Outsource Everything" has been an absolute disaster for our economy that will take decades to dig out of, if we even have the will to try.
At the risk of a serious tangent, the bots here have become so out of control that there is also a major anti-bot pattern that downvotes anything that remotely looks like a bot.
I know we aren't supposed to ever say HN is in decline, but LLMs really do look like they've killed it.
If we accept the premise that Welch sold the goose that laid the golden egg for short-term "number go up" and immediate shareholder satisfaction, another question arises. Are there other non-market forces (such as easy money policies from the central bank, or an unfriendly domestic regulatory environment) which created this equilibrium? If so, then laying blame at the feet of "capitalist greed" or the trope of monocled Monopoly men in stovepipe hats, may be misplaced.
That said, I'm not sure that, "Jack Welch, the Man Who Optimized For the Corporatist Mixed-Economy" would resonate as well with audiences.
Welch exploited a combination of events when a lot of those limitations (especially legal) ended, acting in extremely capitalist ways.
Once we reach the end of the road for further invention and improvements (even if that is in the form of our own capacity and theoretically there's more), that's when capitalism becomes zero sum. Until than point, capitalism is a way of distributing more resources to people who are better at finding those improvements.
The definition of Communism per the west, is something that always fails by default. The way Chinese define communism is doing whatever it takes to win.
When you remove all the abstract words behind this game, a simple philosophy is if you do the right things you win. You can call it capitalism, communism or whatever you want.
Squeezing people is an easier source of investment gains. In theory, competition keeps this in check, but competition is for the little guy. If you listen to business pitches or investor relations or take business classes you know the real game is all about avoiding fair competition by hook or by crook, and the biggest companies are the ones who have done this successfully. Two-sided markets, network effects, platform effects, last-mile dynamics, etc, etc, and yes, at the bottom of the the list of anticompetitive forces we have the runt red-headed stepchild of regulatory capture, which is real, but tends to be overstated by people who want blanket deregulation and reverse-engineer their complaints to get what they want.
> Are there other non-market forces which created this equilibrium?
Haha, and here we see the reverse-engineering process in action. Capitalism is never responsible for its own messes! Every mess MUST have come from a market distortion! Deregulation is always the answer!
Also let us not forget other tools that have significantly helped capitalist nations: Slavery, Colonialism, Imperialism, Sanctions, Wars, Coup d'etat's... these have all contributed to what capitalism is today. So yes Capitalism in the grand scheme of things is entirely zero sum.
The entire foundational assumption of (Smith's) capitalism is the idea that people who are better at making a profit are exactly who should be given more money to work with, and that this benefits all of society — and while I will agree that the phrase "trickle down economics" doesn't fit reality of the behaviour of billionaires (who act more like aristocrats), that's where that phrase comes from, and it seems to often work up to deca-millionaires at least.
The flaw with this (even in the case of millionaires) is it presumes no parasites. As it happens, both Smith and Marx noticed this, but as history shows, the proponents extolling the virtues of each were not very effective at preventing economic parasites.
If I read an article that titled "this NGO is distributing food and medical aid to the refugees of the conflict" and then on the body of the article I find out that a single guy got all the supplies and the rest got nothing, I would consider the title very misleading.
I'd count that as a sorites problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox
But the distribution for wealth under capitalism isn't "one" person, and capitalism wouldn't work if it was, because nobody else could buy anything with the money, and therefore everyone else would invent a new currency or barter, and then all the money which that one person has would be worthless.
The data from the Fed show great inequality which can be expected from a zero-sum game. Another example check how under develop DR Congo is in the electronic age, while hardware (and to an extend software) companies are some of the most valuable companies, they all source raw materials from Congo.
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/richest-1-bag-nearly...
Capitalism isn't zero sum because at its core principle are transactions, which are inherently non-zero-sum.
Is that what you perceive the mainstream dogma to be? When I observe use of the word "capitalism", it is usually in regards to rationalizations for interventions or other socialist policies. Whereas proponents generally use specific language, like market, market-based or laissez-faire. Opponents are can be observed using language like, neoliberal, deregulation, greed and capitalism.
The Sad Decline Of The Word "Capitalism"
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alejandrochafuen/2013/05/01/the...
>Although Karl Marx did not create the word, it was after his work “Das Kapital” (1867) when the term “capitalism” began to be widely used to describe an economic system based on private property as the means of production. Marx remains the great labeler: “capital,” “the capitalist” and “the capitalist system of production” appear repeatedly in his writings.
...
>Should we care if we lose the term capitalism? Assessing its popularity, or lack thereof, I recently reviewed the mission of 25 leading market oriented think tanks around the globe. I could not find a single one using the term. “Free enterprise,” “free-markets” “free-economy” and better yet “free society” will continue to crowd out “capitalism,” if not as a system, at least as a word.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Looking over HN comments, I observe that uses of the term generally contain anti-market critiques.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=capitalism
Popular stories also seem to use it in a generally negative way, or with a modifier to "improve" it.
I'm not convinced that the mainstream dogma is positive. To the contrary, I would regard use of the word as symptomatic of anti-market sentiment.
Personally (as I am not any kind of educated expert nor an oracle) I would say that a lot of "free enterprise", "free economy", "free society", even "market-based" terms are very much orthogonal to capitalism and behaviours described by it, but some of them push for conditions that enable said behaviours (deregulation - which I often encounter as positive term thrown around - or "laissez-faire". Or even absolute focus on "free" in "free market" to detriment of said market as bigger players destroy competition)