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[Stiefel]

Is socialism a good thing or a bad thing? Do you care more about average living standards or raw economic growth?

[Loud Whispers]

Is socialism a good thing or a bad thing? Do you care more about average living standards or raw economic growth?

Depends how you go about it.

[freeformschooler]

Is socialism a good thing or a bad thing? Do you care more about average living standards or raw economic growth?

Depends how you go about it.

/thread

[Playergamer]

We need to lock this and preserve it for future generations. Never before have I seen a thread won in a single.

[kaijyuu]

What's the point in raw economic growth if it doesn't result in higher average/median living standards?

I suppose some people might want to put humanity into slavery for a few generations so everyone after that can live in luxury. I'd probably prefer something a bit more gradual.

[mainiac]

I suppose some people might want to put humanity into slavery for a few generations so everyone after that can live in luxury. I'd probably prefer something a bit more gradual.

I would be very amused to see what that would look like given that the chief limiting factors on economic growth are no longer industrial.  We'd have a bunch of Oliver Twist orphans laboring away in the schoolmines producing more PhDs for the future.  Wailing babies getting vaccinated four or five times a day to make sure that we eradicate the role of early life lack of healthcare in lifetime poverty.  Teenagers and young adults chained to their laptops developing web 3.0, web 4.0, web 5.0 and so on.

[BFEL]

I suppose some people might want to put humanity into slavery for a few generations so everyone after that can live in luxury. I'd probably prefer something a bit more gradual.

I would be very amused to see what that would look like given that the chief limiting factors on economic growth are no longer industrial.  We'd have a bunch of Oliver Twist orphans laboring away in the schoolmines producing more PhDs for the future.  Wailing babies getting vaccinated four or five times a day to make sure that we eradicate the role of early life lack of healthcare in lifetime poverty.  Teenagers and young adults chained to their laptops developing web 3.0, web 4.0, web 5.0 and so on.

Oh yes, just make the dystopia comical.
That obviously won't cause confusion.

[scrdest]

I suppose some people might want to put humanity into slavery for a few generations so everyone after that can live in luxury. I'd probably prefer something a bit more gradual.

I would be very amused to see what that would look like given that the chief limiting factors on economic growth are no longer industrial.  We'd have a bunch of Oliver Twist orphans laboring away in the schoolmines producing more PhDs for the future.  Wailing babies getting vaccinated four or five times a day to make sure that we eradicate the role of early life lack of healthcare in lifetime poverty.  Teenagers and young adults chained to their laptops developing web 3.0, web 4.0, web 5.0 and so on.

Education mines sound like a cool idea.

[LordBucket]

Is socialism a good thing or a bad thing?

Too vague a question.

Do you care more about average living standards or raw economic growth?

Living standards. Economic growth isn't always even a beneficial condition. Obvious example: overproduction. If there are a million people and you go from producing one million $$1000 televisions every year to producing two million $2000 televisions every years, that would constitute economic growth. But what's the benefit?

Or consider employment. Imagine you have a half a million happily married couples with 2.2 children each. And imagine that your workforce is 500,000. One per household. And imagine you increase that to one million workers. You've doubled the employment, and presumably also doubled your production potential. But do you really want two worker households? Who's taking care of the kids? Or are the kids the ones working?

Economics is a field that, while useful, is sometimes liable to become counterproductive when viewed in isolation. It may be helpful to remember that "growth" is supposed to serve purpose. Growth for the sake of growth is not always beneficial. If a small child grows bigger, that's beneficial growth. If he starts sprouting tumors on the side of his head, not so much. Money economy is similar.

[alexandertnt]

I think happiness beats both economic growth and living standards. Someone who has high living standards and is depressed is probably worse off than someone who has lower living standards and is happy.
I think both economic growth and living standards are both means of achieving happiness and not ends themselves.

[misko27]

Is socialism a good thing or a bad thing? Do you care more about average living standards or raw economic growth?

Depends how you go about it.

I need to be able to reward posts somehow. Do you accept DOGE?

[Eagle_eye]

I think happiness beats both economic growth and living standards. Someone who has high living standards and is depressed is probably worse off than someone who has lower living standards and is happy.
I think both economic growth and living standards are both means of achieving happiness and not ends themselves.

Well, yes, but living standards are by far the easiest way to influence happiness on a societal scale.

As for the OP, yes, I think socialism is a good thing. To be clear, I don't mean the state nationalizing industry(though things like power, water, healthcare, etc. really do need to be nationalized), but the abolition of absentee ownership. Factory workers should own the factories, miners should own the mines, farmers should own the farms, and so on. So long as income can be generated passively, we're never going to have a remotely egalitarian society. 

[Myrkky100]

Is socialism a good thing or a bad thing?

Socialism, broadly understood as a society in which the state has a fairly large degree of influence over the economy and the labor market is a good thing. That is, provided that the state has a political system which really allows it to act as an instrument of the "general will", something in which the so called socialist states of the Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist tradition have miserably failed.

People in society are always in a network of economic and political power relations. While a more free market-type system seems to give people more freedoms, these are actually more limited because of the differences in economic and political power (i.e. without collective bargaining and guaranteed support for the unemployed, a person selling his/her labor on the open market is often at a severe disadvantage in relation to an employer). A more collectivist system allows for more positive freedom, such as use of collective goods (nationalised healthcare, infrastructure, etc.) and better guarantees that a person can trust to make a living on his/her labor.

[Jelle]

Egh any economic system is only ever as good as the people behind it, wich is to say it'll always tend to be a steaming pile of corruption and/or class divide. But my poorly conveived opinion on socialism specifically why not.

Socialism is a bandaid fix to a broken economic system (capitalism), but for now it's the best avaible option. It'll still allow for rampant class divide but at least with an acceptable standard of living for the lower end of the spectrum. Like anywhere with a lot of government control there will be corruption. I suppose it is a compromise between two problematics.

Still with ever improving technology comes higher effeciency, and automatons diluting the meaning of labor power. So to as all with economic systems made centric to man and his labor power will socialism have to make room for something more compatible with modern economy.

[i2amroy]

I feel that socialism is great in theory, but it fails hard-core in wide-scale actual implementation (generally due to some people being selfish at the core). For wide-scale implementation democracy and personal ownership tend to function more efficiently by far IMO.