Читать книгу The Unintended Consequences of Technology - Chris Ategeka - Страница 10

If you are not in the top 1% (folks who own the majority of the world's wealth), it's very easy to see how capitalism is not working for you. Many want it replaced or at least reconfigured to a hybrid system that works for more people. However, there are so many scars on the U.S. psyche from the communist regimes and conflicts of the USSR that proposing anything new or different from capitalism instantaneously makes you a communist or a socialist, which is considered a slur.

However, we do need to be thinking about alternative systems. Capitalism is working too well for a very few at the top, not so well for the rest of the world, and increasingly threatening our planet and future.

Taking a closer look at a hybrid of capitalism and socialism as an example, at the time of this writing, this form of government appears to be working well in countries like Germany and the Scandinavian subregion of Northern Europe that includes Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. In addition to being economically strong and stable, these countries rank very high on the World Happiness Index, an annual publication of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network. The index is a ranking of national happiness based on the respondents' ratings of their own lives, which correlates with various other life factors, many not related to consumption, such as having someone to count on, having a sense of freedom to make key life decisions, generosity, trust, and purpose (World Happiness Report, March 2020).

However, in the United States, when politicians like Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders propose the distribution of wealth equally among the people, free provision of government social services like schools, healthcare to its citizens, and public ownership of most land, they are quickly demonized as socialists by a subset of the country's population. This subset has been taught that the capitalist ethos of competition and acquisitiveness is simply “human nature,” and is the best and only way to govern. They do not seem to realize that capitalism is a socially constructed way of life that has been deliberately and systematically fostered by centuries of the market economy.