Does capitalism spawn depression

I suppose not havin' much capital might make ya depressed. And I'd be willin' to bet there isn't a teacher anywhere in Switzerland that makes a 10th of Martina Hingis' or Roger Federer's income.

Re: Does capitalism spawn depression


I wouldn't trade my life in for hers for all the monsters in Tokyo.



Celebrity worship is a fundamental element of our culture. These people are the gods in our modern pantheon. Naturally people make sacrifices to these gods and have their own personal favourites. Most people would do a lot to be close to one of these gods and businesses take advantage of this, exchanging capitalist benefits for fame.

I know that I personally would go a long way out of my way to meet Dame Judy Dench (IMHO the best actress in the world) or George Carlin.



That's the idea of capitalism, passing your riches onto your children is one of the fundamental reasons people try to get rich.



The problem is that everyone thinks that they personally can get rich, so they don't oppose it when rich people get great benefits. They imagine that one day they'll receive them too. If people were smart enough to realise that they most likely will never ever be that rich, society could improve a little.



This is the result of a lot of work by the Swedes, it's not like they simply said one day "let's be socialist" and their society magically transformed into its current idealic state. Rather they used socialism as one element of their structure and developed a working and successful society.



Much like capitalism it all depends on the details of its implementation. It can work, or it can not, depending on a thousand variables.

Interesting topic Discreet.

I've thought of this subject quite a bit.

While I don't especially love capitalism, I don't think it makes people any more depressed than socialism, necessarily.

You ever seen cross-sections of populations from *some* of those socialist countries? They don't look very happy, I'll tell you that.

I think it goes deeper than the form of government, for this issue.

The problem I've noticed with it is there is just too little room for "winners."

You know, if you are second in our society, its almost like you are a loser. For example, we have like 32 NFL football teams. And every year, only 1 team at the end of the year can call themselves winners, and the other 31 get sent home as losers. Yet the hundreds of people on these 31 teams are among the best on earth at what they do. Yet they are sort of treated as losers, because they did not win it all.

Take that pyramid and multiply it by 1 million, and you have capitalism.

There's only room for a few celebrities and rich CEOs and a few people living that MTV lifestyle. What, maybe 100,000 or less Beautiful People?

And the rest can sit around and watch MTV and wonder why their house isn't like Cribs, blah blah blah. And be depressed.

Weird.

I don't think of it so much as capitalism's fault though.

Its more like capitalism is a mirror of the mammalian world.

We are mammals. And much of our society resembles a herd of elk or something.

You have a few winners, a few dominant mammals, and a lot of outcasts.

It almost gets back to your "social Darwinism" thoughts.

But it takes it to a sick level. Lance Armstrong wins the Tour de France. All the hundreds of other riders are considered losers and yes some do get depressed. Yet they are superstars at what they do. Yet they are losers. What is that?

Thing is, we have this other side of ourselves that it would be nice if we could develop more. The side that sees we have the potential to be beings that see beyond material success as a primary basis for happiness/depression.

Will we make progress toward this end?

Is it worth punishing those who succeed for the benefit of those who do not? One man has more than another, but is that justification for seizing another persons wealth. Why shold one mans gain be another mans loss?


Socialism will be the downfall of humanity. It takes from (and thus limits), those who have demonstrated that they can survive in a competitive society. It works against able people and works in favor of those who have failed. We currently subsidize breeding at the bottom levels of society, while we exorbitantly tax(and thus limit) the middle and upper classes i.e the (mostly)capable people.

(The above is based upon the general rule that successful people usually have successful offspring, while unsuccessful people usually have unsuccessful children. The board socialists would have you think that it is an environmental issue; that you can change someone by changing their environment i.e their material circumstances. That is one of their greatest lies.)

There are some who inherit great wealth, but that wealth usually doesnt last more than a few generations. The Death Tax ensures that . Capitalism is a far more dynamic system than socialism. Socialism is stagnant, on a social and evolutionary level..

Yes but socialsim would fix having really happy successful people and really depressed poor people. It would spread the wealth so people could afford most of their needs such as education and health care. In the US health care has almost become unaffordible. Many people can spend their life savings and get into a lot of debt because of health care. And i think the people that make more money then they need such as celebs and sports stars, do not need to be so filthy rich. You would like to think that they play for the game but maybe if we didnt' pay them rediculous ammounts of money people wouldn't compete as hard to be athletes. And in sweden there is less poverty and yet you can still become very rich. IE Birgit Rausing the 4th richest woman in the world, lives in sweden.

You must not consider Sweden to be the only example of socialism. There are other countries that strive for it. North Korea and Cuba are examples. They have very little wealth to spread around. China and Vietnam are moving away from socialism and their economies are getting stronger because they are becoming more capitalistic. This has proven to be popular in both China and Vietnam.

Is that a joke??



How so? If a man has healthcare, food, and shelter does that mean he's happy? Poverty is a relative thing, the man will still have less than others; trying to tax people into equality will only guarantee that the successful people will be miserable. Forcing one man to work for the benefit of another is idiotic at best.




The problem is that no amount of taxation will ever "spread the wealth" enough to deal with societies ills. Socialism is an impossible goal, all it does is turn people into dependants(people are more docile that way), it creates an underclass that endures and grows and it severly limits upward class mobility.

U.S. healthcare is expensive, but it is also the best in the world. The beauracracy involved in our medical system is staggering and contributes heavily to the cost to consumers. Medication is also a big cost. U.S. citizens foot much of the bill for the development of new drugs. Other countries get their drugs real cheap from U.S. companies by threatening to break patent law and produce the drug themselves. The end result is that the companies have to make money by charging exorbitant prices to US citizen; either that or stop producing new drugs.





By what authority do you seek to dictate how much money a man should or should not have? What is your standard?



I know little about Sweden. Im not sure how any meaningful comparison can be made between the 3rd most populous nation(U.S.) and the 84th most populous nation(Sweden) What works in Sweden probably wouldnt work here. We have different people and cultures.

There are a lot of disparate threads in the fabric of this 'thread.' Whether socialism is a better system than pure capitalism is one point of discussion. But the original premise -- 'Does capitalism spawn depression?' -- is fairly easy to answer: no more so than any other system which an individual sees as inequitable. Are you aware, Disc, that the suicide rate in Sweden is far higher than in capitalistic USA? There's depression for ya. I'm not saying that the suicide rate has anything whatever to do with either a capitalistic or socialistic society; I am suggesting that the economic system has nothing to do with clinical depression.

This is a good point.

And some of the "countries" with the lowest rates of depression are tribal peoples and people for example living very poor in South America or parts of Asia.

Now it gets complex from here. How much of it is because of their culture/religion, and what else?

But some psychologists argue that some of the happiest folks on earth are the people living near stone age existences.
But, they may have a life expectancy of like 29 or 36 or something...

One reason some of these people are happy is that *some* of them aren't aware of any other lifestyle and the untold riches that modern technological countries have. After some of these people are exposed to the riches available out there (that they can't have), they get more depressed. I'll expand on this below.

____

Then there is this: How much does the very existence of MTV lifestyles make us depressed?

I read this study where these monkeys needed to pull levers & push buttons in a certain order (do work) to get a reward (piece of a banana).
They would sit there and do that all day and keep eating.

But then one of the monkeys in a cage next door was given grapes (much more prized by the monkeys) for doing the same work. Eventually, the monkeys getting the bananas would stop working so hard, and pretty soon, not try at all.

The banana rewarded monkeys got so they didn't even want the bananas any more.

Then a 3rd set of monkeys was given something "better" than grapes (I forget what--candy or some darn thing)--then the 2nd group getting the grapes would eventually see this and stop working.

But as long as all the monkeys only got bananas, all the darn monkeys would keep working all day. Pay the monkeys differently though, and the low paid ones got bummed and stopped working.

Would they eventually get depressed?

Now I'm not saying socialism would cure the above. I don't believe that.

But I do believe we are more like monkeys than we care to admit.

If we pay someone $10/hour for a certain job and that money takes care of all their needs, health care, whatever, and everyone doing that job gets $10/hour, the person stays pretty satisfied.

But if a person (monkey) is able to see another monkey getting a lot more for not working much harder (Paris Hilton on VH1 or MTV), then that person (monkey) wants to just quit.

That is what I think is going on in our world today.

A lot of us are monkeys working hard for the bananas, and we are inundated by seeing monkeys sitting around doing nothing, having servant monkeys feed them grapes all day.

I'm not saying I have solution.

But I can describe the problem!

We are bummed out monkeys working for bananas watching other monkeys getting their grapes for free (I want my MTV!).

****
But not that there is a solution to all this in this material world.

People have been trying to come up with fair systems for thousands of years to address all this. We'll get closer over thousands of years, but I don't think we'll ever quite solve it all.

A lot of it is built into the the nature of existence.

Its all part of the human condition.

As The Police said: "There is no political solution, To our troubled Evolution."

That is why some people turn to things like Buddhism, Mysticism, etc. There are problems inherent in existence which no political system can solve 100%.

In summary: I don't think capitalism spawns depression any more than any other massive political system.

What spawns this type of depression is just being a smart mammal (monkey-like) that covets what other monkeys have.

Capitalism spawns depression in a different way that that you proposed.

Yes, and sometimes recession and other times inflation.

Yeah, that's true. Also, capitalism creates the delusion in society that material wealth is happiness. I don't know whether the really famous actors or billionaires are really happy, and whether they're happy because of their money or of something else, but I have read that depression is something really common today.