Conversation

Kinda curious how “capitalism” as an ideal only exists in the heads of people opposed to it. The term points to a series of historic pseudo-equilibrium conditions that are unified only by being paths of least coordination resistance through their eras.
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If you want to know what capitalism in a particular time/place looked like, say America 1787-1830 (constitution to Andrew Jackson). 3 questions tell you the answer: 1. What other explicit ideologies existed? 2. What was the shortfall in trust they faced? 3. What trust existed?
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“Capitalism” = how people with trust capital but cynical about the idealism of extant ideologies actually act in coordination. What unifies them is skepticism of grand visions. What empowers them is their mutual trust. So they pay lip service to ideologies and get on with life.
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The upside is, capitalists are always shipping and learning by shipping, never still. Whereas ideolgues are often frozen into either inaction or overt destruction because they lack the trust reserves to actually act on their ideas about how society ought to work.
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The downside: sometimes they ship slaves, guns, or drugs, which they’d rather forget. To the extent capitalism has any ideology and historic continuity, it lies in forgetting bad parts and only remembering when it shipped net good stuff — food firvthe hungry, medicines, iPhones.
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Umm even at its peak, the triangular trade was only a minority fraction of world commerce/GDP. The world is a big place. The sheer quantity of commerce going on by default is much bigger than people realize.
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Sure, a minority of total world trade, but Triangular Trade was the major economic activity before 1800 in RI where I live (and wrote about), like cotton would become in the South a few decades later.