Is capitalism Bad or Good

Answer 1

Capitalism is not a normative value, it's a thoroughly complex and complicated economic system that has its advantages and disadvantages like many other existing or proposed economic system. A simple definition of capitalism is a system where prices are established by market forces (supply and demand). Currently, in terms of economics, it's the only system empirically proven to work (as in obtaining the maximum possible output from a certain input) with such complex amounts of information, products and actors (organizations and people involved in the system) as we have in the modern world. The only other system tried instead of capitalism, which was centralized planning (where, instead of the market freely or almost freely deciding prices, there was a central planning office, alike a governmental department setting what was produced, by whom, and in what quantities and who got the resources and the finished products) proved to be far less efficient (from the same amount of materials, the output was lower then in the case of capitalism, thus people under such systems were far poorer overall as in capitalist systems).

However, capitalism does have its problems, and economists are working for more than a century to find solutions to those problems (for example of problems - how do we insert environmental concerns into markets, how do we achieve efficient distribution of goods, so that all people will be well off rather than some very poor and other very rich etc.), giving birth to control mechanisms (such as taxation, intervention etc.) and to individual blends of capitalism, specific to each country and each economic bloc (say, Sweden, France and the US are all capitalist countries, as is India and to some extent Russia, but they each possess their own individual blend of capitalism ). Others, both economists and non-economists proposed other examples of economic systems (corporatism, social-environmentalist economics etc.), but, besides capitalism and central planning, none have been empirically utilized so far.