The Capitalist Manifesto

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book is a homage to the progress that capitalism has brought. It is an interesting comparison to the doom and gloom books. It is a book about the fantastic increase in wealth and prosperity that capitalism has brought.

🎨 Impressions

I liked the book, it is not a difficult book and it is a good and positive read. Also, do not mess with the system, it never works.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

Not much, it is a positive and chill book to read.

✍️ My Top Quotes

*‘No one is particularly keen on globalization now, except possibly Johan Norberg.’
‘No power on earth can resist an idea whose time has come.’
US economist Luis Martínez has shown that autocracies exaggerate their annual growth numbers by around 35 per cent.
Think of the story of the man who comes to the job interview: ‘It says in your CV that you are quick at mathematics. What is seventeen times nineteen?’ ‘Sixty-three.’ ‘Sixty-three? That’s not even close!’ ‘No, but it was quick.’
‘In the pre-capitalist world, everyone had a place. It might not have been a very nice place, even maybe a horrible place, but at least they had some place in the spectrum of the society.’ NOAM CHOMSKY
Document that economic freedom is positively correlated with tolerance of other ethnic groups and gay people and with the belief that it is important to teach children to be tolerant.
The most important role of the alternatives is to try to compensate for the fact that the public sector by its nature has to go for a one-size-fits-all approach and therefore blocks innovation in some of the areas that are most important to us.
All information is local and it is not even always available to ourselves. I do not know how much coffee I want next week, or how important it is for me to drink the coffee from a cardboard cup that allows the drink’s aroma to float out while I drink.
One reason why capitalism is morally superior to socialism is that you are free to live as a socialist in a free market economy, as long as you do not force anyone else to do so.
American study of the years between 1850 and 2015 shows that the period with the largest churn in the labour market – the most jobs destroyed and created – was the earliest, while the one with the least churn was the most recent.
Studies of Uber and Lyft drivers in the United States consistently show that between 60 and 70 per cent prefer to have the job as a gig over a permanent job. And this is also the wrong question, since the real choice is between being a gig worker and having a smaller chance of permanent employment, because if companies have to pay fixed salaries and benefits, they will not be able to accept anyone, especially not someone who does not pull in a sufficient number of assignments or is not efficient.
This means that for every job that disappeared due to Chinese imports, 150 workers lost their jobs due to a completely different cause.
A detailed analysis of different US trade barriers showed that each saved job cost consumers on average six times more than the average wage in the manufacturing industry. So for each job saved by protectionism, we lost purchasing power that could have been used to employ six other workers.
As the Marxist economist Michał Kalecki concluded in 1962 after seeing the desperate poverty in then-socialist countries such as India, the problem is that there are ‘too many exploited and too few exploiters’.
The French economist Thomas Piketty has shown that income from interest and gains on capital grow faster than growth (r > g) and that inherited properties just grow and grow until a small elite has almost everything.
His position is almost a caricature of a French intellectual sitting comfortably in his ivory tower, taking pride in ignoring what’s going on down there, in garages, shops and factories, and how that might be related to the fact he lives in history’s richest civilization. Piketty happens to confirm my prejudice. Since he turned twenty-five, he writes, ‘I have not left Paris, except for a few short trips.’
Experts who estimate that about 70 per cent of the subsidies go to the 10 per cent largest agricultural holdings.
‘When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators,’ as P. J. O’Rourke has observed.
Economists Esteban Rossi-Hansberg and Chang-Tai Hsieh estimate that about 93 per cent of increased concentration in the United States is due to large companies having established themselves in more places.
On average, we lie about twice in a ten-minute conversation, usually to our loved ones.
However, data is not ‘the new oil’ but the new sand. Sand is not very valuable in itself. But if you refine it properly (to silicon), you can create the most powerful productive power we have (the data chip).
Mazzucato has been criticized by other scholars because in this area she does not lean towards systematic research but instead tells various stories to show the government’s involvement and success, and such anecdotes say nothing about overall effects. In addition, she fiddles with many of those stories.
When I asked the energy expert Dieter Helm about the German energy transition’s three goals of reducing emissions, and increasing competitiveness and safety, he replied briefly: ‘to fail on one is something the politicians should answer for. But to fail on all three, that’s a pretty big achievement.’
In 2019, Germany’s Auditors General stated that the change had cost €160 billion in the last five years alone and that the expenditure is ‘in extreme disproportion to the results’.
Governments are bad at picking winners, but losers are good at picking governments. Several researchers have identified the species ‘welfare entrepreneurs’, who systematically turn to various authorities to keep their business afloat for a while longer.
Most ingenious was the Swedish entrepreneur who managed to collect as many as thirty-eight different grants between 1997 and 2013.23 Imagine how much such inventive people could have contributed to the national economy if they had had incentives to seek markets instead of grants and were paid for innovations instead of capital destruction.
The Chinese will no longer ‘seek truth from facts’, as Deng Xiaoping urged them to. Now it is written in the constitution that they should study ‘Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era’.
Officials and students practise Xi Jinping’s thinking via apps on mobile phones, and eighteen research institutes have been set up to study his speeches and texts.
According to the World Bank, nearly 70 million people were thrown back into extreme poverty as a result of the pandemic.
The large emissions are built into our societal infrastructure and our energy systems. We can get rid of them too, through a transition to non-fossil fuels and energy sources, but it will cost tens of thousands of billions of dollars.
An Indian study shows that for every million children born, 8,000 die from lack of electricity. A report from Bangladesh documents that infant mortality is more than a third higher in villages without electricity.
Disability-adjusted life years (DALY), which it uses to assess the total disease burden that something causes in a population, both in terms of premature death and disability. Globally, from 1990 to 2017, the number of DALYs lost to air pollution has decreased by 49 per cent and to water pollution by 65 per cent.
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has documented fewer than a thousand species that have become extinct in the last five hundred years, mostly invertebrates, which is about one-twentieth of a per cent of all described species.12 On the other hand, even these numbers represent a tragedy, and with great certainty it is an underestimation. The IUCN estimates that 37,000 species are currently endangered.
Today, 13.5 per cent of the Earth’s surface is protected from exploitation, more than double the figure in 1990.
In the 1980s, Soviet economists calculated that their factories needed to use 50 per cent more materials and more than twice as much energy to produce the same amount of goods as American ones.
The best thing about having money is that you can think of other things than money. Prosperity changes our preferences.
The Philippines alone accounts for seven times more plastic in the oceans than the whole of Europe and North America together.
Instead, the great effect of trade is to stimulate technological development globally. It drives down the price of greener methods and products so local companies can use them to a greater extent. This makes it easier for poor countries, who face the greatest environmental challenges, to learn from our mistakes and from our progress. They can use technology that it took us many generations and many billions to develop. (From that perspective, tariffs on green technology are even more idiotic than tariffs in general.
In the world as a whole, the amount of energy required to produce a unit of GDP decreased by 36 per cent between 1990 and 2018.
The world’s states spent a total of $440 billion on fossil fuel subsidies in 2021, mainly involving large developing countries such as China, India and Iran.41 That’s almost ten billion every day.
The problem with assessing our level of loneliness is that we tend to interpret the difficulties we all experience with relationships and relatives as a sign that such connections have fallen into disrepair, and that there must have been a better time or place when we all lived in more harmonious relationships.
‘There is an epidemic of headlines that claim we are experiencing a “loneliness epidemic”, but there is no empirical support for the fact that loneliness is increasing.’
Some mental pain is simply the abrasions of the soul, says Rück, which is just a part of life, but we have begun to confuse it with the fractures of the soul, which we need help and treatment to deal with.
David Hume said of his close friend Rousseau that he just happens to be unhappy but tries to blame it on society instead of his own melancholy disposition.
‘You can be an asshole and still make people’s lives much better off,’ pointed out the great classical liberal Steven Horwitz,