Edit Feedback

Assessing Democratic Capitalism

Societal metrics demonstrate the idea of assessing different systems, but require a lot more work and research to be usable. Assessing DC is attempting to apply the metrics using general knowledge and logic. The ultimate goal is to have metrics that are purely assessed with data. For now this is a very draft approximation.

Let’s assess DC.

Metric	Result
Corruption	4/10
Crime	8/10
Culture	6/10
Efficiency	4/10
Flexibility	3/10
Happiness	3/10
Health	7/10
Justice	5/10
Long Term And Short Term Balance	2/10
Privacy	7/10
Rights Equality	5/10
Safety	8/10
Segregation	7/10
Socialization	5/10
Survival	2/10
Wealth Equality	3/10
Overall	0.49 (4.5/10)

Democratic capitalism (DC) is a system that can generate a great amount of wealth. Unfortunately the majority of that wealth goes to a select number of wealthy people in society. This generation of wealth is not concerned with the greater good or long term thinking and thus society doesn’t trend towards more happiness and success. The only thing that DC is reasonable at is motivating people to strive since they can be greatly rewarded.

Ultimately DC boils down to a class based system with a ruling class, a middle class and a working class. Each group has different rights to health, education and the fruits of their labor. This is mitigated due to the incredible level of technology that has been reached by DC (and it deserves credit here). Additionally DC countries exploit cheap labor in poor countries, which means that even the working class in DC developed nations can be relatively well off (and not perceive the overall system well). However, the ruling class are still staggeringly more wealthy and the wealth inequality is generally increasing.

The ruling wealthy class also has tremendous political power through the lobbying system. This allows them to affect policy, which enables them to become more rich, which gives them more political power and so on.

DC also requires continual expansion of the economy to mitigate the problem of existing wealth accumulating to the top. When new wealth is generated all classes can take a piece of it as income, maintaining the current balance. However, perpetual expansion is not possible which is why there is the continual boom bust cycle. The wealthy can weather the busts, the working class may not be so lucky.

DC is a 300 year old answer to feudalism and it is a better system. Unfortunately it comes with its own set of problems and with the development of technology and globalization is becoming increasingly unfair. The majority of society get a minimum of the wealth and have limited ability to change this.