> Today's capitalists aren't focused so much on capital though. Stock buybacks are bigger than ever. Founders are happy to sell off huge portions of their ownership as long as they can keep control with super-voting shares, where the previous generation of industrialists would be happy to accept outside board members but wanted to make sure they kept all the profits. A decade ago the goal was to be a "serial entrepreneur" who would use their huge exit from one company (as it matured) to fund another, even more profitable one; now keeping control of a big company is a much bigger deal.
Seems like a lot of handwaving and arbitrarily picking parameters to fine tune your proposition. Let's step back and look at the big scheme of things.
Food has always been scarce for some and plentiful for others. Same as land. Same as capital. And there have always been some people who have enough or more than they need who have a drive to amass even more, but that does not mean they have a shortage of it. And inversely if they don't try to horde more of a particular resource or asset that doesn't mean that asset is post-scarce for society as a whole.
I'll put it a different way, are you just trying to create such a specific definition that you can manage to fit it into? Then what's the point? it doesn't usefully say anything as far as I can see.
If you can support an argument which says practically everyone has plentiful cheap and easy access to capital via loans then that would be saying something. And if you can do that then you don't need these flimsy examples of food in prehistoric times or the behavior of wealthy elites to prop up your argument at all, do you?
> My sense (and I don't have evidence) is that getting a loan for study or business is easier than ever before (though reducing your working hours might not be).
Quite a journey remaining to get from there to "capital is not scarce or limiting for society", though.
Less than 20 years ago we had the credit markets almost cease functioning, major banks collapsed almost taking the banking sector with them, hundreds of thousands of home owners being unable to service their loans and were foreclosed. In my layman's understanding a major cause of this was undervaluing the cost of loans. Things have changed since then of course, but these industries and environments are very cyclical. Similarly, just because you kill a woolly mammoth or have a bumper harvest does not mean your society has been liberated from food scarcity problems.
But even ignoring recent massive failures of capital markets and just looking at the situation now, I'm still pretty skeptical of the assertion that anybody can get easy plentiful access to bank loans. People without much collateral or high incomes or steady work history get hit with extreme costs and harsh terms on loans if they can get them.
> Food has always been scarce for some and plentiful for others. Same as land. Same as capital. And there have always been some people who have enough or more than they need who have a drive to amass even more, but that does not mean they have a shortage of it. And inversely if they don't try to horde more of a particular resource or asset that doesn't mean that asset is post-scarce for society as a whole.
Sure, so you can say that everything is scarce - because for any given thing there will surely be one person for whom that thing is scarce. But that has no explanatory power. If we want to talk about what's scarce for society as a whole, looking at what most elites and most everyday people focus most of their attention on takes sense.
> Less than 20 years ago we had the credit markets almost cease functioning, major banks collapsed almost taking the banking sector with them, hundreds of thousands of home owners being unable to service their loans and were foreclosed. In my layman's understanding a major cause of this was undervaluing the cost of loans. Things have changed since then of course, but these industries and environments are very cyclical.
I completely agree with this, but it's worse (or better) than cyclical - the 2008 financial crisis was a small bump in the road that we've kept travelling down. Mortgages, subprime mortgages, subprime debt, indebtedness... take any measure you like, there's now more of it than in 2008. There's just so much capital sloshing around the system looking for anywhere to go.
Seems like a lot of handwaving and arbitrarily picking parameters to fine tune your proposition. Let's step back and look at the big scheme of things.
Food has always been scarce for some and plentiful for others. Same as land. Same as capital. And there have always been some people who have enough or more than they need who have a drive to amass even more, but that does not mean they have a shortage of it. And inversely if they don't try to horde more of a particular resource or asset that doesn't mean that asset is post-scarce for society as a whole.
I'll put it a different way, are you just trying to create such a specific definition that you can manage to fit it into? Then what's the point? it doesn't usefully say anything as far as I can see.
If you can support an argument which says practically everyone has plentiful cheap and easy access to capital via loans then that would be saying something. And if you can do that then you don't need these flimsy examples of food in prehistoric times or the behavior of wealthy elites to prop up your argument at all, do you?
> My sense (and I don't have evidence) is that getting a loan for study or business is easier than ever before (though reducing your working hours might not be).
Quite a journey remaining to get from there to "capital is not scarce or limiting for society", though.
Less than 20 years ago we had the credit markets almost cease functioning, major banks collapsed almost taking the banking sector with them, hundreds of thousands of home owners being unable to service their loans and were foreclosed. In my layman's understanding a major cause of this was undervaluing the cost of loans. Things have changed since then of course, but these industries and environments are very cyclical. Similarly, just because you kill a woolly mammoth or have a bumper harvest does not mean your society has been liberated from food scarcity problems.
But even ignoring recent massive failures of capital markets and just looking at the situation now, I'm still pretty skeptical of the assertion that anybody can get easy plentiful access to bank loans. People without much collateral or high incomes or steady work history get hit with extreme costs and harsh terms on loans if they can get them.