Friday 5 January 2018

"What's Good For MM Enterprises Is Good For The US Of A!"

"...capitalism did make an important contribution to global harmony by encouraging people to stop viewing the economy as a zero-sum game, in which your profit is my loss, and instead see it as a win-win situation, in which your profit is also my profit. This mutual-benefit approach has probably helped global harmony far more than centuries of Christian preaching about loving your neighbour and turning the other cheek."
-Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (London, 2017), Chapter 6, pp. 244-245.

My main reason for quoting this passage is that Poul Anderson's Nicholas van Rijn promulgates "win-win," most notably on t'Kela.

My comments on Harari's passage:

I agree that preaching is not enough and also that capitalist win-win is preferable to pre-capitalist win-lose;

however, I hope that I do not have to spell out that capitalism is not always win-win! (Anderson shows this in "Lodestar" and Mirkheim.)

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