Capitalism good for technological progress?

[SmithSmith]

My argument is weak, I need better ones.

All systems work better with competition. Competition raises standards.


Some refutation and rebuttals would be great.

[Connolly]

All systems work better with competition. Competition raises standards.

I dont think its needs a "rebuttal". Except for the "all" bit.

Capitalism is very good at advancing technology - to a point (which we havnt seen yet).

And yes, competition is a good thing.

This is why capitalism exists. It has a historical purpose. Competition causes the capitalist to continually revolutionise the means of production.

It has its good points!!!

However - stretching it a bit to answer your "rebuttal".

Competition can reduce the quality of goods produced - through constantly trying to reduce the cost of material and quality checks during manufacture. This can produce cheaper goods, low quality products - or high profits, low quality products.

although not an object! Dublin Bus for example. They used to have bus conductors on board, along with the driver - improving passanger safety and customer satisfaction.
Due to cost cutting (which could be due to increased competition), there is no longer a bus conductor on board.

REDUCING THE QUALITY OF THE GOODS OR SERVICE.

Same goes for Tesco - with their automated checkouts (people seem to have great trouble scanning in their items). Yet to maintain competitivness, they remove the laboursome checkout "girl" - or boy.

millions of examples like this, where quality is reduced for increased profit and lower costs!!!

[Xanthus]

Yes, not only does technology go unused as in the previous example but there are some major constraints imposed by capitalism as well. I'll try to give a couple examples.

Reaserch is in most cases only directed by profit.
For example, very few reaserchers are looking for a cure for AIDS, because bio-tech companies can get far richer selling treatments repeatedly over the lifetime of the patient. Also, thousands of scientists are "busy" looking for the latest anti-depressant or baldness cure which could find a mass-market.

Intellectual property rights can be a major restriction to development, as they restrict development of a technology to just the company which patented it.
The most obvious example of this to us on a messageboard is the inferiority of closed source software compared to open source. Just look at how much more quickly Firefox (public domain) gets updated and improved reletive to Internet Explorer (capitalist enterprise).

Here is a Marxist perspective on intellectual property rights (http://www.marxist.com/intellectual-property-rights221105.htm).

[Xanthus]

Also, I forgot to mention that under socialism all schooling (including the sciences) would be free, and there would end up being a great deal more reaserchers and scientists, who would all be employed in the will of the common good.

As many problems as the USSR had, it's worth saying that by WW2, they had as many scientists as the rest of the world combined. Of course, these scientists were bound by the will of the corrupt beurocracy to direct most of their efforts towards things like weapons... but that wouldn't be the case under true socialism.

Then there's the more debatable point that a through understanding of dialectical materialism would aid all fields of science. The application of dialectics to science has been well documented not only 100 years ago by Engels, but also as recently as the mid-1990s in Reason in Revolt (Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/103-0150799-0126201?search-alias=aps&keywords=reason%20in%20revolt) / Online Text (http://www.marxist.com/rircontents.asp)).

[Ol' Dirty]

Capitalism is very technologicaly efficient, along with Fascism... But...

In a Capitalist or Fascist society, only a few people (oligarchs and plutarchs) have access to this technology; thusly, technology is in the hands of people with power, meaning only a few people are technoloicaly advanced.

A Technocratic Socialist society could easily be just as efficient.