Software: Computing Unassessed

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Software, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of software on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.SoftwareWikipedia:WikiProject SoftwareTemplate:WikiProject Softwaresoftware articles
???	This article has not yet received a rating on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.
	This article is supported by WikiProject Computing.

New stuff

Use talk for actual discussion

In particular, pasting the entire (mostly unrelated) article on the Index of Economic Freedom into this talk page, in multiple copies, is completely pointless. That article already exists, and all the editors here are aware it exists. It concerns a different topic than this article.

There's a remark by Wittgenstein about being shocked by a news story, and buying multiple copies of the newpaper to verify that it's really true. Ludwig figured out what was wrong with that methodology: perhaps we could learn from him. LotLE×talk 03:38, 30 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Large scale deletions and violations of npov

Now the article has been cleaned from all modern pro-capitalist arguments so that the Marxist POV should not have any troublesome counter-arguments.

This has been followed by archiving or deletion of all the ongoing talk page discussions about this.

Here is some of the material that is obviously so dangerous that the readers should not be allowed to see it even on talk pages.[1][2]Ultramarine 03:48, 30 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Criticisms of capitalism section

I actually agree with Ultramarine (though for different reasons), that the "criticisms" section is a bit unbalanced. Marx' general analysis is notable. And Lenin's work on capitalism in relation to imperialism is worth mentioning. But there's a lot missing there: where are the utopian socialists; the Narodniks; the anarchists of various strips; the Luddites; etc. Most of this sort of thing, should of course go in the child article. But a couple sentences seems worth mentioning to me. LotLE×talk 03:51, 30 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Explain why the main empirical pro-capitalitst arguments has been completely deleted.Ultramarine 03:53, 30 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

They can be seen here: [3]Ultramarine 03:54, 30 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The topic of this article is "Capitalism"; which is to say, roughly, "What is Capitalism?" The topic of "Is Capitalism good or bad?" is not the one this article addresses. Nor is the topic "Does economic deregulation cause greater growth?" Nor is the topic "What are the best public policies to cause economic growth?" Those topics might be reasonable to address in other articles—in fact, they are addressed in many other articles, including the one Ultramarine has repeatedly cut-and-pasted here.

FWIW, most of the thinkers we present who have been influential in trying to answer the question "What is Capitalism?" were themselves pretty staunchly pro-Capitalist. Certainly Smith was strongly pro-Capitalist. So was Schumpeter, and the Austrian School economists. Weber and Keynes are slightly more mixed-bag, but both were essentially enthusiastic about capitalism as a system. Marx, obviously, was more-or-less opposed to capitalism; but even that is hardly that simple. Marx himself thought that Capitalism was an historically necessary stage of economic development that unleashed greater productive forces than any prior system. But the question of "pro-" or "con-" is not the issue of this article. All the thinkers presented tried to answer the ontological question of "what is it?"

Now it's true that the figures Ultramarine calls "ancient"—by which she means "recent modernist thinkers"—are dead white guys. There hasn't really been anything fundamentally new in understanding capitalism in the last 50 years. But even if some thinker came along with completely novel understanding of the issues, it's inevitable that figures of the recent past (say, a century ago) will have more diffused and rarified influence than some brand new idea, no matter how good the new idea might be. This article isn't breaking news, but an overview of trends in understanding the nature of Capitalism over the last 400 years or so. This week makes up a pretty narrow slice of 400 years, as does this year, or even decade. LotLE×talk 04:19, 30 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately this shows a serious lack of understanding of the subject. As noted, none of the above persons have contributed anything during that last 50 years. It is of course ridiculous to state that there has been no development and research on capitalism during the last 50 years. There has been an enormous amount of quantitative research and theores developed from that.

There certainly no wikpedia policy that states that an article should only deal with the correct definition of the word. Articles should deal with all significant aspects, including effects, benefits, disadvantages, criticism, and advocacy. The Index of Economic Freedom documents not only economic growth, as implied above, but many other things as life expectancy and literacy. Hundreds of researchers have used it in different fields. This research should be mentioned for two reasons: 1) What has been the impact of capitalism. 2) This impact is one the main arguments for capitalism. It violates NPOV to only mention criticism and what some theorists think happens, but not to mention advocay and what has actually has happened.Ultramarine 04:45, 30 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Talk:Capitalism

Archives

New stuff

Use talk for actual discussion

Large scale deletions and violations of npov

Criticisms of capitalism section