What are the advantages and disadvantages of socialism?

Answer 1

Advantages of Socialism

• In environments with plentiful resources, socialism provides all members with their survival needs, creating a stable social environment.
• Members that cannot participate economically - due to disabilities, age, or periods of poor health - can still impart wisdom, emotional support and continuity of experience to the system.
• Freedom from work provides opportunity for some societal members to explore non-economically-productive pursuits, such as pure science, math and non-popular arts.

Disadvantages of Socialism

• Since there is no culling and no economic advantage to working harder, socialistic systems provide no inherent incentive to participate. This makes socialism internally unstable.
• Due to a lack of incentives, socialistic systems tend not to be competitive, making them externally unstable.
• In times of plenty, immigrants are drawn to the free resources offered by socialistic systems, while potentially adding nothing economically productive.
• In times of scarcity, resentment of non-economically-productive members of society increases, causing a destabilizing effect on the society and economy.

Answer 2

Disadvantages of socialism:

• The lack of a profit motive lowers the incentive to invest in further production and capital as in capitalism.
• Socialism focuses on coordination and cooperation of resources as opposed to competition, which creates less efficient allocations of goods in some situations.
• Free rider problem occurs, like public gooddistributions in capitalism, because socially-controlled resources require coordinated payments and purely profit-motivated agents have little incentive to pay.