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Don't disregard that markets done right are proven to be Pareto optimal: this means they find the point where the price is such that the benefit to society is optimized. Competitive markets are by far the easiest mechanism to implement that reaches Pareto optimality, and Pareto optimality is *good*: it means you found the value that a a good is worth to society (or rather, to anybody with access to that market). Obviously, real life has all kinds of problems that make real markets either non-competitive (cartels, monopolies), or people to act even less rationally than they normally do (the great toilet paper scare of 2020, for instance).
The *main* problem with capitalism isn't actually the market, it's people. We, as humans, are selfish assholes. Whether that's the Bezos of the world trying to make as much profit as possible or the regular Joe who wants to be fashionable for cheap. I have a recent example: chicken was stupidly cheap for a long time. This was only possible by exploiting chickens in the most awful way, breeding for growth (Google Broiler) squeezing as many as possible into a barn, feeding them more than they could reasonably eat by "tricking" them into faster day/night cycles, making them grow faster with hormones and pumping them full of medicine. I don't actually know the details, but that's pretty much what I imagine you need to do to get a chicken from egg to sellable size in a few weeks. Animal Rights organizations protested and the government passed a law regulating minimum space for chickens, a minimum age before they get slaughtered for food and some other stuff to put an end to the worst practices. Supermarkets warned that the price of chicken would go up by 50% and people went out to protest. They didn't want chickens to be treated humanely. They wanted their € 1 chicken filets.
The market in this situation functioned quite well (despite agribusiness and the supermarket cartels). But the brutal reality is that we really shouldn't be consuming the amount of meat we do. Nor should we need new clothes every 3 months regardless of what Zara tells you. But people WANT that, despite knowing the cost. Because the cost is to other beings and... screw them!
And that selfishness is cultural. We can, and should, educate people better. But it's a loooong process (maybe gen Z is better, but millennials overall are selfish assholes, and basically just want what was promised: a better life than their parents', and screw everything that stands in the way of that). And when we reach the point that people are willing to put the good of society ahead of their own greed, then I don't think socialism is the answer to resource allocation, because markets will continue to do that Pareto efficiently, but maybe we'll have advanced computational help that will be able to calculate the Pareto optimal prices without bothering with markets. But the immediate problem is getting people to stop putting their own greed ahead of the needs of society.
Now, let me eat my T-bone steak in peace, please!
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On February 25 2023 19:20 Artisreal wrote:Show nested quote +On February 25 2023 18:57 Gorsameth wrote:
Where do I say we should never do anything to improve?
The stuff we tried in the past was worse, things we might try in the future can be better but they will still be crap because they will be run by people.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to improve what we have. I don't think that assumption is far off, judging from your previous post, no? Moreover, if we're looking at the posts in this thread over the last days, we see a lot of people happy enough with the status quo to question the need for radical reform and instead of thinking what and how things can be changed, it's mostly "this won't work". Which in and of itself can only be said from a rather privileged position, as the need of change is questioned. Basically "it can't be helped", which is rather similar to what you wrote. I'm very happy to be corrected. Show nested quote +On February 25 2023 18:14 Gorsameth wrote:On February 25 2023 18:04 Artisreal wrote:
If you're taking a long term view you can easily see that without the strictest of regulation the free market sucks a lot for most people.
See East Palestine, see American labour laws (it's absolutely ridiculous to have no PTO), see slavery, see child labour (us, like the majority of cocoa producers, mining) see migrant worker exploitation (Spain, UK, Germany), see climate inaction.
It's still baffling to me that "it's better than what was before" is an argument for the continuation of no more than mediocrity.
How's that not failing? How can you be ok with that?
How dare you determine what's the best we've got if you're standing at the top of everything? And every other system we have ever tried suffered from the same issues throughout the entirety of human history. The problem isn't the economic system of the day, its humanity. Let me try to explain my position better then.
To me this is not all mutually exclusive.
Everything we have tried in the past being worse then what we have now doesn't mean the now is the best it can ever be, just that the past was worse. We should still work on improving what we have now.
And I do believe that fundamentally we can't stop worker exploitation long term because its a fundamental human flaw. But that shouldn't mean we stop trying to do better. Trying to be better is how we improve both as individuals and as a collective.
We can recognise that we're not going to stop worker exploitation and short term gains at the cost of long term consequences (like climate change) entirely so long as its a system run by humans while at the same time still trying to do better.
People being resistant to change just points back to the problem being people, not certain people specifically, but humans in general are greedy selfless beings that don't care much for those outside their circle.
And yes I'm sure there is a certainly level of defeatism in my position, as I said I don't think we can fundamentally solve this problem because we are all the very problem. I'd say we do the best we can but its pretty clear we're not.
So yeah, shit is fucked. And no its not going to get much better.
But who knows, maybe some day AI technology comes far enough that a computer programmed to treat all life, human and animal, equally can come along and maybe our descendants gather the will and courage to let go of the strings long enough to give it control so they can sit back and enjoy a better society for a few moments before its inevitable collapse.
That is my small glimmer of hope in an otherwise uncaring universe.
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On February 25 2023 13:46 Salazarz wrote:
Why is everybody so convinced that free markets are 'efficient' and actually work well compared to some form of a planned or hybrid economic system, anyway? Even the most advanced and egalitarian societies of today are immensely wasteful and have serious issues with wealth distribution, and all of the successful Western democracies are built on the back of hundreds of years of colonialism and are to this day subsidized by cheap labor and resource extraction from poorer nations.
A lifetime of propaganda including vapid cliché's like "everything else has failed" and "better than everything else we've tried" as well as rationalizations for the inhumanity like believing "its human nature". As nojok points out, it's convenient to ignore their dependence on exploited workers, it's depressing to think about how we make some kid claw at the earth with their bare hands in deadly environments so we can feel good about having the shiny thing or driving more electric cars in 2035. Even more to think of what has/had to be done to countless women and children (men/nonbinary people too but they tend not to make as many people feel as depressed) around the world when they refuse/d to do it.
People's lives suck bad enough without thinking about all the atrocities it takes just to keep it from sucking worse for them. We all want to enjoy watching a good meal and a stream/show without thinking about all the crimes against humanity it takes to provide the resources required to facilitate it, let alone our complicity in it.
As Kwark once put it (paraphrased and combined) "People are too busy trying to ensure that they’re in the part of the world population getting paid, and not the part getting ruthlessly exploited, displaced, poisoned, tortured, bombed, ethnically cleansed, etc, to realize that they’re a single group that has been arbitrarily divided"
In that vain and to this larger point/question, people need look no further than food. In the US it's quite possible that the cost of dealing with our food waste alone could make sure no kid has to go hungry. I don't mean reallocating scraps or reallocating shipments so that unpurchased food doesn't rot in the dumpster behind the supermarket (instead of giving it away before it expired), or even not throwing out perfectly good "weird looking" fresh foods. I mean just the cost to move only the food we waste into a pile and bury/burn it, never mind the environmental "externalities". That's just the tip of the iceberg of how insanely inefficient, at the expense of humanity, for the sake of profit the capitalist market system is.
Forget being willing to read a book or two to find something better (which is already a bridge too far for too many), we should all be dropping everything to bang down the doors of power and demand at full volume that our society treat this with the urgency and seriousness we would expect if it were our own kids clawing in mines and starving to death so billionaires on the other side of the planet could upgrade their yachts and their lackeys could sit relatively comfortably in front of their screens stuffing their faces and telling us to be patient imo.
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On February 25 2023 20:08 Gorsameth wrote:
...
But who knows, maybe some day AI technology comes far enough that a computer programmed to treat all life, human and animal, equally can come along and maybe our descendants gather the will and courage to let go of the strings long enough to give it control so they can sit back and enjoy a better society for a few moments before its inevitable collapse.
That is my small glimmer of hope in an otherwise uncaring universe.
This is where even the definition of a better future gets into a conflict. I personally would not be willing to hand over society to an AI that treats animals as well as people. One that treats them better than currently and gives them certain rights would be fine for me, details up for debate. I honestly don't think we need to give an animal goods worth €10000 per year even if we achieve that for people. Or guarantee veterinarian services for all animals globally.
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On February 25 2023 20:35 Yurie wrote:Show nested quote +On February 25 2023 20:08 Gorsameth wrote:
...
But who knows, maybe some day AI technology comes far enough that a computer programmed to treat all life, human and animal, equally can come along and maybe our descendants gather the will and courage to let go of the strings long enough to give it control so they can sit back and enjoy a better society for a few moments before its inevitable collapse.
That is my small glimmer of hope in an otherwise uncaring universe. This is where even the definition of a better future gets into a conflict. I personally would not be willing to hand over society to an AI that treats animals as well as people. One that treats them better than currently and gives them certain rights would be fine for me, details up for debate. I honestly don't think we need to give an animal goods worth €10000 per year even if we achieve that for people. Or guarantee veterinarian services for all animals globally. I thought it was pretty obvious I wasn't being that literal. If we give everyone in the world access to transportation we don't need to also buy a car for every geese...
come on, work with me a little here.
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On February 25 2023 19:33 Acrofales wrote:
Don't disregard that markets done right are proven to be Pareto optimal: this means they find the point where the price is such that the benefit to society is optimized. Competitive markets are by far the easiest mechanism to implement that reaches Pareto optimality, and Pareto optimality is *good*: it means you found the value that a a good is worth to society (or rather, to anybody with access to that market). Obviously, real life has all kinds of problems that make real markets either non-competitive (cartels, monopolies), or people to act even less rationally than they normally do (the great toilet paper scare of 2020, for instance).
The key thing about Pareto optimality is that by definition it is optimality in the sense that you can't make anyone better off without making someone worse off.
Pareto optimilality is used by economists because it avoids the more difficult question of what is truly optimal by looking only at what is optimal given initial starting positions, and because the pareto optimal is better than the initial starting conditions for everyone and worse for nobody. It's the best the can be done without anyone complaining, so to say.
It is not the same as socially optimal acording to some metric like, for example, utility. The utilitarian optimal would include transfers of resources from the well off to the worse off, making it non-pareto optimal.
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On February 25 2023 16:14 nojok wrote:Show nested quote +On February 25 2023 13:46 Salazarz wrote:
Why is everybody so convinced that free markets are 'efficient' and actually work well compared to some form of a planned or hybrid economic system, anyway? Even the most advanced and egalitarian societies of today are immensely wasteful and have serious issues with wealth distribution, and all of the successful Western democracies are built on the back of hundreds of years of colonialism and are to this day subsidized by cheap labor and resource extraction from poorer nations. It's convenient to ignore the workers we're relying on who are making 2$ a day on the other side of the planet to claim we're advanced. And imo it's the biggest taboo in our societies, we're pretending they don't exist or that they're just here to make money for company owners when every single one of us is heavily benefitting from this abuse of power.
It's precisely the countries that leased their well-trained excess labor force (China, Vietnam, Eastern Europe) to the West that saw the most rapid growth in development, real wages, quality of life and lifting people out of poverty in the past 30 years. Our countries 10X'd to 20X'd in that time, something that would not have been possible without your "exploitation" of us. The difference in day to day life in these places since my childhood is nothing short of science fiction.
I'm not sure why you would think this great (even if uninteded) success story is taboo. I've noticed both here and on reddit that people's perceptions of faraway countries updates a lot slower than reality, that's probably part of it
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On February 25 2023 13:46 Salazarz wrote:
Why is everybody so convinced that free markets are 'efficient' and actually work well compared to some form of a planned or hybrid economic system, anyway? Even the most advanced and egalitarian societies of today are immensely wasteful and have serious issues with wealth distribution, and all of the successful Western democracies are built on the back of hundreds of years of colonialism and are to this day subsidized by cheap labor and resource extraction from poorer nations.
There has been decades of academic research at this point that tries to answer the question of where markets work and where they do not. I think Slydie is right in that the interesting discussion is not what system works best. We already know that it is a market based system. The interesting discussion is where do markets work, where do they fail, how can we fix those market failures, where is government intervention required, etc.
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On February 25 2023 20:17 GreenHorizons wrote:
In that vain and to this larger point/question, people need look no further than food. In the US it's quite possible that the cost of dealing with our food waste alone could make sure no kid has to go hungry. I don't mean reallocating scraps or reallocating shipments so that unpurchased food doesn't rot in the dumpster behind the supermarket (instead of giving it away before it expired), or even not throwing out perfectly good "weird looking" fresh foods. I mean just the cost to move only the food we waste into a pile and bury/burn it, never mind the environmental "externalities". That's just the tip of the iceberg of how insanely inefficient, at the expense of humanity, for the sake of profit the capitalist market system is.
How is this an -ism thing and a not a people thing like Acrofales was saying? I go to the store and intentionally pick the firmest fruit and veg, and perishables with the longer expiration dates, precisely because I don't want them to go bad before I get a chance to eat them and have to throw them away. The next person does the same. The next person does the same. By doing this we externalize the throwing away part to the store then we point at how wasteful and evil the store is. Of course they would rather sell those things but they figured out buyer psychology a long time ago.
We could go to the store more frequently and get the smaller carton of milk that expires in 4 days instead of two larger ones that expire in 2 weeks, we could get fewer bananas that are already going dark instead of a large bunch of green ones. We could go to a stall and have the person running it select what vegetables to put in the bag and they'll pick the ripest things first. But that's less convenient and takes more of our free time and we want to spend as little time as possible on chores.
The current way we get both the benefits of convenience and the moral superiority over the evil corporate chain that provides it.
The market is like the golden sphere in Roadside Picnic (or the room in Stalker for you cinephiles), it gives society what it actually wants rather than what it says it wants (or wishes it would want).
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I have said it before, and I'll say it again until it happens:
What about a well made general thread about general macro politics? This thread has drifted far off US-specific issues so many times.
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On February 25 2023 23:56 Slydie wrote:
I have said it before, and I'll say it again until it happens:
What about a well made general thread about general macro politics? This thread has drifted far off US-specific issues so many times.
I've tried as well. This will repeat until the heat death of the universe.
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On February 26 2023 01:41 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:Show nested quote +On February 25 2023 23:56 Slydie wrote:
I have said it before, and I'll say it again until it happens:
What about a well made general thread about general macro politics? This thread has drifted far off US-specific issues so many times. I've tried as well. This will repeat until the heat death of the universe.
We can take the question to website feedback if you want, but honestly I think this is all perfectly relevant to political discussion. Sometimes the thread turns to something that bores you (I remember an extremely dull back-and-forth between IgnE and xDaunt about Bismarckian diplomacy (at least I think it was about that, I wasn’t really comprehending it). But someone saying “here’s my political ideology, and what I think should be done in the US” is relevant to US politics, isn’t it? As is people debating the correctness/effectiveness of that ideology?
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On topic (or more so, anyway): I don’t think the word “efficient” can reasonably be applied to any sufficiently large corporation, not in my experience anyway. Every company I’ve worked at has followed the same trend: somebody creates a small, scrappy startup and creates a tight-knit team that works really hard to keep this thing alive. Long hours, not great pay, but stuff like holiday parties are absurdly extravagant. So they get along with their coworkers and they’re passionate about the job (if they’re smart, they also found a way to negotiate a few stock options at this stage). Then at some point they achieve “success” (here meaning, they get bought out by some enormous corporation with more money than God).
The owner takes his money and leaves; whoever is left of the senior leadership is now middle management, taking orders from their new corporate overlords. And the new bosses don’t actually understand the business that well; they bought because of what they saw on balance sheets, and some vague ideas about business strategy and diversification. They didn’t understand the culture of this place and they don’t care to; if anything they want their new employees to adapt to the new corporate culture.
So a few old-timers stick around because they care about what happens to this thing they built, everybody else starts seeing work as a transaction rather than part of their identity, and they’re not content with working long hours for low pay. Why make Herculean efforts for a job that won’t reward you?
So corporate has this new acquisition that was very profitable right up to the moment they bought it. It’s very likely that changes not long after the acquisition, but either way now they’re calling the shots and they want it to make more money. They tend to interpret that one of two ways: either “let’s invest more money to increase revenue,” or “let’s look for ways to cut costs.” In the former case they make eye-popping investments in new buildings, equipment, and staff that the startup’s management never would have done; in the latter, they try to decide what money is being wasted here (cutting this extravagant holiday parties, for sure, but also, layoffs).
My company just announced layoffs (not directly affecting me just yet, if you were worried). The acquisition was a year and a half ago, and we’ve already gone through a couple cycles of “let’s flood them with investment, no hold on let’s cut costs.” It seems insane that corporate would be this bipolar, but it’s happened everywhere I’ve been; sometimes it makes sense to invest, and sometimes it makes sense to cut costs, but the people making the decision are way too high in the stratosphere to be able to tell which, and they don’t trust their lower management to not just ask for more money all the time.
They’re in the same situation as the central planners, right? Within the company, it’s not a free market, it’s a hierarchical command structure, and it’s everybody else’s job to do what a few guys at the top decide. But at the top they can’t possibly know sufficient detail to say whether any given cost is “worth it,” or whether any given investment will pay off. They don’t know the name of the guy that will run that expensive new equipment, or how it will change his productivity, or how his productivity relates to the rest of the organization. And they sure as hell don’t know the names of the people they’re laying off, or exactly what impact *that* will have on the organization.
Don’t get me wrong, the profit motive is part of what fucks this up (e.g. our layoffs are because we “only” made $60mil in profit last year). But even if corporate’s philosophy is just “let’s figure out how to do a good job, and profits will follow” the centralization of it just makes smart decision-making impossible.
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On February 25 2023 23:18 Dan HH wrote:Show nested quote +On February 25 2023 20:17 GreenHorizons wrote:
In that vain and to this larger point/question, people need look no further than food. In the US it's quite possible that the cost of dealing with our food waste alone could make sure no kid has to go hungry. I don't mean reallocating scraps or reallocating shipments so that unpurchased food doesn't rot in the dumpster behind the supermarket (instead of giving it away before it expired), or even not throwing out perfectly good "weird looking" fresh foods. I mean just the cost to move only the food we waste into a pile and bury/burn it, never mind the environmental "externalities". That's just the tip of the iceberg of how insanely inefficient, at the expense of humanity, for the sake of profit the capitalist market system is. How is this an -ism thing and a not a people thing like Acrofales was saying? + Show Spoiler +I go to the store and intentionally pick the firmest fruit and veg, and perishables with the longer expiration dates, precisely because I don't want them to go bad before I get a chance to eat them and have to throw them away. The next person does the same. The next person does the same. By doing this we externalize the throwing away part to the store then we point at how wasteful and evil the store is. Of course they would rather sell those things but they figured out buyer psychology a long time ago.
We could go to the store more frequently and get the smaller carton of milk that expires in 4 days instead of two larger ones that expire in 2 weeks, we could get fewer bananas that are already going dark instead of a large bunch of green ones. We could go to a stall and have the person running it select what vegetables to put in the bag and they'll pick the ripest things first. But that's less convenient and takes more of our free time and we want to spend as little time as possible on chores.
The current way we get both the benefits of convenience and the moral superiority over the evil corporate chain that provides it.
The market is like the golden sphere in Roadside Picnic (or the room in Stalker for you cinephiles), it gives society what it actually wants rather than what it says it wants (or wishes it would want).
It's capitalist culture and a cult of individualism. One thing I've learned in my research is that the history of the world/modern civilization that I was taught is not only grossly outdated (anthropology has made significant discoveries over the last decade+) but specifically intended to rationalize that culture (look at phrenology for an example with a shorter social half-life, not that there aren't lingering vestiges).
I've always found it completely absurd that apologists for capitalism insist that it's sensible to believe human nature is inextricably cruel and selfish and appease it by developing/defending a system designed to amplify and incentivize the worst parts of that nature. It's not a coincidence that some of the best compensated jobs in the US are also among the most popular jobs for people with antisocial personality disorders (or psycho/sociopathy/narcissism colloquially).
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On February 26 2023 04:48 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On February 25 2023 23:18 Dan HH wrote:On February 25 2023 20:17 GreenHorizons wrote:
In that vain and to this larger point/question, people need look no further than food. In the US it's quite possible that the cost of dealing with our food waste alone could make sure no kid has to go hungry. I don't mean reallocating scraps or reallocating shipments so that unpurchased food doesn't rot in the dumpster behind the supermarket (instead of giving it away before it expired), or even not throwing out perfectly good "weird looking" fresh foods. I mean just the cost to move only the food we waste into a pile and bury/burn it, never mind the environmental "externalities". That's just the tip of the iceberg of how insanely inefficient, at the expense of humanity, for the sake of profit the capitalist market system is. How is this an -ism thing and a not a people thing like Acrofales was saying? + Show Spoiler +I go to the store and intentionally pick the firmest fruit and veg, and perishables with the longer expiration dates, precisely because I don't want them to go bad before I get a chance to eat them and have to throw them away. The next person does the same. The next person does the same. By doing this we externalize the throwing away part to the store then we point at how wasteful and evil the store is. Of course they would rather sell those things but they figured out buyer psychology a long time ago.
We could go to the store more frequently and get the smaller carton of milk that expires in 4 days instead of two larger ones that expire in 2 weeks, we could get fewer bananas that are already going dark instead of a large bunch of green ones. We could go to a stall and have the person running it select what vegetables to put in the bag and they'll pick the ripest things first. But that's less convenient and takes more of our free time and we want to spend as little time as possible on chores.
The current way we get both the benefits of convenience and the moral superiority over the evil corporate chain that provides it.
The market is like the golden sphere in Roadside Picnic (or the room in Stalker for you cinephiles), it gives society what it actually wants rather than what it says it wants (or wishes it would want). It's capitalist culture and a cult of individualism. One thing I've learned in my research is that the history of the world/modern civilization that I was taught is not only grossly outdated (anthropology has made significant discoveries over the last decade+) but specifically intended to rationalize that culture (look at phrenology for an example with a shorter social half-life, not that there aren't lingering vestiges). I've always found it completely absurd that apologists for capitalism insist that it's sensible to believe human nature is inextricably cruel and selfish and appease it by developing/defending a system designed to amplify and incentivize the worst parts of that nature. It's not a coincidence that some of the best compensated jobs in the US are also among the most popular jobs for people with antisocial personality disorders (or psycho/sociopathy/narcissism colloquially).
This has little to do with what I wrote, I wasn't going for a human nature angle. I think the disconnect between us is that you think the -ism is what drives local culture whereas I think it's local culture that determines how much good we can do within either -ism.
I understand your position within the context of the US, it makes perfect sense. But I can't blame capitalist culture for our ills since my own country is a baby capitalist and the defects of our local culture caused even more damage under communism.
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On February 26 2023 04:48 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On February 25 2023 23:18 Dan HH wrote:On February 25 2023 20:17 GreenHorizons wrote:
In that vain and to this larger point/question, people need look no further than food. In the US it's quite possible that the cost of dealing with our food waste alone could make sure no kid has to go hungry. I don't mean reallocating scraps or reallocating shipments so that unpurchased food doesn't rot in the dumpster behind the supermarket (instead of giving it away before it expired), or even not throwing out perfectly good "weird looking" fresh foods. I mean just the cost to move only the food we waste into a pile and bury/burn it, never mind the environmental "externalities". That's just the tip of the iceberg of how insanely inefficient, at the expense of humanity, for the sake of profit the capitalist market system is. How is this an -ism thing and a not a people thing like Acrofales was saying? + Show Spoiler +I go to the store and intentionally pick the firmest fruit and veg, and perishables with the longer expiration dates, precisely because I don't want them to go bad before I get a chance to eat them and have to throw them away. The next person does the same. The next person does the same. By doing this we externalize the throwing away part to the store then we point at how wasteful and evil the store is. Of course they would rather sell those things but they figured out buyer psychology a long time ago.
We could go to the store more frequently and get the smaller carton of milk that expires in 4 days instead of two larger ones that expire in 2 weeks, we could get fewer bananas that are already going dark instead of a large bunch of green ones. We could go to a stall and have the person running it select what vegetables to put in the bag and they'll pick the ripest things first. But that's less convenient and takes more of our free time and we want to spend as little time as possible on chores.
The current way we get both the benefits of convenience and the moral superiority over the evil corporate chain that provides it.
The market is like the golden sphere in Roadside Picnic (or the room in Stalker for you cinephiles), it gives society what it actually wants rather than what it says it wants (or wishes it would want). It's capitalist culture and a cult of individualism. One thing I've learned in my research is that the history of the world/modern civilization that I was taught is not only grossly outdated (anthropology has made significant discoveries over the last decade+) but specifically intended to rationalize that culture (look at phrenology for an example with a shorter social half-life, not that there aren't lingering vestiges). I've always found it completely absurd that apologists for capitalism insist that it's sensible to believe human nature is inextricably cruel and selfish and appease it by developing/defending a system designed to amplify and incentivize the worst parts of that nature. It's not a coincidence that some of the best compensated jobs in the US are also among the most popular jobs for people with antisocial personality disorders (or psycho/sociopathy/narcissism colloquially).
I think maybe I wasn't clear. I thought I'd said that putting our own greed ahead of what is good for society is cultural. I'm not sure what a good culture is for living in globalist megalopoli, as the societal culture that worked decently for most of human history was pretty much tribal, and focused very much on small close-knit communities: you put the needs of your family and your town ahead of your own greed *because* they did the same for you. That comes together with a whole bunch of problems stemming from "othering", but it did give us a solid societal cohesion within those small(ish) groups. That started to break down roughly around the industrial revolution, which was also the rise of cities, and of nationalism. But nations are kinda too big to wrap our brains around, and I don't think nations are a useful unit either: if we have to go bigger than we can wrap our brains around anyway, we should teach people that *everybody everywhere* is our social in-group. Of course, we haven't solved the problem of "not being able to wrap our brains around it" yet, but at least we (theoretically) got rid of othering. An equally big problem is that even if you go local, a city with a few hundred thousand inhabitants is already too large a unit for most people to wrap their brain around, leading to things like neighborhoods getting neglected (because only criminals live there anyway), hate crimes (against "others"). So even at a local level, achieving social cohesion is far harder than it has been throughout most of human history. And, well, if you don't feel particularly cohesive with your surroundings, then it's a fairly easy step to say that what really matters is the *individual*, and if everyone just looks out for number one, society will work out fine (Ayn Rand style).
Now, I don't think socialism solves that. True believers in socialism have already solved it. The problem is that there are very few true believers. And the vast majority is just trying to get on with their lives. A capitalist system allows for that (and indeed, rewards it, which is counterproductive, we agree on that). But socialism fundamentally breaks down if you don't have enough true believers, because it isn't set up well to deal with freeloaders. So socialism right now would be a disaster, just as it was when the Bolsheviks or the Maoists tried it.
So can we educate people to be less individualistic and *also* sort out a structure where we consider *nobody* to be an "other"? I don't know if it's possible to get there (some Klingons arriving and threatening to wipe us out might help. They'd be othererer than other humans), but we definitely need to try that! There are smart humanists and pedagogues who have thought about this, there's sociologists and city planners trying to deal with the practicalities of humans living in cities. It's not as if we're starting from scratch. But we should probably get a move on if we want to get people to care enough about "others" before we destroy the planet out of callousness, greed and apathy.
E: freeloaders is probably not the right term. It's probably just straight up corruption or larceny if people try to get paid "extra" for their labor by selling it on the black market.
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On February 26 2023 05:55 Dan HH wrote:Show nested quote +On February 26 2023 04:48 GreenHorizons wrote:On February 25 2023 23:18 Dan HH wrote:On February 25 2023 20:17 GreenHorizons wrote:
In that vain and to this larger point/question, people need look no further than food. In the US it's quite possible that the cost of dealing with our food waste alone could make sure no kid has to go hungry. I don't mean reallocating scraps or reallocating shipments so that unpurchased food doesn't rot in the dumpster behind the supermarket (instead of giving it away before it expired), or even not throwing out perfectly good "weird looking" fresh foods. I mean just the cost to move only the food we waste into a pile and bury/burn it, never mind the environmental "externalities". That's just the tip of the iceberg of how insanely inefficient, at the expense of humanity, for the sake of profit the capitalist market system is. How is this an -ism thing and a not a people thing like Acrofales was saying? + Show Spoiler +I go to the store and intentionally pick the firmest fruit and veg, and perishables with the longer expiration dates, precisely because I don't want them to go bad before I get a chance to eat them and have to throw them away. The next person does the same. The next person does the same. By doing this we externalize the throwing away part to the store then we point at how wasteful and evil the store is. Of course they would rather sell those things but they figured out buyer psychology a long time ago.
We could go to the store more frequently and get the smaller carton of milk that expires in 4 days instead of two larger ones that expire in 2 weeks, we could get fewer bananas that are already going dark instead of a large bunch of green ones. We could go to a stall and have the person running it select what vegetables to put in the bag and they'll pick the ripest things first. But that's less convenient and takes more of our free time and we want to spend as little time as possible on chores.
The current way we get both the benefits of convenience and the moral superiority over the evil corporate chain that provides it.
The market is like the golden sphere in Roadside Picnic (or the room in Stalker for you cinephiles), it gives society what it actually wants rather than what it says it wants (or wishes it would want). It's capitalist culture and a cult of individualism. One thing I've learned in my research is that the history of the world/modern civilization that I was taught is not only grossly outdated (anthropology has made significant discoveries over the last decade+) but specifically intended to rationalize that culture (look at phrenology for an example with a shorter social half-life, not that there aren't lingering vestiges). I've always found it completely absurd that apologists for capitalism insist that it's sensible to believe human nature is inextricably cruel and selfish and appease it by developing/defending a system designed to amplify and incentivize the worst parts of that nature. It's not a coincidence that some of the best compensated jobs in the US are also among the most popular jobs for people with antisocial personality disorders (or psycho/sociopathy/narcissism colloquially). This has little to do with what I wrote, I wasn't going for a human nature angle. I think the disconnect between us is that you think the -ism is what drives local culture whereas I think it's local culture that determines how much good we can do within either -ism. I understand your position within the context of the US, it makes perfect sense. But I can't blame capitalist culture for our ills since my own country is a baby capitalist and the defects of our local culture caused even more damage under communism. I don't want to go down a rabbit hole about culture in Romania here but needless to say both under ostensible communism and today it's developing under the influence of hegemonic (though it was still fighting over domination until the ~80's) US racial capitalism, which has its roots in European racialism and colonialism (the history and impact of which is probably more relevant to your inquiry, for which I highly recommend Black Marxism by Cedric Robinson). This is part of what I'm referencing when I talk about developments in anthropological, historical, psychological, sociological, etc understandings of the world vs what they were/how they were taught in the 18/1900's.
Basically a lot of things people take for granted historically, psychologically, etc. as "common sense" or "the way it has always been" are just peculiar and transitory artifacts. A frequent example of this phenomena is the gendering of pink and blue (and basically dresses for all toddlers) in the US. Prior to the 1900's it wasn't really even a thing. From 'the early 1900's until ~1940's pink was the "masculine" color and blue the more "delicate". Now in the 21st century, we're going back to thinking gendering colors (and clothing somewhat), is silly. I get the appeal putting an infant in jeans or a tux or whatever so they look like a little you, but beyond a little harmless fun, it's capitalism preying on people at the expense of having less profitable and more practical customs for dressing infants/young children. Again, notwithstanding the immense environmental devastation it causes and capitalism calls "externalities" which is a euphemism for "the part that invalidates the conclusions drawn from many economic models". Basically if you remove the externalities with things like taxes/ environmental laws and remove the worker exploitation by appropriately compensating labor for the value they add, there are no profits left. That's a central quandary (or feature) of social democracy, they can only sustain the "social" part by perpetuating capitalism and it's exploitation/abuse. It is, by design, impossible for it to produce within its own mechanisms a society without capitalism and the atrocities that sustain it.
On February 26 2023 06:33 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On February 26 2023 04:48 GreenHorizons wrote:On February 25 2023 23:18 Dan HH wrote:On February 25 2023 20:17 GreenHorizons wrote:
In that vain and to this larger point/question, people need look no further than food. In the US it's quite possible that the cost of dealing with our food waste alone could make sure no kid has to go hungry. I don't mean reallocating scraps or reallocating shipments so that unpurchased food doesn't rot in the dumpster behind the supermarket (instead of giving it away before it expired), or even not throwing out perfectly good "weird looking" fresh foods. I mean just the cost to move only the food we waste into a pile and bury/burn it, never mind the environmental "externalities". That's just the tip of the iceberg of how insanely inefficient, at the expense of humanity, for the sake of profit the capitalist market system is. How is this an -ism thing and a not a people thing like Acrofales was saying? + Show Spoiler +I go to the store and intentionally pick the firmest fruit and veg, and perishables with the longer expiration dates, precisely because I don't want them to go bad before I get a chance to eat them and have to throw them away. The next person does the same. The next person does the same. By doing this we externalize the throwing away part to the store then we point at how wasteful and evil the store is. Of course they would rather sell those things but they figured out buyer psychology a long time ago.
We could go to the store more frequently and get the smaller carton of milk that expires in 4 days instead of two larger ones that expire in 2 weeks, we could get fewer bananas that are already going dark instead of a large bunch of green ones. We could go to a stall and have the person running it select what vegetables to put in the bag and they'll pick the ripest things first. But that's less convenient and takes more of our free time and we want to spend as little time as possible on chores.
The current way we get both the benefits of convenience and the moral superiority over the evil corporate chain that provides it.
The market is like the golden sphere in Roadside Picnic (or the room in Stalker for you cinephiles), it gives society what it actually wants rather than what it says it wants (or wishes it would want). It's capitalist culture and a cult of individualism. One thing I've learned in my research is that the history of the world/modern civilization that I was taught is not only grossly outdated (anthropology has made significant discoveries over the last decade+) but specifically intended to rationalize that culture (look at phrenology for an example with a shorter social half-life, not that there aren't lingering vestiges). I've always found it completely absurd that apologists for capitalism insist that it's sensible to believe human nature is inextricably cruel and selfish and appease it by developing/defending a system designed to amplify and incentivize the worst parts of that nature. It's not a coincidence that some of the best compensated jobs in the US are also among the most popular jobs for people with antisocial personality disorders (or psycho/sociopathy/narcissism colloquially). I think maybe I wasn't clear. I thought I'd said that putting our own greed ahead of what is good for society is cultural. + Show Spoiler + I'm not sure what a good culture is for living in globalist megalopoli, as the societal culture that worked decently for most of human history was pretty much tribal, and focused very much on small close-knit communities: you put the needs of your family and your town ahead of your own greed *because* they did the same for you. That comes together with a whole bunch of problems stemming from "othering", but it did give us a solid societal cohesion within those small(ish) groups. That started to break down roughly around the industrial revolution, which was also the rise of cities, and of nationalism. But nations are kinda too big to wrap our brains around, and I don't think nations are a useful unit either: if we have to go bigger than we can wrap our brains around anyway, we should teach people that *everybody everywhere* is our social in-group. Of course, we haven't solved the problem of "not being able to wrap our brains around it" yet, but at least we (theoretically) got rid of othering. An equally big problem is that even if you go local, a city with a few hundred thousand inhabitants is already too large a unit for most people to wrap their brain around, leading to things like neighborhoods getting neglected (because only criminals live there anyway), hate crimes (against "others"). So even at a local level, achieving social cohesion is far harder than it has been throughout most of human history. And, well, if you don't feel particularly cohesive with your surroundings, then it's a fairly easy step to say that what really matters is the *individual*, and if everyone just looks out for number one, society will work out fine (Ayn Rand style). Now, I don't think socialism solves that. + Show Spoiler +True believers in socialism have already solved it. The problem is that there are very few true believers. And the vast majority is just trying to get on with their lives. A capitalist system allows for that (and indeed, rewards it, which is counterproductive, we agree on that). But socialism fundamentally breaks down if you don't have enough true believers, because it isn't set up well to deal with freeloaders. So socialism right now would be a disaster, just as it was when the Bolsheviks or the Maoists tried it.
So can we educate people to be less individualistic and *also* sort out a structure where we consider *nobody* to be an "other"? I don't know if it's possible to get there (some Klingons arriving and threatening to wipe us out might help. They'd be othererer than other humans), but we definitely need to try that! There are smart humanists and pedagogues who have thought about this, there's sociologists and city planners trying to deal with the practicalities of humans living in cities. It's not as if we're starting from scratch. But we should probably get a move on if we want to get people to care enough about "others" before we destroy the planet out of callousness, greed and apathy. E: freeloaders is probably not the right term. It's probably just straight up corruption or larceny if people try to get paid "extra" for their labor by selling it on the black market.
I think one of the most important points I'm trying to make is that I'm not trying to convince people that socialism (particularly not just the economics of it) will solve this stuff, but that it's the "lesser evil" way to try.
Increasingly the scientists and experts you allude to are coming to the realization (to the degree they can and not lose funding, which in itself is another example of such) that capitalism fundamentally and inextricably stands in the way of their (and all of ours) potential for progress on these fronts.
EDIT: Just to clarify, this doesn't mean I expect all aspects of capitalism to cease entirely overnight under even an ideal scenario, it means rather than the thirdway/social democrat worldview (appeasing capitalists and bribing proximal people "just trying to get by" with basic social services/human rights/status/etc. to go along to get along), we have to transition out of capitalism using non-reformist reforms toward something else (I would argue clearly socialism is the best candidate). From there we can and should think about how we can address real challenges/circumstances we face as a species/society, but under a socialist framework. That should (and does) include looking to what the people immersed and active in this stuff have said over the years as well as fresh insights from the proletariat this stuff will directly impact.
Instead, people basically just end up demanding that socialism first eli5 how it's going to completely solve things capitalism has been failing to resolve through hundreds of years of experimentation and modifications or else they can't bothered. Then they act indignant when someone points out the apparent inhumanity of such a stance.
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On February 26 2023 07:48 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On February 26 2023 05:55 Dan HH wrote:On February 26 2023 04:48 GreenHorizons wrote:On February 25 2023 23:18 Dan HH wrote:On February 25 2023 20:17 GreenHorizons wrote:
In that vain and to this larger point/question, people need look no further than food. In the US it's quite possible that the cost of dealing with our food waste alone could make sure no kid has to go hungry. I don't mean reallocating scraps or reallocating shipments so that unpurchased food doesn't rot in the dumpster behind the supermarket (instead of giving it away before it expired), or even not throwing out perfectly good "weird looking" fresh foods. I mean just the cost to move only the food we waste into a pile and bury/burn it, never mind the environmental "externalities". That's just the tip of the iceberg of how insanely inefficient, at the expense of humanity, for the sake of profit the capitalist market system is. How is this an -ism thing and a not a people thing like Acrofales was saying? + Show Spoiler +I go to the store and intentionally pick the firmest fruit and veg, and perishables with the longer expiration dates, precisely because I don't want them to go bad before I get a chance to eat them and have to throw them away. The next person does the same. The next person does the same. By doing this we externalize the throwing away part to the store then we point at how wasteful and evil the store is. Of course they would rather sell those things but they figured out buyer psychology a long time ago.
We could go to the store more frequently and get the smaller carton of milk that expires in 4 days instead of two larger ones that expire in 2 weeks, we could get fewer bananas that are already going dark instead of a large bunch of green ones. We could go to a stall and have the person running it select what vegetables to put in the bag and they'll pick the ripest things first. But that's less convenient and takes more of our free time and we want to spend as little time as possible on chores.
The current way we get both the benefits of convenience and the moral superiority over the evil corporate chain that provides it.
The market is like the golden sphere in Roadside Picnic (or the room in Stalker for you cinephiles), it gives society what it actually wants rather than what it says it wants (or wishes it would want). It's capitalist culture and a cult of individualism. One thing I've learned in my research is that the history of the world/modern civilization that I was taught is not only grossly outdated (anthropology has made significant discoveries over the last decade+) but specifically intended to rationalize that culture (look at phrenology for an example with a shorter social half-life, not that there aren't lingering vestiges). I've always found it completely absurd that apologists for capitalism insist that it's sensible to believe human nature is inextricably cruel and selfish and appease it by developing/defending a system designed to amplify and incentivize the worst parts of that nature. It's not a coincidence that some of the best compensated jobs in the US are also among the most popular jobs for people with antisocial personality disorders (or psycho/sociopathy/narcissism colloquially). This has little to do with what I wrote, I wasn't going for a human nature angle. I think the disconnect between us is that you think the -ism is what drives local culture whereas I think it's local culture that determines how much good we can do within either -ism. I understand your position within the context of the US, it makes perfect sense. But I can't blame capitalist culture for our ills since my own country is a baby capitalist and the defects of our local culture caused even more damage under communism. I don't want to go down a rabbit hole about culture in Romania here but needless to say both under ostensible communism and today it's developing under the influence of hegemonic (though it was still fighting over domination until the ~80's) US racial capitalism, which has it's roots in European racialism and colonialism (the history and impact of which is probably more relevant to your inquiry, for which I highly recommend Black Marxism by Cedric Robinson). This is part of what I'm referencing when I talk about developments in anthropological, historical, psychological, sociological, etc understandings of the world vs what they were/how they were taught in the 18/1900's. Basically a lot of things people take for granted historically, psychologically, etc. as "common sense" or "the way it has always been" are just peculiar and transitory artifacts. A frequent example of this phenomena is the gendering of pink and blue (and basically dresses for all toddlers) in the US. Prior to the 1900's it wasn't really even a thing. From 'the early 1900's until ~1940's pink was the "masculine" color and blue the more "delicate". Now in the 21st century, we're going back to thinking gendering colors (and clothing somewhat), is silly. I get the appeal putting an infant in jeans or a tux or whatever so they look like a little you, but beyond a little harmless fun, it's capitalism preying on people at the expense of having less profitable and more practical customs for dressing infants/young children. Again, notwithstanding the immense environmental devastation it causes and capitalism calls "externalities" which is a euphemism for "the part that invalidates the conclusions drawn from many economic models". Basically if you remove the externalities with things like taxes/ environmental laws and remove the worker exploitation by appropriately compensating labor for the value they add, there are no profits left. That's a central quandary (or feature) of social democracy, they can only sustain the "social" part by perpetuating capitalism and it's exploitation/abuse. It is, by design, impossible for it to produce within its own mechanisms a society without capitalism and the atrocities that sustain it. Show nested quote +On February 26 2023 06:33 Acrofales wrote:On February 26 2023 04:48 GreenHorizons wrote:On February 25 2023 23:18 Dan HH wrote:On February 25 2023 20:17 GreenHorizons wrote:
In that vain and to this larger point/question, people need look no further than food. In the US it's quite possible that the cost of dealing with our food waste alone could make sure no kid has to go hungry. I don't mean reallocating scraps or reallocating shipments so that unpurchased food doesn't rot in the dumpster behind the supermarket (instead of giving it away before it expired), or even not throwing out perfectly good "weird looking" fresh foods. I mean just the cost to move only the food we waste into a pile and bury/burn it, never mind the environmental "externalities". That's just the tip of the iceberg of how insanely inefficient, at the expense of humanity, for the sake of profit the capitalist market system is. How is this an -ism thing and a not a people thing like Acrofales was saying? + Show Spoiler +I go to the store and intentionally pick the firmest fruit and veg, and perishables with the longer expiration dates, precisely because I don't want them to go bad before I get a chance to eat them and have to throw them away. The next person does the same. The next person does the same. By doing this we externalize the throwing away part to the store then we point at how wasteful and evil the store is. Of course they would rather sell those things but they figured out buyer psychology a long time ago.
We could go to the store more frequently and get the smaller carton of milk that expires in 4 days instead of two larger ones that expire in 2 weeks, we could get fewer bananas that are already going dark instead of a large bunch of green ones. We could go to a stall and have the person running it select what vegetables to put in the bag and they'll pick the ripest things first. But that's less convenient and takes more of our free time and we want to spend as little time as possible on chores.
The current way we get both the benefits of convenience and the moral superiority over the evil corporate chain that provides it.
The market is like the golden sphere in Roadside Picnic (or the room in Stalker for you cinephiles), it gives society what it actually wants rather than what it says it wants (or wishes it would want). It's capitalist culture and a cult of individualism. One thing I've learned in my research is that the history of the world/modern civilization that I was taught is not only grossly outdated (anthropology has made significant discoveries over the last decade+) but specifically intended to rationalize that culture (look at phrenology for an example with a shorter social half-life, not that there aren't lingering vestiges). I've always found it completely absurd that apologists for capitalism insist that it's sensible to believe human nature is inextricably cruel and selfish and appease it by developing/defending a system designed to amplify and incentivize the worst parts of that nature. It's not a coincidence that some of the best compensated jobs in the US are also among the most popular jobs for people with antisocial personality disorders (or psycho/sociopathy/narcissism colloquially). I think maybe I wasn't clear. I thought I'd said that putting our own greed ahead of what is good for society is cultural. + Show Spoiler + I'm not sure what a good culture is for living in globalist megalopoli, as the societal culture that worked decently for most of human history was pretty much tribal, and focused very much on small close-knit communities: you put the needs of your family and your town ahead of your own greed *because* they did the same for you. That comes together with a whole bunch of problems stemming from "othering", but it did give us a solid societal cohesion within those small(ish) groups. That started to break down roughly around the industrial revolution, which was also the rise of cities, and of nationalism. But nations are kinda too big to wrap our brains around, and I don't think nations are a useful unit either: if we have to go bigger than we can wrap our brains around anyway, we should teach people that *everybody everywhere* is our social in-group. Of course, we haven't solved the problem of "not being able to wrap our brains around it" yet, but at least we (theoretically) got rid of othering. An equally big problem is that even if you go local, a city with a few hundred thousand inhabitants is already too large a unit for most people to wrap their brain around, leading to things like neighborhoods getting neglected (because only criminals live there anyway), hate crimes (against "others"). So even at a local level, achieving social cohesion is far harder than it has been throughout most of human history. And, well, if you don't feel particularly cohesive with your surroundings, then it's a fairly easy step to say that what really matters is the *individual*, and if everyone just looks out for number one, society will work out fine (Ayn Rand style). Now, I don't think socialism solves that. + Show Spoiler +True believers in socialism have already solved it. The problem is that there are very few true believers. And the vast majority is just trying to get on with their lives. A capitalist system allows for that (and indeed, rewards it, which is counterproductive, we agree on that). But socialism fundamentally breaks down if you don't have enough true believers, because it isn't set up well to deal with freeloaders. So socialism right now would be a disaster, just as it was when the Bolsheviks or the Maoists tried it.
So can we educate people to be less individualistic and *also* sort out a structure where we consider *nobody* to be an "other"? I don't know if it's possible to get there (some Klingons arriving and threatening to wipe us out might help. They'd be othererer than other humans), but we definitely need to try that! There are smart humanists and pedagogues who have thought about this, there's sociologists and city planners trying to deal with the practicalities of humans living in cities. It's not as if we're starting from scratch. But we should probably get a move on if we want to get people to care enough about "others" before we destroy the planet out of callousness, greed and apathy. E: freeloaders is probably not the right term. It's probably just straight up corruption or larceny if people try to get paid "extra" for their labor by selling it on the black market. I think one of the most important points I'm trying to make is that I'm not trying to convince people that socialism (particularly not just the economics of it) will solve this stuff, but that it's the "lesser evil" way to try. Increasingly the scientists and experts you allude to are coming to the realization (to the degree they can and not lose funding, which in itself is another example of such) that capitalism fundamentally and inextricably stands in the way of their (and all of ours) potential for progress on these fronts.
ok, so as interesting as this conversation is, in that it's different than what we normally get, GH and I generally ignore each other because we are so very far apart. We also have a history of, uh, lowering thread quality many years ago. So I hesitate to wade into a conversation between what might be called the neoliberal left and the revolutionary left.
But I would just say that we can do better and actually affirm the moral superiority of a market capitalist system. I think it gives away too much to say "well, it's the least bad." After all, if we are going to go down to the level of community and individuals we could of course, as has already been alluded to, call capitalism a system of free exchange. I don't know that, at least in theory, it's a fair characterization to say that capitalism is merely "greed is good." In fact I don't know how many self-proclaimed capitalists who would say such a thing. Certainly none of the market-loving intellectuals whose names we know would say this. Now to me of course as a matter of empirical examination the different between capitalism and some form of Marxism or socialism is clear, but we have wandered into more difficult territory because the socialist gets to play at what they want and the capitalist has to play with what is.
Nonetheless, if we are going to compare apples to apples (i.e. theory to theory) capitalism is still better in that it allows for dispersed knowledge which aids dealing with unforeseen consequences and free choice which hopefully leads to happier lives.
I admit I haven't presented an actual argument but as I said above I am loath to wade in here. Summary is to say that we need not argue that capitalism "succeeds" because humans are bad. That's a flaw in every system, and people on the right don't encourage greed or avariciousness any more than they encourage theft. Capitalism's faults stem from human failure too, it's not only socialism that deals with this. But it better corrects for these imperfections embedded in human free will than does an actual socialist system. Capitalism does not turn vice into virtue.
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Hm. Maybe I was overly negative? I don't think it's unfair to say capitalism rewards greed? It doesn't succeed because of greed, but it is kinda built-in that greed is not a bad trait. It's kinda what "rational actor" means in economical models. Agents who act in the interest of maximizing their personal gains.
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On February 26 2023 08:22 Introvert wrote:Show nested quote +On February 26 2023 07:48 GreenHorizons wrote:On February 26 2023 05:55 Dan HH wrote:On February 26 2023 04:48 GreenHorizons wrote:On February 25 2023 23:18 Dan HH wrote:On February 25 2023 20:17 GreenHorizons wrote:
In that vain and to this larger point/question, people need look no further than food. In the US it's quite possible that the cost of dealing with our food waste alone could make sure no kid has to go hungry. I don't mean reallocating scraps or reallocating shipments so that unpurchased food doesn't rot in the dumpster behind the supermarket (instead of giving it away before it expired), or even not throwing out perfectly good "weird looking" fresh foods. I mean just the cost to move only the food we waste into a pile and bury/burn it, never mind the environmental "externalities". That's just the tip of the iceberg of how insanely inefficient, at the expense of humanity, for the sake of profit the capitalist market system is. How is this an -ism thing and a not a people thing like Acrofales was saying? + Show Spoiler +I go to the store and intentionally pick the firmest fruit and veg, and perishables with the longer expiration dates, precisely because I don't want them to go bad before I get a chance to eat them and have to throw them away. The next person does the same. The next person does the same. By doing this we externalize the throwing away part to the store then we point at how wasteful and evil the store is. Of course they would rather sell those things but they figured out buyer psychology a long time ago.
We could go to the store more frequently and get the smaller carton of milk that expires in 4 days instead of two larger ones that expire in 2 weeks, we could get fewer bananas that are already going dark instead of a large bunch of green ones. We could go to a stall and have the person running it select what vegetables to put in the bag and they'll pick the ripest things first. But that's less convenient and takes more of our free time and we want to spend as little time as possible on chores.
The current way we get both the benefits of convenience and the moral superiority over the evil corporate chain that provides it.
The market is like the golden sphere in Roadside Picnic (or the room in Stalker for you cinephiles), it gives society what it actually wants rather than what it says it wants (or wishes it would want). It's capitalist culture and a cult of individualism. One thing I've learned in my research is that the history of the world/modern civilization that I was taught is not only grossly outdated (anthropology has made significant discoveries over the last decade+) but specifically intended to rationalize that culture (look at phrenology for an example with a shorter social half-life, not that there aren't lingering vestiges). I've always found it completely absurd that apologists for capitalism insist that it's sensible to believe human nature is inextricably cruel and selfish and appease it by developing/defending a system designed to amplify and incentivize the worst parts of that nature. It's not a coincidence that some of the best compensated jobs in the US are also among the most popular jobs for people with antisocial personality disorders (or psycho/sociopathy/narcissism colloquially). This has little to do with what I wrote, I wasn't going for a human nature angle. I think the disconnect between us is that you think the -ism is what drives local culture whereas I think it's local culture that determines how much good we can do within either -ism. I understand your position within the context of the US, it makes perfect sense. But I can't blame capitalist culture for our ills since my own country is a baby capitalist and the defects of our local culture caused even more damage under communism. I don't want to go down a rabbit hole about culture in Romania here but needless to say both under ostensible communism and today it's developing under the influence of hegemonic (though it was still fighting over domination until the ~80's) US racial capitalism, which has it's roots in European racialism and colonialism (the history and impact of which is probably more relevant to your inquiry, for which I highly recommend Black Marxism by Cedric Robinson). This is part of what I'm referencing when I talk about developments in anthropological, historical, psychological, sociological, etc understandings of the world vs what they were/how they were taught in the 18/1900's. Basically a lot of things people take for granted historically, psychologically, etc. as "common sense" or "the way it has always been" are just peculiar and transitory artifacts. A frequent example of this phenomena is the gendering of pink and blue (and basically dresses for all toddlers) in the US. Prior to the 1900's it wasn't really even a thing. From 'the early 1900's until ~1940's pink was the "masculine" color and blue the more "delicate". Now in the 21st century, we're going back to thinking gendering colors (and clothing somewhat), is silly. I get the appeal putting an infant in jeans or a tux or whatever so they look like a little you, but beyond a little harmless fun, it's capitalism preying on people at the expense of having less profitable and more practical customs for dressing infants/young children. Again, notwithstanding the immense environmental devastation it causes and capitalism calls "externalities" which is a euphemism for "the part that invalidates the conclusions drawn from many economic models". Basically if you remove the externalities with things like taxes/ environmental laws and remove the worker exploitation by appropriately compensating labor for the value they add, there are no profits left. That's a central quandary (or feature) of social democracy, they can only sustain the "social" part by perpetuating capitalism and it's exploitation/abuse. It is, by design, impossible for it to produce within its own mechanisms a society without capitalism and the atrocities that sustain it. On February 26 2023 06:33 Acrofales wrote:On February 26 2023 04:48 GreenHorizons wrote:On February 25 2023 23:18 Dan HH wrote:On February 25 2023 20:17 GreenHorizons wrote:
In that vain and to this larger point/question, people need look no further than food. In the US it's quite possible that the cost of dealing with our food waste alone could make sure no kid has to go hungry. I don't mean reallocating scraps or reallocating shipments so that unpurchased food doesn't rot in the dumpster behind the supermarket (instead of giving it away before it expired), or even not throwing out perfectly good "weird looking" fresh foods. I mean just the cost to move only the food we waste into a pile and bury/burn it, never mind the environmental "externalities". That's just the tip of the iceberg of how insanely inefficient, at the expense of humanity, for the sake of profit the capitalist market system is. How is this an -ism thing and a not a people thing like Acrofales was saying? + Show Spoiler +I go to the store and intentionally pick the firmest fruit and veg, and perishables with the longer expiration dates, precisely because I don't want them to go bad before I get a chance to eat them and have to throw them away. The next person does the same. The next person does the same. By doing this we externalize the throwing away part to the store then we point at how wasteful and evil the store is. Of course they would rather sell those things but they figured out buyer psychology a long time ago.
We could go to the store more frequently and get the smaller carton of milk that expires in 4 days instead of two larger ones that expire in 2 weeks, we could get fewer bananas that are already going dark instead of a large bunch of green ones. We could go to a stall and have the person running it select what vegetables to put in the bag and they'll pick the ripest things first. But that's less convenient and takes more of our free time and we want to spend as little time as possible on chores.
The current way we get both the benefits of convenience and the moral superiority over the evil corporate chain that provides it.
The market is like the golden sphere in Roadside Picnic (or the room in Stalker for you cinephiles), it gives society what it actually wants rather than what it says it wants (or wishes it would want). It's capitalist culture and a cult of individualism. One thing I've learned in my research is that the history of the world/modern civilization that I was taught is not only grossly outdated (anthropology has made significant discoveries over the last decade+) but specifically intended to rationalize that culture (look at phrenology for an example with a shorter social half-life, not that there aren't lingering vestiges). I've always found it completely absurd that apologists for capitalism insist that it's sensible to believe human nature is inextricably cruel and selfish and appease it by developing/defending a system designed to amplify and incentivize the worst parts of that nature. It's not a coincidence that some of the best compensated jobs in the US are also among the most popular jobs for people with antisocial personality disorders (or psycho/sociopathy/narcissism colloquially). I think maybe I wasn't clear. I thought I'd said that putting our own greed ahead of what is good for society is cultural. + Show Spoiler + I'm not sure what a good culture is for living in globalist megalopoli, as the societal culture that worked decently for most of human history was pretty much tribal, and focused very much on small close-knit communities: you put the needs of your family and your town ahead of your own greed *because* they did the same for you. That comes together with a whole bunch of problems stemming from "othering", but it did give us a solid societal cohesion within those small(ish) groups. That started to break down roughly around the industrial revolution, which was also the rise of cities, and of nationalism. But nations are kinda too big to wrap our brains around, and I don't think nations are a useful unit either: if we have to go bigger than we can wrap our brains around anyway, we should teach people that *everybody everywhere* is our social in-group. Of course, we haven't solved the problem of "not being able to wrap our brains around it" yet, but at least we (theoretically) got rid of othering. An equally big problem is that even if you go local, a city with a few hundred thousand inhabitants is already too large a unit for most people to wrap their brain around, leading to things like neighborhoods getting neglected (because only criminals live there anyway), hate crimes (against "others"). So even at a local level, achieving social cohesion is far harder than it has been throughout most of human history. And, well, if you don't feel particularly cohesive with your surroundings, then it's a fairly easy step to say that what really matters is the *individual*, and if everyone just looks out for number one, society will work out fine (Ayn Rand style). Now, I don't think socialism solves that. + Show Spoiler +True believers in socialism have already solved it. The problem is that there are very few true believers. And the vast majority is just trying to get on with their lives. A capitalist system allows for that (and indeed, rewards it, which is counterproductive, we agree on that). But socialism fundamentally breaks down if you don't have enough true believers, because it isn't set up well to deal with freeloaders. So socialism right now would be a disaster, just as it was when the Bolsheviks or the Maoists tried it.
So can we educate people to be less individualistic and *also* sort out a structure where we consider *nobody* to be an "other"? I don't know if it's possible to get there (some Klingons arriving and threatening to wipe us out might help. They'd be othererer than other humans), but we definitely need to try that! There are smart humanists and pedagogues who have thought about this, there's sociologists and city planners trying to deal with the practicalities of humans living in cities. It's not as if we're starting from scratch. But we should probably get a move on if we want to get people to care enough about "others" before we destroy the planet out of callousness, greed and apathy. E: freeloaders is probably not the right term. It's probably just straight up corruption or larceny if people try to get paid "extra" for their labor by selling it on the black market. I think one of the most important points I'm trying to make is that I'm not trying to convince people that socialism (particularly not just the economics of it) will solve this stuff, but that it's the "lesser evil" way to try. Increasingly the scientists and experts you allude to are coming to the realization (to the degree they can and not lose funding, which in itself is another example of such) that capitalism fundamentally and inextricably stands in the way of their (and all of ours) potential for progress on these fronts. ok, so as interesting as this conversation is, in that it's different than what we normally get, GH and I generally ignore each other because we are so very far apart. We also have a history of, uh, lowering thread quality many years ago. So I hesitate to wade into a conversation between what might be called the neoliberal left and the revolutionary left. But I would just say that we can do better and actually affirm the moral superiority of a market capitalist system. I think it gives away too much to say "well, it's the least bad." After all, if we are going to go down to the level of community and individuals we could of course, as has already been alluded to, call capitalism a system of free exchange. I don't know that, at least in theory, it's a fair characterization to say that capitalism is merely "greed is good." In fact I don't know how many self-proclaimed capitalists who would say such a thing. Certainly none of the market-loving intellectuals whose names we know would say this. Now to me of course as a matter of empirical examination the different between capitalism and some form of Marxism or socialism is clear, but we have wandered into more difficult territory because the socialist gets to play at what they want and the capitalist has to play with what is. Nonetheless, if we are going to compare apples to apples (i.e. theory to theory) capitalism is still better in that it allows for dispersed knowledge which aids dealing with unforeseen consequences and free choice which hopefully leads to happier lives. I admit I haven't presented an actual argument but as I said above I am loath to wade in here. Summary is to say that we need not argue that capitalism "succeeds" because humans are bad. That's a flaw in every system, and people on the right don't encourage greed or avariciousness any more than they encourage theft. Capitalism's faults stem from human failure too, it's not only socialism that deals with this. But it better corrects for these imperfections embedded in human free will than does an actual socialist system. Capitalism does not turn vice into virtue.
"Moral superiority" is an interesting word choice. It sounds like a claim, not of the greater efficacy of a market system (though I'm sure you believe that too), but of the greater virtue of a market system over something centrally planned. I know you're trying to avoid wading into this discussion, but I'd be very curious at some point to hear why you think capitalism has a greater tendency to inspire virtue.
It reminds me of an argument I hear sometimes from religious conservatives (not attributing this to you, necessarily) that goes something like this: society has a variety of people in need of help, but the government shouldn't provide it – not because they couldn't do it effectively, but because it denies private charity the chance to help. It's virtuous, after all, to help a person in need; God rewards good deeds like that! But if it's just done systemically, as a matter of law, nobody had the chance to be virtuous, and God has no one to reward. In fact, I have an uncle who made an even stronger version of this argument: it's good for people to rely on private charity, because private charity is frequently church-based. Churches are, naturally, more inclined to take care of their own, and therefore people will be incentivized to join a church and be active in it if they want a social safety net.
+ Show Spoiler [aside] +In the same discussion, he kept repeating that taxing your fellow citizens to pay for social services is essentially "enslaving" them – he was quite insistent on this word choice. You may imagine he and I didn't agree on much, although I kind of appreciated his honesty, at least.
It's not for me to tell people their faith, although it seems to me this scheme is equivalent to maintaining a walled-off kingswood stocked with "wild" animals, so you can demonstrate to God your great hunting prowess; it's hard to imagine believing He could be fooled so easily. But it is, at least, useful to remember that people wrap up ideologies like free market capitalism in value systems that have very little to do with being more "effective." One consequence is that the belief is not, fundamentally, empirical; if you rigorously showed that some alternative economic system was ultimately more productive, and produced more total goods and services for everyone to enjoy, it would do very little to persuade someone who believes in capitalism for other reasons.
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