It's hard to imagine a modern concept like "unemployment" without Capitalism, which brought with it boom/bust cycles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_economic_crises

There's very little on that list before the Industrial Revolution

Before capitalism, everyone was gainfully employed in just struggling to survive. #FarmLife

The historical terms for "unemployment" would have been beggars and paupers. They certainly existed prior to the term and economic philosophy of Capitalism (big-C) being defined.

If everyone's basic needs are covered, and they are free to pursue artistic or otherwise unnecessary pursuits to fulfill themselves, they will fast begin to compete with each other about who is the most artistic, or free-spirited, or creative. Then it will become a game to be gamed, and the sheen will wear off for a lot of people.

I don't know if this was intended as a criticism or agreement with the person you replied to. Either way, competing on levels that are far removed from the bottom hierarchy of needs is something we should consider a good thing, whether or not the sheen wears off for some people. The problems with our hypercompetition for many of the basics are that it produces cheating because there's such intense pressure to stay/get ahead ("The Cheating Culture"), and that failure can leave you with absolute, rather than just relative, levels of privation.

As far as the sheen wearing off, I'm not sure I'd agree with that. In extant communities that have no rewards outside of their status hierarchy, people continue to participate, often with great gusto: gaming, stamp collecting, meme creation, drawing, etc. People do them for both intrinsic rewards, and for status rewards only within that hierarchy or in "nearby" hierarchies.

Even Trotsky thought "the powerful force of competition which, in bourgeois society, has the character of market competition, will not disappear in a socialist society, but, to use the language of psychoanalysis, will be sublimated, that is, will assume a higher and more fertile form" "individual competition will have the widest scope." In the cases where the sheen does wear off, people can always switch, as they do now, to other areas (get bored of WoW, start playing Dark Souls, or go to a completely different hierarchy [games -> painting].)

Aren't artistic endeavors already plagued by this... at least to some extent?

Any small microcosm will ultimately generate heated, competitive spirit -- even when the reward is minuscule and virtually meaningless.

In other words: people love to compete over stupid shit.

Whether it is minuscule or meaningless is isomorphically equivalent to the question of whether reproduction itself is meaningless. I'd say the meaning in this case is in the eye of the beholder.

The physical reality is one and only.

I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're trying to say.

I guess parent is suggesting the competition over stupid shit is really about signaling reproductive fitness, like a peacock's tail etc.

Cool interpretation! I like that concept. But grandparent was definitely trying to deconstruct the word "meaningless", getting a little existential in the process.

The parts of capitalism that are worth keeping are the least zero sum of any other system. Unfortunately, "capitalism" has come to cover concepts that really don't belong to it.

Culturally, mimetic envy of one's neighbor was explicitly proscribed against in Western systems of though - "thou shalt not covet" - until fairly recently. So what changed? Probably TV advertising.

Or "thou salt not covet" was always bullshit no one really followed and used selectively to shame people who went against the church and to shame the people into tithing, shame the rich to giving up their estates to the church, protect markets/vendors that the church has a stake in, etc.

As a student of history I find it amusing when people pick some golden period when things were better or when we look at written records uncritically. From what I can tell, human nature doesn't really change and follows the types of algorithms evolution has inserted into other animals like following game theory-like tactics.

I plead observer bias - I've noticed the difference in my lifetime. It wasn't some halcyon golden era, but I was raised by people who grew up in the Depression, and they had a certain Puritan streak about material possessions.

And TV advertising is just a hobby horse. The first practitioners were "retired" OSS officers, principally propagandists. This certainly fits my desire to avoid it for aesthetic reasons. I'd just note that Prosperity Gospel really is a thing, caused (and carried) by Cable TV.

I agree. The article describes pretty interesting cultural problems, makes some interesting points, and then out of nowhere suggests radical political change as the solution.

Still worth the read, especially in the context of tech industry, where personally I see it at a crossroads of cubicle-farm vs artistic-expression. Maybe just ignore the last paragraph.

Its fairly ironic that the biggest criticism I've seen of continuing education is that academics get really out of touch with the status quo and academia becomes its own weird echo chamber of near nonsense, especially outside the hard sciences. The fact that this guy ended his little essay with a "tear down capitalism and replace it with $failed_communist_lite_ideas" fulfills that prediction.

Everyone I know who went to grad school had a "meh, I dont have anything else to do and being a student beats working" attitude as opposed to some cutthroat "fuck you losers" attitude the writer is suggesting. This is a bizarre essay unless you're to the far left and casually blaming everything on capitalism is the only card in your intellectual deck (which is often the case on the internet I'm afraid).

"Capitalism does not require the concept of a loser. It's the base human instinct of comparison to ones neighbor that requires the concept of a loser."

I would say that both benefit from the concept of a loser. In fact capitalism and this instinct go hand in hand. Capitalism is a frame work which works with this instinct.

Having said that it is also true that children have a natural instinct to play with their own faeces. Both this preoccupation with poo and the desire to elevate self at the expense of other should be discouraged.

Capitalism sucks, for the reasons eloquently outlined in this article.

Capitalism, at it's core, is the freedom to offer people a deal and at the same time the freedom to reject deals. If you create something of value, you are free to ask something of value in return. Anybody is free to pay your price, to try to negotiate or to say no. Capitalism is a system where created value is distributed with the least amount of compromise to freedom.

Anything else I feel is sick capitalism, Banks repackaging unsustainable mortgages, hiding their inherent risks is not capitalism, it is lying, obfuscating and misleading. It is crime.

Capitalism is someone creating value and others willingly giving up their time and money (their create value) to get that value. Capitalism a beautiful system but it is ill and wrongly labeled in the current world.

The fundamental issue with that line of thinking is that deal-making only works when one of the parties is not under duress. If your life is on the line, you will take terrible deals, because you have no choice.

Capitalism is a system where the companies hold all the power and labor holds none- because if labor doesn't take the deal, labor will die. You can't negotiate a fair deal under those circumstances.

Which is why you need the government- social safety nets give power back to labor. So do unions. But both have been severely cut back in the past few decades.

Anyone can start a company under capitalism. You are empowered to create wealth yourself and enrich yourself from that creation. That's a beautiful thing and should not be taken for granted.

Anyone with enough capital, though.

MIT provides a great book on learning deep learning. Amazon web services and many other big name virtualization services provide free trial periods for their services. A raspberry pi and a cheap tv and keyboard/mouse will get you the ability to write programs and you can get free phone service and internet with absurdly cheap smartphones available at most retail stores. All of the courses you need to work up to a masters in theoretical physics are available through MIT OCW and the perimeter institute or other programs(Stanford, UCI), and there are many programs that will help you with starting up a company. There's no excuse nowadays. A couple of years ago, yes, but now, there's no excuse.

Where do you get rent and food while you're earning the masters degree online?

Get a job as a security guard? Security guards have a surprising amount of down time when it comes to work, and one of my good friends wrapped up his degree while working as a security guard on campus. That's not what you want to hear though. What you likely want to hear is 'Free Monayz!' Well either you're taking that money from someone else who earned it productively or you're taking that money from someone who saved it in the form of inflation if you print it.

So let me get this straight: your solution to labor's subservience to capital is for all the millions of working poor to get jobs as security guards while earning degrees in theoretical physics?

I get what you're trying to say, but you're proposing an individual solution (that cannot scale) to a systematic problem.

What capital? We're not building widgets here. You take advantage of the resources that are given to you and make something of yourself. That's how it works.

In the 20th century you needed a lot of capital to start a company. In the 21st century, you don't.

So how much capital do you reckon you need to start a company, and why isn't that amount "a lot"?

A friend of mine got an MBA at MIT and started a company. He had to spend the first 6 months without any income, living off his savings. On top of the capital he needed to start it.

And any labor force can organize, go on strike or simply leave. (edit: responded to the wrong post, sorry.)

I agree with this. It is why I feel healthcare (where your option may become: Pay or Die) is not a system that should be left to the free market but is better at it's place under a government. Of course this should be a government that operates with the consent of the governed, is kept highly accountable for it's actions and is insensitive to lobbying. I think that especially the latter is undoing many of the benefits of democracy.

Also, usually when people criticize capitalism, they're referring to "the current modern day manic deregulated post-neoliberal form of capitalism" as shorthand. People are probably okay with capitalism as practiced in the postwar era, when there were stronger social safety nets in the West.

Honestly, usually not. There's an argument to be made that capitalism causes industries to tend towards monopolies (or at least oligopolies) in many areas, monopolies centralise money, money equals power, power then gets used to remove safety nets in the name of making more money - so the current state of things is nearly inevitable. Even if the vast, vast majority of cases don't lead to monopolies, it only takes a couple of large industries.

He is talking about how it actually functions, not the theory of capitalism. It does work that way.