Even at the most level of the most fundamental unit of the economy -- the worker -- being a team player is just as important as being a good individual contributor. For most jobs, "fit" is a huge factor in hiring.
Hence our problems. If there's something I've learned to notice recently is that most world issues are or were very profitable for someone. I think we're past the point where "nature" is really that big of an issue, and now it's mostly just us pecking each other down either in the smaller scale, or in large, systematic ways.
Can you elaborate a bit more?
This is a result of our narrow vision.
Slavery - treating people as property, like we treat animals - is an extreme example of this, and to this day we are still facing the consequences. But we still treat animals that way - as things that are bought and sold and exploited to death. Even after such animal slavery is abolished, we will still experience its consequences, for a long time.
This is a difference between those who believe in Scarcity from those who believe in Abundance (at least in theory). The Takers and Makers.
It would be very easy to outperform capitalism if you could find leaders who care more about the output of the system than their personal power. There is no evidence that it is possible to find such leaders, and lots of evidence that capitalism resists bad leaders for extended periods of time.
As a result in practice a hybrid system of capitalism and communism tends to work the best aka socialism. See Scandinavia.
Just because something works in a tiny and homogenous country, under the shadow of a few hegemonic superpowers, does not mean that same thing will work in a super power like the US, which is larger, more heterogenous, and already contributes expenses to world society that benefit Scandinavia.
Take the military for example. In any real world war, Scandanavia would depend on the help of NATO; and yet their contributions to NATO are significantly smaller than those of the larger countries.
Would the Scandinavian system work if any of the Scandinavian countries had a population as large and heterogenous as the US? Or if Scandinavia did not save costs by relying on the power projection of larger allied countries?
What about the benefits reaped from the heterogenous nature of giant countries like USA? Are you willing to give all that up for this single goal?
All said and done, I strongly believe USA as it is moves the humanity forward considerably in the mid-long outlook. Hence my questions.
I dont have data on whether or not the system will function well as a big country or not because the data doesnt exist. The nonexistence of said data unsubstantiates any claim I can make or you can make and pushes it into the realm of speculation.
But speculate we shall. Military seems like an arbitrary choice. Socialist countries can choose to either spend on military or education and they have chosen the latter probably because there has never been a century where human society is more at peace than ever before according to all available data we have.
Why has the current century broken all records for peace on earth? Perhaps it's because, unlike previous centuries, war no longer offers spoils as it once did. A country that goes to war in the past had a net gain in wealth while a country that does the same in modern times will have a massive net loss. Information and technology have replaced territory and gold as our treasure and such a treasure can only be destroyed during war. Either way, data shows that conflict as a percentage of human population is currently massively smaller than all previous eras.
Still america chooses to build a huge army. Probably because of something called the military industrial complex. Powerful capitalist entities infiltrate a deliberately weak government and proceed to manipulate it into building an impressive yet uneeded military. Maybe? Just speculation.
Would such capitalist powers be able to influence a socialist government? What industrial complex tells Scandinavia to redirect those tax dollars towards free education instead of war?
All speculation.
While we tend to spend more time reflecting on failure modes (in order to continue expanding the necessary protection set), we also take for granted so many protections democratic legislation have provided us from the raw algorithmic selection of capitalism.
Naively, it seems like capitalism is a means of “top group” selection, so long as there is relatively high chance for social mobility and opportunity.
The method which worked better for chickens still involved selecting the best cohort (capitalism), and this improved over open breeding (socialism) or winner-take-all (monarchy).
Most of the time people who get stuff are the ones who have been attributed the most output individually.
Upper management was perfectly okay with that because they had good release quality and time tables.
From individual employees up to the C-level divisions they judged everything solely on what was easiest to put into a spreadsheet and it destroyed them in less than a year. Sad to say my hope they were unique was wildly optimistic.
This is important, because it implies the solution to our problems with the present is not to throw it out for a system that does worse asymptotically (eg, swap capitalism for socialism), but rather to further optimize and refine capitalism.
We select for companies that can outcompete other companies rather than ones that contribute the most to the system.
If you consider a fern to be an alligator then it's an example of a deadly reptile.
> We select for companies that can outcompete other companies rather than ones that contribute the most to the system.
I think that the whole point of our system is to ensure that firms which outcompete other firms are the ones which contribute the most total value to the system. Where this isn;t the case (e.g. as with the effects of mass advertising, monopolies &c.) it's a bug, not a feature — and should be adjusted for.
Determining which firms "contribute the most total value to the system" is just too hard to be a useful strategy.
Translating that back to the workplace, I'm more inclined to agree with TFA.
Yes, it is — which is why we have a free market instead of a central authority trying to determine who contributes the most. Wisdom of crowds & all that.
It is correct that the economy corrects a bit against this, but the incumbent advantage is so huge that even extremely mismanaged companies can live on for decades, letting these parasites thrive, build competitive resumes and then spread to healthier companies.
Companies are optimizing for survival and draining their environment of as many resources with as little compensation they can get away with.
Companies are not optimizing for the benifit of the public. benefit for the public is PR and just like billionaire philantropes they would help humanity by magnitudes more if they paid their taxes instead of tossing cookies. No big company on earth would ever limit their usage of ressources just on their own in any significant way. if the resource runs out, they die or find another resource.
This is of course a polemic statement, and reality is more shaded than this. But capitalism can and will get nasty with increasing company size and revenue. They also get better in hiding the nasty, which doesn’t make it any easier
Most utilitaristic? Best in stealing public resources while being seen as a philantropist?
What the best is, depends on the incentives, the goals and the company culture. The best Mafioso in a group of the best mafiosi will be without a doubt a damn good Mafioso – but what does this mean for the rest of society?
I understand why a isolated look at these things could make sense though
The method that worked best for people that is. It has been pretty damn horrible for chickens. From the comment:
> Indeed, for some strange reason, the individual breeding programs which had been so successful at increasing egg production now required hens to have their beaks clipped, or be housed in individual cages, or they would peck each other to death.
That doesn't sound like "better for chickens" at all. If I were a chicken I'd take open breeding any day.
The one I called a better method was the top cohort selection, not individual selection.
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
This is the nice thing about capitalist systems. It simply selects for whatever works. At times this is not a good thing (e.g. - perhaps convincing people to buy drugs they don't need could be more profitable than making drugs people genuinely need), but in general it tends to be better, and more organic, than what any individual or group might try to dictate as what should be desired.
As for capitalism and productivity I highly recommend Dan Lyons’ Lab Rats exposing the complete chaos that human management is in.
People dynamics are complex and well, dynamic. Changes and rules carry potential for difficult to predict outcomes.
Humans are not hens and capitalism has turned out to be extremely unproductive in many situations requiring collaboration — who would’ve thought that putting short term self interest above everything else is not the best of ideas.
So there are two ways we could approach this game. In the game theory optimal solution my goal is to minimize my worst possible outcome. In the exploitative solution my goal is to maximize my best possible outcome. This has an oddly direct analog to this conversation.
> "..who would’ve thought that putting short term self interest above everything else is not the best of ideas."
I fully agree with you. Elevating self interest to the highest assumption is an awful idea. But in practice it's the least awful of other even more awful ideas. By assuming the lowest common denominator (self interest > all) you create a scenario where the worst scenario, of people behaving in this way, is not catastrophic in any way. In fact it's wholly expected. You will probably never have a utopic outcome, but you'll also probably never have a catastrophic outcome.
Other systems have been trialed multiple times. These systems are phenomenal in theory. So long as every person agrees to cooperate and play their assigned role in a fair and equitable way we can have a utopia where no one ever need go without and everybody can live a comfortable life without fear of ever going without. The problem here is that these systems are extremely dependent upon good behavior. With good behavior, you get what some might call a utopia. But when bad behavior emerges, instead of a utopia you get starvation, oppression, and a general nightmare of existence.
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Maybe one of the coolest things about capitalism though is that you're free to try any system you want, even within it! For instance the Garden of Eden [1] has been a phenomenally successful fully self sufficient independent commune. By contrast, if you'd like to try out a capitalist (or even some sort of communal system) within an enforced social economic system, you can't. And trying to do so would generally be met with a rather aggressive response from the government. Because once again, the sustenance of such systems require everybody play their role. If people just start doing whatever they want, the whole system would collapse. With a half dozen ideologically aligned people on a few acres of land, this works out phenomenally well. With millions of diverse people on millions or billions of acres of land, it tends to be somewhat less successful.
It also requires a certain wilful denial of the mounting evidence that catastrophic outcomes - including starvation, oppression, and worse - have already happened for many people, and are likely to happen for many more people in the near/medium future.
Having said, it's true that this is the Number One problem that humanity has to fix now - how to deal with bad actors?
Clearly, elevating them to positions of immense power and influence through political, corporate, and economic systems that attempt to deny their toxicity isn't the correct answer.
Meanwhile there's a certain unaware irony in applying the "toxic" label to employees, but not to employers.
Most of the FAANGs (with the possible exception of Netflix) and many prominent unicorns could be considered toxic actors in exactly the sense described in the paper the OP is based on - self-regarding, high-performers generating high productivity gains for insiders, but a net social and cultural loss overall.
Things like this are pretty improbable, but far from impossible. The odds of catastrophe are probably higher than utopia, but your concern for catastrophe should still be at least somewhat comparable to your enthusiasm for the odds of a utopia emerging from capitalism. Neither is at all likely.
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As for bad actors, I imagine at one point the vast majority of politicians probably thought about getting involved in politics to try to make the world a better place. They were likely good people, like I think most tend to be. But at the same time I think we are all probably alot more 'morally flexible' than we'd like to admit.
Imagine I tell you I'll give you a million dollars a year if you agree to spend an average of an hour a day to engage in divisive trolling online. I somehow have a mind-reading device to ensure you will genuinely and actively work to do this and further my malicious ends. Regardless, unless you're already quite rich, you're probably going to agree after approximately 0 seconds of thought. What's one more troll even matter, right?
Now imagine you're in power and I want you to do something awful. So I give you a nice long power point presentation, more than enough to ensure you can convince yourself it's a good thing to do, and then offer you a very enticing sack of incentives as well. You're suddenly going to do a great job of convincing yourself that that snazzy powerpoint was right on point. I mean if you hold the banks accountable the economy will really collapse, and people will starve, it'd be catastrophic. The only way to save the world is to not only not hold the banks accountable, but to give them billions of dollars instead and work to actively re-empower them. Yes, Mr. Sachs, I see your point. I completely agree with you! Now hand me those sacks!
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So the whole issue isn't about getting rid of bad actors. You need to somehow elevate people to power that cannot be swayed by self interest. I don't think this is, or ever will be, possible. Even in a time where we have Star Trek style replicators that can pump anything out in an instant there will still be incentives - ego, sex, power, fame, legacy, desirable appointments, ideological victory, etc.
I do fully agree with you on your pointing out the quite hypocritical distinction between behavior of employer and employee. Our entire economy is increasingly be driven by culturally regressive business endeavors. I think there are some solutions there, but this is another topic altogether.
Pure capitalism and pure socialism are both destructive ideologies that inevitably lead to cruelty. Hasn't humanity moved on from this false dichotomy yet? Successful societies manage the balance between the two.
I do very much appreciate the premise of being free to try different approaches within the framework of capitalism.
However all these approaches compete with actors who do not comply to good behavior and often use highly predatory tactics both internally and toward competitors.
Also, capitalism fails to account for external factors. Selling gas pollutes everyone’s air for free. Producing billions of plastic bags and bottles affects everyone’s oceans and rivers and surroundings, for free. Maximizing exploitation and squeezing one’s workers in an employer’s market creates dangerous levels of equality, chronic diseases and destroys families, for free. Extracting and exploiting attention from a full generation of children will cripple said generation in unpredictable ways, and is still allowed, for free. Same with the destruction of privacy, worldwide.
Capitalism is good at extracting and turning resources into money. It is not good in a world of limited resources.
And I’m not even mentioning the acts of lobbying and collusion which allow corporate entities to change the environment to suit them better than it does living human beings, not unlike a colonizing force.
Capitalism selects for what works for certain individuals.
We don't know that the success of capitalism isn't just a pyramid scheme that has yet to destroy the biosphere. We only know that on the scale of a few lifetimes, modern capitalism has worked ok-ish for us in the first world. It's been pretty rough on the former colonies and the proxy states.
Capitalism is very new. Mercantilism is just in the rear-view mirror. Capitalism has been subsidized by the simultaneous rise of industrial technology.
There have been flourishings of sudden well-being in the past. The Romans, the Mayans, etc. They discovered new techniques of agriculture, shipping, weapons manufacture, bloomed and expanded and collapsed and died.
Capitalism has not yet matched the long-term success of the Roman republic or the subsequent empire, let alone the Egyptian and Chinese systems of successive dynasties supported by a civil service.
It's a huge mistake to assume that capitalism works better just because we've been doing ok with it for a while and because it's the system embraced by the country that won WWII by being across an ocean. That gave capitalism a big leg up but the headstart is running out.
Kleptocracy has a good chance of out-competing managed capitalism in the next fifty years by using regulatory capture.
If you want to avoid regulatory capture by deregulating, remember that an unfettered market has always degenerated into kratocracy (government by the powerful) and kratocracy tends to turn into aristocracy.
Capitalism: Doing OK for now!
It’s one thing for me to personally think I’m at the end of history chilling in a coffee shop in SF, it’s quite another when I’ve got the finger on the nuclear codes.
From Wiki:
> The end of history is a political and philosophical concept that supposes that a particular political, economic, or social system may develop that would constitute the end-point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government.
There were a couple of leftist experiments when societies were managed like farms, but they are now considered atrocities.
but wait... our entire economical system is based on this.