This makes it sound like it is a collection of individual failings that lead to market and growth remaining as the only normativities today.
It is the other way around; since religion and nation are left for dead after modernism, there is no glue layer that brings values together. People are not likely to be virtuous in isolation because in absence of coordinating factors, game theoretic advantage is on the one who cheats, at least in the short run. If there is no ambient sense of fair play, character doesn't pay the bills.
New generations are increasingly feeling being cheated out of a life preceding generations had had. There is only one button available to them and that is "more work, more growth, more hype".
The problem with the article's premise is in its framing; why does one feel that they need to be rich to feel secure to begin with? What anxiety locks us up on focusing on that goal? What buttons we could viably add back to the game?
A lot of progress and innovation has been made by greedy individuals. I think much of this progress would be lost had they adopted more wholesome values, because greed is a superior motivator.
Greed is a superior motivator because it has no bounds. When someone is obsessed with accumulating wealth, it tends to be a never-ending pursuit. No matter how much wealth they accumulate, they're left wanting more. This is in stark contrast to more wholesome values, which tend to be more easily satiated.
I think another way to frame this is: the problem is not greed itself. Rather, the problem is that our current system of harnessing greed fails at controlling negative externalities. Without these negative externalities, greed would be a positive force.
I'm not sure why you are stating this like it is a universal fact. Plenty of people reach a level of wealth in which their desire for more is satiated and many people have a need to do good that is never fully satisfied. It all depends on the person.
Agreed. I'm speaking in generalities to make the point that, on average, greed is a superior motivating force. At least from personal experience, I've found far more people foregoing personal health and relationships for the sake of wealth accumulation than societal contribution. Even among those that eventually satiate their desire for wealth, it's mostly because their values have shifted (not because their ultimate value remains wealth accumulation and now they have enough).
Also check the overjustification effect to see how extrinsic motivation destroys any motivation.
Imo intrinsic > extrinsic
Any time any day.
Want examples? Look at passionate people. Look at academia. They’re not a handful if people but tons of them that did good work that helped innovation.
Further the institution of retirement suggests greed isn’t an unlimited motivator for most people.
It’s not exactly difficult to spend a billion dollars, yet to spend several Billion dollars per year without retaining any value is basically just charity, politics, or bad investments.
Disclaimer: not saying I agree with GP.
I believe it isn't a "current system" attribute, but a chronic feature of human power dynamics in scarcity-bound systems. We've always had these negative externalities, but the reach and rapidity available to those at various apexes within our power structures has dramatically expanded in recent generations.
Greed could be perceived a positive force in the past because its negative externalities were limited to relatively local scope and durations, and its essential beneficial features could be extracted and applied in modified forms outside of those scopes. But it still sucked mightily for those within its blast radius.
I really wish there was structured, systematic study of human power structures in relation to the various common personality types engaged at different focal points of those structures I could investigate, as I feel quite naive and ignorant of them.
I hope someone studies the dynamics and effects of power through the lens you described.
It might show up in biological systems as well, as so many of these depend on resource competition and signalling in an ever changing, open evolution environment.
To a first-order approximation my mental model I'm trying to look for extant literature upon: model the signalling as a message-passing system whose agents exhibit observational reflexivity while they pass the payload. Agents are simultaneously bounded by their individual observational capacity's volume (how much granularity, how fast, how broadly of topics, how far-ranging of inter-relationships they can comprehend).
If the hypothesis withstands systematic back-testing scrutiny against historical data, then the next step is to assess its predictive modeling power. Degrees of validation would help me resolve some confounding observations of my own that different organizing principles of various systems ("capitalism", "socialism", "communism", "anarcho-", "merchantilism", etc.) in different contexts (economic, biologic, social, etc.) appear to repeat certain patterns. As if the levers of control change an interface like a protein surface on a cell/bacterium/virus/DNA-strand/RNA-strand changes, but there is a certain "core API" functionality that is found over and over, like a "portable DSL" that is re-evolved in many contexts due to emergent properties of power structures in resource-constrained settings.
I wish I had Dyson Swarm-scale computronium and stor-tronium to help us process and synthesize all of history's known works to find out who else has gone down this rabbit hole, though. There is hardly any original thought when college-dorm-style chatting ideas like this, mostly new ideas only show up in engineering new capabilities and pursuing scientific discovery of new principles; our ancestors were smart cookies. The Vatican has vast stores of works yet to comprehend, for just one data source out of many (every nation's archives, every private archive, etc.).
Curse our limited lifespans, and simultaneously marvel at our verse's breathtaking beauty, right?
As a side note:
>It doesn't make any sense to talk about "losing" progress.
Haven't you (or someone you know) ever lost progress because of a power failure? ;)
I'm arguing that the progress will get achieved with or without the greedy actors, and possibly even in a "better" way, overall.
The upside of character is it is a bottom-up limitation on creating negative externalities, placed on those who are best placed and informed to avoid creating them.
Admittedly, this only goes so far. Another issue is that people are so often greedy for status. Being zero-sum, it is inherently a negative externality when one achieves a status increase.
is it?
and even if it was, is it worth the (personal, familial, societal, environmental) consequences?
People in a great many fields put in huge amounts of effort for very little financial reward (and even virtually guaranteed hardship), and sometimes that results in huge benefits for the world.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26125003
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/world/europe/coronavirus-...
Wealth creation is not value creation.
Just because you put money in your account, does not mean you 'grew the pie' - in fact - you can generate a lot of wealth individually, while shrinking the overall pie.
For example, some kinds of resource extraction do more environmental damage than the profits generated.
'Good Capitalism' creates a ton of value for society, and then captures some of those surpluses.
'Negative Capitalism' just grabs surpluses by whatever means: leverage, legalities, etc..
The problem is we generally don't have a language for distinguishing between the two.
As of today, I believe everything related to blockchain is 'bad capitalism' - in that, the externalities and effort are not worth the benefits (though that could change).
My mother was complaining yesterday about the volume of ads on Facebook - while I think ads are ok, when people are locked in and deluged, its starts to corrode the net value of a situation.
'The Web' and 'Google' probably create a lot of value.
'Facebook' and 'Blockchain' ... more dubious.
Because of the ridiculous amount of money available to be made in net-zero games, even respectable VC's have to pay attention.
It definitely bothers me that there is no language of distinction in the SV.
Finally, yes, greed is a quixotic motivator, and sometimes it actually does help.
There is a language for this sort of stuff, it's part of economics, they just don't teach people much of it by default in our public school system. I think some of the terms you're looking for are productivity, rent-seeking, etc.
More and more I think economics should be a bigger component of K-12 education even if it means pushing out some things to college like chemistry or calculus (or really, even CS). Basically all the wealthy first world countries are social democracies, with a large role for government spending/regulation in addition to the private sector. Getting more people to see the economy through an economic lens (as a complex series of cause-effect relationships and not a more simple story like "who are the bad people", which politics often devolves to) might help us as a country better connect the actions we need to take to the outcomes we desire.
The difference between zero-sum wealth capture, and 'growing the pie' is a point of discussion, yes, but it's rarely discussed and we don't do any real discrimination on it.
Where is the economists lists of businesses that create the most surplus value?
Imagine if we did valuation by consumer surplus, instead of stock value.
None of that is part of the discussion.
We generally don't even tax differently between those who extract and those who generate surpluses.
Of course, it's a very difficult thing to measure.
I think what you call "value creation" (growing the total size of the pie) is what economists would call "productivity", and it doesn't include zero-sum wealth capture. The idea that productivity is ultimately what makes a country prosperous and not money or gold I believe dates back to Adam Smith's "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations".
If you look at the shortest intro to modern macroeconomics that I know of [1], productivity is still basically the first thing mentioned.
The opposite of growing the pie is rent-seeking [2] - trying to get a bigger piece for yourself without growing it. Businesses that face a lot of competition have trouble just unilaterally taking a big piece of the pie, so the focus on this is businesses that are monopoly-like (or at least have a lot of market power). I think some of the courtroom arguments in the ongoing Apple vs Epic trial are essentially about value creation vs rent-seeking.
But these two factors tie in to many aspects of public policy - when making projections about the effect of corporate tax rate changes on growth, economists are probably estimating what percent of profits are due to monopoly rent. The reason for doing infrastructure investment is long-run productivity growth. Some countries have implemented a land-value tax because it falls on rent instead of value-creation.
The more I learn about economics, the more I feel that our (economic) problems don't really stem from a lack of effort on the part of economists to understand things - I think the obvious things have usually been considered already (although many things are hard to measure). More often the problem seems to stem from sound economic advice just getting ignored by our political processes.
Productivity, classically i.e. 'stuff per labour input' - would be a good measure.
But productivity is ultimately measured in profits. If Nike is able to capture massive surpluses by changing their logo and making it more hip, it's deemed more 'productive' effectively, even though it really isn't in the classical sense. I guess you could argue their 'cool logo' does improve people's lives but that's different than the difference between a 'good shoe' and a crap, 1960's one.
And for services, which make up much of the economy? It's hard to measure.
And yes, rent-seeking is the other side, but probably 'the best' companies are 'rent-seekers' in some way, using their value chain power or entrenchment to generate profits. But how much is due to their innovation vs. power is really hard to tell.
Like the AppStore debacle ... what if Apple subsidized the iPhone distribution to recoup profits in their AppStore monopoly? What if if the judge rules they have to open up their AppStore to competition, thereby meaning they have to jack up iPhone prices? Would consumers win in the end? Hard to tell. (Of course, Apple makes a lot of money on iPhones, I'm just stretching reality to provide an example)
One way to do it would be to measure aggregate consumer surplus, but we don't or can't do that.
No. It would be easier without people deeply invested in the status quo system directing the political system from outside, but which marketing-focussed-label applies to the birth year of representatives in Congress has pretty much no bearing on that, even if age-cohorts correlate with differences in views in the electorate.
We don’t have a sortition system where you might expect people in Congress to be otherwise typical of their age group, after all.
If you want the values of Millenials more represented, you want more Millenials voting and devoting time and money to activism; more Millenials in Congress isn’t itself a recipe for change. Finding 535 Millenials that the establishment could rely on to represent their interests wouldn't be challenging.
Nit: In a democracy, you are the government. We all are. There is no 'them'. They are us.
I know, I know. What I just typed was naive pedantic droll.
But if you really do believe it, then it does become true, kinda. It takes work, a lot of work, very hard work. But votes and service to the community really really do matter.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/12/03/precariou...
Here's the classic chart that has been thrown around.
No other economic system has come close to that.
See "The Black Book of Communism". https://www.amazon.com/Black-Book-Communism-Crimes-Repressio...
I have a copy of the book. I haven't found that in it, although it's a large book and I may have missed it. Can you provide a page number? I'd appreciate it.
Regardless, capitalism’s death toll far exceeds 100 million, it achieves that much in a few years. The carnage is truly difficult to imagine, especially in the comfort such carnage buys for the imperialist countries.
Do you have a reliable source for this fantastical claim?
Millions die every year due to poverty, through lack of clean water, lack of food, disease, etc. Wars are also used to prevent the poor countries from rebelling, which kills people too. In many cases the two go together, like the starving of Yemen. The attacks against Iraq or Libya or Syria are also good examples. It only takes a few years to get to 100 million if you add all of that up.
It doesn’t look very good historically either. The slave trade was essential to the initial accumulation of capital. In settler colonies like the US or Australia or South Africa or Israel indigenous people have been displaced and killed. WW1 started over competition for colonies in the global south. Later on the invasions of Korea or Vietnam, etc.
In the meantime, you might want to look at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_economic_reform
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiaogang,_Anhui
> In December 1978, eighteen of the local farmers, led by Yen Jingchang, met in the largest house in the village. They agreed to break the law at the time by signing a secret agreement to divide the land, a local People's Commune, into family plots. Each plot was to be worked by an individual family who would turn over some of what they grew to the government and the collective whilst at the same time agreeing that they could keep the surplus for themselves. The villagers also agreed that should one of them be caught and sentenced to death that the other villagers would raise their children until they were eighteen years old. At the time, the villagers were worried that another famine might strike the village after a particularly bad harvest and more people might die of hunger.
> After this secret capitalist reform, Xiaogang village produced a harvest that was larger than the previous five years combined. Per capita income in the village increase from 22 yuan to 400 yuan with grain output increasing to 90,000 kg in 1979. This attracted significant attention from surrounding villages and before long the government in Beijing had found out. The villagers were fortunate in that at the time China had just changed leadership after Mao Zedong had died. The new leadership under Deng Xiaoping was looking for ways to reform China's economy and the discovery of Xiaogang's innovation was held up as a model to other villages across the country. This led to the abandonment of collectivised farming across China and a large increase in agricultural production. The secret signing of the contract in Xiaogang is widely regarded as the beginning of the period of rapid economic growth and industrialisation that mainland China has experienced in the thirty years since.
It's well past time to face the facts: Capitalism raises standards of living. Socialism impoverishes.
> Poor countries are kept poor in order to exploit cheap resources and labour, which enrich a few in the rich countries.
Complete nonsense. Poor countries with liberal economies grow fastest and see the most dramatic drops in absolute poverty. No one benefits more from free trade than poor countries.
> Millions die every year due to poverty, through lack of clean water, lack of food, disease, etc.
And they die at a higher rate under socialism than capitalism.
> In many cases the two go together, like the starving of Yemen. The attacks against Iraq or Libya or Syria are also good examples. It only takes a few years to get to 100 million if you add all of that up.
What does this have to do with capitalism? Capitalism means
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_economy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalization
> The slave trade was essential to the initial accumulation of capital.
Slavery isn't capitalist. And it more aptly describes the conditions of those who live under socialist regimes.
> Later on the invasions of Korea or Vietnam, etc.
Are you referring to the Communist invasions launched by North Korea and North Vietnam against their southern counterparts?
It puts the present death toll of capitalism at around 9 million a year, so a mere decade or so to surpass 100. This without counting the significant historical death toll too.
https://rd.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230114319_3
> Compared to those that were less free, countries with higher economic freedom ratings during 1980–2005 had lower rates of both extreme and moderate poverty in 2005. More importantly, countries with higher levels of economic freedom in 1980 and larger increases in economic freedom during the 1980s and 1990s achieved larger poverty rate reductions than economies that were less free. These relationships were true even after adjustment for geographic and locational factors and foreign assistance as a share of income. The positive relations between the level and change in economic freedom and reductions in poverty were both statistically significant and robust across alternative specifications.
> Some fear that growth propelled by economic freedom will leave the poor behind. This was not the case during 1980–2005. During this quarter of a century, the developing countries that moved the most toward economic freedom achieved both strong economic growth and substantial reductions in poverty. This indicates that an institutional and policy environment consistent with economic freedom is an important ingredient for progress against poverty.
https://www.mohrsiebeck.com/en/article/the-relationship-betw...
> We study the relationship between economic freedom and poverty rates in 151 countries over a twenty-year period. Using the World Bank's poverty headcounts of those living on less than $1.90 per day, $3.20 per day, and $5.50 per day, we find evidence that economic freedom, measured by the Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom, is associated with lower poverty rates. We also test the effect of various components of the Index of Economic Freedom. We find that a government's integrity and a country's trade freedom are associated with lower poverty rates. We check the robustness of our results using alternative freedom indices.
See also https://cei.org/blog/why-economic-freedom-is-the-best-weapon....
If you're serious about learning, I suggest putting down outdated ideological texts and looking at the actual data.
Are you claiming that the famines in the USSR and the gulags, for example, didn't happen? How about Pol Pot's massacres?
I'm curious as to your explanation for why communist countries built walls to keep people in, and the US builds walls to keep people out? Can you point out famines and gulags in the US?
I toured East Berlin in 1969. I went through the wall. East Berlin looked like a drab prison camp compared to West Berlin. You can believe whatever you like, but I've seen it with my own eyes.
I think the Berliners were a little too eager to tear down that wall, though I totally understand why. Should have left more of it up to inform later revisionists.
Another interesting thing is aerial photos of Korea. The South is lit brightly, while the North looks like a stain of black paint.
I've heard the claim before that the Wall was built to keep Westerners out. But, as I said, I've visited the Wall in 1969. It was very clearly designed to keep people in, not out. The defenses pointed East. It was a layered defense, with the weakest parts easternmost and the deadliest parts adjacent to the Wall itself. Exactly what would be built to defend from attack from the East. You'll see the same setup in fortifications from castles (layers pointing outwards) to prisons (layers pointing inwards).
For another example, West Berlin helped out people who wanted to invade East Berlin by building platforms so one could look over the Wall (as myself and lots of tourists did). Nobody hopped over, though, to invade the East. But many got shot trying to go the other way, there's a museum there documenting it.
BTW, it was the East that blockaded West Berlin, attempting to starve the city into submission, not the other way around.
A similar kind of brain drain is happening all over Eastern Europe, to disastrous consequences. Especially with COVID it’s a massive problem that most trained medics have emigrated.
> For example, the USSR disagreed with the wall and recommended against building it.
It's a laughable idea that the GDR did decide such things without Moscow. Closing and fortifying the German-German border effectively happened on Stalins orders, the Berlin Wall was built with Moscows permission.
Recommending is not the same thing as ordering or proscribing.
> proposal
I'm sure a lot of proposals were floated and discussed.
Yeah, I've heard that before. How the communists provided a free education, and so the citizens then owed a lifetime of servitude in return.
This one is wrong to the point of making you seem delusional.
> The GDR was poor because it was small,
It was about double the size of Switzerland, four times the size of Norway or Denmark, 30 times the size of Luxembourg. Do you see where I am going here?
> didn’t start out with much industry,
Berlin and Prussia have a rich industrial history.
> had a hostile enclave forced on half its capital,
Calling West-Berlin the hostile enclave is insulting to hundreds of people getting shot trying to flee towards it. You should be ashamed for this sentence.
> paid reparations,
... enforced on it by their communist puppet-master.
> competed with the US-funded western part
The effects of the Marshall plan are overestimated. It competed with its dysfunctional system against a functioning one.
> and was under constant attack from it.
I am confused. Are you talking about the care-packages sent to Eastern Germany by western family members?
The GDR was small and with little industry compared to its Western counterpart, not in absolute terms. When we’re talking about people moving between the two that is what is relevant.
It’s not the people of West Berlin that were hostile, but its state and US occupiers. The insistence of the US on a split Germany with half of the capital as an enclave was the first such hostile action, especially when the USSR was proposing a united neutral Germany. Leaving Nazis in positions of power in the west was the second.
Now you are insulting the people of the former GDR by implying they were puppets of the Soviets. Did you know the USSR were against the wall, but the GDR built it after all? In terms of reparations, it’s normal for an invader to pay reparations to their victim, if nothing else to rebuild. What is unusual is that the rest of Germany didn’t pay reparations to Eastern Europe.
In addition to the Marshal plan (which was significant in West Germany), imperialism continued. As the most obvious example, West German banks continued to export capital at extortionate rates to extract profits from poorer countries.
There were numerous covert attacks against the GDR, what do you think the Stasi were fighting? Western agents were found all over Eastern Europe spreading lies, arming fascists, assassinating people, etc.
I recommend you speak to some people that experienced the GDR. Their opinions are instructive.
They hate with a passion the current times when people are able do better themselves and achieve their dreams on their own however they wish and wherever they wish, in freedom.
What I did find is that those whose families were poor had most praise for socialist and condemnation for the return to poverty after 89. Freedom from poverty, hunger, homelessness, ignorance are important.
Former gentry, small business owners and fascists did hate socialism, indeed. The freedom to exploit others was what they wanted.
And I wouldn't be so sure about the fascists hating socialists - weren't they even allies at some point? They seemed quite chummy to me. And they certainly had the same obsession with killing the ones they perceived as "guilty" for the whatever "societal injustices" their sick minds imagined.
"The poor" seemed quite happy to take off into the exploitative West to make some money after '89 though. ;-)
I repeat my point: Switzerland is tiny compared to Germany, yet it is richer. Russia is big compared to Germany, yet it is way poorer. China is enormous compared to Germany, yet it took ages to overtake German productivity and is still somewhat within range.
> The insistence of the US on a split Germany with half of the capital as an enclave was the first such hostile action, especially when the USSR was proposing a united neutral Germany.
Historically just wrong. There were different plans during and after WW2. Britain had the idea to do a North-South division. The UDSSR wanted to split Germany permanently and as small as possible. Read what Stalin said in Teheran in 1943. It was not the US, who proposed to divide Germany.
All of them invaded Germany, but the US did so comitting less war crimes (e.g. against women) themselves than the UDSSR and with less intend to destroy everything or move it to America. That's of course also, because their people were less affected. We all know, who they acted in the Pacific. But it was also, because they had learned from WW1 and tried to bring stability to Europe. The UDSSR brought a totally different kind of "stability".
> In terms of reparations, it’s normal for an invader to pay reparations to their victim, if nothing else to rebuild. What is unusual is that the rest of Germany didn’t pay reparations to Eastern Europe.
If you ignore giving up 25% of its landmass with entire cities like Königsberg/Kaliningrad, which is now impoverished because of the system you are defending, then sure. I also don't know whether Poland and other Eastern European countries would have called the UDSSR a victim, after they had been invaded by them.
> The insistence of the US on a split Germany with half of the capital as an enclave was the first such hostile action, especially when the USSR was proposing a united neutral Germany.
Germans have to be forever thankful for the US keeping tabs on Berlin. It is part of the reason why Germany could reuinte eventually. You probably know about the Berlin Airlift. The UDSSR has proven its open inhumanity not only against enemies but also its own people and people they controlled time and time again.
> There were numerous covert attacks against the GDR, what do you think the Stasi were fighting?
It's own people. The documents are still there, you can look at them. It was a horrendous system. I cannot imagine why you defend it. I can admit that the West is not perfect. We can find ways to improve it, without defending a system that is so clearly worse.
Besides, even if the stats are exaggerated by factor of 10, communism still winds up being terrible.
Yes, I'm glad you live at the top of the pyramid in a comfortable American existence (a lifestyle which if everybody on the planet led we'd already be extinct), but don't forget the billions who aren't reaping those benefits.
Quoting old ideologies is getting wearying. From screeds about 'labor' (its becoming extinct; what about Marxism then?) to imperialism (the majority of countries in the world are democracies) to blaming the rich for success.
We have achieved better living standards over the years despite capitalism, not because of it.
Meanwhile inequality grows, democracies are backsliding across the globe, and inexhaustible "growth capitalism" has us facing a climate crisis which it continues to refuse to tackle. Inequality of wealth and income means necessities such as housing are ever more expensive, pushing ever more people into virtual "debt bondage" towards the landed class. Inequality of wealth also means inequality of opportunities, as the rich are afforded endless cheap credit and the poor cannot afford homes and cannot afford to start businesses.
But all that's okay, because we get 1001 new models of phones every year and TVs are cheaper than ever.
This is my opinion of course.
> Quoting old ideologies
The myth that Marxism is "old and irrelevant" is what's getting wearing :) On the contrary, it's frightening how relevant it still is, and how much Marxist criticism and analysis applies to 21st century capitalism.
Read his major points (and not just what other people tell you his major points are) and you'll be surprised.
> labour becoming extinct
I don't get it.
> most countries in the world are beautiful democracies
There's only really one country in the world, as far as I'm aware, that truly deserves the label "democracy", and that's Switzerland, with high levels of political participation, a free press, well-functioning institutions, etc. Maybe the autonomous municipalities in Chiapas too :)
All the rest are the bare minimum to keep the people from rebelling.
> imperialism
Imperialism is a major feature of global capitalism. Quick example: the market logic (a weasel-word for violent coercion by powerful countries) dictates that Ethiopia faces famines at the same time that it exports massive amounts of food.
What happens to Marxism when the workers can't own the means of production, because there aren't any workers in the plant? That's already true in many, many operations. Automation has been explosive in the last 20 years. Production is off-shore when Chinese hand-work is cheaper then retooling for automation. When a factory 'comes back' from overseas, its because volume has increased to the point its effective to automate. No jobs come back (ok 2 or 3 automation Engineers but not 100 workers).
Today America's largest buyer of automation equipment is ... China. They're 20 years behind us but catching up fast. Imagine another Billion workers put out of a job.
The writing is on the wall. Workers are going to be irrelevant, and not that far in the future. Going on about what the workers are owed is going to be moot. Fast becoming so.
What works then? Not capitalism, I admit, because owning a factory that produces goods quits returning profit when there's few that have the money to buy the goods. The whole system is circling the drain.
But no just keep on about Marxism or workers rights or whatever, irrespective of how that group is dwindling and will soon be gone and the world is no longer an 1800's industrial society.
Oh and that mark about "No True Democracies" is an old, old, tired trope called "No True Scotsman". There's no point in addressing that at all.
It's ridiculous — and frankly reeking of inane SV bubble/echo chamber — that you make the absurd claim that "labour is a thing of the past". Plus dismissing concern about exploitation as being "workers rights or whatever".
2. Socialism is (broadly speaking) about social ownership of capital / means of production. Corporations being worker-owned is only one way of implementing a fairer and more efficient ownership model. In a future hypothetical world with replicators, post-scarcity and post-labour, if it ever comes, socialism will only become more of a necessity. Everybody will have to own a stake in the replicators, the mechanism of private and absolute control over capital will be absurd.
I don't dismiss workers' rights; but when there are fewer and fewer workers needed in society, workers' rights become less and less the focus.
Automation means most non-professionals will stop being employed. Except in make-work personal services. No road-building gangs; no fields of farm workers; no rows of checkout clerks or bank tellers. All going away. One person in 100 is needed to keep the electronics factory going. Workers will have no place. Even in China; most of your 3B will be out of a job. Not in the far future, but probably in your lifetime.
Folks love to point out every shit job somebody is resorting to as 'employed' and put the god of employment above any other measure. Putting pumping gas on a par with owning your own business, counting them both equally as 'employment'. The old Protestant work ethic writ large - the point of human existence is to be employed, at all cost.
Back in the '50s we read stories of the day robots would take the burden of labor from our shoulders so we could live better lives. Now that it's happening we read of nothing but panic and desperate moves to toward 'full employment'.
If Socialism will find a way to keep the high-tech machinery of society going with technical folks in charge and making the decisions, well I'll be flabbergasted. Because putting former shoe-makers in charge of a silicon plant seems doomed. Just look at existing experiments in Socialism to see the disasters - Venezuela springs to mind.
It'll be something like Capitalism or Socialism but adapted to the new reality, that keeps the machinery running. Not old 1800's papers about a bygone age.
If worker collectives are more efficient, why are they unable to compete with shareholder corporations?
Actually the remarkable thing is that even despite the massive promotion of consumerism and the cult of money, the majority of people do not want to be rich or famous, they just want a nice comfortable life, where they don't work too much and don't have to worry 24/7 about making it till the end of the month with unpaid bills stacking up. They want to work reasonable hours and get a reasonable salary. They just don't want to be exploited, they don't want to rent a shitty apartment for their whole lives, they don't want to postpone starting a family because they cannot bear the expense.
For common people only 2 generations ago, the only way to 'make money' was to do actual work, something that probably created some kind of net value. Surpluses were shared differently, but work was done.
The opportunities to hustle and grab value while creating little for society is available to the common person today.
The economics have changed quite dramatically and that does factor into the equation.
Only because they just wanted the money for themselves.
I knew when I saw "at scale" in call-for-proposals issued by federal granting agencies that it was soon to lose all meaning, and I think this is about the point at which it's done that.
This is a very broad statement and does not apply equally to everyone. It fits well for someone belonging from a well off family/society vs someone struggling to survive.
I think our generation is forgetting some fundamentals: money at the expense of anything else. The problem with this approach, is not only that it destroys character in the individual, but that it also scales externalities to the rest of society.
Part of this narrative is sold by startup culture and technocrats preaching to "change the world", while in reality the majority is just chasing quick money. From FAANGs to VCs, they control the media that convince young people to do the same: Robinhood, GameStop, cryptocurrencies are just reflections of this epidemic.
This article is as ignorant as it gets as it refers to a misquoted saying "money is the root of all evil". The real quote is "the LOVE of money is the root of all evil" (aka. GREED)
"The vaunted American dream, the idea that life will get better, that progress is inevitable if we obey the rules and work hard, that material prosperity is assured, has been replaced by a hard and bitter truth. The American dream, we now know, is a lie. We will all be sacrificed. The virus of corporate abuse – the perverted belief that only corporate profit matters – has spread to outsource our jobs, cut the budgets of our schools, close our libraries, and plague our communities with foreclosures and unemployment." - Chris Hedges
Americans are forgetting their values https://m-g-h.medium.com/why-we-are-dispensable-7a577eba4f3e