It feels like when I want more stuff per unit time/effort, I’m just “trying to support my family and build a better life for my children”. But when other people do the same, it’s “greedy”. Is there any definition of “greedy” we could use for the purposes of this discussion that would apply yo all humans equally?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

Its somebody who instills distrust in society by taking advantage of it.

The problem is the term greed is often used in a pejorative way as a proxy for success. If you work hard and achieve a lot and that comes with financial rewards, you are greedy by definition. Add in some snark about how the work hard part doesn't count somehow, and that's the modern critique of capitalism.

Oh, and rent seeking and corruption are because capitalism too and not at all human flaws seen to an even greater degree in every other economic system ever devised.

A billionaire could conceivably work much harder than the median person. However, they don't work 8000 times harder ($1 billion divided by the median net worth in America of $122k).

part from my first job working for the government here in the UK all my other jobs have been for companies founded and run by private individuals. They've helped me put food on my table and clothes on my children.

On the other hand I do agree that when it comes to inheritance, rent seeking, financial manipulation, etc there's a lot to do to close loopholes and create a more equitable system. There is a good argument to be made that the main reasons inequality has risen are not good ones. I do not see those as fundamentally flaws in capitalism, they're certainly flaws but you get abuses in any economic system. They're not fundamental. The Netherlands is definitely a capitalist society, but they also have a wealth tax for example. There are good arguments for land value taxes, which some countries use to good effect. There are plenty of tools available to us.

Opposition to addressing inequality in the US tends to take the form of arguing that the rich worked harder, earned their wealth, are more valuable, etc.; therefore, it is immoral to redistribute that wealth. The argument that I am attempting to make is that the differences in wealth are so dramatic that it isn't realistic that they earned it in the sense that free market advocates are implying.

That being said, I think it's also unlikely that they brought a skill to the table that's 8000 times more valuable. My understanding is that people who become billionaires do so by leveraging capital.

As a third world native I find corruption works better than everyone mindlessly following law under one self-righteous government becomes illegal under the next one, thereby making citizens life hell.

For example, if we make a back of the envelope estimate that an elite person has skills that are 10 times those of an average person (10 times smarter, stronger, more charismatic, better educated, etc.) and works 3 times longer then they could conceivably be 30 times more productive. If, to be conservative, we doubled that, then we could define greed as attempting to amass more than 60 times more wealth than the average person.

And you can be much more than 10x more productive than your average person without being 10x smarter. You can just have skills or have an idea that allows you to scale your contributions much more than an average person.

For instance, if we can teach cars to drive themselves, we have the capacity to save hundreds of millions, if not billions, of man hours a day.

The people who made significant contributions to that effort will have contributed thousands of times more to society than an average person.

If a surgeon saves 50 lives a year, I'd say that's a lot more than 10x what I'm doing.

I guess the way forward is to build a sustainable future for everyone and their families. And to get everyone to agree it's the best way to go about things.

I am very confused about this statement, can you please explain what is the "natural state of things" ?

Most people will chose child/spouse/relative without thinking twice and doing so is quite natural. Not everyone agree on that though, and would argue that the potential benefit the stranger could be to society should be taken into the equation.

Luckily, reality isn't that black and white in most cases, but most people will prioritize their in-group. That's just the way people work.

People will often prefer their own in-group to themselves.

Thus, it depends on how one defines the in-group, and one's own interests.

Looking at Coldtea's earlier comment:

>It's either pushed to us by greed, or given to us as a substitute for things we'd rather have (no friends, but here are games you can buy), (no work-life balance, but here's Netflix you can watch when you're home exhaused from work), (no community, but here's social media, go argue with strangers), etc.

showing how the 'in-group' has shrunk. Used to be a larger tribe, now you could be lucky to consider it an atomic family.

Community-building might be a possible solution, but how do you pull people away from their screens and get them out on the streets to make new connections and then turn that into a positive force that actually makes a different?

- stupidity

-fear

-greed

The problem is figuring out which instances of these are induced by society and civilization and which are inherent to human behavior in general. While we can try to address the former, the latter probably can't be fixed without significantly changing our definition/perception of what humans are.

I think recent history has shown that simply killing the Bourgeoisie tends to just eventually create another in the form of whoever had the power to do the other killings, and not always to better ends for the people. That form of communism has been shown to not really work. Democratic socialism though seems to work out pretty well for people.

That's difficult, as technology is here mostly because of greed.

Much of technology we don't really need, and even more so for most technology we consume (of course, you can't convince tech workers for that, as their salary, and hobbies, are based on the stuff).

It's either pushed to us by greed, or given to us as a substitute for things we'd rather have (no friends, but here are games you can buy), (no work-life balance, but here's Netflix you can watch when you're home exhaused from work), (no community, but here's social media, go argue with strangers), etc.

I am not sure if by technology you mean products or ideas. In case of the latter, that does not sound right. Smart driven persons do not have to be greedy in order to devote their live to something.

Smart people who have the ability and resources to change things don't really share the same problems as the target audience of mass market tech (I mean, hackernews is full of product reports illustrating this) - greed motivates them to solve problems of their "outgroup", filling the needs of all the people they don't really care about much.

There was a lot more to it than that, and largely speculative, but it was interesting. What if the reason we don't see alien civilizations all over our sky is that sociopathy in social animals is actually really rare or is always otherwise controlled for?

also, scientists, doctors, researchers, even maybe the military?, progress has been defined by a lot of different motivators than just greed i would think… (was einstein full of greed when he made his breakthroughs?)

Even if there were an event that wiped out 75% of people, it kicks the can down the road at most 30 years due to a baby boom.

Refusing to solve the real problem is what got us in to this mess.

It’s also utterly like us as a species to think that killing 3 out of 4 people is an easier fix than just living within our means.

Individuals aren't really responsible for the mass amounts of pollutants put into the atmosphere the same way corporations are. In order for the human population to "live within it's means" at an impactful scale it would require a change of capitalist philosophy that quite obviously isn't going to change anytime soon.

Kicking the can down the road 30 years is by far the best option we have available to us at this point (not that it will happen in my lifetime).

Capitalism won’t go without a fight.

Yes.

Absolutely the scale of the problem is unprecedented though, but that message hasn’t changed in 50 years.

We live in a world of finite resources. If we, as a species, overpopulate to the point where these finite resources run dry, what are the best options?

Climate change is a problem that makes us need a rapid solution right now even if its costly and painful, general depletion of resources really isn't; if it wasn't for climate change then we could just let the replacement of oil to renewables happen "naturally" as oil prices slowly increase as the supply decreases, the usual market incentives would be enough to manage the resource allocation.

Finiteness of resources is not as big of an issue as it looked in 1970s (when the original Limits to Growth study was made) - with a stable or shrinking population (current situation in developed world, soon-to-arrive globally) each person's share of physical resources is the same all the while as each person's need for physical resources (except energy) is not growing now (unlike 1970s), with advances in tech meeting the same needs now requires less resources so we can continue to grow our economy within the limits of the same finite resources.

We live in a society where everything is disposable, and that has a huge energy cost that we don't factor in because energy is so cheap right now. When energy is more expensive, repairing, conserving, and reusing a thing will be a better choice instead of throwing it out and buying a new one.