...and/or idealized socialism. i agree that consumerism is an issue, but the solution isn't 'end consumerism', as that's just completely unrealistic. it'd be more realistic to think of ways to redirect our esteem-giving activities toward people who produce real and essential goods, and the rest would balance out much better as a result. that's diametrically opposed to our corrent system of giving esteem to the wealthy, which is why this approach is also very difficult, but not impossible.

The way "esteem" is distributed today is if you produce something I want I "esteem" you by buying it. If you don't produce anything I want I "disrespect" you by doing absolutely nothing to you. I don't give you anything, I don't take anything away from you. I simply smile, nod, and move on with my life.

Seems like you want to take freedom of association away from the rest of humanity and put it into your own hands. It's hard for me to imagine a mentality that is more self-centered and more selfish than that.

that's an odd and quite uncharitable interpretation. there's not even a remote connection to (restricting) freedom of association, much less with my own hands (how would that even work?).

the underlying point is that money isn't the be-all-and-end-all of what we value and what we exchange in our socioeconomic lives. money collapses a multidimensional social calculus into a single-dimensional metric, with all the undesirable consequences of that kind of collapse. hoarding wealth is selfish, but it's worse when it also hoards power and esteem along with it.

not many wealthy people deserve respect (or power) along with their riches. people who make stuff with their hands and brains, not passively through wealth (e.g., rents), deserve esteem. that's the point.

Would you change your opinion if you were presented with hard data proving that 80% of wealthy people earned that wealth by delivering goods and services to people who voluntarily paid for it, and only 20% of the wealthy inherited it and that inherited wealth does not last more than 3 generations?

> 80% of wealthy people earned that wealth

More likely they hired workers who created that wealth. And while in today's system we say that the person at the top "earned" that wealth, we could just as easily arrange firms differently so they are cooperatively owned. And in doing so they would not produce super wealthy people but instead a society with broader wealth distribution.

>More likely they hired workers who created that wealth.

More likely they hired workers and everyone created wealth together. A worker can't work until someone builds the assembly line, buys the materials, and sells the final product.

If it's so easy to do the whole process that anyone can do it, what's stopping you? Marxists claimed the capital class denied the funds to the working class to start their own companies. Well since the world went off the gold standard there is no lack of funding. It's the opposite now. Inflation is an attack on wealth. Wealthy people are ravenous to get their wealth out of currency and into "things" like property and businesses. Venture capitalists will fund the most ridiculous ideas in the desperate hope that one of them will "hit".

Nothing is stopping me and I am working on this.

The binary metric you're referring to is simply an answer to the question "are you interested in an exchange?". This question is fundamentally binary. "Consumerism" is just the interaction of private property and freedom of association - which of these would you get rid of to abolish it?

> "Consumerism" is just the interaction of private property and freedom of association

No, you have misunderstood. I am 100% for freedom of association and freedom of contract. "Consumerism" is not just exchange, it is something more specific. It is the idea that buying more is directly tied to happiness and well being. Look.

"Consumerism is the idea that increasing the consumption of goods and services purchased in the market is always a desirable goal and that a person's wellbeing and happiness depend fundamentally on obtaining consumer goods and material possessions. " https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/consumerism.asp

Could you elaborate on what you mean when you say ending consumerism is completely unrealistic?

just zoom out and really look at the scope of the issue: 7+ billion people in the world want stuff. there's a huge matching problem between the want and the stuff, and a huge geographic/wealth/information asymmetry as well. there's going to be a lot of friction and waste in that huge, inefficient matching process (e.g., 30-40% of US food goes into the trash, 30-40% of stuff is returned to retailers). to achieve your goal, you'd have to be able to control (aka coerce) a majority of those people to want only an arbitrarily narrow set of "acceptable" things. that's just not tenable, even in a small, remote country.

You and I view this very differently. First of all, getting people goods that they need is not consumerism. Consumerism is the idea that buying a new car or a Pepsi will make you feel better. Or that doing so will make you “cool”. So for example most car manufacturers come out with a new model every year and then push the idea that buying a new model is an indicator of success. But I claim we would be better off if cars were more similar year to year so that replacement parts were more common year to year. This would make repair easier and lower waste. The problem is not getting people cars (well, cars in particular are a contentious example…). The problem isn’t getting people goods they need. Is that the companies who make those goods use psychological tricks to convince us we need to upgrade even when our thing is working. And they design their products with the upgrade in mind and it all leads to more waste.

To be honest it’s difficult for me to describe what I mean when I say consumerism. But getting people goods they need is not in and of itself consumerism. Consumerism is like the military industrial complex. It creates problems to feed a bloated production machine that consumes more and more because it benefits those in charge of the whole thing. And so consumerism leads our culture to believe the person with the new watch is cool and we all believe we must work day in and day out to compete in an endless game of consumption.

That is very different than, say, manufacturing electrical transformers and cabling so a new town can have electricity. In the middle the line is not clear but we can focus at first on the extents.

> if cars were more similar year to year

They were like this in the Soviet Union, and it was laughable how much they ended up lagging behind after a few decades. I see the process you describe, despite it's perceived but necessary inefficiency, as resulting in a system that delivers the most progress and the most resiliency. There's a reason that self-driving cars are being invented in one place and not another. The driving force behind that reason is much more important to preserve than any incidental waste or excess along the way.

But in another way, this is exactly how open source works. They do not sell you a new release and push ads showing how stylish you will be if you dump version 13 and upgrade to version 14. They just push a point release as needed. Some software is updated daily and some is updated once every five years. There is no marketing team trying to drum up artificial demand for some python package.

> They were like this in the Soviet Union, and it was laughable how much they ended up lagging behind after a few decades.

The soviet system was an authoritarian one and I am proposing a free market solution. I am basically just saying people can save money if they band together and buy machines which provide for their basic needs. But also it would all be open source, and like software it would be updated as needed.

Actually the example with cars was just an attempt to explain consumerism. I might as well just paste this definition in to this comment like I just did elsewhere.

"Consumerism is the idea that increasing the consumption of goods and services purchased in the market is always a desirable goal and that a person's wellbeing and happiness depend fundamentally on obtaining consumer goods and material possessions."

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/consumerism.asp

i understand your position. i had that sort of idealism once upon a moon. but i now realize that the causation is backwards. people want, full stop[0]. that is natural and universal, and trying to take that away from people is tantamount to stripping humanity of its animus.

given this universal truth, the question isn't 'how do we limit our wants, and our desire to induce others' wants to fuel our own wants?', but rather 'how do we repurpose this innate desire for the greatest collective good?' capitalism tries to provide one answer: redirect greed into productive drive by rewarding economic novelty and efficiency. however, even that idealism has been subverted by the political economy and the complex interactions between government and business, to the detriment of social harmony.

[0]: note that what we all really want is to be at the top of the monkey pile, and everything you're talking about are various proxies for how to tell where we are in the pile. we're never going to overcome that with solutions like 'end consumerism'. you're literally working against human nature with that line of thinking.

For a long time I wanted to be at the top of the monkey pile.

A LOT of that came from received culture growing up in California as a boy in the 1990's. I no longer want to be at the top of a pile of monkeys. I want my daily labor to support others in my community (broadly) rather than working to enrich a few people who will own everything and control our economy.

I think if you grow up in a society that tells everyone "greed is good" then you're going to think being greedy is human nature, but actually anthropologists know that societies have again and again existed based on mutual support of one another. I am simply suggesting we drop this "greed is good" mantra and focus on helping one another. And I think it can be more economically efficient when you value each person's life more or less equally.

no offense to you personally, but that's a naive position. "greed is good" is a movie platitude, not the basis of our complex socioeconomic system, so it's practically useless to argue against it. more crucially, your solution says nothing about the universality of human desire, which is why it's simply a non-starter.

if you really want to improve social equity, distributing esteem more widely[0] will be more fruitful as a guiding light than trying to devise a more perfect, automation-based socialist/communist economic model. extreme automation will inevitably increase inequality as capital will find ways to corner ownership of the machines and hoard the productivity gains, no matter your good intent.

[0]: 'flatten the pile', if you will.

Isn't ending consumerism essential to avoid running out of resources.

If we could mandate that a product can only be sold if the entire lifecycle is sustainable then technically it could continue. This includes the company taking responsibility for disposal and recycling of anything they produce.

The current model of transferring materials from source, through consumers and then direct to landfill where they sit forever can only end one way.

probably not. it's hard to consume lots of stuff en masse by most of the population. in the developed world, we've already largely moved to service economies and have less than replacement population growth, and so in that sense we've "maxed out" on consuming stuff. that's not to say that we're doing a great job at being efficient and frugal in what we consume, but that running out of resources isn't that big of a problem (for the foreseeable future).

I’d say so yes.

I mean yes I do call it libertarian communism, tho I often leave that part out since people will be totally onboard until you mention the name. But also it’s a specific scheme that has the goal of lowering the marginal cost of living. And it’s totally voluntary which is not true for all schemes for communism.

> And it’s totally voluntary

Sure, while you are in charge. But when a more ambitious leader bashes your head in and takes over, maybe not so. How much of Lenin remained when Stalin took over?

There is no one in charge. I am not in charge. This is not a system based on any manner of authoritarian control.

Even a spiritual leader is in charge, if not in control. There still need to be laws, and those often follow from central sources/philosophies.

It's communism that reduces one of the notable downsides of communism, the social loafing aspect, due to reliance on machines instead of your fellow man for productive effort(labor equivalent).

It's a little hand-wavey though.

Who services the machines?

Are the machines centralised in mass-manufacture-scales and products distributed (as they are now); or de-centralised but also less efficient (wrt manufacture and supply chain) as a result. What would the raw materials be, and how are they powered (given the carbon-crisis).

I'd also ask what specifically are the essentials. Food? Shelter? ok. What about healthcare?

I love that you are asking these questions. Indeed I think any writing meant to describe an entire economy in a few paragraphs will necessarily be a bit hand wavey.

I did try to answer one of your questions: the machines are serviced by the members of the collective. In any plan for a society education must be considered. But much the same way that any halfway technical person can learn how to fix a 3D printer, these machines should be designed with repair in mind and along with open source designs there would be freely accessible repair guides.

Production should be somewhat decentralized so there should be many places manufacturing motors etc. but when it comes to putting the machines together I’d expect that different collectives would focus on certain machines and they would trade with people near them. Remember that you can always fall back on “people use money to exchange goods and services” I’m just imagining a model where that isn’t really the dominant way people manage their day to day survival.

I am not sure that decentralization is less efficient.

Getting the raw materials is one of the more serious questions. Generally falling back on non-automated things, firms should be cooperatively run. Also raw material consumption would arguably go down for westerners who move to this model, as there would be minimal waste and the machines would all be designed for repair.

Health care is to me essential but these things would vary from region to region based on cultural ideals and material conditions.

I am an engineer and I love to fix machines. I would rather spend my days fixing machines than working a corporate job to enrich a few executives. People who want to be Doctors or teachers often feel similarly. They need their material needs covered so they can do what they value most - helping others. I basically just think we can really streamline the whole production side of the economy and design things so everyone benefits and actually stops needing to work 40+ hours a week forever.

How would you prevent one of these collectives from, say, inventing an iPhone and monetizing it? And if you don't, aren't you back to square one again?

> How would you prevent one of these collectives from, say, inventing an iPhone and monetizing it?

You don't.

> aren't you back to square one again?

No, why would that be? We live in a world with a million top down owned capitalist corporations. If by some mass movement we get a few thousand collectives to band together, there will always be churn. Groups that dissolve, or change their aims, or seek profit over the cohesiveness of the group. You would do the same thing with them as would have been done at the beginning. Do you best not to trade with them. If you actually need what they have on offer, clone it. But the whole point of this system is to create some semblance of independence. Either people value that enough to stick with it, or they don't. IMO it's worth trying even if it might fail.

But isn't it the profit-seeking capitalists who actually bring innovations to market, to the benefit of everyone? Why would you deprive yourself of the benefit of trading with these groups? "Independence" isn't really a thing in a world with a global supply chain. It's simply not realistic to produce everything that we consume locally for anything approaching a reasonable cost. Economies of scale are extremely powerful.

I think your vision makes sense. It might not be optimal currently but as A.I., automation, and other technologies advance (Fusion fingers-crossed) I can see it becoming plausible and even desirable over the "pure-ish" capitalist economy we currently have.

Just to showcase some of the automation prototypes that makes me a hopeful believer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/14/weedkill... https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/PlayStation-s-sec...

3-d printed homes too

Thank you. I should say that critically, this scheme is not dependent on advancement in technology. It does take advantage of the fact that computers can perform labor for free, but there are examples of the elimination of hunger and equitable distribution of food without using any advanced technology. Specifically the Sikhs in India [1] serve over 1 million free meals a day in facilities all over India, and in Vienna Austria housing is built by the city and distributed equitably [2].

Advanced technology changes what is possible, but we can do this without advanced technology. 3D printed homes for example don’t really solve the problem as framing a home isn’t expensive: it’s the land and finishing the home that cost the most.

[1] https://youtu.be/qdoJroKUwu0

[2] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr_edge_featd_articl...

Point accepted. Yeah technology isn't necessary, but if tech can do the same amount for the same cost removing much of the labor requirement then that's a tremendous win. Additionally the lower the cost the easier it is to append a welfare or socialist cost on the the tax payer's bill. Providing decent food, housing, and some minimal healthcare at 5% of GDP vs 40% of a nations GDP makes a world of difference.

At thresholds of 5% combined with high automation mean such social programs won't be as vehemently contested and their absence might even be viewed as a unnecessary cruelty.

Some mutant hybrid of what the Sihks do in India, and these automations might be interesting:

https://mobile.twitter.com/TechAmazing/status/14397489959166...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byDmDWq7wc8

+ a quick google of food factory gifs/videos

A hybrid mutant that maximizes yield, minimizes cost and labor, if such a permutation is realistic and technology-wise permitting.

Socialism partially generates such an antagonistic response (at least in the USA) because how much of a burden it is on others, Minimize that burden might change the fundamental collective consciousness to how people view what the government should provide.

Yes!! That is a big motivation. If supporting others is very cheap people are more likely to support it.

And I love that you're on to the food machines. I have obsessed over the idea of automated production based on the Sikh systems. I hope I can build it some day. Or even if I don't, that someone does.

> I am not sure that decentralization is less efficient.

So, maybe your vision of focussing on the essentials - food, shelter etc rules out microchips which definitely benefit from specialised employees, and centralised operations; but that will rules out a lot of future advances wherein microchips are embedded in everything, or at least until a suitable de-centralised equivalent is found.

In the meanwhile, I'd worry of the problem of being over-taken; i.e other free nations that do subscribe to capitalism and the centrally managed resource model outcompete and invade you - which is arguably the fate of many of the American tribes that lacked the weapons to fight colonialism. Not having microchips can cripple any modern army/defence-force, least of all an ad-hoc decentralised one.

Also, things like injection moulding might be out to - modern products manage cheap mass-productions by producing expensive master tools, and using them to churn out millions of items - unless tribes specialise on produce (in which case we are back to trading goods and services) then no more of these items either.

> the machines are serviced by the members of the collective

This limits how complex these machines can be, and or numerous - which in turn limits how prevalent. Also, back to the question; are all the machines going to be bare mechanical contraptions of wood and steel, or can they contain silicon - which unless you have an answer for fabrication/manufacture, cannot be repaired forever, and will need to be replaced. Modern open-source is parasitic to the capitalist economy around it - 3D printers still contain Atmel mcus and intel cpus, not to mention the motors, rotors and precision belt/shaft/bearings.

> Health care is to me essential but these things would vary from region to region based on cultural ideals and material conditions.

Where do the doctors come from? Are we hoping as many people are willing to spend a large amount of time training, or being trained, as surgeons; as there are people who need surgery? Will we still punish negligent doctors, at risk of no-one wanting to bear the burden of liability if we did?

What about law? Would anyone want to be a lawyer if it wasn't well paid? Would many current lawyers do law if it wasn't well paid?

> I am an engineer and I love to fix machines

I feel this is a strong bias colouring your opinion - many engineers love their jobs, and the things they fix/design/repair/manipulate. You seem to be arguing for a society of engineering, based on the manufacture of things (machines and their products) - but society needs more than things, and people are often motivated less by things too; by wealth and status, for example; I'm not sure everyone can find the same joy in engineering as those who select for it.

> Doctors or teachers often feel similarly

Not so sure that's true. Many engineers care more about the things than the help they provide people, and I'm sure doctors are the same too. If feels too much that everyone needs to subscribe to the same philosophy for this to work, and even then there will be some roles that are neglected in favour of more "engineery" ones..

While I do not advocate for a state-based model, I want to point out that the soviets beat the USA to orbit on a centrally planned economy. I see no reason to assume we cannot have machine tools and other high end equipment. Especially because: > open-source is parasitic to the capitalist economy

A parasite harms the host. Open source is symbiotic with the capitalist economy. I do fully expect that these machines will be built by products of the capitalist system at first. The point is that over time these people would rely less and less on the capitalist system for directly meeting their needs. Over time if this works it would behoove them to replace the entire economy they rely on with one they control. But there are first order needs like food and clothing and then there are second order needs like parts for the machine that brings them food. They can gain a lot of freedom by just covering their first order needs with machines they own.

As far as engineering, yes my examples all center around engineering because I am an engineer speaking mostly to other engineers here. But there are other people: therapists, grief counselors, teachers, doctors, librarians, carpenters, etc who would love to provide those services to friends for free if their survival was ensured.

I am imagining communities inside of the USA which simply trade with one another instead of buying from capitalist corporations. So only people who want this lifestyle would actually choose to live there. People who are super selfish and don't want to help anyone can simply keep living in the capitalist world, and see what it's like when no one cares for anyone else.

I’m not sure why you got downvoted. This is completely correct. Providing for everyone by trapping human beings in a giant production machine is inhumane. But machines are (generally) happy to do this for us.