That's a wild statement that is going to need some strong proof
A perfect market is one where
- alternatives can be created for little to no money so they can easily exist
- consumers have an infinity of time, money and energy to analyze products
- consumers have total agency over their decision
- picking an alternative has no cost, no drawback
- it is possible to buy nothing and still be content
There are 0 markets that fall under those conditions. The measure of how good your product is is not in its sales figures it is in... reviews.
No, it doesn't. We live in a stochastic world, not a deterministic one, and nothing perfectly fits any speculative model. There are always outliers and edge cases, and that's fine -- the world doesn't need to perfectly adhere to any model in order for the model to be more accurate than not in the general case.
And the proposition that business profits are largely aligned with consumer interests in the general case, even despite outliers to the contrary, is very obviously true.
But that's my point: the world is so different from that model that it becomes inaccurate. You might be privileged enough to have a good enough approximation of a perfect market, leading you to believe that the model stands, but you are not representative of the population. Not even close to the median.
> And the proposition that business profits are largely aligned with consumer interests in the general case, even despite outliers to the contrary, is very obviously true.
I don't know why I'm debating this in the hyper-capitalistic forum that Hacker News is, but no, business profits are not. If they were, no advertising would be necessary, because products would naturally be sold. If they were, every consumer would have access to everything. If they were, no lobbying by any company to soften laws seen as too restrictive would be necessary. If they were, companies would not emit a single gram of CO2.
The whole point of business profit is to profit. Aligning with consumer interests is lucky happenstance, not a necessity. A fringe outlier, as you say. You cannot say "it is true because I see it". It needs to be backed by strong analysis.
Look at something like Dark Patterns. These make a business more money by making a product worse.
Do you mean there are myriads of example of companies who say that they are optimizing for profit, but don't actually follow through in their actions? Humans do, indeed, have a penchant for saying one thing and then doing another. But if they are truly optimized for profit, how could they possibly go bust?
Of course not. The constraints are exactly what you optimizing against. Choosing to operate in a market that is not capable of supporting profitability is not optimizing for profitability, though. One may claim to be optimizing for profitability, but actions speak louder than words.
"Just existing in the world, providing a service to customers and a wage to employees" is a fine and stable way for a company to exist.
E.g. https://www.fiftybyfifty.org/2021/06/workers-at-cooperatives...
Elsewhere I've seen some reporting on cooperatives report lower satisfaction on some metrics, usually suspected to be exactly because worker cooperatives tend to give employees more of a stake and so stress levels around the future of the business may be higher.
At the same time, it is flawed to focus on any purported notion that they don't optimize for "worker happiness" because workers decide what they optimize for. And so that may or may not be "happiness" for any given coop, but it certainly does mean optimizing for what workers care about.
Comparing that to, I presume the notion of e.g. the Soviet Union as representative of "communism", where workers had near no say in what the dicators imposed on them, seems to be a rather crass and gross misrepresentation when used as a comparison for workers coops where they do have a say.
There is some kind of derangement in the English speaking West, any attempt to reign in power of capital must be communist.
If free public libraries didn't exist and were proposed today, they'd be accused of communism. If free public legal deference did not exist today, anyone proposing it would be accused of being a communist. Also notice that using public money to hurt a person, i.e. prosecution, is never accused of an ideology.
These sort of comparisons are deeply unhelpful and only betray illiteracy of the accuser.
They are paid for by property owners via tax millages rates on their homes.
Most people support this but none are free since the public pays for em.
I do believe corporatism is a problem with modernity. That being said, the article does sound fairly similar to "workers must own the means of production". Are we not in the ballpark of Marx, for better or worse?
You mean like how we upended reality in 2008 to save corrupt institutions and/or incompetent institutions? And then again during COVID? And then again to save Silicon Valley Bank?
You pretend that current situation some kind of natural state of affairs, when in reality it is a result of ‘legal force for me but not for the’
Personally, no I don't think greed is intrinsic. I think its learned. I also don't think its eat or be eaten. I think that's learned, ingrained, to benefit the most powerful.
I think 99% of people are good and just want a decent life. They don't care about having more or being better.
Yes morals are made up. Everything is made up. Everything is a social construct. "the world" (I assume you mean evil and greed?) does not supersede that. Because if you kill someone you go to jail, and jail is real. Don't believe me? Try it out.
The law of the jungle is... well... something you made up. Sorry. That may apply to your dog. But for the people I know, many would sooner end their own lives than doing something that distasteful. Hell, I've known many to end their own lives for much much less. Point being, it doesn't actually work this way.
You bring up jail in the same breath you say that. The plural of anecdote is not evidence, and you've provided equal weighting to both that people will do terrible things and that some people will not. At the very least, presumably that's evidence of free will. Either way, it has no bearing on the iron law of nature.
Just because civilization exists, and we exist within it, does not mean that we have overcome our basest nature, we only hold it at bay, presumably by choice.
This is preposterous, and frankly quite uninformed. It is especially ironic coming from you, since you are going round and accusing other people of being delusional.
We have iron-clad proof that cavemen took care of members of their tribe that were born crippled, and of the elderly. For no benefit to themselves. We have evidence of morals going back thousands of years. This is a topic well researched by anthropologists, and is not up for debate.
That's what the word 'civilisation' means - civilised behaviour and ethical standards. The people who think you can have a complex society, but have no respect for morals, are frankly savages.
It is unfortunately quite common to come across people in technology that have great talents, but they are as informed and society and civics as a high-scooler.
The other day I came across libertarians who think parents should have no obligations to feed their children and should not be held accountable if the child dies, because freedom. Might as well be speaking to Neanderthals.
I actually studied moral philosophy in a relatively well-respected institution (although I did drop out prior to getting any form of degree). Nothing I have learned about the world has ever indicated that there is any such thing as a moral absolute, although there are certain moral principles that tend to be enforced by most societies across history. You are arguing a position that both presupposes moral relativism and presupposes moral absolutism, and both cannot be true at once. At best, you are applying pragmatism towards your own political and economic beliefs and searching for post-hoc rationalizations, but the argument you have made in this entire thread is neither complete nor internally consistent.
Every time? Nonsense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_and_children_first has multiple documented examples to the contrary.
> You are arguing a position that moral absolutism,
Not by my reading; the argument was that iron clad examples of moral behaviour exist, not that we all share a core moral absolutism.
> although I did drop out prior to getting any form of degree
Not a suprise. To be fair even had you graduated you'd hardly be the Peter Singer of moral philosphy and those that attain such heights are not without counter argument.
Maybe lay off the "I'm an (almost) expert and this is my strawman" comments, they're clearly weak and cast you in a poor light.
Like most people, I am not an expert in most things, only in a very narrow subset of things. My expertise lies in some areas of technology, not really elsewhere. There is a vast gap between being an expert and being uninformed, it's not a binary distinction.
> Every time? Nonsense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_and_children_first has multiple documented examples to the contrary.
I think it was clear that my statement of 'every time' was not to be taken literally.
I don't think we're going to construct a well-supported moral framework defined in the most literal terms in the context of a set of comments on a website.
Nothing anyone has responded to me with in any way supports the idea that communism is something that aligns with reality and is anything more than a fantasy for idealists.
E.g. Critique of the Gotha Programme has a whole sections where Marx rips the then still largely Marxist precursor of the SPD for trusting the state too much, for not understanding that equal opportunity means distribution can't be equal, and The German Ideology has Marx pointing out that "eat or be eaten" means socialism according to him is impossible in a society that isn't rich enough to meet sufficient needs to remove poverty entirely through redistribution.
Overall, Marx central thesis is that workers being forced into a choice of "eat or be eaten" is what he believed would eventually force them to rise up and end capitalism once capital gains sufficient upper hand to drive labour costs down so much it's rising up or starving.
These "idealist delusions" about greed not existing annoyed him enough that there's a whole section in the Communist Manifesto mocking them, and the reason Marx and Engels used the term "communist" instead of "socialist" was to set themselves apart from socialist movements that believed that people could just be convinced to stop being greedy.
If society isn't driven by greed, that would invalidate the central theses of Marxist communism. All of his core predictions rests on the assumptions that greed is what drives the evolution of capitalism towards a stage where he believed workers would eventually not put greed aside but understand that the way to maximise their own benefits would be to work together to strip capitalist of power and wealth.
Whether or not we think he was right or wrong about that, it's in any case clear that the major inspiration of communist ideologies explicitly rejected the notion of ending greed.
One could similarly say that the company goes kaput if you over-optimize for profit extraction.
The goal should be to some-how optimize for the sweet spot where the well-being of the company, the employees, investors, the economy and the environment are sufficiently in balance.
I think the customer has a good bit of influence by voting with their wallet but we don't see it in action very often. One could underoptimize for that too!