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Eschat0n posted:This forum is extremely paranoid. Typo posted:This is actually extremely true It's not "paranoia" it's loving pattern recognition. You think you're the first idiot to stumble drunkenly into D&D and post long screeds about how you've figured out economics/wealth/humanity more than anyone else in the whole world? And for some reason, the conclusion of all these brain geniuses is never "we should give poor people more money" so if you're the first one with that conclusion, congratulations, but somehow I highly doubt that's the big thing you've been working up to. Eschat0n posted:lol, it's pretty funny that you reference Peterson. I like the guy at first glance; I like some of what he says. And shock of all shocks, you're a JP fan. Of course.
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Feb 19, 2019 21:49
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Eschat0n posted:No, your linguistic pedantry is just a refusal to accept what I say without loving with it in some sense so that you can come off as having "corrected" me. I suspect that most other people would have no problem with my usage of the term parasite in the sense that I used it. quote:Coming up with novel terms to describe particular senses of more common terms is useful when you're going to be referring to it at length later on and don't want to keep having to make clear the sense in which you're using the term, but unless that's going to happen it is a superfluous effort that actually will confuse people by requiring them to remember a bunch of new poo poo that will end up having little bearing on later discussion. I'm aggravated because I think you know that and are simply trying to flex on me so that it keeps looking like I'm admitting I'm wrong when in fact you're just loving around with the language we're using while agreeing with me in actual principle. We can move past this any time; I'm fine with uberparasite. We'll see how much it subsequently comes up. I may be being pedantic, but the root cause it that you keep using phrases like "can only be" or "must be" to describe things that would be better described as "are often". I'd even maybe grudgingly accept a "let us assume" construct as couching for one of these excessively absolute statements, but when you're trying to establish your axioms, giving axioms that are demonstrably false is asking for pedantry. But again, when challenged, instead of adjusting the absoluteness of the statement, you turn some other word of the claim into some absolute thing that the word doesn't typically mean, to try to protect the inviolable axiom. If you can get over the idea that I'm trying to one-up you or belittle you or whatever it is you think is my motivation, maybe think about what it is that I'm challenging (it's not you, it's the things you said!) you could probably move on faster to the "accessible coconuts are worth just as much as stacked coconuts" realization. quote:It grounds economics in the context of the physical world and makes it clear what wealth creation really means outside of economics as well as inside of it. It makes it impossible to ignore the significance of sustainability and scale. It establishes an outer boundary of what is possible and centers the focus of discussion about economics on efficiency and human labor. It is a frame for the picture I'm trying to paint, in short. quote:Steam Engine: Wikipedia: heat engine Of course this is completely irrelevant to the original point which was that you were asserting that a temperature gradient such as that created by heating a thing creates a reduction in the local entropy of that thing by creating a temperature gradient, and as such what I was describing as an entropy increase is, more locally, an entropy decrease, and as such can still qualify as a wealth increase. (I think you were arguing that wealth is comprised of low-entropy stuff, but I'm honestly not sure any more.) There's still a problem here, because cooking a thing that's inedible when raw clearly gives it more use-value, but overcooking the same thing clearly gives it less use-value, and no matter how you might redefine the boundaries of this entropy change these two changes are obviously both in the same entropic direction. So again, maybe it would be more reasonable to say that most forms of use-value represent a thing in a lower-entropy state, but then you'd be giving up the absoluteness of an axiom.
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Feb 20, 2019 00:52
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Having enough resources that you can use it to force changes in society that make life worse for the people around you in order to increase your own personal well being while shrugging your arms and saying 'that's just the way life is' and somehow be protected by the same society.
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Feb 20, 2019 01:46
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Moridin920 posted:Here's LVT: But if it does take $100 to start, where does that come from? Without $100 worth of capital, we never get to produce the goods in the first place, so the workers are never paid $50. If it doesn't come from investors, it has to come from somewhere right? A bank? The government? Crowdsourcing? Does the $100 worth of goods and $50 worth of salaries always return at least $150 so that the $100 is repaid and the workers are paid their $50? If it doesn't and the $100 can't be returned in full, who covers the extra loss? The workers? The bank/government/whatever that's funding the $100 can't give everyone $100 if it's not always getting the money back, so now we're charging financing or interest or something to cover risk. Who decides how much is charged? Are they allowed to say no? Who decides if they get to say no?
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Feb 20, 2019 02:27
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paternity suitor posted:The bank/government/whatever that's funding the $100 can't give everyone $100 if it's not always getting the money back, Actually I'm fairly sure the point of MMT is that it absolutely can and does and should do this, and that if it stopped doing this there would be no money left in circulation. The reason money exists is because the government printed it and gave it to someone. More specifically though the money can come from anywhere, the marxist position is that we don't need private ownership of capital, just take it all off the private holders and put it under democratic control, you don't trust random people to make decisions about any other aspect of your life, why would you trust them to marshal your labour? OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 02:41 on Feb 20, 2019 |
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Feb 20, 2019 02:34
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OwlFancier posted:Actually I'm fairly sure the point of MMT is that it absolutely can and does and should do this, and that if it stopped doing this there would be no money left in circulation. The reason money exists is because the government printed it and gave it to someone. I'm familiar with the basic gist of MMT, so I suppose I can see how that can address the issue of essentially a negative return on any money lent by the government. I understand that all money in circulation is created by the government. Government deficits can simply be restated as private surplus, I get that. When you say, more specifically the money comes from anywhere...that's not very specific. It seems like it has to come from the government if it's lent out with no expectation of return. Who else would lend it? Even government spending has an expectation of return, even if the return isn't monetary, but improved safety or overall wellbeing of the population. What does it mean to put money under democratic control? I guess what I'm driving at is, going beyond the idea that capital is provided interest free by the government, who exactly is deciding who gets the money in this scenario? If I have a business idea how would I obtain money, and what if my idea is really loving stupid and expensive? Who decides that it's loving stupid? What if it's actually very smart, but most people think it's loving stupid because it's esoteric?
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Feb 20, 2019 05:25
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WampaLord posted:It's not "paranoia" it's loving pattern recognition. You think you're the first idiot to stumble drunkenly into D&D and post long screeds about how you've figured out economics/wealth/humanity more than anyone else in the whole world? To be fair, this is more amusing than the usual 'see all of recorded history' result when the libertarians stop by. I mean, watching y'all teach the basic terms of macroeconomics to what appears to be one of the dudes in Plato's cave is entertaining. paternity suitor posted:I'm familiar with the basic gist of MMT, so I suppose I can see how that can address the issue of essentially a negative return on any money lent by the government. I understand that all money in circulation is created by the government. Government deficits can simply be restated as private surplus, I get that. Money explicitly comes from nowhere. It is a promise of value based on the value of the issuing country's entire economy, at its most base. Money creation has no expectation of return, but is rather necessary to prevent the existence of savings and hoarding from making money useless as a method of exchange by locking up the entirety of the currency pool and creating hyperdeflation. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 07:07 on Feb 20, 2019 |
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Feb 20, 2019 07:01
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Liquid Communism posted:Money explicitly comes from nowhere. It is a promise of value based on the value of the issuing country's entire economy, at its most base. Money creation has no expectation of return, but is rather necessary to prevent the existence of savings and hoarding from making money useless as a method of exchange by locking up the entirety of the currency pool and creating hyperdeflation. I honestly don't see how that addresses what I was asking. I'm on board with money creation up to the point of excessive inflation. Money creation has no expectation of return. But spending or investing money does, even if the return isn't explicitly money. There is a finite amount that can go out before inflation occurs, so you need to rank and choose where that money goes. Outside of the government, who is going to lend you $100 today, for a 90% chance to receive back $100 in the future? Maybe crowdsourcing? Family? What does money under democratic control mean? Who decides who gets access to money? If I have a business idea and need money to start it, where do I get that money? And if my idea fails, who pays the difference? Going back to the $100 widget with $50 worth of labor. That's assuming 100% yield, or assuming the $100 includes an assumed yield. What if the someone miscalculated and the yield is 50% instead, so it turns out it's $200 worth of material on average, and there's no market for a $250 widget? Or what if they only sell half of their supply of $150 widgets because they miscalculated demand? Who eats those losses? Do the workers still get paid, shrug their shoulders and move on?
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Feb 20, 2019 14:36
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The government would be an option. Essentially consider how it works now, where random rich people decide where the money goes. And are only willing, generally, to spend it on things that generate them maximal amounts of extra money, regardless of whether it's of actual use to people, whether it's actually really bad for people in the long run because it's gonna kill everyone by global warming, whether it's something you should absolutely spend money on even if it doesn't make money like ensuring the hungry can eat and the sick can be healed. Having just some rando rich fucker in charge of deciding what gets done by giving them control of the motivation supply, is a really weird way to do it. "Who eats the loss" assumes that there is generally a net loss, if a business runs for 10 years and then looks like it's on the way out what will generally happen is all the workers get fired and the business owner sells up and walks off with the 10 years worth of profit. There is no loss there. Democratic control would mean the workers equally get to decide what happens in that instance and it might involve either continuing to provide the business if it's providing value to the consumers, possibly applying for state support if it's something that provides enough benefit to the consumers that it merits being run as a service, even at a loss. Or they might decide to close up and each get a share of the total profit, it being them who actually put the work in to generate it. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 15:18 on Feb 20, 2019 |
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Feb 20, 2019 15:14
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Its stolen from da workers, OP
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Feb 21, 2019 03:20
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I'm going to answer everyone in a single post to try to cut down on the amount of checking I have to do today just because I've been away from this thread awhile, still don't really have time to step away from my wage-slavery to devote all the attention in the world to it, and there are some interesting things being said that I really do want to address.Typo posted:Those are very well understood problems in economics, namely externalities and the collective actions problem... It's more than those things. Externalities describe unintended consequences, but these aren't necessarily even unintended. Certain countries may even view it as their function to conquer and subsume other national economies. Collective action problems certainly describe the issue, but hopefully we can get more specific than that. Super-national agreements and entities such as the EU (much more than the UN) really simply comprise larger, worse-coordinated nations, unless one of them manages world domination/cooperation. The desire to base all this on work and entropy is an attempt to describe how economics arises out of the conditions of the natural world (trees, per OwlFancier) and ends up with systems we have today. Ideally you could describe all economic and pre-economic systems of wealth in a single way, understand how they were inevitably going to arise given the conditions, and do all this within a framework that centralizes sustainability and efficiency while not worrying more than we have to about what is right and good. No one really cares to argue with the Laws of Thermodynamics these days, so I figured that was a good place to try to build from. Of course can argue night and day about whether or not I've properly mapped the one discipline to the other - and that's valid, and what I hope to continue doing here. Orange Devil posted:If you want to talk about the best way to distribute scarce resources though you aren't talking about efficiency so much as you are talking about distributive justice and you've entered philosophy. I recommend Rawls. Orange Devil posted:Now this is something I can actually understand and relate to, thanks for explaining better... Orange Devil posted:Again you stick too closely to orthodox economic framing, which is not coincidentally infused with nationalism here.... WampaLord posted:And shock of all shocks, you're a JP fan. Of course. roomforthetuna posted:I had no problem with usage of the term parasite, until it was fed into the conclusion that all parasites can only be detrimental... roomforthetuna posted:I was about ready to concede this, assuming the linked article defined a steam engine as a specific type of implementation, but no, turns out according to wikipedia there's no requirement that a heat engine uses a temperature gradient.... roomforthetuna posted:(I think you were arguing that wealth is comprised of low-entropy stuff, but I'm honestly not sure any more.) There's still a problem here, because cooking a thing that's inedible when raw clearly gives it more use-value, but overcooking the same thing clearly gives it less use-value, and no matter how you might redefine the boundaries of this entropy change these two changes are obviously both in the same entropic direction. "Use-values are established by work, which is the process of reducing entropy within some frame of reference accessible to the user." This goes all the way back to my initial discussion regarding what Marx said about use-values and whether I thought he was right about what he said. I had a slight modification to his statement at that time: "Wealth always consists of accessible use-values." (https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3881137&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=3#post492614364) At the time I had in mind the following: "You have to be able to use it, don't you? I'm not even sure Marx would disagree with this, given he doesn't seem to think any of this contravenes his contention that use-values require a quality of usefulness." So when you burn the meat, you're reducing entropy but you're also making it unusable, much the same as if you had cooked it properly but far away from anyone able to eat it. I think the same modification catches at least this example of how decrease in entropy with in a frame of reference does not necessarily increase wealth. It has to be useful too, and that's a clause which has been with my position since I first defined it, but insufficiently explored. What it does is potentially make entropy a less useful measure of wealth than it might first appear. It certainly doesn't stand on its own. I think my conclusions are still safe, though, and here's why: I still can't imagine a situation in which entropy increases and so does the use-value of that frame of reference/local system/thing. So long as that remains valid, I can say no, we aren't getting a free lunch out of the universe. I don't even think that's a very controversial statement; some others in here might even go so far as calling it "dumb" to even bother mentioning. Most axioms are, really, but whatever. OwlFancier posted:Actually I'm fairly sure the point of MMT is that it absolutely can and does and should do this, and that if it stopped doing this there would be no money left in circulation. The reason money exists is because the government printed it and gave it to someone. OwlFancier posted:"Who eats the loss" assumes that there is generally a net loss... A Russian troll farm posted:Its stolen from da workers, OP Eschat0n fucked around with this message at 23:29 on Feb 21, 2019 |
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Feb 21, 2019 22:56
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Do you think poor people should have more money, yes or no? I would like a literal one word answer to this question.
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Feb 21, 2019 22:58
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Eschat0n posted:Just to kind of butt in once more on the conversation, I think in my understanding of economics, though, there is always a net loss somewhere in the economy. The work is done, and it physically cannot be distributed perfectly efficiently, so there's systemic loss, and there's also the loss which happens as a result of the entropy increasing. That's true not only in a socialist economy but really in any economy, right? So paternity suitor is basically right - in any economic system, to some extent, all participants end up "shrugging their shoulders and moving on." That's the price paid to be part of the group, yeah? And people are generally willing to pay that price, because economies are much more efficient than taking all the risk on yourself - but broadly speaking they're all just ramps with varying inclines down the entropy well, converting as much of the potential wealth to actual use-values as can be done before they get to the bottom. How efficiently you perform that descent is important and matters, but loss is unavoidable under any system. If you turn a tree into chairs the chairs have higher utility than the tree, if they didn't, you wouldn't do it, and people would just stand around and stare at trees instead of sitting on chairs. This is not in any way a "net loss", there is all sorts of work that produces things that are actually useful and beneficial to people and which, by basically any metric, generates value, whether or not you consider money to be value, or utility, or beauty, or artifice, or whatever. Human work transforms things into more useful things and there is not any sort of loss inherent to this process. Loss can occur due to market factors, or due to your boss owning the means of production and screwing you out of your fair share, but the overwhelming probability is that your labour is useful and generates value, not a loss. If you're trying to say that's all meaningless because eventually the universe is gonna freeze to death then that's really not very useful to anybody who's ever been or is or is gonna be alive. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 23:08 on Feb 21, 2019 |
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Feb 21, 2019 23:04
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Eschat0n posted:It's more than those things. Externalities describe unintended consequences, but these aren't necessarily even unintended. Certain countries may even view it as their function to conquer and subsume other national economies. Collective action problems certain describe the issue, but hopefully we can get more specific than that. Super-national agreements and entities such as the EU (much more than the UN) really simply comprise larger, worse-coordinated nations, unless one of them manages world domination/cooperation. No it doesn't, from the first sentence of the wiki article I linked: quote:In economics, an externality is the cost or benefit that affects a party who did not choose to incur that cost or benefit. there's nothing about intentions here, an externality can be intended or unintended this btw, is one of the problems ppl itt have with you and why they seem frustrated, namely that you seem unwilling to do like a 5 second reading of concepts that people are trying to explain to you that are really vital to understanding the issues you are coming to grasps with Typo fucked around with this message at 23:39 on Feb 21, 2019 |
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Feb 21, 2019 23:16
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quote:The desire to base all this on work and entropy is an attempt to describe how economics arises out of the conditions of the natural world (trees, per OwlFancier) and ends up with systems we have today. Ideally you could describe all economic and pre-economic systems of wealth in a single way, understand how they were inevitably going to arise given the conditions, and do all this within a framework that centralizes sustainability and efficiency while not worrying more than we have to about what is right and good. No one really cares to argue with the Laws of Thermodynamics these days, so I figured that was a good place to try to build from. Of course can argue night and day about whether or not I've properly mapped the one discipline to the other - and that's valid, and what I hope to continue doing here. But all you are really saying here is that everything uses energy and there is a finite amount of energy in the universe to be used up because the universe is (probably) finite, which is true, I'm just not sure why you need like 10 pages of words to say this or how this is non-trivial the idea that there are finite resources (scarcity) and that we need to find a good way of allocating said finite resources is the very premise of economics as a discipline: whether you are of the Marxist or Neoclassical school. I think your entire 10 page thesis when boiled down is just replace "resources" with energy or thermodynamics or something in the above statement Typo fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Feb 21, 2019 |
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Feb 21, 2019 23:27
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And I again really want to point out that the heat death of the universe is an utterly irrelevant concern for humans. It has no place whatsoever in our lives. Right now we live on a planet with some resources which are finite, some which are constant, and some which are renewable up to a point. The goal of our economic system should be to balance all of those out as well as possible to maximise human wellbeing, and the fact that a couple dozen fuckers are holding more of the sum total of human monetary wealth than half the goddamn planet is point numero uno on things that are wrong with the present system.
OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Feb 21, 2019 |
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Feb 21, 2019 23:41
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and OP, the idea you are vaguely coming to grasp with is something called Malthusiniasm and neo-malthusianism only instead of food and land it's energy you are using instead
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Feb 21, 2019 23:44
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like the thing OP is trying to say (and maybe has already said but I'm not gonna read the last 2342349 paragraphs he wrote) is basically: 1) there's a limited pool of energy 2) entropy takes away from this pool 3) work = creating wealth = using up energy = entropy 4) wealth is energy 5) this framework is useful because it encourages us to think about finite energy available to us on earth it's just that this is a pretty useless framework from just thinking about resources as resources because as others have already said the earth is not a closed system (there's more energy than we can use blasted out of the sun we just don't have the technology to fully harvest it yet) and the actual sustainability issues the Earth faces isn't that we are "running out" of energy or even specific resources like oil but rather the side effects from particular technological means of production (heh) causing specific environmental parameters like avg global temperature to change. Typo fucked around with this message at 00:18 on Feb 22, 2019 |
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Feb 22, 2019 00:10
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Typo posted:it's just that this is a pretty useless framework from just thinking about resources as resources because as others have already said the earth is not a closed system (there's more energy than we can use blasted out of the sun we just don't have the technology to fully harvest it yet) and the actual sustainability issues the Earth faces isn't that we are "running out" of energy or even specific resources like oil but rather the side effects from particular technological means of production (heh) causing specific environmental parameters like avg global temperature to change. This is the key thing, climate change is a problem because we have an economic system that encourages individual and nations to enter into an arms race, either literal or figurative, where they try to outproduce each other and struggle for dominance, and then even when dominant they want to become even more dominant and run up the score regardless of the effect it has on the planet. Which is why marxist environmentalists argue that this is dumb and we need to stop doing it, and that the only way we're gonna be able to stop doing it is by taking power out of the hands of any random poo poo who can accumulate money. Because if that's how you assign power then you create a system where power havers do nothing but try to accumulate more to have more power, or just out of pathological obsession with doing it. And that creates the whole rotten edifice of mass-consumption-as-life .
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Feb 22, 2019 00:35
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Eschat0n posted:Well, this is the problem, then. You have no idea what I actually said! What I said was not "that all parasites can only be detrimental" - what I said was "Not an argument from sustainability or ethics, these actors probably represent a simple drain on the efficiency of the economy; they are an anti-economy; a parasite, in various degrees. For ethical reasons it may be desirable to continue including these parasites, but there couldn't be any economic justification." So my formulation was "the actors" - as in those who matched the description I had just formulated - were parasites. This does not imply that all parasites are "these actors." You've gone and created this entire idea of something you think I said, but I never actually said it. Let's move on. quote:
quote:So when you burn the meat, you're reducing entropy but you're also making it unusable, much the same as if you had cooked it properly but far away from anyone able to eat it. I think the same modification catches at least this example of how decrease in entropy with in a frame of reference does not necessarily increase wealth. It has to be useful too, and that's a clause which has been with my position since I first defined it, but insufficiently explored. I get that a useful local decrease in entropy can work for your model, but my contention is that there are useful local increases in entropy, which I think invalidates the premise that use-value is made of useful-local-low-entropy. quote:What it does is potentially make entropy a less useful measure of wealth than it might first appear. It certainly doesn't stand on its own. I think my conclusions are still safe, though, and here's why: I still can't imagine a situation in which entropy increases and so does the use-value of that frame of reference/local system/thing. You might argue that burning a log increased entropy with a small decrease in use-value, and the heated thing arguably decreased entropy for a larger increase in use-value, now that you've decided that the low-entropy thing must be useful to count, but I'm not sure even that holds up. At the very least, it needs a better definition of useful before this becomes a predictive model - right now the model as described would seem to rate owning an unburned log pretty highly since it's low entropy, useful and accessible. Actually, that might be getting to the heart of the topic - a thing that's been missing from the concept of wealth is the self. If you're dead you don't have any wealth even if your estate has a billion coconuts - and that's why eating a coconut is a positive thing even though it inarguably decreases your residual spare wealth. That's why heating your house by burning a log is a positive thing even though by pretty much every metric that anyone has ever measured wealth by it's a loss. That's why cooking food is valuable even though it makes the food less flexible and last less long - it contributes to the self (or to someone else's self - which gives it a higher trade value than its otherwise inherent value). Sustaining (and entertaining!) the self may be of higher value than any codified use-value/entropy can measure. More clearly, a given object doesn't really have an inherent use-value. A barrel of oil is worth a lot more to me right now than a glass of water, but if I'm about to die of dehydration the opposite is true. Entropy can't explain that.
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Feb 22, 2019 03:07
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Eschat0n posted:Stolen is such a loaded word. What do you mean? In a certain sense, as described above - yes, participation in an economy "robs" you of some of your work. You get a lot out of it though - just not perhaps measured in terms you normally measure, so you think it's all a bad joke - but somehow still preferable to not participating, yeah? You're talking about exploitation. Which, yes, allowing yourself to be exploited for a central goal can be mutually beneficial. All private property is theft. Land belongs to everyone. When someone claims something is theirs and they aren't immediately using it they are stealing from the community. We have a lot of laws that reinforce this theft but it's still theft.
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Feb 22, 2019 03:42
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MixMastaTJ posted:You're talking about exploitation. Which, yes, allowing yourself to be exploited for a central goal can be mutually beneficial. I agree with this but your AV makes me imagine Steven saying it and that's truly great. Pearl replies "I dunno Steven that seems a little abstract."
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Feb 22, 2019 04:15
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Eschat0n posted:I don't think so, because my formulation so far doesn't say anything about who gets what; only that the most efficient economies will distribute use-values such that they actually get used. This is far from dealing with whether it's fair to give a use-value to any certain person or group. Right now it seems as apt to suggest we give all use-values to some idealized central command computer that can maximally use the wealth for the benefit of everyone in the system as to recommend you just let people murder each other to get what they need; you'd have to introduce additional arguments about the ethics or efficiency of that plan to argue against it, and that's not been done yet. The only thing it attempts to establish is that whatever system is decided on, it should be chosen because it is efficient. You're absolutely right that such arguments do rapidly enter the realm of philosophy and ethics rather than "pure scientific economics" or whatever, though. You've lost me completely again. I'm trying to tell you that efficiency on its own means nothing, yet you keep insisting that efficient economies (which apparently is capitalism first and foremost) will triumph over less efficient economies (read: socialism) and that's the lens I should adopt for this issue. It appears that your unstated goal (ie. what are we being efficient towards) is profit maximization. Ok cool, but what if in our hypothetical socialist economy we abolish private property? Or markets? I'm trying to tell you that I reject the unstated fundamental underpinnings of your argument. By the way, I vehemently disagree with your characterisation that any of this is "a simple political change away". These are massive, literally revolutionary, changes I'm talking about. Nothing about this will be simple. But focusing on the wrong things, ie. what you are doing by trying to frame these things in purely economic terms, will not only not help, but actually harm achieving any of these goals. Furthermore, please note that I've already agreed with you that having "one signficant economy", and specifically the US, defect from these goals and instead continue with the capitalist course that they are on is an existential threat. I disagree with you, again, that this competition would be a purely economic affair. The US (or any other sufficiently powerful capitalist actor) will use and has used every form of violence available to it to stop socialism from succeeding. What you need to sit down and think about is, what are ecoomies supposed to be for anyway? Or what ought the goal of human labour be?
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Feb 22, 2019 12:21
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WampaLord posted:Do you think poor people should have more money, yes or no? OwlFancier posted:If you turn a tree into chairs the chairs have higher utility than the tree, if they didn't, you wouldn't do it, and people would just stand around and stare at trees instead of sitting on chairs. Typo posted:there's nothing about intentions here, an externality can be intended or unintended Typo posted:But all you are really saying here is that everything uses energy and there is a finite amount of energy in the universe to be used up because the universe is (probably) finite, which is true, I'm just not sure why you need like 10 pages of words to say this or how this is non-trivial OwlFancier posted:And I again really want to point out that the heat death of the universe is an utterly irrelevant concern for humans. It has no place whatsoever in our lives. Right now we live on a planet with some resources which are finite, some which are constant, and some which are renewable up to a point. The goal of our economic system should be to balance all of those out as well as possible to maximise human wellbeing, and the fact that a couple dozen fuckers are holding more of the sum total of human monetary wealth than half the goddamn planet is point numero uno on things that are wrong with the present system. Typo posted:and OP, the idea you are vaguely coming to grasp with is something called Malthusiniasm and neo-malthusianism If wealth is use-values And use-values are created by people More people = more use-values = more wealth Given how cheap it turns out to be to keep people around at some maximum level of misery, nations do not have a huge incentive to lower population numbers until they hit 1st world status and automation reduces (eventually removes completely?) the number of workers who must be given some slice of the pie... and even then, I'm not actually sure it doesn't just keep making sense to have as many people as you can in your economy. Awesome Euro and Asian Tiger economies don't really stand a chance against much less efficient juggernauts like India or China. Even America, relatively large in population, isn't on track to best them in the long run. Typo posted:it's just that this is a pretty useless framework from just thinking about resources as resources because as others have already said the earth is not a closed system (there's more energy than we can use blasted out of the sun we just don't have the technology to fully harvest it yet) and the actual sustainability issues the Earth faces isn't that we are "running out" of energy or even specific resources like oil but rather the side effects from particular technological means of production (heh) causing specific environmental parameters like avg global temperature to change. But all of that is beside the point. It's not so much about running out as it is about efficiently converting; not because you'll get to the absolute bottom of the pool of X resource, really, but because you can have Y amount of X per P harvesting period, and run out of it in that time, or even simply just not make the best use of your time over such and such period, leaving you uncompetitive. OwlFancier posted:This is the key thing, climate change is a problem because we have an economic system that encourages individual and nations to enter into an arms race, either literal or figurative, where they try to outproduce each other and struggle for dominance, and then even when dominant they want to become even more dominant and run up the score regardless of the effect it has on the planet. Which is why marxist environmentalists argue that this is dumb and we need to stop doing it, and that the only way we're gonna be able to stop doing it is by taking power out of the hands of any random poo poo who can accumulate money. Because if that's how you assign power then you create a system where power havers do nothing but try to accumulate more to have more power, or just out of pathological obsession with doing it. And that creates the whole rotten edifice of mass-consumption-as-life . 1. The economic paradigm is "Outproduce wealth to achieve dominance" 2. Marxist environmentalists (and, I'd argue, plenty of others) will stop this by "taking power." But how will they "take power?" "By convincing people they're right and then getting them all to vote their ideas into action." "But what if your ideas will temporarily reduce the amount of wealth flowing into people's coffers, and they rather don't like that, so they don't vote for your ideas?" (It's my explicit contention and worry that this seems inevitable and I'm hoping someone will point out how actually it's not true). "Then we must outproduce our competitors by creating a society where we are even more productive than those capitalists who are ruining the planet!" (with, potentially, the inane sub-loop of this step where we talk about bloody revolution but realize we'll need to outproduce our competitors to win post-industrial wars anyhow). But that's just participating in the system you seek to overthrow, so I think really we just need to sit down and ask ourselves "how do you go about outcompeting modern capitalism economically?" roomforthetuna posted:I have no argument with that. It doesn't say "temperature gradient" at all, nor anything that requires a temperature gradient [across space] be involved. roomforthetuna posted:I'm confused by the claim that overcooking meat is a reduction in entropy. My position was that cooking and overcooking meat are both an increase in entropy, and that one of them increases use-value. (In case you're going to say temperature gradient again to excuse calling it an entropy decrease, I'd like to make it raw meat -> cooked-then-cooled meat -> overcooked-and-cooled meat.) roomforthetuna posted:At the very least, it needs a better definition of useful before this becomes a predictive model... /quote] MixMastaTJ posted:You're talking about exploitation. Which, yes, allowing yourself to be exploited for a central goal can be mutually beneficial. On the flip side, if we share a coconut for eating, but you are always using it for making music, then will never actually get to eat the coconut. It seems like by your logic the musical coconut user is not a thief, despite having deprived me my use of a shared coconut. I'd say he absolutely is... better for me to have a coconut and tell you to get your own, since you and I do not agree on how best to use coconuts. But ultimately I'm not really interested in the immense argument that will unfold down this line of discussion. Let's suppose for now that ownership is theft. I'm fine with that, for the sake of continuing the argument in another direction. Orange Devil posted:You've lost me completely again. I'm trying to tell you that efficiency on its own means nothing, yet you keep insisting that efficient economies (which apparently is capitalism first and foremost) will triumph over less efficient economies (read: socialism) and that's the lens I should adopt for this issue. It appears that your unstated goal (ie. what are we being efficient towards) is profit maximization. Ok cool, but what if in our hypothetical socialist economy we abolish private property? Or markets? I'm trying to tell you that I reject the unstated fundamental underpinnings of your argument. Orange Devil posted:By the way, I vehemently disagree with your characterisation that any of this is "a simple political change away". These are massive, literally revolutionary, changes I'm talking about. Nothing about this will be simple. But focusing on the wrong things, ie. what you are doing by trying to frame these things in purely economic terms, will not only not help, but actually harm achieving any of these goals. Orange Devil posted:Furthermore, please note that I've already agreed with you that having "one signficant economy", and specifically the US, defect from these goals and instead continue with the capitalist course that they are on is an existential threat. I disagree with you, again, that this competition would be a purely economic affair. The US (or any other sufficiently powerful capitalist actor) will use and has used every form of violence available to it to stop socialism from succeeding. Orange Devil posted:What you need to sit down and think about is, what are ecoomies supposed to be for anyway? Or what ought the goal of human labour be?
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Feb 25, 2019 07:30
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Eschat0n posted:So what? So, wealth arises out of useful human effort, except when by chance the accessible natural world is also useful. Wealth creation is a physical process - people must do something (think, write, saw, mine, etc) to generate it, except when the natural world provides it. But the natural world itself is also a process; its entropy increases over time, system-wide. I think that you would really benefit from a deeper engagement with the philosophy of science. Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" is the classic example here but there's also lots of up to date stuff on these debates. The point I would emphasize is that ultimately there are certain criteria that tend to get used to help use make sense of what a good theory looks like. One widely held value for a theory is the principle of parsimony - which is more or less just a formalized way of referring to Ocam's Razor - the idea that we should aim for the most simple and straightforward available explanation that still fits all the available data. Based on a first glance the wiki on this concept seems decent enough and gives a helpful overview of debates and grey areas where parsimony can be hard to apply. My point here is that your instinct to go for a grand universe scale theory of the economy sort of cuts against the grain of how most science and academic work is conducted. If you're going to bring in something as complex as physics and start musing about faster than light travel or the heat death of the universe then these concepts ought to be doing some crucial work in your theory. But so far as I can tell your references to entropy are largely just aesthetic. They give your theory as sciencey flavour but I can't for the life of me figure out what practical work they do in enhancing our understanding of anything. I'm still not clear on how your theory generates any novel predictions or ideas. It just seems to take things we already know and restate them in a slightly different way, without yielding any new insights. As another user already pointed out, economists are well acquainted with the idea of scarcity and the distribution of scarce resources. That isn't to say that there's no value to big picture thought exercises or to experimenting with borrowing theoretical concepts from one discipline and trying to fit them into another. It can be a good way to familiarize yourself with ideas and get used to playing around with them. But insofar as what you're doing here is more than just a playful exercise and is actually intended to be a serious attempt at constructing a new theory of wealth, I'm still struggling to see what genuinely new and important insights we get from your way of formulating things that we can't get out of existing theories. quote:The economy's primary concern - the reason it exists - is to make use-values accessible; attributes of an economy which restrict accessibility, like ownership, monopoly, unrealistic valuations, etc. reduce its efficiency and therefore its purpose. It should therefore be recognized that arguments in favor of anything that will reduce economic efficiency are ethical arguments, with the exception of arguments arising out of sustainability concerns. The unique position of arguments about reducing economic efficiency for the sake of sustainability comes from any kind of disagreement about how efficiency is measured over time. Arguments about sustainability are attempting to determine how to maximize wealth over time by minimizing entropy - sometimes at the expense of wealth generation within a subset of that time. Ethical beliefs may be the backing of such arguments, but they need not be. I can't tell if you're saying that this should be true or if you're saying it actually is true. If you're trying to say that this is how the actually existing world economy is actually designed then I'd have to disagree with you or at least say that this statement requires a book's worth of qualifying provisions. quote:Ethical concerns about the economy may well be valid, but are not strictly economical concerns; they would derive their importance from outside the discipline. It should be noted, however, that ethical concerns may impinge on the efficiency of the economy in unexpected ways; for example, if the economy makes people unhappy enough, it could result in economic collapse as participants refuse to cooperate, leading to widespread abandonment. This would lead to a much lower state of efficiency than if those people were kept to some minimum of happiness (assuming happiness were necessarily detrimental to efficiency, which is by no means part of the hypothesis). The "discipline" of economics is - as you're already implicitly acknowledging when you call it a discipline - a historically embedded set of ideas and discursive practices. The boundaries of what counts as economics (or political economy as it was once known) fluctuate across time and depending on location. I don't think you can just casually assert "this is one economics is, and anything else isn't really economics". That's a massive argument to be making quite aside from all the other arguments you've made in this thread. If you want to define economics you'd have to engage with its actual existence as a discipline over two centuries. The same is true of loaded terms like "efficiency" or even the concept of "the economy" as such. These terms need to be defined before they are used in this way. This is part of why I was so skeptical of your coconut thought experiment and why I was dubious of your claim that it was helpful to remove the "social fiction" from any analysis of wealth. Because the kind of argument you're seeking to make is fundamentally a social argument and that requires a deep engagement with the historical record. You can't derive laws about society from abstract first principles alone,. Eschat0n posted:Yes, I'm diverging from that understanding of history. Maybe this is because I've been arguing with ancaps over on 4chan for too long and it's messed with my head, but I'll hear people tell me all the time "capitalism is what happens when you get the government out of the market." They position capitalist markets as what would naturally obtain if only we'd get the gently caress out of the way. Well that's fine, I say to myself, but of course humans naturally create rules for markets; if you start with capitalism and "don't get in the way" you're still going to end up with something other than your ancap paradise. "Well not if there are rules in place to prevent that kind of abuse" they say, and it's like OK, but you had just done with saying rules are the devil, get the rules out of the market! Not to be glib but that seems to be exactly what happened. Ancaps are essentially a faith based religion masquerading as a political creed. Their approach to these questions is intentionally designed to support their pre-existing ethical commitments and to leave no room for dissenting approaches. And since their ridiculous ideas are contradicted by more or less the entire historical record they unsurprisingly have a lot of theoretical justifications for why instead of every looking at history we should derive all our ideas from first principles. Their lingering influence on your thinking is really not doing you any favours. Stop intentionally designing your ideas to be palatable to one of the dumbest ideological tendencies imaginable and you'll probably start getting a better reception to your ideas. Helsing fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Feb 26, 2019 |
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Feb 26, 2019 22:01
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I would really criticise the entire notion of saying "the economy has a purpose" It's not some singular thing directed by a singular intelligence, it's the word for an aggregate of a whole bunch of practices that are directed at a functional infinity of different levels and economics as a subject is more trying to observe this thing and understand how it works rather than writing rules for how it prescriptively should work. Even any sort of aggregate purpose doesn't really work other than broadly "to make money" because the methods by which this is achieved are wildly variable and often at odds with each other. This feeds into the weird ancap element cos they do more or less literally deify the market and ascribe all good things to its benevolent invisible hand.
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Feb 26, 2019 22:43
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Hmm, so I think I get the point OP is making? Basically economic activity is a biological/physical process by which a society distributes energy usage. Wealth is energy stored (like how an animal stores fat). Does that sound right? What I'm unclear on is which of the two points are you making - objectivism, that most of what we complain about hurts individuals, not humanity as a whole (which capitalism will sustain for a long time) OR fatalism (entropy will destroy rich and poor alike)?
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Feb 26, 2019 22:49
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OwlFancier posted:I would really criticise the entire notion of saying "the economy has a purpose" The whole reason we can even have a sensical conversation about this is because we choose the rules of the economy. There is no neutral, natural economy. If we instituted a wealth tax, and punitive capital gains, corporate, and high-income taxes, and gave UBI and Medicare to everyone, we'd "efficiently" pick different winners in the U.S. than we do today.
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Feb 26, 2019 23:02
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Helsing posted:I think that you would really benefit from a deeper engagement with the philosophy of science. Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" is the classic example here but there's also lots of up to date stuff on these debates. The point I would emphasize is that ultimately there are certain criteria that tend to get used to help use make sense of what a good theory looks like. Given the physical properties acknowledged of economies, can sustainable economies hope to overcome unsustainable economies? Or to put it another way: can economies which are not entropically efficient be expected to dominate human economic systems if we assume people will preferentially choose to participate in economies that provide them (the individual) with more wealth? To be clear, that question has no possible answer using only the things I have discussed so far (at least not so far as I can tell). You'd have to bring other economic concepts into the discussion - I don't want to pretend anything else or leave anyone disappointed. My hope was to say something that would make sense of where that question is coming from - to justify the terms in which it is couched. I'm not actually thinking that I'm on to some grand unified theory of economics, and I don't know why you and others have imputed that to me: I'm simply eschewing economic concepts until someone points out I need them, and otherwise working in a very small subset of economics as I understand it, talking about wealth, how it works inside and outside of economies, and the implications of those particular things. Just like pretty much any complex field when you do something like that, a million other aspects of the field impinge on the answer - and that's fine - but to be clear and get to the point in a discussion, I don't want to bring all that stuff in unless forced to. Not that any of it is wrong - just that I want to think about it this way, and if you want to call that a playful exercise, I'm fine with that because I'm definitely not claiming a degree in Economics or any special genius. I think I have an IQ of like 100 or whatever. Nothing special. To put it another way, my argument is much less jealous than many: I'm not here to say "what I'm saying is the only right way to think about wealth and economies" - I'm saying "I think it makes sense to talk about wealth and economies this way." See the difference? Helsing posted:I can't tell if you're saying that this should be true or if you're saying it actually is true. If you're trying to say that this is how the actually existing world economy is actually designed then I'd have to disagree with you or at least say that this statement requires a book's worth of qualifying provisions. Helsing posted:The "discipline" of economics is - as you're already implicitly acknowledging when you call it a discipline - a historically embedded set of ideas and discursive practices. The boundaries of what counts as economics (or political economy as it was once known) fluctuate across time and depending on location. I don't think you can just casually assert "this is one economics is, and anything else isn't really economics". That's a massive argument to be making quite aside from all the other arguments you've made in this thread. If you want to define economics you'd have to engage with its actual existence as a discipline over two centuries. It is likely that we do not actually want the best possible economy. It is likely that what we want is the best possible economy which doesn't trample our ethical notions. But let's not get confused about where those notions are coming from - they're not economics. There are two ways to argue workers should be kept happy - the first argument is that people have a right to happiness. That's an ethical argument. The other argument is that they produce more wealth - that's an economic argument. That's the whole point, to distinguish those kinds of arguments - not separate them out and say "these don't matter." Helsing posted:Not to be glib but that seems to be exactly what happened. OwlFancier posted:I would really criticise the entire notion of saying "the economy has a purpose" MixMastaTJ posted:Basically economic activity is a biological/physical process by which a society distributes energy usage. Wealth is energy stored (like how an animal stores fat). Does that sound right? This is broadly exactly what I have in mind, though people have since pointed out that it can't really equate to "storing fat" because there are particular facets of use-values which don't map well to that metaphor. But not everything about genetics maps perfectly to Dawkins' Memetics, yet it's a pretty cool and useful framework for discussing culture. Eschat0n fucked around with this message at 00:26 on Mar 1, 2019 |
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Mar 1, 2019 00:21
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Eschat0n posted:see my interesting discussion with roomforthetuna, for example. It is conceivable he may show me that it's not even making sense at this level, so from my point of view I want to try to address his concerns before trying to address yours. The one thing I think that still isn't very well addressed in your model is the idea of wealth being subjective (as in my glass of water vs barrel of oil example) - since you're now talking about the success of an economy being measured in terms of wealth production that seems like it's important - producing a thousand coconuts a day for a population of a thousand people is a moderately successful economy, but producing two thousand coconuts a day may briefly be more successful, but in time that system's use-value becomes identical to that of the one-thousand-coconuts system; nobody wants to own excess coconuts beyond a limit. (This is an interesting side-effect of money - the facts that it deteriorates only very slowly, can be exchanged for almost any goods or services, takes up no physical space, and can be leveraged to extract even more money, makes it endlessly desirable, unlike most commodities.) This may be a problem with your suggesting a dichotomy between a successful economy (as measured by production of wealth) and making people happy - if you agree that wealth is use-value and that use-value is subjective then this definition of wealth effectively is a measure of making people happy/comfortable/alive. At least until you start to approach the weird psychology poo poo like advertising in order to create a demand for a product by making people unnaturally unhappy.
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Mar 1, 2019 01:54
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roomforthetuna posted:The one thing I think that still isn't very well addressed in your model is the idea of wealth being subjective (as in my glass of water vs barrel of oil example) - since you're now talking about the success of an economy being measured in terms of wealth production that seems like it's important - producing a thousand coconuts a day for a population of a thousand people is a moderately successful economy, but producing two thousand coconuts a day may briefly be more successful, but in time that system's use-value becomes identical to that of the one-thousand-coconuts system; nobody wants to own excess coconuts beyond a limit. Marx's definition of wealth as use-values removes subjectivity from the equation in that sense. I know you don't like that because it purports an absolute, but hopefully you can put aside that bias (there are absolutes, you know) to see what he meant: use-values vary depending on context - it's not how we perceive the use of a thing, but how it can actually be used that matters. So while a person may subjectively believe a nugget of gold to be very valuable, that belief in no way corresponds to actual use-value of the nugget of gold to that person or other entities. It is certainly the case that a glass of water has a much higher use-value than a glass of refined oil to a man lost in the desert, but his perception has nothing to do with it; the water is objectively more useful to him. I'm going to have to disagree with your presentation of money's value - you really need to qualify what you're saying here. Money's value can deteriorate in a few minutes depending on how the currency supply is affected. It's also not clear what you mean when you say it can be leveraged to extract even more money - this language suggests you don't think it needs to be transacted to do this, but even if all it is doing is sitting in a bank, getting you interest or what have you, that represents an opportunity cost that - at least so far as I have been able to tell - most of the time is going to outstrip whatever leverage it gives you, up to the point where you have so much money there's literally nothing useful you can buy with it - which puts the lie to your last claim that it is endlessly desirable. As far as your last paragraph, I'm not actually suggesting a dichotomy between happiness and successful economies. As it happens I believe there actually is such a dichotomy (not an inverse proportional relationship or anything like that, but at least something more crudely resembling an incomplete fulfillment of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs), but it wasn't meant to be implied by anything I've previously said.
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Mar 5, 2019 23:51
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Eschat0n posted:Marx's definition of wealth as use-values removes subjectivity from the equation in that sense. I know you don't like that because it purports an absolute, but hopefully you can put aside that bias (there are absolutes, you know) to see what he meant: use-values vary depending on context - it's not how we perceive the use of a thing, but how it can actually be used that matters. So while a person may subjectively believe a nugget of gold to be very valuable, that belief in no way corresponds to actual use-value of the nugget of gold to that person or other entities. It is certainly the case that a glass of water has a much higher use-value than a glass of refined oil to a man lost in the desert, but his perception has nothing to do with it; the water is objectively more useful to him. Anyway, apparently my use of "subjective" was an uncommon one, so I apologise for that - I meant the use-value varies by who the subject is, but apparently subjective usually just means perception-related. My point was that the use-value of the glass of water really is different for different people, which makes it clearly not an objective measure (though since you've said "objectively more useful to a specific person" let's say for clarity it's not an objective measure without also including a corresponding measure of the surrounding universe to make sure of the context being unchanged). Which means use-value can't be derived from work or entropy, because in some contrived situation the work or entropy change involved in delivering a glass of water to this guy is identical to the work or entropy change involved in delivering a glass of water to that guy, but that guy is right on the edge of dying of dehydration and this guy just had a drink 5 minutes ago and is fine, so the use-value of the otherwise identical action is completely different. Or, if wealth is use-value and use-value is "objective but dependent on the context", then a man can "produce wealth" by becoming thirsty near some water or becoming hungry near some food. The use-value goes up, right? Of course the man's use-value goes down as he needs more inputs; if you're okay with saying that people are also part of wealth then we can probably kind of agree here, but that looks pretty fraught in the context of the previous paragraph. quote:I'm going to have to disagree with your presentation of money's value - you really need to qualify what you're saying here. Money's value can deteriorate in a few minutes depending on how the currency supply is affected. It's also not clear what you mean when you say it can be leveraged to extract even more money - this language suggests you don't think it needs to be transacted to do this, but even if all it is doing is sitting in a bank, getting you interest or what have you, that represents an opportunity cost that - at least so far as I have been able to tell - most of the time is going to outstrip whatever leverage it gives you, up to the point where you have so much money there's literally nothing useful you can buy with it - which puts the lie to your last claim that it is endlessly desirable. By leveraging money to extract more money I meant you can pay people less than their value to do work, and keep the difference. I didn't mean to suggest it's not transacted. I don't believe it's possible to have so much money that there's literally nothing useful you can buy with it, unless you're trapped somewhere where there aren't enough people you could pay to do things, or you're defining useful as actually productive in which case you're very much wrong about more not being desirable, because the ability to pay people to do unproductive things on a whim is absolutely a desirable perk to have. Edit: since you might be thinking "but you can't need lots of people per day to entertain you", an example I would do if I had Bezos money is pay people to do large scale clinical trials of all sorts of things, like anything where I don't know what the optimal option is and have any curiosity at all. Different kinds of brush-picks versus floss versus water-picks. Soft toothbrushes versus stiff. High fructose corn syrup versus sugar versus dextrose, with blood tests. I'd also pay people to do whatever loving stupid clinical studies they want to do, under my controlled conditions. I could easily spend millions per day on this one whim alone, and I have plenty of whims. quote:As far as your last paragraph, I'm not actually suggesting a dichotomy between happiness and successful economies. As it happens I believe there actually is such a dichotomy (not an inverse proportional relationship or anything like that, but at least something more crudely resembling an incomplete fulfillment of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs), but it wasn't meant to be implied by anything I've previously said. 
roomforthetuna fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Mar 6, 2019 |
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Mar 6, 2019 03:41
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Eschat0n posted:Given the physical properties acknowledged of economies, can sustainable economies hope to overcome unsustainable economies? Or to put it another way: can economies which are not entropically efficient be expected to dominate human economic systems if we assume people will preferentially choose to participate in economies that provide them (the individual) with more wealth? The second law of thermodynamics refers to a closed system. Closed systems are entirely theorhetical like perfectly smooth surfaces or a perfect vacuum. There may be some systems that resemble a closed system, but the economy is not one of them. All the energy we have used or will ever use is totally negligible compared to how much energy the sun will have blasted the Earth with by the time it burns out. We got about 5 billion years. That's not forever in geological terms but it is forever in human terms. I don't see any reason to say an economy could not be sustained virtually forever given that. If anything, I'd say the bigger threat is wealth divide inevitably reaches a maximum and the working class revolts. However, I'm sure there exists some perfect equilibrium of oppression where the working class is not unhappy enough to ever overthrow the ruling class. quote:The decision to distinguish ethical arguments from economic arguments is to point out that economics cannot be the whole answer - there are a million other considerations impinging on economic systems - many (most?) of them having in their motive nothing to do with whether the economy runs better or worse - and these are valid concerns. They're just not economical concerns. I feel it's important to distinguish that because plenty of people are very concerned with making sure, above all, that whatever we talk about, "the poor people get more money" or "the rich are not stripped of their fairly-earned wealth" or whatever the concern is. Those are valid concerns - but the motive in those concerns is to make sure justice is served, not to make the economy run as well as possible. I don't think anyone's making Marxist arguments because they're concerned about the economy's well-being. Hell, I don't think most right wings would consciously make that argument- they're more concerned with their nation controlling economic power. A strong economy for its own sake is pretty much exclusively a Libertarian argument with a basis in ethical egoism. Which is bad philosophy. A lot of people, however, tend to take to ethical stances that support their own comfort. People who control wealth benefit from Libertarian and right wing policies. They can take comfort in the view that people are poor because they don't work hard enough. You need wealth to change the status quo. That wealth can be taken by force when the working class seizes the means of production OR we can convince those who control wealth into giving it up. So, yes, I think people should have access to food because I'm ethically opposed to starvation. But I will argue that a well fed populace is more productive because this is more liable to convince someone in power to give up food.
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Mar 6, 2019 17:53
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roomforthetuna posted:I don't dislike absolutes that are actually absolute, I just dislike when people say things as absolute that are not. Is it really bias to prefer people to say not-incorrect things? I think you are making conclusions that do not follow your arguments. First of all, yes, water in front of a thirsty person is more wealth than water in front of a satiated person. The use-value goes up when the thirsty person has it - but the equal amount of work done to deliver it to the non-thirsty person does not somehow negate the work done to bring it to one who thirsts - work was done in both situations, without which there would never be use-value at all. It is simply the case that the work done for the thirsty person was more efficient at creating wealth. Now if a sated woman stands in front of a glass of water until they are thirsty, the use-value of that water goes up - yes. Whether that constitutes work is, I think, actually debatable. Certainly as I think you yourself have said earlier, just living is work itself. Wealth is being created all the time. But even if you don't like that, it is still the case that work was done to create the glass of water and bring the person to it. But before we get too far off on a tangent of money and other forms of wealth, and whether there remain any edge cases in the concept of work as wealth - let's consider the possibility of alternative explanations. Certainly your hesitation to admit work is wealth indicates you either hold some alternative position or have no position. In this thread already I have asked people to define what wealth is to them - and we've had a few strong contenders, like violence. I think that it's pretty clear, though, that violence is just a more specific form of work, and I don't think anyone at this point is still arguing that you cannot create use-values without violence, so I think I've come out on top in that regard. To properly understand use-values and wealth in all contexts, you have to admit that violence cannot fully account. Let's apply the same question to the concept of human work/labor. If work is not the creation of use-values, then what is it? Why do bustling economies tend to cause so much work? What do people work for, in groups or alone? MixMastaTJ posted:The second law of thermodynamics refers to a closed system. Closed systems are entirely theorhetical like perfectly smooth surfaces or a perfect vacuum. There may be some systems that resemble a closed system, but the economy is not one of them. All the energy we have used or will ever use is totally negligible compared to how much energy the sun will have blasted the Earth with by the time it burns out. We got about 5 billion years. That's not forever in geological terms but it is forever in human terms. If you're simply arguing that we have so little to worry from entropy that we need not concern ourselves with sustainable economics and go hog-wild on the ride to maximum wealth production in the short term, then I respectively must disagree. Easter Island's prehistory, I think, is a token of my position's strength. With that in mind, my argument does proceed along lines a little closer to what you imagine the "right-wingers" might argue; though they're after "nation controlling economic power," I'm interested in whether a sustainable economy can hope to control enough of its power to retain sovereignty over itself at a minimum and expand and subsume other economies at best. The reason I'm interested in this is because I intuit (though perhaps someone may show me this is not a good intuition) that sustainable economies are better for the planet, perhaps even their participants' personal well-being, and in a very utilitarian sense, that they will be better for more people over time. Which is all nice and good, but if they have no hope of competing with a short-sighted monster of an economy that strip-mines its way to glorious and alluring short-term wealth, then people will prefer that economy and the sustainable one will fall to the wayside through various means both violent and nonviolent.
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Mar 9, 2019 07:51
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Eschat0n posted:While the system of Earth is functionally open, there are ways in which it looks significantly more closed than those 5 billion years to which you refer. Firstly, any given terrestrial economy only has imperfect access to all the natural resources, and some of the natural resources (such as helium) are not so easily replenished. No amount of sunlight will bring back the Mastodon, though it was pretty useful to early hominid economies. Even the time you have to make your wealth is limited; economies are in some sense competing against each other; and how they make use of time in that race is irretrievable and important. This isn't really "entropy," though. The only resources we had before humans evolved we don't have now are the handful we launched into space. We might be draining our aquifers but there's still just as much water- it's just in a different place. We might be burning fossil fuels but we have as much carbon as before- it's just in the atmosphere. Entropy specifically means that the number of possible configurations of particles decreases. You're arguing that particles could never be in the configuration of a mastodon again but couldn't they be? Has marine ecology changed in such a way that it is impossible for a mastodon to evolve? Unlikely, yes, but that's not entropy, it's just you arbitrarily preferring one state to all other available states. quote:If you're simply arguing that we have so little to worry from entropy that we need not concern ourselves with sustainable economics and go hog-wild on the ride to maximum wealth production in the short term, then I respectively must disagree. Easter Island's prehistory, I think, is a token of my position's strength. Definitely not arguing we should go all out and who cares. I'm saying sustainability of an economy is a dumb concern compared to human rights or environment preservation. Entropy isn't killing folks, capitalism is. quote:With that in mind, my argument does proceed along lines a little closer to what you imagine the "right-wingers" might argue; though they're after "nation controlling economic power," I'm interested in whether a sustainable economy can hope to control enough of its power to retain sovereignty over itself at a minimum and expand and subsume other economies at best. The reason I'm interested in this is because I intuit (though perhaps someone may show me this is not a good intuition) that sustainable economies are better for the planet, perhaps even their participants' personal well-being, and in a very utilitarian sense, that they will be better for more people over time. Which is all nice and good, but if they have no hope of competing with a short-sighted monster of an economy that strip-mines its way to glorious and alluring short-term wealth, then people will prefer that economy and the sustainable one will fall to the wayside through various means both violent and nonviolent. Okay, so I think I get what you're saying? I think rather than referring to "economies" it would make more sense to refer to "economic powers" such as firms and governments. And wealth/use-value is what keeps an economic power "alive." Economic powers that are good at accumulating wealth (profiting) survive and ones that don't die. I.e. economic Darwinism. Does that sound on track with your reasoning?
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Mar 9, 2019 10:18
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Eschat0n posted:With that in mind, my argument does proceed along lines a little closer to what you imagine the "right-wingers" might argue loving shocked. This is my shocked face.  Eschat0n posted:The reason I'm interested in this is because I intuit (though perhaps someone may show me this is not a good intuition) that sustainable economies are better for the planet, perhaps even their participants' personal well-being, and in a very utilitarian sense, that they will be better for more people over time. Which is all nice and good, but if they have no hope of competing with a short-sighted monster of an economy that strip-mines its way to glorious and alluring short-term wealth, then people will prefer that economy and the sustainable one will fall to the wayside through various means both violent and nonviolent. "Sure a sustainable economy won't cook the planet and would probably leave all of the people better off materially, but what if it gets wiped out by an unsustainable economy that doesn't give a gently caress?" Well then we're all dead anyway, so maybe we should focus on creating the good sustainable economy and not worry about hypothetical non-sustainable economies somehow wiping us out with their vast economic power. Like in your mind, the US does a Green New Deal, stops carbon emissions, and then China goes "Oh now we can win!" and increases carbon emissions 10000% and what, just buys the US? Invades the US? What is the loving fear here?
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Mar 9, 2019 17:29
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MixMastaTJ posted:Entropy specifically means that the number of possible configurations of particles decreases. You're arguing that particles could never be in the configuration of a mastodon again but couldn't they be? Has marine ecology changed in such a way that it is impossible for a mastodon to evolve? Unlikely, yes, but that's not entropy, it's just you arbitrarily preferring one state to all other available states. MixMastaTJ posted:Okay, so I think I get what you're saying? I think rather than referring to "economies" it would make more sense to refer to "economic powers" such as firms and governments. And wealth/use-value is what keeps an economic power "alive." Economic powers that are good at accumulating wealth (profiting) survive and ones that don't die. I.e. economic Darwinism. Does that sound on track with your reasoning? WampaLord posted:loving shocked. This is my shocked face. WampaLord posted:"Sure a sustainable economy won't cook the planet and would probably leave all of the people better off materially, but what if it gets wiped out by an unsustainable economy that doesn't give a gently caress?" Considering how immature you've been up to this point in the conversation, you probably think we can enjoy widespread prosperity and continue to sit atop the world's pile of power if we only just implement the dreams of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or some like-minded thinker. That's naive. Policymakers need to be real with us about the costs of the move, however good it will be in the long run, and real about the consequences. Many of the consequences can even be mitigated now. For example, given what has been discussed in this thread so far - that absolutely no one has come up with a conclusion to the contrary concerning sustainable economies, we are going to need to accept that people will be less wealthy individually under such a New Deal. Per capita use-values will go down; overall GDP of participating nations will go down. The nonsense we hear about sustaining our way of life or even dramatically improving the output of our economies is not going to materialize; I don't think it makes physical sense. However, if we open our borders to immigration very wide, we can massively increase use-values in the sustainable economy overall. Social issues resulting from an influx of immigrants will not outweigh the economic benefits of adding millions of ready-made workers to the workforce; while this will potentially further thin the use-values accessible to each individual in the economy to a certain extent, even that consequence does not outweigh the use-values which will enter the economy as a result. Humans are the source of wealth, ultimately. That's been part of my argument from page one. You can get around your economic slowdown by adding more of them to your population and getting them gainfully employed. But at the same time, you need to keep people from leaving insofar as that is possible without being morally repugnant. You don't want to go all Green New Deal and then watch citizens migrate to China thirty years on because lol, they'll let me earn more and I'll get to drive a cooler car, etc. That defeats the whole plan. To some extent you can win that war with social policy; you can be a more open, tolerant, vibrant society that people want to be a part of, but at the same time, keep in mind we do see people literally leaving countries where their religion and social standing is highly-regarded, just to come to western countries because of the economic opportunity. That's a trend which should concern people out to make our economies sustainable, because it will undermine us and make the whole process harder to win at. But here you are, all loving worried that I'm some kind of crypto loving something or other.
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Mar 12, 2019 20:53
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You're working backwards if you think policy drives circumstances rather than the other way around.
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Mar 12, 2019 20:56
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Eschat0n posted:and think you're acting like a toddler. Drop the tone argument bullshit, this is Something Awful and you're the one who created a thread of 'I understand economy better than everyone else, prove me wrong" and now you're bitching because we're finally getting to the actual meat of your beliefs and oops, turns out they're very stupid, no matter how many words you use to try to disguise that fact. You appear to be terrified of hypothetical future bad economies disrupting our hypothetical future good economy, this is not a normal state of affairs to be in, when there are actual bad economies and we all currently live in them. Let's just work on making a good economy and we can worry about the bad ones if they actually do get angry enough to attack us for reducing carbon emissions.
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Mar 12, 2019 21:17
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OwlFancier posted:You're working backwards if you think policy drives circumstances rather than the other way around. it's both ways, a feedback cycle if you will
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Mar 12, 2019 21:38
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