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Proposal: wealth is precisely how much human life you have access to. E.g. in a desert, a canteen with enough water to keep you alive for 2 hours is worth 2 hours of your life. A canteen that will keep you alive till you get out of the desert where you will proceed to live a healthy life for 40 years is worth 40 years of your life. You can never truly OWN more wealth than the means to keep you comfortably alive until you die of old age. You can, however, hold a gun to someone's head and convince them to do some task for you. In this way someone can "waste" some portion of their life to benefit you. Someone who's "wealthy" has a gun to a lot of people's heads and is capable of exploiting their wealth for his own personal wealth.
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Feb 4, 2019 22:02
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 18:33 |
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Flowers For Algeria posted:Wealth, OP, is the metric that will define your place in the line to the guillotine. Oh my God. That's why all these goons want to define it as "friendship."
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Feb 5, 2019 18:36
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So I'm not interested in playing riddlemaster McDipshit's word chess. Wealth is what a person possesses, value is what an object of wealth possesses. The problem, OP, with your Robinson Caruso Coconut Orgy is it makes no sense for the question being asked. "Wealth" can pretty non-controversially be defined as "economic success." But this definition has two problems- first, it presupposes some economy and second the concept of "success" is ambiguous. Asking "what is wealth?" Is really asking "what do we consider economic success?" And this is why people are pushing back on Coconut Palooza- the goals of economic success in a one person economy and real life are totally different. Robby's only goal is to survive- his economic success is minimizing personal energy to retrieve coconuts. Just guessing here, but are you angling for "ah, if wealth is propensity to survive is seizing wealth not violence!" or some bullshit? But that definition of success only applies that specific economy and with the specific priorities of Rocco's Modern Caruso. OUR economy has more than enough labor and resources to take care of the needs of people. There's a lot of goals we COULD value for wealth- art, health, kindness towards fellow man, etc. What we DO value as wealth- what we define as economic success in the 2019 Western society- is control over the working class with violence. This is represented in a number of ways- liquid assets are passively backed by the threat of starvation for the working class; political ties give far more direct control over the firepower of police and military; dynastic names- Hilton, Kennedy, Bush, etc.- are leveraged against the reputation of the serfdom. All this- whether used purposefully or not- is systematic violence and it is how our society values economic success.
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Feb 13, 2019 06:17
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The entropy of any isolated system can only ever increase. If a system's entropy decreases the entropy outside the system must increase by an equal or greater amount. So where do you wanna call the edge of our system? If it's a room, where an individual burns logs for warmth, the individual has reduced the possible configurations of molecules within the room by converting the bonds keeping the logs solid into heat energy. This INCREASES entropy. If we, for some reason, consider the logs "outside" the system, then yes, burning them adds energy into the room and increases potential configurations of energy/particle distribution in the room, reducing entropy. Entropy outside the room (where the logs are burned) is increased by at least that amount. By your definition the only way for the world economy to increase wealth is harvesting resources from space through agriculture, solar technology or some kind of hypothetical space mining.
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Feb 18, 2019 17:50
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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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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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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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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:... to be perfectly clear, mastodons were land animals, like wooly mammoths. Not that it matters. But also... look, you need to understand that the second law of thermodynamics does not say things can not return to a prior state; it says things cannot return to a prior state without the expenditure of more energy, ultimately leading to some of it being lost into irrecoverable forms because of the nature of its configuration. You could slowly breed Mastodons back into existence using DNA taken from frozen mastodon corpses we've found abundantly now that siberia is melting, use that in a cross with Elephant eggs, and just keep breeding more and more mastodon-like elephants using females created in the prior generation until the resulting animal was like 99.99+ % mastodon or whatever metric you wanted. But the process it would take to do that - even just if by some miracle of convergent evolution these animals were to arise again naturally - requires more energy input than the energy that anything can get out of it. That's just one of the fundamental truths of our universe - no change is perfectly lossless, and no process can reduce entropy except locally. ... Did you just "well akshully" me on the second law of thermodynamics? Okay, fine, no more simplifications. The second law of thermodynamics states that for an isolated system- a system for which there is no loss or gain in energy or matter - entropy never decreases. Entropy is equal to a constant times the natural log of all possible microstates or configurations of the system. Let's pretend you put an isolation shield over the Earth to make it an isolated system. Now, all these mastodons you got walking around are trapping particles into the configuration of a mastodon, limiting the microstates available. When the mastodon dies those particles are free to spread randomly, growing the number of microstates. So in that sense, you're right- in an isolated system extinction will increase entropy. Except treating the Earth or any aspect of Earth as an isolated system is insane. The particles of those Mastodons aren't floating around randomly, they're reintroduced into the biological world through decomposition and photosynthesis. Which would be impossible in an isolated system which doesn't have a burning chunk of gas blasting it with constant energy. I understand you're trying to say economies specifically are isolated but do you realize what EVERY economy shares as an origin? Agriculture. And do you know where those plants get their energy from? That's right - the loving sun. It's insane to try to argue that a system which has a virtually inexhaustible source of energy as a primary input is isolated. Eschat0n posted:Yes. Economic darwinism is part of what I'm thinking about; it is certainly a concern: how do you steer that natural process toward a solution we want, instead of what will naturally happen? We need to stop treating capitalism like a God who we serve and start treating it like the wild animal it is. The economy's big strength is the threat of starvation. Defang it, establish necessity as a human right not something you earn by our capitalist masters' grace.
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Mar 13, 2019 16:59
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Typo posted:A more efficient production process which uses -less labor- per unit by LTV standards seem to be -lowering- the total economic value of same units produced. Which means the total value of your output actually -drops- as it gets more efficient and use less labor. As it gets less efficient, total value of output -increases-. Consider the ideal trade- you find a lump of gold with minimal effort. The gold itself has very little value to you however it has a high perceived value on the market. You will be easily able to trade this object of minimal value for something of greater value, thus profiting. Value on the supply side is a liability as, unless price changes with value, higher value means less profit.
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Mar 27, 2019 16:12
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Typo posted:So what if I got my money from being a life-long Stakhanovite who saved my money (many bonuses were handed out for exceeding quotas!) from working at Socialist factory workplace. The idea of saving in the first place is antithetical to socialism. The reward for exceeding quotas and the widget factory is an economy with more widgets and thus everyone in the society has greater access to widgets, yourself included. "Saving" implies either you were unjustly overcompensated for your labor and thus your wealth is stolen from someone who was undercompensated OR you subjected yourself to a lower standard of living than you should have had. But subjecting yourself to unhappiness is not justification to make up for your unhappiness by subjecting others to cruelty. But, of course, claiming that all people have some right to any share of resources or the ethics of leveraging other's happiness for personal benefit are value judgements. I would also say that judgement changes depending on if we're producing bread at the cost of people starving or if we have a society with an acceptable ground floor and we're producing luxury goods at the cost of someone getting a smaller TV. quote:They are both needed but it seems to me that one is needed a lot more than the other: if the floors don't get cleaned at the theater for the night, worst that happens is the next morning some movie-watchers are gonna have a worse experience. If the Doctor doesn't work that night: somebody dies. Okay, let's say you're right. Assume that a heart transplant which takes an hour is inherently more valuable than a clean floor, which took an hour to clean. But they both have some non-zero value. Doesn't that, then, imply there is an amount of clean floors equivalent to a person's life? LVT would suggest that the value from the end of doctors and janitors is equal and the difference comes in market preference, or price. This preference has nothing to with work required by a doctor or janitor or the food and shelter required to keep a doctor or janitor alive. Instead, we ethically consider a life saving operation invaluable and always preferential to having our doctors clean floors.
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Mar 27, 2019 20:57
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Typo posted:Before i address the rest of your post, what does this mean? A doctor and janitor work just as hard so their labor has the same value. When you look at the value they provide society you're looking at a market demand definition of value. In LTV value is from the perspective of the laborer, or the doctor and janitor.
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Mar 27, 2019 23:55
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Typo posted:I don' t think I follow this line of logic Oh, no, I mean the act of profiting off private property. The act of pocketing wealth from your workers because you own the means of production is cruelty. quote:is deferring consumption to the future (trading a lower standard of living for today in exchange for higher standard of living tomorrow) inherently illegitimate as well? Is stuffing my money into a piggy bank instead of spending it today exploiting somebody? See, you're stuck in this very capitalist mindset. The idea is that everyone is entitled to an equal share of the economy. It's not you work an hour to earn a soda. You work an hour to contribute to society. Because society has enough sodas, you can consume a soda. You can grab a soda now because you know you'll want it tomorrow but you can't hoard a pallet of 12 packs. Likewise, you don't build a soda factory because you want to get rich- you build it because you and a bunch of others want soda and are willing to produce it. You don't own the factory- society owns the factory and your reward is the soda you create. quote:Ok, the wording you use "the end" confuses me, I mean I can see your point from a philosophical perspective, it just seems incoherent to organize any economy: Socialist or Capitalist, from this framework. Well, obviously we should prioritize doctor training to janitor training. But the reason is because human life is more important than clean floors, not because one is more valuable. And again, capitalist mindset tells us that doctors are only going to do their job if they're rewarded with greater luxury. But this is unsubstantiated bullshit. People will be doctors because they understand the importance of healing others. I doubt many doctors would agree to mop floors for the salary they make as doctors- people prefer careers they're good at.
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Mar 28, 2019 02:28
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Typo posted:I want to be very clear here: is this discussion about savings or investment, or are you treating the two as the exact same thing? Investment is what I am calling cruel and unethical. Savings, context matters. Saving under socialism is a non-sequitur. People don't own capital TO invest. Under capitalism, as I said, you saved one of two ways- you were overcompensated for your work (your savings are stolen from an undercompensated worker) or you lived below your own means. The former is unethical, the latter is ethical though masochistic. So wealth might be ethically accumulated under capitalism but that does not then justify the inherently unethical practice of investment. quote:is this something you are stating axiomatically, or something you are deriving from LTV? The axiom is "violence is wrong." LTV suggests that private property is violence. Ergo, in an ethical socialist society means of production and excess production belong to society not individuals. Taking advantage of that society without upholding your duty to that society is violence (i.e. he who does not work, neither shall he eat.) Conversely, though, as long as you participate in society you have an equal right to the socially owned goods (otherwise, some gatekeeper of goods preventing you from your fair share effectively owns private property.) quote:But it seems to me like you -are- telling me that doctor labor hour is more valuable than janitor labor hour More desirable, from the market perspective. I.e. more valuable by subjective theory of value. The key point of LTV is that the market demand refers to price which is distinct from the actual value. Consider a society where clean floors are religiously important and medical practice is considered blasphemy. Such a society would prefer janitors to doctors and the PRICE of janitorial work would be higher. But is medicine any less valuable in that society? Can a society make clean floors more valuable than human life? What I'm arguing is OBJECTIVELY the hour of heart surgery and hour of floor cleaning have the same value or cost society the same. If I then ethically argue that saving a life is more important than a clean floor, we should focus our distribution of valuable labor more towards saving lives, or our doctors probably ought not be cleaning floors. wateroverfire posted:Where do the resources even come from to fund the lending of the collective bank if not from the gains of the enterprises it's funding? Freely given by the workers for projects workers collectively deem worthwhile to society instead of stolen from the workers for the benefit of individuals.
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Mar 28, 2019 16:21
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Typo posted:What about differed consumption? Let's say I'm throwing a party next month so I save up a little this month to spend more the next? That doesn't seem masochistic to me. Today, in American society there are people barely scraping by. I, personally, have a decent paying job and a lot of privilege. When I "differ consumption" to stock up on snacks and booze for a party it's my excess compensation at the expense of those less fortunate than me. But if we're talking I buy one loaf of bread a month instead of two or I skip my weekly hot shower so friends and I can get a six pack... That's masochistic. (But, sure, perfectly ethical.) But this understanding of saving is rooted in capitalism. Instead of getting a paycheck which you either spend or put in the bank, imagine a warehouse containing all society's goods not being used. You ONLY have control over your own taking from this warehouse, not others. You are entitled to a fair share of the goods, which is based on how many goods there are and how many people we're dividing between. How much you took yesterday is not a factor in what your fair share is. If you want a soda today whether or not that soda is part of your fair share depends on the availability of soda. Either there is a soda for you or not. Same with a keg of beer for your party. Either we have enough for you to throw your party or we do not. So, okay, I suppose you can limit your beer consumption in HOPES that we will have enough for a kegger next month, but without controlling other people's consumption that relationship is very abstract. Maybe taking your daily bottle of beer when there's exactly enough beer produced for everyone to have one bottle and stashing it for your party rather than drinking it could be acceptable, but it stratles the line. Taking something you have no intention to use for the purpose of denying the consumption of others is bad. But I would say denying yourself a beer you would have drunk today would merely be masochistic. (Minorly so, but it's still denying yourself pleasure you have the right to.) But we're talking about saving itself and using those savings for something that is not unethical. If you saved up your beer to trade for some other good (such as an extra loaf of bread) that's leveraging your capital which is unethical, regardless of how ethically that capital was obtained. quote:when you say private property are you talking about personal property or private ownership of capital? Private capital, very specifically. quote:Right, so already, it seems that -not- everybody has a right to equal share in economic output of a society. Because you are telling me voluntary unemployment is violence against society and presumably a crime and person straight-up deserves to starve. Which tbf actually makes it more congruent with LTV. It's less they deserve to starve as society is under no obligation to feed them. And I'm talking WILLFULLY refusing to contribute to society. If a farmer says he needs help on his field and you say you don't feel like it, maybe they don't "feel" like sharing their bread. That doesn't apply to actual reasons you can't. Child rearing, illness, working on a painting prevent you from specific work but aren't refusing to participate in society. As well, after a couple days going hungry, you're free to do your part and earn your food. Refusal to work has to be a conscious action. If you crawl to the farmer begging for food and they say "sure, just help with some chores" and you still refuse then that's on you. quote:So how does LTV treat people who work but work more or less, is the guy who work 9 hours a day deserving of same share of the economy as the guy who works 4 hours a day? Again, LTV makes no ethical judgement. I suppose, then, you can argue that everyone is exactly entitled to the work the put in. But there are a lot of problems with that. I would instead argue that members of a society are owed equal share of goods (at least, so much as the can actually use them. Obviously someone without children doesn't have "equal rights" to diapers) and we owe to society whatever our fair share of work is. That fair share of work is going to require context. If society works fine with everyone working 30 hours a week then 30 hours a week is your fair share. And if we're in a famine and everyone needs to put in 9 hour days farming then that's the fair share. Someone who is working more than their fair share is either being unfairly exploited or is working because they want to. Which is fine, but they aren't entitled to a greater share beyond whatever immediate benefits their extra labor might produce.
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Mar 30, 2019 00:55
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I agree with OP, unions should be state funded.
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Apr 11, 2019 22:03
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 18:33 |
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Typo posted:sure that works too *Sigh* I know I'm gonna regret playing devil's advocate here, but... A core concept of thermoeconomics is that firms' capital effectively exists at a low energy state and consumer wealth is a high energy state. A firm only releases funds to consumers when it is profitible, i.e. the return will transfer greater funds than are lost. Wealth, like matter, will naturally flow exclusively from high energy state to low energy state without additional energy introduced to the system. Ergo at a maximum, all wealth will be pooled into a single corporation (or else trapped in other smaller corporations with no path to the lower state). Labor unions give additional power to the working class, who operate as the vast majority of consumers. This will at least retard the flow of wealth from consumer to firms as firms will be unable to exploit workers to the same, highly profitible extremes. At best, workers will gain reparations rolling wealth back into consumer pockets, reducing entropy.
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Apr 12, 2019 02:24
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