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Because I'm not sure I understand fully, and that seems like it might be kinda important. I'm not going to try to ask for an Econ 101 here; I do come to this question with some prior knowledge, but it seems to me that there's a lot of confusion about economics stemming from suppositions about this fundamental assumption - that we know what we're talking about when we talk about wealth and its manifestations - money, capital, stock, debt, etc. This perceived issue is stemming either from a widespread lack of understanding or - much more likely - my own lack of understanding. This is not to say that I don't have my own conception of wealth - otherwise, why would I post this in a debate forum? I want people to point out where I'm wrong with this, so I can push back and forth and - you know - have a debate. So: Isn't it the case that wealth is human work at its most fundamental level? That is - money, capital, stock, debt, etc. - these are all fundamentally representations of human work. A man who is alone on a desert island may be said to possess wealth. He may have tools which he has made, and food which he has gathered. If he encounters another person, these items may be bartered or sold. This basic concept doesn't decohere at larger scales or lose importance, either - fundamentally, wealth = work. Such a concept puts the lie to the notion that wealth can be created out of thin air. A government which prints money by fiat in fact subdivides extant representations of a finite wealth - this has its uses, but it does not create wealth except that it may, by increasing liquidity, promote investment enabling work which in turn produces wealth. Inflation increases liquidity by devaluing currency in favor of investment. Risk is a form of human work. A random distribution of investments will tend to neither increase or decrease wealth, but when one works to determine where best to risk investment, that work may produce wealth just as a farmer's decision to plant crops in a flood plain may or may not produce wealth. The amount of wealth produced by work is its value. Value is a product of your work's demand in its best available market and its liquidity. If you have dug up gold but have nowhere to sell it, then its value is only that which you yourself can use the gold for. If you have dug up gold and have a market for it but the boat you want to buy with your gold is sold by one who already has enough gold, you will have to first convert your gold into capital the boat seller desires, lowering the liquidity of your gold and thus its value to you. Thus is wealth.
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Feb 2, 2019 00:24
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OwlFancier posted:Very specifically wealth is not human labour. It is a marshalling tool for human labour but it is not labour itself. It is produced by human labour, but it is not the labour itself. OwlFancier posted:This is relevant because if you have some method of extracting wealth from other people's labour, then you are able to amass more of it, marshal more labour, exert more power over others, all without actually doing anything yourself. You acquired the wealth by the work of others, you spend it to direct the work of others, you have the control, others do the work. OwlFancier posted:To use your example, if I have the tools, and you want to use them to build something, I can loan you the tools, but in exchange I might demand you build something for me too. Now you might say this is fair because I made the tools, but what if I didn't make the tools, what if I inherited them? What if I, by virtue of owning the tools and being the one in a position to say whether or not you get to use them, demand an unfair amount of work from you in exchange? What if, the thing you need to use them to build is a house, and if you don't you'll be out in the cold. How long can you go without them? What if I can do this with hundreds of people? Which of us has more power? Which of us is doing the work? Which of us is going to get wealthier? OwlFancier posted:Also if you wanna just advocate for goldbuggery you're not doing it very subtly.
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Feb 2, 2019 07:51
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Also before I forget - something to touch on later, as I'm not sure how it fits in - knowledge seems like work which behaves a little differently than other forms of wealth. It can be multiplied without diminishing it. If you share knowledge, you quite simply inject more wealth into the system. The same is true of any other worker - their work is injecting new wealth into the system daily. With knowledge, though, you're doing this very, very efficiently - at its best, knowledge sharing expends only the time of the involved parties and some of their physical energy (usually relatively little). Public schooling may well have some of the best returns of any government program, ever. However, given the stupendous efficiency with which knowledge work injects wealth into an economy, why is it that libraries, open source licensing initiatives, pure research, and the like are not similarly championed, funded, and otherwise encouraged? Why are patents allowed to degrade this highly efficient means of improving economic growth? I don't have answers to these questions yet - usually a sign of a chink in the structure I'm imagining...
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Feb 2, 2019 08:01
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Indeterminacy posted:I'm not sure that we would call this kind of exchange a use of "wealth", as such. Wealth has connotations of surplus, whereas one's tools and food on a desert island are never excessive - one barters them as valuable precisely because they are not readily abundant. What is the difference, economically-speaking, between a man on a desert island with no tools, and a man on a desert island with tools? I don't think wealth has connotations of surplus - or at least, it is only a loose connotation, and not strictly required. I think capital is a type of work storage. Value is a property of work. Abundance I haven't even started to consider yet.
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Feb 2, 2019 15:34
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OwlFancier posted:It's because people make money from creating scarcity, op. roomforthetuna posted:Edit3: Counterproposal: in a society, wealth does not represent human work, it represents human capacity to inflict violence at some level of indirection. Helsing posted:Without social relationships the "value" of the capital that you amass is meaningless. glowing-fish posted:"Wealth" is an abstract ownership of the economy, that seems to have an increasingly tenuous connection to possible economic production or consumption. communism bitch posted:the value of the table is in its complete form. So are all of you actually secretly in agreement and just not telling me, or is it the case that this forum is full of people talking about economics and politics of economics without any of them agreeing on what wealth is? But that's just a little snark. I appreciate everyone chipping in with some goddamn essays; you don't get that kind of interest everywhere. I read 'em, and the ones which I understood to contribute to the discussion I tried to distill as seen above. I want to make clear (I thought I had already, but whatevs) before I continue: I understand wealth does not equal money/currency. I think everyone here does, actually. That's not in question, so nobody should feel the need to further emphasize that. I'd like to briefly address the notions distilled above. Before I do, I'd like to mention that there were some folks who wanted me to remember that natural resources figure into wealth. I think that's a good point and worth making before I get too far into my whole wealth = work rabbit hole; certainly having the good fortune to be born in minerally-rich Tanzania beats being chucked out of the womb into "this is just dirt and rock" Japan. Certainly, happening to exist on the fertile soils of the Mississippi Delta beats being dumped into volcanic barren heath Iceland. But I don't think the natural resources are actually wealth in and of themselves, anymore than our physical bodies are wealth in and of themselves. I think they have to be worked to have value (in the economic sense, not the philosophical one). And though I didn't want to get into it, I probably can't escape (as some have already intimated) ownership - because many may suppose ownership of land is the predominant means of possessing wealth. Without work, though, I think ownership of natural resources like land doesn't really get you any wealth. Back to the so-called just-so spherical cows (or let's be brief and call it the JSSC scenario). On a slightly more complicated desert island, populated only with Robinson Crusoes (hereafter RCs for short) and palm trees, coconuts are the chief source of food and drink. Those patches of the island with plenty of fallen coconuts on the ground are certainly nicer to be at than those patches which are only sand. However, no one is getting anything out of any patches unless they actually go out and harvest coconuts. In areas with plenty of RCs milling about, furthermore, no one gets anything additional out of the land so long as all RCs are free to gather coconuts where they may. An individual or group of RCs may defend a patch of ground against the depredations of other RCs (violence! scarcity!), but claims to ownership are hollow without the effort to back it up with violence or some other form of work (e.g. diplomacy or deceit) (social relationships!). Natural resources require work to get wealth out of. Not necessarily a lot of work - these RCs simply stoop and pick up a coconut, so long as the local coconut cartel or palm tree fief-lord isn't hanging around - but work nonetheless. Some RCs actually live on the next island over. This is not so great for them, for here there are many fewer palm trees and the distance between these islands is too great for them to swim. Regardless of the work they do or the willingness of all parties to allow these RCs to scurry about where they may, these RCs just don't have it as well off as the RCs on the other island. Nevertheless, they may work to harvest what coconuts they do have and subsist on these. The existence of the richer island, even if known to them, does not devalue what they do have. Now the RCs on these islands may even establish a system whereby they may agree to float coconuts across the water to each other, but those men on the less endowed island will be at a disadvantage in trade - all other things being equal. Yet still those succulent nuts which they do possess, comprise their wealth entire. At times some very successful RC may gather more nuts than he can eat in a lifetime. Surplus nuts are of no value to him, but if he works to gather more nuts, he may parlay these into alliances, sexual favors, etc - other things which are of value to the RC. On his death, such an RC might bestow his remainder of coconuts on some other RC at random - an RC who has done no work to deserve it, even! Yet still the coconuts gathered are his wealth, and this wealth was created by work - just not his work. Further, if such an undeserving RC were to burn all his ill-gotten coconuts, wealth would be destroyed and none created. It is certainly true that work does not necessarily create wealth, but all wealth is derived of work. As for the Theory of Value and The Labour Theory of Value that folks suggested to me, thanks. I've deliberately written all the above prior to reading those, so that if I learn something which convincingly contradicts what I've written I'll come back and do the work of refuting myself from these sources so that the difference between what I'm saying and what these sources are saying is clear.
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Feb 3, 2019 07:18
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Helsing posted:If you need to invent such an elaborate and ridiculous scenario to justify your theory of value then why not start over, working from the actual historical record instead of something you invented? roomforthetuna posted:Looked like mostly agreement to me, just with slightly varying levels of cynicism / abstraction. But also notable, none of us were agreeing with the premise that wealth=work... I don't see the need to give up the premise at all; I just think I haven't explained what I had in mind well enough yet. The work involved in gathering the coconuts is simple on purpose, it represents a very trivial amount of work - so that we can start from the hardest point for my argument, where the work required is the least. I don't like arguing against straw men, and while I set up "simplistic" thought experiments because (please excuse my imbecility) I'm not trying isolate what I'm talking about instead of make observations about the real world which are completely caught up in historical circumstance. The work to gather the coconuts was, in my mind, simply stacking them in a pile so you can say they're yours; without that work there is no basis to the claim or easy method of delineation. The alternative is to make the effort, also fairly trivial, to stake a claim on the land the ungathered coconuts lie on, but the land itself is not an RC's wealth unless and until they do that. The point is that no matter how simple I can make it, I can't come up with a situation in which the land itself, without any work, counts as wealth to anyone. Frankly I think this takes on an important moral dimension since I am interested in preventing arguments about wealth arising from the circumstance of birth - just because one is born near a bit of land which is more easily converted to wealth via work than other bits of land doesn't entitle you to that wealth. The violence argument is a good idea, but I actually think it's pretty trivial to prove violence isn't the basis of all wealth, and even if violence is a step, I kinda see violence as just a special type of work. The RC who gathers coconuts and hides them from another is not threatening anyone or doing violence to anyone except through a broad interpretation of the term "violence" that I don't agree with (whether you agree with my fairly broad interpretation of the word "work" may represent a sticking point worth bringing up later on). Typo posted:then why are people willing to purchase completely unimproved pieces of land and count it as among their assets?... And yes, I am trying pretty hard to come by all this myself, even if others have gone before me. It's more fun, and it's usually more gratifying, when I've done this for a while, to then go and read this poo poo, and find out just how alike or dissimilar the greats were to us when talking out of our asses. If you don't find it entertaining then I'm really not sure why you're in D&D at all, unless you hold the rest of the discussions here to meet some standard you think this one doesn't meet. In which case I suppose this thread ought to be removed. glowing-fish posted:This isn't meant to be a rude question, but I am really curious:... I don't get where the accusation of Libertarianism comes from, to be honest. I don't see how anything in the idea that wealth = work is Libertarian. I personally am not Libertarian. Currently the economic strategy I think makes the most sense is some kind of Distributionism, but as you can see, my beliefs really are in a state of flux. As far as who I am (though Logic preserve me from why you'd think that information was necessary to come to grips with ideas), you could have bothered to read my account info. I've posted a drat sight more there than most. If you really want to know more than that I can be more specific, but really I hesitate to take that as true interest when it seems more likely a grab at ad hominem. As for your personal history, that's nice. It doesn't matter to me. OwlFancier posted:OK but none of us live on desert islands, we live in societies which have laws and the laws say that if you own something, you can tell other people what to do with it.... I have no drat clue who jrod is. I have no idea why you have so much trouble taking me at my word. I have not railed against fiat currency; in fact I think I've praised it at least once. I am not obsessed with desert island metaphors, I thought they were fun and valid, which is a nice combo to have. If you'd like to offer some other simple theming for a gedankenexperiment, you go right ahead. Indeterminacy posted:I don't think there's anything wrong with going back to first principles every now and then, as long as you don't spend too much time reveling in this pretheoretic state (as we see far too often amongst the pseudo-theorists of the Right).... Helsing posted:The LTV,predicts that there will be a correspondence between the labour invested into an object and its exchange value on the market. Right or wrong it is a predictive theory. The OP is just building up rhetorical sandcastles to try and bolster a poorly thought out ethical argument. Wistful of Dollars posted:Wealth is freedom from want. Moridin920 posted:With respect to economics, wealth is the ability to command labor. This is great, too. I mean, I'm going to take it or leave it as far as your opinions on capitalists go (you do you, I'm not there yet), but everything else you say makes a ton of sense. It really seems like I'm gonna want to read Wealth of Nations cover to cover... but also that's a pretty old book and stuff has been said in economics since then (understatement understood). Anything more recent which focus on stuff like the LTV and the meaning of "work" in economics and stuff like that? Helsing posted:As I've heard it explained, according to Marx the socially necessary labour time does play a role in determining the exchange value of the commodity. An individual commodity might sell for more or less than its objective value based on local factors like supply and demand or marketing, but those fluctuations are still anchored around the socially necessary labour time taken to produce the commodity. In cases where one commodity consistently sells for more than its real value there has to be another commodity that is consistently selling for less than its real value, so that the economy as a whole balances out. Reznor posted:...I mean, I guess op made a rubric for it. But I don't see the explanatory power or use for his theory. VirtualBasement posted:I'm actually surprised this was not the first reply to this thread. OP is even cherry picking replies and doing that "just asking questions" bullshit. Helsing posted:OP's proposed theory has no such predictive content. It's a purely normative statement. So in that sense he's not even mucking around in the 19th century reinventing the labour theory of value, he's all the way back in the 17th century reinventing Locke's theory on the origin of property. I think I'd have to start off on this tangent by saying, though, that I don't think it's obvious property belongs to the agent whose work brought it into existence. I think property is actually an enforced concept; work is actually constantly sunk into its enforcement. A society with no concept of property, like one of perfect robot agents or something, would be capable of creating wealth through work and not having to sink any of it into enforcing ownership. I mean hell, that's kind of the thing with Communism, right? In a perfect society without notions of property, we could efficiently distribute wealth as required, and so long as no one was an imperfect agent (or at least not very often), then that would be a pretty easy and efficient method of government. It's a perfectly rational economic system borne out of an age in which it seemed to make sense to economic theorists to treat economic agents as perfectly rational spherical cows.
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Feb 7, 2019 06:28
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roomforthetuna posted:Go on then. I think hidden coconuts differ from coconuts on the ground in that coconuts on the ground are not gathered in a central location for your (even easier) use, they are also concealed from easy gathering unlike coconuts on the ground, and yes, absolutely part of the work being done here is discovering them; that's part of the work it takes to make use of a coconut. I do not understand the distinction between people having wealth alone and people having wealth in groups. To me, it makes sense to say a guy living alone with all he needs is very wealthy compared to the girl living without something necessary. The prisoner in solitary with a book is wealthier than the prisoner without any external means of diversion. What I will agree is missing in this case is value; value and wealth seem distinct to me. I think I have a good motivation for trying to imagine that violence does not back all wealth in the real world, and I think I can justify that motive. My motivation for arguing against violence as the ultimate source of wealth (which again, is a special kind of work, so not totally at odds with what I'm saying) is that it seems to me antithetical to human society. Violence tends to degrade social interactions, whereas trust in a lack of violence tends to form social bonds. This is not to make an ethical argument, by the way - I'm not passing judgment on the morality of institutional violence - I'm just thinking that violence tends to dissolve societies, so it makes a poor basis for an economy. While it is very hard to prove violence is nowhere evident in a complex economy (hence my fallback on coconuts and castaways), perhaps I can make my point by trying to show where wealth arises out of trust or something like that, in a situation where violence would seem an ineffective method of guaranteeing wealth. When trying to come up with an example of wealth not backed by violence, you have to look outside nations, because nations enforce their currencies and notions of property, and I'd be the first to agree all of that is ultimately backed with threats of violence. It doesn't really matter the type of government in charge; one of the primary purposes of human government in general is provision for the self-defense. I hold that self-defense is tantamount to violence in defense of property; at a minimum, my body is my property and in defending it, I am asserting my right to its wealth (a quick aside: "But Eschat0n, surely the body was not worked for? Is it not an intrinsic source of wealth which is not work?" Eschat0n: "No, for the body was indeed worked for by the parents. We are not jellyfish."). I'm sure I'm not the first to make that argument... So where can I find wealth outside of nations in a more "realistic" example? Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, but so far as I am aware no one followed up with The Wealth Outside of Nations. Criminal activity is outside of nations in that the wealth created by it is not protected by national violence, but it seems a poor choice because criminals simply replace institutional violence with their own. Cryptocurrency is a good example, but I think that ultimately it equates to "hiding the coconuts" and I'd like to find a counterexample that doesn't use subterfuge, since I've already given a trivial example of that. I'll focus instead on three examples of "modern" wealth creation that I don't think really rely on violence: 1. Some forms of international trade. Certainly in many cases of international trade there is implicit violence, but sometimes countries with no plausible way of inflicting pain on each other due to geographical distance, lack of pertinent international law, etc., will trade anyway. I think in that case it's really just down to trust and need - if we were to try to reduce this, we would find that functionally they are playing the "cooperation" strategy in a prisoner's dilemma. 2. Discovery. When an economic agent discovers an oil field in international waters, wealth is created by that work (the knowledge of where to go to get oil). Though there are laws which protect this kind of work, they are tenuously enforced in many cases, and wealth seems primarily backed up by who can best utilize it first, or who even has the technological ability to do so. 3. Gratis work. Sometimes people seem to just do things that improve their society without any serious expectation attached. This one is my favorite example - I have a computer at home running OpenWRT. OpenWRT is an extremely valuable program to me; I cannot make it myself, and it does something I need - provide internet to my whole house from a tethered phone - but the license under which it is published is not really enforced - and even if I somehow violated it, it seems highly unlikely I would actually be pursued for it. Yet people make OpenWRT and distribute it, and that wealth spreads throughout the community. I just don't see where violence is involved in that transaction. I don't know why people do this, and I'm too cynical to suppose it's just pure altruism - perhaps it's just part of their self-improvement process (yet if so, why go to the trouble to make it freely available?), or perhaps they get a feeling of accomplishment/do-gooding from it... in any event, the motive is immaterial; the wealth is not. This is far from making a convincing argument, by the way, that trust (or anything else) underlies all wealth in societies. Right now it's going to just have to be restricted to "it is true that not all wealth derives from violence" because that's just about all I can wrap my head around right now. Eschat0n fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Feb 7, 2019 |
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Feb 7, 2019 16:50
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glowing-fish posted:Well, your attitude of being curiously naive did seem a bit too much for me. When someone asks questions that show they are trying to "reinvent the wheel" about topics that are covered in a community college Economics 101 or Sociology 101 course, it is kind of natural for me to think that they are not innocently asking questions, but are trying to drive the conversation towards their typical set of beliefs. Is it within my rights on this forum to ask you to stop posting until you actually want to engage with the topic? You seem to have a serious problem with taking people at their word. You literally quoted me saying "my beliefs are in a state of flux." Six years ago, yes, I had a certain set of ideas - but even more importantly, why does it matter that I had established notions six years ago? I'm not dragging those notions into this conversation - that quote of mine is political in nature, not economical. They are related but separate. If all you want to establish is that I'm not coming to this conversation ex nihilo... great. Yes. Of course. I'm 33 years old; I have had a few thoughts in my brain before now.
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Feb 7, 2019 19:07
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As a quick aside, and since my blog was already posted, if anyone is is mystifyingly obsessed with learning more about my preceding thoughts and beliefs, here's a blog post of mine from 2017, which is reasonably recent: https://leadprophet.blogspot.com/2017/12/big-ideas-about-free-markets-regulation.html Hopefully that will dispel any further sidetracks about my identity, faith, etc. Please don't comment on its contents here, though. Not wanting to derail the present conversation.
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Feb 7, 2019 20:20
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Infinite Karma posted:To make the coconut analogy make sense, you have to bring in another element. Whether coconuts represent a store of value, or whether they represent literal food that you're going to eat, most definitions of wealth wouldn't include them. Secondly, when you say "And the violence of needing to consume food and water and shelter to stay alive prevents them from refusing to participate in the coconut economy if they don't think the rules are fair" - I disagree that we can describe the natural state of existence as violence without the word losing its usefulness. It is true that people feel compelled by exigency to participate in economies where they are at a disadvantage - if I'm not mistaken, I'd already brought that up. But it is possible to be "compelled" by forces other than violence. One can feel compelled by compassion, or pity, or hunger, or gravity. Let's not lump all that together under the heading "violence." Infinite Karma posted:The examples of finding oil in international waters are disingenuous - there are still rules and laws that govern international ownership. There are still "finders keepers" rules where the first one there gets to lay claim to the resources. Trust is just a shortcut to make transactions backed by violence easier. If you break trust, there are fallback rules, and fallback rules for those rules, because violence is only useful as a threat - when you actually carry it out, nothing is gained. But if someone broke trust enough times, the only thing left to do is remove them from the economy with violence, so they can't further harm the good faith actors. Meeting violence with violence, in order to break the rules without consequence, is the only alternative to the rule of "law backed by violence". Which is, you know, violence. I don't think I'm being disingenuous; at worst perhaps I am ignorant. If you find a super-valuable alien spaceship crashlanded in antarctica and you get your team there first to pull it out (and you do the work of killing the shapeshifting occupants), then in reality when the dust clears, you've got the death ray technology and everyone else can sue you in international court all they want, but you have the wealth. If you grab that oil you found, agents can make claims to it and sue; they can even try to assert naval power, but sometimes the disputing parties really have no physical way of getting there to stop you, and in the time it takes the courts to resolve the issue you'll have built a platform and sucked all that oil up and sold it. Violence didn't really enter into it because it couldn't be applied; you simply had the technical ability to get there and others didn't. It's an edge case, but it can happen. Even if you don't think it happens on earth (it totally does), you can easily see how this could happen if the USA were to make a concerted effort to colonize Mars.
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Feb 7, 2019 20:43
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Pablo Nergigante posted:Land has minimal use value until you produce Worker units to improve the tiles This loving guy 
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Feb 7, 2019 20:53
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Helsing posted:It's not hard to understand, it's just elaborate. You can lampshade this by making self aware jokes about spheres in a vacuum but that doesn't change the fact you're developing your arguments through references to a historically impossible situation. It's incumbent on you to justify why this sprawling desert island metaphor maps onto any real world closely enough that it can actually illuminate a real world situation. Helsing posted:Notice how whenever you try to discuss wealth it immediately turns into a discussion of how you stake a claim that other people will recognize. You see you keep trying to simplify this process down to the individual level but that is literally impossible because something like 'wealth' only makes sense in the context of a world inhabited by other people. Wealth necessarily involves your ability to control access to a resource. That control inevitably entails some relationship with other people. These relationships are the basis upon which we can seperate some random plot of land from something that counts as 'wealth'. Helsing posted:Every historical society on earth involves this process of judging different claims to access of resources or of determining who gets to do what with society's available stock of wealth. You need to give us a really good reason why our understanding is somehow improved by ignoring all those real world examples and focusing on one that you invented. Why should we expect the moral intuitions generated by your thought experiment will be a useful guide for understanding a world that has no real resemblance to your metaphor? Helsing posted:So having read what you've posted so far, my biggest question for you is what you're actually trying to accomplish with these musings. This is actually a really important question. Theories exist to help inform us or to guide us in reaching certain conclusions. The kind of understanding we want to achieve has an important influence on how we design our theories. I think that Marx has it specifically wrong about labor's power; it does NOT add more wealth than it cost; it is itself a pure, raw sort of wealth; the potentiality of the human worker to make anything. What we choose to spend our time on is necessarily expending a tremendous opportunity cost; we are exchanging parts of our lives for a specific work which can never repay the time and effort which was put into it. To me, work cannot escape the arrow of time; to create local reductions in entropy one must accept greater increases across the whole of the system. You will never get out more than you put in. Marx may be right that labor still retains more wealth than other forms of capital because it is closer to the raw potential prior to its expenditure - that I grant him; that may help explain the predictive power of his analysis. But to presume human work actually turns back the clock of time and inexorably heats the engine of Progress is pure Industrial fancy, ignorant of the laws of the universe which constrain all human endeavor. This is not a mere observation without implication; this speaks to us about sustainability and the influence of the human condition on the economy. I think it should force us to acknowledge that harmonious economic systems are not possible without tremendous human sacrifice, which is why we have not historically had them. People will not usually willingly throw away their satisfaction for the good of the group; that impression is the downfall of communism. My formulation of wealth predicts the exact problem with command economy experiments of the 20th and 21st centuries which manifested itself. Ironically, the traditional societies which socialist experiments often blew away in search of a better tomorrow may well have provided the social bonds needed to induce people to sacrifice more readily for the good of the group; to see group success as more important than their own individual success... but that's a conversation for another time. This is not about denying the importance, by the way, of sustainable economies. To the contrary; achieving sustainability is all the more critical once one acknowledges the fundamental inequality at the base of human endeavor and the real, tragic, irreversible damage that is done to the commons in the course of typical human economic activity. But people should not go into that fight blind to what awaits them; as wealth is work and does not return to us what we put into it, we will not have sustainability without giving up a great deal. Sacrifice is imperative, however impossible it may be to ethically compel a populace to embrace it. I would go so far as to say that this problem may even represent the Great Filter figured in the Fermi Paradox. The capitalist says we can spend and enjoy without real consequence, but the socialist says we can spend and enjoy without real consequence as well - only so long as we follow their opposing recipes for economic well-being. Only the realist says you'll have to sometimes forgo children, or yachts, or strip malls, or life-saving medicines, because there is a fundamental inequality at the bottom of the system we live in. No one's interested in getting by when the promise of fabulous prosperity for all is supposedly on the table. So the charade continues: no taxes! universal basic income! It keeps getting better and better while the world burns. There's no attempt by me here to come up with a better alternative, by the way; that's why it's not worth crowing about as much as it might sound like it; that's a thought for another time as well, if and when I feel like my basic understanding of economics is on-point. People make a great deal out of value; but take away the market and replace it with a pure communist society run by angels; you'd still have wealth (equitably distributed). Value, however, would be absent, because there is no trade to be made; each and all have what they need, and if some inequality should arise, the balance will be restored by the benevolent bureaucratic class. But that wealth would still not be without its costs; to the world and the workers who produced it from the world; the system from which it was taken. The trick of sustainability would still haunt such a perfect society, even with value totally absent. That's why I think it's worth separating wealth and value. Typo posted:ok is op basically just reaching the conclusion property rights only exist insofar a state exists to enforce it? Eschat0n fucked around with this message at 06:27 on Feb 12, 2019 |
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Feb 12, 2019 06:19
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Moon Shrimp posted:In Marxist terms, what you're referring to as wealth is access to use-values. Use-values are specific things that can be used to satisfy your needs or wants. Use-values can be obtained from nature, or bought, or produced from the labor of your serfs and/or slaves. So with this definition you can be wealthy by living in natural abundance, or by being rich and having access to a market than can provide all of your necessary use-values, or by owning a Roman latifundia. Yeah, perhaps wealth is too freighted a term. I'd be OK with calling it use-values, I think.
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Feb 12, 2019 06:20
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Helsing posted:Nothing in your post comes even close to hinting at an answer to this question. When you equate wealth/use-value with work, then you can couple economics with physics and see how sustainable economies will never produce widespread prosperity because of systemic constraints. The coconuts were not necessary, strictly-speaking. We could have tried to discuss this in abstractions alone; sorry I didn't construct my argument according to your specifications... that doesn't make it wrong, however. Liquid Communism posted:'What is wealth, I just don't know?' asks the guy with a a several paragraph critique of Marx and how command economies got it wrong. I begin to think, sir, that you are arguing under false pretenses. Do you understand the difference between opinions and convictions, though? I'm not sure about any of this. But discussion is not simply a process of folks coming in here and telling me how it is, and me rolling over immediately. I'm going to have questions and counterpoints; I'm going to want people to more thoroughly provide counterexamples which make more sense than mine. Thus far it has been a pretty lovely experience, with most people mocking me, accusing me of false pretenses, making jabs at my background, or providing pretty poor critiques of my position that show they're not really paying attention to what's been said or are just as in the dark as I am. However, there have been a few bright points - some things I've been forced to be more clear about, or even admit I'm wrong in: - I think people have done a good point so far of showing me that "wealth" is probably not the word I want to try to redefine. What I'm really thinking of is some term that would describe the transition of manipulations of our environment to make it better for us - something we use economies to accomplish and promote, but terms like "value" and "wealth" are already used to mean things different from that, so probably not a good idea for me to continue using that word. At this point I'm kind of stuck because I've used it from the beginning, so people coming in will think I've completely diverged if I stop using the word suddenly, but if I were doing this thread over again I'd use a different term. - Ownership is a concept I won't be able to separate from what I'm thinking about, mostly because of how much work goes into defining ownership in modern economies. Does that constitute wasted/inefficient work, or does ownership have a useful place in economies? These are questions I thought I could avoid, but they're tightly coupled with thinking about the meaning of work in economies. At some point we'll need to circle back to these and elaborate on them more if the conversation continues. - It seems more and more apparent that it was also wrong to call this thread an economics thread. What I'm really talking about is a predication of economics; a process of human life. I do still think understanding this predicate is really crucial for understanding economics rightly, though. I don't think it's right to say I came to a debate and discussion board in bad faith when I am debating, discussing, and acknowledging where I think others have made their points convincingly. Please don't crucify me just because I think some argument remains here (and have given my reasons why). Eschat0n fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Feb 12, 2019 |
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Feb 12, 2019 19:55
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roomforthetuna posted:I say this too. It looks like you were explaining why in your view wealth != value, but you ended up explaining wealth = stuff, not wealth = work. Well at least now we agree the coconut thing is worth talking about. I think you're hostile to my idea for some unexpressed reason, however, because the quality of your criticism here is really, really low. If you gather the coconuts up, the pile isn't going to be in some far place - it's going to be near to where you usually are, of course! If you're a bronze age farmer you don't just leave your wheat in the field until you need it - you gather it up, because it's very convenient for you to have it in your granary. It would suck to have to go everywhere on the island to get the most out of its coconut crop. It would also help with things like taking inventory. Like, personally, if I were stranded on a desert island, I would totally gather my coconuts, not leave them on the ground. It seems pretty worthwhile to me. The holes thought experiment (see guys, these are useful!) is worth considering; obviously not all work is equal. Some work is downright useless. I have to add the word "useful" to my definition; wealth = useful work. That's a dangerous thing to do for me; usefulness is dependent on who is measuring it, isn't it? I was thinking about this earlier. I might have to say something pretty convoluted, like "wealth (or use-value) is the measure of all the use that can be got out of work done by any agent or agents which can interact with the work or its products." To the first thing you said: wealth is stuff to me in the sense that it takes work to make that stuff. It's one step of separation from the true source of the stuff's usefulness, so it's not an atomic statement to say wealth is stuff, nor does it capture the use of the work done in immaterial realms like software. Eschat0n fucked around with this message at 20:33 on Feb 12, 2019 |
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Feb 12, 2019 20:10
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Infinite Karma posted:Wealth = work is just a bizarre conclusion to draw. Certainly wealth can be used to get a certain kind of work done that, for various reasons, you'd rather not/cannot do yourself. Markets exist to facilitate this transaction. But I don't think anyone is going to trade you something that they could get by working for instead, so you're only ever going to get less work out of that agent than the work you put into whatever it is you're offering. A guy makes hammers. Another guy makes shirts. The guy with the shirt would like a hammer, but he doesn't have any stones, so he's gonna have to get one from the hammer guy. Luckily, he lives in an economy with currency, so he sells some shirts, gets some currency, and buys the hammer. But nobody's buying a shirt off this guy if it costs the same as the work it would take for them to make the shirt themselves; he's going to have to sell to people for whom it would take more work than him to make the shirt. That's fine as far as it goes; these people exist, so he has consumers. But those people bought it with money they got for selling other goods or services; transactions which also were subject to the same considerations. At the base of it, at some point, people are making money by doing work, and the only difference between them doing the work and the person paying them for doing the work is that the person paying could totally do the work themselves, but they just don't want to spend their time that way; though it would take an equivalent amount of time no matter who did it. The only way that kind of agent makes money is by selling their work for less than it is really worth; they're getting screwed (or you could say this is the cost of entry into the currency economy; elsewise those agents would be better off not participating at all - and certainly with people who have no way to really make the most of their time, you see them opt out of economies; that's often seen as criminality in nation-states). And that inequality goes on up the chain of transactions, back to the shirt guy. The hammer is worth more to him than the shirts he sold to get it, sure - he's done less work than if he made the hammer himself - but in order for that to work, someone somewhere had to get screwed.
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Feb 12, 2019 20:27
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I think it's pretty clear by now I hosed up the start of this thread - even if you agree with me in some vague sense, you'd still have to admit I wasn't rigorous enough for this crowd. And I actually appreciate that; there are places for shooting the poo poo; this is not one of them. I don't really care to defend my original idea anymore as it just isn't rigorous enough to defend; being super vague (and, some would argue, super-vacuous), it's just about as difficult to accurately defend as it is to accurately attack, if not moreso, and in the end we do a disservice to each other to continue arguing when really the other side feels we're just talking past them or not really understanding what was originally meant. When you start thinking that people who were previously pretty good raconteurs are suddenly attacking strawmen of your position, or that in general the critiques of your position attack things you're pretty sure you already answered, then the problem is probably not with your critics, but with the way you've argued or what it is you're arguing about - or both. I hosed up. I think the question posed is still worth continuing discussion over, unconnected with my bad initial attempt at answering it. There were also some really good points in the conversation that followed, which have lead me to think it would be worth trying to formulate my thoughts again, differently (with less coconuts and vagueness, this time). Obviously if this makes you groan, perhaps just let the thread die. I still find the conversation interesting; I still find the people here interesting to talk to, never mind the abrasion; that comes with the territory to a certain extent. Question: What is wealth? And, over the course of the argument, it was increasingly clear to me that while I am interested in wealth, there are some pretty decent extant answers to that word's definition. I particularly thought the idea of defining it using the Marxian concept of "use-value" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value) made sense to me, anyway: "Whatever its social form may be, wealth always consists of use-values, which in the first instance are not affected by this form." A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) (excerpt from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value#Marx's_definition) Use-value, as he said: "...inheres in the intrinsic characteristics of a product that enable it to satisfy a human need or want." The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value#Origin_of_the_concept) And to further elaborate: "A thing can be a use value, without having value. This is the case whenever its utility to man is not due to labour. Such are air, virgin soil, natural meadows, &c. A thing can be useful, and the product of human labour, without being a commodity. Whoever directly satisfies his wants with the produce of his own labour, creates, indeed, use values, but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use values, but use values for others, social use values. (And not only for others, without more. The mediaeval peasant produced quit-rent-corn for his feudal lord and tithe-corn for his parson. But neither the quit-rent-corn nor the tithe-corn became commodities by reason of the fact that they had been produced for others. To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use value, by means of an exchange.) Lastly nothing can have value, without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value." Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value#Marx's_definition) That's a nicely nuanced view which: Q1) Makes a connection between work/labor and the product of that labor even when separate from any market. Q2) Defines wealth as opposed to value, and the relationship between them. Q3) Recognizes how wealth is elaborated on when it enters into social use as opposed to its relatively simple existence in the hands of an individual. Q4) Contravenes my original conception of wealth by including in its scope the unimproved natural world wherever it can be used by humans. Q5) Seems to assume the ownership of a person's labor belongs to that person (I'm basing this on the weak fact the translator has written "...his own labor..." in the quote above - a linguistic construction which assumes one may rightly call labor performed by one's self one's own), but otherwise steers about as clear of ownership as it can. Unless the translation is bad, I think this is a pretty safe interpretation because I think you'd have to get into the denial of your own person as belonging to you in order to deny the implicit claim that your own labor belongs to you! And I'd adopt all of the above for myself, except that I have some reservations about Q4 - that statement is not intuitive to me. In fact, although I haven't read Marx as much as I obviously should, it almost seems an off-hand inclusion by him, at least in the quote above; a quick example, not meant for close examination. My intuitive rejection of this is to go back to the idea of a giant gold asteroid sitting in orbit around Proxima Centauri - yes, it would be very useful for people to have, and it is not improved, but it has no meaningful use-value. 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 my slightly-modified answer to the question "What is wealth" is mostly (perhaps completely?) Marx's: Wealth always consists of accessible use-values. And I shouldn't just stop there, because answering the question is fairly meaningless unless it entails falsifiable predictions. Essentially, we ask the naturally following question: "so what?" Hypothesis/Elaboration: 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. Wealth creation, by its nature, entails an increase in entropy system-wide, in exchange for a local decrease in entropy (useful work). Its destruction does the same; entropy is created. Economies are arbiters of this creation of entropy at social scales, and the efficiency of an economy could be measured in the ratio at which entropy is created vs wealth - granting that economies deal with wealth only indirectly, mediated by the concept of value. 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. 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). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it could be expected that economies which efficiently make use-values accessible may not be favored by participants acting for greedy reasons; individuals or groups can and do act to reduce economic efficiency so that use-values remain theirs, whether because of an insufficient supply or a desire to control the economy by artificially withholding wealth. 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. A final note about arguments from imperfect knowledge and scale: Arguments about how to conduct an efficient economy which would restrict its efficiency in favor of some other behavior due to imperfect knowledge of what is happening in the economy may proceed from concerns about sustainability or ethics, or both. Certainly much in an economy is unknown; and it is expected this will result in inefficiencies both intended and unintended. Similarly, arguments about the appropriate scale of an economy are particularly interesting insofar as efficiency fluctuates with scale - and so does knowledge. From a Distributist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism) point of view, it might make sense to restrict scale at the cost of efficiency for the sake of improved knowledge of the economy, if the exchange rate were acceptable - the answer to which might vary over time according to the sustainability of the economic system in question. Scale also raises other questions - since larger scales typically mean increased access to natural wealth not previously accessible - and this increases the economic efficiency greatly, at least in the short term. Whether such rapid expansionism would be more efficient in the long term than a slower growth which reduced ignorance and unfortunately also efficiencies of scale is to me an open question. Assumptions: I think given the level of rigor expected, assumptions should be clearly and separately stated so they can be referred to, attacked, or supported more easily. It seems to me there are a few so far: A1) My interpretation of Marx's use-values is correct. A2) Ownership of labor belongs, at first at least (e.g. naturally), to the laborer. I'll separate that one out from A1 because I'm making a tenuous interpretation which I personally agree with and I'm not sure if it's really Marx's. A3) You can't get work out of entropy. A4) Probably something else that someone will point out; I'll post it here when it is pointed out.
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Feb 16, 2019 00:49
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Luckily I think most of what you say here is just quibbles; we can agree, perhaps? The use-value of a thing probably already incorporates what you term "use-cost" - that is, we are asked to consider the use-value of a thing, keeping in mind things like what it would take to improve it to usefulness. When I talk about entropy I'm trying to place human work into the broader context of energy exchanges in physical processes in general - I'm talking about the kind of entropy you think of in physics class. I'm glad you bring up agriculture in this context, because I think agriculture's real contribution (and I don't think this is actually very controversial to say) is the massive efficiency bonus it confers on societies practicing it. The amount of work it takes to hunt and gather seems to be a major hurdle for societies to overcome; there's a boundary of civilizational complexity that doesn't seem to be attainable, historically-speaking, until you can find some way to harness nature's own growth (this would include pastoral activities like shepherding) as an efficiency "hack," for lack of a better term. And this is perhaps the first major question humanity has ever had to face vis a vis sustainability vs efficiency, because hunter-gatherer societies aren't efficient enough to support large populations, they counter-intuitively end up being pretty sustainable compared to agricultural societies which tend to wear out their land, practice monoculture, and feature large populations. Obviously during the periods in which any historical civilization had to make that transition it never was really presented as a choice per se, but looking back on it now there are those extreme luddites who say "maybe this whole crops thing was a bad idea," because they're intuiting that maybe more wealth will be got out of the system in the long run via a hunter-gatherer approach with small populations and low impact. I think your heat counterexample is just misunderstanding what heating a building or food is really doing. When you raise the heat in a localized area like a building or in food, you're actually creating a temperature gradient with the ambient level, which constitutes a reduction in local entropy - useful work could conceivably be got out of that. Not so with entropy. I'm really not clear on where you're going with the Emperor Bezos vs free economy thing. In your example the use-values are only temporarily taken from others; later they are returned, with interest. Investment does not constitute a reduction in economic efficiency; quite the contrary - as you pointed out. But that also makes Emperor Bezos not the kind of slimeball I had in mind. Superrich people in general who are investing their wealth and driving it into economies generally don't fit the bill of "parasite" - but Comcast and AT&T, which actively fight municipal fiber internet buildout in the USA (just for one small example), definitely does - they're expending their wealth and efforts simply to keep coaxial last mile connections relevant by militantly enforcing pole access rules - preventing access to a type of use-value that almost certainly isn't properly valued in their stocks and therefore can't even theoretically be driven back into the economy.
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Feb 17, 2019 09:13
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Unfortunately that's not how entropy works. Just because heat is created in the vicinity, and heat is the lowest form of energy, doesn't mean that local entropy has increased. If you burn a log for warmth the entropy of the log increases, but the heat gradient in the vicinity of the log goes up. It's very easy to see how entropy goes up system-wide in that example; less easy to see where it goes down. In fact, it may make more sense to you if we just drop the "local" vs "system" distinction: the important thing is the process of transferring some of the energy bound up in the chemical composition of the log into the temperature of the air around it; the air's entropy goes down; the log's entropy goes up (by much more than the air's goes down). To see this must be true, consider that we get work out of steam engines - you couldn't if heat gradients didn't constitute a reduction in entropy in some medium. Similarly, you can get almost no work out of the void of deep space, where heat energy is spread at a very slight gradient - that's a high degree of entropy. That entropy works this way - and that you see that it works this way - is crucial to my definition of wealth and the way I see economies. If work could be had from processes which did not increase entropy somewhere, then we would be able to say that in some cases wealth can literally equal entropy, and that would mean sustainability would not necessarily be a concern - just increase entropy all you want and end up with endless wealth. Nothing I've said makes sense unless all wealth creation constitutes a reduction in entropy somewhere - even with things like thinking up new behaviors, like Kanban (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban), which arguably constitutes an increase in wealth in and of itself, we must imagine that the electrochemical structures of the thinker's brain have been restructured to represent a slightly lower entropy state than before the thought was formed. As for the parasite thing... I've thought a lot about what you've said, and I think I know why you and I seem to disagree here, when in fact I don't think we do. First of all you're completely correct: a selfish agent can end up beneficial to an economy. If you look at the way capitalist economies are structured, they rely on this fact, of course. To really be a parasite, simple greed is not enough. You must not only be greedy, but greedy, unable to use further wealth, and unwilling to give it away. You must be, in essence, a wealth sink for the economy, taking wealth out of it - maybe even irrevocably destroying it, to be completely unjustifiable. So your idea of a parasite isn't necessarily a parasite to me. Whether the actual Jeff Bezos is an upstanding economic participant is kind of outside the scope of what I've been talking about so far, which is just establishing some outer bounds of reasonable economic behavior. No doubt there are plenty of people who would technically not count as parasites who I might still find morally repugnant enough to want to keep them from participating in any economy with me, or ones whose behavior seems ill-suited to the kind of economy I want to be in. I don't want to get into the nitty- gritty yet because I think there's an important implication to all that I've said which has yet to be expressed in terms that ought to bother many of the readers of this thread, and provoke more discourse than there has been so far. That is, when you have economies of different efficiencies competing against each other, you have a sort of destructive race which might occur: if you can produce a lot of wealth now at the cost of sustainability, then you can potentially overpower economies that might generate more wealth in the long run. That's the nightmare of the distributist like me; how to create a sustainable economy when it's just not competitive with less sustainable economies which might outcompete it and, through various mechanisms, lead to its destruction? More broadly nightmarish for all of us: how do you get economies to slow down and prevent climate change when they may all view such a move as deadly for their continued survival? There are also other avenues to go down with this discussion, like whether the only resource that really matters is humans (and we ought to be sucking up immigrants and promoting reproduction like crazy, or whether there's something more sane to do), which the theory touches on, but we can probably only go down one of those paths at a time in conversation...
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Feb 18, 2019 10:03
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WampaLord posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJM4sJb4yU Jesus christ, have you read literally anything I've written? This forum is extremely paranoid. EDIT: I'll just come out and say it because I'm so done with this: unless someone is going to convince me otherwise, I don't anticipate ever making the argument that billionaires are in any way necessary. They're really such a small part of the problem I'm trying to illuminate that they don't matter to me. At the most, someone might show me why I should think they are much more of a problem than I think they are - and that's something I'm guessing someone will at least attempt at some point, given how much mental energy here is clearly directed toward them. But arguing that they are in some way anything better than a minor speed bump in the great entropic trend of all economies? No. Eschat0n fucked around with this message at 15:36 on Feb 19, 2019 |
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Feb 19, 2019 15:28
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to convince yourself that you're a really smart bootlicker. Loved the diversion into "well, technically" about entropy in a thread presumably about economics, that was a real nice touch to make yourself seem smart.
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roomforthetuna posted:Steam engines don't do anything with heat gradients. They use chemical energy to produce a pressure difference, via heat, but it's not to do with a heat gradient. It is possible to extract energy from a temperature difference, but steam engines aren't doing that. (At least, not a temperature difference across space - a temperature difference across time is what provokes a pressure change.) Sigh... steam engines absolutely do rely on temperature gradients. How to steam engine: 1. Get liquid state water (that's one temperature) 2. Put water into strong container 3. Burn fuel near container (that's another temperature) 4. Water becomes steam, expands, creates pressure 5. Steam pressure moves mechanism to extract work out of steam None of that is ever going to happen if you put water that's the same temperature as the burning fuel into the container (e.g. STEAM), because no pressure will be created. So yes, there's a temperature difference in the system. And yes, this 100% crucial for my argument. And holy poo poo, if you're going to make me change my terms so that you don't have to change yours - OK, fine. "Uberparasites" it is. And sure, maybe uberparasites don't exist. As I already mentioned, they're an outer limit, an extreme. I don't take them as the beginning of irrational behavior - they're the end of it. We can get more specific about what's rational economic behavior later on - though as you've said, economies are pretty drat complex and when knowledge of the system is imperfect it becomes difficult to see what's acceptable. From what I gather that's pretty much the gist of laissez-faire economic policy; since those who could control the economy (e.g. the govt) have imperfect knowledge of their own economy, the best they can do is let nature have its way and try their best not to trip it up on its merry way. An aside to try to establish my socialist bona fides, since that seems to be the preoccupation of so many of you: right now my position is that capitalism is the natural economic state. People who want to argue for pure capitalism are making the same error as people who want to try to argue for moral systems built on observations of nature - if you take nature as your model of what is good, then you can't reasonably conclude there are any rules to make, least of all those which try to enforce some supposed natural state, because the systems which have evolved in human societies are themselves extensions of that natural system; we are natural creatures. Anyone who wants any rules at all - especially rules that say "there are no rules," is making a tacit admission that in fact they do not think the natural world is a good model to follow, eroding the very basis for their own arguments. If you let things run their natural course, you will get tyrants, monopolies, poverty, etc. To talk about economic policy at all, we have to first admit that we would rather not model our economies after the natural world; we want to construct an artificial system that will distribute wealth more effectively/ethically than that. That is to say, we are all arguing for controlled economies to different extents; ideally we'd be able to completely control an economy so that it never did what we didn't want it to do and we got exactly what we expected out of it. The differences between our positions are only a matter of morals and knowledge. My personal moral system is fundamentally based on roman catholicism, among a few other things, and when catholics are being real with themselves, they have pretty socialist instincts about stuff like wealth redistribution. My instincts therefore trend toward socialism as it is understood today in Europe and the Americas all the time. OK, to return to some of your questions, some of these I thought I'd already answered: quote:Could you explain why you brought entropy into the topic in the first place? quote:the "why are you saying these things" part; it seems strange to withhold it quote:That is, when you have economies of different efficiencies competing against each other, you have a sort of destructive race which might occur: if you can produce a lot of wealth now at the cost of sustainability, then you can potentially overpower economies that might generate more wealth in the long run. That's the nightmare of the distributist like me; how to create a sustainable economy when it's just not competitive with less sustainable economies which might outcompete it and, through various mechanisms, lead to its destruction? More broadly nightmarish for all of us: how do you get economies to slow down and prevent climate change when they may all view such a move as deadly for their continued survival? quote:we could move on to what's wrong with the conclusions.
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Feb 19, 2019 16:22
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MixMastaTJ posted: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. You have it exactly right. If you thought I was saying something different from what you just said above, then I just hadn't made myself clear. And as far as wealth creation goes - don't forget: I'm saying work creates use-values, so you must increase entropy to get wealth. Even bringing stuff in from space will only ever decrease entropy in the local system as we define it. Universally, entropy still increases. To take this to a ludicrous place, if the reachable universe is finite (that is to say, we never develop FTL), then there's a real sense in which there's a maximum cap on wealth. If you had magical nanobots that could convert all reachable matter (including, potentially, some live humans) into wealth, including themselves after the fact, you'd have maximized wealth. That's really a fairly trivial thing to say. I'm trying to say it so I can elevate the importance of sustainability in my model of economics, trying to come to grips with the problem our world is facing right now - how to beat unsustainable economies that outproduce more sustainable economies in the short term, sort of like how fast-growing poplar trees can shade out slow-growing cedars, die out, and leave a barren ground instead of a forest twenty years on. I view that as a fundamental, critical problem we either solve or go extinct as a civilization trying.
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Feb 19, 2019 16:34
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OwlFancier posted:Can you skip to the bit where you explain the point rather than talking about coconuts and entropy? As soon as you actually read what's been written you'll find all your wishes have been granted, darling.
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Feb 19, 2019 17:49
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roomforthetuna posted:Sigh no, you could make a steam engine using microwaves, in which there'd be no different temperature outside the pressure chamber (or even the opposite different temperature once the water starts to heat up, and it wouldn't make your turbine turn backwards). You could put some radioactive material in the tank. It's not about the temperature gradient between locations, it's about the temperature change over time. It just happens that the easiest way to provoke that change is temperature being transferred from a nearby location. I'm extremely tempted to just set up an entire separate debate thread for you and me to discuss how wrong you are about steam engines, but instead I'll just post the link to Wikipedia about what steam engines are and let you argue with that definition if you like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_engine. Protip: read the first drat sentence: "A steam engine is a heat engine that performs mechanical work using steam as its working fluid." 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. 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. quote:So far it hasn't seemed necessary or relevant to any other point. As for the rest, sorry for the confusion. They are only questions because I didn't get into detail about them. Actually more interested in hearing other people talk about what they think would be answers to those questions (either in my conception or some other better understanding of economics).
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Feb 19, 2019 18:09
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Infinite Karma posted:The entropy argument is extremely dumb. Technically, entropy increases when you consider a closed system, that's trivial. In reality, the Sun does as astonishing amount of work on the Earth with no input from the Earth at all. Dumb is not only wrong, but sometimes just simple. It is totally dumb; I've said as much (used the word "trivial" but sure, we can be less nice). But do you disagree? I think we can use the dumb statement to make less dumb statements further on.
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Feb 19, 2019 18:10
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OwlFancier posted:You're not jordan peterson and you aren't gonna sell a book from rambling, condense. lol, it's pretty funny that you reference Peterson. I like the guy at first glance; I like some of what he says. But when it comes to economics and most anything outside linguistics and psychology he's out of his depth. If there's a debate thread about him I'd like to find it and see what this crowd has said about him. But back to your point - no, I'm not going to do that. If the debate isn't interesting enough to go back and read what's been written, you're welcome to not participate, or wait until I feel like updating the OP.
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Feb 19, 2019 18:13
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Infinite Karma posted:Yes, I disagree. It predicts nothing and describes nothing. On top of being wrong. If it predicts nothing and describes nothing, then it's "not even wrong." So pick one. And if you'd like to pick "wrong" then please explain why because to me it seems correct. If, on the other hand, I'm "not even wrong," I'd appreciate - if you care to - show me why the following doesn't make sense or doesn't follow: 1. I start with Marx's definition of use-values (https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3881137&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=3#post492614364). 2. I relate how the work in his definition is (of course) a physical process which causes increases in entropy. 3. I explain how economies relate to wealth creation (they increase its efficiency without ever being perfectly efficient). 4. I connect 2 and 3 to argue economics is about efficiency of wealth creation, which can be loosely measured with entropy. 5. I say that if economics is about efficiency in terms of minimizing entropy while maximizing wealth, then it makes sense to ask questions like whether it is even possible to succeed at this when inefficient economies might - in the short term - choke out economies which are capable of generating greater wealth over time - and we can discuss whether that's something which is bad, doesn't matter, good, etc., but in terms of civilizational survival in the long term seems like it can only be a bad thing to me, assuming we want civilization to continue in the long term. So there, I guess I kind of did what OwlFancier asked for anyway. gently caress, I really wanted to stiff that rear end.
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Feb 19, 2019 18:42
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Typo posted:How? I don't think entropy was even understood at the time of Marx? Yes, this part does not come from Marx. I mean, I actually think entropy as a concept in physics was under development during Marx's lifetime, but you're right that he didn't deal with it. The connection is that he says use-values are created by human labor/work. And it is trivial to say human labor is a physical process. It is further trivial to point out that physical processes cause increases in entropy.
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Feb 19, 2019 18:48
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Orange Devil posted:So loving what? loving read.
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Feb 19, 2019 18:54
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Orange Devil posted:Explain better. I did the best I could; I don't know what else to add unless you ask questions. Broad questions like "so what?" don't give me a clue as to where exactly you're failing to follow the conversation. If you want a more detailed justification than I just tried to give a few posts prior to your own, then you'll have to be more detailed with your aggression.
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Feb 19, 2019 18:59
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Typo posted:So if I run around aimlessly is that work and therefore wealth? No, and it's been dealt with already in detail.
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Feb 19, 2019 19:00
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OwlFancier posted:Physicists were not expecting the unified theory to be a: unholy and b: between physics and economics but this lad's giving it a go I honestly don't get how it's unholy.
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Feb 19, 2019 19:01
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Typo posted:Why is this when capitalism have not being the existing economic system for the vast majority of human history? 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! If they've perverted my brain about what the natural state of human economies is, then there's probably a better term for it you can tell me. I'm just saying that whatever it is, it's not going to lead to laissez-faire market economies naturally; there's no inherent justification in that system.
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Feb 19, 2019 19:20
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Orange Devil posted:Alright, let's say I accept points 1 through 4 of the below as true (I don't): OK, cool. Once we get your negative modifiers out of there: You understand I'm saying efficiency in this context is minimizing entropy while maximizing wealth, which is Marxist use-values. Go read what I wrote on that or just go straight to the source, or preferably both. What I'm saying is "while it might seem desirable to gently caress up our environment as little as possible while we raise our standard of living, it's not clear such an economic system is competitive. Hopefully someone can show me how it could be because right now I'm kind of freaking out." When you say economics is about the distribution of scarce resources I agree; that's what it does. But if you're going to talk about how best to do that (which is part of the study of economics), then you're talking about efficiency - much work can't become a use-value until you make it accessible to the person who can use it, and how well the economy does that without creating entropy as a result of the work it takes to perform that economy is a measure of its efficient distribution of scarce resources. Different countries and entities practice different economies, yes. Of course they are tightly interdependent, but that's the "level of control" we as humans have over the global economy, really - a national level of control. If you want, you might force your nation to commit to a very sustainable economy that will benefit everyone in the long run - but what if another nation commits to a very unsustainable economy that reaps more dividends in the short run, allowing them to replace you in the global economy or even outright conquer you? You end up losing the ability to control as much of the global economy as you used to, and they end up controlling more of it. This does not look good for the sustainable economy. Hopefully there's a way to be sustainable and competitive at a global level. At other, smaller levels, of course it's possible to be sustainable and occupy a niche that no one else cares to compete with you in. No one cares to interact with the tribes of the Sentinel islands; they run their own economy which ends up being pretty sustainable by dint of accident; they and the wealth they posses have little to offer to the global economy, so there's precious little interaction (contrast with the forced US entry into Japanese economics in the 1800s; they were separate, but the global economy wanted what they had so that state of affairs ended). Unfortunately, the Sentinelese have little hope of solving issues like climate change. Eschat0n fucked around with this message at 19:41 on Feb 19, 2019 |
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Feb 19, 2019 19:39
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OwlFancier posted:What the gently caress does natural mean? It's a loving nonsense word unless you're talking about trees. It is; it's bullshit, especially when talking about human systems. People want to act like we somehow aren't part of the natural order, but beyond religious conceptions of "chain of being" and poo poo like that which will have absolutely 0 play in a heterogeneous society, there's no way they can possibly make sense of that claim.
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Feb 19, 2019 19:43
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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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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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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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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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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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