10 ms·

After Capitalism?

55 points by kawera 11y ago

lifeisstillgood 11y ago
I tried, honestly I tried. I tried to read it. I wanted to see the arguments because this is an area of interest to me. But I can't write a tl;dr - it would not sink in my brain. Part overview of the area, part, something else, I really have no idea what the author was trying to say Please enlighten me
- tim333 11y ago
  I gave it a quick try but it was too painful. TL;DR discusses various lefties waffling about what'll happen when the robots do the jobs, I think.
- brian-armstrong 11y ago
  He's saying that peoples' rights will be protected through the action of the worker, not through new technology. There is something of a meme right now that we will singularity our way into a utopian era of plenty. The author is saying that this isn't something we get automatically, that the middle and lower class have to continue to struggle in order to benefit from advances in automation and dramatic increases in productivity.
- skrebbel 11y ago
  This. I mean, > Several crashes later, the gloom has returned, and the signs of autumn are once again most recognizable in the pronouncements of free-market capitalism’s erstwhile boosters. I tried to read this sentence 3 times now, and I still do not know what it means. The same holds for entire paragraphs. IMO the author needs a healthy dose of http://web.princeton.edu/sites/opplab/papers/opp%20consequences%20of%20erudite%20vernacular.pdf http://web.princeton.edu/sites/opplab/papers/opp%20consequen...
  - microcolonel 11y ago
    I believe we only need to go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_Law_of_Headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_Law_of_Headline...
  - 21echoes 11y ago
    > > Several crashes later, the gloom has returned, and the signs of autumn are once again most recognizable in the pronouncements of free-market capitalism’s erstwhile boosters. > I tried to read this sentence 3 times now, and I still do not know what it means. The same holds for entire paragraphs. Is that sentence really that hard to read? I mean, it's definitely overly flowery, but it means almost word-for-word "After many financial crises, there is a lot of economic pessimism around again, even among free-market capitalism's biggest proponents."
    - skrebbel 11y ago
      I didn't know an "erstwhile booster" is a person. Therefore, I thought "pronouncements" referred to something legal, instead of just a complicated word for "opinions". My best guess at the meaning of the sentence, therefore, was something completely different and nonsensical. The whole article is like this. Misunderstand one flowery phrase, misunderstand the entire sentence, misunderstand the whole paragraph. It's like the author hates convincing people.
      - 21echoes 11y ago
        https://www.google.com/search?q=define+erstwhile https://www.google.com/search?q=define+erstwhile https://www.google.com/search?q=define+booster https://www.google.com/search?q=define+booster /shrug If those are familiar words to you, then I think it's a little harsh to say that they "hate convincing people" because they use them. Totally agree that a good author edits out rarer words to reach a broader audience, but I think that's a very weak vector of critique for the article as a whole.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- Maarten88 11y ago
  The article is a lot of incoherent rambling indeed. My interpretation: Capitalism is on its last legs, but the "new left" has no idea what will be next, other than there will be robots, there is basic income and it's better than what we have now, just because.
  - 21echoes 11y ago
    He is strongly critiquing the notion that "there will be robots, there is basic income and it's better than what we have now, just because." He labels this notion "Accelerationism", and then the final section tears it apart (even the section discussing it is constantly pointing out its flaws). To wit, the closing paragraph: "Though the times are bad, the accelerationists presume that the state of the left will get better simply because it can, in principle, get better. An imaginative (if implausible) account of the future, accelerationism is a weak account of how anyone might be persuaded to get there. [...] The accelerationists seem to be telling us: forget about [political effort], [automation] will do that work [of distributing power to the masses] for us! But politics can’t get done by machines."
    - puredemo 11y ago
      >But politics can’t get done by machines. Can't it? Democracy is simply voting, which can easily be handled by machines.
      - icen 11y ago
        When you go to vote, are you only ever concerned about the mechanical action to place a cross in a box? There's quite a lot more to politics, and politics in democracy, than just the act of voting.
      - bildung 11y ago
        > Democracy is simply voting, which can easily be handled by machines. Voting is simply voting. If you insist on inventing a new definition, Democracy is a specific mode of a) gathering and representing the political will of the population; and b) a specific mode of forming that political will by the civil society. Voting is just the rather banal part of making the present aggregate political will visible and quantifiable. The most defining part of Democracy happens before the vote.
- 21echoes 11y ago
  TL;DR: The article is lamenting the inability of the modern, technocratic left to offer compelling paths forward out of the current economic stagnation. * The editors point to previous boom/bust cycles, and the tendency of strong workers movements & chains of strikes/riots/unions to emerge during the bust periods and demand an economic shift towards greater workers rights / less control by capitalists. * They then point out that no such strong workers movement is emerging in this bust cycle. * They claim that this is because there is a strong line of "accelerationist" thinking among the modern left (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism). TL;DR on accelerationism: most of HN's libertarian leftism -- embrace automation, adopt basic income, make everyone their own producer (3D printing, off-the-grid electricity, etc.). * The article claims that this movement will not succeed without significant political change alongside its technological advances, and that no such political effort is currently happening, as far as the editors can tell. "The potential alone for this sort of mass liberation isn’t a guarantee that it will ever take place"
  - lifeisstillgood 11y ago
    Thank you. This is not new though is it? " The old divisions of left and right seem to be falling apart and we don't know what's going to replace it yet" The right is now collapsing into isolationist farce (Trunp being the epitome of what has happened across the Western world), the left is, well we aren't sure what. I agree with the final ideas - utopia is not destiny. Thanks
puredemo 11y ago
Such drivel. There is no "after capitalism," unless the concept of economics disappears completely. Capitalism is simply the codification of a monetary transaction to which both parties agree. As long as there is supply and demand (finite resources) there is capitalism. We have democratic socialism to make capitalism less brutal (read: less efficient but more humanizing) but demand is too fickle for most economies to be centralized much beyond that.
- noja 11y ago
  There is "after capitalism": it's after our current flavour of capitalism.
- lumberjack 11y ago
  What we have is welfare states, not democratic socialism.
  - necessity 11y ago
    The majority (representatives) vote a law that says we take money from some and give it to others. Democratic socialism seems like a reasonable name for it, even though it's not necessarily taking from the owners of the means of production nor necessarily giving to the working class. Though I guess welfare state is more "official".
- creshal 11y ago
  > Capitalism is simply the codification of a monetary transaction to which both parties agree. That depends on your definition of "capitalism" and "economy". If you use "capitalism" in contrast to Mercantilism and feudalism – which seems to be a rather unpopular view in English-speaking countries for some reason –, then it makes perfectly sense. Although it would help to actually read it.
  - puredemo 11y ago
    It would help to read... what exactly?
blackhaz 11y ago
I say this stuff is pseudo-intellectual. Painful to read indeed.
- sebastianconcpt 11y ago
  +1 is not worth your time
obrero 11y ago
A point made by Engels in Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State is that over the past 10000 years, the economic system has been completely upended several times. 10000 years ago hunter gatherers lived in primitive communism. Then slave empires arose in the fertile crescent. After Rome was sacked, decentralized feudalism became dominant. We still see its vestiges, England and Japan are ruled by royals, officially. Capitalism began taking hold only a few hundred years ago. It may be permanent in our lifetime, but it will surely be replaced in time. I doubt production will be for the purpose of enriching heirs 10000 years from now, or even 1000 years from now (perhaps even sooner). Marx said capitalism will run its course, until its doing more harm than good. Then it will be replaced by a different system of production.
- vlehto 11y ago
  Hunter-gatherer primitive communism is alive and well. It's called "family". At that scale it's easy to do business without money. Capitalism as in money, trade, loans and private property date back at least to ancient Babylon. If you wish to include "modern" banking in the mix with currency exchange rates, then you go to 1157 Venice or Genoa. What happened hundred years ago was income tax.
vixen99 11y ago
Nearly 1 billion people have been taken out of extreme poverty in 20 years - Economist Magazine. Harnessing the energy of people across the planet by letting them trade with each other has so clearly been a disaster for everyone, has it? Essentially, isn't this capitalism with all its fault lines? One way or another it can be got to work for everyone's advantage.
- JDDunn9 11y ago
  A fair number of those lifted out of poverty were in China. Haiti is still the poorest country in the western hemisphere, despite having capitalism forced on them. A black-and-white view of the world misses a lot. Economies wouldn't function without public utilities, roads, militaries, etc.
  - patrickaljord 11y ago
    Haiti is more of a crony capitalism as it's one of the most corrupted country http://www.heritage.org/index/country/haiti http://www.heritage.org/index/country/haiti
    - JDDunn9 11y ago
      Corruption is highly correlated with poverty. If you play the "no true Scotsman" fallacy with capitalism, where only the least corrupt countries are capitalistic, then by definition they will be wealthier as well.
      - patrickaljord 11y ago
        The USSR was capitalist too, it's just that the government held all of it. You have various kinds of capitalistic models, there is no "true capitalism" so I'm not claiming that all. You have mixed economies like France, Germany or the US where capital is shared between the private sector and the public one, then you have more free market oriented capitalism where capital flows more freely such as Switzerland or Singapour or Hong Kong where public sector holds much less capital. Note that mixed economies also have a decent amount of free market depending on the country. Crony capitalism is when most of the capital is held by the government and its cronies almost exclusively, this is probably one of the worst kinds of capitalism second only maybe to the Soviet model (and yes, they all have elements of cronyism but mixed and free market have much less). tl;dr: the freer the market the better capitalism works. Just have a look at the top freer economies here, they're also the wealthiest http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking
aaronlevin 11y ago
For those struggling with this, the last three paragraphs sum up the author's thesis pretty well. It's actually more of a critique of current leftist ideas (from a Left perspective) than anything. quote: Getting less work seems unlikely to come about without the fight for solidarity, the chief intellectual achievement of the workers’ movement, and one that none of the accelerationists see fit to mention as an ideal worth preserving or even renovating. This is despite the fact that automation—or, more broadly, the increasing precariousness of labor through technologically assisted means—has always been dialectically connected with it. What tech enthusiasts call“disruption” is in fact almost always directed at forms of organization that preserve a modicum of workers’ control over knowledge and the products of labor. Because London taxicabs are controlled by people who have built up impressive maps of one of the world’s most complex cities in their brains, they ought to be replaced by self-driving cars operating on Google Maps. Because high school teachers have professional systems of accreditation and training and have unions to protect these, they must be replaced by lower-paid short-term Ivy-League graduates and cyber charters. Automation isn’t a neutral, inevitable part of capitalism. It comes about through the desire to break formal and informal systems of workers’ control—including unions—and replace them with managerially controlled and minutely surveilled systems of piecework. An entire political and legal infrastructure has been built up to make these so-called tendencies seem like the natural progression of capitalism, rather than the effects of fights—sometimes simple, sometimes violent—to deprive people of whatever sense of control they have over their work. The only reason such work has ever not been totally shitty is that some attempt to preserve such control was made. This — not some implausible notion of a fully automated postwork future—still remains the surest of utopian impulses, the one most likely to deliver the things we want. Though the times are bad, the accelerationists presume that the state of the left will get better simply because it can, in principle, get better. An imaginative (if implausible) account of the future, accelerationism is a weak account of how anyone might be persuaded to get there. We recall Lenin’s comment about how communism would be “Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.” The accelerationists seem to be telling us: forget about the Soviets, the electricity will do that work for us! But politics can’t get done by machines.
kawera 11y ago
Short review of two recently published books around this subject: https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/4960/where-next-for-capitalism https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/4960/where-next-for-capi... I've just started reading Matt Ridley's book and so far an enjoyable read.
acd 11y ago
Here is a recommended read related to the subject Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-...
ggrothendieck 11y ago
The following link is another review of the same book by Paul Mason http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue73/Gillies73.pdf http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue73/Gillies73.pdf but it focuses more on the economic idea, apparently discussed in his book, that the digital economy features a zero marginal cost of production. Now, if the purpose of the economy is to allocate scarce goods what happens when digital goods dominate the economy and have zero marginal cost (wikipedia, arxiv, github, free software, etc.)? The idea that scarcity might disappear would seem to undermine the very foundation driving economic transactions.
ilaksh 11y ago
The way forward is not techno-communism. The problem is not over-competition or over-coorperation but over-centralization. We can get the imagined benefits of techno-communism by getting better at systems integration through wider adoption of improved common technology platforms. For example, what if web assembly had a registry and semantic versioning like Node.js, and that became the standard for integrating B2B, government, and IoT? This would be a programming-language agnostic system. Systems for things like digital democracy, smart contracts, etc. could be easily deployed, integrated, and evolved. See http://www.reddit.com/r/rad_decentralization http://www.reddit.com/r/rad_decentralization and http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage

55 points by kawera 11y ago

I tried, honestly I tried. I tried to read it. I wanted to see the arguments because this is an area of interest to me. But I can't write a tl;dr - it would not sink in my brain. Part overview of the area, part, something else, I really have no idea what the author was trying to say Please enlighten me

tim333 11y ago
I gave it a quick try but it was too painful. TL;DR discusses various lefties waffling about what'll happen when the robots do the jobs, I think.
brian-armstrong 11y ago
He's saying that peoples' rights will be protected through the action of the worker, not through new technology. There is something of a meme right now that we will singularity our way into a utopian era of plenty. The author is saying that this isn't something we get automatically, that the middle and lower class have to continue to struggle in order to benefit from advances in automation and dramatic increases in productivity.
skrebbel 11y ago
This. I mean, > Several crashes later, the gloom has returned, and the signs of autumn are once again most recognizable in the pronouncements of free-market capitalism’s erstwhile boosters. I tried to read this sentence 3 times now, and I still do not know what it means. The same holds for entire paragraphs. IMO the author needs a healthy dose of http://web.princeton.edu/sites/opplab/papers/opp%20consequences%20of%20erudite%20vernacular.pdf http://web.princeton.edu/sites/opplab/papers/opp%20consequen...
- microcolonel 11y ago
  I believe we only need to go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_Law_of_Headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_Law_of_Headline...
- 21echoes 11y ago
  > > Several crashes later, the gloom has returned, and the signs of autumn are once again most recognizable in the pronouncements of free-market capitalism’s erstwhile boosters. > I tried to read this sentence 3 times now, and I still do not know what it means. The same holds for entire paragraphs. Is that sentence really that hard to read? I mean, it's definitely overly flowery, but it means almost word-for-word "After many financial crises, there is a lot of economic pessimism around again, even among free-market capitalism's biggest proponents."
  - skrebbel 11y ago
    I didn't know an "erstwhile booster" is a person. Therefore, I thought "pronouncements" referred to something legal, instead of just a complicated word for "opinions". My best guess at the meaning of the sentence, therefore, was something completely different and nonsensical. The whole article is like this. Misunderstand one flowery phrase, misunderstand the entire sentence, misunderstand the whole paragraph. It's like the author hates convincing people.
    - 21echoes 11y ago
      https://www.google.com/search?q=define+erstwhile https://www.google.com/search?q=define+erstwhile https://www.google.com/search?q=define+booster https://www.google.com/search?q=define+booster /shrug If those are familiar words to you, then I think it's a little harsh to say that they "hate convincing people" because they use them. Totally agree that a good author edits out rarer words to reach a broader audience, but I think that's a very weak vector of critique for the article as a whole.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Maarten88 11y ago
The article is a lot of incoherent rambling indeed. My interpretation: Capitalism is on its last legs, but the "new left" has no idea what will be next, other than there will be robots, there is basic income and it's better than what we have now, just because.
- 21echoes 11y ago
  He is strongly critiquing the notion that "there will be robots, there is basic income and it's better than what we have now, just because." He labels this notion "Accelerationism", and then the final section tears it apart (even the section discussing it is constantly pointing out its flaws). To wit, the closing paragraph: "Though the times are bad, the accelerationists presume that the state of the left will get better simply because it can, in principle, get better. An imaginative (if implausible) account of the future, accelerationism is a weak account of how anyone might be persuaded to get there. [...] The accelerationists seem to be telling us: forget about [political effort], [automation] will do that work [of distributing power to the masses] for us! But politics can’t get done by machines."
  - puredemo 11y ago
    >But politics can’t get done by machines. Can't it? Democracy is simply voting, which can easily be handled by machines.
    - icen 11y ago
      When you go to vote, are you only ever concerned about the mechanical action to place a cross in a box? There's quite a lot more to politics, and politics in democracy, than just the act of voting.
    - bildung 11y ago
      > Democracy is simply voting, which can easily be handled by machines. Voting is simply voting. If you insist on inventing a new definition, Democracy is a specific mode of a) gathering and representing the political will of the population; and b) a specific mode of forming that political will by the civil society. Voting is just the rather banal part of making the present aggregate political will visible and quantifiable. The most defining part of Democracy happens before the vote.
21echoes 11y ago
TL;DR: The article is lamenting the inability of the modern, technocratic left to offer compelling paths forward out of the current economic stagnation. * The editors point to previous boom/bust cycles, and the tendency of strong workers movements & chains of strikes/riots/unions to emerge during the bust periods and demand an economic shift towards greater workers rights / less control by capitalists. * They then point out that no such strong workers movement is emerging in this bust cycle. * They claim that this is because there is a strong line of "accelerationist" thinking among the modern left (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism). TL;DR on accelerationism: most of HN's libertarian leftism -- embrace automation, adopt basic income, make everyone their own producer (3D printing, off-the-grid electricity, etc.). * The article claims that this movement will not succeed without significant political change alongside its technological advances, and that no such political effort is currently happening, as far as the editors can tell. "The potential alone for this sort of mass liberation isn’t a guarantee that it will ever take place"
- lifeisstillgood 11y ago
  Thank you. This is not new though is it? " The old divisions of left and right seem to be falling apart and we don't know what's going to replace it yet" The right is now collapsing into isolationist farce (Trunp being the epitome of what has happened across the Western world), the left is, well we aren't sure what. I agree with the final ideas - utopia is not destiny. Thanks

puredemo 11y ago

Such drivel. There is no "after capitalism," unless the concept of economics disappears completely. Capitalism is simply the codification of a monetary transaction to which both parties agree. As long as there is supply and demand (finite resources) there is capitalism. We have democratic socialism to make capitalism less brutal (read: less efficient but more humanizing) but demand is too fickle for most economies to be centralized much beyond that.

noja 11y ago
There is "after capitalism": it's after our current flavour of capitalism.
lumberjack 11y ago
What we have is welfare states, not democratic socialism.
- necessity 11y ago
  The majority (representatives) vote a law that says we take money from some and give it to others. Democratic socialism seems like a reasonable name for it, even though it's not necessarily taking from the owners of the means of production nor necessarily giving to the working class. Though I guess welfare state is more "official".
creshal 11y ago
> Capitalism is simply the codification of a monetary transaction to which both parties agree. That depends on your definition of "capitalism" and "economy". If you use "capitalism" in contrast to Mercantilism and feudalism – which seems to be a rather unpopular view in English-speaking countries for some reason –, then it makes perfectly sense. Although it would help to actually read it.
- puredemo 11y ago
  It would help to read... what exactly?

blackhaz 11y ago

I say this stuff is pseudo-intellectual. Painful to read indeed.

sebastianconcpt 11y ago
+1 is not worth your time

obrero 11y ago

A point made by Engels in Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State is that over the past 10000 years, the economic system has been completely upended several times. 10000 years ago hunter gatherers lived in primitive communism. Then slave empires arose in the fertile crescent. After Rome was sacked, decentralized feudalism became dominant. We still see its vestiges, England and Japan are ruled by royals, officially. Capitalism began taking hold only a few hundred years ago. It may be permanent in our lifetime, but it will surely be replaced in time. I doubt production will be for the purpose of enriching heirs 10000 years from now, or even 1000 years from now (perhaps even sooner). Marx said capitalism will run its course, until its doing more harm than good. Then it will be replaced by a different system of production.

vlehto 11y ago
Hunter-gatherer primitive communism is alive and well. It's called "family". At that scale it's easy to do business without money. Capitalism as in money, trade, loans and private property date back at least to ancient Babylon. If you wish to include "modern" banking in the mix with currency exchange rates, then you go to 1157 Venice or Genoa. What happened hundred years ago was income tax.

vixen99 11y ago

Nearly 1 billion people have been taken out of extreme poverty in 20 years - Economist Magazine. Harnessing the energy of people across the planet by letting them trade with each other has so clearly been a disaster for everyone, has it? Essentially, isn't this capitalism with all its fault lines? One way or another it can be got to work for everyone's advantage.

JDDunn9 11y ago
A fair number of those lifted out of poverty were in China. Haiti is still the poorest country in the western hemisphere, despite having capitalism forced on them. A black-and-white view of the world misses a lot. Economies wouldn't function without public utilities, roads, militaries, etc.
- patrickaljord 11y ago
  Haiti is more of a crony capitalism as it's one of the most corrupted country http://www.heritage.org/index/country/haiti http://www.heritage.org/index/country/haiti
  - JDDunn9 11y ago
    Corruption is highly correlated with poverty. If you play the "no true Scotsman" fallacy with capitalism, where only the least corrupt countries are capitalistic, then by definition they will be wealthier as well.
    - patrickaljord 11y ago
      The USSR was capitalist too, it's just that the government held all of it. You have various kinds of capitalistic models, there is no "true capitalism" so I'm not claiming that all. You have mixed economies like France, Germany or the US where capital is shared between the private sector and the public one, then you have more free market oriented capitalism where capital flows more freely such as Switzerland or Singapour or Hong Kong where public sector holds much less capital. Note that mixed economies also have a decent amount of free market depending on the country. Crony capitalism is when most of the capital is held by the government and its cronies almost exclusively, this is probably one of the worst kinds of capitalism second only maybe to the Soviet model (and yes, they all have elements of cronyism but mixed and free market have much less). tl;dr: the freer the market the better capitalism works. Just have a look at the top freer economies here, they're also the wealthiest http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking

aaronlevin 11y ago

For those struggling with this, the last three paragraphs sum up the author's thesis pretty well. It's actually more of a critique of current leftist ideas (from a Left perspective) than anything. quote: Getting less work seems unlikely to come about without the fight for solidarity, the chief intellectual achievement of the workers’ movement, and one that none of the accelerationists see fit to mention as an ideal worth preserving or even renovating. This is despite the fact that automation—or, more broadly, the increasing precariousness of labor through technologically assisted means—has always been dialectically connected with it. What tech enthusiasts call“disruption” is in fact almost always directed at forms of organization that preserve a modicum of workers’ control over knowledge and the products of labor. Because London taxicabs are controlled by people who have built up impressive maps of one of the world’s most complex cities in their brains, they ought to be replaced by self-driving cars operating on Google Maps. Because high school teachers have professional systems of accreditation and training and have unions to protect these, they must be replaced by lower-paid short-term Ivy-League graduates and cyber charters. Automation isn’t a neutral, inevitable part of capitalism. It comes about through the desire to break formal and informal systems of workers’ control—including unions—and replace them with managerially controlled and minutely surveilled systems of piecework. An entire political and legal infrastructure has been built up to make these so-called tendencies seem like the natural progression of capitalism, rather than the effects of fights—sometimes simple, sometimes violent—to deprive people of whatever sense of control they have over their work. The only reason such work has ever not been totally shitty is that some attempt to preserve such control was made. This — not some implausible notion of a fully automated postwork future—still remains the surest of utopian impulses, the one most likely to deliver the things we want. Though the times are bad, the accelerationists presume that the state of the left will get better simply because it can, in principle, get better. An imaginative (if implausible) account of the future, accelerationism is a weak account of how anyone might be persuaded to get there. We recall Lenin’s comment about how communism would be “Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.” The accelerationists seem to be telling us: forget about the Soviets, the electricity will do that work for us! But politics can’t get done by machines.

kawera 11y ago

Short review of two recently published books around this subject: https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/4960/where-next-for-capitalism https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/4960/where-next-for-capi... I've just started reading Matt Ridley's book and so far an enjoyable read.

acd 11y ago

Here is a recommended read related to the subject Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-...

ggrothendieck 11y ago

The following link is another review of the same book by Paul Mason http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue73/Gillies73.pdf http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue73/Gillies73.pdf but it focuses more on the economic idea, apparently discussed in his book, that the digital economy features a zero marginal cost of production. Now, if the purpose of the economy is to allocate scarce goods what happens when digital goods dominate the economy and have zero marginal cost (wikipedia, arxiv, github, free software, etc.)? The idea that scarcity might disappear would seem to undermine the very foundation driving economic transactions.

ilaksh 11y ago

The way forward is not techno-communism. The problem is not over-competition or over-coorperation but over-centralization. We can get the imagined benefits of techno-communism by getting better at systems integration through wider adoption of improved common technology platforms. For example, what if web assembly had a registry and semantic versioning like Node.js, and that became the standard for integrating B2B, government, and IoT? This would be a programming-language agnostic system. Systems for things like digital democracy, smart contracts, etc. could be easily deployed, integrated, and evolved. See http://www.reddit.com/r/rad_decentralization http://www.reddit.com/r/rad_decentralization and http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage