10 ms·

The essay suffers from Ted-talk disease: lots of grand gestures and bromides, not as much rigorous thinking. The underlying problem is an important one, howeve

The essay suffers from Ted-talk disease: lots of grand gestures and bromides, not as much rigorous thinking. The underlying problem is an important one, however. A little-discussed solution to this problem is one I would like to see tried, distributism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism A book I am currently reading (and enjoying) on it is: https://www.amazon.com/Toward-Truly-Free-Market-Distributist/dp/161017027X/ https://www.amazon.com/Toward-Truly-Free-Market-Distributist...

jonah 10y ago
Another vote for Distributism but combined with Subsidiarity and Solidarity.
jjoonathan 10y ago
It's good to be able to put a name to this. I had come to the same conclusion privately but never knew the term to point to. The real question is "when?". The costs of distributed manufacturing currently make distributionism less-than-viable (see: communes), but those costs decrease as technology advances, while the rents imposed by centralization do not, and perhaps even increase. There will be a crossing point. Services are the sticky bit. Goods alone can't replace doctors, lawyers, and the like, at least not yet. On the timescale of the "crossing point" I'm less sure. Fortunately, they might not have to -- anything we can do to decrease the urgency of the "mandate to make money" serves as a relief valve for the oversupply of labor and decreases the toxicity of the market, even if it doesn't eliminate it.
alexmingoia 10y ago
> Under such a system, most people would be able to earn a living without having to rely on the use of the property of others to do so. Examples of people earning a living in this way would be farmers who own their own land and related machinery, plumbers who own their own tools, software developers who own their own computer Nonsense. Our abundance is increased by specialization not a lack of it. Specialization and trade allow for higher-order goods to be used as inputs to produce lower-order goods. Farming doesn't just require a tractor and some land. You need fuel to run the tractor, other industries to come together to make the tractor, a merchant to purchase the tractor from, and on and on. It does not follow that owning more things related to a trade will produce more things. The opposite is the case, it's cheaper for the farmer to buy the tractor than produce tractors himself.
- ken47 10y ago
  You are assuming abundance is the issue. It is not.
- lucideer 10y ago
  Generally speaking, I agree with the overall content of your post. However your first and last sentences really emphasise for me the real problem: oversimplifying and stratifying the discussion. "Nonsense" is an extreme overstatement, there are nuances to both arguments. "This is economics 101" is exactly the problem: we're dealing with an economic system that isn't working. Questioning economics 101 is precisely what's needed, and I'd argue that while your arguments are sound, they've been treated as absolutes, which they're not. A farmer needs to buy their tractor from a tractor manufacturer and fuel it from a fuel extractor/generator, but not everyone need be involved in this cycle and not every step need be specialised in a completely unary manner. Also, the emphasis on individual economic efficiency over efficiency of communal benefit is important: if a farmer can produce less - but sufficient - food, for less - but sufficient - material profit, while not producing negative impacts for others elsewhere in the economic system at large, that's a more "efficient" overall system. The most important word in the excerpt you quoted is "most"
  - sqeaky 10y ago
    How do you build a system that is stable where an individual is expected to leave some personal gain on the table? That runs entirely counter to human nature. If you can solve that you may have something workable, but without it "Nonsense" is as good a word as any.
    - bjelkeman-again 10y ago
      Really? In Northern Europe I would argue we have this working decently well. To point where we have a health care system and educational system which is both less expensive than some and more productive/effective at the same time.
      - 10y ago
amelius 10y ago
> The essay suffers from Ted-talk disease: lots of grand gestures and bromides Most Ted-presenters can be characterized as people trying to become thought-leaders. Not sure if it is the case here.
hitekker 10y ago
Related to Ted-talk disease: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tom6_ceTu9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tom6_ceTu9s The Youtube comments enhance the experience.
lumberjack 10y ago
I don't see the point of Distributism. Capitalism in reality doesn't work like that and no methods are laid out on how to achieve that kind of different capitalism. I personally don't even think it's possible. It's just another form of utopian idealism.
CuriousSkeptic 10y ago
Thanks for the pointer, a new word for me. In my own thinking I've been leaning towards representing the commons, with some institution, as the sole owner of property, aiming for a good distribution by renting instead. I see some similarities of sentiment. Perhaps even the same thought taken to an extreme? The distribution coming from two aspects. The income form rent is itself distributed evenly constituting a basic income for all. Some form of auctioning should ensure that the rent represents the current value, it also ensures the resource being allocated to the highest bidder (the one capable of providing the highest value use for the resource). Since resources must be rented also avoiding the feedback loops that encourage hoarding of capital just for rent extraction. Thoughts in that direction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism
ChuckMcM 10y ago
I agree with your assessment of a lack of rigor in the Aeon article, I'll reserve judgment on the topic until I can peruse the book (which presumably takes the time to build a foundation for some of the claims made in the article). That said, the central notion of Distributism is property ownership, and that it was one of the philosophy's of the founding fathers for the US that property ownership, and property ownership rights, were fundamental to preserving the independence of the individual. (here is an article attributed to Madison [http://www.vindicatingthefounders.com/library/madison-property.html http://www.vindicatingthefounders.com/library/madison-proper...] but this topic comes up often in the Federalist Papers) The challenge of course is that most of this thinking was done in the 'goods' economy and not in the 'information' economy. Using distributism to illustrate a topic that is often robustly debated here, consider the computer programmer who writes a program on his computer. The fruit of his property (the program) is just as much his property in the founding father's view as is the corn from a farmer's field. And yet this "property of the mind" or intellectual property is often criticized as being a fiction created in order to support rent seeking practices. The for argument starts from the notion of property, the against argument starts from the notion that information has no intrinsic value. Turning this around yet a third way, and why I believe that Dr. Livingston is incorrect in his conclusions, when you invalidate or work around legal restrictions on profiting from ones property (as AirBnB and Uber have done), you see a rapid uptick in GDP from works using their property for additional income. While I find Livingston's observations compelling, my interpretation is more along with Piketty's in that the regulation of labor in favor of structures which are more rent seeking creates artificial barriers to entry. And work ethic or not, most people work, it seems, in order to trade their skills for a currency that lets them trade back for other needs where they lack the skill or the time to procure. Either way, its a complex topic and if you're really interested in the topic spend some time on Google's newspaper archives (https://news.google.com/newspapers https://news.google.com/newspapers) and browse stories written during the great depression about how the world was doomed and people would never work again because of the permanent displacement of labor.
elihu 10y ago
> "Around the start of the 20th century, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc drew together the disparate experiences of the various cooperatives and friendly societies in Northern England, Ireland, and Northern Europe into a coherent political ideology which specifically advocated widespread private ownership of housing and control of industry through owner-operated small businesses and worker-controlled cooperatives. In the United States in the 1930s, distributism was treated in numerous essays by Chesterton, Belloc and others in The American Review, published and edited by Seward Collins. Pivotal among Belloc's and Chesterton's other works regarding distributism are The Servile State,[33] and Outline of Sanity.[34]" That's interesting that Chesterton was an advocate of distributism. I've read a couple of his books, but but I wasn't aware of his political/social views.
throwaway1974 10y ago
2016 when old ideas get new names distributism > communism altright > fascism
srtjstjsj 10y ago
Distributivism is the classic American Dream: own your own home and small business. It's a "balance of power" that resists hegemony. To create a distributive economy: taxing the wealth, and have strong anti-trust law, and strong individual rights (but not "Koch/Soros" style individual writes to extreme amounts of speech rights in the form of lobbying dollars). America's greatest success has come from its distributive policies. Sadly, we are moving away from those.

jonah 10y ago

Another vote for Distributism but combined with Subsidiarity and Solidarity.

jjoonathan 10y ago

It's good to be able to put a name to this. I had come to the same conclusion privately but never knew the term to point to. The real question is "when?". The costs of distributed manufacturing currently make distributionism less-than-viable (see: communes), but those costs decrease as technology advances, while the rents imposed by centralization do not, and perhaps even increase. There will be a crossing point. Services are the sticky bit. Goods alone can't replace doctors, lawyers, and the like, at least not yet. On the timescale of the "crossing point" I'm less sure. Fortunately, they might not have to -- anything we can do to decrease the urgency of the "mandate to make money" serves as a relief valve for the oversupply of labor and decreases the toxicity of the market, even if it doesn't eliminate it.

alexmingoia 10y ago

> Under such a system, most people would be able to earn a living without having to rely on the use of the property of others to do so. Examples of people earning a living in this way would be farmers who own their own land and related machinery, plumbers who own their own tools, software developers who own their own computer Nonsense. Our abundance is increased by specialization not a lack of it. Specialization and trade allow for higher-order goods to be used as inputs to produce lower-order goods. Farming doesn't just require a tractor and some land. You need fuel to run the tractor, other industries to come together to make the tractor, a merchant to purchase the tractor from, and on and on. It does not follow that owning more things related to a trade will produce more things. The opposite is the case, it's cheaper for the farmer to buy the tractor than produce tractors himself.

ken47 10y ago
You are assuming abundance is the issue. It is not.
lucideer 10y ago
Generally speaking, I agree with the overall content of your post. However your first and last sentences really emphasise for me the real problem: oversimplifying and stratifying the discussion. "Nonsense" is an extreme overstatement, there are nuances to both arguments. "This is economics 101" is exactly the problem: we're dealing with an economic system that isn't working. Questioning economics 101 is precisely what's needed, and I'd argue that while your arguments are sound, they've been treated as absolutes, which they're not. A farmer needs to buy their tractor from a tractor manufacturer and fuel it from a fuel extractor/generator, but not everyone need be involved in this cycle and not every step need be specialised in a completely unary manner. Also, the emphasis on individual economic efficiency over efficiency of communal benefit is important: if a farmer can produce less - but sufficient - food, for less - but sufficient - material profit, while not producing negative impacts for others elsewhere in the economic system at large, that's a more "efficient" overall system. The most important word in the excerpt you quoted is "most"
- sqeaky 10y ago
  How do you build a system that is stable where an individual is expected to leave some personal gain on the table? That runs entirely counter to human nature. If you can solve that you may have something workable, but without it "Nonsense" is as good a word as any.
  - bjelkeman-again 10y ago
    Really? In Northern Europe I would argue we have this working decently well. To point where we have a health care system and educational system which is both less expensive than some and more productive/effective at the same time.
    - 10y ago

amelius 10y ago

> The essay suffers from Ted-talk disease: lots of grand gestures and bromides Most Ted-presenters can be characterized as people trying to become thought-leaders. Not sure if it is the case here.

hitekker 10y ago

Related to Ted-talk disease: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tom6_ceTu9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tom6_ceTu9s The Youtube comments enhance the experience.

lumberjack 10y ago

I don't see the point of Distributism. Capitalism in reality doesn't work like that and no methods are laid out on how to achieve that kind of different capitalism. I personally don't even think it's possible. It's just another form of utopian idealism.

CuriousSkeptic 10y ago

Thanks for the pointer, a new word for me. In my own thinking I've been leaning towards representing the commons, with some institution, as the sole owner of property, aiming for a good distribution by renting instead. I see some similarities of sentiment. Perhaps even the same thought taken to an extreme? The distribution coming from two aspects. The income form rent is itself distributed evenly constituting a basic income for all. Some form of auctioning should ensure that the rent represents the current value, it also ensures the resource being allocated to the highest bidder (the one capable of providing the highest value use for the resource). Since resources must be rented also avoiding the feedback loops that encourage hoarding of capital just for rent extraction. Thoughts in that direction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism

ChuckMcM 10y ago

I agree with your assessment of a lack of rigor in the Aeon article, I'll reserve judgment on the topic until I can peruse the book (which presumably takes the time to build a foundation for some of the claims made in the article). That said, the central notion of Distributism is property ownership, and that it was one of the philosophy's of the founding fathers for the US that property ownership, and property ownership rights, were fundamental to preserving the independence of the individual. (here is an article attributed to Madison [http://www.vindicatingthefounders.com/library/madison-property.html http://www.vindicatingthefounders.com/library/madison-proper...] but this topic comes up often in the Federalist Papers) The challenge of course is that most of this thinking was done in the 'goods' economy and not in the 'information' economy. Using distributism to illustrate a topic that is often robustly debated here, consider the computer programmer who writes a program on his computer. The fruit of his property (the program) is just as much his property in the founding father's view as is the corn from a farmer's field. And yet this "property of the mind" or intellectual property is often criticized as being a fiction created in order to support rent seeking practices. The for argument starts from the notion of property, the against argument starts from the notion that information has no intrinsic value. Turning this around yet a third way, and why I believe that Dr. Livingston is incorrect in his conclusions, when you invalidate or work around legal restrictions on profiting from ones property (as AirBnB and Uber have done), you see a rapid uptick in GDP from works using their property for additional income. While I find Livingston's observations compelling, my interpretation is more along with Piketty's in that the regulation of labor in favor of structures which are more rent seeking creates artificial barriers to entry. And work ethic or not, most people work, it seems, in order to trade their skills for a currency that lets them trade back for other needs where they lack the skill or the time to procure. Either way, its a complex topic and if you're really interested in the topic spend some time on Google's newspaper archives (https://news.google.com/newspapers https://news.google.com/newspapers) and browse stories written during the great depression about how the world was doomed and people would never work again because of the permanent displacement of labor.

elihu 10y ago

> "Around the start of the 20th century, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc drew together the disparate experiences of the various cooperatives and friendly societies in Northern England, Ireland, and Northern Europe into a coherent political ideology which specifically advocated widespread private ownership of housing and control of industry through owner-operated small businesses and worker-controlled cooperatives. In the United States in the 1930s, distributism was treated in numerous essays by Chesterton, Belloc and others in The American Review, published and edited by Seward Collins. Pivotal among Belloc's and Chesterton's other works regarding distributism are The Servile State,[33] and Outline of Sanity.[34]" That's interesting that Chesterton was an advocate of distributism. I've read a couple of his books, but but I wasn't aware of his political/social views.

throwaway1974 10y ago

2016 when old ideas get new names distributism > communism altright > fascism

srtjstjsj 10y ago

Distributivism is the classic American Dream: own your own home and small business. It's a "balance of power" that resists hegemony. To create a distributive economy: taxing the wealth, and have strong anti-trust law, and strong individual rights (but not "Koch/Soros" style individual writes to extreme amounts of speech rights in the form of lobbying dollars). America's greatest success has come from its distributive policies. Sadly, we are moving away from those.