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There are tail wagging dog problems. Is the purpose of an economic system to generate the largest pile of capital and damn those obnoxious humans for getting i
by VLM 10y ago
There are tail wagging dog problems.
Is the purpose of an economic system to generate the largest pile of capital and damn those obnoxious humans for getting in the way or expecting a quality life or even expecting to survive? Whats important is the piles of money in themselves.
Or is the purpose of an economic system to make people happy... or happy enough, anyway?
The French Revolution can be looked at on a large scale of trying to run a sem-industrial pre-industrial nation using an agricultural medieval economic operating system. It simply didn't work anymore and the population was suffering horribly from it. Trying to do the wrong, old fashioned thing harder, mostly resulted in making people even unhappier and more guillotine chops in the end. Likewise if the capitalist system means almost everyone is going to be very poor, very angry, and very desperate, then trying to do more of the same old thing that screwed everything up is just going to result in the guillotines being busier sooner this time around.
Not so much OPs post, but I see a lot of free floating condescension on HN along the lines of, well, I guess people with an IQ below 120 just won't be participating in the economy anymore. Oh they had the misfortune of being born in the wrong geographic area? Their parents weren't rich, too bad. Should have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. Won't happen to me. As for them, well all thats certain is it sure sucks to be them! However realize that historically "it sucks to be them" for only a certain integrated quantity of suck and time, before heads start filling baskets and things are much worse in the short term and staggeringly better in the long term.
No man has ever watched his child starve and die, thinking to himself, well, it was for the maximal efficient allocation of capital, so its OK, in fact here's my other kid, if it'll only help boost the DJIA some more.
- AndrewKemendo 10y agoOr is the purpose of an economic system to make people happy... or happy enough, anyway? There is no purpose. Markets arise out of aggregated self interest eg. I need to eat and I can work on something that someone else wants that they will give me food for; or I want to play sports, people will pay to watch me play sports. The history of humanity is that we build technologies that optimize for most efficiently satisfying human needs and wants and we are doing amazingly well at it. Worldwide poverty is at an all time low, violent deaths are at an all time low etc... Currently the majority of humanity choose not to produce their basic food needs, so about 2% of people do that work. Ok, now extend that to everything, both need and want. In such a system if an individual wants to build their own X and company Y produces it more efficiently, and the plurality of others choose that more efficient one, then they will not be able to compete and there is nothing for them to do. It's not a value proposition it's a math problem. It's also not condescension, it's reality. Do you feel bad for horse carriage makers?