9 ms·

Because criticizing capitalism is like criticizing gravity. It objectively works as a method for optimizing allocation of resources for the progress of society,

by kobeya 9y ago

Because criticizing capitalism is like criticizing gravity. It objectively works as a method for optimizing allocation of resources for the progress of society, as measured by metrics like GDP per capita. Saying capitalism doesn't work is the economic equivalent of being a flat earther. So if you are saying something that sounds like "capitalism doesn't work", you'd better phrase it as "capitalism as practiced today works but is suboptimal" if you want to not be automatically dropped in the looney bin category.

substack 9y ago
GDP has its own limitations, as it measures aggregate economic activity and does not take into consideration things like wealth distribution, environmental impact, unrenumerated labor. Further, imagine a society where everyone must pay for something that used to be free, like breathable air. If air becomes commodified, GDP goes up, but quality of life goes down as something that was previously a public good enters the realm of private profit. Extrapolate for various kinds of state-run services. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product#Limitations_and_criticisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product#Limitat...
RealityNow 9y ago
Not sure if you were being sarcastic, but to equate criticizing capitalism to being a "flat earther" is absurd. Economics is not a science. Capitalism has a ton of flaws, just talk to the masses in poverty in America. The fact that we ignore this while fixating on flawed metrics like GDP is a huge problem.
- kobeya 9y ago
  I assure you I am not being sarcastic. By history and by the objective metrics used by economists capitalism works and alternatives tried do not. There are two legitimate criticisms of this I'm aware of: (1) capitalism is less optimal than scheme X that has never been tried yet, or (2) the metrics used by economists doesn't measure what we should value--maximizing them doesn't necessarily result in optimal outcomes, as measured by better social utility metrics that we should be using instead. TFA falls in the first category as it makes an argument (which I believe btw) that interest rate policies in place result in net transfers of wealth from poor to rich since the 80's. I could also believe arguments that free market capitalism is a form of local gradient ascent of the GDP landscape that does anticipate or react to global or systemic risks like global warming. I could also believe an argument that our metrics of societal prosperity don't measure what we really want, which is a moral judgement about whether the society is better or not. E.g. if all the wealth gets concentrated in the 1% and the remaining 99% becomes figurative or even literal slaves, that's probably a worse outcome even if productivity increases. The problem is that while it is easy to cook up such what-if thought experiments, it is not easy to quantify the result into a mathematical model of moral social utility. Come up with such an objective, measurable metric and economists will start using it. Seriously try coming up with one and you will see why no one has. Moral philosophy is still a field of philosophic arguments, not solved problems.
  - arthur_pryor 9y ago
    ok, first, i appreciate your more fleshed out argument here. > The problem is that while it is easy to cook up such what-if thought experiments, it is not easy to quantify the result into a mathematical model of moral social utility. that said... you seem to be implying that we should do things only if we can make decisions using a well understood objective model with easily measurable inputs and outputs. but if that model leads us to a world that i'd characterize as a moral travesty ("all the wealth gets concentrated in the 1% and the remaining 99% becomes literal slaves"), i'll take my chances with the thing that's hard to quantify that might get us a better outcome. and maybe that'll lead to even worse suffering. but seems worth a shot. EDIT: as a deeply logical person who greatly values the scientific method, i understand the desire to come up with a model of morality that has strong mathematical foundations, which can have its tenets checked against empirical evidence to provide us with something closer to a mechanically produced answer to a moral question. but i don't think we're there yet. and i think to some degree, it's fundamentally impossible, but i think we could get closer, and i think beyond some core moral tenets, it is best to optimize in a utilitarian way. but before we start the optimizing, i want to prevent things like slavery, or even de facto indentured servitude. i wish i could provide you with something like a mathematical proof of why indentured servitude is bad, but i'm going to keep operating on the premise that it's bad, despite the fact that i can't prove it in a mathematically rigorous way.
    - EGreg 9y ago
      May I suggest that most non-sociopaths would like to see their society maximize the minimum of what people have, rather than minimize the maximum? It goes by many names Unconditional Basic Income Negative Income Tax Social safety nets Single Payer systems Or various Welfare schemes
      - kobeya 9y ago
        Ah so if I disagree with you I'm a sociopath? That's not a friendly rhetorical tactic btw. It may not be obvious, but your post is not critiquing capitalism. Free-market capitalism is solution in the space of how we decide to allocate scarce resources. It stands mostly in contrast to various forms of collectivism and central decision making (socialism). Take UBI/negative income tax since it is most relevant to the linked article. UBI is the equivalent of saying that rather than construct our incentive models in such a delicately balanced way as to target a specific value of τ, the wealth redistribution constant, let's just forceably redistribute wealth by that amount. It's only non-capitalist in the sense that any form of taxation and central governance structure is non-capitalist, but of possible welfare schemes it is probably the most capitalist -- it punts the issue of how those funds should be spent and lets their new owners decide.
- dsacco 9y ago
  > Economics is not a science. Yes it is. Economics is a social science, like psychology and archaeology. The empirical precision of physics and chemistry are not required for a discipline to be scientific; standards of rigor and reproducibility in methodology are. Moreover there is a significant amount of rigor in much of economics, despite widespread memes that the entire discipline is wanton fluff. That aside, we encounter flaws and unresolved problems in many theories in every scientific field of study. A coherent argument can be posited that denying the supremacy of capitalism as a broad, categorical model is analogous to denying that the Earth is round. I don't necessarily endorse this view, but there is enough evidence to construct a sane backing for that position. It's not absurd, even if it's not absolutely correct. We need not understand everything about gravity or resolve all issues pertinent to its existence to more or less agree on the main points. Similarly, for specific definitions of social stability, productivity and happiness, capitalism is demonstably superlative given the implementation track record.
  - kobeya 9y ago
    > supremacy of capitalism Efficacy is more the word I would have gone for, compared against other systems we have historical evidence for.
    - EGreg 9y ago
      Would you call the system on which Open Source Software and Free Software operates capitalism? How about Science? How about Wikipedia? How about languages, is someone paying someone for using a word? Because these systems have led to a lot more advancement, when people can collaborate and add to a growing snowball of work. Wikipedia beat Britannica. Linux + BSD beat Windows. WebKit beat IE. Apache and NGinX beat IIS. Most languages are open source. And so on. And yet in drugs we still have the patent system. And the superbugs are back because we run out of antibiotics. And the USA which has the most patents also pays the most per capita for the same drugs. Who wins from these monopolies? And before you say that Intellectual Property shouldn't be considered property, throwing other anarcho-capitalists under the bus, consider this: if people shouldn't own ideas, should people be able to own large bodies of air, water, land, etc. that they personally will never use? Will that make them more or less likely to become polluted for example?" The same John Locke who popularized the idea of homesteading or "mixing one's labor with the land" as anarcho-capitalists' favorite way to theoretically paper over acquision of natural resources in their theory also emphatically said that a man shouldn't own too much land. Yet that's what Capitalism is. At its core it is about granting PROPERTY to private entities and enforcing it. PROPERTY IS A MONOPOLY RIGHT TO EXCLUDE OTHERS FROM THE USE OF A RESOURCE. And pure unfettered Capitalism recognizes no limits on who can own what, as long as the what isn't other people.
musage 9y ago
Capitalism only works in optimizing those things it measures in the first place. Progress of society does not even enter into it, at all. If 300 million people had nothing and screamed in pain all day, and one person had it it all and multiplied it by X, the GDP would be multiplied by X. So what kind of measure is that? I also find it interesting that nobody even mentioned capitalism "not working". The comment said that any mention of capitalism is often followed by generic praises. I guess another form of that is "capitalism brought us great things, and is better than the alternatives we had so far, but [criticism of some aspects or consquences of it]" -- which acknowledges that it "works", just like using coal to heat your home works, like many things undeniably work; yet even that would raise the above question, how come it's treated like a religion? If it's so great, why so defensive to the point of scoring own goals?
- kobeya 9y ago
  > Capitalism only works in optimizing those things it measures in the first place. Progress of society does not even enter into it, at all. If 300 million people had nothing and screamed in pain all day, and one person had it it all and multiplied it by X, the GDP would be multiplied by X. So what kind of measure is that? A utilitarian would say that is a equal outcome to everyone having equal measures of happiness.
  - arthur_pryor 9y ago
    > A utilitarian would say that is a equal outcome to everyone having equal measures of happiness. lots of people (myself included) would strongly posit that utilitarianism is a thoroughly incomplete foundation for a moral framework. to be clear, i think it's absurd and callous to treat those outcomes as equal for anything other than a back of the envelope calculation or a thought experiment. if you're going to put forward a philosophy 101 idea, at least do the philosophy 101 level work of trying to defend a controversial point of view against charitable objections.
    - kobeya 9y ago
      My point is that you cannot replace GDP with a better metric of societal "goodness" without objectivity defining "good", and that is an unsolved problem.
BoiledCabbage 9y ago
> Because criticizing capitalism is like criticizing gravity. It objectively works > Saying capitalism doesn't work is the economic equivalent of being a flat earther. This is such an incorrect framing of the problem. Saying capitalism doesn't work is like saying a hammer doesn't work. Over course it works according to it's nature - however in our situation we really need to unscrew a screw. Hammering on it is going to continuously get negative results. An even more accurate analogy would be using a flathead when we need a philips...
- vixen99 9y ago
  its nature

by kobeya 9y ago

substack 9y ago

GDP has its own limitations, as it measures aggregate economic activity and does not take into consideration things like wealth distribution, environmental impact, unrenumerated labor. Further, imagine a society where everyone must pay for something that used to be free, like breathable air. If air becomes commodified, GDP goes up, but quality of life goes down as something that was previously a public good enters the realm of private profit. Extrapolate for various kinds of state-run services. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product#Limitations_and_criticisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product#Limitat...

RealityNow 9y ago

Not sure if you were being sarcastic, but to equate criticizing capitalism to being a "flat earther" is absurd. Economics is not a science. Capitalism has a ton of flaws, just talk to the masses in poverty in America. The fact that we ignore this while fixating on flawed metrics like GDP is a huge problem.

kobeya 9y ago
I assure you I am not being sarcastic. By history and by the objective metrics used by economists capitalism works and alternatives tried do not. There are two legitimate criticisms of this I'm aware of: (1) capitalism is less optimal than scheme X that has never been tried yet, or (2) the metrics used by economists doesn't measure what we should value--maximizing them doesn't necessarily result in optimal outcomes, as measured by better social utility metrics that we should be using instead. TFA falls in the first category as it makes an argument (which I believe btw) that interest rate policies in place result in net transfers of wealth from poor to rich since the 80's. I could also believe arguments that free market capitalism is a form of local gradient ascent of the GDP landscape that does anticipate or react to global or systemic risks like global warming. I could also believe an argument that our metrics of societal prosperity don't measure what we really want, which is a moral judgement about whether the society is better or not. E.g. if all the wealth gets concentrated in the 1% and the remaining 99% becomes figurative or even literal slaves, that's probably a worse outcome even if productivity increases. The problem is that while it is easy to cook up such what-if thought experiments, it is not easy to quantify the result into a mathematical model of moral social utility. Come up with such an objective, measurable metric and economists will start using it. Seriously try coming up with one and you will see why no one has. Moral philosophy is still a field of philosophic arguments, not solved problems.
- arthur_pryor 9y ago
  ok, first, i appreciate your more fleshed out argument here. > The problem is that while it is easy to cook up such what-if thought experiments, it is not easy to quantify the result into a mathematical model of moral social utility. that said... you seem to be implying that we should do things only if we can make decisions using a well understood objective model with easily measurable inputs and outputs. but if that model leads us to a world that i'd characterize as a moral travesty ("all the wealth gets concentrated in the 1% and the remaining 99% becomes literal slaves"), i'll take my chances with the thing that's hard to quantify that might get us a better outcome. and maybe that'll lead to even worse suffering. but seems worth a shot. EDIT: as a deeply logical person who greatly values the scientific method, i understand the desire to come up with a model of morality that has strong mathematical foundations, which can have its tenets checked against empirical evidence to provide us with something closer to a mechanically produced answer to a moral question. but i don't think we're there yet. and i think to some degree, it's fundamentally impossible, but i think we could get closer, and i think beyond some core moral tenets, it is best to optimize in a utilitarian way. but before we start the optimizing, i want to prevent things like slavery, or even de facto indentured servitude. i wish i could provide you with something like a mathematical proof of why indentured servitude is bad, but i'm going to keep operating on the premise that it's bad, despite the fact that i can't prove it in a mathematically rigorous way.
  - EGreg 9y ago
    May I suggest that most non-sociopaths would like to see their society maximize the minimum of what people have, rather than minimize the maximum? It goes by many names Unconditional Basic Income Negative Income Tax Social safety nets Single Payer systems Or various Welfare schemes
    - kobeya 9y ago
      Ah so if I disagree with you I'm a sociopath? That's not a friendly rhetorical tactic btw. It may not be obvious, but your post is not critiquing capitalism. Free-market capitalism is solution in the space of how we decide to allocate scarce resources. It stands mostly in contrast to various forms of collectivism and central decision making (socialism). Take UBI/negative income tax since it is most relevant to the linked article. UBI is the equivalent of saying that rather than construct our incentive models in such a delicately balanced way as to target a specific value of τ, the wealth redistribution constant, let's just forceably redistribute wealth by that amount. It's only non-capitalist in the sense that any form of taxation and central governance structure is non-capitalist, but of possible welfare schemes it is probably the most capitalist -- it punts the issue of how those funds should be spent and lets their new owners decide.
dsacco 9y ago
> Economics is not a science. Yes it is. Economics is a social science, like psychology and archaeology. The empirical precision of physics and chemistry are not required for a discipline to be scientific; standards of rigor and reproducibility in methodology are. Moreover there is a significant amount of rigor in much of economics, despite widespread memes that the entire discipline is wanton fluff. That aside, we encounter flaws and unresolved problems in many theories in every scientific field of study. A coherent argument can be posited that denying the supremacy of capitalism as a broad, categorical model is analogous to denying that the Earth is round. I don't necessarily endorse this view, but there is enough evidence to construct a sane backing for that position. It's not absurd, even if it's not absolutely correct. We need not understand everything about gravity or resolve all issues pertinent to its existence to more or less agree on the main points. Similarly, for specific definitions of social stability, productivity and happiness, capitalism is demonstably superlative given the implementation track record.
- kobeya 9y ago
  > supremacy of capitalism Efficacy is more the word I would have gone for, compared against other systems we have historical evidence for.
  - EGreg 9y ago
    Would you call the system on which Open Source Software and Free Software operates capitalism? How about Science? How about Wikipedia? How about languages, is someone paying someone for using a word? Because these systems have led to a lot more advancement, when people can collaborate and add to a growing snowball of work. Wikipedia beat Britannica. Linux + BSD beat Windows. WebKit beat IE. Apache and NGinX beat IIS. Most languages are open source. And so on. And yet in drugs we still have the patent system. And the superbugs are back because we run out of antibiotics. And the USA which has the most patents also pays the most per capita for the same drugs. Who wins from these monopolies? And before you say that Intellectual Property shouldn't be considered property, throwing other anarcho-capitalists under the bus, consider this: if people shouldn't own ideas, should people be able to own large bodies of air, water, land, etc. that they personally will never use? Will that make them more or less likely to become polluted for example?" The same John Locke who popularized the idea of homesteading or "mixing one's labor with the land" as anarcho-capitalists' favorite way to theoretically paper over acquision of natural resources in their theory also emphatically said that a man shouldn't own too much land. Yet that's what Capitalism is. At its core it is about granting PROPERTY to private entities and enforcing it. PROPERTY IS A MONOPOLY RIGHT TO EXCLUDE OTHERS FROM THE USE OF A RESOURCE. And pure unfettered Capitalism recognizes no limits on who can own what, as long as the what isn't other people.

musage 9y ago

Capitalism only works in optimizing those things it measures in the first place. Progress of society does not even enter into it, at all. If 300 million people had nothing and screamed in pain all day, and one person had it it all and multiplied it by X, the GDP would be multiplied by X. So what kind of measure is that? I also find it interesting that nobody even mentioned capitalism "not working". The comment said that any mention of capitalism is often followed by generic praises. I guess another form of that is "capitalism brought us great things, and is better than the alternatives we had so far, but [criticism of some aspects or consquences of it]" -- which acknowledges that it "works", just like using coal to heat your home works, like many things undeniably work; yet even that would raise the above question, how come it's treated like a religion? If it's so great, why so defensive to the point of scoring own goals?

kobeya 9y ago
> Capitalism only works in optimizing those things it measures in the first place. Progress of society does not even enter into it, at all. If 300 million people had nothing and screamed in pain all day, and one person had it it all and multiplied it by X, the GDP would be multiplied by X. So what kind of measure is that? A utilitarian would say that is a equal outcome to everyone having equal measures of happiness.
- arthur_pryor 9y ago
  > A utilitarian would say that is a equal outcome to everyone having equal measures of happiness. lots of people (myself included) would strongly posit that utilitarianism is a thoroughly incomplete foundation for a moral framework. to be clear, i think it's absurd and callous to treat those outcomes as equal for anything other than a back of the envelope calculation or a thought experiment. if you're going to put forward a philosophy 101 idea, at least do the philosophy 101 level work of trying to defend a controversial point of view against charitable objections.
  - kobeya 9y ago
    My point is that you cannot replace GDP with a better metric of societal "goodness" without objectivity defining "good", and that is an unsolved problem.

BoiledCabbage 9y ago

> Because criticizing capitalism is like criticizing gravity. It objectively works > Saying capitalism doesn't work is the economic equivalent of being a flat earther. This is such an incorrect framing of the problem. Saying capitalism doesn't work is like saying a hammer doesn't work. Over course it works according to it's nature - however in our situation we really need to unscrew a screw. Hammering on it is going to continuously get negative results. An even more accurate analogy would be using a flathead when we need a philips...

vixen99 9y ago
its nature