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"Socialists advocate a method of compensation based on individual merit or the amount of labour one contributes to society" How do you measure merit and the am

by bstills 16y ago

"Socialists advocate a method of compensation based on individual merit or the amount of labour one contributes to society" How do you measure merit and the amount of labour one contributes to society? The only fair way I know of is capitalism where people get to vote with their money on whether or not you are providing value or not. I would posit that merit is the amount of value you give to another. Minus marketing and any government interference, capitalism rewards individuals for the value they contribute to society. It is also necessary to separate capitalism from corporatism. The latter is what most people are against when they say that capitalism is evil. There is no such thing as a corporation in terms of capitalism. There is one flaw in capitalism that I am aware of but I still think it is the best system. That flaw is that it tends to reward those with capital. To have capital is to have an advantage over someone of equal ability. Over time power tends to consolidate into a few select organizations / individuals.

steveklabnik 16y ago
> The latter is what most people are against when they say that capitalism is evil. Many would, but a libertarian socialist would reject capitalism outright as being hierarchical. > Over time power tends to consolidate into a few select organizations / individuals. Spot on.
_delirium 16y ago
> Minus marketing and any government interference, capitalism rewards individuals for the value they contribute to society. I suppose I don't buy this as an a priori equality. One problem is that when there are very large flows of capital, one can often make more money by skimming very small amounts off the top, than by creating new things. That's one reason finance is a better route to wealth than tech startups, even though tech startups create a lot more value for society: because when hundreds of billions of dollars are moving around, you only need to find a way to pocket a very small amount of it to get fabulously wealthy. More generally, rent-seeking, i.e. maneuvering yourself into a position where you can be sort of a private-sector version of the taxman, is a viable way to make money. Plus, "minus marketing" is a pretty big caveat. It's quite possible to be successful in a "black-hat capitalist" sort of way, by not creating products that contribute to society, but instead by swindling society out of its money by getting people to buy your crap (even in tech, there's a whole affiliate-marketing underworld of tricking people into buying shitty ebooks). And, to pick a third problem, the economy is a rather complex dynamical system, and like many dynamical systems, is not driven purely by fundamentals (real supply/demand), but also by feedback loops and attractors within the system. So sometimes you get some really weird ways of making money that have nothing to do with anyone providing value to anyone else, but have more to do with asset bubbles and debt spirals and other such market patterns. Not that markets don't often work, and might work even better without the government propping up the corporate form. But I certainly don't think we can a priori say that money transfers are a direct measure of value. I mean, we'd live in a pretty coincidentally amazing universe if it just happened that the economy, this very complex dynamical system that does not care about human concerns like "value" or "society" or "ethics", happened to end up 100% aligning with them. I think instead it's an open question when they align and when they don't, and if there's anything we can do to make markets align with value-to-society better.
forgottenpaswrd 16y ago
I think you put it very clear: 1)The good about capitalism is that it rewards high squiled-hard workers individuals fairly based on objective results, not on ideology and prejudices(subjective) like socialism. 2)The bad is that "everybody love their children, family and friends". That means those near those highly successful people get unfair advantage(nepotism). Given that no political system has been able to improve (2)(who were those that had the privileges to cruise the Volga, feed-educate better their children in SU but communist party members? who has the power and the companies in P.R.C today but comunist party members?) I prefer capitalism.

by bstills 16y ago

steveklabnik 16y ago

> The latter is what most people are against when they say that capitalism is evil. Many would, but a libertarian socialist would reject capitalism outright as being hierarchical. > Over time power tends to consolidate into a few select organizations / individuals. Spot on.

_delirium 16y ago

> Minus marketing and any government interference, capitalism rewards individuals for the value they contribute to society. I suppose I don't buy this as an a priori equality. One problem is that when there are very large flows of capital, one can often make more money by skimming very small amounts off the top, than by creating new things. That's one reason finance is a better route to wealth than tech startups, even though tech startups create a lot more value for society: because when hundreds of billions of dollars are moving around, you only need to find a way to pocket a very small amount of it to get fabulously wealthy. More generally, rent-seeking, i.e. maneuvering yourself into a position where you can be sort of a private-sector version of the taxman, is a viable way to make money. Plus, "minus marketing" is a pretty big caveat. It's quite possible to be successful in a "black-hat capitalist" sort of way, by not creating products that contribute to society, but instead by swindling society out of its money by getting people to buy your crap (even in tech, there's a whole affiliate-marketing underworld of tricking people into buying shitty ebooks). And, to pick a third problem, the economy is a rather complex dynamical system, and like many dynamical systems, is not driven purely by fundamentals (real supply/demand), but also by feedback loops and attractors within the system. So sometimes you get some really weird ways of making money that have nothing to do with anyone providing value to anyone else, but have more to do with asset bubbles and debt spirals and other such market patterns. Not that markets don't often work, and might work even better without the government propping up the corporate form. But I certainly don't think we can a priori say that money transfers are a direct measure of value. I mean, we'd live in a pretty coincidentally amazing universe if it just happened that the economy, this very complex dynamical system that does not care about human concerns like "value" or "society" or "ethics", happened to end up 100% aligning with them. I think instead it's an open question when they align and when they don't, and if there's anything we can do to make markets align with value-to-society better.

forgottenpaswrd 16y ago

I think you put it very clear: 1)The good about capitalism is that it rewards high squiled-hard workers individuals fairly based on objective results, not on ideology and prejudices(subjective) like socialism. 2)The bad is that "everybody love their children, family and friends". That means those near those highly successful people get unfair advantage(nepotism). Given that no political system has been able to improve (2)(who were those that had the privileges to cruise the Volga, feed-educate better their children in SU but communist party members? who has the power and the companies in P.R.C today but comunist party members?) I prefer capitalism.