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According to many economists, yes. Capitalism does not appear to have a stable mode with a low Gini coefficient. Power that derives from wealth becomes concent

by dsr_ 9y ago

According to many economists, yes. Capitalism does not appear to have a stable mode with a low Gini coefficient. Power that derives from wealth becomes concentrated, which is clearly anti-democratic. Democracy is only viable as a decision-making process in societies where everyone is more or less equal. When people gain power at the expense of others, the result is that the system may remain nominally democratic, but becomes more and more of a plutocracy. In Marx's view, the abuse of the 99% by the 1% would inevitably lead to revolution, violent or otherwise. He then tried to come up with a method of economic organization that could be fair and stable after that revolution. It's not clear that this method has ever worked on a scale larger than a kibbutz or cooperative, but it's also clear that most families are run as communes, though this is rarely discussed. Somewhere in the trek from startup partnership to corporation there is a shift from commune-like organization to dictatorial/plutocratic organization. I don't know if anyone has done an organized study.

yosito 9y ago
> it's also clear that most families are run as communes Interesting observation. I'm not saying I disagree but growing up in an Evangelical religious culture (which describes much of America), this was definitely not the case. Men, specifically husbands/fathers were considered superior than other members of the family.
dharma1 9y ago
I think programmatic organisational structures with economics and voting built in are pretty interesting. We're building tooling for something like that with https://aragon.one https://aragon.one It's still pretty early days but right now you can create your democracy based DAO in a couple of minutes with no programming. You can issue tokens, vote and and tie in any action of a dapp to another action (like transfer of tokens to the result of a vote). I think it's an interesting vision of a future where you can very easily create programmatic cross-border organisations that can have economic value creation attached to them, and operate based on how the token holders vote.
spiralx 9y ago
> but it's also clear that most families are run as communes Hunter-gatherer groups also operate on a cooperative basis where food sharing is an integral part of their social organisation. The trouble is whether this sort of model scales beyond Dunbar's number, something that few political models seem to take into account IMHO.
nickik 9y ago
Don't throw out 'all economist' argument when its not true. It is simply false the all economist believe in the marxist notion of automatic capital centralisation. There is also little evidence that economiclly freeer country are more unequal or that have a lower share of wealth amoung the poor. > It's not clear that this method has ever worked on a scale larger than a kibbutz or cooperative, but it's also clear that most families are run as communes, though this is rarely discussed. This is actually not rarly discussed. Capitalist thinkers like F.A. Hayek and Adam Smith did actually think about these problems quite carefully. Sadly people like him are simply ignored by much of the leftist marxist crowd becuase they are just evil capitalist handmaidens. If you read Adam Smith two books 'Wealth of Nation' and 'Theory of Moral Sentiment' it is quite clear how he fought about this. Hayek made this into a more coherent theory. As you abserve amoung familiy and friends (evne in tribes) we do not engadge in property rights and trade. The problem is that humans devloped in these communities and to attemed to scale the same way of thinking and organisation to a macro society is impossible because of information and insentive problems. Hayek makes distinction between micro cosmos and macro cosmos where in the small you would not want to run it like a market, but it would be equally damaging to attemped to apply the micro cosmos rules to macro cosmos. In fact psycology has made it perfectly clear that humans simply do not have the intellectual capacity to relate to millions of human that they don't know in anywhere close to the same way the do to the humans they know.

by dsr_ 9y ago

yosito 9y ago

> it's also clear that most families are run as communes Interesting observation. I'm not saying I disagree but growing up in an Evangelical religious culture (which describes much of America), this was definitely not the case. Men, specifically husbands/fathers were considered superior than other members of the family.

dharma1 9y ago

I think programmatic organisational structures with economics and voting built in are pretty interesting. We're building tooling for something like that with https://aragon.one https://aragon.one It's still pretty early days but right now you can create your democracy based DAO in a couple of minutes with no programming. You can issue tokens, vote and and tie in any action of a dapp to another action (like transfer of tokens to the result of a vote). I think it's an interesting vision of a future where you can very easily create programmatic cross-border organisations that can have economic value creation attached to them, and operate based on how the token holders vote.

spiralx 9y ago

> but it's also clear that most families are run as communes Hunter-gatherer groups also operate on a cooperative basis where food sharing is an integral part of their social organisation. The trouble is whether this sort of model scales beyond Dunbar's number, something that few political models seem to take into account IMHO.

nickik 9y ago

Don't throw out 'all economist' argument when its not true. It is simply false the all economist believe in the marxist notion of automatic capital centralisation. There is also little evidence that economiclly freeer country are more unequal or that have a lower share of wealth amoung the poor. > It's not clear that this method has ever worked on a scale larger than a kibbutz or cooperative, but it's also clear that most families are run as communes, though this is rarely discussed. This is actually not rarly discussed. Capitalist thinkers like F.A. Hayek and Adam Smith did actually think about these problems quite carefully. Sadly people like him are simply ignored by much of the leftist marxist crowd becuase they are just evil capitalist handmaidens. If you read Adam Smith two books 'Wealth of Nation' and 'Theory of Moral Sentiment' it is quite clear how he fought about this. Hayek made this into a more coherent theory. As you abserve amoung familiy and friends (evne in tribes) we do not engadge in property rights and trade. The problem is that humans devloped in these communities and to attemed to scale the same way of thinking and organisation to a macro society is impossible because of information and insentive problems. Hayek makes distinction between micro cosmos and macro cosmos where in the small you would not want to run it like a market, but it would be equally damaging to attemped to apply the micro cosmos rules to macro cosmos. In fact psycology has made it perfectly clear that humans simply do not have the intellectual capacity to relate to millions of human that they don't know in anywhere close to the same way the do to the humans they know.