5 ms·
This is also a crisis of critical thought. There's an utter lack and/or willingness to imagine any other reality than the current market economy. This goes even
by jahaja 8y ago
This is also a crisis of critical thought. There's an utter lack and/or willingness to imagine any other reality than the current market economy. This goes even to the length of advocating some sort of scorched earth policies to decrease the earth's population since in their mind, the only human is the market-human and is as such inherently a terrible polluter.
This is fundamentalism.
- sunir 8y agoThere are plenty of attempts to think about other systems, implement them, and advocate for change. They all lack something important: success. Also ironically it is a market of competing ideas to markets.
- jahaja 8y agoIf success would be a prerequisite of evolution it would grind to a halt.
- sunir 8y agoThat may have sounded profound but it comes off poorly because it gets the theory of evolution completely wrong. Success is the differentiator that allows for the selection part of natural selection. Also evolution cannot “grind to a halt” because it is an outcome of thermodynamics. Evolution isn’t a metaphor. It is still the underlying physical process even in selection of political systems.
- jahaja 8y agoDid I though? Success is the differentiator post-mutation. If mutation itself ceases due to the prerequisite, evolution does too. But why do you feel the need to read and dissect an analogy so literally in the first place? It's not the point.
- Sacho 8y ago> If mutation itself ceases due to the prerequisite, evolution does too. But then your reply doesn't make sense. Here's what parent said: > There are plenty of attempts to think about other systems, implement them, and advocate for change. They all lack something important: success. That part would imply that mutation is happening, just unsuccessfully. If you wanted to disagree with that, then your analogy was just confusing.
- jahaja 8y agoGiven what I wrote in my original comment I interpret the reply as standard status quo apologetics and implying that success needs to be a prerequisite. Then the analogy seems appropriate no?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sunir 8y agoIt’s not an analogy. Evolution is the actual process. No ifs ands or buts about it. There are myriad attempts to try alternatives to some ideal “market economy”. From Venezuela to Burning Man to Wikipedia to China to Japan to Romania to the Canadian wheat board. What succeeds, lives.
- olau 8y ago> They all lack something important: success. Are you sure? The increasing automation will perhaps give us a future where most people don't have to work and we'll still have plenty of food, shelter, social interaction and entertainment - the latter is almost free in this digital world. Maybe it is just me, but it's as if one can start to see the contours of it forming, slowly, though, as many of the remaining automation tasks are really, really hard. Like building a house, or making something that can do the house chores that we don't have machines for yet.
- meowface 8y agoThis will probably happen someday, but it's probably centuries away, or at least a single century away if we're being very optimistic. We have to figure out how we can deal with the problems we're facing in our lifetimes.
- sunir 8y agoYour counterexample is an unrealized future hypothetical utopia. I am not sure where you are going with that, but I am sure that isn’t a “success” because it doesn’t exist yet. That is just a simple question of logical validity not of empiricism.
- lorenzorhoades 8y agoNot the OP, but it is not 'unrealized' as you say. Read enlightenment now by steven pinkerton. He has a whole book about how we are currently 'realizing' this 'future hypothetical utopia'
- foxylad 8y agoWhen I was 18, microcomputer advocates were predicting 3-day working weeks because of all the hum-drum work computers would do for us. I'd like to believe in your dream and I'm not saying it won't come to pass, but we'll have to redesign our culture to stop fetishising hard work first.
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoThere's not been too many as it's remarkably difficult to implement an alternative to a market economy outside of revolution. That likely favours specific alternatives. I've not seen attempts to implement any approach that is seeking sustainability, or constrain growth, or break out of the duopoly of centrally planned vs free market. That leaves a lot of ideas, of varying credibility, that have never been trialled in any way, shape, or form. Off the top of my head "doughnut economics" was briefly popular in the news a few years ago. It remains a thought experiment. (I don't remember enough about it to comment on its viability).
- sunir 8y agoCoops, communes, nonprofits, open source projects... lots of attempts to develop a sustainable micro economy. Build up from there.