7 ms·

There is. It's incompatible with the continuing existence of a living planet. Naturally enough, a billionaire megaconsumer, having bought a moat intended to se

There is. It's incompatible with the continuing existence of a living planet. Naturally enough, a billionaire megaconsumer, having bought a moat intended to separate himself comprehensively from physical reality, isn't fussed. But he's a mammal. All mammals live in ecologies, not economies, whatever they tell themselves.

andrewstuart 7y ago
On the contrary I don't agree that capitalism is responsible for environmental decline. If anything environmental decline can be attributed to the form of democracy in which companies control government policy via donations and lobbyists. The government policy thus serves the interests not of the people but of the companies. Companies have no interest in anything but furthering their own goals, typically to make money without any attribution of the collateral costs such as environmental vandalism. This is not about capitalism - it's about broken democracy, subverted to become some weird system of government that serves companies and vested interest above those of the citizens. Nor are billionaires the cause of poverty. There's plenty of money to go around and plenty of resources to go around with room to spare for billionaires. Poverty exists because governments expend the resources to the betterment of companies rather than the citizens. If we suddenly took all the money from all the billionaires this would make zero difference to poverty because the reasons for poverty have little or no relationship to the existence of billionaires.
- omegaworks 7y ago
  >Companies have no interest in anything but furthering their own goals, typically to make money without any attribution of the collateral costs such as environmental vandalism. These kinds of companies are precisely the form in which capitalism has shaped them. Cost externalization (collateral costs, as you call them) are a competitive advantage, and under an improperly regulated capitalism these entities are incentivized to find and exploit every single one of these advantages to dominate and eventually monopolize their market. What we are debating now is if it even possible to create a system of properly regulated capitalism. Will capitalism necessarily exhaust the planet, capture and subsume every form of regulatory control and destroy itself.
  - andrewstuart 7y ago
    I agree. I think our current form of government is completely unsuited to saving civilisation. There will be an environment driven revolution within 20 years. The current generation of children will include deeply radicalised kids so disillusioned with government that it will lead to an overthrow. Exactly what that will look like cannot be predicted. I think it will be violent because the government has so many protections in place to prevent fundamental change, but that is what future generations will want, due to the dying earth.
    - omegaworks 7y ago
      >There will be an environment driven revolution within 20 years. Whether it takes the form of eco-socialism or eco-fascism is the choice we have to make.
    - crispinb 7y ago
      > The current generation of children will include deeply radicalised kids so disillusioned with government that it will lead to an overthrow. We're seeing hints of that now, and it's one of the few chinks of light. I don't see how they can succeed, but I don't take my own predictions too seriously
- cryptica 7y ago
  >> If we suddenly took all the money from all the billionaires this would make zero difference to poverty It would make a massive difference. Without billionaires, there would be more millionaires[1], and their collective ability (and collective incentive) to invest their money efficiently would be far greater. More minds making more sophisticated investment decisions under more pressure using smaller amounts of money. A billionaire investor is a lazy investor. They can afford to make blanket decisions which ignore all the intricate negative ramifications of those decisions. When you factor in the inefficiencies created by corporate monopolies and index funds which reward lazy investors without any risk[2], the people who end up paying for those inefficiencies are members of the working class. [1] When we consider that supply tends to adjust to meet demand, we can deduce that if we were to artificially limit the amount of supply that any single person could reap the rewards from (which is equivalent to artificially limiting wealth accumulation of a single person), then we would need a larger number of people to supply the same quantity of goods/services. [2] The risk is essentially 0 because index funds such as S&P500 spread risk across many stocks such that only the complete and sudden collapse of human society could result in any significant loss of investment. As a human investor, if society were to collapse completely, you probably wouldn't survive anyway, so within the scope of human experience, your risk of living to see your investment fail is 0.
- panarky 7y ago
  > I don't agree that capitalism is responsible for environmental decline > environmental decline can be attributed to the form of democracy in which companies control government policy These are the same thing everywhere except in theory.
  - crispinb 7y ago
    Yeah. Capitalism apologists now sound very much like the credulous lefties who made excuses for the Soviet Union's many catastrophes, long after it was manifestly a disaster. A benign idealist version might exist in some Platonic realm, but for now the capitalism we have is a dire threat to all.
- crispinb 7y ago
  > Nor are billionaires the cause of poverty Whether that's true or not, many billionaires (Bezos, Thiel etc) are certainly propagandists of death cult capitalism.
treelovinhippie 7y ago
You'd think billionaires would know enough about complex systems to recognise that they are the worst possible voices on the planet to comment on the state of capitalism. Lmfao.
loeg 7y ago
> [Capitalism] is incompatible with the continuing existence of a living planet. This seems like a pretty extreme viewpoint. Can you explain your reasoning?
- crispinb 7y ago
  Quick reply as I have to dash back into the physical world! Grounds: - theoretical: economic 'growth' is (a) central to capitalism, and (b) identical to global entropy increase (decoupling is a faith-based myth). So-called 'growth' IS ecosystem destruction - empirical: numberless studies showing nearly every ecosystem to be in catastrophic decline. In short - everything is dying (and astonishingly fast - on human-generational timeframes)! As for 'extreme': in corporatist media circles, sure. But there are plenty to whom it's perfectly commonplace (ecologists, indigenous peoples, etc), and has been well-understood for decades.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
Consultant32452 7y ago
China is communist. They're arguably worse. Not fully embracing nuclear power when we still had time to avoid global catastrophe will probably be the thing that's really done us in.
- jkmcf 7y ago
  China is politically communist. Economically, they still want to make a lot of money, as cheaply as possible, without regard to regulations, be they intellectual property, ecological, or otherwise. However, I've read that they are taking air pollution more seriously: https://phys.org/news/2019-03-china-air-pollution.html https://phys.org/news/2019-03-china-air-pollution.html
inawarminister 7y ago
Soviet system destroyed the Aral Sea: >The Aral Sea was once the fourth-largest lake in the world. But in the 1960s, the Soviet Union diverted two major rivers to irrigate farmland, cutting off the inland sea from its source. The Aral Sea has been slowly disappearing ever since [0] We need a new solution. Not capitalism, not communism. Something better. And I have zero idea on what it would look like. But the Earth need one nonetheless. [0] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/videos/shrinking-aral-sea https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/videos/shrinking-...
- crispinb 7y ago
  Quite. I'm not remotely claiming that capitalism is the only system which collapses ecosystems. Plenty of civilisations did that locally millennia before global capitalism was conceived. As for what needs to come next, that's well beyond my abilities to come up with.
tim333 7y ago
True economic activity is trashing the planet but the biggest CO2 emitter, China, is nominally communist. What we need is a tax on environmental damage applied globally, probably enforced by trade sanctions on countries that don't go along, or something along those lines. Get the financial incentives right and loads of startups and billions of investment dollars will pile into fixing environmental issues. Capitalism can do good stuff too.
- crispinb 7y ago
  Yes, this is the discredited Blair-Clinton Third Way, applied to environmental issues. It was a catastrophe applied to the so-called 'economy' as a whole, and would be worse applied to more serious real (ie. physical-ecological) issues: The physical problems of so-called 'growth' are many. They number in the thousands, and more are discovered with unremitting and accelerating frequency. Climate collapse is just one (albeit the most currently newsworthy). Trying to nail each one with the vast range of accounting and pricing mechanisms required would cripple capitalism. New rules and regulations would have to be enacted, and harmonised worldwide, constantly. Nostalgic capitalists call this 'green tape', and their solution is to pretend the real (physical, ecological, complex) world doesn't exist. Third Wayers instead pretend that the green tape problem doesn't exist. They both get this wrong because they have sworn religious fealty to fake 'growth' ('religious' is meant quite literally here - it has its historical origins in European variants of Christianity, and questioning it in public is taboo). Capitalism, whether nostalgic or third way, collapses ecologies because of its inherent allegiance to a fictional concept of growth. Ecologies are where we live, and we have nowhere else to go, whatever the protestations of capitalist death cult evangelists (Bezos et al).

andrewstuart 7y ago

On the contrary I don't agree that capitalism is responsible for environmental decline. If anything environmental decline can be attributed to the form of democracy in which companies control government policy via donations and lobbyists. The government policy thus serves the interests not of the people but of the companies. Companies have no interest in anything but furthering their own goals, typically to make money without any attribution of the collateral costs such as environmental vandalism. This is not about capitalism - it's about broken democracy, subverted to become some weird system of government that serves companies and vested interest above those of the citizens. Nor are billionaires the cause of poverty. There's plenty of money to go around and plenty of resources to go around with room to spare for billionaires. Poverty exists because governments expend the resources to the betterment of companies rather than the citizens. If we suddenly took all the money from all the billionaires this would make zero difference to poverty because the reasons for poverty have little or no relationship to the existence of billionaires.

omegaworks 7y ago
>Companies have no interest in anything but furthering their own goals, typically to make money without any attribution of the collateral costs such as environmental vandalism. These kinds of companies are precisely the form in which capitalism has shaped them. Cost externalization (collateral costs, as you call them) are a competitive advantage, and under an improperly regulated capitalism these entities are incentivized to find and exploit every single one of these advantages to dominate and eventually monopolize their market. What we are debating now is if it even possible to create a system of properly regulated capitalism. Will capitalism necessarily exhaust the planet, capture and subsume every form of regulatory control and destroy itself.
- andrewstuart 7y ago
  I agree. I think our current form of government is completely unsuited to saving civilisation. There will be an environment driven revolution within 20 years. The current generation of children will include deeply radicalised kids so disillusioned with government that it will lead to an overthrow. Exactly what that will look like cannot be predicted. I think it will be violent because the government has so many protections in place to prevent fundamental change, but that is what future generations will want, due to the dying earth.
  - omegaworks 7y ago
    >There will be an environment driven revolution within 20 years. Whether it takes the form of eco-socialism or eco-fascism is the choice we have to make.
  - crispinb 7y ago
    > The current generation of children will include deeply radicalised kids so disillusioned with government that it will lead to an overthrow. We're seeing hints of that now, and it's one of the few chinks of light. I don't see how they can succeed, but I don't take my own predictions too seriously
cryptica 7y ago
>> If we suddenly took all the money from all the billionaires this would make zero difference to poverty It would make a massive difference. Without billionaires, there would be more millionaires[1], and their collective ability (and collective incentive) to invest their money efficiently would be far greater. More minds making more sophisticated investment decisions under more pressure using smaller amounts of money. A billionaire investor is a lazy investor. They can afford to make blanket decisions which ignore all the intricate negative ramifications of those decisions. When you factor in the inefficiencies created by corporate monopolies and index funds which reward lazy investors without any risk[2], the people who end up paying for those inefficiencies are members of the working class. [1] When we consider that supply tends to adjust to meet demand, we can deduce that if we were to artificially limit the amount of supply that any single person could reap the rewards from (which is equivalent to artificially limiting wealth accumulation of a single person), then we would need a larger number of people to supply the same quantity of goods/services. [2] The risk is essentially 0 because index funds such as S&P500 spread risk across many stocks such that only the complete and sudden collapse of human society could result in any significant loss of investment. As a human investor, if society were to collapse completely, you probably wouldn't survive anyway, so within the scope of human experience, your risk of living to see your investment fail is 0.
panarky 7y ago
> I don't agree that capitalism is responsible for environmental decline > environmental decline can be attributed to the form of democracy in which companies control government policy These are the same thing everywhere except in theory.
- crispinb 7y ago
  Yeah. Capitalism apologists now sound very much like the credulous lefties who made excuses for the Soviet Union's many catastrophes, long after it was manifestly a disaster. A benign idealist version might exist in some Platonic realm, but for now the capitalism we have is a dire threat to all.
crispinb 7y ago
> Nor are billionaires the cause of poverty Whether that's true or not, many billionaires (Bezos, Thiel etc) are certainly propagandists of death cult capitalism.

treelovinhippie 7y ago

You'd think billionaires would know enough about complex systems to recognise that they are the worst possible voices on the planet to comment on the state of capitalism. Lmfao.

loeg 7y ago

> [Capitalism] is incompatible with the continuing existence of a living planet. This seems like a pretty extreme viewpoint. Can you explain your reasoning?

crispinb 7y ago
Quick reply as I have to dash back into the physical world! Grounds: - theoretical: economic 'growth' is (a) central to capitalism, and (b) identical to global entropy increase (decoupling is a faith-based myth). So-called 'growth' IS ecosystem destruction - empirical: numberless studies showing nearly every ecosystem to be in catastrophic decline. In short - everything is dying (and astonishingly fast - on human-generational timeframes)! As for 'extreme': in corporatist media circles, sure. But there are plenty to whom it's perfectly commonplace (ecologists, indigenous peoples, etc), and has been well-understood for decades.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

Consultant32452 7y ago

China is communist. They're arguably worse. Not fully embracing nuclear power when we still had time to avoid global catastrophe will probably be the thing that's really done us in.

jkmcf 7y ago
China is politically communist. Economically, they still want to make a lot of money, as cheaply as possible, without regard to regulations, be they intellectual property, ecological, or otherwise. However, I've read that they are taking air pollution more seriously: https://phys.org/news/2019-03-china-air-pollution.html https://phys.org/news/2019-03-china-air-pollution.html

inawarminister 7y ago

Soviet system destroyed the Aral Sea: >The Aral Sea was once the fourth-largest lake in the world. But in the 1960s, the Soviet Union diverted two major rivers to irrigate farmland, cutting off the inland sea from its source. The Aral Sea has been slowly disappearing ever since [0] We need a new solution. Not capitalism, not communism. Something better. And I have zero idea on what it would look like. But the Earth need one nonetheless. [0] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/videos/shrinking-aral-sea https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/videos/shrinking-...

crispinb 7y ago
Quite. I'm not remotely claiming that capitalism is the only system which collapses ecosystems. Plenty of civilisations did that locally millennia before global capitalism was conceived. As for what needs to come next, that's well beyond my abilities to come up with.

tim333 7y ago

True economic activity is trashing the planet but the biggest CO2 emitter, China, is nominally communist. What we need is a tax on environmental damage applied globally, probably enforced by trade sanctions on countries that don't go along, or something along those lines. Get the financial incentives right and loads of startups and billions of investment dollars will pile into fixing environmental issues. Capitalism can do good stuff too.

crispinb 7y ago
Yes, this is the discredited Blair-Clinton Third Way, applied to environmental issues. It was a catastrophe applied to the so-called 'economy' as a whole, and would be worse applied to more serious real (ie. physical-ecological) issues: The physical problems of so-called 'growth' are many. They number in the thousands, and more are discovered with unremitting and accelerating frequency. Climate collapse is just one (albeit the most currently newsworthy). Trying to nail each one with the vast range of accounting and pricing mechanisms required would cripple capitalism. New rules and regulations would have to be enacted, and harmonised worldwide, constantly. Nostalgic capitalists call this 'green tape', and their solution is to pretend the real (physical, ecological, complex) world doesn't exist. Third Wayers instead pretend that the green tape problem doesn't exist. They both get this wrong because they have sworn religious fealty to fake 'growth' ('religious' is meant quite literally here - it has its historical origins in European variants of Christianity, and questioning it in public is taboo). Capitalism, whether nostalgic or third way, collapses ecologies because of its inherent allegiance to a fictional concept of growth. Ecologies are where we live, and we have nowhere else to go, whatever the protestations of capitalist death cult evangelists (Bezos et al).