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>The economic system and the system of values are interdependent and mutually reinforcing. Our system of values enables hyper-commercialized capitalism to funct

by goda90 7y ago

>The economic system and the system of values are interdependent and mutually reinforcing. Our system of values enables hyper-commercialized capitalism to function and expand. It then follows that no change in the economic system can be imagined without a change in the system of values that underpins it, which the system promotes, and with which we are, in our everyday activities, fully comfortable. But to produce such a change in values seems, at present, to be an impossible task. It has been tried before and ended in the most ignominious failure. We are thus locked in capitalism. And in our activities, day in, day out, we support and reinforce it. But can capitalism expand endlessly? It seems to me that capitalism will expand itself to destruction.

WalterBright 7y ago
> But can capitalism expand endlessly? There's no limit to the value one can add. Consider computer software - there's no limit to how good one can make software. There's no limit to making better art, better movies, better houses, etc.
- krapp 7y ago
  There are always limits. Time, resources, energy, entropy, bandwidth, intelligence, cultural norms, the bounds of the law, physical stamina, what the market will bear. Value is subjective, so claiming that there is no limit to anything to which "value" can be applied in a capitalist marketplace is meaningless. Unbounded infinite progress only exists in the realm of pure math.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    In the extremely limited universe of a chessboard, there are still an infinite variety of games one can play. Just think of the "chessboard" of all the molecules that make up the earth. I do agree, however, that a great many people seem to have very limited imaginations, and that this limits their lives.
    - krapp 7y ago
      >In the extremely limited universe of a chessboard, there are still an infinite variety of games one can play. No... the set of all possible games of chess is finite, somewhere around 10^120. You might call that "practically infinite," but another term for practically infinite is "really big, but still finite." >Just think of the "chessboard" of all the molecules that make up the earth. Entropy and thermodynamics are a thing, and the amount of work one can do with the molecules that make up the earth is also finite. Trek-style replicators and nanotech that instantly converts anything to anything else only exist in fiction.
      - WalterBright 7y ago
        > No... the set of all possible games of chess is finite, somewhere around 10^120. You and your opponent can simply move your queens back and forth forever, making for infinite (albeit boring) game possibilities. Besides, the posed question "can capitalism expand endlessly" is not a math question. It's a pragmatic question, and includes an implication of "for all practical purposes". Taking it literally is just being argumentative.
        krapp 7y ago
        >No it's not. You and your opponent can simply move your queens back and forth forever. We might disagree on this point, but to me, that's the same game regardless of how many times you move the pieces around, because that game ended in a draw. Moving queens around indefinitely to no purpose is no longer chess, there are no more possibilities to be found at that point, it's pure entropy. >It's a pragmatic question, and includes an implication of "for all practical purposes". Taking it literally is just being argumentative. I honestly don't think it's true for all practical purposes, either. I'm not trying to be argumentative, I legitimately disagree with the premise. When you're talking about capitalism, you need a market which will return a profit on something people are willing to pay for, and there are only so many things people will be willing to pay for, and only so much they will pay, because people's time and budgets are limited.
        7y ago
nostrademons 7y ago
You can resolve this paradox by making a distinction between the whole & its parts. Capitalism is not a monolith - it's a system where many competing firms and ecosystems vie to become the dominant producer. Some of them inevitably grow faster than others and take over the ecosystem. At that point capitalism is redefined to mean "the winner", and all the losers wither and die off. Then some small variation within the new definition of capitalism takes off, grows faster than its competitors, eventually replaces them, and redefines capitalism as itself. As a result, "capitalism" is always growing, but it doesn't mean the same things, and most of the things that it previously meant end up dying and being lost to history. You can see this cycle actually happening if you look at history from the medieval rennaissance until today. "Capitalism" initially meant the decoupling of farm labor from manorial estates that owned the land; in the wake of Black Death, there was a surplus of land and a shortage of labor, and so peasant farmers were able to choose from the estates that were most productive and gave them the best life. That spurred competition among estates to improve farming mechanisms, which increased food productivity, which allowed some laborers to specialize into guilds. Capitalism was then redefined as the private ownership of the tools used for this specialized labor, which competed to produce the best quality goods at the lowest prices. The surplus generated by this then allowed the conquest of the New World, of Africa, and of Asia, which opened a big new resource source and ushered in the era of mercantilism. Those raw resource sources then created demand for more efficient ways than the guild system, which led to the invention of industrial capitalism. "Industry" initially referred to one specific industry, textiles; as mass-production techniques were applied to more and more areas of the economy, "industry" eventually became synonymous with "capitalism", and people forgot that mercantile traders used to be the dominant corporations on earth, or that there was a time when everyone was either a farmer or landlord. Now software is eating the world, while software in 1975 was a tiny industry that most people thought of as a hobby or loss-leader. Along the way there've been plenty of losers that were destroyed. If you were one of those peasant farmers who weren't among the most efficient, you are now dead. If you were a cobbler, or a tailor, or a baker, or a smith, or a weaver, you lost your specialty when industrialization came around. If you were a Luddite, sucks to be you. If you were a Native American, you're probably now dead too. If you were a plantation owner in the American South, you lost most of your holdings after the Civil War. If you're a factory worker in America, you're probably jobless. Someday software engineers will be the dinosaurs of the future. But all of these groups are just written out of the narrative: capitalism is defined in terms of the winners, and the losers drop out of history. Capitalism will expand forever, but it won't look like the version of capitalism we have today.

by goda90 7y ago

WalterBright 7y ago

> But can capitalism expand endlessly? There's no limit to the value one can add. Consider computer software - there's no limit to how good one can make software. There's no limit to making better art, better movies, better houses, etc.

krapp 7y ago
There are always limits. Time, resources, energy, entropy, bandwidth, intelligence, cultural norms, the bounds of the law, physical stamina, what the market will bear. Value is subjective, so claiming that there is no limit to anything to which "value" can be applied in a capitalist marketplace is meaningless. Unbounded infinite progress only exists in the realm of pure math.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  In the extremely limited universe of a chessboard, there are still an infinite variety of games one can play. Just think of the "chessboard" of all the molecules that make up the earth. I do agree, however, that a great many people seem to have very limited imaginations, and that this limits their lives.
  - krapp 7y ago
    >In the extremely limited universe of a chessboard, there are still an infinite variety of games one can play. No... the set of all possible games of chess is finite, somewhere around 10^120. You might call that "practically infinite," but another term for practically infinite is "really big, but still finite." >Just think of the "chessboard" of all the molecules that make up the earth. Entropy and thermodynamics are a thing, and the amount of work one can do with the molecules that make up the earth is also finite. Trek-style replicators and nanotech that instantly converts anything to anything else only exist in fiction.
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      > No... the set of all possible games of chess is finite, somewhere around 10^120. You and your opponent can simply move your queens back and forth forever, making for infinite (albeit boring) game possibilities. Besides, the posed question "can capitalism expand endlessly" is not a math question. It's a pragmatic question, and includes an implication of "for all practical purposes". Taking it literally is just being argumentative.
      - krapp 7y ago
        >No it's not. You and your opponent can simply move your queens back and forth forever. We might disagree on this point, but to me, that's the same game regardless of how many times you move the pieces around, because that game ended in a draw. Moving queens around indefinitely to no purpose is no longer chess, there are no more possibilities to be found at that point, it's pure entropy. >It's a pragmatic question, and includes an implication of "for all practical purposes". Taking it literally is just being argumentative. I honestly don't think it's true for all practical purposes, either. I'm not trying to be argumentative, I legitimately disagree with the premise. When you're talking about capitalism, you need a market which will return a profit on something people are willing to pay for, and there are only so many things people will be willing to pay for, and only so much they will pay, because people's time and budgets are limited.
        7y ago

nostrademons 7y ago

You can resolve this paradox by making a distinction between the whole & its parts. Capitalism is not a monolith - it's a system where many competing firms and ecosystems vie to become the dominant producer. Some of them inevitably grow faster than others and take over the ecosystem. At that point capitalism is redefined to mean "the winner", and all the losers wither and die off. Then some small variation within the new definition of capitalism takes off, grows faster than its competitors, eventually replaces them, and redefines capitalism as itself. As a result, "capitalism" is always growing, but it doesn't mean the same things, and most of the things that it previously meant end up dying and being lost to history. You can see this cycle actually happening if you look at history from the medieval rennaissance until today. "Capitalism" initially meant the decoupling of farm labor from manorial estates that owned the land; in the wake of Black Death, there was a surplus of land and a shortage of labor, and so peasant farmers were able to choose from the estates that were most productive and gave them the best life. That spurred competition among estates to improve farming mechanisms, which increased food productivity, which allowed some laborers to specialize into guilds. Capitalism was then redefined as the private ownership of the tools used for this specialized labor, which competed to produce the best quality goods at the lowest prices. The surplus generated by this then allowed the conquest of the New World, of Africa, and of Asia, which opened a big new resource source and ushered in the era of mercantilism. Those raw resource sources then created demand for more efficient ways than the guild system, which led to the invention of industrial capitalism. "Industry" initially referred to one specific industry, textiles; as mass-production techniques were applied to more and more areas of the economy, "industry" eventually became synonymous with "capitalism", and people forgot that mercantile traders used to be the dominant corporations on earth, or that there was a time when everyone was either a farmer or landlord. Now software is eating the world, while software in 1975 was a tiny industry that most people thought of as a hobby or loss-leader. Along the way there've been plenty of losers that were destroyed. If you were one of those peasant farmers who weren't among the most efficient, you are now dead. If you were a cobbler, or a tailor, or a baker, or a smith, or a weaver, you lost your specialty when industrialization came around. If you were a Luddite, sucks to be you. If you were a Native American, you're probably now dead too. If you were a plantation owner in the American South, you lost most of your holdings after the Civil War. If you're a factory worker in America, you're probably jobless. Someday software engineers will be the dinosaurs of the future. But all of these groups are just written out of the narrative: capitalism is defined in terms of the winners, and the losers drop out of history. Capitalism will expand forever, but it won't look like the version of capitalism we have today.