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Poverty is the base case. It's the default state. How does prosperity increase at all?

claudiawerner 6y ago
There are a number of interesting responses to the idea that poverty is the base case or default in some way here: https://www.reddit.com/r/samharris/comments/f12rl0/poverty_is_the_default_state_of_humankind/ https://www.reddit.com/r/samharris/comments/f12rl0/poverty_i... What do we mean by default? Would we say that the default state of a child is surviving without their mother? Is a lack of breast milk or shelter the default? I can easily imagine a situation (I.e. a functioning society) in which poverty is not the default. If poverty is defined to mean having below a certain daily wage[0], then how is that "default"? Do we mean absolute or relative poverty? Just like default settings in your favourite program presuppose the program itself, it seems poverty presupposes a system where some people make above $<poverty threshold> a day and some do not. To say that poverty is the 'default' without also specifying to whom and in which society it is the default is either useless information, or an apparently irrelevant claim that only concerns some cases in the early stages of human pre-civilization. [0] Beware that if you disagree with this supposition, you lose the ability to claim that statistics which use increase in daily wage indicate moving out of poverty. The case for saying that capitalism does away with poverty depends on this definition of poverty.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > I can easily imagine a situation (I.e. a functioning society) in which poverty is not the default. You're imagining a society that has overcome the default state and maintains their progress. They haven't changed the default. A machine's default state isn't being powered, but if you power up a machine and keep feeding it power and maintain it well, you can rely on it being powered. Once you stop maintaining it, or stop providing power, it will go back to the default state of not being powered. > Do we mean absolute or relative poverty? Absolute if you want to get anywhere. Unless you distribute everything perfectly equal, you'll always have one half that makes less than the median.
  - claudiawerner 6y ago
    >You're imagining a society that has overcome the default state and maintains their progress. They haven't changed the default. They have changed the default from the perspective of an individual in that society, or if the society is large enough to encompass the majority of people, they have changed the default even more. The default state in the abstract sense is not only poverty, but the struggle against a state of non-privation through human labour. >Unless you distribute everything perfectly equal, you'll always have one half that makes less than the median. Nobody is denying this fact, and no serious philosopher (with the exception of Barbon in the 18th century) contends that "distributing everything perfectly equal" is possible or even desirable. What is "poverty is the default" supposed to be telling us? What is its rhetorical function?
    - luckylion 6y ago
      The default mode is what happens when you stop interfering. What happens when a society stops doing anything, does it remain in it's current state? Then that is the default state and they have truly altered it. But it doesn't, of course. Any individual may perceive it to be the default because they've never experienced anything else, but it would be foolish to believe it to be the actual default. History has taught us over and over again that it's not, that civilization may crumble and advances can be lost. Like somebody relying on their car always working because "it never died on me before" and not maintaining it well, they will eventually find that suddenly it does. > What is "poverty is the default" supposed to be telling us? I believe it's an important fact, because it changes the perspective. If wealth was the default, we'd just need to take care not to do some certain things that would change it, and had it happened, we'd just need to stop doing those things for it to automatically return to the default state. If poverty is the default, it's the opposite: you need to do something to end it, and you need to keep doing it.
      - claudiawerner 6y ago
        >The default mode is what happens when you stop interfering. This sounds reasonable, but it seems that the 'default' state of humans is to interfere, to change their environment and process it with human labour. Accepting that, any talk of a 'default' state of life is metaphysical and removed from the actual reality of human production. The state of wealth being a default or not (in the relative sense) is contingent on the true default of human labour and appropriating nature. The state of wealth being a default or not (in the absolute sense) doesn't provide any new information. Humans need to make things to have wealth. >If wealth was the default, we'd just need to take care not to do some certain things that would change it, and had it happened, we'd just need to stop doing those things for it to automatically return to the default state. Why is this an important point to make? Even Marx famously claimed (in defence of his theory of value) that every society must constantly maintain itself, or it will perish within a week. Others have gone further and argued that society must constantly maintain its ideology and relations of production too, not merely the fact of production. It's unclear who denies that society needs constant maintenance and improvement, even just to stay in the same state.
asdff 6y ago
The whole idea of having any government at all is to pull resources to collectively advance beyond the base state. Clearly this prosperity is not very equally shared, and that is the problem.
- foogazi 6y ago
  > The whole idea of having any government at all is to pull resources to collectively advance beyond the base state. Where do you get that from? Government has been around for millennia and it has mainly been about security - not being invaded - than economic freedom
djrobstep 6y ago
Poverty is not a natural state. It's artificially created and violently enforced through property law.
- narag 6y ago
  Poverty is not a natural state. "Natural state" is not a very useful predicate because, even if you can define it (what hominid and what period) first you need to define poverty unambiguously. But I'll bite. If we settle on stone age, in my very humble opinion, poverty is a natural state. Someone can argue that paleo people were happy or in harmony with nature or whatever, but then they were at the mercy of elements, diseases and wars. That's poverty to me. It's artificially created and violently enforced through property law. This seems a description of a lawless society. By the way, law of the jungle is the natural state. Property law is a cornerstone of civilization.
  - claudiawerner 6y ago
    >This seems a description of a lawless society. GP specifically mentioned property law. >Property law is a cornerstone of civilization. This is a dubious claim, but I believe GP is specifically referring to property rights and law under capitalism, which until quite recently in human history was not the cornerstone of civilization. Property law worked much differently in pre-capitalist societies, and through the enclosures in Western Europe and imperialism off the continent, it is by no means a stretch to declare it as originating in violence and requiring a monopololy on violence by the state to continue to exist. 'If money, according to Augier, “comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,” capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.'
    - narag 6y ago
      GP specifically mentioned property law. Exactly. "...capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt." This is a way to look at things as useless as the "natural state" thing, and for the same reason: it's looking back, not forward. It's condemning the money and the production means as evil because of their origin, not their usefulness. It's far more interesting to look at how societies evolve when you tweak the rules. It turns out that the results of abolishing capitalism are not pretty.

There are a number of interesting responses to the idea that poverty is the base case or default in some way here: https://www.reddit.com/r/samharris/comments/f12rl0/poverty_is_the_default_state_of_humankind/ https://www.reddit.com/r/samharris/comments/f12rl0/poverty_i... What do we mean by default? Would we say that the default state of a child is surviving without their mother? Is a lack of breast milk or shelter the default? I can easily imagine a situation (I.e. a functioning society) in which poverty is not the default. If poverty is defined to mean having below a certain daily wage[0], then how is that "default"? Do we mean absolute or relative poverty? Just like default settings in your favourite program presuppose the program itself, it seems poverty presupposes a system where some people make above $<poverty threshold> a day and some do not. To say that poverty is the 'default' without also specifying to whom and in which society it is the default is either useless information, or an apparently irrelevant claim that only concerns some cases in the early stages of human pre-civilization. [0] Beware that if you disagree with this supposition, you lose the ability to claim that statistics which use increase in daily wage indicate moving out of poverty. The case for saying that capitalism does away with poverty depends on this definition of poverty.

luckylion 6y ago
> I can easily imagine a situation (I.e. a functioning society) in which poverty is not the default. You're imagining a society that has overcome the default state and maintains their progress. They haven't changed the default. A machine's default state isn't being powered, but if you power up a machine and keep feeding it power and maintain it well, you can rely on it being powered. Once you stop maintaining it, or stop providing power, it will go back to the default state of not being powered. > Do we mean absolute or relative poverty? Absolute if you want to get anywhere. Unless you distribute everything perfectly equal, you'll always have one half that makes less than the median.
- claudiawerner 6y ago
  >You're imagining a society that has overcome the default state and maintains their progress. They haven't changed the default. They have changed the default from the perspective of an individual in that society, or if the society is large enough to encompass the majority of people, they have changed the default even more. The default state in the abstract sense is not only poverty, but the struggle against a state of non-privation through human labour. >Unless you distribute everything perfectly equal, you'll always have one half that makes less than the median. Nobody is denying this fact, and no serious philosopher (with the exception of Barbon in the 18th century) contends that "distributing everything perfectly equal" is possible or even desirable. What is "poverty is the default" supposed to be telling us? What is its rhetorical function?
  - luckylion 6y ago
    The default mode is what happens when you stop interfering. What happens when a society stops doing anything, does it remain in it's current state? Then that is the default state and they have truly altered it. But it doesn't, of course. Any individual may perceive it to be the default because they've never experienced anything else, but it would be foolish to believe it to be the actual default. History has taught us over and over again that it's not, that civilization may crumble and advances can be lost. Like somebody relying on their car always working because "it never died on me before" and not maintaining it well, they will eventually find that suddenly it does. > What is "poverty is the default" supposed to be telling us? I believe it's an important fact, because it changes the perspective. If wealth was the default, we'd just need to take care not to do some certain things that would change it, and had it happened, we'd just need to stop doing those things for it to automatically return to the default state. If poverty is the default, it's the opposite: you need to do something to end it, and you need to keep doing it.
    - claudiawerner 6y ago
      >The default mode is what happens when you stop interfering. This sounds reasonable, but it seems that the 'default' state of humans is to interfere, to change their environment and process it with human labour. Accepting that, any talk of a 'default' state of life is metaphysical and removed from the actual reality of human production. The state of wealth being a default or not (in the relative sense) is contingent on the true default of human labour and appropriating nature. The state of wealth being a default or not (in the absolute sense) doesn't provide any new information. Humans need to make things to have wealth. >If wealth was the default, we'd just need to take care not to do some certain things that would change it, and had it happened, we'd just need to stop doing those things for it to automatically return to the default state. Why is this an important point to make? Even Marx famously claimed (in defence of his theory of value) that every society must constantly maintain itself, or it will perish within a week. Others have gone further and argued that society must constantly maintain its ideology and relations of production too, not merely the fact of production. It's unclear who denies that society needs constant maintenance and improvement, even just to stay in the same state.

asdff 6y ago

The whole idea of having any government at all is to pull resources to collectively advance beyond the base state. Clearly this prosperity is not very equally shared, and that is the problem.

foogazi 6y ago
> The whole idea of having any government at all is to pull resources to collectively advance beyond the base state. Where do you get that from? Government has been around for millennia and it has mainly been about security - not being invaded - than economic freedom

djrobstep 6y ago

Poverty is not a natural state. It's artificially created and violently enforced through property law.

narag 6y ago
Poverty is not a natural state. "Natural state" is not a very useful predicate because, even if you can define it (what hominid and what period) first you need to define poverty unambiguously. But I'll bite. If we settle on stone age, in my very humble opinion, poverty is a natural state. Someone can argue that paleo people were happy or in harmony with nature or whatever, but then they were at the mercy of elements, diseases and wars. That's poverty to me. It's artificially created and violently enforced through property law. This seems a description of a lawless society. By the way, law of the jungle is the natural state. Property law is a cornerstone of civilization.
- claudiawerner 6y ago
  >This seems a description of a lawless society. GP specifically mentioned property law. >Property law is a cornerstone of civilization. This is a dubious claim, but I believe GP is specifically referring to property rights and law under capitalism, which until quite recently in human history was not the cornerstone of civilization. Property law worked much differently in pre-capitalist societies, and through the enclosures in Western Europe and imperialism off the continent, it is by no means a stretch to declare it as originating in violence and requiring a monopololy on violence by the state to continue to exist. 'If money, according to Augier, “comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,” capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.'
  - narag 6y ago
    GP specifically mentioned property law. Exactly. "...capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt." This is a way to look at things as useless as the "natural state" thing, and for the same reason: it's looking back, not forward. It's condemning the money and the production means as evil because of their origin, not their usefulness. It's far more interesting to look at how societies evolve when you tweak the rules. It turns out that the results of abolishing capitalism are not pretty.