5 ms·

I wouldn't be so sure. How do you allocate resources and pick the best prospects in your alternative, presumably centrally directed, economy?

by binbag 5y ago

nynx 5y ago
Centrally directed economy? No, that most likely wouldn't work. There is a lot of room for free-market economies that are very much not capitalist.
- rytill 5y ago
  Can you help me learn more about this? I'm genuinely curious and don't know what kinds of things you have in mind.
Banana699 5y ago
This whole argument (it isn't yet really, but it's developing into a very familiar one) is a huge waste of breath IMHO, suitable more for heat than light. For one thing, "Capitalism" vs. "Central Planning" are strawmen abstracted from competing families of concrete approaches that, while similar in very broad strokes enough to justify the strawmen abstractions, are wildly different in specifics. The "Capitalism" of Singapore, Switzerland, and USA are so wildly different underneath the superficial names and slogans that any discussion of them that views them as basically the same is necessarily going nowhere. Sometimes humans' amazing ability to recognize very loose patterns just turns out to be a foot gun like that. For another, Innovation (or risk-taking ventures or whatever you want to call it really) is an institution thing, a culture if you will, the challenge of building an institution goes way far beyond what type of managment you choose for it. DARPA and NASA are both bureaucratic bodies that produced amazing innovations and took incredibly risky ventures, Nokia and Xerox were once risk-taking cowboys that got averse and stagnated. The canned response to this is always 'Yes but you can always found your own company and eat their lunch, that's why capitalism is superior', this is wildly wrong on a lot of things, but the most jarring blindspot is that it assumes all innovations have the capacity to carve out a market from the established. This isn't true in general, it just so happened that digital cameras, personal computers or smartphones are so amazing they can jumpstart a new market out of thin air and take on existing companies head-on, but what if you have a search engine innovation that can make search 50% better (less spam and SEO trash, more discoverability, etc..), a 50% better search is an amazing innovation, but good luck going against Google with that and that alone. If nothing else, they will just buy you and put you in the drawer if you make too much of a fuss. This problem is standard in evolutionary approaches to optimization. Despite the wildly different specifics of things that humans call 'Capitalism', they all share a very broad faith in the power of competition as an optimization process and a constraint-driven solution discovery algorithm. Well, that's called Evolution, and it heckin sucks sometimes. There are probably millions upon millions of good biological designs that got extinct because they weren't lucky enough to carve out a niche out of the chaos. Evolution is basically saying 'If you don't like how it is, make your own species and eat their lunch' to the beings playing it, but sometimes, a lot of times, insanely good mutations aren't enough to build a new species, or they can build a new species but it will be eaten in a heartbeat by the established ones for reasons unrelated to its efficiency. Just look at the human eye, there is an incredibly dumb design flaw where fibers connecting it to the brain warp around in a funny way and cause a blind spot in its midst, the brain corrects it automatically by simply lying to itself (I mean, uhh, 'Interpolating'). This wasn't enough to drive humans extinct, you might object that this is okay because Evolution is actually optimizing for survivability, not the best eye, so a species that manages to survive despite a dumb flaw in its sensor suite is just par for the course. But this a huge problem for competition-driven innovation, because we actually want to optimize for the best eye, a dumb design flaw in the eyes of a stagnant behemoth that refuses to die like Google is a very bad thing for us. Innovation is just an insanely hard problem no matter how you look at it, and it's always solved in real life by ad-hoc competition-planning hybrids that is always fragile to stagnation, to which it eventually (almost always) falls prey. The Capitalism-CentralPlanning debate, if it's to be productive at all, should just stick to standard boring economic issues (ideally by discussing concrete approaches, not vague semantic clouds), because innovation is just a red herring that supports neither party of the debate.
- winterplace 5y ago
  Summary of above: Survival is sometimes chance and is not always optimized. Best to avoid too much generalization when thinking. Some things are very different even though they are called the same name.
m_ke 5y ago
The alternative to capitalists picking who gets funded doesn't have to be central planning. You could have a consumer driven model where citizens get to allocate money to new research and development, similar to the democracy dollar idea that Andrew Yang was pushing. This would allow money to trickle up to the best companies instead of "trickling down" and getting captured by the rich. If each American got to distribute 5 thousand a year to businesses, researchers or infrastructure the world would be a much better place. I'm sure none of them would allocate it to advertisers or tools that spy on them.
- winterplace 5y ago
  Could you expand on your point about the distributing?
  - m_ke 5y ago
    I had a crowdfunding like model for government grants in mind where projects are pitched with funding goals that everyone can chose to allocate a portion of their fixed budget to. This could also work for businesses or whole industries, so as an example software engineers could decide to allocate funds to open source projects that would make them more productive. Another example would be diabetics funding research and development of more affordable insulin. In general I'm in favor of more direct democracy and empowering citizens/consumers over politicians and bankers.
- nafix 5y ago
  That’s a very interesting idea. That would be a very fair and grassroots driven mechanism. I don’t think that’s something the government would ever allow though. Then again, in some ways the recent NFT craze is kind of precisely the case. The government printed a _lot_ of money last year and paid out a lot of money during covid. This stimulus is almost like a stipend to go spend/“invest” on all these meme and non meme stocks and crypto related projects, because thats where I feel most of this money is going lol. I don’t think that was intentional by the government though. And by government, I guess I mean the Federal Reserve?
- binbag 5y ago

I wouldn't be so sure. How do you allocate resources and pick the best prospects in your alternative, presumably centrally directed, economy?

by binbag 5y ago

I wouldn't be so sure. How do you allocate resources and pick the best prospects in your alternative, presumably centrally directed, economy?

nynx 5y ago

Centrally directed economy? No, that most likely wouldn't work. There is a lot of room for free-market economies that are very much not capitalist.

rytill 5y ago
Can you help me learn more about this? I'm genuinely curious and don't know what kinds of things you have in mind.

Banana699 5y ago

This whole argument (it isn't yet really, but it's developing into a very familiar one) is a huge waste of breath IMHO, suitable more for heat than light. For one thing, "Capitalism" vs. "Central Planning" are strawmen abstracted from competing families of concrete approaches that, while similar in very broad strokes enough to justify the strawmen abstractions, are wildly different in specifics. The "Capitalism" of Singapore, Switzerland, and USA are so wildly different underneath the superficial names and slogans that any discussion of them that views them as basically the same is necessarily going nowhere. Sometimes humans' amazing ability to recognize very loose patterns just turns out to be a foot gun like that. For another, Innovation (or risk-taking ventures or whatever you want to call it really) is an institution thing, a culture if you will, the challenge of building an institution goes way far beyond what type of managment you choose for it. DARPA and NASA are both bureaucratic bodies that produced amazing innovations and took incredibly risky ventures, Nokia and Xerox were once risk-taking cowboys that got averse and stagnated. The canned response to this is always 'Yes but you can always found your own company and eat their lunch, that's why capitalism is superior', this is wildly wrong on a lot of things, but the most jarring blindspot is that it assumes all innovations have the capacity to carve out a market from the established. This isn't true in general, it just so happened that digital cameras, personal computers or smartphones are so amazing they can jumpstart a new market out of thin air and take on existing companies head-on, but what if you have a search engine innovation that can make search 50% better (less spam and SEO trash, more discoverability, etc..), a 50% better search is an amazing innovation, but good luck going against Google with that and that alone. If nothing else, they will just buy you and put you in the drawer if you make too much of a fuss. This problem is standard in evolutionary approaches to optimization. Despite the wildly different specifics of things that humans call 'Capitalism', they all share a very broad faith in the power of competition as an optimization process and a constraint-driven solution discovery algorithm. Well, that's called Evolution, and it heckin sucks sometimes. There are probably millions upon millions of good biological designs that got extinct because they weren't lucky enough to carve out a niche out of the chaos. Evolution is basically saying 'If you don't like how it is, make your own species and eat their lunch' to the beings playing it, but sometimes, a lot of times, insanely good mutations aren't enough to build a new species, or they can build a new species but it will be eaten in a heartbeat by the established ones for reasons unrelated to its efficiency. Just look at the human eye, there is an incredibly dumb design flaw where fibers connecting it to the brain warp around in a funny way and cause a blind spot in its midst, the brain corrects it automatically by simply lying to itself (I mean, uhh, 'Interpolating'). This wasn't enough to drive humans extinct, you might object that this is okay because Evolution is actually optimizing for survivability, not the best eye, so a species that manages to survive despite a dumb flaw in its sensor suite is just par for the course. But this a huge problem for competition-driven innovation, because we actually want to optimize for the best eye, a dumb design flaw in the eyes of a stagnant behemoth that refuses to die like Google is a very bad thing for us. Innovation is just an insanely hard problem no matter how you look at it, and it's always solved in real life by ad-hoc competition-planning hybrids that is always fragile to stagnation, to which it eventually (almost always) falls prey. The Capitalism-CentralPlanning debate, if it's to be productive at all, should just stick to standard boring economic issues (ideally by discussing concrete approaches, not vague semantic clouds), because innovation is just a red herring that supports neither party of the debate.

winterplace 5y ago
Summary of above: Survival is sometimes chance and is not always optimized. Best to avoid too much generalization when thinking. Some things are very different even though they are called the same name.

m_ke 5y ago

The alternative to capitalists picking who gets funded doesn't have to be central planning. You could have a consumer driven model where citizens get to allocate money to new research and development, similar to the democracy dollar idea that Andrew Yang was pushing. This would allow money to trickle up to the best companies instead of "trickling down" and getting captured by the rich. If each American got to distribute 5 thousand a year to businesses, researchers or infrastructure the world would be a much better place. I'm sure none of them would allocate it to advertisers or tools that spy on them.

winterplace 5y ago
Could you expand on your point about the distributing?
- m_ke 5y ago
  I had a crowdfunding like model for government grants in mind where projects are pitched with funding goals that everyone can chose to allocate a portion of their fixed budget to. This could also work for businesses or whole industries, so as an example software engineers could decide to allocate funds to open source projects that would make them more productive. Another example would be diabetics funding research and development of more affordable insulin. In general I'm in favor of more direct democracy and empowering citizens/consumers over politicians and bankers.
nafix 5y ago
That’s a very interesting idea. That would be a very fair and grassroots driven mechanism. I don’t think that’s something the government would ever allow though. Then again, in some ways the recent NFT craze is kind of precisely the case. The government printed a _lot_ of money last year and paid out a lot of money during covid. This stimulus is almost like a stipend to go spend/“invest” on all these meme and non meme stocks and crypto related projects, because thats where I feel most of this money is going lol. I don’t think that was intentional by the government though. And by government, I guess I mean the Federal Reserve?
binbag 5y ago