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the cynic in me says that those savings will just become profits for the companies and government through taxes and greed....so savings are relative. Also it se

the cynic in me says that those savings will just become profits for the companies and government through taxes and greed....so savings are relative. Also it seems to be highly dependent on solar mass adoption

seventytwo 4y ago
You know, collectively, we can do something about that… It’s a political decision in society to allow that added value to be sucked up by those who are already wealthy.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  yes and no - each day it is game rules plus the ability to negotiate; elected officials come in all flavors
- sheepdestroyer 4y ago
  Isn't it too late for that now that the power imbalance afforded to Capital owners is so disproportionate? I think that's what transpired from Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century"
  - stormbrew 4y ago
    History is long, and capitalism as we know it is only a couple centuries old (and that's being generous). It's easy to forget that there was a before because it's very common to frame even old economic systems in modern terms, but things changing is the only real constant. There'll be an after too.
    - dr_dshiv 4y ago
      How do you define capitalism, I’m curious, in this context? What was it 200 years ago that made it different from 400 years ago?
      - stormbrew 4y ago
        The industrial revolution and the beginnings of a global liberal trade order pretty substantially changed the shape of the world's economic system, even if sometimes people call predecessor systems like mercantilism a kind of capitalism. But if you want to extend the time horizon to 400 years (ie. to the beginning of the end of feudalism) that's still not that long in the grand scheme of things. That said I don't really know if I buy that we're in that system anymore either; I think history books will probably eventually recognize a shift starting around the collapse of Breton Woods and that we're currently in a long and increasingly painful transitionary period that we're in denial about to something we can't yet describe. But I Am Not An Economist (nor do I want to be one), so who knows.
        ch4s3 4y ago
        Mercantilism definitely is NOT a kind of capitalism. Adam Smith and other thinkers during the Scottish Enlightenment were specifically arguing against mercantilism. The Cron Laws in England were even successfully repealed by on of Smith's students.
        stormbrew 4y ago
        I mean, I agree with you (I just said sometimes people call it that, not that it is that) but I don't think anything you said really contradicts it being a kind of capitalism. After all Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky disagreed literally violently with each other but Soviet Communism is still a label that contains all their efforts and systems.
        ch4s3 4y ago
        Right but they were fighting over the direction of a type of political economy that predated all of them. Smith and other original thinkers that framed capitalism did so in opposition to mercantilism. Capitalism was a reaction to. And in many ways criticism of mercantilism.
        4y ago
- WalterBright 4y ago
  You can buy stock in those companies and get your share of the profits.
  - kbenson 4y ago
    On the one hand, the ability to usefully interact with the stock market is very limited for the majority of people, as they do not have the extra income to invest. It's very much a system in which the lower class do not get to meaningfully benefit from most the time. On the other hand, the companies will be made of people, expand by hiring new people, and pay these people with those profits, so much of the money will make it to people. Companies making lots of money is not a problem. Companies saving vast amounts of it in war chests is, IMO (depending on how they save it), as it's effectively removing it from the economy. I really hope Apple and Google's massive saving are stored by being reinvested in some way and aren't just entirely removed from the economy, because that would be a shame. I suppose even if they were just stored in a bank that would be used as capital for loans, so maybe it's not that bad.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      > Companies saving vast amounts of it in war chests is, IMO (depending on how they save it), as it's effectively removing it from the economy. Nobody saves money in Scrooge McDuck cash vaults. All the money is invested, all of it. Even money in a checking account is invested. (The banks invest it, that's why they offer free checking accounts. They're not a charity.) The majority of people do invest in the stock market. > the lower class is not the majority. Even so, brokers like Robinhood have made it easy for anyone with a phone to invest.
      - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        > Nobody saves money in Scrooge McDuck cash vaults. All the money is invested, all of it. Russian oligarchs invested vast amounts of money into super yahts and luzury London real estate, which sits empty 360 days a year. Is that productive investment?
- prottog 4y ago
  I would rather the value be sucked up by those who contribute towards creating it.
bpodgursky 4y ago
I hope many companies get filthy rich transitioning the US to a carbon-free economy. I hope we mint a ton of greedy billionaires in the process. That sounds like a great deal for everyone!
burkaman 4y ago
I would say that's a pretty optimistic prediction. The cynical prediction is that this rapid energy transition simply doesn't happen.
WalterBright 4y ago
> will just become profits for the companies ... greed Of course they will. You can thank this effect for the high standard of living we enjoy from the free market.
- rascul 4y ago
  Is there a free market though? Seems like it's all taxed and regulated.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    A free market doesn't have to be a perfect free market in order to work well.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Right: it has to be carefully regulated to work well. The word "free" here is carrying more than it is rated for.
  - radicalbyte 4y ago
    You need regulation to make a free market, otherwise they trend toward monopoly/duopoly/fixed markets.
  - uoaei 4y ago
    You misunderstand the meaning of "free" in the phrase "free market". Read The Wealth of Nations and you will see that Adam Smith was a vociferous advocate of regulation. Because "free" was not "unregulated" in the original conception, it was rather "open to any participant, such that they have the opportunity to benefit", which as we have noted over the past 300 years of economic history requires regulation and enforcement mechanisms (funded by taxes).
    - rascul 4y ago
      I guess there are varying definitions of "free market". I was going off of Wikipedia: > In economics, a free market is an idealized cognitive model of an economic system in which the prices of goods and services are determined by supply and demand expressed by sellers and buyers. Such markets, as modeled, operate without the intervention of government or any other external authority. Adam Smith is mentioned later on in the article though: > For classical economists such as Adam Smith, the term free market refers to a market free from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities. They say this implies that economic rents, which they describe as profits generated from a lack of perfect competition, must be reduced or eliminated as much as possible through free competition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market

seventytwo 4y ago

You know, collectively, we can do something about that… It’s a political decision in society to allow that added value to be sucked up by those who are already wealthy.

mistrial9 4y ago
yes and no - each day it is game rules plus the ability to negotiate; elected officials come in all flavors
sheepdestroyer 4y ago
Isn't it too late for that now that the power imbalance afforded to Capital owners is so disproportionate? I think that's what transpired from Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century"
- stormbrew 4y ago
  History is long, and capitalism as we know it is only a couple centuries old (and that's being generous). It's easy to forget that there was a before because it's very common to frame even old economic systems in modern terms, but things changing is the only real constant. There'll be an after too.
  - dr_dshiv 4y ago
    How do you define capitalism, I’m curious, in this context? What was it 200 years ago that made it different from 400 years ago?
    - stormbrew 4y ago
      The industrial revolution and the beginnings of a global liberal trade order pretty substantially changed the shape of the world's economic system, even if sometimes people call predecessor systems like mercantilism a kind of capitalism. But if you want to extend the time horizon to 400 years (ie. to the beginning of the end of feudalism) that's still not that long in the grand scheme of things. That said I don't really know if I buy that we're in that system anymore either; I think history books will probably eventually recognize a shift starting around the collapse of Breton Woods and that we're currently in a long and increasingly painful transitionary period that we're in denial about to something we can't yet describe. But I Am Not An Economist (nor do I want to be one), so who knows.
      - ch4s3 4y ago
        Mercantilism definitely is NOT a kind of capitalism. Adam Smith and other thinkers during the Scottish Enlightenment were specifically arguing against mercantilism. The Cron Laws in England were even successfully repealed by on of Smith's students.
        stormbrew 4y ago
        I mean, I agree with you (I just said sometimes people call it that, not that it is that) but I don't think anything you said really contradicts it being a kind of capitalism. After all Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky disagreed literally violently with each other but Soviet Communism is still a label that contains all their efforts and systems.
        ch4s3 4y ago
        Right but they were fighting over the direction of a type of political economy that predated all of them. Smith and other original thinkers that framed capitalism did so in opposition to mercantilism. Capitalism was a reaction to. And in many ways criticism of mercantilism.
        4y ago
WalterBright 4y ago
You can buy stock in those companies and get your share of the profits.
- kbenson 4y ago
  On the one hand, the ability to usefully interact with the stock market is very limited for the majority of people, as they do not have the extra income to invest. It's very much a system in which the lower class do not get to meaningfully benefit from most the time. On the other hand, the companies will be made of people, expand by hiring new people, and pay these people with those profits, so much of the money will make it to people. Companies making lots of money is not a problem. Companies saving vast amounts of it in war chests is, IMO (depending on how they save it), as it's effectively removing it from the economy. I really hope Apple and Google's massive saving are stored by being reinvested in some way and aren't just entirely removed from the economy, because that would be a shame. I suppose even if they were just stored in a bank that would be used as capital for loans, so maybe it's not that bad.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    > Companies saving vast amounts of it in war chests is, IMO (depending on how they save it), as it's effectively removing it from the economy. Nobody saves money in Scrooge McDuck cash vaults. All the money is invested, all of it. Even money in a checking account is invested. (The banks invest it, that's why they offer free checking accounts. They're not a charity.) The majority of people do invest in the stock market. > the lower class is not the majority. Even so, brokers like Robinhood have made it easy for anyone with a phone to invest.
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      > Nobody saves money in Scrooge McDuck cash vaults. All the money is invested, all of it. Russian oligarchs invested vast amounts of money into super yahts and luzury London real estate, which sits empty 360 days a year. Is that productive investment?
prottog 4y ago
I would rather the value be sucked up by those who contribute towards creating it.

bpodgursky 4y ago

I hope many companies get filthy rich transitioning the US to a carbon-free economy. I hope we mint a ton of greedy billionaires in the process. That sounds like a great deal for everyone!

burkaman 4y ago

I would say that's a pretty optimistic prediction. The cynical prediction is that this rapid energy transition simply doesn't happen.

WalterBright 4y ago

> will just become profits for the companies ... greed Of course they will. You can thank this effect for the high standard of living we enjoy from the free market.

rascul 4y ago
Is there a free market though? Seems like it's all taxed and regulated.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  A free market doesn't have to be a perfect free market in order to work well.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Right: it has to be carefully regulated to work well. The word "free" here is carrying more than it is rated for.
- radicalbyte 4y ago
  You need regulation to make a free market, otherwise they trend toward monopoly/duopoly/fixed markets.
- uoaei 4y ago
  You misunderstand the meaning of "free" in the phrase "free market". Read The Wealth of Nations and you will see that Adam Smith was a vociferous advocate of regulation. Because "free" was not "unregulated" in the original conception, it was rather "open to any participant, such that they have the opportunity to benefit", which as we have noted over the past 300 years of economic history requires regulation and enforcement mechanisms (funded by taxes).
  - rascul 4y ago
    I guess there are varying definitions of "free market". I was going off of Wikipedia: > In economics, a free market is an idealized cognitive model of an economic system in which the prices of goods and services are determined by supply and demand expressed by sellers and buyers. Such markets, as modeled, operate without the intervention of government or any other external authority. Adam Smith is mentioned later on in the article though: > For classical economists such as Adam Smith, the term free market refers to a market free from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities. They say this implies that economic rents, which they describe as profits generated from a lack of perfect competition, must be reduced or eliminated as much as possible through free competition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market