4 ms·

I wanted to tell you about Adam Smith's invisible hand [1]: >the concept has been captured to mean that the pursuit of individual interest leads to the general

by tkk23 4y ago

I wanted to tell you about Adam Smith's invisible hand [1]: >the concept has been captured to mean that the pursuit of individual interest leads to the general good. However, to my surprise, it seems to have been thought up as an argument against a global adjustment of income: >Smith was worried that if the movement of capital and the movement of goods (imports) were both free, the British bourgeoisie would invest abroad, to the detriment of Britain. To this, Smith came up with an argument according to which the British bourgeois would be biased according to their place of residence and would therefore make investments in the home country guided by an "invisible hand". Against this, I would like to argue that there is no need to help the poor beyond allowing them to access the global market. If you look at Fiverr and such, with internet access, everybody can participate in the global economy and take some of those sweet ad dollars. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand

bannedbybros 4y ago
brnaftr361 4y ago
A lot of Smith's conjectures have proven to be inaccurate, it seems. Additionally nobody seems to read the whole text, and instead they suck decontextualized quotes from the text in support of their argument and typically do so to justify the capitalist modal: "Many right-wingers-in-love-with-large-corporations keep citing Adam Smith, famous patron saint of “capitalism,” a word he never uttered, without reading him, using his ideas in a self-serving selective manner—ideas that he most certainly did not endorse in the form they are presented." -Nicholas Nassim Taleb, Antifragile David Graeber, in his book Debt, points to some interesting work by an Islamic scholar Al-Ghazali[1] and this is mentioned in the article you linked - though it's nowhere near as thorough. This is of interest because there is, to my knowledge, a considerable difference between Medieval Persia and Enlightenment Europe (to now) in both the domains of social landscape and moral paradigm. This is kind of an interesting parallel with the above point. Perhaps these 'components' aren't independent and require a great deal of structure and maintenance - pulling them out of their context and plugging them in to a given civilization, it seems, does not work. And perhaps that's evinced by the gross poverty suffered the world over. Taleb has an interesting point: "The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves. So I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or “incentives” for skill. The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunities as you can." -Nicholas Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan Having pointed that out, I hypothesize that even if it were as outlined by Taleb, discovery would be random and that would lead to similar conditions mentioned in the article, but I would include in that hypothesis that the rate of discovery would drastically increase. Of course, "research" in the common sense is not conducted in the free market, it is highly regulated. Not only in the most common sense, by the government via financing selectivity, but also in more pernicious differential forms through institutions of higher learning. One, in that they vet people in many ways (financial, ideological, 'intellectual') and two, they withhold the tools and information generated which used public funding and is dependent on a long lineage of information. As a tertiary point, I imagine it would be much more difficult, if not virtually impossible for some "layperson" (read: expert without a degree) to propose some new theory, or perhaps to do something as simple as publish a paper. This lays the land in a way that is truly bleak for an independent informal scientist, even bleaker for someone who wishes to be one - though the domains vary on that. I think this is crucial to understanding the failures of the Western economic model as it relates to science. [1]: This is corroborated by Taleb.

by tkk23 4y ago

bannedbybros 4y ago

brnaftr361 4y ago

A lot of Smith's conjectures have proven to be inaccurate, it seems. Additionally nobody seems to read the whole text, and instead they suck decontextualized quotes from the text in support of their argument and typically do so to justify the capitalist modal: "Many right-wingers-in-love-with-large-corporations keep citing Adam Smith, famous patron saint of “capitalism,” a word he never uttered, without reading him, using his ideas in a self-serving selective manner—ideas that he most certainly did not endorse in the form they are presented." -Nicholas Nassim Taleb, Antifragile David Graeber, in his book Debt, points to some interesting work by an Islamic scholar Al-Ghazali[1] and this is mentioned in the article you linked - though it's nowhere near as thorough. This is of interest because there is, to my knowledge, a considerable difference between Medieval Persia and Enlightenment Europe (to now) in both the domains of social landscape and moral paradigm. This is kind of an interesting parallel with the above point. Perhaps these 'components' aren't independent and require a great deal of structure and maintenance - pulling them out of their context and plugging them in to a given civilization, it seems, does not work. And perhaps that's evinced by the gross poverty suffered the world over. Taleb has an interesting point: "The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves. So I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or “incentives” for skill. The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunities as you can." -Nicholas Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan Having pointed that out, I hypothesize that even if it were as outlined by Taleb, discovery would be random and that would lead to similar conditions mentioned in the article, but I would include in that hypothesis that the rate of discovery would drastically increase. Of course, "research" in the common sense is not conducted in the free market, it is highly regulated. Not only in the most common sense, by the government via financing selectivity, but also in more pernicious differential forms through institutions of higher learning. One, in that they vet people in many ways (financial, ideological, 'intellectual') and two, they withhold the tools and information generated which used public funding and is dependent on a long lineage of information. As a tertiary point, I imagine it would be much more difficult, if not virtually impossible for some "layperson" (read: expert without a degree) to propose some new theory, or perhaps to do something as simple as publish a paper. This lays the land in a way that is truly bleak for an independent informal scientist, even bleaker for someone who wishes to be one - though the domains vary on that. I think this is crucial to understanding the failures of the Western economic model as it relates to science. [1]: This is corroborated by Taleb.