4 ms·

that the reward system is broken is clear to everybody. but i am not sure you can build a "well functioning capitalist system" given the previous 400 years of

by kome 4y ago

that the reward system is broken is clear to everybody. but i am not sure you can build a "well functioning capitalist system" given the previous 400 years of experiments with it.

swader999 4y ago
Experiments with the other systems have killed millions. What we have now is a well functioning oligarchy.
- Muromec 4y ago
  Instilling communism through means of genocide and oppression killed people. So maybe someone will find a nicer way to dispossess people that everyone will like. Whi knows
- 082349872349872 4y ago
  1984 is interesting: to read Goldstein, the oligarchy ("inner party") is relatively benign (it is definitely not based on ethnicity, and is merit based, hence —in principle— not hereditary either) yet to believe Winston (a narrator who admitted his willingness to commit domestic terrorism!), it is still dysfunctional, because apparently the oligarchs believe enjoying their own good fortune doesn't suffice: others must suffer misfortune. (to understand this book properly I think it helps to recall that Orwell was on scholarship ["outer party"] to bring up the exam scores at a boarding school that otherwise catered to the rich and thick [cream of society — "inner party" sprogs]; many scenes in 1984 can be traced back to the posthumously-published Such Such Were the Joys)
- godelski 4y ago
  > Experiments with the other systems have killed millions. I'm pretty confident we can say this about every economic system. But we can't really say who has saved the most because we can't do very good A/B testing or really any good causal analysis. It is important to remember that economics is not a hard science and most "experiments" are either in the lab (and we gotta question scaling) and natural experiments, which means its difficult to come up with causal explanations.
  - swader999 4y ago
    No, you can't. Very clearly capitalism when competition is promoted and failure allowed to happen has had the greatest net benefit to the masses.
    - godelski 4y ago
      I think you're missing what I'm saying if you are reading my comment as anti-capitalist.
  - MarkPNeyer 4y ago
    Replace “economic” with “political” and this is obviously a false equivalence. Historically, everyone dies. The right question is “which systems have produced the most new wealth for their participants” and there’s a clear obvious winner there: private ownership and free trade.
    - david-gpu 4y ago
      > The right question is “which systems have produced the most new wealth for their participants” Is that the right question, though? Just the sum of the wealth produced, with no concern to how that wealth is distributed, the effects it had on the population or any externalities? There are wide differences in human flourishing even among capitalist societies, so it may be better to look what other ingredients make the most difference, aside of private ownership and free trade.
- blitzar 4y ago
  Experiments with this system has killed millions
nullsense 4y ago
This. I remember watching an online lecture series on economics once and part of it had live demonstrations of market forces where the people who valued the thing they wanted to obtain more than the currency required to obtain it wound up with those things, and then they went through some graphs of how the maths of that all works out in theory. This was a model from classical economics. I remember thinking wow that's such a beautiful and cool model. Then lecturer turns around and says despite the fact the graph from the model matches our live demonstration almost exactly, it turns out things don't work like this in the real world. The reason being that a reasonable number of people lie, steal and otherwise cheat, and it turns out the effects of that are somewhat non-trivial. It made me realize that the effect that bad actors have on the free market are actually quite significant. I've also realized over the years that when you look deep enough, not much of anything is "well functioning".
MarkPNeyer 4y ago
At the risk of saying something taboo here, it is the belief among lots of people that the system is totally fine except for one bad mechanism which has polluted everything. This bad mechanism is relative new, historically, as it came about around 150 years ago despite many people like President Andrew Jackson saying, “this is bad and I will stop this.” That mechanism is printed money untethered from a hard-to-fake backing, aka hard Money. Hard money advocates say that printed money that loses its value over time screws up all kinds of incentives by more easily rewarding bad behavior like political corruption, and punishing good behavior like saving and not investing in things one doesn’t understand deeply. It shouldn’t be surprising that printed money leads to people getting more reward for positioning themselves closer to the money printer. I don’t think it should be controversial that most of us invest in things we don’t remotely understand, like businesses we are totally unqualified to operate and manage. But this is, in fact, the kind of opinion that gets you mocked and ridiculed by educated elites.

by kome 4y ago

that the reward system is broken is clear to everybody. but i am not sure you can build a "well functioning capitalist system" given the previous 400 years of experiments with it.

swader999 4y ago

Experiments with the other systems have killed millions. What we have now is a well functioning oligarchy.

Muromec 4y ago
Instilling communism through means of genocide and oppression killed people. So maybe someone will find a nicer way to dispossess people that everyone will like. Whi knows
082349872349872 4y ago
1984 is interesting: to read Goldstein, the oligarchy ("inner party") is relatively benign (it is definitely not based on ethnicity, and is merit based, hence —in principle— not hereditary either) yet to believe Winston (a narrator who admitted his willingness to commit domestic terrorism!), it is still dysfunctional, because apparently the oligarchs believe enjoying their own good fortune doesn't suffice: others must suffer misfortune. (to understand this book properly I think it helps to recall that Orwell was on scholarship ["outer party"] to bring up the exam scores at a boarding school that otherwise catered to the rich and thick [cream of society — "inner party" sprogs]; many scenes in 1984 can be traced back to the posthumously-published Such Such Were the Joys)
godelski 4y ago
> Experiments with the other systems have killed millions. I'm pretty confident we can say this about every economic system. But we can't really say who has saved the most because we can't do very good A/B testing or really any good causal analysis. It is important to remember that economics is not a hard science and most "experiments" are either in the lab (and we gotta question scaling) and natural experiments, which means its difficult to come up with causal explanations.
- swader999 4y ago
  No, you can't. Very clearly capitalism when competition is promoted and failure allowed to happen has had the greatest net benefit to the masses.
  - godelski 4y ago
    I think you're missing what I'm saying if you are reading my comment as anti-capitalist.
- MarkPNeyer 4y ago
  Replace “economic” with “political” and this is obviously a false equivalence. Historically, everyone dies. The right question is “which systems have produced the most new wealth for their participants” and there’s a clear obvious winner there: private ownership and free trade.
  - david-gpu 4y ago
    > The right question is “which systems have produced the most new wealth for their participants” Is that the right question, though? Just the sum of the wealth produced, with no concern to how that wealth is distributed, the effects it had on the population or any externalities? There are wide differences in human flourishing even among capitalist societies, so it may be better to look what other ingredients make the most difference, aside of private ownership and free trade.
blitzar 4y ago
Experiments with this system has killed millions

nullsense 4y ago

This. I remember watching an online lecture series on economics once and part of it had live demonstrations of market forces where the people who valued the thing they wanted to obtain more than the currency required to obtain it wound up with those things, and then they went through some graphs of how the maths of that all works out in theory. This was a model from classical economics. I remember thinking wow that's such a beautiful and cool model. Then lecturer turns around and says despite the fact the graph from the model matches our live demonstration almost exactly, it turns out things don't work like this in the real world. The reason being that a reasonable number of people lie, steal and otherwise cheat, and it turns out the effects of that are somewhat non-trivial. It made me realize that the effect that bad actors have on the free market are actually quite significant. I've also realized over the years that when you look deep enough, not much of anything is "well functioning".

MarkPNeyer 4y ago

At the risk of saying something taboo here, it is the belief among lots of people that the system is totally fine except for one bad mechanism which has polluted everything. This bad mechanism is relative new, historically, as it came about around 150 years ago despite many people like President Andrew Jackson saying, “this is bad and I will stop this.” That mechanism is printed money untethered from a hard-to-fake backing, aka hard Money. Hard money advocates say that printed money that loses its value over time screws up all kinds of incentives by more easily rewarding bad behavior like political corruption, and punishing good behavior like saving and not investing in things one doesn’t understand deeply. It shouldn’t be surprising that printed money leads to people getting more reward for positioning themselves closer to the money printer. I don’t think it should be controversial that most of us invest in things we don’t remotely understand, like businesses we are totally unqualified to operate and manage. But this is, in fact, the kind of opinion that gets you mocked and ridiculed by educated elites.