3 ms·

David Ricardo covered this: Prices will adapt.

chongli 3y ago
Yes. Prices for corn and cheap clothing and consumer electronics will all fall to zero because no one has any money so demand will be zero. But then in response production will halt since there’s no longer any profit to be made. This widespread contraction of production is economic collapse. So you haven’t answered my question. Wealthy capitalists aren’t going to keep McDonald’s in business: they don’t eat there. If consumers don’t have any money, McDonald’s collapses.
- Radim 3y ago
  Second-order effects are hard! Especially when your day-to-day is already consumed by first order effects: keeping your job, putting food on the table. In times of great turbulence, it pays to hold on to fundamentals. Partly because they're a stable beacon that helps one muddle through; partly because there's little else to hold on to anyway. On that note, a few observations: 1) We're biological animals. People love profit, but ultimately need other people to realize and enjoy that profit. To your point, in the limit, what good is being the wealthiest man on Earth, if you are the last man on Earth? The rich and powerful are hardwired to flaunt their power and wealth and social status too, just like the apes we all are. Which puts a lower cap on how much they want to reduce the outside human population, whether consciously or as a 2nd order effect of their "whoopsie, I never!" actions. At some point on the concentration-of-wealth vs population-size curve, capitalism self-aligns with humanism, simply to preserve the biological substrate that powers it. 2) Taking off the human-centric goggles, "profit" is a function (one of many) to optimize. Humans love to optimize because Nature loves to optimize. Nature's favourite goal appears to be bulldozing energy gradients, reducing free energy, increasing entropy. Everything else a downstream corollary: chemistry, biology, humans, civilizations, ecology. So any plan to pause or subvert this optimization process is immediately suspect. Especially if that plan lacks a clear articulation of the process and ways to counter it. You and who's army? You think putting ink to paper to draft a regulation will do it? Because "Democracy" and "Will of the people" and "We humans are special"? That's not a call for cynicism or despondency; just an observation of nature's directionality over the past few billion years. You'll be up against some formidable forces; Nature's rat-race to always do more with less is real, and us men and women merely players. Having a way to model this space rigorously and explore the various equilibria and inflection points would be cool. Rather than humanity bouncing off the walls with new 1st-order-effect ideologies and religions all the time; a few million murdered here; a starvation there; an economic collapse yonder.
  - cornholio 3y ago
    It's an interesting point of view, but the assumption that human society is bound to replicate internally the natural law of increasing entropy is quite the naturalistic fallacy. Until now, there hasn't been, to our knowledge, rational processes in our universe, capable of self reflection and decision making regarding their own behavior and organization, so past observations are not really relevant. Sure, humanity is just another physical process that will ultimately dissolve in a high entropy lukewarm soup, but as long as we have access to low entropy, high energy density sources, we can buck the trend and choose to do quite unoptimal things, such as assigning individual rights to every individual, even those unfit for reproduction. Zooming out past the current Stelliferous era of the universe and into the distant black hole and dark eras might risk losing quite a bit of nuance about humanity's nature and destiny.
    - Radim 3y ago
      Of course. Different levels of resolution reveal different details, and 2. was the ultimate zoom-out. Still, I believe keeping the directionality in mind helps with perspective – even as turbulent whirls and eddies appear to float upstream, miraculously, temporarily. I now realize I forgot another observation, closer to chongli's original slightly-beyond-human resolution of bust-and-boom economic feedback loops: 3) Most people are pliable and will do as they're told. Even to their detriment, even all the way to their demise. And the process of human self-domestication is still accelerating. Historical examples abound; from extremely ancient to uncomfortably recent.

Yes. Prices for corn and cheap clothing and consumer electronics will all fall to zero because no one has any money so demand will be zero. But then in response production will halt since there’s no longer any profit to be made. This widespread contraction of production is economic collapse. So you haven’t answered my question. Wealthy capitalists aren’t going to keep McDonald’s in business: they don’t eat there. If consumers don’t have any money, McDonald’s collapses.

Radim 3y ago
Second-order effects are hard! Especially when your day-to-day is already consumed by first order effects: keeping your job, putting food on the table. In times of great turbulence, it pays to hold on to fundamentals. Partly because they're a stable beacon that helps one muddle through; partly because there's little else to hold on to anyway. On that note, a few observations: 1) We're biological animals. People love profit, but ultimately need other people to realize and enjoy that profit. To your point, in the limit, what good is being the wealthiest man on Earth, if you are the last man on Earth? The rich and powerful are hardwired to flaunt their power and wealth and social status too, just like the apes we all are. Which puts a lower cap on how much they want to reduce the outside human population, whether consciously or as a 2nd order effect of their "whoopsie, I never!" actions. At some point on the concentration-of-wealth vs population-size curve, capitalism self-aligns with humanism, simply to preserve the biological substrate that powers it. 2) Taking off the human-centric goggles, "profit" is a function (one of many) to optimize. Humans love to optimize because Nature loves to optimize. Nature's favourite goal appears to be bulldozing energy gradients, reducing free energy, increasing entropy. Everything else a downstream corollary: chemistry, biology, humans, civilizations, ecology. So any plan to pause or subvert this optimization process is immediately suspect. Especially if that plan lacks a clear articulation of the process and ways to counter it. You and who's army? You think putting ink to paper to draft a regulation will do it? Because "Democracy" and "Will of the people" and "We humans are special"? That's not a call for cynicism or despondency; just an observation of nature's directionality over the past few billion years. You'll be up against some formidable forces; Nature's rat-race to always do more with less is real, and us men and women merely players. Having a way to model this space rigorously and explore the various equilibria and inflection points would be cool. Rather than humanity bouncing off the walls with new 1st-order-effect ideologies and religions all the time; a few million murdered here; a starvation there; an economic collapse yonder.
- cornholio 3y ago
  It's an interesting point of view, but the assumption that human society is bound to replicate internally the natural law of increasing entropy is quite the naturalistic fallacy. Until now, there hasn't been, to our knowledge, rational processes in our universe, capable of self reflection and decision making regarding their own behavior and organization, so past observations are not really relevant. Sure, humanity is just another physical process that will ultimately dissolve in a high entropy lukewarm soup, but as long as we have access to low entropy, high energy density sources, we can buck the trend and choose to do quite unoptimal things, such as assigning individual rights to every individual, even those unfit for reproduction. Zooming out past the current Stelliferous era of the universe and into the distant black hole and dark eras might risk losing quite a bit of nuance about humanity's nature and destiny.
  - Radim 3y ago
    Of course. Different levels of resolution reveal different details, and 2. was the ultimate zoom-out. Still, I believe keeping the directionality in mind helps with perspective – even as turbulent whirls and eddies appear to float upstream, miraculously, temporarily. I now realize I forgot another observation, closer to chongli's original slightly-beyond-human resolution of bust-and-boom economic feedback loops: 3) Most people are pliable and will do as they're told. Even to their detriment, even all the way to their demise. And the process of human self-domestication is still accelerating. Historical examples abound; from extremely ancient to uncomfortably recent.