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This is something that has bothered me for a while. When we're discussing capitalism, people seem to get it in their head that it's either what we have now, or

This is something that has bothered me for a while. When we're discussing capitalism, people seem to get it in their head that it's either what we have now, or you can fuck off to North Korea. How I would characterize my ideal economy is one where the feedback loop works: people can make reasonable guesses about what a product is, how long it will work for, and what its cost is. They can adjust their purchases according to their needs, which tells us which products should exist and which should not. Businesses do not trick the customers into thinking a thing has more value than it actually does. A very large part of this economy is accurate information, and a very large part of accurate information is trust. After all nobody is going to know more about the product than the people who made it, and they will always have an interest in representing their product in the most positive light. Lemon problem. The thing that seems to characterize the economy now is that businesses will violate your trust in order to make money. They know that you won't read the license agreement when you sign up for a service, and they will use that. They know that you won't be checking what kind of joins your sofa has. They know that you won't get as much value from their items as the adverts say. All of these abuses can be done within the law, perhaps because these same businesses are involved with shaping the law. The feedback loop is broken, and this leads to the same problem as what the Soviet Union had. Their problem wasn't that people were lazy and didn't go to work. Their problem was that they made the wrong stuff. Things that nobody wanted, often with the same quality issues as what you get these days buying an item from a market economy. Note that GDP figures will still not know this, it just sees all the crap and counts the money paid for it. Often we pick on MBAs when it comes to this sort of critique, and there's some merit to it. If your only goal is to make money, and the economy is riddled with loopholes where you can make money without providing value, then we will have an economy that doesn't provide a lot of value, because MBAs are really good at finding these types of things.

refulgentis 2y ago
This sort of thing is satisfying to write and even more satisfying to read and nod along to. But it's paper-thin histrionics. "an ad said I'd value something and I didn't" and "I didn't read the license agreement" are trans-mutated into "abuse" that should obviously be illegal, and somehow become grist for all sorts of grand invocations, GDP, capitalism, MBAs, North Korea... You're free to check what joins your sofa has. In fact, we all seem pretty well-informed on that. God bless the info markets. It is legal to make cheaper sofas than artisanal leather couches with joins approved by a FAANG employee. God bless the sofa market.
- lordnacho 2y ago
  There's always someone who writes the rebuttal you're writing here. I used to do it all the time as well. It's always the same rebuttal, "why don't you just check this then", along with "well all the information is out there". In isolation, it is true. You could spend a day going out on the internet to try to learn what kinds of join your sofa might have. I suspect you would never even have considered the problem, and that is a rather major problem. There are a LOT of products in the world. You will not know the unknown unknowns of every item. Even the known unknowns are often not worth your while to spend time on, because a scale manufacturer can provide an item at a price below which you will not bother to check. The fact is we're all dependent on people making the honest choices when they're offering us stuff, you can't check it all.
  - bratwurst3000 2y ago
    Crypto bros are like this. 100% behind the product . Most don’t even know how a database works or that crypto is that. It’s only magic words….
    - refulgentis 2y ago
      Crypto bro? Databases? What? Anyways, for the crowd, in another post, you say: "May I add, cheap shit will always win if most people don’t have the initial money to spend on quality. A 400€ dollar shitcouch seems better than no couch at all." Sounds like you completely understand my point
      - bratwurst3000 2y ago
        Sorry the crypto argument was for one post beneath you. But yes I get your point.
  - refulgentis 2y ago
    > It's always the same rebuttal, "why don't you just check this then", along with "well all the information is out there". What's is this thing you're always seeing attempting to be rebutted? I'd love to hear more specifics. > I suspect you would never even have considered the problem, and that is a rather major problem. I worked my butt off from a college dropout waiter to get to the point that I had enough money to care about this and specifically did. I'm glad I was able to afford a shitty sofa in the interim. You are mindreading and myopic. > The fact is we're all dependent on people making the honest choices when they're offering us stuff, you can't check it all. 3rd try: when we come down from the castles in the air, what are we asking for here?
concordDance 2y ago
It's very much an information problem. One needs a company that can go do all the research and tell their readers what stuff is well made and good quality. Things like Consumer Reports and Which are supposed to full this niche but they only assess big brands (and are probably under used by people).
- ginko 2y ago
  >It's very much an information problem. One needs a company that can go do all the research and tell their readers what stuff is well made and good quality. This role used to be filled by reputable stores.
  - card_zero 2y ago
    Curating stuff means: You aren't offering most of the things people can imagine, You aren't offering all the latest trendy stuff, important in the moment, You're paying people to check the quality of your limited range of dusty goods. (Wikipedia has solved this problem by having an army of 120,000 active and mostly conscientious volunteer editors, but that's some kind of magic trick or luck that cannot be deliberately copied into other domains.)
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Small business stores mostly had lousy selection and wanted to sell you what they had in stock for the most part. Yes, you had some niche labor of love businesses, but those were the minority. Information used to be really hard to come by outside of a few sources like Consumer Reports.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Doesn't help you at all when the company waits until the review is done (possibly speeding it up by soliciting independent reviews early), and then swaps out the components and manufacturing process for cheaper, worse one, without changing the product name and the SKU. Big brands have already been caught red-handed doing it; most recent big story I recall was about hard drives.
solidasparagus 2y ago
That leaves a market gap and then a better company can fill it, unlike centralized economies. Is that happening? I would say yes, at least in some cases. High-quality, direct-to-consumer brands are great. I rely on purchasing guides for many of my buys and those point me to brands whose primary attribute is quality (or cost effectiveness) instead of marketing or historic adoption. That's great for me and great for the company! But many people haven't adapted to ecommerce like that. I think that will change as people learn to have more suspicion and place more of their trust in neutral third parties (historically how you made purchases when everything was local and your community gossiped about which places were good and bad). Yeah, there will be issues when those third parties turn out not to be trustworthy (like Yelp), but I think overall the ability to make well-informed purchasing decisions has never been higher. People are just slow to change their habits for this new world.
- thrance 2y ago
  I really don't believe people will be able to adapt to navigating a system that is designed (and constantly redesigned) to make them buy cheap garbage. Young people are not much more tech-literate than their elders.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  > That leaves a market gap and then a better company can fill it, unlike centralized economies. Is that happening? Not really, as the gradient points towards those companies cheapening out or folding. After all, under information asymmetry, companies that sell low-quality crap for mid-level price and lie about their product quality outcompete those selling mid-quality goods for mid-level price honestly. > I rely on purchasing guides for many of my buys and those point me to brands whose primary attribute is quality (or cost effectiveness) instead of marketing or historic adoption. That's great for me and great for the company! That's assuming any of those guides aren't paid advertisements, which I believe most are. Even Wirecutter is questionable nowadays. And that's before considering that manufacturers do stuff like giving first high-quality batch of products to reviewers, and then, couple months down the line, swapping components and process for cheaper, low-quality ones, but retaining the SKU.
temporarely 2y ago
The political system angle is a red herring, imo. The issue is how is money created, who gets to create it, and what sort of political economy then grows around it. Our system is based on private entities creating money out of thin air and then charging interest on it. Everybody else must service these debts so continual "growth" is baked into the system. IMF (surprisingly) allowed two economists to take a look at an alternative. Chicago Plan Revisited, 2012 https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2012/wp12202.PDF https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2012/wp12202.PDF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_plan
- throw0101c 2y ago
  > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_plan Doing a quick read: this appears to be the Gold Standard by another name. Irving Fischer is associated with it, and Fischer was a mentor/inspiration to Milton Friedman, who, amongst other things, gave us: > The Friedman doctrine, also called shareholder theory, is a normative theory of business ethics advanced by economist Milton Friedman which holds that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.[1] This shareholder primacy approach views shareholders as the economic engine of the organization and the only group to which the firm is socially responsible. As such, the goal of the firm is to increase its profits and maximize returns to shareholders.[1] Friedman argues that the shareholders can then decide for themselves what social initiatives to take part in, rather than have an executive whom the shareholders appointed explicitly for business purposes decide such matters for them.[2] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine You know, the philosophy that Boeing's management has been following the last decade or so. The post that you are replying to wrote: > The thing that seems to characterize the economy now is that businesses will violate your trust in order to make money. Under the ideology of Fischer and Friedman this is just fine. So I'm not sure putting forward an economic idea ("Chicago plan") by them would really help in preventing/reducing/rolling back 'Late Stage Capitalism' (or whatever) or accelerate its effects more. Probably the latter.
  - temporarely 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

refulgentis 2y ago

This sort of thing is satisfying to write and even more satisfying to read and nod along to. But it's paper-thin histrionics. "an ad said I'd value something and I didn't" and "I didn't read the license agreement" are trans-mutated into "abuse" that should obviously be illegal, and somehow become grist for all sorts of grand invocations, GDP, capitalism, MBAs, North Korea... You're free to check what joins your sofa has. In fact, we all seem pretty well-informed on that. God bless the info markets. It is legal to make cheaper sofas than artisanal leather couches with joins approved by a FAANG employee. God bless the sofa market.

lordnacho 2y ago
There's always someone who writes the rebuttal you're writing here. I used to do it all the time as well. It's always the same rebuttal, "why don't you just check this then", along with "well all the information is out there". In isolation, it is true. You could spend a day going out on the internet to try to learn what kinds of join your sofa might have. I suspect you would never even have considered the problem, and that is a rather major problem. There are a LOT of products in the world. You will not know the unknown unknowns of every item. Even the known unknowns are often not worth your while to spend time on, because a scale manufacturer can provide an item at a price below which you will not bother to check. The fact is we're all dependent on people making the honest choices when they're offering us stuff, you can't check it all.
- bratwurst3000 2y ago
  Crypto bros are like this. 100% behind the product . Most don’t even know how a database works or that crypto is that. It’s only magic words….
  - refulgentis 2y ago
    Crypto bro? Databases? What? Anyways, for the crowd, in another post, you say: "May I add, cheap shit will always win if most people don’t have the initial money to spend on quality. A 400€ dollar shitcouch seems better than no couch at all." Sounds like you completely understand my point
    - bratwurst3000 2y ago
      Sorry the crypto argument was for one post beneath you. But yes I get your point.
- refulgentis 2y ago
  > It's always the same rebuttal, "why don't you just check this then", along with "well all the information is out there". What's is this thing you're always seeing attempting to be rebutted? I'd love to hear more specifics. > I suspect you would never even have considered the problem, and that is a rather major problem. I worked my butt off from a college dropout waiter to get to the point that I had enough money to care about this and specifically did. I'm glad I was able to afford a shitty sofa in the interim. You are mindreading and myopic. > The fact is we're all dependent on people making the honest choices when they're offering us stuff, you can't check it all. 3rd try: when we come down from the castles in the air, what are we asking for here?

concordDance 2y ago

It's very much an information problem. One needs a company that can go do all the research and tell their readers what stuff is well made and good quality. Things like Consumer Reports and Which are supposed to full this niche but they only assess big brands (and are probably under used by people).

ginko 2y ago
>It's very much an information problem. One needs a company that can go do all the research and tell their readers what stuff is well made and good quality. This role used to be filled by reputable stores.
- card_zero 2y ago
  Curating stuff means: You aren't offering most of the things people can imagine, You aren't offering all the latest trendy stuff, important in the moment, You're paying people to check the quality of your limited range of dusty goods. (Wikipedia has solved this problem by having an army of 120,000 active and mostly conscientious volunteer editors, but that's some kind of magic trick or luck that cannot be deliberately copied into other domains.)
- ghaff 2y ago
  Small business stores mostly had lousy selection and wanted to sell you what they had in stock for the most part. Yes, you had some niche labor of love businesses, but those were the minority. Information used to be really hard to come by outside of a few sources like Consumer Reports.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
Doesn't help you at all when the company waits until the review is done (possibly speeding it up by soliciting independent reviews early), and then swaps out the components and manufacturing process for cheaper, worse one, without changing the product name and the SKU. Big brands have already been caught red-handed doing it; most recent big story I recall was about hard drives.

solidasparagus 2y ago

That leaves a market gap and then a better company can fill it, unlike centralized economies. Is that happening? I would say yes, at least in some cases. High-quality, direct-to-consumer brands are great. I rely on purchasing guides for many of my buys and those point me to brands whose primary attribute is quality (or cost effectiveness) instead of marketing or historic adoption. That's great for me and great for the company! But many people haven't adapted to ecommerce like that. I think that will change as people learn to have more suspicion and place more of their trust in neutral third parties (historically how you made purchases when everything was local and your community gossiped about which places were good and bad). Yeah, there will be issues when those third parties turn out not to be trustworthy (like Yelp), but I think overall the ability to make well-informed purchasing decisions has never been higher. People are just slow to change their habits for this new world.

thrance 2y ago
I really don't believe people will be able to adapt to navigating a system that is designed (and constantly redesigned) to make them buy cheap garbage. Young people are not much more tech-literate than their elders.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
> That leaves a market gap and then a better company can fill it, unlike centralized economies. Is that happening? Not really, as the gradient points towards those companies cheapening out or folding. After all, under information asymmetry, companies that sell low-quality crap for mid-level price and lie about their product quality outcompete those selling mid-quality goods for mid-level price honestly. > I rely on purchasing guides for many of my buys and those point me to brands whose primary attribute is quality (or cost effectiveness) instead of marketing or historic adoption. That's great for me and great for the company! That's assuming any of those guides aren't paid advertisements, which I believe most are. Even Wirecutter is questionable nowadays. And that's before considering that manufacturers do stuff like giving first high-quality batch of products to reviewers, and then, couple months down the line, swapping components and process for cheaper, low-quality ones, but retaining the SKU.

temporarely 2y ago

The political system angle is a red herring, imo. The issue is how is money created, who gets to create it, and what sort of political economy then grows around it. Our system is based on private entities creating money out of thin air and then charging interest on it. Everybody else must service these debts so continual "growth" is baked into the system. IMF (surprisingly) allowed two economists to take a look at an alternative. Chicago Plan Revisited, 2012 https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2012/wp12202.PDF https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2012/wp12202.PDF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_plan

throw0101c 2y ago
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_plan Doing a quick read: this appears to be the Gold Standard by another name. Irving Fischer is associated with it, and Fischer was a mentor/inspiration to Milton Friedman, who, amongst other things, gave us: > The Friedman doctrine, also called shareholder theory, is a normative theory of business ethics advanced by economist Milton Friedman which holds that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.[1] This shareholder primacy approach views shareholders as the economic engine of the organization and the only group to which the firm is socially responsible. As such, the goal of the firm is to increase its profits and maximize returns to shareholders.[1] Friedman argues that the shareholders can then decide for themselves what social initiatives to take part in, rather than have an executive whom the shareholders appointed explicitly for business purposes decide such matters for them.[2] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine You know, the philosophy that Boeing's management has been following the last decade or so. The post that you are replying to wrote: > The thing that seems to characterize the economy now is that businesses will violate your trust in order to make money. Under the ideology of Fischer and Friedman this is just fine. So I'm not sure putting forward an economic idea ("Chicago plan") by them would really help in preventing/reducing/rolling back 'Late Stage Capitalism' (or whatever) or accelerate its effects more. Probably the latter.
- temporarely 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]