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It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ours

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chuses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens. -- Adam Smith Care doesn't scale but self-interest scales efficiently. The baker who gets up at 3 am generally does so because she cares about her close circle of loved ones, far more than the world at large. In this sense care and self interest are not in tension but amplify by constructive interference.

croes 2y ago
The countless hours of voluntary unpaid work by many people shows don’t act only for their own benefit
- bell-cot 2y ago
  True-ish. But try talking to some old folks, about the vastly reduced scale of such volunteer work since (say) the 1950's. That "voluntary unpaid" stuff would include religious organizations, civic groups, housewives, ...
  - croes 2y ago
    You need time for that. It’s true that first you care for yourself but after survival is secured many people care for others without profit concerns. But if you need more time to satisfy your own needs you have less time for others.
  - harimau777 2y ago
    It seems to me that capitalism discourages that behavior. If the system is setup to be transactional, and you can't rely on others reciprocating altruism if you need it; then it seems like engaging in altruism would be for suckers.
    - bell-cot 2y ago
      True-ish. But in older-fashioned communities - long-term stable, extended families usually present, participation in many altruistic groups and activities are established norms, everybody's noses not buried in web browsers and smart phones - there's this thing called "social capital". And, as a generality, it's at least as important as the monetary kind.
      - Eisenstein 2y ago
        True-ish. But when you say 'older-fashioned communities' I have a feeling you are speaking through nostalgia or a rose-tinted view of an idealized past. Can you name some of these older-fashioned communities that exist today, and how they are different from the ones you are contrasting them to?
    - sabarn01 2y ago
      capitalism is so that strangers with no reason to cooperate can via the market. It should have nothing to say about you network or closer relations and how you interact. Altruism has a large place in life but in general it is directed to friends and family then your larger social groups.
      - atq2119 2y ago
        Nit: That's not the defining property of capitalism. The defining property of capitalism is that the means of production are privately owned, as opposed to e.g. market socialism.
  - lelandfe 2y ago
    America's in-person group membership plummeted across the decades[0], but I don't know about overall volunteerism. It may just come in different forms. Anecdotally, here in NYC volunteer orgs are stuffed to the gills; spots to clean my local park fill up in days, finding any weekend activity on NY Cares can be hard. More concrete data are hard to find, AmeriCorps' only started in '02. We can look at volunteer rates across demographics[1] but it's likely true that volunteer hours drop off with age. [0] see: Bowling Alone (needs a post-COVID update, though) [1] https://americorps.gov/sites/default/files/document/Volunteering_in_America_Demographics_508.pdf https://americorps.gov/sites/default/files/document/Voluntee...
- tightbookkeeper 2y ago
  There are more kinds of compensation than money
downut 2y ago
"...baker who gets up at 3 am..." But those 3am bakers are being exterminated by at scale corporate chains, no? Generalizes to just about anything that could reasonably be described using "artisanal". Social atomization inexorably spreads, and after thinking about it pretty hard for many years of travel putting eyeballs on "artisanal" processes I don't see any possibility of any other outcome. So we enjoy what is left.
- moolcool 2y ago
  To complete the thought, the baker example is explicitly in opposition to OP's point. In the economy we exist in, a 3am artisan baker does so explicitly out of a care for craft and community.
  - downut 2y ago
    Yes. Precisely so. As it happens, we've been friends with a "3am baker" for decades. We do not envy her life, but we do intensely enjoy her taste. Delighted to pay double for it.
    - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
      I would argue that the killing of small businesses that care by chains that don't is that the vast majority of consumers are in a position where making even such choices as paying twice as much for a donut are luxuries. Salaries have been stagnant forever, with a boost during COVID but was then immediately undone with price gouging on the part of tons of essential-to-life industries. And do not come at me with inflation, it has been demonstrated, numerous times and is continuing to be demonstrated, as nothing more than profit seeking. Inflation was a factor, yes. Greedy bastard corporations were another, IMO much larger, factor. The pandemic as a whole stomped the gas on an already running process of money being trapped in the hands of the uber rich, and if none of it is coming back down, then the amount of money everyone has to spend necessarily shrinks too. And this is not my usual pinko-commie-scum ass set of thoughts. This is a well understood principle that many economists have been banging on about for years now, because even those who believe capitalism is the best system, though I disagree with them on much, also understand that if all the damn money goes to the rich and stays there then the entire party ends REAL quick and probably violently.
anonylizard 2y ago
That's not true, and only seems true because of highly selective examples. Money can force people to work, out of the necessity of survival. What it buys is reliability. You can force a toilet cleaner to come to work day after day, and the toilets stay clean. But human progress, social progress, economic growth, does not solely come from people grinding through their jobs. It comes from people 'giving it their all', look at the great scientists, Newton, Von Nuemann, all the people at bell labs etc. These people create titanic economic value in their wake, and they are motivated by passion, which heavily mixes altruism with self interest. Indeed, the 'developed economies' are precisely the ones that also allow 'care' to scale, that's why we have social welfare, that's why we have free education. Its that 'Care' doesn't scale, its that its impossible to centrally monitor and control. People in the third world work harder than the first world, and are 10% as rich, because no one in their societies care.
- bccdee 2y ago
  > free education Public schools are notoriously uncaring. It's expensive private schools which can afford to have small class sizes, so the teachers can develop personal relationships with the students. "Care" in this context isn't just "doing something for someone's benefit"; it requires a caretaker's undivided attention, which is why it doesn't scale.
- blargey 2y ago
  The quality floor of "reliable" work produced solely by economic self-interest is also quite vulnerable to misaligned incentives. If you don't provide the right balance of economic incentives for quality, the rational economic answer becomes "quiet quitting", and quality plummets. And maintaining that balance of incentives is also someone's job, which needs the right economic incentives to be done well, so it's turtles all the way down (or up). In practice, it's an unstable, patchwork combination of care and economic incentives that keeps real-life institutions in working order.
- r14c 2y ago
  > People in the third world work harder than the first world, and are 10% as rich, because no one in their societies care. typically they "care wrong" and the first world comes in and dismantles everything to keep raw resource prices at a price point that they like. advanced third world economies are a threat to first world prosperity.
pkphilip 2y ago
This is only true to an extent. Self-love only goes so far.
cnr 2y ago
"The story, then, is everywhere. It is the founding myth of our system of economic relations. It is so deeply established in common sense, even in places like Madagascar, that most people on earth couldn’t imagine any other way that money possibly could have come about. The problem is there’s no evidence that it ever happened, and an enormous amount of evidence suggesting that it did not.” "Debt", David Graeber
- r14c 2y ago
  Its wild to me how often people conflate "human nature" and culture. People who share a cultural background with Adam Smith may very well be accustomed to this self-interest-first way of seeing the world. People who would struggle to see other people's life ways as valid, because there's very little value in other people's perspectives. Especially if they involve practices that undermine profitability.
bumby 2y ago
>In this sense care and self interest are not in tension but amplify by constructive interference. Perhaps in a well designed system, but if self-interest can be derived at a cost to the collective good, that also scales rather efficiently and without such a wholesome outcome.
bccdee 2y ago
I feel like you missed the point completely. Did you read the article at all? The social workers in the article are also professionals working for a paycheck. The operative difference is that a baker produces bread: If they can produce (say) 100 loaves for 100 people in a day, you have a 1:100 producer:consumer ratio, and with a bigger oven you could probably double that. Conversely, a social worker cares for children at close to a 1:1 rate, with one worker per child, and you can't do much better than that. Regardless of a social worker's motivations, their productivity is limited by the fact that they are doing the labour of caring.
tomjen3 2y ago
Capitalism is a fantastic solution to the problem of biological wants and physical limitations. But that does not really change the issue that you need about 1:1 caregiver per child. It just means you get them much more effectively than any other system.
empath75 2y ago
People do depend a lot on the benevolence of the butcher and the brewer and the baker, because while regulation and inspections and laws and so on are there to stop out and out sociopaths from killing people in pursuit of profits, a lot of people that do their jobs are doing it because they think their job provides some value to the community at large, and they try to do it in a way that doesn't harm people.
velcrovan 2y ago
Just want to add that so many freshman-level thinkers who are fond of this idea forget that democratically enacted regulation and oversight also count as self interest.

croes 2y ago

The countless hours of voluntary unpaid work by many people shows don’t act only for their own benefit

bell-cot 2y ago
True-ish. But try talking to some old folks, about the vastly reduced scale of such volunteer work since (say) the 1950's. That "voluntary unpaid" stuff would include religious organizations, civic groups, housewives, ...
- croes 2y ago
  You need time for that. It’s true that first you care for yourself but after survival is secured many people care for others without profit concerns. But if you need more time to satisfy your own needs you have less time for others.
- harimau777 2y ago
  It seems to me that capitalism discourages that behavior. If the system is setup to be transactional, and you can't rely on others reciprocating altruism if you need it; then it seems like engaging in altruism would be for suckers.
  - bell-cot 2y ago
    True-ish. But in older-fashioned communities - long-term stable, extended families usually present, participation in many altruistic groups and activities are established norms, everybody's noses not buried in web browsers and smart phones - there's this thing called "social capital". And, as a generality, it's at least as important as the monetary kind.
    - Eisenstein 2y ago
      True-ish. But when you say 'older-fashioned communities' I have a feeling you are speaking through nostalgia or a rose-tinted view of an idealized past. Can you name some of these older-fashioned communities that exist today, and how they are different from the ones you are contrasting them to?
  - sabarn01 2y ago
    capitalism is so that strangers with no reason to cooperate can via the market. It should have nothing to say about you network or closer relations and how you interact. Altruism has a large place in life but in general it is directed to friends and family then your larger social groups.
    - atq2119 2y ago
      Nit: That's not the defining property of capitalism. The defining property of capitalism is that the means of production are privately owned, as opposed to e.g. market socialism.
- lelandfe 2y ago
  America's in-person group membership plummeted across the decades[0], but I don't know about overall volunteerism. It may just come in different forms. Anecdotally, here in NYC volunteer orgs are stuffed to the gills; spots to clean my local park fill up in days, finding any weekend activity on NY Cares can be hard. More concrete data are hard to find, AmeriCorps' only started in '02. We can look at volunteer rates across demographics[1] but it's likely true that volunteer hours drop off with age. [0] see: Bowling Alone (needs a post-COVID update, though) [1] https://americorps.gov/sites/default/files/document/Volunteering_in_America_Demographics_508.pdf https://americorps.gov/sites/default/files/document/Voluntee...
tightbookkeeper 2y ago
There are more kinds of compensation than money

downut 2y ago

"...baker who gets up at 3 am..." But those 3am bakers are being exterminated by at scale corporate chains, no? Generalizes to just about anything that could reasonably be described using "artisanal". Social atomization inexorably spreads, and after thinking about it pretty hard for many years of travel putting eyeballs on "artisanal" processes I don't see any possibility of any other outcome. So we enjoy what is left.

moolcool 2y ago
To complete the thought, the baker example is explicitly in opposition to OP's point. In the economy we exist in, a 3am artisan baker does so explicitly out of a care for craft and community.
- downut 2y ago
  Yes. Precisely so. As it happens, we've been friends with a "3am baker" for decades. We do not envy her life, but we do intensely enjoy her taste. Delighted to pay double for it.
  - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
    I would argue that the killing of small businesses that care by chains that don't is that the vast majority of consumers are in a position where making even such choices as paying twice as much for a donut are luxuries. Salaries have been stagnant forever, with a boost during COVID but was then immediately undone with price gouging on the part of tons of essential-to-life industries. And do not come at me with inflation, it has been demonstrated, numerous times and is continuing to be demonstrated, as nothing more than profit seeking. Inflation was a factor, yes. Greedy bastard corporations were another, IMO much larger, factor. The pandemic as a whole stomped the gas on an already running process of money being trapped in the hands of the uber rich, and if none of it is coming back down, then the amount of money everyone has to spend necessarily shrinks too. And this is not my usual pinko-commie-scum ass set of thoughts. This is a well understood principle that many economists have been banging on about for years now, because even those who believe capitalism is the best system, though I disagree with them on much, also understand that if all the damn money goes to the rich and stays there then the entire party ends REAL quick and probably violently.

anonylizard 2y ago

That's not true, and only seems true because of highly selective examples. Money can force people to work, out of the necessity of survival. What it buys is reliability. You can force a toilet cleaner to come to work day after day, and the toilets stay clean. But human progress, social progress, economic growth, does not solely come from people grinding through their jobs. It comes from people 'giving it their all', look at the great scientists, Newton, Von Nuemann, all the people at bell labs etc. These people create titanic economic value in their wake, and they are motivated by passion, which heavily mixes altruism with self interest. Indeed, the 'developed economies' are precisely the ones that also allow 'care' to scale, that's why we have social welfare, that's why we have free education. Its that 'Care' doesn't scale, its that its impossible to centrally monitor and control. People in the third world work harder than the first world, and are 10% as rich, because no one in their societies care.

bccdee 2y ago
> free education Public schools are notoriously uncaring. It's expensive private schools which can afford to have small class sizes, so the teachers can develop personal relationships with the students. "Care" in this context isn't just "doing something for someone's benefit"; it requires a caretaker's undivided attention, which is why it doesn't scale.
blargey 2y ago
The quality floor of "reliable" work produced solely by economic self-interest is also quite vulnerable to misaligned incentives. If you don't provide the right balance of economic incentives for quality, the rational economic answer becomes "quiet quitting", and quality plummets. And maintaining that balance of incentives is also someone's job, which needs the right economic incentives to be done well, so it's turtles all the way down (or up). In practice, it's an unstable, patchwork combination of care and economic incentives that keeps real-life institutions in working order.
r14c 2y ago
> People in the third world work harder than the first world, and are 10% as rich, because no one in their societies care. typically they "care wrong" and the first world comes in and dismantles everything to keep raw resource prices at a price point that they like. advanced third world economies are a threat to first world prosperity.

pkphilip 2y ago

This is only true to an extent. Self-love only goes so far.

cnr 2y ago

"The story, then, is everywhere. It is the founding myth of our system of economic relations. It is so deeply established in common sense, even in places like Madagascar, that most people on earth couldn’t imagine any other way that money possibly could have come about. The problem is there’s no evidence that it ever happened, and an enormous amount of evidence suggesting that it did not.” "Debt", David Graeber

r14c 2y ago
Its wild to me how often people conflate "human nature" and culture. People who share a cultural background with Adam Smith may very well be accustomed to this self-interest-first way of seeing the world. People who would struggle to see other people's life ways as valid, because there's very little value in other people's perspectives. Especially if they involve practices that undermine profitability.

bumby 2y ago

>In this sense care and self interest are not in tension but amplify by constructive interference. Perhaps in a well designed system, but if self-interest can be derived at a cost to the collective good, that also scales rather efficiently and without such a wholesome outcome.

bccdee 2y ago

I feel like you missed the point completely. Did you read the article at all? The social workers in the article are also professionals working for a paycheck. The operative difference is that a baker produces bread: If they can produce (say) 100 loaves for 100 people in a day, you have a 1:100 producer:consumer ratio, and with a bigger oven you could probably double that. Conversely, a social worker cares for children at close to a 1:1 rate, with one worker per child, and you can't do much better than that. Regardless of a social worker's motivations, their productivity is limited by the fact that they are doing the labour of caring.

tomjen3 2y ago

Capitalism is a fantastic solution to the problem of biological wants and physical limitations. But that does not really change the issue that you need about 1:1 caregiver per child. It just means you get them much more effectively than any other system.

empath75 2y ago

People do depend a lot on the benevolence of the butcher and the brewer and the baker, because while regulation and inspections and laws and so on are there to stop out and out sociopaths from killing people in pursuit of profits, a lot of people that do their jobs are doing it because they think their job provides some value to the community at large, and they try to do it in a way that doesn't harm people.

velcrovan 2y ago

Just want to add that so many freshman-level thinkers who are fond of this idea forget that democratically enacted regulation and oversight also count as self interest.