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Could it be that Chicago school thinking has worked but greed & profiteering elsewhere have stolen benefits from the citizens?

• themafia 1y ago
  Were those vulnerabilities particularly obscure or might they have been obvious from the outset?
• bryanrasmussen 1y ago
  since some of the criticisms of Chicago style thinking include blindness to greed and profiteering, or actively promoting them, it would seem more reasonable to argue the criticisms of Chicago school thinking were correct, that Chicago school thinking worked as planned, and this is what we got out of it.
• fredrikholm 1y ago
  > Is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed? … What is greed? Of course none of us are greedy. It’s only the other fellow who’s greedy. The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. Milton Friedman when asked about combating greed.
  • Teever 1y ago
    Milton Friedman is wrong. The human emotion that drives free market capitalism optimally isn't greed, it's competition. People compete to produce better goods at a lower price to win acclaim and profit. Greedy people mess that all up by amassing wealth and then using that wealth to change the rules of the game so that they can amass more wealth.
    • da_chicken 1y ago
      "Winning profit" is greed. That's how you amass wealth. It's like you're arguing that overeating isn't how you gain weight, it's just having an unbalanced caloric ratio.
      • Teever 1y ago
        Profit seeking through competition isn’t the same as greed. Greed is the impulse to rig the game once you’ve won a little, so you can keep extracting more without competing. And that tendency from some kinds of people corrodes free market capitalism and its ability to drive innovation and reduce prices. Competition only works if players play by the rules. And your food analogy works against you. If we extend your analogy, profit is like eating, greed is like overeating. Saying profit = greed is like saying every person who eats three meals a day is a glutton. Competition rewards healthy eating -- efficiency, balance, discipline. Greed is scarfing down the pantry and locking the fridge so nobody else can eat.
        • somenameforme 1y ago
          A typical example here might be something like chess. The primary reason people play it is competition and enjoyment of the game. But there are some who a distorted mentality and simply want to win, even if they're not the one's doing anything, and so you get things like people using computers to cheat. And online chess sites (and increasingly even major over the board events) only work so well by making sure that these sort of people are completely removed from the game. The desire to compete is somehow not really the same as the desire to win. This is overtly apparent in things like body building. 99.9% of body builders will never compete in a body building show, let alone win, but enjoy the journey that's mostly full of years of self inflicted pain, occasional injury, and endless dedication - largely for the sake of competition and of course what it does to your body. And that latter part isn't really about showing off or sex or whatever, but simply about pride in what you've accomplished - much in the same way one might take pride in their ability to play chess well, or manage a healthy business.
        • roenxi 1y ago
          > Greed is the impulse to rig the game once you’ve won a little, so you can keep extracting more without competing. You're making up your own novel definition of greed there, which is certainly cheating when you're saying Milton Friedman is wrong. He was using greed in a more generally accepted sense, ie, a desire for more than one has right now. There are a lot of greedy people out there who are scrupulously honest. As far as I can tell, the average greedy person should be modelling scrupulous honesty, advocating fair systems and enforcing rule-following behaviours - that is creating the best environment for acquiring capital and maintaining property rights. Greedy people who white-ant the systems sustaining their capital are generally more stupid than greedy.
    • marbro 1y ago
      [dead]
  • BlackFly 1y ago
    Yes, and altruism doesn't exist, everyone is political, and a whole slew of other nonsense banalizations that pretend that distinctions cannot be made. > Greed: a selfish and excessive desire for more of something (such as money) than is needed This definition is quite easy to distinguish ordinary desire from greed. Otherwise you need to render selfish and excessive banal and meaningless as well.
    • lotsofpulp 1y ago
      How is "needed" determined? 3 of my 4 grandparents made it around 100 years old with way, way less than what I "need" for my kids. They did not need doctors, daycare, helmets, cars (they sat 5+ to a motorcycle), air conditioning, avocados, bedrooms, computers, etc.
      • BlackFly 1y ago
        Getting more than needed does not imply that something is needed at all. You can live your whole life without needing to eat a Lychee, but if you eat 1000 of those that is clearly more than needed. A person who never ate a lychee maybe cannot put it into perspective and might suggest that wanting a single lychee is greed, but most people wouldn't find it difficult to see that perspective as extreme. Change lychee for cocaine and you suddenly start getting a different balance. Context and our norms is what determines it.
        • lotsofpulp 1y ago
          I know. Per your definition, anyone who desires a vacation to a tropical island is greedy. Or eating at restaurants. Playing video games, renting a movie, eating dessert, etc. How about living on the California coast? People who want to earn more so they can move there are greedy? Or do they simply desire it? One of my cousins' parents immigrated to the Bay Area, but mine went to the midwest. Am I greedy for desiring to earn income more than a couple standard deviations above the mean so that I could buy land in the Bay Area? Is my cousin not greedy because they were born there? >Context and our norms is what determines it. Exactly, which is the problem with trying to distinguish "desire" and "greed". "We" don't have norms. I was lambasted growing up by my grandparents for wanting things that any 1990s kid had in the US, but they didn't have in their poorer country from 1920 to 1940.
• jabl 1y ago
  Sounds a bit like all those no true Scotsman defenses of communism - Communism is awesome! - What about countries X, Y, and Z? - Oh, that wasn't "real" communism!
  • westmeal 1y ago
    I mean it really wasn't. Every time a country has tried communism it's fallen straight down the despotism rabbit hole or had the government taken over by officials who wanted a much bigger piece of the pie at the cost of the constituents if you catch my drift.
    • mcphage 1y ago
      > Every time a country has tried communism At what point do you decide that's an inevitable outcome, rather than an unfortunate unexpected outcome that happens every single time?
      • Filligree 1y ago
        Once a country that isn’t already prone to dictatorships has tried it.
        • mcphage 1y ago
          I'm not sure there's very many of those.
        • Jensson 1y ago
          Communism gives politicians 100% control over the country instead of roughly half like they have in capitalist democracies, So people wont vote for communism because its autocratic. You never want all power to be in the hands of a single group of people, capitalist democracies separates private from public, so politicians regulating companies are not the same people who are owning those companies. Communism can never work since its an autocratic system with a single player, you need multiple actors. And yes, in some capitalist democracies company leaders are close bedfellows with politicians, we call that corruption, it isn't like that in all countries.
• hopelite 1y ago
  “The purpose of a system is what it does.” If it just weren’t for that darn greed and profiteering that the Chicago school endorses.