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Thank you for this insightful comment. It really was a joy to read. To some extent I feel you are avoiding the basic question, though. What do you think the so

by waps 12y ago

Thank you for this insightful comment. It really was a joy to read. To some extent I feel you are avoiding the basic question, though. What do you think the solution is ? The only real argument in favour of capitalism is simply that it has survived where other systems have not. Natural selection. Granted, economic systems haven't always failed for "good" reasons. Some were conquered. Others built an economy based on oil, and oil ran out. Others strip-mined colonies. Islam built it's civilization on slavery, and can be said to be a continuation of Rome (mostly of the bad parts of the Roman empire, but ...). But, like natural selection, there are no good and bad reasons, hell, there aren't even really (known) reasons at all, and it doesn't really matter "whose fault it is", they failed, and when they failed, that was the end of the road. Capitalism, by contrast, has risen from the ashes more times than a drunk pyromaniac phoenix. The vast majority of critiques on capitalism are simply expressing a refusal to change (in some cases ironically). In a way, it's a form of conservatism, even if different from what we usually call conservatism. Or, in some cases, much worse : an attempt to resurrect dead societies (like the many attempts at resurrecting the caliphate we see now, hell, those even fight like the Roman empire did, which frankly justifies killing them all in my humble opinion, but ...). But sadly[1], there's a reason these societies died (and in the vast majority cases, like the islamic one for example : good riddance). If you resurrect them, that reason will simply surface again, and kill them in the cradle. Right now we are in a boom phase of capitalism, and yes, it looks like we may be at the end of the boom (then again, it's looked like that for 10+ years now, and before that we had 1980, 1972, the cold war, 40-48, 30-40, 14-18, "revolutionary" Europe, and so on and so forth, and all of those look to me much, much worse than our current situation. So to some extent I feel inclined to say to people complaining about the economy "big fucking whoop". But it certainly is getting a little bit worse. On the other hand today, I can name 50+ things that could easily resurrect economic growth, and only one of them needs to happen. We could discover a useful fusion principle, we could find a way to mine plate-edge methane gas, we could find a way to produce really cheap solar panels (we're not too far from making that happen, actually), we could ... If you ask me "what could anyone have done to avoid what's coming" in 1938 or 1912, I'd have said "other than changing the religion/ideology of a great many people overnight, nothing can be done". Most societies never even tried to dig themselves out of the hole they dug for themselves. Certainly the Ottoman empire, for example, "deserved" what was coming to it. So did the kingdom of France. So did ... Most of these civilizations had people working in them that had at least the seeds of a solution to their problems, and, generally speaking, they killed those people. I'm pretty confident in saying that we are currently not doing that. Anyway, I may be rambling a bit here. My question is simple : what is the way out of the current conundrum ? If history is a guide, the way out is simply a huge war, a new superpower, and a new dollar, and more capitalism. That's what happened to Spain, Britain, Portugal, ... and that's what fixed their versions of financial industry stupidities. I will agree that it looks like the US is getting buried in financial industry stupidities as well, but ... In history two economic systems have lasted really long times : slavery, and capitalism. The choice seems obvious to me. [1] I say sadly out of nostalgia. But having read stories from the Roman empire, medieval China, from the Colonies, from the Ottoman empire (I talked to the grandfather of an Armenian immigrant. That was enlightening, especially the parts about the supposed "tolerance" of the Ottoman empire. By that standard Hitler was a saint), stories from 19th century Europe (hell, my granddad actually told me some stories his dad told him about what life was like in France between the revolution and WWI), I'd say it is a very good thing indeed that you can't resurrect societies.

dredmorbius 12y ago
When you ask for solutions, the first thing to be clear about is what the question is. I was addressing the matter of the study and understanding of economics rather than of the economic system itself, though both are pretty profoundly troubled. For the first, I think adopting a systems approach as suggested by Limits to Growth would be a good start, and find the writings of ecological economists (Odum, Daly, Hall) to be superior to most of the orthodxy, with Hall perhaps among the most rigorous. In terms of the economic system itself: I don't see a solution to the present crisis. There are too many people, consuming too many resources, and yet we want to increase both values. There's a simple formula that was derived in the 1970s that describes this: I = P x A x T Impacts is equal to population times affluence (material resource utilization per capita) time technology. Alternatively: k <= S x A x P Sustainability x Affluence x Population is subject to a maximal constraint k. Which means that you can optimize at best any two of the three. Your choices are high affluence and large population, but low sustainability. High population and high sustainability but low affluence. Or high affluence and high sustainability, but low population. Or of course, optimizing for at most one or zero aspects. The "solutions" in this case involve deciding reducing population, accepting crushing poverty (as existed for much of human history), or wipe ourselves out. I'm not predicting an imminent collapse of the global order, but things could turn south on relatively short notice. More likely this is a scenario which will play out over decades, possibly a couple of centuries paralleling the rise of human population following the Industrial Revolution. Economic growth has to top out at some point, simply due to physical planetary limits. And no, we're not going to overcome those any time soon, if ever. Even planetary space travel is tremendously expensive, let alone interstellar travel. And there are multiple things we'd have to solve to address near-term challenges, with energy, phosphorus, other minerals, soil, and fresh water chief among them. Look up Leibig's Law of the Minimum -- any one constraint is sufficient to limit growth, and we're facing many. Your past civilizations and empires weren't global in scope and yet even their falls typically precipitated long periods of darkness. And yes, life for much of human history was pretty interesting, in a Chinese curse sense of the word. The solution in a nutshell? A man (or all humans) have got to know their limits.
- waps 12y ago
  > The solution in a nutshell? A man (or all humans) have got to know their limits. But if you look at animal or plant (or bacteria) species, they absolutely don't do this. They just grow to whatever the current capacity of the world is (meaning they would immediately choose the "low sustainability option you present). This is despite the fact that most non-human species are most definitely living in a world that is being filled close to capacity. So the argument to this solution is that it's not possible. It's not a Nash equilibrium and any set of humans that picks an option like that will simply die through natural selection, and this will not result in increased sustainability at all.

by waps 12y ago

dredmorbius 12y ago

When you ask for solutions, the first thing to be clear about is what the question is. I was addressing the matter of the study and understanding of economics rather than of the economic system itself, though both are pretty profoundly troubled. For the first, I think adopting a systems approach as suggested by Limits to Growth would be a good start, and find the writings of ecological economists (Odum, Daly, Hall) to be superior to most of the orthodxy, with Hall perhaps among the most rigorous. In terms of the economic system itself: I don't see a solution to the present crisis. There are too many people, consuming too many resources, and yet we want to increase both values. There's a simple formula that was derived in the 1970s that describes this: I = P x A x T Impacts is equal to population times affluence (material resource utilization per capita) time technology. Alternatively: k <= S x A x P Sustainability x Affluence x Population is subject to a maximal constraint k. Which means that you can optimize at best any two of the three. Your choices are high affluence and large population, but low sustainability. High population and high sustainability but low affluence. Or high affluence and high sustainability, but low population. Or of course, optimizing for at most one or zero aspects. The "solutions" in this case involve deciding reducing population, accepting crushing poverty (as existed for much of human history), or wipe ourselves out. I'm not predicting an imminent collapse of the global order, but things could turn south on relatively short notice. More likely this is a scenario which will play out over decades, possibly a couple of centuries paralleling the rise of human population following the Industrial Revolution. Economic growth has to top out at some point, simply due to physical planetary limits. And no, we're not going to overcome those any time soon, if ever. Even planetary space travel is tremendously expensive, let alone interstellar travel. And there are multiple things we'd have to solve to address near-term challenges, with energy, phosphorus, other minerals, soil, and fresh water chief among them. Look up Leibig's Law of the Minimum -- any one constraint is sufficient to limit growth, and we're facing many. Your past civilizations and empires weren't global in scope and yet even their falls typically precipitated long periods of darkness. And yes, life for much of human history was pretty interesting, in a Chinese curse sense of the word. The solution in a nutshell? A man (or all humans) have got to know their limits.

waps 12y ago
> The solution in a nutshell? A man (or all humans) have got to know their limits. But if you look at animal or plant (or bacteria) species, they absolutely don't do this. They just grow to whatever the current capacity of the world is (meaning they would immediately choose the "low sustainability option you present). This is despite the fact that most non-human species are most definitely living in a world that is being filled close to capacity. So the argument to this solution is that it's not possible. It's not a Nash equilibrium and any set of humans that picks an option like that will simply die through natural selection, and this will not result in increased sustainability at all.