If I had to choose between common good and shareholder value all else being equal, I'd choose common good every time.
We should be suspicious of games that favor shareholder value over common good and repair them. Of course this is harder than it sounds, but letting the person with the most money in a Monopoly game also set the rules is absurd and and obviously wrong. Wrong even without having a consensus reality on what "common good" entails and this is important.
The "capital game" should serve us, rather than us serving it. A fatalistic lack of imagination is no longer an option. When we're more afraid of unintended consequences than accepting that we have a responsibility to the current consequences, our current consequences look rather intended.
You're never going to be able to change the economic system for the entire population where you live. Better to vote with your feet and move to a country where all economic activity is arranged for "the common good". There are many, many such countries. You're not the first with that idea.
That of course won't mean that you will have the privilege of deciding for everyone else what counts as "the common good". It's unfortunately not like the Arch Linux terminal where you are omnipotent.
I say that sincerely, as somebody who had to do just that. It's easier for Mohammad to go to the mountain.
Edit: To say: I voted with my feet and moved to a place which better aligns with my values. From a "common good" society to a "freedom" society.
I'm not sure this is true. My analysis shows that 75% of economic transitions are completed without violent revolt.
Just a quick glance at the 44 historic economic transitions in my dataset, most of them aren't well known. The most likely reason why we think economic revolutions are associated with violent revolt is due to selection bias - violent revolts are more memorable, take up a larger section of history books, etc.
Happy to take at look at your dataset and compare notes.
Many EU countries are pretty nice places to live, and didn't need a violent revolution to make it happen. All it took was democracy, a population willing to stand for its rights, and an elite which understood that building a welfare state is preferable outcome over having a violent Communist/Fascist revolution.
A capitalist system with right amount of social democracy to prevent worst concentration of wealth is the best model there is, at least for the well-being of its citizen and survival of its democracy.
"Stand for it's rights" is just weasel words for "Was willing to use violence in order to obtain their rights"
Even if they never actually had to become violent, violence or the credible threat of violence is the only thing that has ever in history convinced "The Elites" to change things
There was no such revolt in the country where I live, and in many others. Also if you are talking about France it was to create democracy, not to change the economic system, with democracy you can change the economic system without a revolution.
> Also if you are talking about France it was to create democracy, not to change the economic system
I'm no expert on the French Revolution but I'm pretty sure that "We're all poor while the monarchs are all rich" was a huge driving force behind the French Revolution. "Let them eat cake", etc
It also didn't create democracy, they more or less immediately wound up under Napoleon, a self crowned Emperor
> It also didn't create democracy, they more or less immediately wound up under Napoleon, a self crowned Emperor
It did create democracy, the French Republic, Napoleon did end that though but its much easier to reinstate democracy later than to create it from scratch.
> I'm no expert on the French Revolution but I'm pretty sure that "We're all poor while the monarchs are all rich" was a huge driving force behind the French Revolution. "Let them eat cake", etc
Revolutions to loot the rich happened a lot throughout history, but here the explicit goal was to end monarchy and create democracy not just looting the rich, that is a big difference.
I think the majority of European countries had a violent revolution. And the German invasion of many neighboring nations had the same characteristics, they were welcomed with their new world order by the populace in many places.
The war in general ushered in new economic systems.
After Stalin's death, the Soviet union wasn't a total failure. And few can argue that China is a total failure today. But they paid a much higher price than what's acceptable. To make a somewhat successful "common good" society you first need to exterminate large swatches of the population. (This includes Scandinavian countries, which is less common knowledge). Then you can build on the new generation which won't resist - for a while. And the results are still lack luster, depending on your measuring stick.
There's no general way to model, only empirical evidence. Unless I'm supposed to enter the mind and soul of people and see their motives and reasoning.
Kind of sounds like what is happening now in the west under our current financial/economic system, albeit slowly by manufacturing crisis's and health problems to whittle down the population.
>To make a somewhat successful "common good" society you first need to exterminate large swatches of the population
It sounds like you are conflating "common good" with authoritarianism.
Common good happens at the grass roots level and then spreads by consensus. Doesnt mean it will happen on a large scale, esp if there are larger forces at work.
It seems like this is a population size problem to me. Or at least a concentration of large populations in a small area (Cities). Maybe the trick is to spread out the population a bit more and prevent areas from becoming over populated somehow.
I don't have the data in front of me right now, but there are some sources that say when groups become to large people vie for attention which causes the most egoic people to try and dominate the areas that they are in.
Thus this creates social circles that try to gain power for powers sake and do not contribute to society.
> when groups become to large people vie for attention which causes the most egoic people to try and dominate the areas that they are in.
You may be interested in this essay from the feminist movement in the 60s: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm. It describes how the lack of structure or process forces the group to be run primarily by social dynamics like friendship, charm and influence.
There are lots of effects that happen as groups scale. But this capture of consensus-based and flat groups by ego-centric charismatic members happens in even tiny groups.
That's why successful flat groups (e.g. parliaments) have structure (e.g. Robert's rules) and make decisions by majority vote rather than consensus.
Yeah I can see some truth in this. Structure and processes help us deal with this problem. And my experience has been that structures and process get corrupted, kind of like what has happens in or political systems over the years.
IMHO, it seems like it easier to deal with ego when the groups are smaller. When they get too large, we tend to use bureaucracies to manage decision making logistics. Bureaucracies make it easier for people that want power over others to hide.
> After Stalin's death, the Soviet union wasn't a total failure. And few can argue that China is a total failure today. But they paid a much higher price than what's acceptable. To make a somewhat successful "common good" society you first need to exterminate large swatches of the population. (This includes Scandinavian countries, which is less common knowledge). Then you can build on the new generation which won't resist - for a while. And the results are still lack luster, depending on your measuring stick.
What do you mean by exterminate large swatches of the population in Scandinavia? Yes the way the Sumi have (and to a degree still are) been treated is atrocious, but I'd argue that if anything this is not a feature of creating a "common good" society. I would argue that strongly capitalistic/mercetalistic societies have a horrible track record of treating (and still treat) indigenous populations.
They're called Sami, and I don't think they've been treated much worse than any other ethnicity in Nordic countries.
What I'm referring to are the eugenics programs in Sweden, where unfit people were sterilized and/or had their children taken from them. These kind of programs were also present in North America, for what it's worth. The complete extent of these programs will probably forever be unknown, in all countries. Scandinavian countries are probably the countries who are most open about this, just like with suicide reporting.
As for Finland, they had a communist revolution and a very brutal civil war about the same time as the Russians. So their "common good" society was also born from a bloodbath, although the communists lost the war.
Norway is probably an exception. They're building a "common good" society on oil fortunes, just like the Gulf states have no problem with giving generous welfare for all of their citizens.
Switzerland is not a good place for working moms. It is a very conservative country, for example working moms are systematically discriminated. The society, police, insurance, and banks enforce a conformity to a conservative, male-dominated society.
I hear you but disagree. Who decides what the common good is? You end up with companies moralizing, forcing employees to adhere to those common goods in both their work and personal lives. Forcing people to get the vaccine was for the common good. DEI was common good and that in turn led to Trump being elected. The pendulum swings.
At least with share holder value, you know where you stand. The common good is a constantly changing thing determined by the moral authority in charge at a moment in time.
Common good: humans, according to systems theory, have the same needs and there's a finite set. We can map them & then design systems so as to satisfice all of them.
If one of human needs is status and status is zero-sum, then why does it matter what economic system is in place at all? We could equally rely on feats of strength, or games of chess, or rolling dice for all I care.
Besides why can't one of human needs also be an economic system that doesn't have the failure mode of poverty?
> We could equally rely on feats of strength, or games of chess, or rolling dice for all I care.
Those aren't very productive, our current system makes people produce value for others in their chase for status. Older systems people destroyed value for others in that chase, creating wars or other miseries, we have much less of that today.
I'd much rather have another billionaire than another authoritarian warmongering dictator.
> our current system makes people produce value for others in their chase for status
I don't think most of the people who have extremely high status are doing anything remotely close to producing value
They just own capital which they use to pay other people to produce value, which they then take credit for, which boosts their status
So it would seem that we're pretty divorced from the idea of "produce value -> get status" these days, if you can just pay people to produce value for you instead
Billionaires are the warlords of the 21st century. The only difference is that we've switched the map. We don't compete on the land, we compete on economic territory. But the results are the same - they fill the same role.
Expansionism, cult of followers, dispensing boons, and absolute control over their territory? check. The only reason we don't recognize them as warlords is because they don't wave scimitars and wear turbans. Neolibrral warlords wear Patagonia vests and beige slacks.
We're terrible at mistaking asthetics for function. Fortresses have been replaced by platforms; trade routes replaced by data sharing agreements. Armies have been ursurped by legal teams and lobbyists. We barely escaped feudalism and it's not clear we're out of the orbit of neo feudalism.
If we're able to be honest with ourselves, we need to learn that asthetics and function are different things. Just because they look different doesn't mean they don't fulfill the same function.
If it's zero sum you can design a system where everyone gets three sane amount. That's what strict monogamy does for mating, and you can easily imagine some "everyone is equal" communism-like system.
In practice that doesn't work, and the most successful "common good" systems instead ensure the disparity is limited and access is as equal as possible (e.g. not everyone can be wealthy, but the wealthy are not too rich and anyone had a chance to become rich instead of needing rich parents; or everyone can only have one married partner at a time instead of people who can afford it amassing big harems and not leaving any partners for the rest; or anyone can become famous, and famous people pushing their kids into fame is looked down on)
Humans don't generally have the same needs, and to the extent they do they're competing over limited resources.
At one extreme you get theories like communism or socialism that treat humans as disposable cattle to be murdered or starved when they stand in the way of whatever the party leaders decide is the common good.
The common good is something that has to be worked out deliberatively and is more like taking the resultant of a huge number of force vectors than it is like mass producing units of the same good for everyone.
The word "Common Good" has a specific meaning. It steams from the word "Common" which means the people that share common values at our most basic levels, and "Good" means whats best for the people that share these common values.
What you are talking about is imposed self-interest at the level of the population from one or a small population that do not represent the common good. Not the same thing IMHO.
That's not what common good is. Common good never requires that people share core values.
Common good historically was what's good for the city/polis/country/band/family. Basically, you make some (ideally relatively small) sacrifice to your own interest for the sake of a larger group you share fate with.
There are more formal/mathematical versions of it, for example in Bentham where the common good is essentially a weighted sum over the good to each individual. Rousseau described it almost exactly as the resultant of force vectors. There are more authoritarian versions like in historical Sparta and more recently in Marx and Engels where it's imposed through violence.
> imposed self-interest
I'm not sure exactly what you're saying here, but self-interest is almost by definition not externally imposed. In Marxism one particular vision of the common good is imposed externally via a "revolutionary terror."
c. 1300, "belonging to all, owned or used jointly, general, of a public nature or character," from Old French comun "common, general, free, open, public" (9c., Modern French commun), from Latin communis "in common, public, shared by all or many; general, not specific; familiar, not pretentious." This is from a reconstructed PIE compound ko-moin-i- "held in common," compound adjective formed from ko- "together" + moi-n-, suffixed form of root mei- (1) "to change, go, move," hence literally "shared by all."
Your confusing political language with what came before this. Common good is the will of the people. It has nothing to do with cities, countries, or states. All of those things were created by people that wield political power. This is not the same as the common good. Common good directly relates to what is good for the people that share common values. You have been misinformed, by political society unfortunately.
The idea of common good is centuries older than the appearance of French or the English translation.
It has nothing to do with shared values. It's exactly as I described it above.
Notice the reconstructed PIE means to move together. Common good is about the interests of groups that co-move rather than groups that share values.
This makes sense even in family contexts. What is good for the family is often different from what any one person wants. Think about things like choosing dinner for a big hungry family on a long road trip.
Often the best solution is at best everyone's third or fourth choice because values and desires differ.
So "Common Good" is directly related to "Common Law" which showed up in 509-27 BC Rome during the Republic period and it was a way to have a common understanding between the "Common People" when Rome's political state was trying to use political law against non-Romans. The common people needed a way to protect themselves from the rising emperors and their decrees.
So I understand that you think its about families, but in this context, its really not. It was a way or a method to protect commoners.
When I say value, I mean if we both value freedom then we have a "Shared Value". This is really about the rights of the people which differs what rulers, want for the people. And I mean rulers that want to wield power against the people, for self-interested purposes.
Again that is not what common good is and it does not originate in the Roman Republic.
I'm honestly not sure it's worth responding here or what you're trying to say about Rome. It sounds like you may be confusing the Roman Republic with the Roman Empire, which started much later in 31 BCE. For one thing the Roman Republic did not have an emporer. For another it wasn't expanding militarily or ruling non-Romans.
And you also seem to be confusing different uses of "common".
Common generally means something held collectively by a group. By extension it can mean "customary" as in common law rather than statutory law. By extension it also can mean "ordinary" or "plain", as in "common house cat". "Commoners" or "common people" are just "ordinary" people; that is, people without titles.
The only connection between the "common" in "common good" and "common people" is the use of the string "common". The word means different things in the two contexts.
Rome most certainly was expanding militarily and ruling non romans far before it became an empire. The punic wars for example were more than a century before it became an empire.
No the original meaning of "Common Good" is related to "Common Law" And that actually originated in Rome between the Republic and Empire periods. Your focus on the specific dates have nothing to do with the actual originating use of the saying.
It can mean "ordinary" or "plain", but not in the context of "Common Good". I think you are trying to obfuscate the meaning by focusing on the peripherals of the context.
In this context, I disagree.
Its really clear what the good in "Common" means.
Its like principles of what the Constitution was written on. Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Principles like these are qualities we all naturally exhibit and as such doesn't need any explanation or qualifications. I know in our modern world people have decided that everything is open to interpretation. But I believe this was indoctrinated into us, over a long period of time, not to consider the human value[0] aspect of our being that we are born with. This was done by watering down the direct meaning of words and slowly changing the perception that humanity doesn't have infinite value and has to rely on external power structures to give it meaning.
This is capitalist mythology. You'll need to account for "best" here because millions of people under the thumb of large-scale genocide, such as the policy decisions to implement poverty (which capitalism requires), likely have something to say about what you think is "best".
Can you present me with an alternative that was implemented, ran for a significant period of time and resulted in a better quality of life for those under it? Also poverty is not genocide, if you are going to present an argument please make it factual. You insult victims of actual genocide and minimize what they have endured with this comparison.
I'm going by how people in the global majority, victims of imposed poverty by empires through debt slavery, who also experience OTHER forms of genocide & recognize poverty for the genocide it is.
Check out the quality of life of the Aka, Baka, and Mbuti tribes. They're genetically and culturally linked to a mother tribe 150k years ago.
So a culture has kept these people going for 150k years. Capitalism has no such capability.
Collaboration, spontaneous improvisation, counterdominant play/decision making/protection, egalitarian, matrifocality, immediate return. Those are values that flourish in an infinite game theoretically and in real life. We just have been taught so many backwards ideas these ideas seem foreign & barely recognizable.
Friend you are comparing civilizations that support hundreds of millions of people to small tribes of pygmies that total maybe 30k people and survive on hunting and gathering. Additionally they only exist in little groups of 50 to a few hundred individuals. How do you see billions of people surviving as hunter gatherers? Or do you forsee the need to cull 95% of humanity? This is not a realistic comparison friend and you know that. The only system that can keep hundreds of millions or billions of people fed and housed is capitalism.
Friend, go run the simulations at scale and get back to me before you keep peddling the religious belief that capitalism is the only way to feed billions.
You have no idea how to scale up collaboration due to separation from indigenous cultures that were praxised for tens of thousands of years & cultivated food forests across America without price tags.
I am sure you know this due to your extensive research and simulations but the average life span of the tribes you mentioned is in the low 20s... Some of your examples are even less than that.
Only 40% of the Aka and Mbuti actually survive to age 15 or greater
I look forward to you explaining how this is actually a good thing. Because currently it looks like your argument is that the 9 billion people on earth should adopt the life style of tiny groups of hunter gatherers that for the most part don't make it out of childhood and those that do generally die in their early 20s or younger.
For reference, the average lifespan in the United States is 77, so more than 3x, approaching 4x. Per your prior arguments, this is a genocide...
I am sure you've looked at this through a nuanced lens that examines the impact of colonialism on each of those tribes. I'm sure you've taken into account what's causing the deaths.
There's no way this is a dismissive colonially racist take without depth.
Longevity is not quality of life. This is still a culture that, despite all the modern world has done to these people, managed to survive 150k years. If longevity is what you're after, there's your longevity.
You're talking about averages, which ignores all the white supremacy embedded in these systems, ignores the decline of US lifespan, and especially ignores quality of life of those living in poverty.
From here on out, any further disingenuous comments get an AI response.
Not really - in practice on paper capitalistic countries need tons of socialist policies in order to prevent the system from eating the people it depends on.
We should be suspicious of games that favor shareholder value over common good and repair them. Of course this is harder than it sounds, but letting the person with the most money in a Monopoly game also set the rules is absurd and and obviously wrong. Wrong even without having a consensus reality on what "common good" entails and this is important.
The "capital game" should serve us, rather than us serving it. A fatalistic lack of imagination is no longer an option. When we're more afraid of unintended consequences than accepting that we have a responsibility to the current consequences, our current consequences look rather intended.