* If capitalism is as inevitable and natural as evolution, why did it take until the late 18th century and require the Enclosure and Poor Laws to appear?
* If capitalism is good, such that even Communists need to ape it, why does it result in massive deflationary panics which leave entire nation-sized regions stripped of their wealth and utterly impoverished?
* If capitalism is useful, why does it only seem to be working for manufactured-goods exporters and bankers? Why have growth rates dropped since the Bretton-Woods system and social democracy were abolished? Why has productivity growth been so terribly low despite the computer revolution?
In short: if capitalism is so great, why all the problems we see in actually-existing capitalist countries?
Capitalism is one way to choose who's values are satisfied.
It does this (in general) by giving points to people who satisfy other people's values and proportional to how much they satisfy them. These points can be used to satisfy their own values after and this creates a feedback loop of value satisfaction. IMO a very good thing.
Of course there are problems, every system has winners and losers and thats why we have taxation and welfare, to smooth out some of the issues. (perhaps not enough but thats another debate).
If you have another system in mind, I'd like you to think about who the winners and losers are and talk about the alternative system in those terms.
Before we discuss my proposals, which will involve quite a lot of detail since I cannot resort to well-worn buzzwords, let alone strange in-group buzzwords like "values being satisfied" (I see we have a Slate Star Codex reader), I have a simple question:
How can you show that the goal system you described in your post actually describes actually-existing capitalism?
You have described how you imagine capitalism is supposed to function or should function. You have not described how the real-world system known as "capitalism" actually behaves. You have not made a prediction.
(Further, the entire "values are subjective" premise is just plain wrong. Value is objectively psychological: different individuals have different minds, but the workings of those minds are just as amenable to objective investigation as anything else. Oh, and the agents involved are bounded-rational, and competition is not perfect, and information is nowhere near free...)
> Value is objectively psychological: different individuals have different minds, but the workings of those minds are just as amenable to objective investigation as anything else
I agree, but if you go down that path you realise that morals are objectively psychological too and in which case why do people have different ones? are they just broken? and according to what standard?
Its not that you can't predict someones morals/values from a copy of their brains, its that you can't rank them objectively, i.e. not using your own morals/values as a basis.
> You have described how you imagine capitalism is supposed to function or should function. You have not described how the real-world system known as "capitalism" actually behaves. You have not made a prediction.
I'm talking about capitalism as a system, its implementation has flaws and winners and losers and I think its important to fix them. But, I do think its a good system. I think it makes sense to start with an ostensibly good system than any other without very good reasons not to.
> strange in-group buzzwords like "values being satisfied"
>Its not that you can't predict someones morals/values from a copy of their brains, its that you can't rank them objectively, i.e. not using your own morals/values as a basis.
And here we've reached the heart of the disagreement: I don't think you are. You're talking about an imagined capitalist utopia. It no more resembles real capitalism (that is to say, the common features and behaviors we can generalize from all actually-existing capitalist systems) than "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" resembles Soviet Russia.
>I think it makes sense to start with an ostensibly good system than any other without very good reasons not to.
Why should you try to solve an optimization problem by examining only one proposed solution, and then simply apologizing that all real-world systems with the same name as the proposed theoretical solution are terrible, while not even examining the degree of resemblance between the proposal and the actuality, and never examining alternative hypotheses?
After all, it's not like anti-capitalists lack for proposed utopias (see list of citations at the bottom). In fact, our proposals nowadays tend to have worked in experiments far better than the proposal of "Implement the capitalist utopia of Austrianism/libertarianism" has actually worked in experiment -- starting with the triumphs of the social-democratic era and going from there!
And this is all, of course, before we start addressing techno-utopian or techno-socialist proposals that run off the basic concept of, "Well, resources aren't that scarce..."
> Just because you are not currently a moral realist, doesn't mean there's no such thing as moral realism.
This is very important, more in a bit
> You're talking about an imagined capitalist utopia.
I really don't think I am, all I've described is the basis for the allocation of resources, not even a mention of how it will eventually lead to a Utopia.
But this basis depends on moral/value subjectivity (which as an aside is also the basis for democracy).
If that is not the case, then a command and control system which allocates resources based on that set of values and enforces laws according to that set of morals will be objectively better than anything capitalism can come up with.
> And this is all, of course, before we start addressing techno-utopian or techno-socialist proposals that run off the basic concept of, "Well, resources aren't that scarce"
As far as I can tell they are, at least for the moment, once we start hitting whole numbers on the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale we can talk about this practically. I do love Dyson Spheres.
---
I will read this paper on moral realism and get back to you.
>If that is not the case, then a command and control system which allocates resources based on that set of values and enforces laws according to that set of morals will be objectively better than anything capitalism can come up with.
There is a false dichotomy between "capitalism" (ie: your imagined utopia of perfect markets that increase the subjective value of rational agents) and "command and control".
What I have been trying to say, despite your visible and extreme prior inability to hear it, is that there are far more alternatives than "something resembling American capitalism" and "something resembling the Soviet command economy".
If you can imagine a civilization hitting Kardashev Level I, you ought to be able to imagine their doing so in a way that isn't designed to rationalize 20th-century party politics!
Last time, because I really can't see why we're talking past each other.
In this entire conversation
Imagined Utopia of Perfect Markets, not mentioned once
American Capitalism, not mentioned once
Soviet Command Economy, not mentioned once
Lets assume for the moment that I am talking about a system and how it should allocate resources. Can there be other systems? yes, can there be better systems? also yes.
Now, based on objective vs subjective morals and values (which is a dichotomy as far as I can tell), we have two types of systems.
1) Given objective values/morals => There exists an objective best allocation of resources and laws governing people and we need to find a system to achieve this.
2) Given subjective values/morals => There is no objective best allocation of resources and laws and we need to find a way to reach consensus on what is produced and what laws are enforced.
Capitalism is a type 2 system, it might be terrible at allocating resources but it does this by reaching consensus
Communism is a type 1 system, it might be terrible at allocating resources but it does this by determining the best allocation
Democracy is a type 2 system, it might be terrible at determining laws but it does this by reaching consensus
Dictatorship is a type 1 system, it might be terrible at determining laws but it does this by determining the best set of laws
The first step is to figure out which universe we live in.
If we live in universe 1, we need to pick type 1 systems. If we live in universe 2, type 2.
Terminological question: if you're not talking about the Soviet command economy, what do you mean by "Communism"? Because you definitely don't seem to be talking about a classless, moneyless, stateless society of nonviolent cooperation and economic democracy, which is the official definition of "communism". Likewise, you don't seem to be talking about economic democracy either, which is the official definition of "socialism".
For the conversation so far, "Communism" only refers to the system that decides and maintains how resources are allocated. (Just like how I've been using capitalism).
As I understand it, communism decides an allocation of resources to maximise a utility function which isn't driven by individual demands but by some objective ranking of value.
From my side I am curious what you mean by economic democracy.
>As I understand it, communism decides an allocation of resources to maximise a utility function which isn't driven by individual demands but by some objective ranking of value.
That is incorrect. Communism refers to the set of economic systems which involve a stateless, moneyless, classless society in which the means of production are operated by workers for human need (ie: individual and collective demands).
Or at least, that is how the term "Communism" is used by self-professed communists, as opposed to by self-professed enemies of communism, who of course use the term in their propaganda to mean "Soviet-style dictatorship". But if you use any term as its enemies imply it to be defined in their propaganda, you will of course never get the bottom of the matter.
> (Just like how I've been using capitalism).
This is very wrong, as well. "Capitalism" means the set of economic systems in which the means of production are primarily controlled by private owners (who are distinct from the state), and operated for profit (via the sale of commodities in some sort of market), by wage laborers (who survive by offering their labor in a labor market), coordinated via the exchange of currency (again, some kind of market).
Systems can vary from "textbook" capitalism in multiple directions, such as: by the state intervening to some great or small degree in the economy (social-democratic capitalism), by finance becoming the dominant economic power above and over commodities manufacturers (financialized capitalism), by raw-materials producers becoming the dominant economic power (rentier capitalism), by private rentiers merging state power into their own personal power (feudalism), by the replacement of capital-labor separation with economic democracy (socialism), by the foundational subsidization of "market" businesses by the state (state capitalism), by the complete nationalization of production and its turning towards the state's national goals (fascism), by the removal of the state and its regime of private exclusive-possession "property" titles to resources but the keeping of the market economy (mutualism), by the removal of the state and its private-property regime and the removal of markets in favor of a debt/gift economy (anarchism), etc.
>From my side I am curious what you mean by economic democracy.
The means of production are owned and ultimate decisions are made by the people who actually do the work operating those means of production. It means exactly what it sounds like: democracy in the workplace and the commons, either direct or representative.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_realism#Mark_Fisher
A few simple questions:
* If capitalism is as inevitable and natural as evolution, why did it take until the late 18th century and require the Enclosure and Poor Laws to appear?
* If capitalism is good, such that even Communists need to ape it, why does it result in massive deflationary panics which leave entire nation-sized regions stripped of their wealth and utterly impoverished?
* If capitalism is useful, why does it only seem to be working for manufactured-goods exporters and bankers? Why have growth rates dropped since the Bretton-Woods system and social democracy were abolished? Why has productivity growth been so terribly low despite the computer revolution?
In short: if capitalism is so great, why all the problems we see in actually-existing capitalist countries?