Meh. I’ve seen a lot of these short essays about how after the pandemic we either should not or simply will not return to the status quo. It doesn’t really do anything to say “the economy doesn’t work” in 5 paragraphs and then say nothing else.
Yes, lots of poor people are getting screwed. Some jobs don’t pay well despite the higher moral standing of directly assisting others. The environment looks pretty bad. But you can’t just say “rich people bad. New economy plz”.
Did you expect a new country wise economic model to be purposed in this article? I believe the author was trying to say, "Poor people are getting screwed, some jobs dont pay well, the environment is bad, lets do something and not forget it."
It is a solution? No. I don't think it is trying to be though. It's just trying to be a reminder that letting everything go back to the way it was is the easiest route forward and the quickly route to getting back on the shitty path the country has been on for the past 20 years.
Agreed. This article is pretty clear about its intent: don’t be lulled into a false sense of economic security after the pandemic and build this experience into our understanding of our system.
The first step of any solution is convincing people there is a problem. Not just the obvious “things are bad,” but an understanding that these issues are systemic in a way that challenges American ideology. These articles frustrate HN because they aren’t pitching some technocratic reformism, but instead are seeding ideas about the structure of our society that need to be absorbed before we can hope to change it.
I’m honestly surprised to see this pop up at all here, HN isn’t a crowd that is demographically primed to challenge the assumptions of capitalisms.
This doesn't challenge assumptions of capitalism in any meaningful way. In fact my impression reading it was how the author seemed to fundamentally misunderstand finance. I'd love to hear thoughts on how it would be done differently, but he doesn't get that far and rather just makes shallow statements.
It wasn't an insult, it was a critique. Any economy built on promises that can be thrown out at will is just a house of cards. Where do you even start with that? That's just one thing, the article is filled with half thought out premises that when taken to their conclusion fall apart. In reality it is the author making serious accusations that require evidence, not my critique.
I can't help you if you don't know where to start to support your own claims but rhetorical hand-waving probably isn't it. That you disagree with Graeber isn't really indicative that he fundamentally misunderstand finance though. He's kind of a well-received[1] expert on the subject, even according to the Financial Times[2].
My point was is the author didn't even provide any detail on where his claims (not mine) would lead or how they would work. Why does the burden keep being put on me to disprove his claims instead of him being required to prove that they do work?
I'm asking you why you think what you do. He communicated to me why he thinks the way he does and I have no questions about that. I think the essay was clear enough for what it was and didn't think it betrayed any fundamental misunderstanding of finance.
I think what he said is that things aren't working for many, this crisis showed that to everyone and we should therefore keep this in mind and do something about it. The part I liked in particular was the implication that we should keep in mind that the economy exists primarily to satisfy our needs and not the other way around.
I don't see anything there that suggests he misunderstands finance, especially with a reputation for the opposite, or that he doesn't get the philosophy of contract law (I think that's what you're hinting at), so that's why I asked.
It is one thing to say that you are not convinced by his arguments, but it’s pretty clear that he directly questions our conception of financial markets, markets more broadly, and our definition of “economy” that are key components of capitalism.
In fact, he challenges it so directly that you confuse his intentional materialist characterization of finance as a misunderstanding. Mostly, I think this is a result of our ideology being so pervasive under capitalism that we are accustomed to describing our artificial economic structures as borderline laws of physics. Graeber here is simply trying to insert a wedge into that line of thinking, not propose an entire alternative socioeconomic process.
Based on what gets up and downvoted, most of people on HN are ancap or fascists.
I guess it makes sense - startups are gold rush, VC's are the ones giving away shovels for portion of gold should there be any, and founders are people who either found gold or believe they will.
I wonder if most of people have political outlook like this. If they do, it is both sad and comforting, because then the humanity is doomed to kill ourselves via climate change, but we would deserve it.
This sort of generalization is notoriously unreliable and subject to cognitive bias. People are far more likely to notice what they dislike, and to weight it more heavily. This produces false feelings of generality:
That's why users with opposing views to yours make the opposite generalization [1]. It's not that HN is any different—they simply dislike different things. This is one of the most reliable phenomena I've seen on HN. It's so reliable that one can accurately predict people's politics (or other preferences) simply by flipping a bit on the generalizations they make.
Since we are here, Daniel, and also with reference to something I wrote nearby: I think the guidelines should be augmented, in terms of "downvoting without justification should be frowned upon". Otherwise, some would be tempted to just downvote something because they "feel differently": posts are not polls ("how many like strawberry, how many dislike it"). In general, downvoting should be accompanied by posting the underlying reasons - it should take posts evidently inconsistent with the purpose (cheap cheer, cheap joke etc.) to be exceptionally downvoted silently.
I understand HN is pretty conservative in terms of structure and rules, but I believe this should be a general norm that would be consistent with the spirit of the site (intellectuality and promotion of meaningful posts), and beneficial if made explicit.
It is a common suggestion but I think it would be a mistake to require people to post reasons for their downvotes. It would produce a ton of noise (because people would just make shit up) and dramatically increase meta-bickering about downvotes, which we already have too much of.
Edit: here's a partial list of past explanations about this, in case anyone is interested in seeing how it has come up over the years: https://news.ycombinator.com/downvote-reasons
There are probably quite a few ancaps, and I've seen a fair few communists, but I have yet to see a genuine fascist. That suggests to me your using the term more as a slur than as a word that actually means something.
Upvote and downvote do not work that way at HN and should not be interpreted that way without analysis. Here it is not about how you feel: it is about whether you make sense. Experience mostly reflects the principle (some noise must be expected).
Your claim is fallacious. It is not rooted in any formal study of HN voters or voting outcomes. It is just a story HN members tell themselves to feel special. Reality is, HN is like every other social media platform, and feelings deeply influence voting around here. IMO it is obvious.
There is little need for formal studies. HN is very surely different from «other social media platform[s]»: you must have never been on Reddit or YT, to provide examples of diametrically opposite places. A quick look at information density and "where the uttering came from" (say, above the neck, below the hips or other guts) should clearly show a massive, radical difference. That feelings influence voting, in terms of "hear, hear" or "thank you", is not undesirable: it is still agreement on reasoning. Expression of disagreement through downvoting is limited already through a technical limitation, which also contributes to indicate the form. Some foolish snipers (hitting without leaving any justification) are around: bad apples are not curbed, also because it apparently is not a mission for HN to create an optimal system of moderation and debate.
In fact, there are several shortcomings to adopt HN as a model for moderation and debate - it was evidently not the objective. But civilization wise, there is no comparison with many other places.
By the way:
> a story HN members tell themselves to feel special
Please. Accusing others to have unclean grounds in their evaluations, gratuitously? And, when one is "special", it is not out of some free membership that confirmation comes.
Please don't be an asshole in HN comments, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. You've done this repeatedly (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28673020), and that's not cool.
Sorry to pile on the scolding I already posted (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28963043), but I don't think this description of HN users is either accurate or fair. You can find samples of anything in any large-enough sample, but the median HN user doesn't say that they're special, and we certainly would never claim such a thing.
Comments like this are one reason why we added this guideline: "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." I can appreciate the reasons for supercilious putdowns on the internet, but they make for lousy conversation.
Moistly, there was no claim of specialness in that idea, and there was no bait. You almost seem to defend a relativism in which all ideas are worth the same, if you make "making sense" akin to "specialness". If that were true, there would be no point to debate. Surely, feeling alone does not constitute any basis for rational exchange - only for communication in terms of "sharing". HN does not read like "There is a shortage if lithium" // "I feel your pain, bro": some of us are very glad it so is, because it would make a largely useless, noisy reading.
Disambiguation at re-reading: «Surely, feeling alone does not constitute any basis for rational exchange» is to be read as "A mediated (unfiltered) expression of feelings in a language which does not work for rational exchange, consistently is noise when attempting that (information exchange, insight and debate)".
Expressed in my unedited (too late), it «feeling alone» ("feeling" alone) could have been read as "when feeling lonely". Which is not what was intended, but seems almost a point: if somebody is here for the greatest laughters, enveloping warmth, or tickling, I am not sure it is the place. Some language and thinking is fit here, some elsewhere.
Thanks for the kind reply. I know that people sometimes say such things, but they're a tiny minority of HN users. I cringe inwardly when I hear them, and I'm probably oversensitive on the point.
Hi Daniel. Sorry but I do not quite understand your point. It seems like you are censoring my statement «Here it is not about how you feel: it is about whether you make sense», and you found it cringeful - it even seems like you state you are glad "my position represents a minority". I am also interested in your "sensitivity", also (not just in terms of sheer human relation) because I do not quite understand what "touches" you in that direction.
I have not yet managed to read (all) pg's interventions. I just read though that according to him "down arrows [can be used to] express agreement". As I tried to observe formerly, though, this contrasts with the direction of "reasoning". If one just "felt" disagreement, but cannot justify it (or will not out of laziness), there will be no progress, no discussion, no quality. The guidelines, I a pretty sure, specify to warn against cheapness, and there is very little cheaper than one's statement "I disagree [end of statement]". What are we debating for if disagreement is not rationalized? I was pretty sure we are meant to be reasoning here, not to do some expressive "performance art". (Note: which I do myself, as an aside luxury, always taking care though that the intellectual structure it accompanies appears solid. Never alone, never without the important bits attached.)
What I tried to express in fact to the user that seems obsessed about the idea that some "feel special", in my last intervention, is that "expression of "feeling" will be consistent with this apparent framework when it will be expressed within a rational framework, which will allow it to be managed within a discussion". Without that, it will not be "information exchange, insight and debate": it will be noise. The very fact that on average we restrain ourselves from joking, to try to keep density high, is indicative.
The quality of debates here are completely different from what you can find elsewhere: as mentioned, for example, YT and Reddit - where noise and low quality are abysmally huge. What is the filter that causes that increase, if not that using the "head" is promoted here instead of lower bits? (It was a rhetoric formula: I am sure it is that.) To quote Daniel G. (read somewhere else), "We are just trying to build a [cannot remember term] that does not suck". It is the direction of consistency with "intellectual curiosity" which is granting that.
Tireless moderation is what makes this place a bit better. It is the only thing that makes this place better. Remove the moderation and HN will immediately become a Reddit cesspool.
I just meant that when enthusiastic users make what seem to me to be excessive claims about HN, I feel embarrassed (a.k.a. cringe). Also, I brace myself because I know that other users are going to get triggered by it.
> Did you expect a new country wise economic model to be purposed in this article?
No, I didn't, but I'm frankly growing tired of cookie-cutter article like this one that just enumerate problems that have existed since the literal dawn of civilization.
The entire "economy bad" brigade is, as parent comment puts it, "r/im14andthisisdeep". They see problems everyone else sees, but they don't have any actual insight, just empty rethoric.
There are quite a number of solutions on offer - they just have a difficult time gaining traction in our media (and therefor in the public debate). Part of that has to do with the fact that a majority of those with economic and political power - those who have succeeded in the current system - still refuse to recognize that the problems are systematic. They refuse to recognize that the problems are intrinsically caused by our economic and political systems and necessitate systematic change to those systems. And since these people wield economic and political power, they have the ability to prevent the conversations about these problems and their solutions from being held in the halls of media and power. Thus, the solutions are only discussed among fairly niche political and academic communities who have a hard time broadcasting the ideas widely.
But if you go looking for it, there is a wide array of work that has been done divising ideas for the systematic change we need to solve these problems. I have a whole bookshelf of authors proposing alternatives. Projects like The Next System project, and the Democracy Collaborate, have been working on divising ways to grow alternative systems with in the confines of the current one.
The challenge of course, remains funding. Because those with the wealth got that wealth through the current system and continue to benefit from the current system.
So actually making change is going to take either a mass popular uprising (electoral or otherwise) or enough people with enough wealth recognizing the problems and being willing to give up their wealth and power to solve them. Knowing that the solutions will forever disempower them and their peers.
Edit:
To provide some clarity of the sort of solutions on offer, I'll provide my favorite. Stop prioritizing capital, start prioritizing labor. Right now, Capital basically gets to call the shots - because we allow for any kind of contract in business formation and you can't start a business with out capital and we don't restrict what capital can demand. This allows capital to take advantage of that power imbalance at the time of business formation to demand control. If instead, we restricted what capital could demand to say - a reasonable interest on a loan - and legally structured businesses as institutions democratically run by those working in them, this would have the effect of empowering labor and disempowering capital.
People would still have the ability to make money from their money, but it would vastly reduce the current multiplier effects on the growth of wealth, and thus the tendency for wealth to concentrate. It would tend to spread wealth out to a much wider proportion of the population - because the people doing the work would get to vote for the leaders of their businesses, and those leaders then have a much, much strong incentive to take care of the people doing the work. Likewise, the people doing the work would have a much stronger incentive to take care of the communities in which they operate, because they are much more likely to live in those communities than distant investors. It has the effect of reconnecting businesses with their neighbors and communities in a much more real way, and empowering those involved in the business who are most aware of the effects it has to change those effects.
Would this system be perfect? Nope. It's really a pretty gentle refactor of the current sytem (though one with wide ranging effects). Would it be better? Yeah, I really believe it would.
There are many other effects this change would have - I've wanted to write a book on it for years, but haven't been able to find the time or bandwidth. Someday. If I ever get to take a long leave of absence or get to cash out, someday.
Another alternative you could consider, one I've played with as a thought experiment many times, what would happen if we simply banned people from making money directly from their money in all forms? It's a challenging thought experiment, because where do you draw the line? Money is just a representation of property, so how do you define money made from money versus, say, renting a machine you own? But it's a worthwhile thought experiment - could we devise a system where you could only make money by working, and not by simply owning property or holding wealth?
There are many more alternatives out there, from gentle refactors to whole rewrites. Some fleshed out, some just thought experiments. And everything in between. They should really - all of them - be a much bigger part of our public dialog than they are.
Further edit: Many threads are on-going but I've been at this all morning so I'm going to call it a day and go make lunch. I've appreciated the dialogs, and maybe I'll write that book some day. If I do find the time to write that book, I know exactly where to come to harden it against criticism. If I can convince a forum full of capital investors and would be capital investors that making capital investment illegal is a good idea, then I'll be able to convince anyone!
Not one single line of what you wrote is a concrete and actionable thing you would do. It's frankly a whole bunch of rethoric. I'll pick the bits that seem like they mean something real:
> legally structured businesses as institutions democratically run by those working in them
This already exists, they are called cooperatives, many of them actually work pretty great. Try to guess what happens when they grow and they need to hire employees...
> what would happen if we simply banned people from making money directly from their money in all forms?
No banks, no loans, no credit cards. No way to protect against inflation with financial instruments as basic as a target-date fund.
Oh, and 0% public debt, of course.
> Money is just a representation of property
It's not and you know it's not, you're just playing with words.
> This already exists, they are called cooperatives, many of them actually work pretty great. Try to guess what happens when they grow and they need to hire employees...
They continue to operate. Mondragon has 80,000 worker owners. And yes, it has a challenge in recent years where the worker owners have created a class of non-owner employee. But it got pretty big before that started happening, and there's no reason to believe it wouldn't continue to function just fine if that wasn't an option.
There are many other worker cooperatives functioning very well at scale with zero non-owner employees. My proposal is essentially that we make this the requirement. That any business formed must be formed as a democratically run worker cooperative. This is perfectly actionable. Governments define the legal structures under which businesses may form today, and continue to regulate those structures. Right now, those structure enable the investor ownership relationship, and most worker cooperatives have to use those structures and bend them to allow the worker ownership relationship. It's a relatively straight forward legal matter (with wide ranging consequences) to change that structure.
> No banks, no loans, no credit cards. No way to protect against inflation with financial instruments as basic as a target-date fund.
Like I said, this is a thought experiment. Not fleshed out. And it's not the same as the proposal I outlined above for a worker cooperative based democratic socialism. I don't think you actually read my post, I suspect you just skimmed it and then reacted to certain sentences.
> My proposal is essentially that we make this the requirement
So basically we are abolishing the ability for any business to hire employees? This would be terrible, especially for the poor. Owner and employee are different risk profiles, it's neither useful nor beneficial to impose by law that nobody can be an employee any longer, especially for those who can't afford the risk.
It's also very easy to route around that obstacle if it were made law: just fire everyone and hire them back as contractors, oh, no, sorry, democratically run worker cooperative employing one worker.
You are completely throwing away many layers of protections that are afforded to workers in a system of regulated employment relations.
> Like I said, this is a thought experiment.
It's a thought experiment predicated on paying an enormous social cost that nobody is willing to pay, to get to a point where nobody wants to be. If the first step of your plan directly implies getting rid of all credit, then I frankly don't think it's really a good plan.
> Owner and employee are different risk profiles, it's neither useful nor beneficial to impose by law that nobody can be an employee any longer, especially for those who can't afford the risk.
The owner doesn't carry the risk - the business does. That's the whole point of a limited liability corporation. And there's no reason those liability protections couldn't be strengthened further.
Plus, this is seriously underestimating the risk a poor employee takes. Someone living pay to pay check who has no information about the state of the business and stands to lose everything if they get fired risks a lot more than a business owner who has all the information about the state of the business and can keep a comfortable cushion for themselves to fall back on should the business fail (and can choose the moment at which to end the business to be sure they don't eat into that cushion).
Who's taking more risk here? The employee, not the business owner.
> It's also very easy to route around that obstacle if it were made law: just fire everyone and hire them back as contractors, oh, no, sorry, democratically run worker cooperative employing one worker.
You could pretty easily tweak contract law to get rid of this workaround. Even so, this isn't an easy workaround. No business of reasonable size can afford to fire all of its employees. And if those employees are co-owners of the business no single employee has the power to fire all the others.
> You are completely throwing away many layers of protections that are afforded to workers in a system of regulated employment relations.
And replacing them with power. They don't need those protections when they are in control. They can devise their own rules.
> It's a thought experiment predicated on paying an enormous social cost that nobody is willing to pay, to get to a point where nobody wants to be. If the first step of your plan directly implies getting rid of all credit, then I frankly don't think it's really a good plan.
My proposal is a separate thing from the thought experiment. The thought experiment is an example of the sort of innovative thinking we should be engaging in to come up with new alternatives, but for the most part - aren't on a large scale.
My proposal is a fleshed out proposal that I could work. Sure there are pieces of it that still need to be further fleshed out - like exactly how the transition would work. But I you can I must hang out with different crowds if you don't think anybody wants to get to a place with less inequality and where the average person has a hell of a lot more control over their day to day life.
Someone living pay to paycheck can not afford to be an owner in the first place. The structure being LLC or whatever makes no difference: the vast majority of business enterprises just fail.
You are effectively forcing everyone to be a business owner even when they might have no will, interest or ability to be one, something that disproportionately damages those who would putatively be helped by this system.
> You could pretty easily tweak contract law to get rid of this workaround.
Yes you can. You can do that in my world, where regulated employment, you know, exists, and you can easily show how an operation like that is fraudolent.
> And replacing them with power. They don't need those protections when they are in control. They can devise their own rules.
How would they be in control? Magic? The invisible hand? How would a law mandating that everyone be an owner, assuming for the sake of argument something like that is possible and enforceable, make a minimum wage worker in control of his own destiny?
It doesn't work, it's a pipe dream, and it's ironically the same argument used by hyper libertarian right-wing types.
> if you don't think anybody wants to get to a place with less inequality
Pointless rethoric. Literally everyone wants that, like everyone wants an extra million in their bank account.
I'm disagreeing that what you're proposing will get us there.
Yeah this same thing you’re saying has been tried. Just newer words for the same thing.
Unless you mean it should be an entirely voluntary system? More likely you’re thinking like the Bolsheviks and you’ll cause 20 million people to stave with your ideas.
No, that was centralized state socialism - it was authoritarian and centralized.
What I'm proposing is more akin to distributed democratic socialism. Our government is still democratically run. You still have independent banks (formed as credit unions) or crowdfunding to start businesses. The only difference is that once a business hires that first worker, then decisions start getting made democratically. And they continue from there. The state isn't running any of the businesses and there's no central planning arm.
To my knowledge, this has never been tried as a whole economic system. But worker cooperatives exist and are functioning just fine in the current system. Ever bought Equal Exchange chocolate? That's a worker cooperative. Heard of Mondragon? 80,000 member worker cooperative that's functioned successfully for decades across multiple verticals in Spain.
What I am proposing is that we do away with the traditional investor relationship and mandate that all businesses must be formed as democratic worker cooperatives funded either by regulated loans or some form of crowd funding.
This is all bog-standard bolshevik/communist propaganda dressed up in modern lingo. Your "co-ops" are just "soviets" (literal definition "council"). These "worker councils" were officially democratic as laid out in various USSR constitutions, and even the names of some communist bloc countries such as East Germany (German Democratic Republic) and North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea).
In practice of course, none of the freedoms of decision making we typically ascribe to western democratic nations existed despite these labels. The reason, as always, is that significant coercion and force is required to get people to give up control of their property and wealth. This inevitably leads to not only authoritarianism, but also wealth being transferred to the state instead of the people.
No the co-ops I'm talking about are businesses democratically run by their workers and they exist in the current economy with out coersion. Ever heard of Mondragon? 80,000 worker owner cooperative operating out of Spain for decades. Had an Equal Exchange chocolate bar? King Arthur Flour?
There's no reason you couldn't write the laws of business structure in such a way that all businesses have to be run democratically by their workers. Essentially you do away with the partnership, LLC, and Corporation and replace it with the worker cooperative. What you get is an economy of democratically run worker cooperatives competing with each other in a free market economy. No central planning. No government control. And this is different from the worker councils you're talking about which are, essentially, an effort at democratic, distributed economic planning.
If you and your hippie friends wanna band together and start a commune somewhere and commit mass suicide (or something), I got no problem with that. Just don't force everyone else to join you by gun point (the logical endpoint of enforcing laws).
Many states already have usury laws which limit interest rates but in practice that doesn't give labor any more power relative to capital. Lowering limits on interest rates would just result in capitalists ceasing lending to risky businesses.
A better solution would be to increase taxes on income from interest and capital, and use that funding for education and social services.
It would have to be linked to a requirement that all businesses be formed as worker cooperatives, democratically run by their workers. That's what would give labor the power.
The usery laws are just about preventing banks from exercising undo power over those worker cooperatives at the formation stage.
Why would anyone ever try a high risk innovation play to propel society forward if there was no reward? Most businesses fail. This would encourage people to just work at BigCo instead of trying to start new things.
I feel like innovative companies such as SpaceX or Moderna would never happen under that economic model for example.
Yikes. You... uh... must have a social circle that looks very different from mine.
I know any number of people who would eagerly start a high risk innovation play as a worker cooperative, because the money reward isn't what they care about. They care about making change in society or seeing a technical advancement become wide spread.
For most of them, they just need the chance - a floor under their feet so they can't fall too far if they fail and enough funding to get going. And, given how much crowdfunding has succeeded in todays world of concentrated wealth - I believe crowdfunding could provide that in this system where wealth is much, much more distributed.
The other piece of if is, with worker cooperatives every single employee of the company is fully bought into that innovation play. And stands to see the rewards created by it. Not just the investors and company founders. If anything, it increases the effectiveness of these companies, because everyone involved in them is incentivized to give it their all. Everyone involved stands to see the rewards of success.
So all of that is possible in today's economic model. You don't need to make capital investment illegal for that to happen. Looking forward to the next crowdfunded carbon capture worker cooperative. Heck the SEC just raised the crowdfunding limit for startups to $5M so time will tell.
I do find it interesting that your social circle is willing to bet their entire net worth on a risky startup where the reward is a salary cut in the worker cooperative + some savings account level interest. The "funding" bit is the key. You waived over it with crowdfunding, but now it's like buying lottery tickets with low payout. Pay $20 for a 20% chance at $40 in 10 years! You'll make the world a better place!
Even in the example you provided a labor-led, democratically funded entity can only receive 5M while capital-led, private investor funded entity has no real limit.
Investing in startups is hard, as I am sure Y-Combinator would attest. The layperson is not prepared to invest in them. To vet the companies, their leadership, the feasibility of their ideas, etc... Especially with a low payout. I can understand the SEC's hesitation as this could easily lead to scams. Just look at kickstarter and all the things that have gone down there.
Really what the parent is proposing is something like -
Here is a savings account. You can throw chunks of money in it at startups that have a high chance of failing. But if they succeed you'll only earn bank level interest since it's not capital investment. So you have a small chance at earning bank level interest.
"I can understand the SEC's hesitation as this could easily lead to scams."
It's not "could", it's will. With 100% certainty. The only question is how many and hard they will be to control. We know this because it has happened before.
> still refuse to recognize that the problems are systematic
I think you're reading into other's worldviews too much. Most people likely agree it's systemic. Many would not be convinced by the proposed solutions, because they do not think they would improve the situation. Moreover, large numbers of people do not think the situation can be improved, that this is just the natural state of the world (for which they have thousands of years of evidence to point to).
They don't have thousands of years of evidence. The modern economic system has only existed about 200 years. It's precursor was around a couple hundred years before that. Prior to that, the economic system looked very different. And there was a wide range of economic systems prior to that.
> that this is just the natural state of the world (for which they have thousands of years of evidence to point to).
You write:
> And there was a wide range of economic systems prior to that.
That is my point. every single one of those 'wide range of economic systems' (including the ones directly intended to produce equality) produced inequality.
That didn't seem like the point you were making, what you seemed to imply is that some form of the current system has existed forever.
But lets work with your new point. Saying "all the economic systems we've tried produced inequality" with the implication being there's no point in attempting to devise new ones is rather like saying "all materials we've devised produced some amount of friction". Sure. But some produce a hell of a lot more than others. And it's still worth searching for new materials that produce less friction so that they can be used in applications where friction is a detriment.
Some economic systems produce a lot more inequality and environmental degredation than others. Our current system has produced a lot more than most. And a lot of the proposals on the table would almost certainly produce less than our current system does.
Which other systems are you referring to? Feudalism, fascism, and communism all produced more inequality than free-market capitalism. Note that equality or inequality involves more than just income and assets.
Environmental degradation is more a function of overpopulation and technology than the economic system. With free-market capitalism we at least have the potential to price in the environmental degredation externality in a fair and consistent way through taxes. That approach has been underutilized so far, but with most other economic systems it's not even an option.
There are many more options than feudalism, fascism, or communism. And my point is that the lack of awareness of them is part of the problem.
For example, there's the form of Democratic Socialism I propose above: where we replace the current business structure with worker cooperatives funded by regulated loans or crowd sourcing that compete with each other in a free market. We know worker cooperatives work, because there are many successful worker cooperatives operating well in the current capitalist economy. There's no reason to believe they would stop functioning well in a free market economy where all businesses are worker run.
And like I said, I have a whole bookshelf full of alternative proposals. Some of which don't make a whole lot of sense. Some of which are very plausible. And some of which are already working in micro, just waiting to be tried in macro.
There's nothing stopping workers from creating worker cooperatives today and getting business loans today. We don't need a new economic system for that. But lenders won't lend without a high expected ROI.
Yes, worker cooperatives have formed and functioned in the existing economy. Which is part of how we know using them as the foundation of our economy, rather than a niche aspect of it, could work.
> But lenders won't lend without a high expected ROI.
Exactly, that's what's stopping them. Worker cooperatives don't provide the return on investment that investor ownership grants. They don't allow those with capital (wealth) to demand a large portion of the returns from the business. That's what requires the new economy - removing the option for capital to demand ownership and control so that it has to make do with a reasonable, regulated return on its loans.
This is an unrealistic fantasy. Capital owners don't lend money to businesses just for fun. You haven't proposed a viable way to encourage lending. If they can't achieve a high expected ROI on business lending then they'll use their capital for other purposes.
> Which is part of how we know using them as the foundation of our economy, rather than a niche aspect of it, could work.
We don't use worker cooperatives in the same way we don't use corporations. There is no overarching entity that uses any of these things.
If worker cooperatives are so great, they should be outpacing corporations. Some do. For example, companies like Winco and Mondragon exceed productivity of their corporate counterparts. That's fine. More power to them. Their story should encourage others to start worker cooperatives.
> That didn't seem like the point you were making, what you wrong seemed to imply some form of the current system has existed forever.
My meaning was very plain. I said many people would be unconvinced that anything could be done to achieve equality. I then stated they could point to thousands of years of human life (which, as you correctly stated, contained many economic systems). If you put both points together, you'd see that I was saying essentially that 'no human system tried has achieved equality', so many people would believe that there are few changes we can make to ours to achieve this goal.
I'm going to expound on this idea more. Please consider everything I say before jumping to conclusions this time.
> Sure. But some produce a hell of a lot more than others. And it's still worth searching for new materials that produce less friction so that they can be used in applications where friction is a detriment.
Correct. But there's more than one knob. Some systems produce little inequality, but lots of destitution. Others produce lots of inequality but little destitution. By all objective metrics, ours produces little destitution, and while it produces inequality, it is a different form of inequality than many other systems. For example, marxism and communism in the forms tried produce more equality, but utter destitution for large swaths of the population (it's a race to the bottom). Our system of free markets, even in its heavily corrupt form, produces inequality, certainly, but little destitution, by all objective metrics. Moreover, of the inequality we create, it is a shifting inequality. Studies show that family fortunes in the United States do not form dynasties as they do in other economic systems (like monarchist mercantilism, for example). Most family wealth dissipates by the third or fourth generation.
If some inequality that ends up being redistributed is the price we pay for less destitution, then I don't see why equality ought to be prized.
> Some economic systems produce a lot more inequality and environmental degredation than others. Our current system has produced a lot more than most. And a lot of the proposals on the table would almost certainly produce less than our current system does.
Okay, and as I said, simply optimizing for 'equality' and 'environment degradation' would not lead to a good economic system. There are other goals you're completely ignoring. WE can create a system that's perfectly equal and great for the environment, but leaves everyone destitute.
For me, there's a hierarchy of needs here. First, destitution must end, then we can talk about equality. But ultimately, if the world is extremely unequal, but no one is destitute, then that economic system is good. And we're very close to that by continuing with current trends
> But ultimately, if the world is extremely unequal, but no one is destitute, then that economic system is good. And we're very close to that by continuing with current trends
Yes. If everyone is actually better off compared to the equal society, then the only problem is jealousy really. So why not attack that instead, people will never be equal anyway since nature is unfair, and some will always be much more beautiful, talented etc, even in a perfectly "equal" society. Capitalism just amplifies the human condition, raises everyone, and raises the best even more.
It seems to me that our consumeristic culture makes people extremely jealous. As I've stated countless times here, I don't like Mark Zuckerberg, or Jeff Bezos. I want to make sure that their wealth cannot buy them the ability to affect my life (and I've called openly for their prosecution for when they've done those things based on existing criminal law).
That being said... I don't begrudge them their wealth. I don't begrudge them their private jets. I have nothing to complain about. I have a home, a wonderful family, a lovely spiritual life, a fantastic community, etc. I have things that their money would never buy. Half the time I feel sorry for them.
It seems to me many of my fellow citizens are simply jealous of their material goods and want their private jets and all that nonsense for themselves. No thanks. We should discourage this kind of materialism.
> For me, there's a hierarchy of needs here. First, destitution must end, then we can talk about equality. But ultimately, if the world is extremely unequal, but no one is destitute, then that economic system is good. And we're very close to that by continuing with current trends
This strikes me as an excellent way to put it, and is really at the core of why I look upon “alternative solutions” with a cynical eye.
Every proposal I’ve seen results in limiting overall wealth of our society. That just doesn’t pass the smell test for me.
To put it another way - it’s far easier for a wealthy society to achieve equality than it is for an equal system to achieve wealth.
Ironically, this seems to more closely mirror the writings of Marx than the goals of the self-described Marxists I’ve encountered.
> The free market and worker cooperatives are completely compatible.
I agree.
But there is something that needs to change in order for worker cooperatives become the dominant business form. So long as capital can demand ownership, worker cooperatives will remain a relative niche. What needs to change in markets is we need to remove the ability for capital to demand ownership. That's essentially the core of my proposal for a new system.
Replace the LLC and Stock Corporation with the worker cooperative. Remove the investor stock owner relationship from the economy. Legally mandate that all businesses be formed as worker owned cooperatives. And then regulate the amount of interest that banks and financiers can charge on their loans to limit their power over those worker cooperatives.
What you get is a free market economy where all businesses are democratically run by their workers and the relationship between capital and labor is flipped. It would vastly increase equality, with out increasing destitution. And would likely have some small decrease on environmental degradation.
In some ways it's a very gentle refactor of our existing economy. In other ways, it's far reaching and drastic (stock markets go away entirely and traditional banks become a primary mechanism of savings).
The idea that replacing ownership with loans will lead to good outcomes is frankly shocking to me.
There's a reason all major religions historically prohibit usury (the charging of any interest, as well as enforce debt jubilees), while encouraging ownership.
Frankly, this sounds like a great idea, but it vastly understates the role of the markets (esp the stock market) in lifting others out of poverty.
Humans are not machines. We cannot always work. Stock ownership provides the ability for the disabled, the elderly, etc to earn income based off of work they'd already put in. It's like buying a stake in society. Without it, each person would be measured based off their economic output. I know you claim that's how the current system works, but imagine how much worse it would be if there were no other way to earn money other than by working.
> It would vastly increase equality, with out increasing destitution.
Your meaning was not plain, you wrote a few very broad sentences and in your clarifications it seems you were talking about a single problem - equality. The original post was outlining many problems, inequality being one of them and the systems being proposed potentially address many problems.
But that's fine, such is the nature of dialog over text.
> Studies show that family fortunes in the United States do not form dynasties as they do in other economic systems (like monarchist mercantilism, for example). Most family wealth dissipates by the third or fourth generation
This is likely to be an outdated statistic at best. If you go back three or four genenerations, you will find yourself passing through a time when the US had very high inheritance taxes and a 90% top marginal tax rate. That period of time did likely prevent the formation of dynasties across it. However, those policies have since been repealed and current studies show very low social mobility and a significant increase in dynastic formation. [1, 2]
> Some systems produce little inequality, but lots of destitution. Others produce lots of inequality but little destitution.
If you're just measuring destitution and inequality, then you're getting a very narrow picture. You can't leave out things like environmental degradation from your calculation. The environmental degradation - in climate change - threatens to upend what gains there have been made in destitution and the current system is completely failing to respond appropriately to the threat. So the great likelihood is that if we stay with the same system on the same trendline, there's a cliff coming in our near future.
> For me, there's a hierarchy of needs here. First, destitution must end, then we can talk about equality. But ultimately, if the world is extremely unequal, but no one is destitute, then that economic system is good. And we're very close to that by continuing with current trends.
Saying "first destitution" must end before we consider any refactors of the current system makes very little sense. There are other options on the table than state socialism or returning to mercantalism. Systems that have the potential to increase equality, decrease environemntal degredation, and decrease destitution. All at the same time. Systems that haven't been tried in macro yet, but are working just fine in micro - for example the move to universal worker cooperatives funded by credit unions and crowd sourcing that I propose. And that's just one of many proposed possibilities. Those doing the work of proposing alternatives are absolutely including things like destitution in their calculations.
Throwing your hands up and saying "we can't do better than this" frankly runs counter to the very mindset that this website is supposed to represent. We can always do better.
> This is likely to be an outdated statistic at best. If you go back three or four genenerations, you will find yourself passing through a time when the US had very high inheritance taxes and a 90% top marginal tax rate. That period of time did likely prevent the formation of dynasties across it. However, those policies have since been repealed and current studies show very low social mobility and a significant increase in dynastic formation. [1, 2]
How is it possible that you can dismiss my claims for being too long ago, and then cite claims on dynastic formation made today? Surely, in order to make the latter claim, you would need to wait equally long into the future as my claims were into the past? Would you look at my family, which has risen exponentially from poverty and claim we're forming a dynasty? How could you possible know it's a dynasty until I'm dead and my children inherit?
I don't believe the tax policy argument is satisfying. The studies show that the wealth dissipates due to squandering, not taxation. Even with a 90% income tax, these heirs still get millions and millions (likely billions in todays dollars), and yet still lose it all.
> The environmental degradation - in climate change - threatens to upend what gains there have been made in destitution and the current system is completely failing to respond appropriately to the threat. So the great likelihood is that if we stay with the same system on the same trendline, there's a cliff coming in our near future.
Even the worst models of climate change do not predict the catastrophic ends you are attempting to paint. You're just distracting from the issue at this point. In general, I find doomsday predictions unvaluable. Nevertheless, i'm not going to fall for this change in goalposts.
> Systems that haven't been tried in macro yet, but are working just fine in micro - for example the move to universal worker cooperatives funded by credit unions and crowd sourcing that I propose
So... a free market? There is nothing incompatible with the system we have and worker's cooperatives.
Although I will say credit unions have proven just as dangerous and capable of malfeasance as banks (Savings and Loans Crisis of the 80s, which everyone seems to forget for some reason).
> We can always do better.
Sure, we can improve some things in my hierarchy of needs by following down our current path, which, unlike your changes, is empirically shown to improve material conditions. This idea that because the current system hasn't made everyone's life better overnight, it must be replaced, is foolish. Some people have this constant drive to change things. Doing nothing is also a choice. And often a good one.
> Even the worst models of climate change do not predict the catastrophic ends you are attempting to paint. You're just distracting from the issue at this point. In general, I find doomsday predictions unvaluable. Nevertheless, i'm not going to fall for this change in goalposts.
Yes. Yes they do. [1] That, and climate reality has so far been worse than our worst case models in many respects. [2]
Anyway, we could keep going, but we've been at this all morning so it's probably best to let it lie. I feel comfortable I've made my point well enough, and I think you've made yours. I think we're unlikely to make further progress in a low bandwidth media.
I dunno, maybe if/when I write the book I dream of I'll be able to address more of your points in more detail and with more data and you'll find that more convincing than I can be reactively writing forum posts. Until then, I've appreciated the dialog.
Nothing would fundamentally change about human nature and society if the scenario in [1] comes to pass. Humans will still likely thrive and be happy, as we have for many years.
Yeah but it gets tiresome when leftists never bother themselves with any form of practical solutions of even a path forward, always just point out that things are not perfect, and then hint at some vague ideal. What's the point of instigating and persuading people on such grounds, I don't understand
While it is not completely without value, just confirming to readers that a problem they are well aware of already exists is probably the least value you can provide to them. You'd hope for more than just criticism.
> Did you expect a new country wise economic model to be purposed in this article?
Coming from a publication like theanarchistlibrary.org, purporting a new system is implicit. And the following quote: "to create an “economy” that lets us actually take care of the people who are taking care of us. " - with economy in quotes removes ambiguity on that question.
Yeah it kind of reminds me of why I thought Bernie Sanders was once a useful voice. He was willing to point out realities that most political elites wanted to keep hidden.
His solutions though are crap, and he has profited greatly off the misfortune of the poor.
Because he exploits their situation to promise them free stuff by taking from the wealthy. That wealth taken might give some poor a token gift, but mostly it ends up in the pockets of bureaucrats.
Maybe not, maybe he only has one modest home which is still more than the people he appeals to, but not utterly hypocritical.
At the very least we need Federally mandated sick days. My mother caught COVID at the beginning of March of 2020 from a coworker who knew her husband had it but continued to come into work out of fear of losing her job. It's crazy that it would happen again during the next pandemic.
Meanwhile 20 years after 9/11 we're still taking off our shoes to get on airplanes.
Wait, are you saying she was actually threatened with being fired if she didn't come in sick or that she just thought that she might be? If the latter, no federal mandate would change that - I get sick days, but I feel weird taking them, like I'm getting a black mark on my employment record that will come back to haunt me later. No law can change that, that's just how our society (currently) is.
> No law can change that, that's just how our society (currently) is.
Laws can change society, through propaganda. See "Click it or Ticket" campaigns, and the like.
A simple PSA / Propaganda effort of "If you're sick with COVID19, stay at home. Federally mandated leave demands it", would probably go a long way. Maybe something like 'Use your sick days, they're a promised benefit of US Law', or "True Americans stay home when they're sick". (Etc. etc. I'm not good with PSA videos, but give it to some Hollywood artist and have them figure out the details, lol)
The WW2 propaganda levied upon the population was incredibly epic in size and scope, and was key to building US national unity and drumming up support for the war.
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There was that Bangladesh mask study, showing that something like 30+% of people would listen to masking advice/propaganda from religious leaders, in that 400+ village study. (200 villages as the control, 200 villages as the experiment. Found a bunch of religious leaders who would push pro-Mask statements and then ran the experiment). 10% of people wore masks before the study, 40% of the experiment-group wore masks after the study (so 30% of people were "affected").
No, that's not 100%. But changing even a fraction of the population would have huge effects.
A law would dissuade corporate cultures that punish workers for taking sick days. It would pave the way for class action lawsuits against companies where this type of thing is a pattern.
I agree. He writes about how we lived in a dream but for me what he writes is also a dream of some sort.
Just stop doing our dream-work.. and then? What do I do to provide for my family? Should we all get a patch of land and grow food for ourselves? This idea does not seem realistic or scalable.
But maybe I am just misunderstanding the essay or my thoughts are just not deep enough.
> Should we all get a patch of land and grow food for ourselves?
A lot of those types would loooove to see lots of people to go back to subsistence.
That is a lot of people but not them, they are way too smart for that and they’ll reluctangly agree to take the job of guiding lights for all those that went back to subsistence.
Reminds me a lot of the meme of the intellectual advocating for communism thinking that they’ll have a nice cultural advisor job instead of either being shot by the thugs that seize power or forced to work 60 hours a week on a collective farm or in a shoe factory.
Add to the fact: nothing prevents them from putting their money where their mouth is and living the life, right now, however which way the communes are envisioned. Hell, even the Amish and Mennonites are still doing their thing.
What is the point of vaguely placing the author in a category of "those types" and expressing your distaste for "them"? It adds nothing, and refutes nothing.
The current system created artificial scarcity which kept many people poor and a few people rich. We didn't actually need to consume until the planet was ruined, but we did. Now we are all screwed because real scarcity is returning and we still don't know how to share.
The current system has been responsible for creating actual abundance that has vastly improved the living conditions of the vast majority of people. Scarcity is the default state, not artificial.
The 'vast majority of people' have not had their lives improved. They were, and still are, given a Squid Game-esque choice to either participate in a status-seeking game to destroy your health for someone else's comfort or exist in total squalor, dependent on other people who are destroying their health so that you can exist on the crumbs they throw your way.
Capitalism seems more or less benign in affluent nations which can afford to value individual life at millions of dollars. You can rest assured that the homeless people you ignore aren't going to starve, that they'll just buy drugs with the money you'd have given them anyway. It's easy to squint your eyes and believe in the system.
It's much harder to look at countries were life is much much cheaper and accept that the system is a net improver of lives rather than one of enforced stagnation. Where getting people fed, clothed and housed is a matter of politics, not logistics. Everywhere you go in the developing world, you see politics, by that I mean rich people preserving their riches, keeping the people willing to do the legwork and work out the logistics, from following through on their altruistic missions.
We need to stop pretending the system designed to make people feel better about exploiting whatever they can in self-interest is the arbiter of human worth.
Scarcity could go away tomorrow if the rent-seekers could just get out of the way.
Your first sentence is absolutely wrong and your second sentence is absolutely absurd. If you want to have a real conversation, maybe keep out the latest thing you watched on Netflix as a source of your bias.
You can look at numbers on reports, or you can go and actually look at some of these run-down areas. It's actually kinda hard to do, my eyes were opened one day when I was trying to get from point A to point B in Colombia and I took a shared cab some 400 miles. Seeing it in person is way different than looking at pictures online, lemme tell you. It hits you that it's not just that part of rural Colombia that looks like that, rural everywhere does. And you'll never unsee it, but you'll never actually see it either unless you go out there and look.
The world isn't much different now than the one that caused the Buddha to leave his princely lifestyle and dedicate his life to teaching and spirituality. Those material gains over the last 200 years, sorry they just don't seem all that germane.
Wait, is your argument really to ignore the data and go with your gut?
Wow, in the past 200 years, we've seen the eradication of smallpox, treatment for Tuberculosis, vaccines for pneumonia, all issues plaguing humanity for pretty much all of recorded history.
A rural farmer in Nigeria can access price data in real time using a cell phone, while democracy in India allows dozens of politicians from every state argue on live TV simultaneously to get their views heard.
What, pray tell, can you say that the world isn't a better place
Amazon workers are paid $20/hour plus benefits. What % of humanity had access to such economic opportunities 200 years ago? Those Amazon workers also don’t need to worry about their whole families dying from diseases (smallpox, cholera, TB), famine, and war.
What are you even talking about? 150 years ago a large fraction of the world population were slaves. You’re insulting them and your own intelligence if you think their lives were comparable to Amazon workers.
You go on one trip to Columbia and think your eyes are open. Meanwhile many of the people in this thread have lived their whole lives in such countries, including me.
I had a feeling you wouldn't want to look at the data and accept the possibility that you are wrong. I see the poverty everywhere, I lived in SF paying $3000 for rent while homeless people were everywhere, I don't disagree that capitalism is hitting a stride that will be hard to recover from. But the fact that you claim to know what the world was like when Buddha was around is even more alarming.
Do you know how many babies used to die before they were a year old?
It sounds like you saw real poverty and it woke you up to your immense wealth and comfortable existence, so kudos on that. You took the wrong leap though and decided that your life is the default state, when in fact it is in an incredible aberration of history. For millions of years every person was poor, then a few were rich, then more were rich, and now you're one of them.
> The world isn't much different now than the one that caused the Buddha to leave his princely lifestyle and dedicate his life to teaching and spirituality. Those material gains over the last 200 years, sorry they just don't seem all that germane.
In my experience, the people who are typically 'shocked' by this destitution are people who have lived extremely privileged lives, believe this is the default state of the world, and then see this destitution, and are so moved, that they dedicate their lives to eradicating it, while often misidentifying the cause.
Buddha is the archetypical version of this narrative, and it's no wonder -- as a rich prince, he had no idea what the world was really like.
In reality, most of the problems you see in rural areas all around the world are human-caused problems, typically where humans are interfering with individual freedom (civil and economic).
> It hits you that it's not just that part of rural Colombia that looks like that, rural everywhere does.
Except it doesn't. My parents live used to live in rural America and it was quite nice. My brother lives in the countryside and it's also quite nice. It's no less destitute than the area of Portland I live in. Have you ever been to a city? It's not like they're some model of refinement.
> In reality, most of the problems you see in rural areas all around the world are human-caused problems, typically where humans are interfering with individual freedom (civil and economic).
This is exactly what I'm trying to say. Rent-seekers are keeping the world under their callous little thumbs, just like they have been for thousands of years. I think I'm done. HN hivemind, you can have your echo chamber back.
If you let humans freely exchange goods, and not interfere, you get capitalism. Capitalism is not a creed like marxism. Capitalism is Marx's term used to describe what happens when people can exchange goods freely.
If you're arguing that we should protect free markets in these areas, like Colombia (which would also include curtailing criminal cartels, which infringe on freedom), then sure, we can have a discussion.
If you're going to pretend that rural areas are sometimes impoverished because of 'muh evil capitalism' and that we need 'insert untried, or failed social policy here', then I don't see the point.
Here's an idea, capitalism, without the rent-seeking. When someone wants to do something everyone knows is wrong, we don't let them. Instead of making excuses, we hold people with power and affluence to higher standards.
Yes, as long as you can agree on "everyone knows is wrong"/
What the fuck does that mean? The same people who would complain about HFT would also probably complain that a person in the 1800's who could run fast would be doing something 'wrong' after they found out a trade ship had returned.
What is "wrong" with the fast exchange of information in that case?
Absolutely. This is an angle I didn't even mention in my post, because it had already gotten wrong. Generalized statements like 'everyone knows is wrong' are a dogwhistle for 'whatever I think is wrong'.
> When someone wants to do something everyone knows is wrong, we don't let them.
Yes. that's called enforcing criminal law, and most people would agree with it. Although, I dunno, maybe not in the past two years, it seems more people are okay with letting criminals go.
EDIT:
If your claim is that we don't put enough people in jail for breaking the law, I agree with you. I don't see the need to regulate businesses per se. For example, many complain about Amazon and Facebook and want to break it up. I can understand why. I sympathize.
However, Mark Zuckerberg ought to be in jail for conducting social experiments on people without their consent, selling our data, etc. WE don't need to regulate the activities of private enterprise and add more regulation. We just need to actually prosecute people who quite obviously have committed criminal activity.
Same with Jeff Bezos, who owns two businesses (Amazon and the Washington Post) that quite obviously form a conflict of interest. We need no new laws to prevent this kind of conduct.
All of those things would be great. But if we, the most affluent people in the world and best positioned to make our voices heard, make excuses for Zuck, make excuses for Amazon, make excuses for all these businesses that extract wealth without supporting their communities, then we'll just keep building unholy unequal pyramids, where what's normal is completely, irreparably broken, replicating the teetering social structures of the Bronze Age. (I don't back up the points I make drawing from ancient history because HN comment section isn't a place to give history lessons)
We need to not leave it up to the Kalanicks of the world to change the social order, reinventing taxis for fun and profit.
It's more than a change in legal and ethical norms. We need to not fire people who speak their minds for the social good against the company, then further marginalize the already marginalized community they're speaking up for.
> We need to not leave it up to the Kalanicks of the world to change the social order, reinventing taxis for fun and profit.
Why? Uber materially improved my access to taxis. Why does everyone diss on uber's business model (I understand the company itself is a bit meh), but the idea of hailing cab drivers with an app, and then encouraging people to drive (i.e., ridesharing) is a great one.
Ultimately, I'd rather leave it up to individuals to improve their and their community's conditions, then a bureaucrat.
> It's more than a change in legal and ethical norms. We need to not fire people who speak their minds for the social good against the company, then further marginalize the already marginalized community they're speaking up for.
Okay, so I assume you are against the firings of religious employees, standing up for their beliefs? How do you reconcile when a religious employee speaks out against spreading of gender dysphoria as social contagion on facebook, and then a trans employee speaks out against him?
Or is your economic system mainly meant to impose your beliefs on everyone else?
> the idea of hailing cab drivers with an app, and then encouraging people to drive (i.e., ridesharing) is a great one.
I didn't think I'd have to explain this, I thought most here already understood it. But okay. Nothing about hailing cab drivers with an app changes the economics of transportation. What changed the economics was exploitation. Not that the cab industry was really all that much better. But what's wrong with Uber and the gig economy at large is that we're letting huge companies with big budgets get away with not respecting labor norms. And so they have changed those norms, for the worse.
It's a clear-cut example of the tech industry making things better for the well-off, and worse for those trying to scrape by.
> Not that the cab industry was really all that much better. But what's wrong with Uber and the gig economy at large is that we're letting huge companies with big budgets get away with not respecting labor norms
Hold on hold on. You previously blamed our current corporate system for preventing workers from owning their means of production.
Uber exemplifies the vision you seek... where individual workers own their own means of production. There is no need for a worker coop for drivers. A driver uses one car -- their own. They do not need to own some large capital investment (it's not like the owners need a factory to work). Why should driver A and B share cars together? That's the very vision of shareholding that you deride.
Uber, the company, is obviously not a worker coop, but frankly, its model is the most viable way towards a vision of worker-owned businesses. If you truly desire worker coops, instead of large corporations, then the vision of uber and the system it seeks to achieve ought to be lauded, even if the specifics of uber's implementations should be scorned.
Unfortunately, all the progressive labor activists made such small worker coops illegal. A more sensible solution would have been add a corporate structure that lets drivers band together for certain collectively purchased services (like health insurance and other benefits), without all the reporting requirements of normal corporations. Instead, they basically banned small businesses.
That's... pretty laughable. A worker-owned business would get together to determine what an acceptable and transparent comp scheme would be. Instead the drivers rebel all the time against corporate's intransigent and blatantly-exploitative shenanigans. Hint: it's not because the company sees its workforce as people. If you think there's a viable way to get from here to there, well, I think I can get Bezos to sell you a bridge, on Amazon of course. And we... mostly don't care because who cares about the people who run our cabs, and if they succeed it means ubers are more expensive for us.
Sigh, sometimes I regret being a liberal rather than a leftist, because I can see all the complaints they have about us. I think I'm really done now, I've heard enough. In a nutshell, it's easy to defend the existing order when we're the one's benefiting from it.
> Instead the drivers rebel all the time against corporate's intransigent and blatantly-exploitative shenanigans. Hint: it's not because the company sees its workforce as people.
For what it's worth, it's not like co-ops are immune to this criticism. For example, Winco had a case a while ago where employees were claiming that they were being mistreated. In a worker co-op with sufficient numbers of members, no individual member is powerful enough to effect change.
> If you think there's a viable way to get from here to there, well, I think I can get Bezos to sell you a bridge, on Amazon of course.
Except there is. Now that Uber has pioneered the model, I've seen worker co-ops pop up in my own town. I imagine these models will grow, as more people feel emboldened to take on such professions now that the model is validated. I don't see why this is such a stretch. It seems to me you have reached a conclusion, and don't seem interested in listening to alternatives.
> Sigh, sometimes I regret being a liberal rather than a leftist, because I can see all the complaints they have about us. I think I'm really done now, I've heard enough. In a nutshell, it's easy to defend the existing order when we're the one's benefiting from it.
Alright man. My family immigrated to this country, my father was working as a slave for a while, and my parents started off with nothing when we were small kids. Trust me, I've not benefited a whole lot from this system. I've probably seen it worse than you. So sick of being gaslit by people who think I'm some privileged WASP kid, and that they know better. Maybe try listening?
And I wish them everlasting health and wealth. Can we please stop pretending Uber is some kind of glorious pioneer? They pioneered an industry whose very foundation is eroding the social contract. That some people are now turning around and setting up proper collectives doesn't suddenly mean now that Uber was a good thing. It's not, it's horrible, otherwise we wouldn't have the raft of alternatives, some better than others. And all of these alternatives have to compete on the open market with Uber, who enjoys the competitive advantage of exploitative economics. Let that sink in. Worsening the social contract doesn't in any way make things better, market economics will always drive a race to the bottom until people just can't stand it anymore. This is why labor norms are enforced by laws and not by us.
> So sick of being gaslit by people who think I'm some privileged WASP kid
Please don't put words in my mouth. The logic was simple. We don't care about Uber drivers, not nearly as much as we should, because higher rates means more money paid by us. We benefit directly from the tech industry who gives us services that are cheaper not because technology makes them cheaper, but because they exploit workers harder. Every time you take an uber, you participate in this exploitative economy. If you don't take uber, bully for you, you're not participating, at least not in this particular way. If I have to take an Uber, I always tip $5 or more, that's how I deal with the quandary.
You took that and turned it into purported gaslighting. I have no idea who you are, this isn't personal. You're obviously not a leftist because you rail against standard leftist platform points. I suppose you're a libertarian then. You tell me, not that it really matters for the purposes of this discussion, that's more meta-commentary.
I’m not that person but I’ve noticed this pattern in such people. Rent-seeking is anything they don’t like. So it could be landlords charging tenants rent, it could be Apple charging developers 30% “rent”, could be Google charging “rent” on the ad space next to search results, Microsoft charging for Windows even though an additional copy of Windows doesn’t cost them more to produce.
Basically it can be as broad as you want it to be. And these delusional folks say we can stop it by “not letting it happen”. Lol.
Yeah... I understand the danger of rent-seeking, but I too have noticed this trend. Few can cite an actual example of rent-seeking that ought to be illegal in the general case. It's mostly just like.. company XYZ did something I don't like.
Look, I despise amazon and facebook as much as the next guy, but I don't see why their products or their services ought to be heavily regulated. That's a dangerous road. I just want the law applied fairly, so if the case is that facebook and amazon can kick people off their multi-billion dollar platforms due to their beliefs, then it seems only right that bakers don't have to bake cakes.
Currently, the main behavior I see is that corporations seem exempt from the very laws that individuals apparently have to follow. That seems wrong, and moreover it seems illegal (to be treated differently).
Spoken like a religious tenet, detached from everything interesting.
Which board? What implementation of capitalism? You don't pretend that the States are running a free market or anything absurd like that, do you? The States have a Crony system at best.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for capitalism. I think humans are a rotten animal at heart and capitalism is the only way to effectively harness that bad nature for good results. But like any technical system, the implementation matters, and the implementation in the States in the last 50 years has been dreadfully short-sighted.
We have gradually whittled away at every collectively positive subsystem for generations now and are left with an inordinate number of miserable people whose day to day life would show up as, 'improved' on the Pinker style charts & graphs.
The subjective is the core of wellbeing.
Objective reality matters, certainly. But all the more so when you apply nuance to your reading of it.
Humanity managed to create an abundance but thus far has failed to distribute the abundance. This is not surprising and I'm very hopeful we will solve the distribution problem over the next two hundreds years. In the last hundred years we have made enormous progress to solving the distribution problem and expanding the abundance.
Solving the abundance problem was the high priority as distribution was purely theoretical concern until we achieved abundance. It took us about 200,000 years develop the ideas, technology and to put the infrastructure in place to achieve post-scarcity for food and water.
Reality creates scarcity. The "current system" produces a modern society with so much abundance that people like you have forgotten that scarcity of everything is the natural state and the "system" is responsible for artificial ABUNDANCE, not scarcity.
Yes, there are edge cases like intellectual property but "no economy please" is the kind of thing someone who is completely ignorant to the nature of reality would say.
Can you explain what you mean by "the natural state"? Your argument assumes an understanding of what that is, but the picture I have in my mind when I read that phrase is not scarcity of everything.
Imagine waking up in a forest with your tribe. One of your cousins has an infected foot after stepping on a branch a few days before and it is known that he will soon die in agony. Everyone is hungry and there is nothing to eat, so you prepare hunting and foraging parties and hope that you will find food before starving to death.
I don't know who he is/was and I don't much care who he is/was, because whoever that was doesn't change the fact that this is a low-effort communist screed like millions of other communist screeds (including Marx's own works): "bad things have happened to me, and I'm sure bad things have happened to you, so lets gang up on people who have some of the things we want and take it from them". What's infuriating is that I can sort of forgive somebody who thought this was a good idea 100 years ago, before we had 100 years of evidence that communism is catastrophic. If anybody thinks this is a good idea today, they're being willfully ignorant.
The one on debt or on bullshit jobs? From what I know, the book on debt is indeed quite influential in financial circles, although I find that a third of its content are entertaining passages on tribal societies.
And the bullshit jobs book is a reiteration of the earlier essay. While the essay is concise and straight to the point, the book has dubious assumptions and generalisations that are there for attention-grabbing.
David Graeber would have been the greatest mind of our era if he adopted the writing style of @pg: straight to the point essays that form a cult following.
As much anti-estabilshment as he was, he was trying too much to fit his brilliant mind into XX century academia writing standards.
I have yet to read his latest book, but the reviews seem quite promising. Basically he and his co-author challenge the view that we got more intelligent over time, and they do back their conclusions with extensive references.
First off, @pg actually started Hacker News and was instrumental to its long-term success.
Second, @pg 10 years ago is not @pg today. People change, and while his latest essays many not be exceptional neither in style nor in content, texts like "What You'll Wish You'd Known" and "What You Can't Say" have been highly influential well outside SV or even US.
P.S funnily, shortly after "What You'll Wish You'd Known" I saw a viral video of Joanne Rowling saying the same thing @pg was barred from saying at a commencement address: Stay Upwind.
I do think that when someone is very successful and has a reputation, others are more likely to try to tear them down, maybe from a sense that the success or reputation is not deserved.
With the obscene income & wealth inequality that exists, thanks to our winners-take-all kind of society, there is a lot of resentment towards such people.
If Mr. Graham's essays were written by an unknown, my guess is there would be a smaller proportion of negative reactions, but also far less interest overall.
That and his posts are popular, shared here often. That's really all there is to it. Some appear to believe that writing has to reach the pinnacle of enlightenment to justify popularity.
>Debt: The first 500 years - I found it extremely interesting.
The interesting things are everything Graeber missed. Which fair, he's an anthropologist and not an economist. Interestingly, none of which really contradicts him.
When Jeff Bezos is worth billions, does he really? He doesn't have actual $, he has an abstract # derived from owning stocks in amazon. But how did you even get there? It's fundamentally debt. Every $ he is worth is the debt someone else has. Society owes him for his contribution. He created something that people love to use. Therefore he will be rewarded for that.
The caveat is that he does not get interest for this debt. He's not holding mortgages or whatever. So inflation is the mechanism in which he gets poorer. He is forgiving that debt like Graeber explains it worked in the olden days. However, he obviously is still operating and continuing to earn, so his worth goes up.
Flipside, if you are someone who holds mortgages, you earn the interest. You're not forgiving debt, so long as inflation is lower than the interest rate. Like right now, the market has bond rates well below inflation. The people holding debt are forgiving the debt. Which are often retirement funds and what have you because they are legally required to buy those.
In the USA, even the 30 year bonds are negative. Whoever holds your debt is forgiving your debt in those percentages. Other countries like Germany have negative interest rates, they have to forgive the debt even faster. Why is this? This is the time when baby boomers are retiring. Germany obviously didn't do well in WW2 and it's going to impact them more.
It has definitely changed my view on what money is and how it came to be. And how political money really is, like a king can say from now one 1 gold coin equals 11 silver coins etc. Another one is the book "And forgive them their debts" by Michael Hudson talking about ancient debt jubilee in the middle east. If i'm not mistaken one of the sources for debt: the first 5000 years book.
> This is what happened after the 2008 financial crash. There was a brief moment of questioning. (What is “finance,” anyway? Isn’t it just other people’s debts? What is money? Is it just debt, too? What’s debt? Isn’t it just a promise? If money and debt are just a collection of promises we make to each other, then couldn’t we just as easily make different ones?) The window was almost instantly shut by those insisting we shut up, stop thinking, and get back to work, or at least start looking for it.
yeah, sure, just completely ignore the $2T cryptocurrency industry that’s objectively a response to govt’s handling of 2008 (read Satoshi’s genesis block)?
i’m not really sure what the author’s trying to push for though: that we all don’t go back to working for rich people? well sure, but the valuable part is showing us how to do that…
I'm not sure the $2T cryptocurrency industry is a response to govt's handling of 2008. I think Satoshi cared very deeply about it: I'm not sure all of the $2T worth of participation in the current economy does, nor am I certain that the current crypto industry addresses many of the problems that existed in 2008.
But otherwise I generally agree. The authors paragraph seems to remember occupy Wall Street but forget that most people don’t care at all about finance if/when things return to normal.
The people shouting loudest about how bad everything is are the people who benefit most from things not getting better. So it is hardly surprising that some governments (e.g. US) jump from crisis to crisis.
Except few engage in this sort of work. If left to their own devices, most people would simply consume content produced by the 10-20% of people who would actually do anything useful.
This is my observation. People are so weirded out when I tell them all the stuff I want to do. Most people just laze if left to their own devices and provided food. People have this image of hunter gatherer tribes doing interesting things in their free time, but the data show that, unless they're hunting, gathering, cooking, or doing other biological imperatives, most of their time is spent lazing.
That's fine, but if your argument about not working is that humans are going to engage in 'dream work'... well I think that's just silly.
Ultimately, from what I've seen, people with this mentality, often end up becoming quite well off. Those who want to engage in 'dream work' often have the self-motivating spirit that almost inevitably leads to material success.
"And if we simply stopped, it might be possible to make ourselves a much more reasonable set of promises: for instance, to create an “economy” that lets us actually take care of the people who are taking care of us."
There is a danger in focusing all our attention on utility. I am not disagreeing that humans can be lazy but don't think we should put the useful above the good, which is what I see this argument doing. Not that I know what the good is but I favor questioning or probing possibilities more than doing something "useful"
that whole the great reset and how life will be different after the pandemic was not serious, those of us who know that knew that back when it was said. maybe it sounds negative, but come on, the system did not change for those who were on the front lines. it was a pat on the back for the working man or woman who was risking their lives, and getting nothing in return.
a lot of people who have worked terrible jobs during the pandemic didn't have an opportunity to retrain and rethink about things, they were still working, the whole things are gonna change crowd were those who had the privilege to wait things out from the safety of their computers, they could order doordash or amazon groceries and drink their home made espresso while shopping for a cute new mask to show everyone how much they cared about being safe. the people who made the mask, worked in the food supply chain, delivered your groceries and doordash food kept their 60-70 hour a week job of hopelessness, had zero opportunity to shift away from that. while people were talking about how things are different now, many americans were dealing with the same, except they were now in an extremely dangerous situation (according to the experts) but, in many cases did not receive anything other than "thanks", and maybe a dollar or two more in tips, if they didn't forget anything.
what the pandemic has taught me is that we are not some civilized, future minded society, we are a bunch of naked apes with pitchforks who like to hoard for profit and fight over which candidate sweet talks better but offers zero solutions other than creating race/freedom/whatever division you can think of... culture war. do we have a chance to make things better? yes, when we stop looking at the world through a political lens, and start looking at it from a humanity lens.
It's good to have savings for when times get bad. Then you can afford to buy things like door dash to get through the bad times. Investing in your education is also good, so that you have valuable skills even when money gets devalued.
That some people can not save up for various reasons does not imply the people who did save for hard times are to blame.
If it angers you, don't work for door dash. Odds are, the people who worked for door dash were actually happy they had a job during the pandemic.
Of course a quite short post. But indeed spinns of a couple of questions about our current reality. Going to remote work as one point. Of course this does not help the nurse in your local hospital. But i do hope, that it will have a major impact on our social lives regarding carework for your family. A shame that i found out about the death of graeber through this post…
> just a way of tabulating the aggregate desires of rich people, most of whom are at least slightly pathological,
He lost me here. Guy is just a communist hoping for another Bolshevik Revolution.
Maybe it is true of the uber rich, but the majority of millionaires are just normal people who saved, started a business, and just invested.
If I was to judge someone character strictly off their economic status, you’re likely to find on average that the average rich man is a more moral productive member of society than the average poor one.
If he was talking about the bureaucrats way of getting rich by accepting bribes and funneling taxes to their pockets he might have had me. As it is his ideas would just make it worse.
Graeber is an anarchist, so definitely not hoping for a Bolshevik Revolution, something he always opposed.
> If I was to judge someone character strictly off their economic status, you’re likely to find on average that the average rich man is a more moral productive member of society than the average poor one.
You didn't give an argument as to why you would believe that. Graeber presumably believes the opposite because the poor suffer needing while the rich refrain from helping despite being able to. It can be considered allowing harm[1], introductory trolley problem stuff. Of course I can't speak for him but based on what he's written elsewhere I think he would agree that it's not possible to be rich and moral while people go starving because he believes people have an obligation to help those in need when they can (i.e. when it is not too harmful to themselves.) If you don't agree with that, then it's likely you differ in the assumptions you have rather than the logic here.
I see this recurring theme in things I read from places like Jacobin and other socialist leaning places, they seem to completely ignore the middle and upper-middle class.
In every argument, there seems to be only two groups of people. The "slaves" working their 9-5 jobs making minimum wage and barely getting by, and the uber-rich like Bezos, Gates, etc.
What they never say is there are tons of millionaires, they didn't have spectacular jobs, they drive regular cars and live in regular houses. They just saved for years and years and now they have a nest egg that's worth 7 figures.
I get why no one talks about them, when you talk about the "millionaires and billionaires", you immediately think of a Bezos type, vacationing on their yacht. You don't think about the husband and wife that both drive Camry's and live in a nice suburban home with a net worth of close to $5M because they invested and saved their whole life.
I am hopeful there will be a technological inflection at which adequate nutritious food, clean water, and shelter will be freely self-sustaining for all people. I am not talking about a point at which these things are provided or paid for, but rather a point at which the appropriate technologies are plentiful and self-sustaining, much like plants are today.
It's strange to see this upvoted on HN of all places. Some marxist inspired ramblings with no clear conclusion. Fact is that the free enterprise system works very well when you let it work and this is backed by a lot of empirical data.
Common misconception, examples are the 40hr work week and banning of payment in scrip in the 1800s.
Another example is that monopolies require legislation or they have the effect of “seizing up” the dynamics of a functioning marketplace and turning toxic.
Semiconductor patents being made public and telecom copper being made open to use by other companies are both pretty well understood examples of legislation that helped bring about the computer era we live in now. Not free market in a pure ideological sense, but a kind of curated open market dynamic.
Markets are created by governments and don’t just spring from anywhere whole cloth. Markets are useful for many many things but need to be gardened, in effect.
In our current world labor “markets” are really not that at all— if a participant does not have the ability to withdraw their offer of labor then price signaling doesn’t work.
I’ve been reading the book Freedom From the Market, it’s well-researched and a literature review of sorts. Would recommend.
> Markets are created by governments and don’t just spring from anywhere whole cloth.
ok, then what of the cryptocurrency drug markets? those were created by govt?
no. there’s so many instances of unorganized humans doing trade. markets are just a more organized form of trade, and goverment is but one way to achieve that organization.
> ok, then what of the cryptocurrency drug markets? those were created by govt?
Indirectly yes, right now one of their biggest selling points is not being in the legal realm of government regulated markets.
If the government were to legalize drugs/endorse crypto that dynamic would heavily change, the black variants of these markets would lose quite a big part of their appeal and thus the demand for them and ultimately their market share.
> goverment is but one way to achieve that organization
There has to be some form of authority enforcing rules, or else you end up with a very anarchistic form of "market" where everything goes. That "everything" ranges from mundanities, like making a "business model" out of cheating people, to selling people like property because when there's a buyer, who has the right the stop me from selling?
> There has to be some form of authority enforcing rules, or else you end up with a very anarchistic form of "market" where everything goes. That "everything" ranges from mundanities, like making a "business model" out of cheating people, to selling people like property because when there's a buyer, who has the right the stop me from selling?
Your anarchy already exists, and they fight with lawyers to decide the winner. Businesses with exactly the vision you describe exist everywhere. Government enables this kind of trickery.
I never disputed that, but there's a difference between embracing it as a "true market" vs setting the kinds of limits that governments can set and enforce.
Because contrary to your claim;
> Government enables this kind of trickery.
There is no "trickery" going on and equating the modern day state of things, with let's for example 200 years ago, it's very easy to show how things have gotten all around better.
Selling people used to be a very wide-spread, and even government endorsed, practice. Now it's generally considered very bad thing to do and criminalized by most nations.
Sure, that does not mean it completely stopped, but claiming it only exists because governments regulate it, is just backwards logic that makes no sense: The practice of slavery was there first, it's regulation and ultimately criminalization were acts of regulation that could never have happened without some form of authority enforcing them.
Cryptos are interestingly the one example of this, and they’ve been around for a really short time.
One of the fundamental reasons this is the case is because trading requires enforcement of property ownership, whoever is doing the enforcing is de facto the government. Private keys and smart contracts allow for ownership which need not be defended, though admittedly only over things in a limited sense. Your keys mean you own your wallet, but an NFT of a bridge doesn’t mean shit.
Most crypto volumes aren’t drugs at all, but are people buying and selling other cryptos using cryptos.
It’s going to be interesting to see if web3 bears fruit but so far that has largely not happened
The truth is that government is fully capable of being exploitative and abusive, but so is private enterprise.
We dont want either to be exploitative or abusive, but the ideology that the “free market” is our savior and that “government bad” is just played out un-nuanced propaganda at this point
Sure! The work week and similar working legislation is a form of negotiating for one’s own contracts. It’s just that people got together and negotiated for their contracts in a group, and then wrote down that rule so that we don’t have to go on strike like they did.
People getting together to negotiate is not incompatible with capitalism. It is actually forming monopolies, which socialists usually try to make illegal.
So I am still not sure what that example is supposed to demonstrate?
Of course they are. Why wouldn't they be free to negotiate? Of course if you have few skills that are in demand, you are in a worse negotiating position compared to people who are in demand. You can try to acquire skills that are in demand, though.
When you make it work. They aren't free by magic; if the freedom isn't enforced and maintained, they rapidly become unfree, and that's what appears to be happening (or has already happened).
Actually Marxists are the best. They tend to express somewhat coherent viewes as Marxism have quite strong philosophical roots. Lots of others are just “views”, that is a pile of incoherent whims that should be realized somehow.
>I believe that David Graeber was an Anarchist not a Marxist.
Anarchism can be capitalist or communism. Anarcho-communism for example.
In a proper free market, the telephone poles would have 50 wires, most of which wouldn't be functioning. Afterall, how would anyone provide you internet? Without government regulation any startup has to put their own wires up. This leads to rats nests of wires. Tons of expensive wires being put up for customers you used to have. Free market obviously doesn't work, you must come in and fix that.
Communism on the otherhand is misuse of people. Everyone must be employed full time in communism. In the USSR, there would be multiple cashiers you would have to go through. Just to ensure people have something to do. You also have to have government slaves. USSR had the gulags. China has the uyghurs. Vietnam has their slaves in forced labour centers.
I don't see what communism has to do with everyone needing to be employed full time. That's just what they made of it in the USSR etc.
> Communism: a theory or system of social organization in which all property is owned by the community and each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs.
I concur, there's nothing "communistic" about the idea of full employment, if anything it strikes me as something rather capitalistic in its nature: Full employment would mean there's an oversupply of labor, which means labor would be dirt cheap and easily replaceable.
That would be the dream for anybody trying to exploit others labor for their own gains, something that's generally seen as a very capitalistic mindset.
The USSR attempting to have full employment was yet another misplaced attempt at trying to "Beat the capitalistic West at their own game".
>I concur, there's nothing "communistic" about the idea of full employment, if anything it strikes me as something rather capitalistic in its nature: Full employment would mean there's an oversupply of labor, which means labor would be dirt cheap and easily replaceable.
There have been nobel prizes on labour participation rate and unemployment rates. The reality is that you have so much population, you have requirements of productivity to produce things for your population.
Cuba is an exception, they do still have government owned slaves. Mostly political prisoners, you can't say anything negative about the government. However, only 30% of their population has a job.
What's the consequence? You only get about 1lb of meat a month. Literally I will eat 1 month's of food in a single meal.
Also what's up with other consequences? Doctors are forced to work ~65hours/week while 2/3rds of the population stays home? Wow. While taxi drivers who work less hours earn more than you.
>That would be the dream for anybody trying to exploit others labor for their own gains, something that's generally seen as a very capitalistic mindset.
Not capitalistic at all, what capitalist society has enforced near full employment? I don't know of any. This is a communist thing. Only communism has ever done this. It's something Marx never said needed to happen. It's just the reality of productivity and how society works.
>The USSR attempting to have full employment was yet another misplaced attempt at trying to "Beat the capitalistic West at their own game".
The even more interesting thing. Graeber obviously says that communism is where you typically get all the bullshit jobs. Yet here they are in capitalism. The reality is that he's right. The reason for the rise of bullshit jobs in capitalism is all the socialism/communism being introduced.
Japan isn't communist and yet they also have government slaves, 99.9% of people accused of a crime are forced to work in a gulag. Why? They implemented loads of socialist policies and blew up their debt. Their public debt to GDP is 266%. That's actually worse than Greece during their collapse. The only thing holding Japan together is the government slaves.
Why does communism(or whatever name) always seem to come with full employment and government slaves in gulags? I actually don't fully understand why, but that's not a capitalism.
I think almost everything you say about Japan is wrong.
"99.9% of people accused of a crime ..." -- this is a reference to the fact that the Japanese criminal system's conviction rate is a startlingly high 99.9%. But what's going on here is that about 60% of criminal cases in Japan get suspended without going to court; prosecutors only proceed in cases where they are nearly certain of getting a conviction, so their 99.9% figure isn't comparable to (say) the US's 93% (that's a figure from 2012; I couldn't readily find anything more recent).
(It may also be true that that 99.9% is artificially high, that substantially fewer than 99.9% of accused criminals who go to trial in Japan are actually guilty despite prosecutors' attempts to proceed only when sure of conviction. But even if say 10% of those convictions are wrongful, that's a much smaller effect than the fact that 60% of cases are abandoned without going to trial.)
"... are forced to work in a gulag" -- so the claim here is that literally every person convicted of a crime in Japan then does forced labour. This is not true, for the simple reason that the great majority of people convicted of crimes in Japan (just like everywhere else) don't go to prison. Only about 15% do.
(It is true that most prison sentences in Japan are imprisonment-with-labour. I'm not sure whether it's all of them; I've seen explicit claims that it is and explicit claims that it isn't. I shall not try to adjudicate whether "in a gulag" is a reasonable description of the life of those prisoners. Incidentally, they are mostly paid for the work they do in prison.)
"Why? They implemented loads of socialist policies and blew up their debt."
The Japanese debt-to-annual-GDP ratio hovered around 50% or so until about 1993 and then started rising rapidly, reaching its present level (the figure I've seen is 225%, not 266%, but in any case it's rather high) around 2012. But they had a policy of prison labour before their debt was large; e.g., here's http://www.jca.apc.org/cpr/kaido.html someone complaining about it in 1997 (debt-to-annual-GDP ratio about 70%) using prison labour figures from 1994 (debt-to-annual-GDP ratio about 60%).
(I shall not try to adjudicate whether Japan's big increase in public debt is the result of "socialist policies".)
"The only thing holding Japan together is the government slaves."
About 50k people are in prison in Japan. The population of Japan is about 125M. That 0.04% of the population would have to be incredibly productive for their labour to be "the only thing holding Japan together".
>I think almost everything you say about Japan is wrong.
Tiny part of my comment, no offense or anything. Certainly hoping to learn where I am wrong.
>"99.9% of people accused of a crime ..." -- this is a reference to the fact that the Japanese criminal system's conviction rate is a startlingly high 99.9%
To be fair, it's hard to compare to English law systems. Perhaps it's totally fine, but when you connect the forced labour. I have questions that are unanswered.
>so their 99.9% figure isn't comparable to (say) the US's 93% (that's a figure from 2012; I couldn't readily find anything more recent).
Conviction rate in Canada is ~63%, even lower if you exclude plea deals. We could go into discussion about how for-profit prison system in the USA or illegitimate crimes being enforced. I'm pretty sure 93% is way too high and it's around ~70%.
>"... are forced to work in a gulag" -- so the claim here is that literally every person convicted of a crime in Japan then does forced labour. This is not true, for the simple reason that the great majority of people convicted of crimes in Japan (just like everywhere else) don't go to prison. Only about 15% do.
I think maybe we are comparing apples to oranges here.
>(It is true that most prison sentences in Japan are imprisonment-with-labour. I'm not sure whether it's all of them; I've seen explicit claims that it is and explicit claims that it isn't. I shall not try to adjudicate whether "in a gulag" is a reasonable description of the life of those prisoners. Incidentally, they are mostly paid for the work they do in prison.)
I will concede this. "In a gulag" was improper. The japanese prisons are not political prisoners like communism. As you say, most prison sentences are forced labour. There's the problem I have with Japan.
>The Japanese debt-to-annual-GDP ratio hovered around 50% or so until about 1993 and then started rising rapidly, reaching its present level (the figure I've seen is 225%, not 266%, but in any case it's rather high) around 2012
266.20% in 2020. Covid made it jump almost 30%
>But they had a policy of prison labour before their debt was large; e.g., here's http://www.jca.apc.org/cpr/kaido.html someone complaining about it in 1997 (debt-to-annual-GDP ratio about 70%) using prison labour figures from 1994 (debt-to-annual-GDP ratio about 60%).
Fair, I was saying that the only reason Japan hasnt collapsed to about 30% poverty like Greece is because of the forced labour.
>About 50k people are in prison in Japan. The population of Japan is about 125M. That 0.04% of the population would have to be incredibly productive for their labour to be "the only thing holding Japan together".
Japan is suspiciously low. Kind of impossibly low. Which in the context of the allegation that people are slaves. In a country with many yakuza orgs, sex trafficing, and some pretty strict rules around many other things(porn for example) it seems to me these numbers are impossible.
One day we will find out what the real numbers are. It also seems to me that clearance rates are impossible. Japan clears arson at >70%? The hell? impossible.
On the US conviction rate: page 8 of https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/usao/legacy/2013... says "Of the 87,709 defendants terminated during Fiscal Year 2012, 80,963, or 93 percent, either pled guilty or were found guilty. [...] The rate of conviction remained over 90 percent, as it has since Fiscal Year 2001." I believe that "terminated during FY2012" here means that they went to trial, and their trial ended during that year.
That does seem like it's the figure that's formally comparable to Japan's alleged 99.9% conviction rate, no?
It may well be that in the US, as in Japan but to a lesser extent, cases are dropped when it doesn't seem like they will get a conviction. And of course the US tries very hard to persuade people to plead guilty by threatening them with extra-harsh sentences if they don't but are found guilty.
What apples and oranges do you think are being compared?
You said that 99.9% of people accused of a crime in Japan go to prison and have to work there. Which of the following do you disagree with?
1. Only about 40% of people accused of a crime in Japan have their cases go to trial at all, rather than being abandoned.
2. Only about 15% of people convicted of a crime in Japan go to prison.
3. If only 40% of people accused have a trial, and only 15% of convicted people go to prison, then at most 6% of people accused go to prison and have to work there.
4. 6% is smaller than 99.9%.
You haven't given any justification for your claim that "the only reason Japan hasn't collapsed to about 30% poverty like Greece is because of the forced labour". Again, there simply aren't enough people in prison in Japan for anything like that to be true.
You say you don't believe their figures. That's your choice, I guess. But it seems like quite a stretch, especially if you expect this to rescue your claim that forced prison labour has somehow saved Japan from otherwise inevitable economic disaster.
The official figures say that about 0.4% of the Japanese population is in prison. What fraction of the population would have to be in (I think almost all low-skilled) kinda-sorta-slavery to make the difference between an economy like Japan's and an economy like Greece's? I can't see how less than, say, 4% could do that. (I'd actually have thought it would need to be a lot more.)
In other words, for your theory to work, there'd need to be some sort of secret prison population ~10x the size of the official prison population. How are you suggesting that happens? Do you think lots of people who are officially reported as having been fined were actually hauled off to prison? (How come their friends don't notice that the official accounts have been falsified?) Do you think there are secret prisons in Japan that no one knows about, where these people are held? Or what?
> Mostly political prisoners, you can't say anything negative about the government.
Have you ever heard about the US UNICORE program [0]? In some US prisons participation in UNICORE is mandatory for parole review and sometimes even part of the course to pre-release for prisoners.
The UNICORE program consists of inmates manufacturing equipment for the US military for a pay that no free human being would ever accept for the work.
Now, imagine you are somebody who opposes the US military, who's aware of the MIC, and thus part of your political convictions is not supporting an expansionist and aggressive military.
What do you think is gonna be the outcome there? Exactly, people who will stick to their political convictions will be denied a way to be released early, and sometimes even released at all. Something that has been going on for literally decades, yet US Americans will gladly regurgitate the claim how "There are no political prisoners in the US!". [1]
> You only get about 1lb of meat a month. Literally I will eat 1 month's of food in a single meal.
That's not something to brag about, particularly when looking at what lengths US producers go to get the "meat" even cheaper, involving such tasty sounding additives like "pink slime", which is just rotten meat freshened up with ammonia or feeding the livestock questionable additives like Ractopamine.
None of that is good or a reason to brag about, particularly as the US beef sector is heavily subsidized by the US government, so it's not even a good example for a "free market" [2].
> Why does communism(or whatever name) always seem to come with full employment and government slaves in gulags?
It doesn't [3], but when you decide to label anything "communism" you don't like, while then projecting problems the US has on those places, it's no surprise that you end up seeing "communism" everywhere.
While ignoring realities that don't fit into your definition. Case in point: The country with the most and biggest gulags, some of them even privately owned and operated, locking up people at higher rates than any other place, is not Japan, Cuba or Greece, it's still the United States of America [4].
> Afterall, how do you stop 'You work, I'll be at home collecting UBI and watching TV.'
Well, if there's no money (because it's not necessary), there wouldn't be a UBI anyway? Communism is supposed to come after socialism and before anarchy, in theory. First you build an egalitarian society with a mindset of peaceful cooperation, then you get them to all work together for the greater good, and finally you dissolve the 'taskmaster' of the state, as society is perfect and no longer needs it.
>Well, if there's no money (because it's not necessary), there wouldn't be a UBI anyway? Communism is supposed to come after socialism and before anarchy, in theory. First you build an egalitarian society with a mindset of peaceful cooperation, then you get them to all work together for the greater good, and finally you dissolve the 'taskmaster' of the state, as society is perfect and no longer needs it.
Lets put capitalism vs communism aside.
I imagine a world where we have fully automated producing essential things. Why can't we have a factory farm fully automated using entirely robots producing food at cost. The same can be done for widgets. Robot arms can just do everything entirely. Someone just has to build this; I've been to one of those greenhouses. It picked thousands of pounds of tomatoes, delivered them to packaging, packaged, and shipped every day with only 3 people. The 3 people are for 2 functions. Q/A making sure its not picking rotten stuff and making sure the trucker doesnt do anything.
We can get to the point that the payment for your groceries is watching advertisements or whatever. Simply because the cost of those goods are that small.
If I could be assured my family was fed and such. Maybe I'd quit my job and entrepreneur and do something else. That's the appeal of communism. The idea that innovation and such takes off. The reality is that under communism you have societal collapse. Cuba hasn't built anything in forever. They have no factories, nobody would work in them. They also dont automate, their population has been stagnant and thermodynamics is wrecking their country. In order to have that upward push in communism, you need slaves. Gulags get shit done.
The name is simply internally contradictory: as those subscribing to it are okay with oppression by the super rich, it is not anarchism.
They advocate exclusively for property law, by which the super rich can "legitimately" hang on to their fortunes and thus power. While many of them advocate against laws like "age of consent".
> In a proper free market, the telephone poles would have 50 wires, most of which wouldn't be functioning. Afterall, how would anyone provide you internet? Without government regulation any startup has to put their own wires up.
Seems like a poor example. If there’s all these unused wires owned by people who are losing money, surely a startup could rent capacity on an existing network, or outright buy it if the capital was already available.
>Seems like a poor example. If there’s all these unused wires owned by people who are losing money, surely a startup could rent capacity on an existing network, or outright buy it if the capital was already available.
Thailand doesnt have regulations in which the government picks a monopoly over a media and then forces them to provide near cost access to competitors. Typically, copper telephone vs cable vs fiber.
Therefore you get that utter mess, and there's no way those wires are properly utilized. It's a high cost to society, aesthetics aside, copper is expensive, fiber is expensive. You would be better to manage it so that you can assign those resources more efficiently.
However, this becomes 1 spot where free market no longer exists. Here in Canada we have Bell Canada who lobbied the regulator and effectively gave themselves a monopoly. The regulated market doesnt get near cost access to the wires.
No, not all communists are Marxists and the predominant tradition, anarcho-communism, is not post-Marxist but derives from a different set of authors who opposed Marx during his lifetime. [1]
Thank you. Some of the comments in this thread are so bizarre I have to wonder if it's down to US educational systems placing everything that's not Reaganomics into a basket marked "Communism BAD".
Wasn’t this guys book on bullshit jobs completely debunked? I mean yeah, filing TPS sheets might seem pointless on their own but in the grand scheme of things someone needs to checkboxes. It might be unglamorous work but it necessary for the whole system to function.
We talk about productivity gains and why we still work 40 hour weeks and my answer is always this - you’re free to trade those productivity gains for free time. Go and find a plot of land 1890 homesteaders would normally claim, grow some food, build a sod house and eschew modern society in all its flavors - technology, healthcare, engineering, etc. i don’t mean to sound like a dick, but that’s why we still work 40+ hour work weeks despite the efficiency gains - because a modern lifestyle costs a hell of a lot more than basic subsistence.
People do this! Ted Kazinsky did it. It is possible. But of course everyone wants their mRNA vaccine technology and 10 hours weeks as well.
I think that's an oversimplification, while I'd agree that modern life costs more to sustain in terms of required input from many different people and industries. There's also issues like the productivity/wage gap, general inertia in cultural change, the glorification of overwork, increasing accumulation of wealth by the already incredibly wealthy, how automation is introduced/managed, etc. that means we shouldn't just assume that people must work 40+ hour weeks or everything crumbles.
While some of the potential solutions I've read on this seem incredibly idealistic, I also believe there is probably a path forward where working time could be reduced significantly without the negative effects on technological, scientific or economic advancements that are presumed
The idea is that many jobs do not contribute to "technology,healthcare,engineering, etc.", rather, salaries and work assignments are regulated to simply force people to spend most of their lives doing meaningless activities as a form of social control.
Even Ted Kaczynski talked about "surrogate activities".
Yeah, how can a narrative book like that be "debunked"? The author wasn't making a logical argument. There is no facts and data. It's an emotional and moral argument. Certain jobs contribute nothing to the world and extract a cost on the psyche of the employee.
The irony is that the socialist system he wished for produces the most bullshit jobs, as in bureaucracy upon bureaucracy. That's also the simple solution to why they exist: governments don't really care about efficiency, as they don't spend their own money. So you have bullshit jobs in bureaucracy, and in people having to cater to bureaucracy.
There are plenty of cases of efficient and inefficient processes in both capitalist and socialist systems, if any can be described as being wholly one or the other anymore. As a direct example to your point, compare the amount of bureaucracy in the US healthcare system to the UK's NHS (and how much extra that costs people per capita), or many other countries that are described as having socialist healthcare systems
> to simply force people to spend most of their lives doing meaningless activities as a form of social control.
This is a human universal. Even uncontacted hunter gatherer tribes spend most of their days doing absolutely nothing useful whatsoever. They sit around and talk shit with their friends. This is not social control. Humans doing nothing useful for most of the day is the norm.
Yes, lots of poor people are getting screwed. Some jobs don’t pay well despite the higher moral standing of directly assisting others. The environment looks pretty bad. But you can’t just say “rich people bad. New economy plz”.
This essay is basically r/im14andthisisdeep