I dont really want to participate in another science-debate, so I will not say too much about that whole arts versus science debate here - just that I think that both go together. Just as what we call natural sciences now was called nature philosophy in the beginning, so also mathematics and science was an "art". It is only in the past 500 years or so that there has been a diminishing in the recognition of some form of art compared to the other.

Also I think in respect to the original topic - the problem here is not between science and arts - both are usually underpaid and/or overworked. Engineers are a bit better paid, but still compare this to economists and you see where the problem is.

I see a problem in that occupations or their value - or in general the life and life choices of people are quantified in money. Monetary/economic value is only one aspect and this society and I think it is limiting itself by focussing on economic success as a measue of what is valuable and what not. Many of the incredibly influential and highly valued artists never had economic success in their lifetime despite their genius.
The flaw is that we think the monetary value assigned to occupations and objects does reflect in any way its true value - this is not so. The monetary value is determined by economics and this includes speculation, gambling and the lot...

While I think this is not entirely true (the majority of technological applications do serve non-essential functions), even if it would be true, it would prove an interesting point - namely that our modern society is in a way very poor. How else can we explain that we as a society can obviously only affort to give money to the necessities and nothing to the things that our civilization claimed much of its superiority compared to "primitive" peoples - arts, music, literature,...

And again - the problem is not artists versus engineers, in the OWS movement a lot is about economics and certainly economists have an occupation that serves a purpose in this system, but what would justify their immense payments - is really the service of market and price regulation and organisation of the flow of products (which would be a benevolent description of the econimics industry) worth much much more than the work of the ones producing these goods?
Or do they take the advantage that they are in a position of power?

This thread has veered way off topic.
While the numbers of occupiers do dwindle down, that isn't a mark of the movement failing..The Occupy movement has been rightly noted as being symbolic rather then being a traditional protest.
Here's an interesting sum up of the events over the weekend:

Busy "Occupy" protesters fail to maintain the rage | News.com.au

http://resources3.news.com.au/images...-129279689.jpg

http://resources2.news.com.au/images...st-britain.jpg

lol just because people have jobs and lives doesn't mean they still don't feel the same as they did :P I'd consider it a success overall since it really got a lot of attention.

Definitely. :) It got people listening and motivated more people to get out there and voice their indignation at the current social, economic and political situation both as individuals and collectively as large groups worldwide. I think the article I found was quite conservative and would naturally play down the movement as it listed the article in the financial news section and largely appears to be a more conservative news source in general..

Sorry, this is third-order economics. (First-order is directly bartering for things, second-order is plain money, third-order is treading things like your own takings, futures, and other such weird things) Everything tradeable has a value.

There isn't such a thing as "true value" in the majority of cases; value depends on the very much recursive factor of how much people will pay for it, as well as changing depending on context, scarcity, how much of other, completely different things are avaliable, and so on so forth.

Has anyone claimed we are superior because of our art or our literature? Anyway, you know what you can buy with $300m, right? How about an entire country? Our culture spends more, in absolute terms, on financing art, literature, etc, than some countries spend in total.

As we move into globalisation, high-frequency trading, etc, the answer to that might indeed be "yes."

Hey Clarke..Shouldn't we stay more on topic?

Isn't a post about economics ontopic in a discussion of people protesting about economics?

Not when you are referring to debates talking about arts and sciences.
We need to keep this debate about the Occupy movement and economic, political and social context and reaction to the movement instead of talking about the value of science and art and arguing about which one is move valuable.

To keep on topic, I'm posting an article about the Occupy movement in the US from the Oct 15 demonstration. Mind you this source is The Wall Street journal..

Occupy Wall Street Movement Grows to Dozens of Cities - WSJ.com

Economics is on topic, however, the debate should be about whether the economic status quo (or where it is going) is just or not (what we were discussing near the front of this thread). According to OWS, Occupy America (who I agree with, Occupy Chicago FTW! :D), and the Global Occupation, it isn't. :)

Anyway, here's something interesting from HuffPo on Occupy Times Square. :)

Occupy Times Square: Occupy Wall Street Protesters Swarm Midtown (PHOTOS)

Another interesting Tumblr group emerged, called "We are the 1 percent, We stand with the 99 percent" of wealthy people who stand in solidarity with OWS and other protests.

We are the 1 percent

I still think that money does not represent the true value - true value in this case meaning the value of something even in respect to the present situation. There is something that cannot be captured in numbers and that is lost when the numbers become the defining characteristic. What is the value of one hour of human life - one can reduce this to the wage he can get when working something - then he can get 50ct or 1000$ for that depending on where and when he happens to be. But is that the value of one hour of a human life? Not really.

I do not understand why. But I do not understand anyways why some jobs that require the same investment in time and education should be paid differently. This free market stuff based on dog-eat-dog bullsh1t is something that will never understand - I understand its mechanics all to well, but I do not understand why anyone except those who make the most profit of it would support it.

Reagrding this whole topic about bankers and the top 1% - here is an interesting article about a study done this year. It says basically that at least some of these 1% (the investment traders) have quite a few things in common with psychopaths:
Going Rogue: Share Traders*More Reckless Than Psychopaths, Study Shows - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International

I am pretty sure that similar tests done with the rest of the 1% - bankers, investment managers, CEOs, managers,... would show results not that different. We are putting the psychopaths of our society in positions of power and wealth instead of shunning or treating them, like a sane culture would do :(

Of course not; the value is represented by what people will pay for it, which isn't quite the same thing as money. It is, for instance, possible to make a profit simply by taking advnatage in a discrepancy between exchange rates.

You're going to have to have a really good idea to get holinism to work in the context of economics. Absolutely everything is quantized in economics because it's impossible to make a "rational" (or the facade of rational, anway) decision with non-quantified information. If you can't make decisions, you can't trade.
They are more or less efficient at generating wealth.

What's the alternative? Communism?

No, we're not; we're putting excessively reckless people in charge. Unintentionally, because no government planned economics this far ahead. Unlike with Communism, nobody sat down and decided how capatalist economcics should work, it just evolved out of neccesity. Nobody is putting anyone anywhere in any sort organised capacity; they're just ending up there because they're being filtered through a set of processes no single human can possibly comprehend together.


The wealth disparity involved here is horrible, but because our economics are a hodgepodge of hotfixes to defeat the most obvious exploits, there is no easy fix. There is no magic bullet-type law that people could implement to solve everything.

**** Communists.
**** Facists.

Hunter Gatherers got it right.
How Hunter-Gatherers Maintained Their Egalitarian Ways: Three Complementary Theories | Psychology Today

I have conflicting views. Sometimes fascists can be useful, sometimes communists can be useful. Hunter Gatherers can't exactly compete in our current economy. Sad, but true. I'm a realist.

Not efficient enough.

This raises an interesting question (or series or questions).

Why has egalitarian collapsed in the post-Agricultural Revolution civilizations? (Inversely, was a collapse in egalitarianism what brought about the AR, as libertarians might argue?) Why have attempts to regain egalitarianism (in modern terms/economies, communism) failed? Does technology and the surpluses it creates simply bring out the worst of our instincts (greed), while the scarcity of HGing forced us to work together? If we were somehow able to form "techno-tribes," as I theorized in the past, could we create a successful modern egalitarian society? Could we maintain our means of production if we became "techno-tribes?"