Occupy Wallstreet

[Clarke]

(This turned out to be a very long post, sorry. Economics is complicated?)

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

And where does that profit in the end come from? Understand this please that no profit exists without people providing something useful to society - Profit is in fact a measure of that.

There is a section in the novel of Catch-22, where we learn that a soldier called Milo Minderbinder sells eggs from Malta to the Air Force mess hall for 5 cents a peice, having bought them for 7 cents a peice. He absolutely insists he makes a profit from this. It turns out, he does: he's buying those same eggs from somewhere else for one cent, and then selling them to vendors in Malta for 4 cents. He then buys them back, and sells them at a "loss" of +1 cent an egg.

There's no production going on here. Milo is essentially magicking the Malta vendors' profits from nowhere.

People taking these profits to themselves by a number of financial tricks (speed trading, discrepancies in exchange rates, hedgefonds, "betting" on higher or lower prices and so on) do not provide any truely useful product. The profit has to come from somewhere else. The "financial industry" does NOT create wealth, it only manages and controls it.

Bizarrely enough, wealth is not conserved. Profit is not a zero-sum game, nor does it correlate to production of any useful thing. It's entirely possible to become wealthy simply by moving money around, as in the Catch-22 example above.

This is why the whole compound has to go - if not, soon air, love and friendship will start to be commodified.

You can't commodify non-scarce things. (It's also nigh-impossible to commodify emotions, not because they're infinite in supply, but because they can't reliably be produced.)

The beginnings of that are already there (carbon trading, protitution, social internet networks). There is a pricetag on human organs, clean water, land to exist on, animals, human lifetime, "consumer behaviour" and so much more. I will not stand by and watch everything that is not really quantifyable to be quantified according to a system of economics that is so much in opposition to life.

Why is it in opposition to life? It sounds you mean it's in opposition to emotion, and you'd be right; organised algorithms and logic will usually beat emotional decisionmaking in this context.

This is only partly true - at least modern consumer capitalism was indeed planned. As was the present day money system and the whole concept of the "self regulating free market".

...Really? Because the "free market" concept predates the US, possibly even pre-dating the Medieval period. The modern concept of money was, AFAIK, around during the Renaissance.

...Scratch that. I just looked it up: the Romans traded stocks in contracters who were working for the government. The Dutch East India Company issued shared ownership stocks in 1602. There does not appear to be any planning going on here.

But what comes out in your words is what many call "the machine" - a monstrous economic system that we do not control, that we do not have agency over, that we do not even understand - but that controls us, our daily lives, our work, our homes, our world. This is what one of the slogans in OWS means that says "the economy should serve the people instead of people serving the economy".

This is essentially impossible. "The economy" is just a name given to a set of interactions between people, and the issue is here that the number of people involved is in excess of 10 million. They all have different incentives, motivations, and critically, information. These can interact in, literally, trillions of different ways, and the speed of the Internet means that those interactions happen millions of times a second.

What does it tell us if heads of states declare that they cannot provide people with good education or healthcare but can provide banks with money because it is "beyond their control". One has to ask, who has control then if not the presidents and prime ministers of the industrialized nations? There is somethign wrong with this picture, don't you agree?

The leaders are not rational. All hail Friend Computer!

Of course not and if one can say something critical about the OWS movement, then it is that they are not radical enough, that they belive to some part at least in hotfixes - more taxes for the rich, financial trade tax, bank regulation laws,... - which will not work, because the whole conglomerate of economics as we use it now is broken.

Feel free to design Economics 4.0 then. I can virtually guareentee there'll be a flaw in it that results in a feedback loop of wealth. (Or the system collapses because of the incentives involved)

It would be a nice idea. There is some hope something like this can be done with a different way of looking at technology though. But as long as all else stays the same (economically, socially) and we remain captured by the use of technology to control the world and people, more of the same will just lead to more of the same...

How do you define scarcity and why do you think that we have scarcity? What exactly is scarce and why?

We have scarcity of physical objects and resources because there's a finite amount of them. This is compared to non-scarce assets like music, film, and other IP; economics goes really wibbly when you try to apply free-marketism to them.

No, they are psychopaths because they are competent, dedicated and hard working first and foremost to their own profit (and secondly to the profit of the company because that profit will create higher benefits for them) and because to reach that goal they will cheat, lie, manipulate and trick others.

...The majority of humans do that if they're confident they won't be seen, don't they?

We have been told that this is "human nature", that we are all just "survival machines" trying to maximize our own profit and this is then reflected in the behaviour of the followers of that ideology. But there are countless examples that this is NOT human nature, that humans are by nature compassionate, cooperative, sharing and helpful.

Are the circumstances the same?

But this culture chose to promote an image of humans that makes psychopaths look like normal people and people who give away their wealth to the poor are considered crazy. We have not only let the crazy bastards rise to power and control the wealth of the world, they have also managed to make us belive that it is us who are the crazy ones!

Peoples' sense of empathy collapses along with their monkeysphere, AFAIK. Unless you want to do fairly severe psychosurgery on most humans on Earth, you'll going to get "psychopathic" behaviour of most people when they interact with strangers.