Occupy Wallstreet

[auroraglacialis]

I will try to reply to Clarke for a moment. This is a bit of a subthread on economy in general. It is partly connected to the OWS topic as obviously the problem OWS protests against is an economic one. The second part of the post will be more general.

1.---------------
The egg you mentioned was "produced" by a chicken, then taken by a farmer and sold. There is production. Obviously that egg is worth 5 ct in the end, so that chicken created 5ct worth of wealth, speaking with the language of economics. You could argue that bringing the chicken from the farmer to the mess hall also contributes to the price, then the wealth created or profit created is coming from transport (cars, people carrying it,...etc). Also I think you messed up the story. It should be that he sells them for 5 cents and buy them for 6 cents.

Why he should in the end first sell them to a vendor and then buying them back is a mystery - no serious economic person would do that unless forced by some customs, laws or regulations. An economist would get the egg for 1ct and sell it for 5 ct (or even better drive the local vendors off the market and then sell it for 7ct because he is the only egg supplier)

So I think the problem is in fact that you can create numerical wealth by "just moving things around", but that is detached from reality. The real value of an egg is the egg. Is the egg in the mess hall really worth 5 times as much as the egg in the farmers shop? After all it still is an egg.

So yes of course one can conjure profit out of nothing, but that profit has no foundation in reality. This is exactly why regularly the economy crashes, because at some point, people notice like coyote chasing roadrunner, that they have been running in midair. Then the economy contracts to what is real, profit vanishes again, sadly usually the professionals know better how to shuffle away their own profits into reality. This is what happened in the mortgage crisis starting in 2008.

Originally Posted by Clarke

You can't commodify non-scarce things
It's also nigh-impossible to commodify emotions

Well of course everything is limited, but that does not mean everything is scarce. Scarcity that is created by limits is real, but it is overimposed by created scarcity. For example on Earth there is enough grain to even put it into cars to have fun driving a SUV while in parts of the world people starve - this is created scarcity in one part. To dive into the mechanisms of why the people driving the SUVs are part of a system that is complicit in the hunger would take this too far, suffice to say that without these systems and theri fallout, the local scarcity would not have to be there. But scarcity is profitable, so it is created.
On a larger context, clean water could only become a commodity because it was made scarce by polluting much of the water elsewhere. Of course I am not a conspiracy buff claiming that this happened intentionally, but I would go so far as to say that the economics we adhere to (capitalism and its precursors) aims in general at creating scarcity or at least does not have a problem with creating scarcity because it is profitable. So it is economically viable to pollute a river (saving costs) even in the full knowledge of diminishing fresh water resources because there is no cost involved in that, but rather a potential profit. People in this economy do not really see scarcity as a big problem that has to be avoided.
And of course you cannot really commodify all emotions for real, but you can commodify fake versions of it and let people pretend these are real. Like "facebook friends" or zoos. The prime example of commodification of emotions is the "entertainment industry". Here you can buy for a few bucks "canned emotions". I have no problem with art like movies or music per se, but I hope you can see that these have been heavily commodified and so have the emotions that come with it. Heck just look at the counters in this forum of how many times people have seen Avatar. Basically you buy the emotions attached to Avatar for money. That does not mean that its not worth it and I am aware that Avatar would not have been produced if it was not for the huge profits, but I see that this is still a problem in general.

Why is it in opposition to life? It sounds you mean it's in opposition to emotion

To emotion certainly (and I think this is a bad thing because emotion is a huge part of life). To life in general - think about what happens if something is commodified. It loses its inherent value and gets assigned a monetary value. A value that does not have a foundation in reality anymore but in markets, desires, demands of human beings. An egg becomes 5 cents, a tree becomes a cubic meter of firewood and then $100, a pig becomes meat for a few hundred $$, a human life lost in an accident becomes so many hundred thousand §§ (or just a few bucks if that human happens to be poor). Real life, trees, pigs, animals, fish, oceans, air, water, humans is turned into profit, into numbers on bank accounts, into products and commodities. That is anti-life. If we look at the processes going on, the ones that are conserving (erecting national parks, nature protection zones, regulation on industrial processes) do not come from the economy, but from governments, compassionate people and other institutions that have some detachment from the economy, that do not in all respects have to act economically, but have the luxury of acting humane. Is that really a luxury? The luxury not to be anti-life? I think this is messed 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.

The East India company was indeed the first corporation and it was pretty controversial at that time. I agree that many of the market economy problems reach far deep into history, but some of the more explosive ones are new. For example the detachment of money from reality. In pre 20th century, the currency was always backed up by something real - goods or gold. Look up "FIAT" currency as one example of what has changed. Another one is "consumerism" ('Consumerism has long had intentional underpinnings, rather than just developing out of capitalism. As an example, Earnest Elmo Calkins noted to fellow advertising executives in 1932 that "consumer engineering must see to it that we use up the kind of goods we now merely use"'). Then there is "planned obsolescence". Also it helps to look at marxist (yes I know its an evil word) analysis of industrial capitalism, specifically the problem of "overproduction" which creates the need for destruction.

Your statement that it is impossible for humans to escape the economic system is pretty much a surrender to a proposed inevitability of us being little cogs in the machine, pawns on a chessboard with players that are beyond our control. I think this is extremely depressing to think so, that it is beyond human capacity to take control of ones own life. If we are bound to follow the invisible players (the "invisible hand of the market"), this means that whatever the future holds is beyond our control and will follow only from the rules of that market. And that market as it is now is bound to turn life on Earth into commodities, destroy ecosystems, create climate change and so on. I refuse to give in to that gloomy future. I believe that things can change and that we can free ourselves from that dynamics of the market that is destroying us. In that sense I am actually an optimist. I also make a difference between economy and economic system. Of course there will always be some kind of economy in its basic meaning - people giving and receiving objects or services from each other, but I think the economic system is changable. It is not inevitable that it has to be set up as it is now. Countless cultures in the past and even some remaining ones now show this in principle.

The leaders are not rational. All hail Friend Computer!

There is such a thing as abusive rationality.

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.

Well a negative feedback loop of wealth is a good start for example. This is even in the ideas of the OWS movement. It is what some anthropologists call a "siphon system" compared to the "funnel system". In one of them, wealth attracts more wealth, the rich get richer. In the other, more wealth means one has to exponentially give more to the ones that have less. Mind you this is unlikely to come from politics or other power structures at the present, because these are the beneficiaries of the present accumulative system. But also know that when looking at different cultures, those that are peaceful, egalitarian, happy, healthy and content are those that have such a cultural system in place that funnels wealth from top to bottom while the ones that are or were agressive, violent, warlike, opressive have cultures that suck welath up to the top. Thats not bull****, its empirical science.
How to make such a system, how to create a culture that fits to this description, especially out of the context of the present one is something I cannot tell. I am not a genius. But I think it is something that certainly would be worth discussing in the assemblies held by the people at the OWS.

The majority of humans do that if they're confident they won't be seen, don't they?.... you'll going to get "psychopathic" behaviour of most people when they interact with strangers.

I disagree. To elaborate would be widely offtopic