Occupy Wallstreet

[auroraglacialis]

...ctd pt.2

Yes: it's a consequence of having humans doing the business. (Another reason to hail Friend Computer. ) Humans are bad at long-term planning and listening to the numbers rather than their own heuristics and emotions, and thus will rush for short-term profit rather than the technically more rational option of holding out for greater long-term profits.

Oh I am all in for letting people who cash in on profits personally feel and suffer from the long term consequences of their actions. Fire away - let Tony Hayward eat oil contaminated fish and let him spend his next vacation on a stretch of oily beach or give indigenous people who have been driven away by Chevron in the Amazon free access to the houses of the executives of that company. Things would become very different very fast. But as it is now, the people and corporations are protected from the consequences of their actions by legislation, politics and in the end by guns. Under these conditions, not only people but every logically programmed computer would act in a way that increases personal profits as long as the costs can be externalized or be moved "out of the system". That can happen in very various ways which are not quantifyable, like (nonessential) species extinction, human suffering, distant future, other countries, other planets, human emotional degradation, animal suffering,... For example, a computer may as well as a rational human conclude that it is highly efficient, profitable and does not pose any risk to profits beyond the gains to keep pigs in small metal cages and force feed them. Humans would object if they would have to do this themselves - but from an economic standpoint it makes perfect sense.

I am a staunch supporter of the Digital Gaia construction, oddly enough. You might be able to tell.

I have huge issues with that idea, sorry.

Neither of these are problems inherent in capatalism, although we come back to what I was saying earlier about the system not being planned.

I used these examples specifically because they were examples of PLANNED elements of the system. People invented consumerism - it did not emerge. Same is true for some other properties of modern capitalism.
Of course no one "invented" trade, but capitalism is a very specific form of how wealth, production and trading is organized. Maybe it even is one that comes up inevitably when some starting properties are set up, like the concept of actually owning property, accumulating wealth, seperation of the individual from others and from nature. Still it has to be overcome because it is destructive - and I think this is what the OWS as well as Marxists think - that maybe it had to come to this point as a consequence of a succession of events, but that this does not mean that it is a good thing and that it still means that it has to be tackled and changed. Call it progress maybe. Thats what Marx did. He saw capitalism as merely one step in the progression from early trade systems, coin money, etc... with his idea of communism as the inevitable next step.
Because one thing is sure - if our culture sticks to capitalism in its present form, it will continue to degrade Nature, harm people and impoverish humans and nonhumans until it eventually collapses under its own false assumptions.

I am not sure if reading a bit on Wikipedia will make the problem of overproduction and similar topics clear enough. Of course Marx looked at these things from his perspective in his time. He could not have forseen what is happening now. But the problems still exist. The basis of our economy is and always will be the real world. Recently a lot of jobs have been created somewhat detached from that, but that does not make them less prone to overproduction and other issues. To be honest, I find it crazy that people still need to do fulltime jobs. And actually this is what Marx feared. That even though now all the work that was occupying people in his time is done to 90% by machines (simplified!) - people are struggling more and more to "get a job", even if that means they are spending 40 hours a week doing some nonsense or buerocratic stuff. There is a new resource that has become scarce and that is jobs - and people think they actually need a job while reality has overtaken that old time fact and probably people could work only 20% of the time and still there would be enough goods around, just maybe less advertisements, financial speculation and so on. Competition is an extremely wasteful way to regulate flows. Cooperation is much more conserving.

What would it change to?...some mystical Economics v4, which would have to be both more efficient at generating wealth, (very difficult) and less prone to screwing people over.

It does not have to be more efficient at "generating wealth" (whatever that actually means), but yes, it would have to be less prone to screwing people over, more just and more egalitarian. It would basically have to be a socially mandated "Robin Hood" system of sorts. I agree that you cannot drain "all the wealth fromt he rich" because people need something to be rewarded with, but I think the margin there is way off. To pay someone 200 times or more the money someone else gets just because he did some things the other did not (or could maybe never do from his starting point) is ridiculous. I think a common number in present day cooperatives is to have the boss get maybe 10 times as much money as the janitor, I think that number could be lowered if these cooperatives would not have to compete with capitalist markets to the extent they do now for management personell.

I do agree that on the scale this culture operates economically, many of the original and viable means of control against opression, greed and accumulation of wealth do not work. This leaves two options - one is that there have to be structures created to mimick these on a larger scale (e.g. a strong and truely democratic government, taxes on accumulated wealth and assets, regulations against people screwing each other over, and so on) or the breakdown of society into smaller units on which level regulation works (e.g. small communties working together and dealing with other small communities in cooperative manners to reach common goals). Both are yet not perfected - the states of Europe tried to get the first option going, Switzerland has adopted some of the second parts in some aspects (local democratic governance at community level) - there are some coopertives in existence and some consensus democratic organizations that managed to scale democratic and social principles up beyond your "monkey sphere".

But then what is the incentive to become rich in the first place?

Exactly. There should not be an incentive to become rich. There can be an incentive to have some extra benefits, respect by the people, entering ones name in history books etc - but why does it have to be monetary wealth. The purpose of these "funnel" systems is exactly to avoid people to become super rich. The richer one gets, the harder it gets to be even more rich, because the increase is funneled to all others. e.g. you can have a 0% property tax for the equivalent value of a house, garden, car, some savings and a couple of other things. Then a 20% tax on anything that goes beyond that. Then a 40% tax on anything that goes beyond 1 million €, then another 60% for anything beyond 5 million, 80% for 10 million, 90% beyond 15 million, 95% beyond 20 million. That is just a crude, impractical example, but maybe you get the idea. In such a system, one can comfortably get to a million, arguably a wealth that is pretty adequate for anyone. You can also have 5 million - lets say a second house, a piece of land that is profitable, shares in a company - but your obligations rise the richer you get. The effect would be that people would tend to remain in the lower parts of that scale. And this is not even new at all. The post-war USA had something like a 80% tax on rich people, Germany still has an increased tax rate for higher incomes - but these ideas have been watered down and there are loopholes and excemptions, often created by politics and corruption. And I think OWS is out for that, mostly

Because (again) humans are involved, discussing and deciding on new economic systems is very difficult. People listen to their own instincts, and play by "social interaction" rules, (such as an aversion to admitting being wrong) rather than logical rules that put the end result ahead of all other concerns.

I would not say so. Maybe again on a large enough scale, it is really too hard. But humans are in the end - in part even strengthened by social rules - acting not always out of self interest. If they fear to be regarded as egoists by their peers, they may vote for a more just system even though they personally would profit from something else. Social dynamics I think can be actually helpful because humans are social people. I am pretty sure that most people would actually agree that rich people should be taxed more while those earning very little should be tax-free. They may not do that if they believe in an egocentric notion of outcompeting others as the goal of life and they may not do so in private if they are rich themselves, but will say so in public because this is social control at work.
Logic only goes so far as you define proper goals in enough detail. Otherwise logic is dumb like a computer, doing only what it was programmed to do. There is no self-regulation in a computer unless someone programmed it into the rules it operates on. Logic is like the Djinn in the bottle who grants you a wish but you can be very surprised in what way it will come true and in how many ways you did not intend the side effects...