Occupy Wallstreet

[Fkeu'itan]

I'm going to ask...

If indeed we are just inherently greedy/knowledge craving, is that any real justification for what we are doing in the world? To me, saying that 'we can't help it, let's carry on' is equally as bad as blaming everything on an "evil 1%".

[Aaron]

The fact that OWS is such a contentious subject just goes to show what a flat-out rotten job these groups have done in publicizing their demands. I'm sorry, but I just don't give a rip when people say, "I'm mad." Really, I just don't. Tell me precisely what you're mad about and then what you think should be done to remedy the situation. Broadly condemning "the system" and asking for "change" is unproductive, and is like a two-year-old's temper tantrum. All it does is make me want to give them a "time out."

Now, don't mistake me; I *do* feel wronged. By whom? Others within the 99%, I'm afraid. Blaming banks and mortgage companies for the mortgage crisis is a bit like blaming gun companies for shootings or knife companies for stabbings. I just can't do that. If you pull the trigger of a gun, what happens after that is positively *your fault*. If the gun merchant broke a law by, say, not checking your background thoroughly before selling you a gun, then that's what they're guilty of and that's it. They are not the murderer. Where has the concept of personal responsibility gone? I'm so sick of this "victim culture" we live in.

I put a 25% down payment on my house and my house's value has declined by almost that much since I bought it. Who do I blame? People who saw a monthly payment figure on their loan papers that was unsustainably high and yet went ahead and signed, only to enter into foreclosure shortly thereafter. They are not the victims in my mind, they are the culprits, and I cannot support a 99% that includes those people. Get them out.

[Tsyal Makto]

Clarke/Aurora - Remember to keep the debate in the context of morality. That's one of the points of Occupy Wall Street, IMO, to bring light to the dearth of morality in the system, and to push back against the idea of Ayn Rand "greed is good no matter what" market-anarchism. For example, is the scheme in Catch-22 a fair use of the free market, or an attempt to take advantage of shortfalls in regulation in it? I like what Thom Hartmann has to say on the issue of market regulation, that they are simply the "rules of the game" like any situation involving competition. Rules are what keep, say, sports games from revolving into chaos, just like regulations keep the market from revolving into chaos.

Aaron - The whole lending fiasco is only one issue here (albeit likely the most catalyzing). Other main issues that OWS is addressing is:
- Lack of regulations against abuses by those in the markets
- Business control/lobbying of government
- Outsourcing
- Attacks on the rights of workers to organize
- Environmental degradation
- Continued tax cuts on the rich
- In short, a general move toward cronyism on the part of the status quo.

And so on. Indeed it is a broad movement, but recent talks with labor leaders are helping to focus the issues a bit more.

Also, news time!!

http://www.alternet.org/occupywallst...iberty_square/

[Clarke]

Originally Posted by Tsyal Makto

For example, is the scheme in Catch-22 a fair use of the free market, or an attempt to take advantage of shortfalls in regulation in it?

Yes.

...More importantly, if it is wrong, which I'm not sure it is, how do you restrict it without restricting something "fair?"

[Tsyal Makto]

Yes meaning former? Yes meaning latter? Yes meaning both??

As for the second part, a robust set of rules and regulations is the best option, not perfect, but good enough to keep everything civil in the marketplace. Like I mentioned about Thom Hartmann, everyone has to follow rules, our economy should be no different.

[Pa'li Makto]

Those Occupy protesters in Liberty Square are a stoic bunch.
As for people who criticise the protesters for varied reasons..I have found something interesting for you to look at:

Taken from Fixing broken system a capital idea | Daily Telegraph Miranda Devine Blog

Fixing broken system a capital idea
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Miranda Devine
Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 07:31pm


IT would be easy to mock the Occupy Wall Street/Sydney/Melbourne/insert city protesters.

You could mock them as rebels without a cause, slackers with misspelt signs who want to change something but they’re not sure what.

It’s hard not to laugh at people tweeting about the death of Steve Jobs on an iPhone while railing against capitalist greed.

Or to smirk when the website for Occupy Brisbane pops up with an ad for the Commonwealth Bank before you can watch the video stream live from Post Office Square.

Or to chuckle at the news that JP Morgan has bought a chunk of Twitter, the online vehicle Occupy uses to spread the word.

But it would be wrong to dismiss the protesters, now in their second month since Occupy Wall Street spawned a global protest movement. They might just have a point.

They are not trying to destroy capitalism, but to make it better. They are attacking the unfairness at the heart of a dysfunctional global financial system, and the lack of accountability of the people who run it, many of whom are ethically challenged.

They bemoan the wasted human talent, as the best and the brightest in western society are sucked out of more worthwhile pursuits into frolics of financial engineering.

Their motto is “we are the 99 per cent” - a line taken from a recent article by Nobel prize winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, who wrote that the top one per cent of the US controls 40 per cent of the wealth.

One OccupySydney tweeter said they represented “the little end of town”.

It has taken three years since the near collapse of the US financial system for protesters to get angry about capitalist greed. But anyone who read former Wall Street trader Michael Lewis’s 2010 book about the financial crisis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, will wonder why it didn’t happen sooner.

Lewis said last week that the Occupy movement “could be a big deal. They don’t know what they want exactly. [But] there is a horrible unfairness at the heart of our economy right now. We have essentially socialism for capitalists and capitalism for everyone else.”

“People working inside Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are still allowed to make big bets and they get to keep the profits on the upside and if things went really really wrong you and I would get stuck with it. People respond viscerally to unfairness.”

Occupy is misunderstood, partly because it is a phenomenon of Generation Y, the most misunderstood generation in living memory.

Beyond the left-right paradigm, they are socially connected and technologically savvy like no previous generation, and therefore unmanageable by the usual controls. But they are serious, worldly people, respectful of authority, cynical but idealistic.

They are worried about grim career prospects, as they face the worst unemployment rates since the Great Depression.

The Occupy crowd take their strength from the “hive mind” of the internet, with some protesters donning the Guy Fawkes mask which has become the trademark of the shadowy “hactivist” group Anonymous.

In Sydney and Melbourne they shrug off criticism that numbers wax and wane as protesters go off to uni or day jobs. They know they carry the protest with them in their pockets, through every form of social media that connects them with counterparts around the world.

“We are legion,” they say.

Their very lack of coherence makes the Occupy movement something more than just another anti-globalisation rally hijacked by anarchists.

They defy stereotypes. They are not socialists. They claim to represent 99 per cent of people.

“No lefty hacks. No union bureaucracies,” read one Occupy Sydney sign in Martin Place at the weekend.

A little girl held up a sign: “Protest is patriotism.”

The biggest banners featured the logos of left wing activist groups such as Socialist Alternative, Solidarity, Resistance, or the Green Left Weekly and the Maritime Union of Australia. There were also anti-American and “Occupy Sydney not Palestine” posters. But the Alan Jones crowd was well-represented, too, with retirees holding banners: “Stop coal seam gas. A disastrous industry using false advertising.”

And, in a development sure to annoy GetUp and the Greens, one of the main organisers of the anti-carbon tax protests, Jacques Laxalle, from Consumers and Taxpayers Association, said yesterday he shares common concerns with Occupy: “They too are showing their anger at so many things that are wrong.”

But, judging by their presence in Sydney and Melbourne, opportunistic leftists are working hard at co-opting the Occupy movement.

One Facebook exchange between Occupy Melbourne participants Mike Rukas and Miriam Robinson yesterday gives an insight into the internal struggle to remain true to the “99 per cent”.

Rukas had taken exception to the “down with the USA” banners he had seen at the protests at City Square. He argued: “The risk that Occupy Melbourne runs, and why mention of the left even comes in, is that people are attaching their own personal agenda to the movement and these are leftist agendas, which therefore by definition stops being about the whole 99 per cent.”

Rukas, real name Michael Chmielewski, whose family came to Australia as refugees from communist Poland in the 1980s is a 20-something student at RMIT and musician with a full-time job who is an avid supporter of Occupy Wall Street. He said the cause is not about overthrowing capitalism: “It is against government corruption and the top economic 1 per cent having power over everybody else.”

The blood-spattered 20th century showed us that communism and socialism don’t work. It’s not capitalism per se that is the problem. It’s the people who run it. It’s us. A sick financial system is a symptom of a sick society.

As US Catholic theologian George Weigel once said, capitalism and the markets are not just machines that run by themselves. They need people of integrity to run them.

[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

[Clarke]

Originally Posted by Tsyal Makto

Clarke/Aurora - Remember to keep the debate in the context of morality.

In the context of, "How do we build the system?" Morailty is not the be-all and end-all, since the markets are so large. We can't rely on the social contract to enforce things like "fairness" and "honour", etc. We have to write the rules, and assume that all loopholes in the rules that generate profit will be exploited.

Originally Posted by Tsyal Makto

Yes meaning former? Yes meaning latter? Yes meaning both??

They are not mutually exclusive, are they?

[auroraglacialis]

Originally Posted by Fkeu'itan

If indeed we are just inherently greedy/knowledge craving, is that any real justification for what we are doing in the world? To me, saying that 'we can't help it, let's carry on' is equally as bad as blaming everything on an "evil 1%".

So IF this is so (which I strongly believe is not an inherent property at all), then I guess all that would keep us from letting it run is an ethical/moral framework. The existence of this is IMO a hint that greed is not something that is inherently in human nature. And I do agree, that to "let it carry on" is worse than criminal neglect. Its like walking by a beggar and not giving him anything because "its his own fault", not helping the slaves in America, the Jews in Germany, the victims of apartheid, the women being raped in warzones because "we cant help it, its their culture/own fault/destiny" or because "we cant help because we are powerless".

Originally Posted by Aaron

The fact that OWS is such a contentious subject just goes to show what a flat-out rotten job these groups have done in publicizing their demands. I'm sorry, but I just don't give a rip when people say, "I'm mad." Really, I just don't. Tell me precisely what you're mad about and then what you think should be done to remedy the situation. Broadly condemning "the system" and asking for "change" is unproductive, and is like a two-year-old's temper tantrum.

Well the OWS is not even two years old.
What I mean is that you cannot expect people to have readymade working solution prepared - or even a complete and conclusive and unquestionable analysis of what is wrong (and how it can be changed). You can see how complicated this gets looking at my discussion with Clarke here. Try to write such an analysis on a flyer or poster for the streets.
I think what is explicitely one goal of OWS is to actually get together under the common perception that something is wrong, that "the system" is injust and that there is an inequality in wealth present. From that common ground, there will have to be the development happening of an analysis of what exactly is wrong and ideas will come up as to how to solve this.

But aside of that - what IF it is "the system" that is wrong. What IF it is not just one little part that has to be tweaked to make it all work again? Do you think this is impossible? And if it is so, would then not be the response to condemn "the system" be quite appropriate?
There seem to be people in OWS that think that by putting taxes on the rich, on financial transactions or by setting up regulations against banks everything can be saved. Here you have specific points of criticism and specific solutions. To me these are superficial attempts to patch up a pressure vessel that is about to explode.

Where has the concept of personal responsibility gone? I'm so sick of this "victim culture" we live in.

Well personal responability is important, but I think it goes beyond ones own direct life. We have a personal responsability to go outside of that and see what causes us to get into bad situation, rather than wiggling around to evade personal involvement (which in the end is not possible anyways). So our personal responsability is actually to go out there and create change. Not just because we personally feel victimized, but also out of compassion for the others who are truely the victims. I think there is no doubt that there are victims in this whole mess - maybe not 99% of the Americans, but a lot (and many more outside the US or outside the human species for that matter).

But in the end, it is not really about individuals. Yes of course, each one has responsability and should be held accountable for it, but in the end most of us are part of a culture and economy that puts limits and restrictions on what we can do and controls a lot of life for us. I cannot really blame the lumberjack who took up this job because the other option would have been to starve and be homeless. And I probably cannot even blame the salesman who sells houses because he as well might have had not so many job options. But I can blame "the system" for forcing these people to accept these jobs. I do not say that individual responsability is neglible and certainyl both of them should if they can try to find some better way to make a living if they can, but ultimately their job will be filled by some other poor soul who would rather not do it and the reason for that is not to blame on the individuals, so talking to individuals will go only so far. Instead the structure itself must be broken - by providing safely and viable alternatives for these people in addition of telling them to act responsibly - and/or by hindering the mechanisms that create such jobs in the first place.

Creating a new economy or even culture will be a huge task and I am not sure if OWS is up to that. I hope they will continue trying and manage to get clarity and find new ways

[Clarke]

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

Obviously that egg is worth 5 ct in the end...

Actually, yes I did mess up; he sells them to the AF base for 5 after buying them for 7. The single egg actually generates 7c of gross profit we know about: 1 for the farmer, 3 for Milo, 3 for the Maltese vendor. (Though Milo then spends 2 of his profit in order to confuse his superiors.)

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.

Milo has an ulterior motive: the economic growth generated by all this shuffling around makes him the equivalent of Vice President of several small countries.

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.

But it has been transported from the farm, perhaps passing through several countries' borders. It may be a single egg, as opposed to a crate of eggs; this affects the economics of demand, sale and transportation, etc. The real value of the egg is not the egg; it's what (you think) has happened to the egg.

So yes of course one can conjure profit out of nothing, but that profit has no foundation in reality.

AFAIK, the enconomy goes through bust cycles because people invest in some given asset because the market value of that asset is increasing... because people are investing in it. (As mentioned, wealth is not conserved.) Once people stop investing, the value drops, and people try to cash in their investment, dropping the price further. This isn't quite the same as Milo's shuffling around, which leaves him with nothing other than dollars at the end of the day. (In fact, Milo may well be said to be doing a physical-goods version of the stock trading that caused the 2008 crash in the first place.)

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.

It's only "created" scarcity if viewed in a particularly negative light. Grain is, by default, scarce; it is a pysical object that can only be produced in specific places and in (compared to infinity) small quantities. It therefore costs money to transport it from place to place, as well as its semi-inherent value via its finite supply. A huge amount of infrastructure and capital would have to be used to render grain "non-scarce."

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 aims in general at creating scarcity or at least does not have a problem with creating scarcity because it is profitable.

I think the opposite; modern capatalism evolved in a world where almost all things are, inherently, scarce; everything had production value, and transport cost, and so on so forth. It was perfectly reasonable to charge for all these things, even if the thing the cosumer is actually interested in, such as the contents of a book, sheet music, etc, were actually "information" and infinite in avaliability. Scarcity is not a consequence of captalism; capatalism is a conseqeunce of scarcity, and falls apart in incredibly short order when applied to things which are not scarce.

People in this economy do not really see scarcity as a big problem that has to be avoided.

Avoiding scarcity in full is a concept almost entirely restricted to science fiction. To achieve post-scarcity of resources in real life, we'd require supertechnologies not avalaible yet, e.g. Unobtanium. (The resulting zero-loss electrical network would be revolutionary and would mean that power could be distrubuted to the remotest places for pennies, assuming of course that real Unobtanium does not obey economics contrived for the sake of plot.)

Basically you buy the emotions attached to Avatar for money.

So it is somehow immoral to sell an experience, or to sell art?

Think about what happens if something is commodified. It loses its inherent value and gets assigned a monetary value.

Assuming things actually do have inherent values, which is a very debatable proposition in itself, it does not lose that value; the market value is based on its "inherent" value, since it'd be stupid to sell something for less than it is actually worth.

...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.

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.

Life itself is a resource, and one with very peculiar properties. It is, when carefully managed, unscarce, but ATM cannot be produced to demand, and can only be coaxed into performing specific processes. The rise of genetic engineering will hopefully alleviate the latter problem, however. (I am a staunch supporter of the Digital Gaia construction, oddly enough. You might be able to tell.)

For example the detachment of money from reality.

Money is already detached from reality. It only had value oriignally because you had a promise you could trade it for something more useful.

Another one is "consumerism". Then there is "planned obsolescence".

Neither of these are problems inherent in capatalism, although we come back to what I was saying earlier about the system not being planned. They happened because the sheer scale of the market got rid of the "monkeysphere" aspect, and so people started doing the most (short-term, see earlier) profitable thing, regardless of whether it was "fair." It was allowed; therefore, it was fair game.

Also it helps to look at marxist (yes I know its an evil word) analysis of industrial capitalism...

Having looked at Wikipedia on the topic, I'm not sure how well the logic behind overproduction's vicious cycle holds up, especially as actual manufacturing in developed countries is often done by machine, and so a loss of production no longer correalates strongly with a loss of jobs. Marxism's relavence will continue to slip as the basis of our economy becomes less and less focused on scarce resources.

I think this is extremely depressing to think so, that it is beyond human capacity to take control of ones own life.

It is impossible to live in the manner you have presumably become accostmed to without relying on other people. The economics involved don't let you.

I think the economic system is changable. It is not inevitable that it has to be set up as it is now.

What would it change to? The only options are post-scarcity of material goods, which is a comparatively long way off, or some mystical Economics v4, which would have to be both more efficient at generating wealth, (very difficult) and less prone to screwing people over.

Countless cultures in the past and even some remaining ones now show this in principle.

As the group size increases, the dynamics do not simply get bigger, but change in new and so far unpredictable ways. The economic systems used by past cultures may both numerically and emotionally work for them, but may not work for a group ten times the size, and modern capatalist society is quite possibly the largest culture to ever exist.

There is such a thing as abusive rationality.

I would say that's only true if you are too vague about your goals, or hold the "wrong" goals.

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.

But then what is the incentive to become rich in the first place? You can't drain all the wealth from the rich, so there must be a balance. (Although I would say that the US is leaning far too far in the other direction. Taxes are good things, also for lack-of-monkeysphere reasons.)

But also know that when looking at different cultures, those that are [positive] are those that have such a cultural system in place that funnels wealth from top to bottom while the ones that are [negative] have cultures that suck welath up to the top. Thats not bull****, its empirical science.

Make absolutely sure that you've got your correalations the right way around. There are, after all, three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

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.

...No, the Romans! [/Monty Python]

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 disagree. To elaborate would be widely offtopic

Feel free to start the thread.

[Tsyal Makto]

Morality might not be a be-all-end-all (but it should be a core value of us and our social contract, no?), but shouldn't we always strive for it, and close loopholes whenever they are found?

Let me ask you this, what economy today do you see as the most ideal? As in the one which best reflects the ideals of the modern, post-Enlightenment, industrial, post-Guilded-age social contract? My bet would be either Germany or France, and the social-market economy.

Also, news time!

http://www.alternet.org/story/152772..._corporations/

[auroraglacialis]

[edit: sorry the answer is long. so this is part 1. I apologize and promise that I will keep my next reply shorter, especially as this starts to be a debate between 2 people]
Again a reminder, Clarke - it is tedious and exhausting to have fragmented posts like you rlast one - it is more a multi-level private discussion that no one else can follow than anything else. Please try to reply with a full paragraph and not with a one-sentence quote plus a one-sentence answer. These are hard to follow and put into context even by me who originally wrote that wuote reply

I do not get really what you try to prove with your example about the egg. It shows that that guy Milo can make a lot of money and buy political influence by making a business scheme in which he cashes in a lot of profit for a service that is not worth that much. Sure the people at AF base will buy from him if there is no one else around, but the price is not the actual cost for the egg. This is even true in free market capitalism, which would in its pure form lead to someone buying the egg for 1ct, add the costs of transport plus a few percent and sell the egg for 3 ct at the AF base, outcompeting Milo. Of course the margin of profit will not drop to zero and depending on politics that other competitor will not have a chance anyways, but basically the value of the egg at the AF base is the price at the producer plus the cost of transport and the wages of the people arranging transport. And I think that latter is highly overvalued in the present system. We pay people 2 or 10 times the value of a good at the producer just so that they organize bringing it to us (not even including expenses of that service). That way some people get fantastically rich on these "profits" - richer than those who in the end sell the product or the ones who produce it or the ones who transport it.
And in the end you even use Milos behaviour as an example of what leads to financial crash - so what is your intention then - showing me that this kind of "creating profit" and "shuffling money around" is not working? I knew that.


The next topic is scarcity. I think one has to make a division here between what I would translate as "scarcity" (Knappheit) versus "limitation" (Begrenztheit). A resource can be limited - like almost all physical things are like grain, minerals, energy, but it does not have to be scarce. Scarcity in that sense means that there is a severe need for it in some place that cannot be fulfilled. So grain is limited worldwide, but in Europe we dont have grain scarcity while in Somalia there is grain scarcity. Capitalism in its current form or even worse uncontrolled free markets lead to that inequality in distribution of the limits which results in localized scarcity. Of course the value of something is determined by the limits of its availability, that certainly is at the basis of trading - a feature that is really really old. The problems arise however if it is easy to "screw over" people by shuffling money - creating fake assignments of value to some things. Like your egg again. Its value at the AF base is the value of its production plus the cost of transport. Yet there is a virtual, created value assigned to it by the trader. That profit has to paid by someone - by the farmer who could charge 2ct for the egg or more understandably by the AF, who overpay Milo for that egg - in the end that cost then is paid by the tax payers.
Another example for created fictional value are brand name shoes. People pay three times as much money for a sports shoe that was produced in a Sweat shop somewhere because it has a special symbol on it. The quality is the same as others, the pain and suffering involved in production is the same, just the trader did a better job at screwing over the buyers by something called PR and marketing.
So a more just trading system would operate without these falsified, virtual or created values (and scarcity) - and it would include more real world values. I dont care if it is possible and economically viable to produce a sports shoe under these conditions for $5 and sell it for $20 in a shop in Europe because that is what the people demand - not if the real cost involve half-slavery , ecological damage and producing toxins and waste. The latter are not included in the $5 or even the $20 - they are not measurable in money, so they just do not appear int he calculations of economists and that makes me MAD AS HELL. - How DARE they say that they can produce something for a few $$ if that number is completely ignorant of all the suffering of life outside their economy? The "best" they are doing is to try and put some value into it that is supposed to represent the monetary value of ecological destruction. A few $$ for the elimination of a wetland, some $$ for burning a forest? Even if they would use that money really for ecological "restoration" its madness. That money never is enough for restoration and restoration is just not the same as original ecosystems. Numerous studies show that it is not the same, that it is fundamentally different to have an old growth forest compared to a bunch of seedlings. And that this will not change for centuries. What is the monetary value of an ecosystem destroyed or changed for centuries. What is the monetary value of a species gone extinct!

So I dont say there is no scarcity. That would be ludicrous. And I definitely dont say there are no limits. To the contrary. But what I dislike is to make a profit out of increasing scarcity artificially or to move around scarcity and dump it on some poor people.

And to make one thing clear - I do not think that modern capitalism is in so many things fundamentally different from previous systems in the medieval ages or in ancient Rome. There are some added features like planned obsolescence, fiat currency and consumerism that add to the predicament, but the problem lies deeper. Modern capitalism came out of an economic system that already had all the flaws, it just increased their impact.

Avoiding scarcity in full is a concept almost entirely restricted to science fiction. To achieve post-scarcity of resources in real life, we'd require supertechnologies not avalaible yet

So I think that is the misunderstanding here - scarcity vs limitation. I do not strive for a world without limits and eliminate scarcity by that means. I think that is proposterous. But by spreading things more equal, I think scarcity can be avoided. Of course with all the grain available in the world, not everyone will be able to have a swimming pool fileld with graint o take a grain bath in it, but if it is reasonably distributed, everyone would have enough to eat, so there would not be scarcity in food for anyone. There would maybe not be abundance or so much food that one can waste it thoughtlessly, but I think such behaviour goes way beyond my definition of scarcity.

Another way to put this is I see scarcity from a human perspective (does one person experience scarcity) compared to some global accounting (is the resource scarce globally).

So it is somehow immoral to sell an experience, or to sell art?

Not per se. I merely pointed towards that there is commodification of emotions happening, something you said is not possible.
If it is moral or not is a different topic. I happen to think that in a culture that has fulfilled its needs, there should be a common culture that fosters art without involving a monetary pressure, but again , that would be too much for here. There are some concepts for that around, a common one is the "culture flatrate" where people pay a small amount to use cultural infrastructure and that money is put into maintaining the infrastructure and providing artists with investments. Add to this the concept of publicly shared income - basically every citizen gets a minute share of the profits of everything in the state. This sums up to enough money to fulfil all the basic needs for a house, food, water, some extras - an artist can then create art free of the pressure of making money with it. If he does well any many people want to see his art, he gets rewarded out of the "big pot" that all people paid into. This is a system that could solve some issues, that also might fail misearbly due to buerocracy - just wanted to point out that people actually have thoughts on these issues.


...ctd

[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...

[Moco Loco]

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

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's a pretty steep increase, but I guess it's fair.

[Tsyal Makto]

That's also a progressive taxation system similar to what the US had in it's most prosperous economic times (1950s and 1960s).

On another note.
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