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CorkyPorky posted:I proposed to him that humans are not inherently greedy, lovely creatures but it's a result of our society. He's arguing it's the other way around. I asked him to define what success means in regards to civilization means, and what he means by civilization. He also said we reached the top of our food chain with our bloodlust, not intelligence. This was the response I got. I don't know poo poo about anthropology so I don't know how to respond to this. Any help is greatly appreciated. And yes, this is the same person who denied white privilege exists. I can help, I speak libertarian... Man is inherently self-interested. Naive self-interest expresses itself as selfish behavior, and enlightened self-interest expresses itself as altruism. A major aspect of 'being enlightened' is knowledge that 'we're all in this together', that we have to overcome the 'prisoner's dilemma', and that we have to avoid the 'tragedy of the commons.' Which is to say, there were some real physical constraints that affected the evolution of Humanity. We all exist in the same universe - you don't get a different universe than me when you're born. The prisoner's dilemma (along with the 'problem of other minds') is 'baked in' to our hardware. The commons has certain traits, and amid those traits is the fact that a large enough group of selfish, mindless consumers can exhaust a resource. And it's harder to see the danger point in an ecosystem than it is in a rock quarry. Because of these evolutionary forces, humans developed as social creatures. We are biologically predisposed towards the formation of normative grammar. Language and empathy are baked in (though there are various glitches that can happen). We naturally form families, and tribes, and nations, and (when conditions are met) nation-states. We live in a human-hive. But the 'social contract' itself is a myth. Hume's objection holds - 'I ain't signed poo poo.' Privilege fits into the narrative so: The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. For most of history - arguably even today, for most people - life is nasty, brutish and short. Subsistence farming is the status quo for a great many people for a great majority of time. At certain points, though, civilizations formed. Athens is one example. After kicking Persia's rear end on the high seas (or some such), the other city-states pledged a hundred years of tribute to Athens. This allowed all the (rich, male) citizens an unusual degree of privilege. Three things emerged: 1) Childhood - when you're subsistence farming, children are treated as miniature adults, and work alongside you in the field. With privilege comes schooling, socializing and play. 2) Romantic love - when you lack food security, you marry for economic reasons, not romantic. 3) Philosophy - people that work in the fields don't have much time to read or study, so they can't 'stand on the shoulders of giants' (so much as they must rely on the urban legends, old wives' tales and conventional wisdom of their limited social network). And it's not like you 'trade fields' and meet dozens of people working a field to live. In the greek marketplace, a much more engaging conversation was occurring. Advances in communication are always followed by major, revolutionary steps 'forward' (subjective judgement, but I'm confident your interlocutor and I could reach a consensus understanding on that valuation). Important conversations that continue today began in that marketplace. There have been other such marketplaces throughout history, around the world, in many different languages. So there are two major forces at work for every human, and for every 'co-operation' of humans. The first is competition - zero-sum game economics. The second is cooperation - which is NOT zero-sum. Humans were cooperating LONG before they reached the degree of privilege necessary to sustain romantic love, childhood, and philosophy. And our ancestors were competing longer that they've been cooperating. We reached the top of the food chain because of the combination of our 'desires' (not bloodlust) and our ability to cooperate in an intelligent fashion. But primacy doesn't matter in judging which one will ultimately 'win' (which I'm taking to be the point of dispute). And anyhow, asking which one is 'dominant' is framing the question wrong. Naive self-interest is the default. We know how to develop an infant into a productive, healthy member of society. Affording them a necessary degree of privilege is a prerequisite for that. There is a real danger in poverty, as it does reduce us to animals. It is the cause and outcome of all wars. So it's not a battle between cooperation and competition, or our 'human' side and our 'animal' side; it's a competition between poverty and privilege. Cooperation affords privilege. Privilege tends to spread. With privilege comes power. And power doesn't come with knowledge or wisdom. A lot of challenges the leaders of the world have faced were novel, at the time they faced them. And not all leaders have been 'enlightened.' Given this reality, where do we go from here? Do we all hoard ammo in the hopes that we might somehow outlive everyone else? Or do we acknowledge the challenges ahead of us and start working with people to figure out solutions - and a plan? From there, turn it to a discussion of what that plan should be. Sustainability will be a tough sell, but it doesn't contradict any of his core beliefs. The social contract you're just going to have to give 'im - it won't derail things to do that, and he'll be quite persistent and not the least bit convincing (he'll resort to ad homs) if you question it. Discussions of top-down and bottom-up architectures will prove lengthy and interesting. Trying to actually design a system that is sustainable, you're ultimately going to have to punt on. That conversation needs to happen between a lot more than just 2 people.
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Jul 8, 2012 13:05
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Cahal posted:I find the government caused the crisis logic odd, as it seems to centre around claims that the government 'encouraged' homeownership and then this led to all the financial instruments, fraud, oversized banks and whatever. Well, I think the implication here is that certain people are incapable of home ownership, either because they don't generate enough income to service the debts associated with home ownership, or because they don't provide adequate care to the building and the neighborhood to keep housing prices up (whereas allowing housing prices in your neighborhood to crash can result in you being 'under water' on your mortgage). Is home ownership a right? I don't think it is. I do think it's a right for a person to have a safe, clean, warm place to lay their head at the end of the day. But if we want to tackle the larger issue of how best to provide that to all people on this planet, it becomes abundantly clear that suburbs are unsustainable (as a general strategy). This gets into issues of population density, public transit, heating and cooling costs (compared between small houses and large apartment complexes), and land use. If the government naively said 'home ownership is a right!' (with very good intentions, and putting in place systems to help first-time home owners and particularly minorities), they may fail to take the further step of considering the implications for sustainability. If the strategy employed can reasonably be expected to produce an unsustainable situation, then yes, a degree of responsibility can be placed on those that designed and implemented the strategy - namely, the government. But there is a hateful implication in the logic - if one believes that poor people and foreigners are incapable (by their nature) of taking care of a home, or accept that it is right and good for neighborhoods with high minority populations to have their property value drop (simply because White Folk don't exclusively inhabit it), this same criticism ends up being 'The government is at fault because they over-estimated the worth of minorities and poor people, resulting in a collapse.' And that whole argument is ignoring the parasitic terms of mortgages targeting those populations, and dismisses the role that banks have an obligation to play in helping someone that is trying for upward social mobility to do it in a wise, achievable manner. The banks are there to make a profit, but their profit model should be as much to market guidance and wisdom to their borrowers as it is to collect the borrowers checks and distribute the profits to shareholders. Uglycat fucked around with this message at 17:58 on Oct 20, 2012 |
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Oct 20, 2012 17:56
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esquilax posted:No, I don't think it is a wrong statement. But it is a common libertarian/conservative argument and an example of a government intervention that helped cause the crisis, so if you're arguing against them you either have to be prepared to say that some government intervention helped cause the crisis, or be prepared to defend the concept of bailouts. Bailouts are done in /response/ to a crisis. The bailout money wasn't earmaked to bail out banks prior to the collapse. Moral Hazard was assumed, going into the crisis, and the bailout was done despite that assumption (to stave off a total collapse, not out of greed).
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Oct 21, 2012 00:41
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The issue of Moral Hazard was raised when the bailout was being considered. The bailout was being considered because the crisis was imminent. Ergo, Moral Hazard is not responsible for the crisis. There are people who argue that the banks should have been allowed to fail, and the 'moral hazard' discussion falls within (but does not exhaust) arguments for that conclusion, but nobody is pinning the crisis on the bailouts.
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Oct 21, 2012 01:29
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A Fancy 400 lbs posted:Is "They only did it because they thought they could get away with it" supposed to make the banks look better? Because to any sane person, it really doesn't. I honestly don't get how that's supposed to be a good thing. It's basically just saying they're not greedy, they're greedy and cowards. No. I'm saying they're incompetent. Or rather, not sufficiently competent. The task they're being charged with is to take as stab at a sustainable plan. The plan fell apart - but they did get somewhere. It hurt a lot of people when it fell apart. There were things that could have been done differently that would have made for a better outcome. But things did fall apart. It's neither greed nor cowardice that was, in the Ultimate sense, the cause of the crash. It wasn't that they 'thought they could get away with it.' It's that they had to do something with it, and they wrote it into the plan that they would be rewarded well for trying. Once it failed, we were in new territory - and a new plan was formed. The first action of the new plan was to bail out the banks. It's sorta like you might elect to allow a fireman to go into your house with a hose, flooding your basement and causing massive water damage to everything on the first floor, to stop the structure itself from burning to ashes. Yeah, it's not a good idea to spray massive amounts of water all over your house. The water didn't cause the fire. edit - and, mind you, the stab they took was a distributed process. There wasn't any one person at the helm, and for any limited group of people that you could rightly ascribe a high degree of influence to, there are major points of disagreement (in philosophy, advocated action, and aim) between the members of that group. The design of the machine was imperfect, and there were imperfect cogs at every level of the machine. The machine needs to be designed with the assumption that all of the cogs are imperfect. And that alone is not sufficient to produce a sustainable future. Uglycat fucked around with this message at 06:17 on Oct 21, 2012 |
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Oct 21, 2012 06:14
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esquilax posted:You're right that the 2008 bailouts specifically did not contribute to the crisis. Fair point. Nonetheless, I feel a more productive narrative will be formed by explicitly identifying the 'riskier practices' than by blaming 'greed' and stringing up bankers. edit - and such a narrative can still be open to the absence of 'moral hazard' being in some way responsible for the riskier practices, while also considering other legal, economic and psychological forces that encouraged that risk. Additionally, there may be some riskier practices that are called for in the present circumstances that might accelerate a recovery and growth. We shouldn't shy away from them - but transparency and rational skepticism is necessary in considering such ideas. Uglycat fucked around with this message at 22:18 on Oct 21, 2012 |
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Oct 21, 2012 21:30
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I've been typing this up over the last day or so, so I'm not sure it really directly addresses anything relevant anymore. Nonetheless, I put effort into, I'm anxious to get feedback, and I'm hopeful some of these ideas may prove useful when arguing with libertarians about our present economic situation.Krabsworth posted:I'm sorry, this has been discussed, and I've looked through the thread at certain points to piece it together...But, when Mitt Romney goes as far as to keep referencing THE DEBT in a foreign policy debate, what is going on here? As it pertains to this thread, I always hear my (R) leaning relatives spout off about THE DEBT. If you say 'we need our domestic programs' they say 'we can't afford them! look at the debt!" Its like the imagery of being on the front porch wearing a barrel as your possessions are carted off is what they think we are heading towards. That is obviously the cartoon-y interpretation, but is the idea that eventually our debt is going to result in...the whole economy stopping? For every dollar owed, somebody else is owed a dollar. Your inability to service your credit card debts and your father's retirement package devaluing are, in a sense, related events. But all debt sums to zero. Fiat currency - and debt held in fiat currency - are ultimately social constructs. If the math stops making sense, that system collapses - but when that system collapses, we're still left with the same amount of 'stuff' as before. The only thing that gets foggy, in such circumstances, is 'ownership' - which is also a social construct (though possession and the ability to defend and preserve that possession is NOT a social construction). If the math stops working - like happened in '08 - there's a few options. First, debts can be renegotiated. If you owe the bank a million dollars, and the whole market gets hosed in the rear end (to the point where you can't service the loan), they might say 'well, if you can pay off half a million, we'll call it even.' Austerity is, in my interpretation, an effort to avoid that outcome (or sometimes a quid-pro-quo in exchange for debt restructuring). Second, inflation can alleviate the problem. If you borrow a thousand dollars at a time when bread costs one dollar a loaf, you effectively borrowed a thousand loaves of bread. If inflation doubles the cost of bread a week later, you can pay the debt off with one thousand dollars, but that's only equivalent to 500 loaves of bread. In essence, you're up 500 loaves and the bank loses 500 loaves. So inflation reduces wealth disparity, reducing wealth and debt at the same time. Mind you, this is only really effective if income increases proportionately with inflation. Third, the country can borrow more money. When the economy stalls out like this, interest rates for the most sound institutions drop to near-zero. There aren't good investment opportunities out there, and the market is incredibly chaotic, so investors are looking for 'safe' places to weather the storm. As such, the US can borrow a great deal of money at zero (and sometimes even negative) interest rates. While avoiding bankruptcy is important in terms of our nation's fiscal health, borrowing money (and investing it in infrastructure projects) seems the wise thing to me. Moreover, we can 'borrow' money from the fed - essentially, they print money, we spend it, then we repay it. This drives inflation (in a controlled way), getting us some of the benefits of the second option, and taking advantage of the third option. If we only borrow enough to service our debts, we merely extend the stagnant, near-dead economy. If we borrow significantly more, and invest it wisely, we can 'pull ourselves out by our bootstraps*.' As such, the focus on 'The Debt' by Romney (and the debt ceiling by the tea party crowd) is, in my view, misinformed. Yes, we can't simply forget it and put it out of our minds indefinitely, but if there's ever a time to borrow, it is now. Those that feel our debts are the most important issue are the same that fear inflation as the Worst Possible Thing(TM), completely oblivious to the fact that our present problems stem from massive DEFLATION. They also tend to believe, naively, that lower petrol prices indicate a strong, healthy economy (whereas, in my view, higher prices are necessary to 1) match market realities 2) jump-start the move towards sustainability and 3) help mitigate further climate change). *we only have that freedom because of our privileged position as the reserve currency. As such, *I* feel we have an obligation to invest it in a way that not only jump-starts our economy, but reinforces the interwoven relationships we have with other nations (in such a way that it helps bring THEM out of recession as well).
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Oct 25, 2012 18:57
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