What is Wealth?

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JBP: Feb 16, 2017; You've got to know, to understand,
Baby, take me by my hand,
I'll lead you to the promised land.

Wealth is the friends we made along the way

# ? Feb 4, 2019 22:27

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# ? Apr 24, 2024 09:45

Freakazoid_: Jul 5, 2013; Buglord

counterpoint: Wealth is the fire in which we burn

# ? Feb 5, 2019 02:01

Mr.Tophat: Apr 7, 2007; You clearly don't understand joke development

Friends OP.

The answer is 'friends'.

# ? Feb 5, 2019 02:21

Pablo Nergigante: Apr 16, 2002

What is wealth? A miserable little pile of secrets

# ? Feb 5, 2019 03:14

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

Spangly A posted:

what? LTV post-marx is about the entire history of capitalism being built and maintained through surplus-value in the market, not the commodity. The exchange value and price both further separate from socially necessary labour time of the commodity as the complexity of an economy increases. The individual labour time of the individual commodity never has any direct interaction with the exchange value - only the wider implication of surplus value matters. Marxist LTV works just fine with discounting booze to make you buy crisps

Surplus value in its stored form is an expression of wealth, being an abundance that can be turned into power, comfort or satiation quickly at any given moment, provided the societal frame of reference hasn't collapsed in on itself in the meantime.

As I've heard it explained, according to Marx the socially necessary labour time does play a role in determining the exchange value of the commodity. An individual commodity might sell for more or less than its objective value based on local factors like supply and demand or marketing, but those fluctuations are still anchored around the socially necessary labour time taken to produce the commodity. In cases where one commodity consistently sells for more than its real value there has to be another commodity that is consistently selling for less than its real value, so that the economy as a whole balances out.

So while the LTV allows that individual commodities can and often do sell for more or less than their labour content it still argues that there is an important relationship between socially necessary labour time and price.

# ? Feb 5, 2019 03:43

Liquid Communism: Mar 9, 2004; Out here, everything hurts.

Wistful of Dollars posted:

Wealth is freedom from want.

That's actually a pretty good philosophical answer.

# ? Feb 5, 2019 09:34

Reznor: Jan 15, 2006; Hot dinosnail action.

Flowers For Algeria posted:

Wealth, OP, is the metric that will define your place in the line to the guillotine.

As much as anything that has been said in this thread this is the most useful bit.

I mean, I guess op made a rubric for it. But I don't see the explanatory power or use for his theory.

# ? Feb 5, 2019 11:43

Wistful of Dollars: Aug 25, 2009

Liquid Communism posted:

That's actually a pretty good philosophical answer.

I only provide the finest musings.

# ? Feb 5, 2019 14:54

MixMastaTJ: Dec 14, 2017

Flowers For Algeria posted:

Wealth, OP, is the metric that will define your place in the line to the guillotine.

Oh my God. That's why all these goons want to define it as "friendship."

# ? Feb 5, 2019 18:36

VirtualBasement: Jun 5, 2006; "Be not afraid..."

OwlFancier posted:

Are you sure you're not a jrod rereg? Cos complaining about fiat currency and obsession with desert island metaphors is like signs 1 and 2 of insane libertarianism. We got a thread for that.

I'm actually surprised this was not the first reply to this thread. OP is even cherry picking replies and doing that "just asking questions" bullshit.

# ? Feb 5, 2019 23:01

Moridin920: Nov 15, 2007; by FactsAreUseless

MixMastaTJ posted:

Someone who's "wealthy" has a gun to a lot of people's heads and is capable of exploiting their wealth for his own personal wealth.

Yes. Wealth is the ability to command labor.

Helsing posted:

it still argues that there is an important relationship between socially necessary labour time and price.

If it costs more to produce then the price will be higher. Is that particularly Marxian though?

e: Oh I see. I think the confusion lies here: value is not the same as price.

quote:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_(economics)

Economic value is not the same as market price, nor is economic value the same thing as market value. If a consumer is willing to buy a good, it implies that the customer places a higher value on the good than the market price. The difference between the value to the consumer and the market price is called "consumer surplus"[1]. It is easy to see situations where the actual value is considerably larger than the market price: purchase of drinking water is one example.

Marx is talking about value, not price, though it quickly gets esoteric and complicated...

quote:

In classical economics, the value of an object or condition is the amount of discomfort/labor saved through the consumption or use of an object or condition (Labor Theory of Value). Though exchange value is recognized, economic value is not, in theory, dependent on the existence of a market and price and value are not seen as equal. This is complicated, however, by the efforts of classical economists to connect price and labor value. Karl Marx, for one, saw exchange value as the "form of appearance" [Erscheinungsform] of value, which implies that, although value is separate from exchange value, it is meaningless without the act of exchange, i.e., without a market.

It's been a while but imo Marx more says that the value of a widget is the amount of work (or currency representing work) someone will do in exchange for it.

Either way it is clear that "value is separate from exchange value."

I know that investepedia and whatnot will say this about LVT:

quote:

It suggested that the value of a commodity could be measured objectively by the average number of labor hours necessary to produce it.

but I don't think that's an accurate reading tbh

I think the real value of LVT lies in the fact that it demonstrates that the end product's value comes from the work done to raw materials in order to produce it and that the workers themselves should determine what happens to the surplus since they made it and that all materials provided by the capitalist is just embodied labor appropriated previously.

Moridin920 fucked around with this message at 23:45 on Feb 5, 2019

# ? Feb 5, 2019 23:22

Moridin920: Nov 15, 2007; by FactsAreUseless

Here's LVT:

If it takes $100 worth of input to produce X, and it costs $50 to pay workers to produce X, and X sells for $200 and thus $50 of profit is made... who determines what happens to the profit? It's not the workers, it is the employer via an autocratic fashion. That profit, the surplus value, is thus stolen from the workers on the justification that well the capitalist provided the $100 of input.

How the capitalist had that $100 to begin with is ignored of course, because the only way they have it is via appropriation of previously embodied labor. The work it required to produce those inputs (such as the work required to make the machine I'm using to build X) IE they have it because of profits from previous exploitations, all the way back to "primitive accumulation" which is more or less what it sounds like (it was stolen, often from native peoples). They just took that land and those resources by force. That's the basis of their ownership and the replacement of 'divine right.'

That's Capital Vol. 1.

It's all pretty simple really and it isn't anything to do with the "haha uhyuck Marx says if pants take 2x longer to make than shirts then pants have to be 2x the price!!!"

Vol 2 is about how the capitalist uses that profit to maintain the system. For example they spend it on bribing politicians to maintain laws favorable to themselves, fund schools teaching propaganda crap cheerleading capitalism, fund churches telling people to just endure and suffer and be rewarded in the afterlife, etc.

Moridin920 fucked around with this message at 00:06 on Feb 6, 2019

# ? Feb 5, 2019 23:38

OwlFancier: Aug 22, 2013

VirtualBasement posted:

I'm actually surprised this was not the first reply to this thread. OP is even cherry picking replies and doing that "just asking questions" bullshit.

It was my first thought but it seemed like bad faith.

# ? Feb 5, 2019 23:45

Moridin920: Nov 15, 2007; by FactsAreUseless

D&D would be immensely served if you guys forgot about "bad faith" for a moment and just argued the merits of what is presented. It's loving tiresome when a bunch of people posting just go "bad faith go post elsewhere" and is a huge reason why D&D gets poo poo on a lot in other subforums.

# ? Feb 5, 2019 23:46

OwlFancier: Aug 22, 2013

Moridin920 posted:

D&D would be immensely served if you guys forgot about "bad faith" for a moment and just argued the merits of what is presented. It's loving tiresome when a bunch of people posting just go "bad faith go post elsewhere" and is a huge reason why D&D gets poo poo on a lot in other subforums.

I uh, was suggesting that it might constitute bad faith arguing if you just assume everyone who doesn't make sense is doing so deliberately...

# ? Feb 6, 2019 00:00

Moridin920: Nov 15, 2007; by FactsAreUseless

My bad then perhaps I'm a bit touchy about it.

I am an idiot

# ? Feb 6, 2019 00:01

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

Moridin920 posted:

If it costs more to produce then the price will be higher. Is that particularly Marxian though?

If it takes more socially necessary labour time to produce a commodity then, ceterus paribus, that thing should cost more than a commodity that required less socially necessary labour time to produce. You're seriosuly asking me how this is a Marxian analysis?

quote:

e: Oh I see. I think the confusion lies here: value is not the same as price.

The confusion here is yours. Saying there's a "relationship" between socially necessary labour time and price is not the same as saying that value = price because, as I stated pretty directly in my last post, prices fluctuate based on local circumstances.

quote:

Marx is talking about value, not price, though it quickly gets esoteric and complicated...

It's been a while but imo Marx more says that the value of a widget is the amount of work (or currency representing work) someone will do in exchange for it.

I'm no Marx scholar but I think this is an almost direct inversion of Marx, who as I understand it was very much emphasizing that the sphere of production is crucial and that the market sphere is secondary and of less significance.

quote:

Either way it is clear that "value is separate from exchange value."

I know that investepedia and whatnot will say this about LVT:

but I don't think that's an accurate reading tbh

I think the real value of LVT lies in the fact that it demonstrates that the end product's value comes from the work done to raw materials in order to produce it and that the workers themselves should determine what happens to the surplus since they made it and that all materials provided by the capitalist is just embodied labor appropriated previously.

From Capital Vol. III:

Capital Vol. III Part II, Conversion of Profit into Average Profit posted:

The capital invested in some spheres of production has a mean, or average, composition, that is, it has the same, or almost the same composition as the average social capital.

In these spheres the price of production is exactly or almost the same as the value of the produced commodity expressed in money. If there were no other way of reaching a mathematical limit, this would be the one. Competition so distributes the social capital among the various spheres of production that the prices of production in each sphere take shape according to the model of the prices of production in these spheres of average composition, i.e., they = k + kp' (cost-price plus the average rate of profit multiplied by the cost price). This average rate of profit, however, is the percentage of profit in that sphere of average composition in which profit, therefore, coincides with surplus-value. Hence, the rate of profit is the same in all spheres of production, for it is equalized on the basis of those average spheres of production which has the average composition of capital. Consequently, the sum of the profits in all spheres of production must equal the sum of the surplus-values, and the sum of the prices of production of the total social product equal the sum of its value. But it is evident that the balance among spheres of production of different composition must tend to equalize them with the spheres of average composition, be it exactly or only approximately the same as the social average. Between the spheres more or less approximating the average there is again a tendency toward equalization, seeking the ideal average, i.e., an average that does not really exist, i.e., a tendency to take this ideal as a standard. In this way the tendency necessarily prevails to make the prices of production merely converted forms of value, or to turn profits into mere portions of surplus-value. However, these are not distributed in proportion to the surplus-value produced in each special sphere of production, but rather in proportion to the mass of capital employed in each sphere, so that equal masses of capital, whatever their composition, receive equal aliquot shares of the total surplus-value produced by the total social capital.

In the case of capitals of average, or approximately average, composition, the price of production is thus the same or almost the same as the value, and the profit the same as the surplus-value produced by them. All other capitals, of whatever composition, tend toward this average under pressure of competition. But since the capitals of average composition are of the same, or approximately the same, structure as the average social capital, all capitals have the tendency, regardless of the surplus-value produced by them, to realize the average profit, rather than their own surplus-value in the price of their commodity, i.e., to realize the prices of production.

On the other hand, it may be said that wherever an average profit, and therefore a general rate of profit, is produced � no matter by what means � such an average profit cannot be anything but the profit on the average social capital, whose sum is equal to the sum of surplus-value. Moreover, the prices obtained by adding this average profit to the cost-prices cannot be anything but the values transmuted into prices of production. Nothing would be altered if capitals in certain spheres of production would not, for some reason, be subject to the process of equalization. The average profit would then be computed on that portion of the social capital which enters the equalization process. It is evident that the average profit can be nothing but the total mass of surplus-values allotted to the various quantities of capital proportionally to their magnitudes in their different spheres of production. It is the total realized unpaid labour, and this total mass, like the paid, congealed or living, labour, obtains in the total mass of commodities and money that falls to the capitalists.

The really difficult question is this: how is this equalization of profits into a general rate of profit brought about, since it is obviously a result rather than a point of departure?

Individual values do not directly translate into prices there is still an important economy wide relationship and therefore Marx does predict that socially necessary labour time plays an important role in determining prices, even though it's not a direct 1:1 correspondence that some people think it is.

# ? Feb 6, 2019 00:08

Moridin920: Nov 15, 2007; by FactsAreUseless

Helsing posted:

If it takes more socially necessary labour time to produce a commodity then, ceterus paribus, that thing should cost more than a commodity that required less socially necessary labour time to produce. You're seriosuly asking me how this is a Marxian analysis?

Seems pretty obvious that if it costs more to produce x it will be worth more, I'd be amazed if Marx was the first one to point that out officially. I think Ricardo did at least.

Moridin920 fucked around with this message at 00:28 on Feb 6, 2019

# ? Feb 6, 2019 00:25

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

Moridin920 posted:

Seems pretty obvious that if it costs more to produce x it will be worth more, I'd be amazed if Marx was the first one to point that out officially

What are you even trying to say?

# ? Feb 6, 2019 00:27

Moridin920: Nov 15, 2007; by FactsAreUseless

A thing's value will reflect the effort of the labor required to produce it.

Like obviously a skilled blacksmith was very highly valued in 1500.

# ? Feb 6, 2019 00:29

OwlFancier: Aug 22, 2013

Unless I am much mistaken Marx is arguing that a thing's value does not determine the price but rather than the collective value of all things produced is equal to the collective price of all things in the economy. And subsequently individual things can fluctuate up and down but the economy as a whole must be zero sum.

And whether or not Marx is the first to make the observation does not prevent it from being an important part of his comprehensive analysis of how capitalist society and economy works.

# ? Feb 6, 2019 00:53

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

OwlFancier posted:

Unless I am much mistaken Marx is arguing that a thing's value does not determine the price but rather than the collective value of all things produced is equal to the collective price of all things in the economy. And subsequently individual things can fluctuate up and down but the economy as a whole must be zero sum.

This is also my interpretation.

This is relevant because as I was noting earlier this is still a predictive theory in which there is supposed to be a relationship between the amount of value produced in the economy and the prices in the economy, even though it's not a 1:1 correlation.

OP's proposed theory has no such predictive content. It's a purely normative statement. So in that sense he's not even mucking around in the 19th century reinventing the labour theory of value, he's all the way back in the 17th century reinventing Locke's theory on the origin of property.

quote:

And whether or not Marx is the first to make the observation does not prevent it from being an important part of his comprehensive analysis of how capitalist society and economy works.

Marx wasn't the first to invent the labour theory of value but I think his particular interpretation of it as being a society wide social construction that was particular to capitalism might have been quite different from the versions of the theory used by Smith and Ricardo.

# ? Feb 6, 2019 21:17

Eschat0n: Jan 16, 2019

Helsing posted:

If you need to invent such an elaborate and ridiculous scenario to justify your theory of value then why not start over, working from the actual historical record instead of something you invented?

It's not elaborate unless you're stupid; hence the joke about it being a spherical cow. Not sure how you got to this point.

roomforthetuna posted:

Looked like mostly agreement to me, just with slightly varying levels of cynicism / abstraction. But also notable, none of us were agreeing with the premise that wealth=work...

If it's agreement it's escaping me. And yes, I can plainly see people are disagreeing with me. Which is, by the way, completely the point of the thread and why it's posted in a forum called Debate & Discussion.

I don't see the need to give up the premise at all; I just think I haven't explained what I had in mind well enough yet. The work involved in gathering the coconuts is simple on purpose, it represents a very trivial amount of work - so that we can start from the hardest point for my argument, where the work required is the least. I don't like arguing against straw men, and while I set up "simplistic" thought experiments because (please excuse my imbecility) I'm not trying isolate what I'm talking about instead of make observations about the real world which are completely caught up in historical circumstance. The work to gather the coconuts was, in my mind, simply stacking them in a pile so you can say they're yours; without that work there is no basis to the claim or easy method of delineation. The alternative is to make the effort, also fairly trivial, to stake a claim on the land the ungathered coconuts lie on, but the land itself is not an RC's wealth unless and until they do that. The point is that no matter how simple I can make it, I can't come up with a situation in which the land itself, without any work, counts as wealth to anyone. Frankly I think this takes on an important moral dimension since I am interested in preventing arguments about wealth arising from the circumstance of birth - just because one is born near a bit of land which is more easily converted to wealth via work than other bits of land doesn't entitle you to that wealth.

The violence argument is a good idea, but I actually think it's pretty trivial to prove violence isn't the basis of all wealth, and even if violence is a step, I kinda see violence as just a special type of work. The RC who gathers coconuts and hides them from another is not threatening anyone or doing violence to anyone except through a broad interpretation of the term "violence" that I don't agree with (whether you agree with my fairly broad interpretation of the word "work" may represent a sticking point worth bringing up later on).

Typo posted:

then why are people willing to purchase completely unimproved pieces of land and count it as among their assets?...

It seems to me that when you buy unimproved land you're doing it through some kind of social organization which sanctions the act and is willing to back that up with law/violence. Furthermore, the land in and of itself is not wealth-providing to society as a whole unless it is eventually improved (through work). I realize that's a nuanced argument. Well, OP, it certainly provides wealth to the individual who buys it, you say. He can sell it to someone else who then improves it, but it certainly represented wealth to that middle man, didn't it? I agree that it did, in the same way that money represents wealth. The land represents the ability to get wealth out of it by work. I can go buy an asteroid made of solid gold tomorrow, but because no one can actually go improve that asteroid, no one in their right mind agrees it represents wealth.

And yes, I am trying pretty hard to come by all this myself, even if others have gone before me. It's more fun, and it's usually more gratifying, when I've done this for a while, to then go and read this poo poo, and find out just how alike or dissimilar the greats were to us when talking out of our asses. If you don't find it entertaining then I'm really not sure why you're in D&D at all, unless you hold the rest of the discussions here to meet some standard you think this one doesn't meet. In which case I suppose this thread ought to be removed.

glowing-fish posted:

This isn't meant to be a rude question, but I am really curious:...

While your first question wasn't rude, the rest of it was. I can be not stilted or artificial; I thought it was funny to write about the topic in that voice. Guess I'm alone in that. Apologies.

I don't get where the accusation of Libertarianism comes from, to be honest. I don't see how anything in the idea that wealth = work is Libertarian. I personally am not Libertarian. Currently the economic strategy I think makes the most sense is some kind of Distributionism, but as you can see, my beliefs really are in a state of flux.

As far as who I am (though Logic preserve me from why you'd think that information was necessary to come to grips with ideas), you could have bothered to read my account info. I've posted a drat sight more there than most. If you really want to know more than that I can be more specific, but really I hesitate to take that as true interest when it seems more likely a grab at ad hominem.

As for your personal history, that's nice. It doesn't matter to me.

OwlFancier posted:

OK but none of us live on desert islands, we live in societies which have laws and the laws say that if you own something, you can tell other people what to do with it....

News flash, people trying to come to grips with complex ideas try to boil them down and separate them into their constituent parts. I'm not going to sit here and pretend to understand modern economic systems. I'm going to start with a really stupidly simple society and work from there. If it makes sense there great, then I get to find out if it still makes sense in more complex figurings. You're free to explain why it breaks down instead of simply asserting it does.

I have no drat clue who jrod is. I have no idea why you have so much trouble taking me at my word. I have not railed against fiat currency; in fact I think I've praised it at least once. I am not obsessed with desert island metaphors, I thought they were fun and valid, which is a nice combo to have. If you'd like to offer some other simple theming for a gedankenexperiment, you go right ahead.

Indeterminacy posted:

I don't think there's anything wrong with going back to first principles every now and then, as long as you don't spend too much time reveling in this pretheoretic state (as we see far too often amongst the pseudo-theorists of the Right)....

Man, honestly, thanks for your post. Was beginning to lose hope in this thread. And yeah, I promise I'm not trying to lead anyone down any stupid paths toward some kind of super right-wing ideology or any stupid ulterior bullshit like that. But yes

Helsing posted:

The LTV,predicts that there will be a correspondence between the labour invested into an object and its exchange value on the market. Right or wrong it is a predictive theory. The OP is just building up rhetorical sandcastles to try and bolster a poorly thought out ethical argument.

That's a really stellar interpretation of my motives, since I've explicitly expressed a desire to remove ethics from the conversation entirely. And yeah, right now I think that if your formulation of the LTV is correct, then I essentially agree with the LTV. Correspondence is a great word to use, too, because obviously there's going to be fluctuation due to demand. What you're missing so far, though, is that I'm also trying to consider value and wealth separately. It seems plausible to me that something could have a lot of value on a market without a lot of wealth in it, given my theory of what constitutes wealth, and conversely you could have a lot of wealth that carries little value in the market.

Wistful of Dollars posted:

Wealth is freedom from want.

The dead are truly the wealthiest. I mean, I get it, but it's not a very useful claim.

Moridin920 posted:

With respect to economics, wealth is the ability to command labor.

I agree you might find The Wealth of Nations interesting.

Capitalists are stupid idiots and routinely ignore externalities to their business transactions (such as this might poison and kill us all) or long term ramifications.

More to the point, in the last few decades the Freidman supply siders have taken over the seats of power and those dudes are ideologically compelled to reduce government size as much as possible. They'd say actually none of those things you mentioned are efficient and private entities can do them better if there is truly a need for those things. They are, of course, idiots. Useful idiots though because they work to further enrich the already ultrawealthy. Mostly via advocating for privatizing public assets and handing them off for rent extraction by private entities.

This is great, too. I mean, I'm going to take it or leave it as far as your opinions on capitalists go (you do you, I'm not there yet), but everything else you say makes a ton of sense. It really seems like I'm gonna want to read Wealth of Nations cover to cover... but also that's a pretty old book and stuff has been said in economics since then (understatement understood). Anything more recent which focus on stuff like the LTV and the meaning of "work" in economics and stuff like that?

Helsing posted:

As I've heard it explained, according to Marx the socially necessary labour time does play a role in determining the exchange value of the commodity. An individual commodity might sell for more or less than its objective value based on local factors like supply and demand or marketing, but those fluctuations are still anchored around the socially necessary labour time taken to produce the commodity. In cases where one commodity consistently sells for more than its real value there has to be another commodity that is consistently selling for less than its real value, so that the economy as a whole balances out.

So while the LTV allows that individual commodities can and often do sell for more or less than their labour content it still argues that there is an important relationship between socially necessary labour time and price.

Would Marx say the commodity consistently selling for less than its real value is human labor? Because I think I can get behind that; it makes sense to me. If work is wealth to me, then the situation in which I am willing to do work for someone else so that they will give me something in return for that work is one in which I am literally trading pure, unadulterated wealth (my work) for something else. The agent getting that work from me is going to profit most from that exchange only when they can get more work out of me than the work they put into getting whatever it is they're giving me in exchange. And this continues on down the line; the craftsman knows in his heart that the work he does for a company is always worth more than the company is willing to pay him, or the consumer is willing to spend. He is forced to make that bad trade because as a finite mortal being he cannot simply make the car, to use an earlier formulation, or print the fiat currency and enforce it with his own personal army. He must rely on others for these things, and is thus compelled to make a "bad" trade. Everyone in a society does this, I suppose.

Reznor posted:

...I mean, I guess op made a rubric for it. But I don't see the explanatory power or use for his theory.

To be sure it's pretty general. I think it helps explain - to me, at least - how the overall wealth of human civilizations has increased over time. I think that's interesting. Looking at a finite planet, you'd think all the stuff there is, is already there - all the wealth is already present and cannot be diminished or improved upon. But manipulations to decrease entropy locally (work) do actually create wealth from the perspective of the folks who can use it.

VirtualBasement posted:

I'm actually surprised this was not the first reply to this thread. OP is even cherry picking replies and doing that "just asking questions" bullshit.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised an old forum behind a paywall has become a pit of internecine conflict, but... is there any way for me to prove I'm not this jrod guy? I mean hell, maybe I'm just like him in terms of my behavior, but if identity really matters aside from behavior this much here, is there anything I can do to show otherwise? Also if I've left out replies which you think are worth responding to, just let me know and I'll say what I think I can say in response to them. I honestly just picked the responses which I wanted to reply to most the first time around... doing what I'm doing here is tiring.

Helsing posted:

OP's proposed theory has no such predictive content. It's a purely normative statement. So in that sense he's not even mucking around in the 19th century reinventing the labour theory of value, he's all the way back in the 17th century reinventing Locke's theory on the origin of property.

This is actually a good point. I suppose I really can't avoid talking about property and ownership like I thought I could; it's really kind of central to what I'm talking about. That does make this discussion take on an ethical dimension as well, like you said earlier, doesn't it? I start to see where you're coming from...

I think I'd have to start off on this tangent by saying, though, that I don't think it's obvious property belongs to the agent whose work brought it into existence. I think property is actually an enforced concept; work is actually constantly sunk into its enforcement. A society with no concept of property, like one of perfect robot agents or something, would be capable of creating wealth through work and not having to sink any of it into enforcing ownership. I mean hell, that's kind of the thing with Communism, right? In a perfect society without notions of property, we could efficiently distribute wealth as required, and so long as no one was an imperfect agent (or at least not very often), then that would be a pretty easy and efficient method of government. It's a perfectly rational economic system borne out of an age in which it seemed to make sense to economic theorists to treat economic agents as perfectly rational spherical cows.

# ? Feb 7, 2019 06:28

roomforthetuna: Mar 22, 2005; I don't need to know anything about virii! My CUSTOM PROGRAM keeps me protected! It's not like they'll try to come in through the Internet or something!

Eschat0n posted:

The violence argument is a good idea, but I actually think it's pretty trivial to prove violence isn't the basis of all wealth

Go on then.

quote:

The RC who gathers coconuts and hides them from another is not threatening anyone or doing violence to anyone except through a broad interpretation of the term "violence" that I don't agree with (whether you agree with my fairly broad interpretation of the word "work" may represent a sticking point worth bringing up later on).

Aha, hiding stuff is an interesting example, and I'm happy to concede that subterfuge is distinct from violence. But if collected, hidden coconuts qualify as wealth, how are non-worked coconuts left on the ground that you know about and other people happen to not know about not equally wealth? Or is your definition of work so loose as to include "becoming aware of the existence of some coconuts" as a kind of work?

This is also falling back to my prior statement that the guy alone on an island of coconuts doesn't have wealth per-se, he just has a comfortable coconutty life. Hidden coconuts are kind of equivalent to coconuts without other people, and as soon as you start trying to leverage them in a more 'wealth' fashion, eg. trading coconuts for herbs, you're making a transition towards something surreptitiously backed with some amount of indirect threat of violence.

But yeah, maybe on a small enough scale and in an environment with little enough scarcity and little enough evident wealth-differential, maybe sometimes a trade can be achieved without any implied threat of violence. Meanwhile, in the real world...

# ? Feb 7, 2019 07:41

Eschat0n: Jan 16, 2019

roomforthetuna posted:

Go on then.

Aha, hiding stuff is an interesting example, and I'm happy to concede that subterfuge is distinct from violence. But if collected, hidden coconuts qualify as wealth, how are non-worked coconuts left on the ground that you know about and other people happen to not know about not equally wealth? Or is your definition of work so loose as to include "becoming aware of the existence of some coconuts" as a kind of work?

This is also falling back to my prior statement that the guy alone on an island of coconuts doesn't have wealth per-se, he just has a comfortable coconutty life. Hidden coconuts are kind of equivalent to coconuts without other people, and as soon as you start trying to leverage them in a more 'wealth' fashion, eg. trading coconuts for herbs, you're making a transition towards something surreptitiously backed with some amount of indirect threat of violence.

But yeah, maybe on a small enough scale and in an environment with little enough scarcity and little enough evident wealth-differential, maybe sometimes a trade can be achieved without any implied threat of violence. Meanwhile, in the real world...

I think hidden coconuts differ from coconuts on the ground in that coconuts on the ground are not gathered in a central location for your (even easier) use, they are also concealed from easy gathering unlike coconuts on the ground, and yes, absolutely part of the work being done here is discovering them; that's part of the work it takes to make use of a coconut.

I do not understand the distinction between people having wealth alone and people having wealth in groups. To me, it makes sense to say a guy living alone with all he needs is very wealthy compared to the girl living without something necessary. The prisoner in solitary with a book is wealthier than the prisoner without any external means of diversion. What I will agree is missing in this case is value; value and wealth seem distinct to me.

I think I have a good motivation for trying to imagine that violence does not back all wealth in the real world, and I think I can justify that motive. My motivation for arguing against violence as the ultimate source of wealth (which again, is a special kind of work, so not totally at odds with what I'm saying) is that it seems to me antithetical to human society. Violence tends to degrade social interactions, whereas trust in a lack of violence tends to form social bonds. This is not to make an ethical argument, by the way - I'm not passing judgment on the morality of institutional violence - I'm just thinking that violence tends to dissolve societies, so it makes a poor basis for an economy. While it is very hard to prove violence is nowhere evident in a complex economy (hence my fallback on coconuts and castaways), perhaps I can make my point by trying to show where wealth arises out of trust or something like that, in a situation where violence would seem an ineffective method of guaranteeing wealth.

When trying to come up with an example of wealth not backed by violence, you have to look outside nations, because nations enforce their currencies and notions of property, and I'd be the first to agree all of that is ultimately backed with threats of violence. It doesn't really matter the type of government in charge; one of the primary purposes of human government in general is provision for the self-defense. I hold that self-defense is tantamount to violence in defense of property; at a minimum, my body is my property and in defending it, I am asserting my right to its wealth (a quick aside: "But Eschat0n, surely the body was not worked for? Is it not an intrinsic source of wealth which is not work?" Eschat0n: "No, for the body was indeed worked for by the parents. We are not jellyfish."). I'm sure I'm not the first to make that argument...

So where can I find wealth outside of nations in a more "realistic" example? Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, but so far as I am aware no one followed up with The Wealth Outside of Nations. Criminal activity is outside of nations in that the wealth created by it is not protected by national violence, but it seems a poor choice because criminals simply replace institutional violence with their own. Cryptocurrency is a good example, but I think that ultimately it equates to "hiding the coconuts" and I'd like to find a counterexample that doesn't use subterfuge, since I've already given a trivial example of that. I'll focus instead on three examples of "modern" wealth creation that I don't think really rely on violence:

1. Some forms of international trade. Certainly in many cases of international trade there is implicit violence, but sometimes countries with no plausible way of inflicting pain on each other due to geographical distance, lack of pertinent international law, etc., will trade anyway. I think in that case it's really just down to trust and need - if we were to try to reduce this, we would find that functionally they are playing the "cooperation" strategy in a prisoner's dilemma.

2. Discovery. When an economic agent discovers an oil field in international waters, wealth is created by that work (the knowledge of where to go to get oil). Though there are laws which protect this kind of work, they are tenuously enforced in many cases, and wealth seems primarily backed up by who can best utilize it first, or who even has the technological ability to do so.

3. Gratis work. Sometimes people seem to just do things that improve their society without any serious expectation attached. This one is my favorite example - I have a computer at home running OpenWRT. OpenWRT is an extremely valuable program to me; I cannot make it myself, and it does something I need - provide internet to my whole house from a tethered phone - but the license under which it is published is not really enforced - and even if I somehow violated it, it seems highly unlikely I would actually be pursued for it. Yet people make OpenWRT and distribute it, and that wealth spreads throughout the community. I just don't see where violence is involved in that transaction. I don't know why people do this, and I'm too cynical to suppose it's just pure altruism - perhaps it's just part of their self-improvement process (yet if so, why go to the trouble to make it freely available?), or perhaps they get a feeling of accomplishment/do-gooding from it... in any event, the motive is immaterial; the wealth is not.

This is far from making a convincing argument, by the way, that trust (or anything else) underlies all wealth in societies. Right now it's going to just have to be restricted to "it is true that not all wealth derives from violence" because that's just about all I can wrap my head around right now.

Eschat0n fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Feb 7, 2019

# ? Feb 7, 2019 16:50

roomforthetuna: Mar 22, 2005; I don't need to know anything about virii! My CUSTOM PROGRAM keeps me protected! It's not like they'll try to come in through the Internet or something!

Eschat0n posted:

What I will agree is missing in this case is value; value and wealth seem distinct to me.

I would agree with the inverse; I think we're using opposite definitions of these two words. I'd say coconuts on your own have value, but are not wealth.

quote:

OpenWRT is an extremely valuable program to me;

That looks more like my usage - don't you mean OpenWRT is an extremely wealthable program?

# ? Feb 7, 2019 17:02

glowing-fish: Feb 18, 2013; Keep grinding,
I hope you level up!

Eschat0n posted:

.

While your first question wasn't rude, the rest of it was. I can be not stilted or artificial; I thought it was funny to write about the topic in that voice. Guess I'm alone in that. Apologies.

I don't get where the accusation of Libertarianism comes from, to be honest. I don't see how anything in the idea that wealth = work is Libertarian. I personally am not Libertarian. Currently the economic strategy I think makes the most sense is some kind of Distributionism, but as you can see, my beliefs really are in a state of flux.

As far as who I am (though Logic preserve me from why you'd think that information was necessary to come to grips with ideas), you could have bothered to read my account info. I've posted a drat sight more there than most. If you really want to know more than that I can be more specific, but really I hesitate to take that as true interest when it seems more likely a grab at ad hominem.

As for your personal history, that's nice. It doesn't matter to me.

Well, your attitude of being curiously naive did seem a bit too much for me. When someone asks questions that show they are trying to "reinvent the wheel" about topics that are covered in a community college Economics 101 or Sociology 101 course, it is kind of natural for me to think that they are not innocently asking questions, but are trying to drive the conversation towards their typical set of beliefs.

Normally, one of the rules of SA is to not dox people (try to reveal their identities), but since you linked your blog (https://leadprophet.blogspot.com/) on your user info page, I think it is fair for me to quote at least part of what you have written on there. Maybe it doesn't reflect your current economic and political views, but you seem to have established some viewpoints at some times:

quote:

America could benefit greatly from a Republican party that stands for the entrepreneur, the individualist, and the sustainable lifestyle. Some party members already have inklings of putting their feet through this door; Romney was really a moderate defeated because of being backed by a rabidly right-wing party that in all probability was the driving cause behind him saying some very unsavory things that voters (like me) just couldn't stomach. I suspect the same was true of McCain, the last time I voted for Obama. Obama is a great president, but it would be great to see a new kind of Republican the next election competing with whoever is tapped to succeed Obama. A Republican prepared to be competitive and radical - only in the sense that they are rethinking what always has made the conservative approach appealing. That Republican could stir up the new majority and do major good for the country and its world. In a future that looks to change our lives so much, so rapidly, we could all benefit from a powerful voice for conservative nation-building philosophy.

It might seem unfair for me to quote something you wrote six years ago, but if you already had established views about economics and social policy six years ago, it seems like you already have some ideas you want to explain to us. If you have already decided that standing for the "entrepreneur" and "individualist" are the political goals that a political party should pursue, it is highly disingenuous to pretend that you are still trying to figure out the basics of economics by inventing desert island fables.

glowing-fish fucked around with this message at 18:38 on Feb 7, 2019

# ? Feb 7, 2019 18:35

Wistful of Dollars: Aug 25, 2009

Eschat0n posted:

The dead are truly the wealthiest. I mean, I get it, but it's not a very useful claim.

Of course it is; I'm right.

# ? Feb 7, 2019 18:49

Edgar Allen Ho: Apr 3, 2017; by sebmojo

Wealth is what the owner of the Colonial Coconut Company has after the RCs are fenced into 1/5 of their native island as a compromise because the government granted full control of the island to said company in trade for a share of the profits. If the RCs wanted to exploit the coconuts maybe they should�ve made a better offer. This is a free market.

# ? Feb 7, 2019 19:05

Eschat0n: Jan 16, 2019

glowing-fish posted:

Well, your attitude of being curiously naive did seem a bit too much for me. When someone asks questions that show they are trying to "reinvent the wheel" about topics that are covered in a community college Economics 101 or Sociology 101 course, it is kind of natural for me to think that they are not innocently asking questions, but are trying to drive the conversation towards their typical set of beliefs.

Normally, one of the rules of SA is to not dox people (try to reveal their identities), but since you linked your blog (https://leadprophet.blogspot.com/) on your user info page, I think it is fair for me to quote at least part of what you have written on there. Maybe it doesn't reflect your current economic and political views, but you seem to have established some viewpoints at some times:

It might seem unfair for me to quote something you wrote six years ago, but if you already had established views about economics and social policy six years ago, it seems like you already have some ideas you want to explain to us. If you have already decided that standing for the "entrepreneur" and "individualist" are the political goals that a political party should pursue, it is highly disingenuous to pretend that you are still trying to figure out the basics of economics by inventing desert island fables.

Is it within my rights on this forum to ask you to stop posting until you actually want to engage with the topic? You seem to have a serious problem with taking people at their word. You literally quoted me saying "my beliefs are in a state of flux." Six years ago, yes, I had a certain set of ideas - but even more importantly, why does it matter that I had established notions six years ago? I'm not dragging those notions into this conversation - that quote of mine is political in nature, not economical. They are related but separate.

If all you want to establish is that I'm not coming to this conversation ex nihilo... great. Yes. Of course. I'm 33 years old; I have had a few thoughts in my brain before now.

# ? Feb 7, 2019 19:07

Infinite Karma: Oct 23, 2004; Good as dead

To make the coconut analogy make sense, you have to bring in another element. Whether coconuts represent a store of value, or whether they represent literal food that you're going to eat, most definitions of wealth wouldn't include them.

Wealth would be the coconut palms. The palms are necessary to create the coconuts everyone depends on. If nobody owns them, and everybody just gathers the coconuts that naturally fall, the wealth is being shared. As soon as there aren't more coconuts to go around than can be gathered (i.e. scarcity), people are going to be either rushing to gather them first when they fall (or whatever other method is legitimate to claim them), resulting in violence when people disagree (or in passive violence when the passive people starve to death), or they're going to set down rules for who gets what coconuts as they become available. Those rules are ultimately backed by violence as well. The intangible "right" to a portion of what the palms are growing is Wealth - an exclusionary method of accruing coconuts.

If somebody owns the coconut palms, that's the Capitalist definition of Wealth. They get everything the palms produce. Nobody else can gather those particular coconuts, and that kind of ownership is also backed by violence. People without their own coconut palms would have to make a deal with the palm owners to get access to coconuts. The deal would likely be that the owners get some coconuts without having to gather them on their own, in return for giving access to the palms to the non-Wealthy.

Because coconuts can also be planted to grow new palms, there is a chance to create more Wealth. But they need to be planted somewhere, making land, even empty land, valuable. Since land is scarce, you also need rules to decide who gets to use what land to plant coconut palms. Now land is also a form of Wealth, and its ownership is backed by violence. This is turtles all the way down until all the natural resources are claimed. At which point newcomers into the coconut economy who don't already have Wealth at their disposal are at a big disadvantage in the coconut economy. In order to gain any Wealth at all, they have to get the Wealth, instead of just the coconuts, from the people who currently own it. Violence prevents them from working outside the rules of the coconut economy to gain new Wealth. And the violence of needing to consume food and water and shelter to stay alive prevents them from refusing to participate in the coconut economy if they don't think the rules are fair.

The examples of finding oil in international waters are disingenuous - there are still rules and laws that govern international ownership. There are still "finders keepers" rules where the first one there gets to lay claim to the resources. Trust is just a shortcut to make transactions backed by violence easier. If you break trust, there are fallback rules, and fallback rules for those rules, because violence is only useful as a threat - when you actually carry it out, nothing is gained. But if someone broke trust enough times, the only thing left to do is remove them from the economy with violence, so they can't further harm the good faith actors. Meeting violence with violence, in order to break the rules without consequence, is the only alternative to the rule of "law backed by violence". Which is, you know, violence.

# ? Feb 7, 2019 19:23

COMRADES: Apr 3, 2017; by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Eschat0n posted:

Is it within my rights on this forum to ask you to stop posting until you actually want to engage with the topic?

You can ask, they probably won't. Honestly just let it go some people are just gonna insist you are arguing in bad faith or whatever and that's that. If it gets too bad a mod usually steps in.

quote:

it is highly disingenuous to pretend that you are still trying to figure out the basics of economics by inventing desert island fables.

You just really got stuck on that desert island analogy huh?

Let it go dude who cares. Even if this is all some elaborate socratic just asking questions am really a libertarian deal then so what? There are 3rd parties who might read through this who are just figuring basics out. Argue the merits in Debate & Discussion or don't if you don't think it is worth your time.

What's gonna happen you're gonna get them to reveal they are in fact a libertarian and then what? You'll go "AHA!" and leave the thread? Just skip to that bit then if you're so sure and let it go.

I don't think any of this has taken on a particularly libertarian/ancap bent tbh.

COMRADES fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Feb 7, 2019

# ? Feb 7, 2019 19:27

Typo: Aug 19, 2009; Chernigov Military Aviation Lyceum
The Fighting Slowpokes

Eschat0n posted:

It seems to me that when you buy unimproved land you're doing it through some kind of social organization which sanctions the act and is willing to back that up with law/violence. Furthermore, the land in and of itself is not wealth-providing to society as a whole unless it is eventually improved (through work). I realize that's a nuanced argument. Well, OP, it certainly provides wealth to the individual who buys it, you say. He can sell it to someone else who then improves it, but it certainly represented wealth to that middle man, didn't it? I agree that it did, in the same way that money represents wealth. The land represents the ability to get wealth out of it by work. I can go buy an asteroid made of solid gold tomorrow, but because no one can actually go improve that asteroid, no one in their right mind agrees it represents wealth.

so basically what you are saying is that property has exchange value but no use value

# ? Feb 7, 2019 19:29

COMRADES: Apr 3, 2017; by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Typo posted:

so basically what you are saying is that property has exchange value but no use value

I think what they are getting at is that land has use value but doesn't in of itself provide anything. People have to farm it / build on it / etc.

Wealth is the ability to command labor, and a nation's wealth is the stream of goods/services it creates. So yeah land just by itself is a raw input more than wealth itself.

COMRADES fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Feb 7, 2019

# ? Feb 7, 2019 19:31

Pablo Nergigante: Apr 16, 2002

Land has minimal use value until you produce Worker units to improve the tiles

# ? Feb 7, 2019 19:41

Infinite Karma: Oct 23, 2004; Good as dead

COMRADES posted:

I think what they are getting at is that land has use value but doesn't in of itself provide anything. People have to farm it / build on it / etc.

Wealth is the ability to command labor, and a nation's wealth is the stream of goods/services it creates. So yeah land just by itself is a raw input more than wealth itself.

Land is wealth because it's all claimed. You can't decide to make your own land from scratch instead of buying it off someone else. So it commands labor by forcing everyone to give someone compensation for using whatever land they want to use.

# ? Feb 7, 2019 20:00

Eschat0n: Jan 16, 2019

As a quick aside, and since my blog was already posted, if anyone is is mystifyingly obsessed with learning more about my preceding thoughts and beliefs, here's a blog post of mine from 2017, which is reasonably recent:

https://leadprophet.blogspot.com/2017/12/big-ideas-about-free-markets-regulation.html

Hopefully that will dispel any further sidetracks about my identity, faith, etc. Please don't comment on its contents here, though. Not wanting to derail the present conversation.

# ? Feb 7, 2019 20:20

glowing-fish: Feb 18, 2013; Keep grinding,
I hope you level up!

Eschat0n posted:

Is it within my rights on this forum to ask you to stop posting until you actually want to engage with the topic? You seem to have a serious problem with taking people at their word. You literally quoted me saying "my beliefs are in a state of flux." Six years ago, yes, I had a certain set of ideas - but even more importantly, why does it matter that I had established notions six years ago? I'm not dragging those notions into this conversation - that quote of mine is political in nature, not economical. They are related but separate.

If all you want to establish is that I'm not coming to this conversation ex nihilo... great. Yes. Of course. I'm 33 years old; I have had a few thoughts in my brain before now.

Sure, you can ask, and I will even give you the benefit of the doubt. If you think that people on this forum reacted suspiciously, it is because a lot of people who make these types of arguments, the "Just asking questions" and "Market economies are all based on individual choice" and the "People in a state of nature are free to use the world around them, society then arises from their voluntary associations", all of what we describe as naive libertarianism, are usually people from middle class or above backgrounds who don't understand what type of advantages their background gives them. I can't really talk about what "wealth" means without talking about the lives of real people, from different backgrounds, and not theoretical coconut harvesters.

So, you want to know about wealth? I can explain it pretty easily.

1. Having a lot of something of value. Imagine you have a garage full of...some small, easily tradeable commodity. You found a bunch of USB battery packs that fell off the back of a truck, and now you have a garage full of them, and you can sell them to make money. You have a wealth of them. Or, for that matter, we can just make it easier. You have a bunch of gold and money. That is wealth. But, the thing about that wealth is, it is going to run out. It is a finite supply. And once you are done with it, you are done. Also, notice this is yet another theoretical situation: people don't end up with a garage full of stuff that fell off the back of a truck often. At least, I don't.

2. Having something that can make something of value. This is where your wealth can get meaningful, because when you have a tool, either in the form of a physical object, or a skill, you can now make money by creating other things of value. Mostly because you have an indefinite amount of production. Instead of having a limited amount of batteries in your garage, you have a machine that recharges batteries. People come from around the neighborhood to recharge their USB battery packs. If we ignore the cost of electricity and the fact your machine will wear out, you can make money forever because you own something that creates more things. Notice this is still a pretty theoretical situation: how many people have wealth in the form of a single tool that they can use by themselves, that requires little or no other inputs? Maybe if you have a knife-sharpening wheel in your garage.

3. Having the political, social, cultural, moral, etc. right to claim the share of someone else's work. And this is what wealth really is, the social agreement that people have an abstract title to something other people produce.

Since you mentioned the city you live in, I will talk about the largest employer in that city, Fiat Chrysler. At least a quarter of Fiat Chrysler is owned by one family in Italy, the Agnelli family. The Agnelli family's origins go back, apparently, to the early 1820s, when they were small scale nobility, who apparently started a business, intermarried with more major nobility, played politics, made money, dominated Italian business and society for about two centuries, and now own a big stake of the US auto industry.

So rather than going from a bottom-up approach, trying to explain how the actions of isolated actors lead to society, a lot of these things can be explained only through their historical/social context: the Agnelli family, starting 200 years ago, had the "social capital": social standing, education, relationships, to seem, in the eyes of their fellow people, deserving of having a share of production. This has a lot to do with the cultural/social/religious structure of Italy 200 years ago, which I couldn't really describe in detail. That social power changed and evolved as Italy went from a semi-feudal agricultural economy to an industrial economy, those same social tools now owned stocks and bonds and put them as directors of companies, and now they are the owners of the largest piece of capital in Rockford, Illinois, and get to enjoy, for legal and social reasons, that wealth. But there is no way to really explain that from the bottom up, you have to go top-down, looking at the entire social and legal framework of a society to understand why the Agnelli's got to that point.

# ? Feb 7, 2019 20:38

Eschat0n: Jan 16, 2019

Infinite Karma posted:

To make the coconut analogy make sense, you have to bring in another element. Whether coconuts represent a store of value, or whether they represent literal food that you're going to eat, most definitions of wealth wouldn't include them.

Wealth would be the coconut palms. The palms are necessary to create the coconuts everyone depends on. If nobody owns them, and everybody just gathers the coconuts that naturally fall, the wealth is being shared. As soon as there aren't more coconuts to go around than can be gathered (i.e. scarcity), people are going to be either rushing to gather them first when they fall (or whatever other method is legitimate to claim them), resulting in violence when people disagree (or in passive violence when the passive people starve to death), or they're going to set down rules for who gets what coconuts as they become available. Those rules are ultimately backed by violence as well. The intangible "right" to a portion of what the palms are growing is Wealth - an exclusionary method of accruing coconuts.

If somebody owns the coconut palms, that's the Capitalist definition of Wealth. They get everything the palms produce. Nobody else can gather those particular coconuts, and that kind of ownership is also backed by violence. People without their own coconut palms would have to make a deal with the palm owners to get access to coconuts. The deal would likely be that the owners get some coconuts without having to gather them on their own, in return for giving access to the palms to the non-Wealthy.

Because coconuts can also be planted to grow new palms, there is a chance to create more Wealth. But they need to be planted somewhere, making land, even empty land, valuable. Since land is scarce, you also need rules to decide who gets to use what land to plant coconut palms. Now land is also a form of Wealth, and its ownership is backed by violence. This is turtles all the way down until all the natural resources are claimed. At which point newcomers into the coconut economy who don't already have Wealth at their disposal are at a big disadvantage in the coconut economy. In order to gain any Wealth at all, they have to get the Wealth, instead of just the coconuts, from the people who currently own it. Violence prevents them from working outside the rules of the coconut economy to gain new Wealth. And the violence of needing to consume food and water and shelter to stay alive prevents them from refusing to participate in the coconut economy if they don't think the rules are fair.

I think I basically agree with your conception of the progress of economies, with two caveats. The first is that I want to point out the Capitalist definition of wealth as you formulate it is not my conception of wealth. My conception makes a distinction between objects and the wealth they represent; the difference is in the work it takes to use those objects. Again - owning an asteroid made of solid gold somewhere around Alpha Centauri B doesn't make you wealthy at all. You can't use it; you don't meaningfully own it.

Secondly, when you say "And the violence of needing to consume food and water and shelter to stay alive prevents them from refusing to participate in the coconut economy if they don't think the rules are fair" - I disagree that we can describe the natural state of existence as violence without the word losing its usefulness. It is true that people feel compelled by exigency to participate in economies where they are at a disadvantage - if I'm not mistaken, I'd already brought that up. But it is possible to be "compelled" by forces other than violence. One can feel compelled by compassion, or pity, or hunger, or gravity. Let's not lump all that together under the heading "violence."

Infinite Karma posted:

The examples of finding oil in international waters are disingenuous - there are still rules and laws that govern international ownership. There are still "finders keepers" rules where the first one there gets to lay claim to the resources. Trust is just a shortcut to make transactions backed by violence easier. If you break trust, there are fallback rules, and fallback rules for those rules, because violence is only useful as a threat - when you actually carry it out, nothing is gained. But if someone broke trust enough times, the only thing left to do is remove them from the economy with violence, so they can't further harm the good faith actors. Meeting violence with violence, in order to break the rules without consequence, is the only alternative to the rule of "law backed by violence". Which is, you know, violence.

I don't think I'm being disingenuous; at worst perhaps I am ignorant. If you find a super-valuable alien spaceship crashlanded in antarctica and you get your team there first to pull it out (and you do the work of killing the shapeshifting occupants), then in reality when the dust clears, you've got the death ray technology and everyone else can sue you in international court all they want, but you have the wealth. If you grab that oil you found, agents can make claims to it and sue; they can even try to assert naval power, but sometimes the disputing parties really have no physical way of getting there to stop you, and in the time it takes the courts to resolve the issue you'll have built a platform and sucked all that oil up and sold it. Violence didn't really enter into it because it couldn't be applied; you simply had the technical ability to get there and others didn't. It's an edge case, but it can happen. Even if you don't think it happens on earth (it totally does), you can easily see how this could happen if the USA were to make a concerted effort to colonize Mars.

# ? Feb 7, 2019 20:43

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# ? Apr 24, 2024 09:45

Killstick: Jan 17, 2010

To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women!

# ? Feb 7, 2019 20:45

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > What is Wealth?

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