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Pablo Nergigante posted:Land has minimal use value until you produce Worker units to improve the tiles This loving guy 
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Feb 7, 2019 20:53
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Eschat0n posted: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. It's not hard to understand, it's just elaborate. You can lampshade this by making self aware jokes about spheres in a vacuum but that doesn't change the fact you're developing your arguments through references to a historically impossible situation. It's incumbent on you to justify why this sprawling desert island metaphor maps onto any real world closely enough that it can actually illuminate a real world situation. quote: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 think that the sentence I've bolded here is really crucial. You are assuming that the best way to understand a complicated real world situation is to begin with an intentionally simplified and abstracted situation. Then we check how our intuitions react to this highly abstract situation and, I guess, later attempt to map these intuitions onto a real world situation so that we can understand the real world situation more clearly. To some extent it's inevitable that we will abstract situations. I did the same thing in my first post in this thread when I described the process that determines the economic value of a car. However, you're operating on such a high level of abstraction that you've completely exiled the real world and any actual history. You've gone so far into the clouds that there just isn't much applicability to what you're describing. Everything you say is coherent on its own terms but has little to no connection to anything that has ever happened in the actually existing world. Let's really zero in on the following statements that you make: quote: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. Notice how whenever you try to discuss wealth it immediately turns into a discussion of how you stake a claim that other people will recognize. You see you keep trying to simplify this process down to the individual level but that is literally impossible because something like 'wealth' only makes sense in the context of a world inhabited by other people. Wealth necessarily involves your ability to control access to a resource. That control inevitably entails some relationship with other people. These relationships are the basis upon which we can seperate some random plot of land from something that counts as 'wealth'. Every historical society on earth involves this process of judging different claims to access of resources or of determining who gets to do what with society's available stock of wealth. You need to give us a really good reason why our understanding is somehow improved by ignoring all those real world examples and focusing on one that you invented. Why should we expect the moral intuitions generated by your thought experiment will be a useful guide for understanding a world that has no real resemblance to your metaphor? quote: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 having read what you've posted so far, my biggest question for you is what you're actually trying to accomplish with these musings. This is actually a really important question. Theories exist to help inform us or to guide us in reaching certain conclusions. The kind of understanding we want to achieve has an important influence on how we design our theories. I ask this because while you have stated that you don't want to talk about the morality of ownership that seems to be the entire point of your thought experiment. This is what I was getting at when I brought up Marx's Labour Theory of Value earlier in the thread. The purpose of Marx's labour theory of value was to help us understand how the capitalist economy works, to reveal the underlying 'laws of motion' that Marx believed would allow us to understand the system and predict some of its behaviours. For Marx, the fact that labour power was the only commodity that could add more value than it cost was a fundamental insight for understanding class conflict as well as the economic cycles of booms and busts. For Marx and his followers the labour theory of value can actually be used to predict future economic events. My issue with your wealth = work theory is that it doesn't seem to be designed to actually make any predictions or tell us anything novel. You just seem to be restating things we already know but giving them a new interpretation. Let's say we completely accept your definition of wealth = work, so what? What actually changes? How would this lead us to view the world different? What does this help us predict or understand? I ask this because it seems like the only real purpose of your theory would be to tell us whether someone's ownership of something is ethically justified. It's very much in the tradition of Locke arguing that the origin of property is when we "mix our labour" with the natural world. This is a normative theory about justifying uneven distributions of resources by arguing that those uneven distributions are the result of justified hard work by the haves and slothful indolence by the have nots. Other than that the theory doesn't really tell us anything - it doesn't seem to give us any way of understanding the world, it merely offers an interpretation of the world that happens to justify a particular distribution of resources. quote: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. See above for why I think you're developing a fundamentally normative theory. Also, apologies if my initial reply was unduly hostile. As you may have realized by now you inadvertently had a lot of us thinking of a notorious previous poster who would start threads like this but who was, suffice it to say, somewhat less open minded or genuinely intellectual curious than you seem to be. I take issue with your attempt to separate wealth from value. Again I have to ask, what's the actual value of holding them as separate things? What's the objective of your theory of wealth? What is it going to help you do or understand better? It seems like for most of these questions it'd be more precise to examine "value" than "wealth", not least of all because value lends itself to objective measurement somewhat more easily than wealth does. "Wealth" in a very real sense doesn't exist. The word itself is a metaphor that covers an infinite variation of discrete phenomena that can't actually be compared to one another. Freedom from hunger is a form of wealth, prestige is a form of wealth, etc. In this sense I don't really know how you can compare the wealth of two people in any precise way. I don't know if Gates or Bezos has more 'weath' in terms of who has the most access to use value. What I can maybe try to actually learn about is how much value each one controls. I feel like you're not really engaging with how slippery and vague the term you're trying to use is. Similarly, your definition of 'work' seems to vague that it feels like the fact I have to breath to stay alive would count as "work" under your system, so as long as I'm breathing I'm working for any wealth I have because after all were I to stop oxygenating my brain I would die and then be unable to enjoy my wealth. quote: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? Yeah, don't start with the Wealth of Nations unless you've got all the time in the world. I think this thread can develop some more up to date recommendations. quote: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. In theory any commodity can sell for more or less than its socially necessary labour time. Diamonds are a notorious example of a relatively common stone whose value has been inflated through artificial scarcity and clever marketing. The result is that you have a situation where diamonds consistently sell for a higher price than the objective amount of socially necessary labour time required to produce them. This implies that somewhere else in the economy there's an equivalent number of commodities that are selling for less than their objective value. The result being that at the economy wide level everything balances out and the value of everything produced is equivalent to the total prices of the economy. What you seem to be referring to is Marx's specific argument that labour power is specifically the only input that generates more value for the capitalist than its cost. This is an important teminological difference in Marxism. Strictly speaking Marx would say that you cannot sell labour, only "labour power". Marxist economist Richard Wolff explains the distinction as follows: Richard Wolf posted:Labor is not a commodity in the Marxian theoretical system, while labor power is. Labor is something humans have always done to produce the goods and services upon which life depends. Labor power is something very historically specific, is often absent in long periods of human history, and reaches its fullest presence in capitalism. Labor power is what a worker sells to an employer. The employer "consumes" the purchased labor power by setting its owner - the worker - to perform the laboring activity (to do labor) alongside/with tools, equipment, and raw materials. The worker is paid a wage in exchange for providing to the employer what he/she owns, namely his/her labor power for a set period of time. The goal of the employer in consuming the labor power he/she has purchased is the commodity emerging at the end of the process of production, a commodity whose value (socially neccesary labor time) exceeds the combined value of (1) the used up tools, equipment and raw materials, plus (2) the value of the wage paid for the purchased labor power. That excess, surplus value, is the driving objective of a capitalist employer. I think the rest of your characterization of Marx is broadly correct. Marx wasn't quite talking about this when he said it but I think his quote about how "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." quote: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. As others have said just ignore the haters. quote: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... Again, my issue with your argument is that even if your definition of work is internally consistent I don't see what it matters. All you seem to be doing is offering a new way of defining existing phenomena. I don't understand what enhancement of understanding we gain if we decide to just label all wealth 'work'. How should this change our views? What insights does this reveal? As I've tried to point out, other work based theories of value (which I think is pretty close to what you mean by wealth even if its not the exact same) are supposed to actually help us understand questions like why does a car cost more than a bicycle or why capitalism has periodic economic crises of over production. What does your theory help us understand? Because - and apologies if I'm misunderstanding - it really seems like all it does is seek to shuffle around our ethical intuitions about ownership.
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Feb 7, 2019 21:19
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Eschat0n posted: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: Not to be overly pedantic, and I want to respect your request that we focus on what you've written here, but I do feel the need to point out that your argument that "if we accept that nature's food chains are free, it's not a great leap to suppose that the first markets were also quite free" is actually a gigantic leap. You really cannot derive economic history out of first principles about nature. I know it sucks but you've gotta put in the spadework to study history in detail and understand it.
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Feb 7, 2019 21:25
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Eschat0n posted: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." It's not possible to be compelled by compassion or pity, that's nonsense in this argument. Compassion is voluntary, compulsion is not. quote: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. If you lay claim to the oil you find according to the law of the land, and I come and pump it and take it back to my house anyway, that's a physical possibility. But if I'm breaking the laws that are enforced by violence, there will be repercussions for my transgression. If there aren't repercussions (because the law is on my side) AND I didn't have to do violence to get the oil, in what sense did you actually have a claim? If you wanted the oil back, what's stopping you from just taking it back? Violence. The only way this non-violence edge case example makes sense is if I flew to Mars and did something illegal. And that's because the law literally can't go to Mars to enforce itself.
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Feb 7, 2019 23:18
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ok is op basically just reaching the conclusion property rights only exist insofar a state exists to enforce it?
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Feb 7, 2019 23:30
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Typo posted:ok is op basically just reaching the conclusion property rights only exist insofar a state exists to enforce it? Seems so Private property is theft, OP Read the Conquest of Bread imo
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Feb 8, 2019 00:15
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Typo posted:ok is op basically just reaching the conclusion property rights only exist insofar a state exists to enforce it? As far as I can tell, trying very hard not to come to that conclusion.
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Feb 8, 2019 00:25
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Eschat0n posted: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. In Marxist terms, what you're referring to as wealth is access to use-values. Use-values are specific things that can be used to satisfy your needs or wants. Use-values can be obtained from nature, or bought, or produced from the labor of your serfs and/or slaves. So with this definition you can be wealthy by living in natural abundance, or by being rich and having access to a market than can provide all of your necessary use-values, or by owning a Roman latifundia. The reason why people are insisting that wealth is connected to violence is because the distribution of access to use-values in a society is rarely even, and the threat of violence can be used to keep people in their place. I actually agree with you, though, that this is not necessarily the case. Convincing people that this uneven distribution is fair is a far more powerful, subtle, and effective way of maintaining things, and boiling everything down to the threat of violence is reductive.
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Feb 8, 2019 07:51
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Helsing posted:It's not hard to understand, it's just elaborate. You can lampshade this by making self aware jokes about spheres in a vacuum but that doesn't change the fact you're developing your arguments through references to a historically impossible situation. It's incumbent on you to justify why this sprawling desert island metaphor maps onto any real world closely enough that it can actually illuminate a real world situation. Helsing posted:Notice how whenever you try to discuss wealth it immediately turns into a discussion of how you stake a claim that other people will recognize. You see you keep trying to simplify this process down to the individual level but that is literally impossible because something like 'wealth' only makes sense in the context of a world inhabited by other people. Wealth necessarily involves your ability to control access to a resource. That control inevitably entails some relationship with other people. These relationships are the basis upon which we can seperate some random plot of land from something that counts as 'wealth'. Helsing posted:Every historical society on earth involves this process of judging different claims to access of resources or of determining who gets to do what with society's available stock of wealth. You need to give us a really good reason why our understanding is somehow improved by ignoring all those real world examples and focusing on one that you invented. Why should we expect the moral intuitions generated by your thought experiment will be a useful guide for understanding a world that has no real resemblance to your metaphor? Helsing posted:So having read what you've posted so far, my biggest question for you is what you're actually trying to accomplish with these musings. This is actually a really important question. Theories exist to help inform us or to guide us in reaching certain conclusions. The kind of understanding we want to achieve has an important influence on how we design our theories. I think that Marx has it specifically wrong about labor's power; it does NOT add more wealth than it cost; it is itself a pure, raw sort of wealth; the potentiality of the human worker to make anything. What we choose to spend our time on is necessarily expending a tremendous opportunity cost; we are exchanging parts of our lives for a specific work which can never repay the time and effort which was put into it. To me, work cannot escape the arrow of time; to create local reductions in entropy one must accept greater increases across the whole of the system. You will never get out more than you put in. Marx may be right that labor still retains more wealth than other forms of capital because it is closer to the raw potential prior to its expenditure - that I grant him; that may help explain the predictive power of his analysis. But to presume human work actually turns back the clock of time and inexorably heats the engine of Progress is pure Industrial fancy, ignorant of the laws of the universe which constrain all human endeavor. This is not a mere observation without implication; this speaks to us about sustainability and the influence of the human condition on the economy. I think it should force us to acknowledge that harmonious economic systems are not possible without tremendous human sacrifice, which is why we have not historically had them. People will not usually willingly throw away their satisfaction for the good of the group; that impression is the downfall of communism. My formulation of wealth predicts the exact problem with command economy experiments of the 20th and 21st centuries which manifested itself. Ironically, the traditional societies which socialist experiments often blew away in search of a better tomorrow may well have provided the social bonds needed to induce people to sacrifice more readily for the good of the group; to see group success as more important than their own individual success... but that's a conversation for another time. This is not about denying the importance, by the way, of sustainable economies. To the contrary; achieving sustainability is all the more critical once one acknowledges the fundamental inequality at the base of human endeavor and the real, tragic, irreversible damage that is done to the commons in the course of typical human economic activity. But people should not go into that fight blind to what awaits them; as wealth is work and does not return to us what we put into it, we will not have sustainability without giving up a great deal. Sacrifice is imperative, however impossible it may be to ethically compel a populace to embrace it. I would go so far as to say that this problem may even represent the Great Filter figured in the Fermi Paradox. The capitalist says we can spend and enjoy without real consequence, but the socialist says we can spend and enjoy without real consequence as well - only so long as we follow their opposing recipes for economic well-being. Only the realist says you'll have to sometimes forgo children, or yachts, or strip malls, or life-saving medicines, because there is a fundamental inequality at the bottom of the system we live in. No one's interested in getting by when the promise of fabulous prosperity for all is supposedly on the table. So the charade continues: no taxes! universal basic income! It keeps getting better and better while the world burns. There's no attempt by me here to come up with a better alternative, by the way; that's why it's not worth crowing about as much as it might sound like it; that's a thought for another time as well, if and when I feel like my basic understanding of economics is on-point. People make a great deal out of value; but take away the market and replace it with a pure communist society run by angels; you'd still have wealth (equitably distributed). Value, however, would be absent, because there is no trade to be made; each and all have what they need, and if some inequality should arise, the balance will be restored by the benevolent bureaucratic class. But that wealth would still not be without its costs; to the world and the workers who produced it from the world; the system from which it was taken. The trick of sustainability would still haunt such a perfect society, even with value totally absent. That's why I think it's worth separating wealth and value. Typo posted:ok is op basically just reaching the conclusion property rights only exist insofar a state exists to enforce it? Eschat0n fucked around with this message at 06:27 on Feb 12, 2019 |
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Feb 12, 2019 06:19
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Moon Shrimp posted:In Marxist terms, what you're referring to as wealth is access to use-values. Use-values are specific things that can be used to satisfy your needs or wants. Use-values can be obtained from nature, or bought, or produced from the labor of your serfs and/or slaves. So with this definition you can be wealthy by living in natural abundance, or by being rich and having access to a market than can provide all of your necessary use-values, or by owning a Roman latifundia. Yeah, perhaps wealth is too freighted a term. I'd be OK with calling it use-values, I think.
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Feb 12, 2019 06:20
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Eschat0n posted:Yeah, I'm glad you identified this. I think this is the crux of our misunderstanding. What am I really trying to do? What does it mean to say work = wealth? I fully agree it's a super-important question. Why even bother saying it at all, if it means nothing, entails nothing? Nothing in your post comes even close to hinting at an answer to this question. quote:People make a great deal out of value; but take away the market and replace it with a pure communist society run by angels; you'd still have wealth (equitably distributed). Value, however, would be absent, because there is no trade to be made; each and all have what they need, and if some inequality should arise, the balance will be restored by the benevolent bureaucratic class. But that wealth would still not be without its costs; to the world and the workers who produced it from the world; the system from which it was taken. The trick of sustainability would still haunt such a perfect society, even with value totally absent. That's why I think it's worth separating wealth and value. Do you really think it's never occurred to anyone that good things in life require human effort? Did you really need an elaborate thought experiment about coconuts to tell you this?
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Feb 12, 2019 07:31
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'What is wealth, I just don't know?' asks the guy with a a several paragraph critique of Marx and how command economies got it wrong. I begin to think, sir, that you are arguing under false pretenses.
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Feb 12, 2019 11:48
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Helsing posted:Nothing in your post comes even close to hinting at an answer to this question. Honestly, your coconut example does the most to undermine your wealth = work premise, especially when you're arguing the premise doesn't require a society, because in the absence of competition for a coconut, a coconut on the ground under a tree is, if anything, better than a coconut in your coconut pile that you've assembled. If you've put all the coconuts in a pile you have to walk all the way to your pile to get a coconut, but if they're all just sitting where they fall then wherever you are on the island there's a coconut a few feet away. Doing work on the coconuts is actively reducing the 'wealth' of the solo man. Unless your definition of wealth is literally just "things you have done work upon", which we can't know because you're making a new definition of the word that doesn't match common usage, and then not even actually defining it. Look upon my wealth of holes I dug, and my equal wealth of holes I filled in again, now I have twice the wealth!
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Feb 12, 2019 16:47
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Wealth = work is just a bizarre conclusion to draw. The whole point of wealth (as commonly understood) is that it gives you stuff/value without work. Maybe you had to work for the wealth originally, but wealth functions like a replacement for your own labor after you have it. The difference between wealth and "stored work" is that wealth can generate more work-value than was originally used to create it... so if you're using it correctly, you only ever use the surplus work-value, and never tap into the principal work-value.
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Feb 12, 2019 17:33
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Helsing posted:Nothing in your post comes even close to hinting at an answer to this question. When you equate wealth/use-value with work, then you can couple economics with physics and see how sustainable economies will never produce widespread prosperity because of systemic constraints. The coconuts were not necessary, strictly-speaking. We could have tried to discuss this in abstractions alone; sorry I didn't construct my argument according to your specifications... that doesn't make it wrong, however. Liquid Communism posted:'What is wealth, I just don't know?' asks the guy with a a several paragraph critique of Marx and how command economies got it wrong. I begin to think, sir, that you are arguing under false pretenses. Do you understand the difference between opinions and convictions, though? I'm not sure about any of this. But discussion is not simply a process of folks coming in here and telling me how it is, and me rolling over immediately. I'm going to have questions and counterpoints; I'm going to want people to more thoroughly provide counterexamples which make more sense than mine. Thus far it has been a pretty lovely experience, with most people mocking me, accusing me of false pretenses, making jabs at my background, or providing pretty poor critiques of my position that show they're not really paying attention to what's been said or are just as in the dark as I am. However, there have been a few bright points - some things I've been forced to be more clear about, or even admit I'm wrong in: - I think people have done a good point so far of showing me that "wealth" is probably not the word I want to try to redefine. What I'm really thinking of is some term that would describe the transition of manipulations of our environment to make it better for us - something we use economies to accomplish and promote, but terms like "value" and "wealth" are already used to mean things different from that, so probably not a good idea for me to continue using that word. At this point I'm kind of stuck because I've used it from the beginning, so people coming in will think I've completely diverged if I stop using the word suddenly, but if I were doing this thread over again I'd use a different term. - Ownership is a concept I won't be able to separate from what I'm thinking about, mostly because of how much work goes into defining ownership in modern economies. Does that constitute wasted/inefficient work, or does ownership have a useful place in economies? These are questions I thought I could avoid, but they're tightly coupled with thinking about the meaning of work in economies. At some point we'll need to circle back to these and elaborate on them more if the conversation continues. - It seems more and more apparent that it was also wrong to call this thread an economics thread. What I'm really talking about is a predication of economics; a process of human life. I do still think understanding this predicate is really crucial for understanding economics rightly, though. I don't think it's right to say I came to a debate and discussion board in bad faith when I am debating, discussing, and acknowledging where I think others have made their points convincingly. Please don't crucify me just because I think some argument remains here (and have given my reasons why). Eschat0n fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Feb 12, 2019 |
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Feb 12, 2019 19:55
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roomforthetuna posted:I say this too. It looks like you were explaining why in your view wealth != value, but you ended up explaining wealth = stuff, not wealth = work. Well at least now we agree the coconut thing is worth talking about. I think you're hostile to my idea for some unexpressed reason, however, because the quality of your criticism here is really, really low. If you gather the coconuts up, the pile isn't going to be in some far place - it's going to be near to where you usually are, of course! If you're a bronze age farmer you don't just leave your wheat in the field until you need it - you gather it up, because it's very convenient for you to have it in your granary. It would suck to have to go everywhere on the island to get the most out of its coconut crop. It would also help with things like taking inventory. Like, personally, if I were stranded on a desert island, I would totally gather my coconuts, not leave them on the ground. It seems pretty worthwhile to me. The holes thought experiment (see guys, these are useful!) is worth considering; obviously not all work is equal. Some work is downright useless. I have to add the word "useful" to my definition; wealth = useful work. That's a dangerous thing to do for me; usefulness is dependent on who is measuring it, isn't it? I was thinking about this earlier. I might have to say something pretty convoluted, like "wealth (or use-value) is the measure of all the use that can be got out of work done by any agent or agents which can interact with the work or its products." To the first thing you said: wealth is stuff to me in the sense that it takes work to make that stuff. It's one step of separation from the true source of the stuff's usefulness, so it's not an atomic statement to say wealth is stuff, nor does it capture the use of the work done in immaterial realms like software. Eschat0n fucked around with this message at 20:33 on Feb 12, 2019 |
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Feb 12, 2019 20:10
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Infinite Karma posted:Wealth = work is just a bizarre conclusion to draw. Certainly wealth can be used to get a certain kind of work done that, for various reasons, you'd rather not/cannot do yourself. Markets exist to facilitate this transaction. But I don't think anyone is going to trade you something that they could get by working for instead, so you're only ever going to get less work out of that agent than the work you put into whatever it is you're offering. A guy makes hammers. Another guy makes shirts. The guy with the shirt would like a hammer, but he doesn't have any stones, so he's gonna have to get one from the hammer guy. Luckily, he lives in an economy with currency, so he sells some shirts, gets some currency, and buys the hammer. But nobody's buying a shirt off this guy if it costs the same as the work it would take for them to make the shirt themselves; he's going to have to sell to people for whom it would take more work than him to make the shirt. That's fine as far as it goes; these people exist, so he has consumers. But those people bought it with money they got for selling other goods or services; transactions which also were subject to the same considerations. At the base of it, at some point, people are making money by doing work, and the only difference between them doing the work and the person paying them for doing the work is that the person paying could totally do the work themselves, but they just don't want to spend their time that way; though it would take an equivalent amount of time no matter who did it. The only way that kind of agent makes money is by selling their work for less than it is really worth; they're getting screwed (or you could say this is the cost of entry into the currency economy; elsewise those agents would be better off not participating at all - and certainly with people who have no way to really make the most of their time, you see them opt out of economies; that's often seen as criminality in nation-states). And that inequality goes on up the chain of transactions, back to the shirt guy. The hammer is worth more to him than the shirts he sold to get it, sure - he's done less work than if he made the hammer himself - but in order for that to work, someone somewhere had to get screwed.
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Feb 12, 2019 20:27
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Eschat0n posted:I hope it occurs to you that simple assertions aren't arguments, and nothing in the post above constitutes anything other than hostility and a lovely straw man. I've given you a lot of time and attention, have listened closely while you explained your case, and have offered specific criticisms of your ideas that you've failed to respond to. You also seem to have interpreted the criticisms of your specific thought experiment with a rejection of all abstract thinking. This is obviously not the case. Everyone relies on thought experiments to some degree in order to make sense of the world. The point is that not all thought experiments are made equal and you don't seem to even understand that you haven't done anything to justify why your specific thought experiment is valid or why any conclusions you reach would actually apply to a real world example. quote:When you equate wealth/use-value with work, then you can couple economics with physics and see how sustainable economies will never produce widespread prosperity because of systemic constraints. How? If you can actually do this then why haven't you done it already? Literally everything else you've typed is wasting our time. This is clearly the core of your theory. But again, you don't really have a 'theory' do you? Because theories make predictions. All you've done is redefined the word wealth to mean something really specific. Changing the definition of a word does not, on its own, generate any predictions about the world. So let me ask you again, what's the actually predictive power of your argument? In particular, how is it any different from the theories people are already using? You're clearly not ready to hear this but the biggest part of explaining a new theory of how things work is relating it to pre-existing theories. You need to say "look, I've really studied the alternative theory and I understand it well, it makes the following argument which I think is demonstrably wrong. Here is my demonstration of why that argument is wrong. Now, here is my own theory which explains the same thing better than the old theory." You haven't done that. And if you're not capable of that then it's pretty rude of you to demand other people spend a lot of time listening to your ideas and giving you feedback since you've explicitly refused to do that work yourself. quote:The coconuts were not necessary, strictly-speaking. We could have tried to discuss this in abstractions alone; sorry I didn't construct my argument according to your specifications... that doesn't make it wrong, however. Again, the burden of proof is on you to justify the thought experiment that you constructed. Nobody else is obliged to start from the assumption that its a good experiment and then disprove it. quote:Thus far it has been a pretty lovely experience, with most people mocking me, accusing me of false pretenses, making jabs at my background, or providing pretty poor critiques of my position that show they're not really paying attention to what's been said or are just as in the dark as I am. Save the self pity. You came into this thread and more or less announced that even though you had not done any previous research and would make no effort to demonstrate any familiarity with pre-existing theories that you nevertheless felt confident constructing an entire new theory of everything and demand people treat it seriously. Can you imagine doing this in literally any other domain of human knowledge and not facing hostile reactions? The fact you actually have multiple people genuinely responding to your ideas and criticizing them rather than just ignoring you is prettty impressive considering the fact you don't appear to have any formal background in economics, anthropology, sociology or philosophy. quote:However, there have been a few bright points - some things I've been forced to be more clear about, or even admit I'm wrong in: The problem is that you're not even wrong: Wikipedia posted:The phrase "not even wrong" describes an argument or explanation that purports to be scientific but is based on invalid reasoning or speculative premises that can neither be proven correct nor falsified. Hence, it refers to statements that cannot be discussed in a rigorous, scientific sense.[1] For a meaningful discussion on whether a certain statement is true or false, the statement must satisfy the criterion called "falsifiability”, the inherent possibility for the statement to be tested and found false. In this sense, the phrase "not even wrong" is synonymous to "nonfalsifiable".[1] On its own redefining a word to mean something new has no real world implications. The work you need to do to establish a new theory is to explain or predict things, not just redefine them. Of course part of explaining something involves learning what other people's explanations were and relating your own ideas to pre-existing theories, which you are just utterly refusing to do.
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Feb 12, 2019 21:11
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Eschat0n posted:Certainly wealth can be used to get a certain kind of work done that, for various reasons, you'd rather not/cannot do yourself. Markets exist to facilitate this transaction. But I don't think anyone is going to trade you something that they could get by working for instead, so you're only ever going to get less work out of that agent than the work you put into whatever it is you're offering. You keep making up false equivalencies. Why is every transaction a change in ownership? We're all harping on you because rent extracting and rent-seeking is an inevitable part of private property. Instead of buying a hammer, what if the shirt guy just wants to rent one to hang a picture? What if the hammer guy refuses to sell his hammers and ONLY rents them temporarily. Do you not see how that inequality builds itself inherently? To the point where you need to account for it in the model of economics as "work abstraction".
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Feb 12, 2019 22:05
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"we are gonna have to exploit somebody" seems to be the thing you are trying to prove but you aren't being very clear about that for some reason and also not proving it very well Wealth as the ability to decide who gets exploited and to what ends?
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Feb 12, 2019 22:26
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quote:- It seems more and more apparent that it was also wrong to call this thread an economics thread. What I'm really talking about is a predication of economics; a process of human life. I do still think understanding this predicate is really crucial for understanding economics rightly, though. I'm guessing the next question you'll ask is "But what are humans" Typo fucked around with this message at 23:19 on Feb 12, 2019 |
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Feb 12, 2019 22:52
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Eschat0n posted:Well at least now we agree the coconut thing is worth talking about. I think you're hostile to my idea for some unexpressed reason, however, because the quality of your criticism here is really, really low. However if you can't even acknowledge that more coconuts than you could ever eat scattered everywhere could be at least as 1. the word you're defining actually just means "things that have had human work applied to them" and you're describing a tautology. 2. you're not debating in good faith, because you're refusing to even acknowledge a valid point. 3. you're explaining why coconuts in a pile are inherently more xxxx than coconuts not in a pile very very badly. I'm pretty confident the problem here is not the quality of my criticism. Edit: Oh, to be clear, the "unexpressed reason" I'm 'hostile' to the idea is because the idea appears to me to be demonstrably wrong. It's not hostility, I'm just trying to show you how your idea is wrong on your own terms, or at least how it appears wrong, and you're not successfully showing that I'm mistaken. roomforthetuna fucked around with this message at 00:56 on Feb 13, 2019 |
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Feb 13, 2019 00:51
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Typo posted:"But what are humans" A miserable little pile of secrets. Not to be confused with a pile of coconuts, which is wealth.
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Feb 13, 2019 00:58
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What is Wealth? What is Wealth? Baby don't hurt me No more
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Feb 13, 2019 01:00
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So I'm not interested in playing riddlemaster McDipshit's word chess. Wealth is what a person possesses, value is what an object of wealth possesses. The problem, OP, with your Robinson Caruso Coconut Orgy is it makes no sense for the question being asked. "Wealth" can pretty non-controversially be defined as "economic success." But this definition has two problems- first, it presupposes some economy and second the concept of "success" is ambiguous. Asking "what is wealth?" Is really asking "what do we consider economic success?" And this is why people are pushing back on Coconut Palooza- the goals of economic success in a one person economy and real life are totally different. Robby's only goal is to survive- his economic success is minimizing personal energy to retrieve coconuts. Just guessing here, but are you angling for "ah, if wealth is propensity to survive is seizing wealth not violence!" or some bullshit? But that definition of success only applies that specific economy and with the specific priorities of Rocco's Modern Caruso. OUR economy has more than enough labor and resources to take care of the needs of people. There's a lot of goals we COULD value for wealth- art, health, kindness towards fellow man, etc. What we DO value as wealth- what we define as economic success in the 2019 Western society- is control over the working class with violence. This is represented in a number of ways- liquid assets are passively backed by the threat of starvation for the working class; political ties give far more direct control over the firepower of police and military; dynastic names- Hilton, Kennedy, Bush, etc.- are leveraged against the reputation of the serfdom. All this- whether used purposefully or not- is systematic violence and it is how our society values economic success.
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Feb 13, 2019 06:17
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Infinite Karma posted:You keep making up false equivalencies. Why is every transaction a change in ownership? We're all harping on you because rent extracting and rent-seeking is an inevitable part of private property. Instead of buying a hammer, what if the shirt guy just wants to rent one to hang a picture? What if the hammer guy refuses to sell his hammers and ONLY rents them temporarily. Do you not see how that inequality builds itself inherently? To the point where you need to account for it in the model of economics as "work abstraction". Also, the quote is based on a poor understanding of basic capitalist economics as well. The sale point for any good isn't 'less than it would cost me to make the shirt myself' it is 'less than the opportunity cost of making the shirt myself', which includes both the cost of manufacture and the time lost to perform that work. It's a minor difference, but very important, because people are more than willing to pay a premium for not having to do a thing they don't want to do, in this case defined as 'making a shirt', so as to spend their time on something more productive or more enjoyable.
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Feb 14, 2019 12:36
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Wealth is how I derive how superior I am to others. Without it, how will I be able to laugh at others for being poor?!
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Feb 14, 2019 13:04
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Liquid Communism posted:It's a minor difference, but very important, because people are more than willing to pay a premium for not having to do a thing they don't want to do, in this case defined as 'making a shirt', so as to spend their time on something more productive or more enjoyable. Enjoyability does not compute in my model of humans as rational actors. Did you mean "spend their time on something with a greater utility"? Beep boop.
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Feb 14, 2019 13:38
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Enjoyment is marginal utility. 
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Feb 14, 2019 14:04
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Liquid Communism posted:Enjoyment is marginal utility. But consider the economic inefficiency!
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Feb 14, 2019 18:57
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Liquid Communism posted:Also, the quote is based on a poor understanding of basic capitalist economics as well. Nevvy Z posted:"we are gonna have to exploit somebody" seems to be the thing you are trying to prove but you aren't being very clear about that for some reason and also not proving it very well
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Feb 14, 2019 20:04
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I think it's pretty clear by now I hosed up the start of this thread - even if you agree with me in some vague sense, you'd still have to admit I wasn't rigorous enough for this crowd. And I actually appreciate that; there are places for shooting the poo poo; this is not one of them. I don't really care to defend my original idea anymore as it just isn't rigorous enough to defend; being super vague (and, some would argue, super-vacuous), it's just about as difficult to accurately defend as it is to accurately attack, if not moreso, and in the end we do a disservice to each other to continue arguing when really the other side feels we're just talking past them or not really understanding what was originally meant. When you start thinking that people who were previously pretty good raconteurs are suddenly attacking strawmen of your position, or that in general the critiques of your position attack things you're pretty sure you already answered, then the problem is probably not with your critics, but with the way you've argued or what it is you're arguing about - or both. I hosed up. I think the question posed is still worth continuing discussion over, unconnected with my bad initial attempt at answering it. There were also some really good points in the conversation that followed, which have lead me to think it would be worth trying to formulate my thoughts again, differently (with less coconuts and vagueness, this time). Obviously if this makes you groan, perhaps just let the thread die. I still find the conversation interesting; I still find the people here interesting to talk to, never mind the abrasion; that comes with the territory to a certain extent. Question: What is wealth? And, over the course of the argument, it was increasingly clear to me that while I am interested in wealth, there are some pretty decent extant answers to that word's definition. I particularly thought the idea of defining it using the Marxian concept of "use-value" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value) made sense to me, anyway: "Whatever its social form may be, wealth always consists of use-values, which in the first instance are not affected by this form." A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) (excerpt from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value#Marx's_definition) Use-value, as he said: "...inheres in the intrinsic characteristics of a product that enable it to satisfy a human need or want." The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value#Origin_of_the_concept) And to further elaborate: "A thing can be a use value, without having value. This is the case whenever its utility to man is not due to labour. Such are air, virgin soil, natural meadows, &c. A thing can be useful, and the product of human labour, without being a commodity. Whoever directly satisfies his wants with the produce of his own labour, creates, indeed, use values, but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use values, but use values for others, social use values. (And not only for others, without more. The mediaeval peasant produced quit-rent-corn for his feudal lord and tithe-corn for his parson. But neither the quit-rent-corn nor the tithe-corn became commodities by reason of the fact that they had been produced for others. To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use value, by means of an exchange.) Lastly nothing can have value, without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value." Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value#Marx's_definition) That's a nicely nuanced view which: Q1) Makes a connection between work/labor and the product of that labor even when separate from any market. Q2) Defines wealth as opposed to value, and the relationship between them. Q3) Recognizes how wealth is elaborated on when it enters into social use as opposed to its relatively simple existence in the hands of an individual. Q4) Contravenes my original conception of wealth by including in its scope the unimproved natural world wherever it can be used by humans. Q5) Seems to assume the ownership of a person's labor belongs to that person (I'm basing this on the weak fact the translator has written "...his own labor..." in the quote above - a linguistic construction which assumes one may rightly call labor performed by one's self one's own), but otherwise steers about as clear of ownership as it can. Unless the translation is bad, I think this is a pretty safe interpretation because I think you'd have to get into the denial of your own person as belonging to you in order to deny the implicit claim that your own labor belongs to you! And I'd adopt all of the above for myself, except that I have some reservations about Q4 - that statement is not intuitive to me. In fact, although I haven't read Marx as much as I obviously should, it almost seems an off-hand inclusion by him, at least in the quote above; a quick example, not meant for close examination. My intuitive rejection of this is to go back to the idea of a giant gold asteroid sitting in orbit around Proxima Centauri - yes, it would be very useful for people to have, and it is not improved, but it has no meaningful use-value. You have to be able to use it, don't you? I'm not even sure Marx would disagree with this, given he doesn't seem to think any of this contravenes his contention that use-values require a quality of usefulness. So my slightly-modified answer to the question "What is wealth" is mostly (perhaps completely?) Marx's: Wealth always consists of accessible use-values. And I shouldn't just stop there, because answering the question is fairly meaningless unless it entails falsifiable predictions. Essentially, we ask the naturally following question: "so what?" Hypothesis/Elaboration: So what? So, wealth arises out of useful human effort, except when by chance the accessible natural world is also useful. Wealth creation is a physical process - people must do something (think, write, saw, mine, etc) to generate it, except when the natural world provides it. But the natural world itself is also a process; its entropy increases over time, system-wide. Wealth creation, by its nature, entails an increase in entropy system-wide, in exchange for a local decrease in entropy (useful work). Its destruction does the same; entropy is created. Economies are arbiters of this creation of entropy at social scales, and the efficiency of an economy could be measured in the ratio at which entropy is created vs wealth - granting that economies deal with wealth only indirectly, mediated by the concept of value. The economy's primary concern - the reason it exists - is to make use-values accessible; attributes of an economy which restrict accessibility, like ownership, monopoly, unrealistic valuations, etc. reduce its efficiency and therefore its purpose. It should therefore be recognized that arguments in favor of anything that will reduce economic efficiency are ethical arguments, with the exception of arguments arising out of sustainability concerns. The unique position of arguments about reducing economic efficiency for the sake of sustainability comes from any kind of disagreement about how efficiency is measured over time. Arguments about sustainability are attempting to determine how to maximize wealth over time by minimizing entropy - sometimes at the expense of wealth generation within a subset of that time. Ethical beliefs may be the backing of such arguments, but they need not be. Ethical concerns about the economy may well be valid, but are not strictly economical concerns; they would derive their importance from outside the discipline. It should be noted, however, that ethical concerns may impinge on the efficiency of the economy in unexpected ways; for example, if the economy makes people unhappy enough, it could result in economic collapse as participants refuse to cooperate, leading to widespread abandonment. This would lead to a much lower state of efficiency than if those people were kept to some minimum of happiness (assuming happiness were necessarily detrimental to efficiency, which is by no means part of the hypothesis). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it could be expected that economies which efficiently make use-values accessible may not be favored by participants acting for greedy reasons; individuals or groups can and do act to reduce economic efficiency so that use-values remain theirs, whether because of an insufficient supply or a desire to control the economy by artificially withholding wealth. Not an argument from sustainability or ethics, these actors probably represent a simple drain on the efficiency of the economy; they are an anti-economy; a parasite, in various degrees. For ethical reasons it may be desirable to continue including these parasites, but there couldn't be any economic justification. A final note about arguments from imperfect knowledge and scale: Arguments about how to conduct an efficient economy which would restrict its efficiency in favor of some other behavior due to imperfect knowledge of what is happening in the economy may proceed from concerns about sustainability or ethics, or both. Certainly much in an economy is unknown; and it is expected this will result in inefficiencies both intended and unintended. Similarly, arguments about the appropriate scale of an economy are particularly interesting insofar as efficiency fluctuates with scale - and so does knowledge. From a Distributist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism) point of view, it might make sense to restrict scale at the cost of efficiency for the sake of improved knowledge of the economy, if the exchange rate were acceptable - the answer to which might vary over time according to the sustainability of the economic system in question. Scale also raises other questions - since larger scales typically mean increased access to natural wealth not previously accessible - and this increases the economic efficiency greatly, at least in the short term. Whether such rapid expansionism would be more efficient in the long term than a slower growth which reduced ignorance and unfortunately also efficiencies of scale is to me an open question. Assumptions: I think given the level of rigor expected, assumptions should be clearly and separately stated so they can be referred to, attacked, or supported more easily. It seems to me there are a few so far: A1) My interpretation of Marx's use-values is correct. A2) Ownership of labor belongs, at first at least (e.g. naturally), to the laborer. I'll separate that one out from A1 because I'm making a tenuous interpretation which I personally agree with and I'm not sure if it's really Marx's. A3) You can't get work out of entropy. A4) Probably something else that someone will point out; I'll post it here when it is pointed out.
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Feb 16, 2019 00:49
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I'm glad to see you're taking a position that doesn't seem trivially falsifiable now. Thank you, and thank Marx.  Eschat0n posted:So my slightly-modified answer to the question "What is wealth" is mostly (perhaps completely?) Marx's: Eschat0n posted:But the natural world itself is also a process; its entropy increases over time, system-wide. Also problematic about the term entropy - people will pay or perform labor to heat a building or some food, which is an increase in both local entropy and use-value. I assume you meant something slightly different by entropy, but I'm not sure what. quote:Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it could be expected that economies which efficiently make use-values accessible may not be favored by participants acting for greedy reasons; individuals or groups can and do act to reduce economic efficiency so that use-values remain theirs, whether because of an insufficient supply or a desire to control the economy by artificially withholding wealth. Not an argument from sustainability or ethics, these actors probably represent a simple drain on the efficiency of the economy; they are an anti-economy; a parasite, in various degrees. For ethical reasons it may be desirable to continue including these parasites, but there couldn't be any economic justification. This fits within your own model of sustainability being potentially at odds with maximizing immediate use-value. It's even possible that a totally selfish Bezos who was just trying to keep coconuts for himself to eat would produce some preferable outcome just by keeping the locusts down.
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Feb 16, 2019 03:51
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Luckily I think most of what you say here is just quibbles; we can agree, perhaps? The use-value of a thing probably already incorporates what you term "use-cost" - that is, we are asked to consider the use-value of a thing, keeping in mind things like what it would take to improve it to usefulness. When I talk about entropy I'm trying to place human work into the broader context of energy exchanges in physical processes in general - I'm talking about the kind of entropy you think of in physics class. I'm glad you bring up agriculture in this context, because I think agriculture's real contribution (and I don't think this is actually very controversial to say) is the massive efficiency bonus it confers on societies practicing it. The amount of work it takes to hunt and gather seems to be a major hurdle for societies to overcome; there's a boundary of civilizational complexity that doesn't seem to be attainable, historically-speaking, until you can find some way to harness nature's own growth (this would include pastoral activities like shepherding) as an efficiency "hack," for lack of a better term. And this is perhaps the first major question humanity has ever had to face vis a vis sustainability vs efficiency, because hunter-gatherer societies aren't efficient enough to support large populations, they counter-intuitively end up being pretty sustainable compared to agricultural societies which tend to wear out their land, practice monoculture, and feature large populations. Obviously during the periods in which any historical civilization had to make that transition it never was really presented as a choice per se, but looking back on it now there are those extreme luddites who say "maybe this whole crops thing was a bad idea," because they're intuiting that maybe more wealth will be got out of the system in the long run via a hunter-gatherer approach with small populations and low impact. I think your heat counterexample is just misunderstanding what heating a building or food is really doing. When you raise the heat in a localized area like a building or in food, you're actually creating a temperature gradient with the ambient level, which constitutes a reduction in local entropy - useful work could conceivably be got out of that. Not so with entropy. I'm really not clear on where you're going with the Emperor Bezos vs free economy thing. In your example the use-values are only temporarily taken from others; later they are returned, with interest. Investment does not constitute a reduction in economic efficiency; quite the contrary - as you pointed out. But that also makes Emperor Bezos not the kind of slimeball I had in mind. Superrich people in general who are investing their wealth and driving it into economies generally don't fit the bill of "parasite" - but Comcast and AT&T, which actively fight municipal fiber internet buildout in the USA (just for one small example), definitely does - they're expending their wealth and efforts simply to keep coaxial last mile connections relevant by militantly enforcing pole access rules - preventing access to a type of use-value that almost certainly isn't properly valued in their stocks and therefore can't even theoretically be driven back into the economy.
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Feb 17, 2019 09:13
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Eschat0n posted:I think your heat counterexample is just misunderstanding what heating a building or food is really doing. When you raise the heat in a localized area like a building or in food, you're actually creating a temperature gradient with the ambient level, which constitutes a reduction in local entropy - useful work could conceivably be got out of that. Not so with entropy. You're right that this is quibbling, but you seemed to be trying to be rigorous, so I'm pointing out the bits that weren't rigorously correct. quote:I'm really not clear on where you're going with the Emperor Bezos vs free economy thing. In your example the use-values are only temporarily taken from others; later they are returned, with interest. Investment does not constitute a reduction in economic efficiency; quite the contrary - as you pointed out. The "where I'm going" for this was that it's an objection to quote:For ethical reasons it may be desirable to continue including these parasites, but there couldn't be any economic justification. Again, I was quibbling, and in this case the phrase was "couldn't be" - if you'd said "there generally is not any economic justification [for parasites]" then I would have had no complaint about this section.
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Feb 17, 2019 17:54
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Unfortunately that's not how entropy works. Just because heat is created in the vicinity, and heat is the lowest form of energy, doesn't mean that local entropy has increased. If you burn a log for warmth the entropy of the log increases, but the heat gradient in the vicinity of the log goes up. It's very easy to see how entropy goes up system-wide in that example; less easy to see where it goes down. In fact, it may make more sense to you if we just drop the "local" vs "system" distinction: the important thing is the process of transferring some of the energy bound up in the chemical composition of the log into the temperature of the air around it; the air's entropy goes down; the log's entropy goes up (by much more than the air's goes down). To see this must be true, consider that we get work out of steam engines - you couldn't if heat gradients didn't constitute a reduction in entropy in some medium. Similarly, you can get almost no work out of the void of deep space, where heat energy is spread at a very slight gradient - that's a high degree of entropy. That entropy works this way - and that you see that it works this way - is crucial to my definition of wealth and the way I see economies. If work could be had from processes which did not increase entropy somewhere, then we would be able to say that in some cases wealth can literally equal entropy, and that would mean sustainability would not necessarily be a concern - just increase entropy all you want and end up with endless wealth. Nothing I've said makes sense unless all wealth creation constitutes a reduction in entropy somewhere - even with things like thinking up new behaviors, like Kanban (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban), which arguably constitutes an increase in wealth in and of itself, we must imagine that the electrochemical structures of the thinker's brain have been restructured to represent a slightly lower entropy state than before the thought was formed. As for the parasite thing... I've thought a lot about what you've said, and I think I know why you and I seem to disagree here, when in fact I don't think we do. First of all you're completely correct: a selfish agent can end up beneficial to an economy. If you look at the way capitalist economies are structured, they rely on this fact, of course. To really be a parasite, simple greed is not enough. You must not only be greedy, but greedy, unable to use further wealth, and unwilling to give it away. You must be, in essence, a wealth sink for the economy, taking wealth out of it - maybe even irrevocably destroying it, to be completely unjustifiable. So your idea of a parasite isn't necessarily a parasite to me. Whether the actual Jeff Bezos is an upstanding economic participant is kind of outside the scope of what I've been talking about so far, which is just establishing some outer bounds of reasonable economic behavior. No doubt there are plenty of people who would technically not count as parasites who I might still find morally repugnant enough to want to keep them from participating in any economy with me, or ones whose behavior seems ill-suited to the kind of economy I want to be in. I don't want to get into the nitty- gritty yet because I think there's an important implication to all that I've said which has yet to be expressed in terms that ought to bother many of the readers of this thread, and provoke more discourse than there has been so far. That is, when you have economies of different efficiencies competing against each other, you have a sort of destructive race which might occur: if you can produce a lot of wealth now at the cost of sustainability, then you can potentially overpower economies that might generate more wealth in the long run. That's the nightmare of the distributist like me; how to create a sustainable economy when it's just not competitive with less sustainable economies which might outcompete it and, through various mechanisms, lead to its destruction? More broadly nightmarish for all of us: how do you get economies to slow down and prevent climate change when they may all view such a move as deadly for their continued survival? There are also other avenues to go down with this discussion, like whether the only resource that really matters is humans (and we ought to be sucking up immigrants and promoting reproduction like crazy, or whether there's something more sane to do), which the theory touches on, but we can probably only go down one of those paths at a time in conversation...
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Feb 18, 2019 10:03
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Eschat0n posted:I don't want to get into the nitty- gritty yet because I think there's an important implication to all that I've said which has yet to be expressed in terms that ought to bother many of the readers of this thread, and provoke more discourse than there has been so far. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJM4sJb4yU Would you just drop your nuclear hot take that you've been clearly itching to get out since you started this thread and stop with all this pointless blather about wealth and coconuts? I imagine it's something like "billionaires are cool and good" but with a million more  to convince yourself that you're a really smart bootlicker. Loved the diversion into "well, technically" about entropy in a thread presumably about economics, that was a real nice touch to make yourself seem smart.
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Feb 18, 2019 10:12
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Eschat0n posted:Unfortunately that's not how entropy works. Just because heat is created in the vicinity, and heat is the lowest form of energy, doesn't mean that local entropy has increased. If you burn a log for warmth the entropy of the log increases, but the heat gradient in the vicinity of the log goes up. It's very easy to see how entropy goes up system-wide in that example; less easy to see where it goes down. In fact, it may make more sense to you if we just drop the "local" vs "system" distinction: the important thing is the process of transferring some of the energy bound up in the chemical composition of the log into the temperature of the air around it; the air's entropy goes down; the log's entropy goes up (by much more than the air's goes down). To see this must be true, consider that we get work out of steam engines - you couldn't if heat gradients didn't constitute a reduction in entropy in some medium. Similarly, you can get almost no work out of the void of deep space, where heat energy is spread at a very slight gradient - that's a high degree of entropy. Which is somewhat beside the point - the log is pretty drat local, it's an item inside the user's micro-economy, so heating a thing by burning a log is, you've basically admitted, increasing entropy in the log-owner's micro-economy. The idea that it can generate entropy-defined wealth because you decreased some even more local entropy by the power of a shifting goalpost is silly again, the same way that work-on-a-coconut was silly and led to a similar shifting goalpost as you were reluctant to release the idea. Could you explain why you brought entropy into the topic in the first place? It seems like it was a completely unnecessary appendage that you've now grown strangely attached to. quote:As for the parasite thing... I've thought a lot about what you've said, and I think I know why you and I seem to disagree here, when in fact I don't think we do. First of all you're completely correct: a selfish agent can end up beneficial to an economy. If you look at the way capitalist economies are structured, they rely on this fact, of course. To really be a parasite, simple greed is not enough. You must not only be greedy, but greedy, unable to use further wealth, and unwilling to give it away. You must be, in essence, a wealth sink for the economy, taking wealth out of it - maybe even irrevocably destroying it, to be completely unjustifiable. So your idea of a parasite isn't necessarily a parasite to me. But yes, we are in disagreement on what a parasite is. I would consider landlords, politicians and Bezoses to be parasites, because they extract wealth disproportionate to their own efforts from other people's efforts. I consider all of them to be probably detrimental to an economy - though not detrimental to a GDP, the current socially accepted measure of an economy's success as decided by politicians and Bezoses. For the sake of getting to your point, I'm willing to adopt "uberparasite" as a term to refer to a complete wealth-destroying parasite, and then agree with your premise that uberparasites are unjustifiable. quote:I don't want to get into the nitty- gritty yet because I think there's an important implication to all that I've said which has yet to be expressed in terms that ought to bother many of the readers of this thread, and provoke more discourse than there has been so far. If the entropy thing is a necessary axiom this is going to be problematic, but if that was just a passing train of thought that you could drop, I think I've sufficiently accepted the rest of your axioms that we could move on to what's wrong with the conclusions.
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Feb 18, 2019 17:39
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The entropy of any isolated system can only ever increase. If a system's entropy decreases the entropy outside the system must increase by an equal or greater amount. So where do you wanna call the edge of our system? If it's a room, where an individual burns logs for warmth, the individual has reduced the possible configurations of molecules within the room by converting the bonds keeping the logs solid into heat energy. This INCREASES entropy. If we, for some reason, consider the logs "outside" the system, then yes, burning them adds energy into the room and increases potential configurations of energy/particle distribution in the room, reducing entropy. Entropy outside the room (where the logs are burned) is increased by at least that amount. By your definition the only way for the world economy to increase wealth is harvesting resources from space through agriculture, solar technology or some kind of hypothetical space mining.
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Feb 18, 2019 17:50
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WampaLord posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJM4sJb4yU Jesus christ, have you read literally anything I've written? This forum is extremely paranoid. EDIT: I'll just come out and say it because I'm so done with this: unless someone is going to convince me otherwise, I don't anticipate ever making the argument that billionaires are in any way necessary. They're really such a small part of the problem I'm trying to illuminate that they don't matter to me. At the most, someone might show me why I should think they are much more of a problem than I think they are - and that's something I'm guessing someone will at least attempt at some point, given how much mental energy here is clearly directed toward them. But arguing that they are in some way anything better than a minor speed bump in the great entropic trend of all economies? No. Eschat0n fucked around with this message at 15:36 on Feb 19, 2019 |
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Feb 19, 2019 15:28
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