Best products from r/CapitalismVSocialism

Yeah Wikipedia doesn't seem like the worst place. It really depends on what you enjoy! You can find a lot of free stuff on Youtube, just be really careful with what you watch.

The part of politics that interest me the most is Propaganda. If I can give you a little bit of caution before you dive to deep, I feel like I need to warn you: there are very powerful people that are trying to convince you to join their side. I've been studying how money comes into play with political ideologies...and it scares the shit out of me. Always keep in mind who is talking to you when you are learning. I, for instance, am somewhat of a Socialist-Libertarian. Keep that in mind as I recommend you resources. I learned so much about my own political beliefs by reading and watching stuff I disagreed with. For instance, I watch a ton of super hardcore alt right stuff because propaganda interests me. But even someone as far left as myself began to see my views of the world slowly change, and not in an intellectual way. The racism started to seep into me without me noticing. Some stuff out there downright is made to brainwash you (this sub is a good example). I am being 100% serious.

If you are interested in learning about who shapes political ideology, here are some recommendations.

Here's a short documentary about how the Koch brothers use their money to change ideology https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nKgKVxFjSg (By Aljazeera, a highly respected international news outlet). It's inspired by an amazing book named Dark Money, the Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. There is also a documentary about it on Amazon Prime if you have it.

Another extremely interesting book is by John Perkins, named, Confessions of an Economic Hitman. The book is about a man who traveled the world for a company named MAIN, and made up bullshit statistics to convince developing nations to take out huge loans to hire US companies for infrastructure. The plan was to get these nations loaded with debt, making them beholden for the U.S.. If Perkin's failed, the CIA sent people into to organize a coup d'etat. Here's him explaining it in an interview

Another good book is called indivisible hands: businessmen's crusade against the new deal goes over how business interests got together and literally shaped modern political discourse around their own interests.

Noam Chomsky (perhaps the world's most respected living intelectual) goes over what he calls "The propaganda model, which I'll let him explain in an interview interview. If you like the interview, follow the rabbit hole down and see what else he has to say. It totally blew my mind some of the shit he talks about. He also has an excellent film named Requiem for the American Dream that will break down what he thinks the power structures are. Chomsky is an Anarchist BTW.

Another good resource is a website named History Commons. The website puts together newspaper articles and books in timelines that are easy to follow. Just be careful, it is amazing that they put together so much data, but some of it is kinda sloppy. Make sure you follow the links to make sure that they can back their claims up. That being said, they have timelines on all sorts of things, from terrorism to U.S. energy policy. The website is extremely critical of capitalism and U.S. imperialism BTW.

As you may be able to gather, I'm not a fan of capitalism. But the intellectual that has the best defense of capitalism, in my experience, is Steven Pinker. It's always good to get the other side.

If you want more traditional political readings, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has excellent academic articles on every political ideology you can imagine. It is a excellent way to get a good foundation on the terminology. Also, because it is academic, it will be less tainted by corporate biases.

If you want to learn about ethics, which is the basis of political philosophy, I highly recommend Michael Sandals Theory of Justice. It is full, 19 lecture course on what Justice is, by Harvard. Sandel is also a critic of unfettered capitalism btw.

I think that a mixture of History and Philosophy are the best ways to understand politics. It allows you to get an outside perspective on what is going on. The more directly political media gets, I find that it becomes less academic, and more propagandistic it becomes. If you go on Youtube and watch the first thing that pops up, you are playing Russian Roulette. You may get a good explanation, you may also get media designed to play to your hopes and fear, designed to suck you into an ideology that you never wanted. I purposely dove headfirst into Far Right Wing content on Youtube on purpose, and it made me more racist. This guy describes his indoctrination into far Right Ideology, and it is honestly reminiscent of a cult. It seems like you are more left leaning, but it is a good idea to familiarize yourself how ideology can suck you in. It happens with me and Anarchy: I became too attached to the idea of Anarchy and I stopped being critical with it. Whenever you base your identity on a political ideology, that is a huge red flag.

Good luck! If you want any more recommendations or have any questions I'm happy to help. There is so much more, but I don't want to throw too much at you. I want to teach politics one day so this shit is right up my ally.

>Charity as an answer is just simply not enough. First of all, it's not a guaranteed income and it's not a fixed amount either. You can't plan your life around charitable donations. You can't draw up a budget from charitable donations because you can't account for a whole host of variables that may decide how much you get that week or whether or not you get anything that week.

Not an ancap or minarchist, but I'm wondering: how did you arrive at this conclusion? Why couldn't charities operate this way?

I only ask because there is a common belief that the government created safety nets to make up for a lack of a voluntary alternatives, and that in general if the government does something -- regardless of the result -- it is because there is a need for it that is unaddressed by private citizens. That sounds intuitive to most people, it just makes sense given what we are taught at an early age. The problem is that there is no evidence for this belief.

Everything from social security, minimum wage, food stamps, unemployment insurance, etc., was proposed and implemented for political purposes, not out of a response to empirical data and research that demonstrated a real problem. While there were certainly good intentions behind many of those, and probably a real desire to help some people, the political campaigns were ultimately planned and run with the goal of capturing a larger segment of the electorate, to make millions loyal to one party or candidate or the other. And it worked beautifully. The minimum wage was and still is widely sold as a necessary regulation to help the poor and prevent people for working for next to nothing, but (economic problems aside) it was explicitly created to protect white workers and favor certain politically important unions. Wages among all workers were already rising steadily. Social security was and is sold as a way to "prevent old people from dying in the streets" which most people take as fact. In reality, there is no evidence that this was an issue at the time, and a huge motivating factor behind social security was ensuring the voting support of the elderly, who back then as now are much more likely to show up at the polls.

Unfortunately, the only study using comparative empirical data on the subject was done by Frederic Almy in 1912 and can be found as one of the essays in this book. What he found was that in cities with a strong government safety net, charitable contributions were lower (sometimes in huge amounts) than the average, meanwhile, cities with relatively little or no safety net had much higher charitable contributions which rose to meet the demand. People will help other people if the right environment is fostered, and having a state force others into this pseudo-charity is neither the most efficient solution nor the most humane.

It's literally the seminal work of anti-capitalist thought in modern history , there is not a socialist or communist or syndicalist or whatever-leftist writer or leader alive who hasn't based their arguments partly or entirely on Marx's critique of Capitalism as laid out in 'Capital'. You started this thread to try to get a better understanding of what socialists believe, well here's the socialist bible. If you give even an ounce of a damn about reading up on socialist ideology in any book, it would be this book.

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Now that said, it is super duper long, dry, and translated from german, so it's a bit of difficult read for a lot of people, which is why many over the years have taken it upon themselves to write lighter, more rudimentary summaries. Here's one: ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JGE4DDQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 )

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I've heard there are also some good summaries on youtube, but can't think of any to recommend at the moment.

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Also,

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> Forgive me if I’m wrong that it seems like this specific author interpreted capitalism in such a way that it would be nearly impossible to actually defend it.

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Capitalism as a word was created by French socialists and left anarchists in the 1850's like Blanc and Proudhon to define what they didn't like about the economic system of their time. Proudhon defined it as:

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>"Economic and social regime in which capital, the source of income, does not generally belong to those who make it work through their labour",

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i.e rule of society by and for the benefit of capitalists; 'capitalist' here referring in its original meaning to essentially mean people who make most or all of their money by sole virtue of already having lots of money. Socialism, then, was and is used by Socialists to describe any active measure to take control of the resources away from those kinds of people and give them to the people who actually use them to produce value. There's a million different ways one could imagine doing this, which is why there's a million different kinds of socialism, and why socialists tend to argue a lot, to answer the question in your OP.

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It was within this tradition, and with this definition of Capitalism in mind, that Marx was writing. Marx didn't selectively cater his definition of capitalism to suit his purposes, the term was later co-opted out from under him.

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People haven't used the word "Capitalism" in terms of a positive ideology for all that long at all the in the grand scheme of things, I think but can't source at the moment that it emerged in the early-to-mid 20th century, first with the likes of Keynes and then with the Austrian School with the likes of Hayek and Rothbard, and then modern 'libertarian' free market types like Milton Friedman. The Cold War was probably a big impetus; giving western non-socialist democracies their own "-ism" to describe what made those places better than places with Totalitarian Soviet-style Communism.

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The ideology that people who self-identify with "capitalism" nowadays describes what in Marx's time was called 'Liberalism'; the idea that the best outcome for everyone is when the people control the government and when that government doesn't have too much power; specifically as pertaining to the economy, which of course had its start in the age of enlightenment with the likes of Adam Smith. Before Marx, Liberals were primarily locked in an ideological battle with Monarchists (the original left vs right issue). As Monarchism faded away, Liberalism itself evolved over time, in the late 19th century splitting into 'Neoclassical' Liberals, (who maintained their lesseiz-faire economic attitudes and evolved into what in the US make up Libertarian and Republican economic positions), and 'Progressives' who wanted to use the democratic government to improve the conditions of the poor somewhat but without fundamentally changing the system that makes them poor, the contingent that more or less evolved into the modern Democrats.

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What makes the debate between 'socialism' and 'capitalism' so interesting and so frustrating is that marxists have more or less been using the same vocabulary since the 1850's, while common usage of those words has drifted past them over time in places like the US. This is why you hear socialists refer to both Obama and Romney as 'liberals', or why they tell libertarians 'you're not a capitalist, you don't even own your own car'.

I like this one but I certainly didn't come up with it:

>"Capitalism is a system in which goods and services, down to the most basic necessities of life, are produced for profitable exchange, where even human labour-power is a commodity for sale in the market, and where all economic actors are dependent on the market. This is true not only of workers, who must sell their labour-power for a wage, but also of capitalists, who depend on the market to buy their input, including labour-power, and to sell their output for profit. Capitalism differs from other social forms because producers depend on the market for access to the means of production (unlike, for instance, peasants, who remain in direct, non-market possession of land); while appropriation cannot rely on ‘extra-economic’ powers of appropriation by means of direct coercion - such as the military, political, and judicial powers that enable feudal lords to extract surplus labour from peasants - but must depend on the purely ‘economic’ mechanism of the market. This distinct system of market dependence means that the requirements of competition and profit-maximization are the fundamental rules of life. Because of those rules, capitalism is a system uniquely driven to improve the productivity of labour by technical means. Above all, it is a system in which the bulk of society’s work is done by propertyless laborers who are obliged to sell their labour-power in exchange for a wage in order to gain access to the means of life and of labour itself. In the process of supplying the needs and wants of society, workers are at the same time and inseparably creating profits for those who buy their labour-power. In fact, the production of goods and services is subordinate to the production of capital and capitalist profit. The basic objective of the capitalist system, in other words, is the production and self-expansion of capital." - Ellen Meiskin Wood The Origin of Capitlaism

I think it's a pretty concrete definition of Capitalism that takes appropriate account of its many relations (borrowing some Marxist jargon). But it's pretty comprehensive and provided by a real authority in the matter. I respect Wood's work and really recommend The Origin of Capitalism. Also i've seen this definition thrown out there a lot by Marxists on this sub I like so it seemed to fit here.

> How would this work on any sort of large scale? e.g. a city. Most people are strangers, so are they just going to be gifting strangers etc?

Give away shops. Gift exchanges.

> These vague, evidence less assertions is exactly why i'm not impressed by leftists.

Carrot and stick theories of human motivation have been disproven

> Leftists make the argument that humans are going to drastically change their behavior from what it is now all the time, and they do it without evidence or any good arguments.


Ancient societies centered around gift-giving and social debt practices rather than the common myth of barter. There have been plenty of scientific arguments in favor of communism.

> Well trade secrets. If you come up with a way to make some process 10% cheaper, and you keep it a secret, you can undercut all the competition and get more sales. It could take them a long time to get hold of this secret.

Depending on what the trade secret is they could just as easily make innovations and increase the price of their good because of the scarcity of the trade secret. This introduces an inefficiency that wouldn’t exist without a market economy. Why should we prefer the efficiency of markets over the efficiencies that can be had without them in this case?

> Is the answer not obvious? People who want the research done will fund it voluntarily.

I don’t think gift economies can be effective for work that requires one's full attention like scientific research without people having their basic needs guaranteed outside the market mechanism (like through gift economy).

> I see indie game makers making games all the time when there's not much chance they'll turn a profit. They do it because they love the idea of making the game, and the money is a bonus (or something that lets them do their hobby full time).

So you understand how people can be motivated in a gift economy. If gift economies can work for these things, why not at least try to get them to work for other sorts of relatively abundant goods?

> Right, but is it more or less efficient than having IP?

It is less efficient because while functionally the innovator gets to keep a monopoly on the knowledge in both cases at least with IP they share their knowledge with others even if those others would have to pay royalties to use that is still better than not having that knowledge not shared at all.

> One big issue here too is that IP laws by their nature violate physical property rights, and I view that as immoral. I mean if you want a great absurd example, it's John Deere claiming people who buy their tractors can't service them themself or with 3rd parties because it'd violate the copyright they have on the software in the tractor, and that John Deere is only licencing the tractors due to this. It's absurd, and a huge violation of property exchange principles (I can't imagine people agreed to this in writing when they bought the tractor).

This is largely a result of regulatory capture. It isn't hard to imagine a much more reasonable form of IP.

> IP laws are as much a moral issues as an issue of efficiency, and I think IP law fails on both fronts.

I agree with you that IP (all forms) is immoral, but I disagree that a reasonable form of IP would be inefficient if one is searching for the same sort of efficiencies that market economies offer for human capital.

> Did you forget competition exists for a sentence there?

Fair enough.

> I'm not sure you know what rivalrous means. It simply means two people can't use the same thing at the same time for different purposes. This absolutely applies to absentee ownership.

Absentee ownership means that the individual that owns it isn't using it, so how is it rivalrous?

> Is that research really that valuable though?

Extending human knowledge of the universe is a worthwhile pursuit in and of itself. Even without that motivation, this research could lead to technological advances down the line.


> Wait, are you saying you disagree with the division of labour?

The division of labour is obviously a great thing as it enables the complexities of modern society, but it isn't a goal unto itself. In the narrow scenario I was discussing, the specialization of the janitor doesn’t buy us much in the way of efficiency. It forces an individual to work a bullshit monotonous job when everyone in the organization can do their share of work towards it, so everyone can do fulfilling and valuable intellectual work. It also defeats the common argument used against communism about who will do the shitty jobs. If there is a job that no one wants to do but has to be done, the group can democratically decide on such a solution rather than just forcing the impoverished to have unfulfilling work.

> I agree market socialism wouldn't suffer from this kind.

Then, what is your objection to market socialism?

> Post-scarcity is utopian and never going to happen

Post-scarcity is only utopian if you define the term in a manner, which makes it not useful. Post-scarcity can refer to an economy where goods can be produced in relative abundance compared to their demand to the point where trading in that good becomes unprofitable. This has actually already occurred in agriculture causing the EU to buy up the surplus to increase the prices back to profitable levels. Production for use, while creating some inefficiencies, can lead to efficiencies like total distribution.

> (just like communism)

How would your view change if it were established that communism is feasible?

> No, of course it's possible, but it's representative of cronyism rather than free market capitalism.

So then by your own admission, just because it's cronyism, doesn't mean it's not capitalism.

> Free market capitalism opposes government intervention, thus any cronyism that involves utilization of the government cannot be defined as free market capitalism. Maybe we have different ideas about what exactly "free market capitalism" means, but it's a term that literally implies lack of government intervention. Plus, if all property/resources are 100% privately owned and individuals have complete ownership over their land and society is only based off free trade, there can be no state. If you don't give the government what it needs to fund cronyism, it's going to have a pretty hard time doing so. When the government, which is publicly funded, is given less power (and less power to engage in cronyism), and private individuals take its place in certain aspects of society, that could be seen as leaning more towards free market capitalism.

If we're going to argue over free market capitalism, it's fair enough to say that government intervention isn't representative of that in practice. However I'll go one step further, free markets not only can't exist, but they never have. Not in the early history of the US, not anywhere.

> Not capitalism. Government spending is not capitalism. Government spending in a capitalist country still ≠ capitalism.

So now you've switched here between saying that it's not free market capitalism, to it's not capitalism at all. Capitalism doesn't stand in contrast to government participation in a market system, and State capitalism has been known to be a real phenomenon.

> I believe the point you're trying to make is that the implementation of capitalism itself is what has led to the government we have now, is that correct?

No, what I'm saying is idealized attempts to implement free markets in practice, never end up the way that libertarians and anarcho-capitalists want them to. That's why in other threads I've said, while it's not a perfect example by any means, aren't countries like Somalia and Mozambique far closer to a free market system in action? Some of them even think Hong Kong and Singapore are closer examples, but it's simply not true, and profit is rarely the factor (at least in the psychological literature) that drives most of us to do what we do.

> Describing government as a corruptible actor is understating it. The government itself is a very active actor, and at the very heart of it is corruption. The fact that it has a monopoly on the legitimized use of force and is allowed to use violence to achieve its goals is the problem. It takes a certain mindset to allow any entity (even if it symbolizes the public) to have this kind of power, and that is at the heart of the problem. All people, whether they’re business owners or regular workers, are susceptible to greed. This greed can emerge as an incentive to produce, or it can lead to cronyism. The worst thing to do would be to justify allowing the government to act as some sort of medium for cronyism. It is the government which people are okay with being taxed and governed by, not businesses.

Right, and as you admit, this is no more peculiar to government than it is to big businesses, so to single it out for special criticism is simply mistaken. If anything in the absence of governments, corporations essentially have free reign, and the incentive structures in capitalism are perverse enough, that I view it as ultimately unsustainable in the opposite direction.

> Wrong. Technically, the bond supplier (fund demander) is losing a bond in the sense that interest that, at the time of the bonds maturity (whenever the funds must be repaid with interest) the bond supplier loses the Face value of the bond plus the interest (which is essentially a loss of a bond in the future).

wrong. There is no guarantee of interest of "other things the bond purchaser could have otherwise bought". It's simply a promise.

The "supplier" doesn't lose them because it implies they were "found" from the start as an asset. It's only an asset once it transfers from promiser to promisee.

The bond supplier doesn't "lose the face value" because it's the one who chose what that 'face value' was to begin with. Otherwise the bond supplier could just assign any "face value" any other amount of promises with no consequence.

Want me to send you an IOU for $57T ? Same principle. I don't "lose the face value" for anything. Like promises are exiting my warehouse.

>The suggestion here would be that lines themselves make graphs invalid so long as the grapher is an idiot.

or that imaginary goods and widgets are unscientific and shouldn't be taken seriously.

>The validity of the graphs?

Correct. When are the graphs you're showing me "Invalid"? Upon what criteria makes for an invalid orientation? Another question is "Why are supply and demand graphs always located in Cartesian Quadrant I when we see negative interest rates"? If "price" is "kinda like an interest rate" per your other posting.

>Yes, you could, but it would be an invalid argument as it is a logical fallacy to base an idea off of an individuals work.

which logical fallacy is it to "base an idea off of a scientific work"? Where is the invalidation logical deduction which says "yep, you just can't look to the moon on May 29th, 1919 to find Beads Einstein predicted"? Which logical fallacy is that?

>To be clear I do not mean to say that the work regarding the idea itself cannot be utilized, only that concurrent works not regarding the idea are insufficient evidence.

right; absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. This has nothing to do with logical fallacies or invalid arguments.

> Einstein's work on reativity can be assessed utilizing the information Einstein has provided regarding relativity

No, Einstein's work resulted in a Scientific Formula, properly balancing relative speeds and gravitational effects. One which will be retestable forever and based on disprovable demarcation boundaries. Universal such that anyone on planet earth can reconstruct this equation devoid of introduction to social concepts (such as value, property, taxes, marginal utility) to predict light refraction from a gravitational body.

>believe the model was logical

no, I don't use "logical" models in my vernacular at all.

>The default risk that a bank faces when loaning funds is based solely on the ifnormation granted to them by the bond-supplier's financial standings and financial history.

and the information about what zip code the loan is going to. Oh and the tax rate of that zip code. Oh and the Transunion FICO credit score metrics. oh and the number of children. oh and the last 3 places of employment. oh and the up-to-date utility bills with an electric company. And that electric company's bond rating and street address.

>You continuously make claims without backing them up.

I'm making claims based on the documentation I had to sign in June to buy a house. It takes about 2 hours in a lawyer office where these exact financial history documents are reviewed. For a mortgage loan.

Conversely, you seem to just link to the first google result with as many pop-up ads as possible.

>What do you mean by "when assets take down"

"Toxic Assets and Systematic Leverage". heres an abstract for you I googled note the thing about "far from being competitive". another way to think of it is a "Troubled Assets and Relief Program" where the "Buyer of Last Resort" liquidates these assets.

>t seems to have nothing to do with banking.

this book shows how Barclays, Vanguard, State Street, and other firms' collusion of asset-trading is the norm, and that the "individual firms are gonna compete" is largely a myth at the rich-end of the economic sectors.

>they paid the price as well as the banks they worked with.

yet none of them missed a vacation and will still be able to retire. I'm sure they really learned their lesson and have been forever humbled. Not serious.

>You do understand that delving into personal experiences and history is the opposite of logical assessment.

wasn't for George Boole.

>If you are not willing to believe in studies or data then I suggest you concede.

dude I spiritually conceded like 9 posts ago. You can "win" the internet argument. I'm after knowledge.

>s. You want your theory to be right so bad that you make it right.

What's my theory?

>When an item is cheap, more people buy it. When an item is expensive fewer people buy it.

My shopping experience is similar. The "number of people" is also part of clientele. In retail, clothing that doesn't sell doesn't get burned for the most part, it's offloaded to other vendors.

> I have done the math a million times in undergrad.

I don't doubt it. It seems second nature to you.

>The idea that people only buy based on their "budget room" and do not consider the price of the item itself aside from their ability to purchase is a fairly rudimentary view.

It's more that people are going to get what they need to survive whether or not that plays nice with "supply-and-demand". There is no "rudimentary view" here. Because there is no "forward-thinking" contrary position. People still, in the USA in 2019, are pressured to "live within their means" else they gotta show up in court.

>However, stemming from that, there the calculation of utility and opportunity cost for every individual for every product.

what about economics textbooks marked down on the ? I got a used Economics Statistics book once for $1.25. Clearly I missed out on the difference my money could have made me had I invested that $1.25 in a top performing blue-chip firm.

>Businesses need only calculate this for their own product, but it is good brain-exercise to understand how it works in consumers' minds as well.

again with the mind control. Like we need to keep tabs on habits and use targeted demographic advertising (and coupons!) otherwise it might be (gasp) BAD FOR BUSINESS!!!!! The fucking horror.

> Based on this consumer demand curve, businesses determine their own demand curve for the product derived from wholesale companies who are attempting to maximize their profits from business purchases.

which demand curve puts as many large firms (>8000 people) out of business as fast as possible? asking for a friend. Maybe we can shift and slide this curve to find an optimal price to give the shareholders as convincing as a false-flag as possible, then BAM! the managers go right back to the unemployment line.

None of these authors would probably call themselves modern communists but I do view them as such. Some of the material here goes into great depth to outline a possible post-scarcity scenario while some stay on the surface but are non the less a great read and great thinking exercices about a possible future.

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Peter Joseph - The New Human Rights Movement: Realizing a New Train of Thought

https://www.amazon.com/New-Human-Rights-Movement-Reinventing-ebook/dp/B01M3NWW48/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1550425640&sr=8-1&keywords=peter+joseph+the+new+human+rights+movement

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Jacque Fresco - The Best That Money Can't Buy

https://www.amazon.com/Best-That-Money-Cant-Buy-ebook/dp/B0773TB3GX/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1550425758&sr=8-2&keywords=jacque+fresco

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Buckminster Fuller - Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

https://www.amazon.com/Operating-Manual-Spaceship-Buckminster-Fuller-ebook-dp-B010R3HVOW/dp/B010R3HVOW/ref=mt_kindle?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1550425647

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Jeremy Rifkin - The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World

https://www.amazon.com/Third-Industrial-Revolution-Lateral-Transforming-ebook/dp/B005BOQBGW/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1550426107&sr=8-1

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Peter Diamandis - Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think

https://www.amazon.com/Abundance-Future-Better-Than-Think-ebook/dp/B005FLOGMM/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1550426273&sr=8-1

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Ray Kurzweil - The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Trenscend Biology

https://www.amazon.com/Singularity-Near-Humans-Transcend-Biology-ebook-dp-B000QCSA7C/dp/B000QCSA7C/ref=mt_kindle?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=

Great question - my preferred “leftist” system - social democracy/welfare capitalism with a strong public sector.

Pretty much every important component in an iPhone - touchscreens, internet, search engine algorithms, GPS, microchips, computer memory, would not have been possible without government investment in basic and advanced research. No federal government funding the universities and government organizations conducting this research, no iPhones.

There are multiple examples of the public sector creating or fueling a new markets and future offshoots of innovation.

The problem with leaving innovation to the private sector is that it will usually only invest in things that are obviously able to be monetized. Basic and advanced research, which is absolutely necessary to innovate across a wide range of disciplines, - technology, medicine, transportation, etc - is not something that the private sector is good at because the way to profit from it isn't readily apparent.

Let's take Elon Musk launching a car into space. The technological know-how in order to safely launch and return something from space was done by governments in different countries funding their space programs, like NASA in the U.S. No NASA no Elon Musk launching cars.

The problem with this subreddit is that it sees the public sector vs the private sector as a zero sum game. A strong entrepreneurial public sector creates innovations and markets that the private sector can run with.

If you're serious about having a deeper understanding of this question, pick up the following:

This Financial Times Book of the Year

And this one by a political scientist working out of Yale.

Or, at the very least, read reviews of the books.

> Demurrage the shares at whatever rate means that it would take you putting in the same portion of your stollars each unit of time to stay in the same place?

That makes sense. It's equivalent to my model, but with only a limited amount of companies you can vote for per "election" cycle. Neat solution for voting, as well.

> Are you sure that the ability to grow that large isn't just an effect of regulatory capture?

I guess I can't be? My point is that a monopoly on invested capital is as problematic as a monopoly on e.g. railroad stock, and as such a company that massively outranks the next competitor in terms of capital investment should be treated the same as a natural monopoly.

> If you can explain why even amazon as a co-op is a problem, then sure.

Coopazon would be able to insert itself as a crucial part of a supply chain and proceed to eliminate all competition through predatory pricing, then create class separation in the same way the Yugoslavian energy coop did.

> Woah, really? Source?

It's mainly linear programming (developed by Leonid Kantorovich and intended for economic planning. There's an absolutely excellent fictional novel about him), Krylov spaces (developed by Aleksey Krylov, a Tsarist admiral who switched sides during the war to become a Soviet admiral -- quite an interesting character as well), as well as a ton of work building on the works of Kantorovich, Markov (e.g. Markov chains), or Chebyshev (e.g. information theory) -- Markov and Chebyshev were both dead by the time of the revolution, but their students and their students' students published a ton of theory that is used today. You've also got Kolmogorov, famous for Kolmogorov complexity, as well his collaborator Vladimir Arnold. I don't have a good source, I just work in AI currently trying to teach a robot language with a bunch of old Soviet mathematics :)

Anyway, Kantorovich developed his theory of linear programming in 1939. He tried for years to convince people that the idea should be applied to economic planning, which is actually not a stupid idea (if economic allocation was not a nonlinear problem, his idea would give a provably optimal solution). Brezhnev finally told him to stuff it after getting into power, then proceeded to take away the majority of his funding for being insufficiently Stalinist in his approach to mathematics.

> Have you run into my concept of stratodemocracy

No, but please explain!

Price is not the product of the law of supply and demand. Increasing price will favor the producer (And so increasing his demand) while disadvantaging the consumer (and so his demand), rising income for the luxury good producer will lower the income of the necessity goods producer, etc. The result is that we can see demand rise and prices fall or demand fall and prices falling as well or even prices rising with demand.

In other words the law of demand holds true only for individuals and not aggregates of individual demand curves.e.

Production is first and foremost concerned with demand directly: rarely (if at all) price is adjusted because of changes in demand. To make an example movie theaters charge the same price for all movies, whether they are Steven Spielberg or M. Night Shyamalan.

When a blockbuster comes out sometimes there's so much demand that the movie theaters just end up turning people away. Theoretically they should raise the price on these ultra-popular movies. Similarly, when bad movies come out the theatre is going to be pretty much empty anyway, so theoretically they should lower the price and try to get a few more bucks filling up the theater with price-sensitive moviegoers.

This does not happen however because if you lowered the price of a movie, people would immediately infer from the low price that it's a crappy movie and they wouldn't go see it. If you had different prices for movies, the $4 movies would have a lot less customers than they get anyway. The entertainment industry has to maintain a straight face and tell you that Gigli or Battlefield Earth are every bit as valuable as Wedding Crashers or Star Wars or nobody will go see them.

The fundamental issue (here at least) is that price in the eyes of the costumer represents value. With this role it cannot also work as a supply/demand signal for the producer because its fluctuation for the consumer rather than represent availability represents a change in quality. This is the reason after all that when the clothing industry tried to be honest and stopped constantly applying discounts when the discounted prices where their actual value, sells fell like bricks.

I really recommend picking up this book. Keen is a great economist (and not a Marxist, in fact he dedicates part of the book to dismantle Marx as well).

> Even if you think that I was just duped by a system into getting a worthless degree and people shouldn't get worthless degrees, this system is still systematically duping millions of American teenagers year after year. If businesses need different skills, but aren't willing to train employees to do those jobs, colleges have to be restructured. There's no "market" forces to fix these problems.

Bryan Caplan who is professor of economics at George Mason University has a good book on this called The Case Against Education

Essentially, he argues that current higher education doesn't increase worker productivity. All the degree and education do is signal to employers that you can show up on time, follow orders, dress appropriately, turn in assignments on time, etc. Subsidizing education through government student loans, Pell grants, etc, only worsens the problem. In our current situation, if you don't have a B.S., many employers won't even look at your resume or even consider you as an intern. Essentially, these government subsidies are subsidizing the cost of companies looking for talent. Without subsidies, companies would have to consider resumes without a degree because it's likely the person is smart, capable, and productive but just doesn't have a degree.

Also, it's important to realize that increasing your productivity is the only way to earn more wealth through your work (and the wealth of society). If it is true that education doesn't (or hardly) increases productivity of those graduating, then -in addition to the above argument- it is doubly inefficient/bad to provide free higher education; as many left politicians are advocating.

Just responded to Hopped, but sounds like you might be interested too. Have you read https://www.amazon.ca/Red-Plenty-Francis-Spufford/dp/1555976042 ?

I read a huge blog post over a series of days going in depth about market planning and it single-handedly (and quite enjoyably) convinced me that a market economy is the only feasible (if imperfect) way to do things. This was the blog post I think: http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/

It seems that it would take a computer the size of the sun to process the multi-million by multi-million matrix of inputs and outputs in an economy.

>at the heart of this, is that loans are merely promises. So any "supply" isn't based on material goods, but a reserve requirement.

Yes, but there is more to the story. The Reserve Requirement Ratio and the actual supply off funds from investors/savers has a direct effect on the loanable rate. I am not sure what you mean by a "promise". All currency is based on a "promise" by the government.

>More sway does not mean sufficient sway.
>
>it kinda does

I mean, if you'd like to contest that rich people have influence over the economy as a whole that is fine, but we are discussing the influence of hefty shareholders over loanable rates.

>If any bank makes a "health inquiry" on its assets' likelihood of default, they can raise rates or lower them based on that inquiry. Or sell them to a "poor sucker" bank if they're likely to go under.

I believe you have this backwards. The raising ad lowering of rates necessarily has effects on available capital and future available capital which can make them appear artificially strong or weak.

>The scandal arose when it was discovered that banks were falsely inflating or deflating their rates so as to profit from trades, or to give the impression that they were more creditworthy than they were

You are right and I missed a key aspect of the scandal regarding the alteration of the Libor metric itself to improve creditworthiness. But regardless, the Libor scandal seems to include rates only "altered" not drastically increased. Thus, the profit comes from the facade given by rates, not by the rates themselves.

https://www.amazon.com/Origin-Capitalism-Longer-View/dp/1859843921

This is a good, relatively easy, read that does a pretty good job with that very subject.

If you are really interested in education, read books, you can start with this one:

https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11225.html

Also on amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691174652

You can also listen to an interview with him if you don't want to read:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hZylJp-pHo

> Nope.

Straw man. It's not about the legality of slavery, but its execution.

> The personal computer?

based on federal researches.

> The smartphone?

based on federal researches

> What about Edison's inventions?

based on Edison ;)

> Yeah, like picking wheat from fields?

For example. And less harmful than the working conditions under capitalism.

> Under capitalism, kids dropped the sickle and picked up books.

nah, more like destroying their lungs in the textile industry.
Remember: We are not talking of today's industrialized countries.

Edit: Formatting