posted on March 18, 2019 02:35 AM by
u/ImperishableNEET
23
u/floweringcacti29 pointsat 1552894006.000000
If an agent receives resources in a voluntary transaction by another
agent, they gain resources, obviously. Agent A (few resources) is born,
and wants 100 resources from Agent B. So Agent A needs to provide
something that is more valuable to Agent B than 100 resources, for a
non-zero sum transaction. If we think in terms of negative-zero sum or
zero sum transactions then that will not be a good path.
I’ve always wondered what Das Kapital would look like if it was
written by a complete fucking idiot…
Free market capitalism is working, it just needs more time. It is
something new, at most, few centuries old. Globally, welfare are
steadily improving, it just needs more time until less and less people
are struggling in poverty.
“The status quo is fine” is okay if you’re not poor. If you are, the
everyday of “please body hold out until I can get a better job and cross
my hands over my chest pray that nothing breaks down” eventually crushes
you. That’s here. Can’t imagine what the hellgrind is overseas.
Free market capitalism is working, but this is as good as it gets.
Resources are actually being distributed in the most optimal way, and
this is the result.
Billionaires being in charge of megacorps that won’t give their
workers potty breaks or let them join a union to get decent pay+benefits
isn’t it chief
Free market capitalism is not applied correctly. The interventions
from the government, or regulatory capture, so social, political, and
cultural factors combined that stops free market capitalism from being
correctly applied, and solve all this problem. If we could just
formulate some kind of minimalist system that let the market do its
magic, then everything will be better.
clearly it is the regulations that are stopping the billionaires from
giving decent wages to their workers, not their unstoppable lust for
ever more and utter disdain of the people who helped the company
grow
Free market capitalism can never be applied correctly. It has too
many assumptions, and the model it uses is too far away from reality. It
was an ok model, better than nothing, but we need better ones now.
adjustments can be made. Whole system rewrites are often done saying
“we’ll get it right this time”, but end up falling into familiar
pitfalls, ignoring past history, or stumbling into worse pitfalls.
I know Scott and many people here are advocate of UBI.
top answer rn: >“Why are people poor” is a rather silly question.
We’ve known from as far back as Adam Smith that poverty is in fact the
natural state of mankind.
i hate this fucking meme. What does it even mean for “poverty” to be
“the natural state” of mankind? Like no matter how I try, I can’t derive
any meaning from this except “quit complaining, you’re lucky you’re not
starving to death”
As Herbert Stein pointed out decades ago, Adam Smith wouldn't have worn an Adam Smith necktie and people who wear Adam Smith neckties haven't actually read much Adam Smith.
I remember that quote, and the context is worth noting too (full disclosure: I don't know it off by heart, so I used wikipedia):
>What stands out in [Smith's seminal work] Wealth of Nations, however, is that their patron saint was not pure or doctrinaire about this idea. He viewed government intervention in the market with great skepticism. He regarded his exposition of the virtues of the free market as his main contribution to policy, and the purpose for which his economic analysis was developed. Yet he was prepared to accept or propose qualifications to that policy in the specific cases where he judged that their net effect would be beneficial and would not undermine the basically free character of the system.
Furthermore, what goes missing even in Stein's evenhanded assessment here is that Smith isn't even really *targeting* government intervention or non-market allocation of resources as we'd understanding those concepts in the 21st century. Even ignoring substantive issues about the historiography of concepts like "government intervention" and the structure of government in the 18th century, extrapolations from 18th century Smith to 21st century economics simply don't have to hold at all. When Smith observes that the division of labour in a market economy results in prosperity, or that governments who engage in trade rather than warfare mutually benefit, this *simply does not* entail that such an observation implies a critique of state redistribution in the form of welfare payments to the worse off, which apart from anything else weren't really part of the perceived role of the 18th century state in the first place.
> What does it even mean for “poverty” to be “the natural state” of mankind?
You know how in the suburbs and the outskirts of American cities there are these warehouse stores the size of the Vatican at which you can decide between hundreds of species of Lay-Z-Boy recliners? In mankind’s natural state, those don’t exist.
Or, [we take it for granted today, but a single Dorito has more extreme nacho flavor than a peasant in the 1400s would get in his whole lifetime.](https://twitter.com/MatthewPCrowley/status/621078253827002368?s=20)
This person has obviously never been poor. Fucking internet tough guys talking like they embrace the punches life throws at them, then proceeding to bitch about everything from not getting laid to basic human decency.
That checks out. I mean, the natural state of any animal in the wild is starving to death. Food, while quite attainable under favorable conditions, is unusual and even exceptional in many ways.
idk that starving to death is any animal's natural state; most of the squirrels and deer I see don't look like they're starving to death. But it depends how you define "natural"; does it mean "if you/the animal didn't actively try to find food and unnaturally just sat on its hands"? idk, idgi
oh, i just saw that you borrowed the comment's verbiage. is this a joke? if so, wooosh i guess
Sorry, I was making fun of the reasoning. I really can't stand Malthusianism, it has never amounted to more than a just-so story justifying the dispossession and exploitation of the lower classes.
> most of the squirrels and deer I see don't look like they're starving to death
Yes, most of the animals you see which are healthy, smart and bold enough to get close to humans/effectively beg for food aren't starving to death...
most of the squirrels and deer I see are definitely not begging me for food nor super smart, they're running for their lives the second they see me, or running out in front of my car. maybe a regional thing; I don't live in a big city.
I don't see how really. I didn't claim most animals do starve, I was just countering the incredible claim that
> idk that starving to death is any animal's natural state
When the tiny fraction of animals that a person might see in their daily life aren't representative of wild animals in general.
That’s fine to say, although I don’t completely agree with that statement. However, it seemed that you were implying that the only animals a person might see are the ones that have been habituated to a human’s presence, which is categorically incorrect unless you’re talking exclusively about people who live in cities.
>What does it even mean for "poverty" to be "the natural state" of mankind?
"Mankind is Bereft of SSC/TheMotte until Now, and thus Impoverished" - guy on the internet
to me this kinda just rearranges the question. Why is the income at the start of any long enough trend line in development economics at the poverty level? Because it's humanity's natural state?
> Why is the income at the start of any long enough trend line in development economics at the poverty level? Because it's humanity's natural state?
Yes. There are quibbles to be had about settled societies vs h-g as natural, but at best you get "technically people could live like the haida and there wouldn't usually be an impoverished underclass." As if that changes the relationship between the widespread subsistence farming poverty that replaced and out-competed the other contenders for the title of "natural" in every viable location and the economic actions necessary to get to what communists see as "not poverty" from there.
I guess it just seems to me that "poverty is humanity's natural state" is at least appearing to make a statement on *modern day* poverty, especially in the context it was brought up in the linked thread. If it's not, there's really not much to disagree with; people thousands and tens of thousands of years ago would be poor by today's standards on any reasonable metric. I just don't see the connection between "humanity was pretty uniformly impoverished several thousands of years ago" and "today's poverty is a completely natural phenomenon".
> I just don't see the connection between "humanity was pretty uniformly impoverished several thousands of years ago" and "today's poverty is a completely natural phenomenon".
This seems trivial: it's because the vast majority of "today's poverty" is a yet-unchanged continuation of that ancient poverty. Around 80% of global poverty is people still in subsistence agriculture. If the claim is merely that "theoretically a gobal sovereign could mass-redistribute capital and thereby virtually end global poverty" well, that's true, but it doesn't make low incomes under subsistence agriculture any less the default state for economic analysis, and the answer to "why are people poor".
Regardless of what we could theoretically do to end poverty, I just think "why have the massive increases in global wealth in the past few hundred years not reached certain communities and peoples" isn't really completely satisfied by "because they never rose very far above the impoverished state most of humanity has spent most of history in."
Like it's just restating the question imo. If we're so dead set on insisting that poverty is the natural human state, the question could be easily restated as "why are some people rich" imo, which closes off the "it's the natural state" cop out. It's a question about why capital is distributed the way it is, and capital has been unequally, "unnaturally" distributed for thousands of years too.
but this is as good as it gets. Resources are actually being
distributed in the most optimal way, and this is the result.
Of course, there’s no reason to believe this and nobody with a
serious look at things think that this is the case, and even idiots in
the anarcho-capitalism weird-holds says this
> but this is as good as it gets. Resources are actually being distributed in the most optimal way, and this is the result.
The statement makes sense when you consider that for them, the "optimal way" is simply *defined* as whatever the market comes up with.
As Scott hints at, most poor people are poor because they can’t work
full time. 80% of poor people are either children, elderly, caretakers,
students or disabled
oh yeah sure and not because the country they lived in got raped by
colonizers for hundreds of years
I’ve always wondered what Das Kapital would look like if it was written by a complete fucking idiot…
“The status quo is fine” is okay if you’re not poor. If you are, the everyday of “please body hold out until I can get a better job and cross my hands over my chest pray that nothing breaks down” eventually crushes you. That’s here. Can’t imagine what the hellgrind is overseas.
Billionaires being in charge of megacorps that won’t give their workers potty breaks or let them join a union to get decent pay+benefits isn’t it chief
clearly it is the regulations that are stopping the billionaires from giving decent wages to their workers, not their unstoppable lust for ever more and utter disdain of the people who helped the company grow
adjustments can be made. Whole system rewrites are often done saying “we’ll get it right this time”, but end up falling into familiar pitfalls, ignoring past history, or stumbling into worse pitfalls.
unions
bring back the unions
top answer rn: >“Why are people poor” is a rather silly question. We’ve known from as far back as Adam Smith that poverty is in fact the natural state of mankind.
i hate this fucking meme. What does it even mean for “poverty” to be “the natural state” of mankind? Like no matter how I try, I can’t derive any meaning from this except “quit complaining, you’re lucky you’re not starving to death”
Of course, there’s no reason to believe this and nobody with a serious look at things think that this is the case, and even idiots in the anarcho-capitalism weird-holds says this
not gonna read this it’s just gonna make me mad
update:
oh yeah sure and not because the country they lived in got raped by colonizers for hundreds of years
I love how the top comment, appropriately flaired btw, spends the entire thread nitpicking and deflecting as hard as he can.
One of the options is not related to cranial capacity? Downboated for cultural Marxism.