https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-modern
Full paragraph: “This goes back to a point I revisit a lot: capitalism is still not capitalist enough. No matter how hard you try to get everything based on money and market forces, it’s still controlled by kind of elite taste and sense of “wouldn’t want to make waves”. We need double-capitalism - no, fifty capitalisms!”
lmao i thought the ‘fifty capitalisms’ bit was a sneer you added in but no he actually writes like this
also i love that he thinks financial incentives for everything would be better
like look at the SSC post that he links, where he’s talking about an article that says stuff like this:
and by the end of the post he’s decided that’s a bad thing? like he wants every conservative myth about raising taxes on the rich or giving welfare to the poor to be true?
I’m sorry, Scott. It’s a bummer. In reality, you’re as dumb as they come. But I needed those free markets real bad and I had to give ‘em up just to get kind of elite taste off my back. So now we’re gonna have to go get more. And then we’re gonna go on even more adventures after that, Scott. And you’re gonna keep your mouth shut about ’em, Scott. Because the world is full of idiots that don’t understand what’s important. And they’ll tear us apart, Scott. But if you stick with me, I’m gonna accomplish great things, Scott. And you’re gonna be a part of ’em. And together we’re gonna run around, Scott, we’re gonna do all kinds of wonderful things, Scott. Just you and me, Scott. The outside world is our enemy, Scott. We’re the only [belch] friends we’ve got, Scott. It’s just Capitalism and Scott. Capitalism and Scott and their adventures, Scott. Capitalism and Scott, forever and forever, a hundred years Capitalism and Scott, s… things. Me and Capitalism and Scott runnin’ around and Capitalism and Scott time. Aaall day long forever. All, a hundred days Capitalism and Scott forever a hundred times. Over and over Capitalism and Scott adventures dot com W W W dot Capitalism and Scott dot com W W W Capitalism and Scott adventures all hundred years. Every minute Capitalism and Scott dot com W W W hundred times Capitalism and Scott dot com.
Pay us to sneer/not sneer then coward!
This entire sequence of posts is “rationalism” at its very worst. I know this should not annoy me so much – who cares if a bunch of idiots want to sound off about their uninformed views on architecture – but it also lays bare so many of the problems with the ways this community reasons.
These posts, written thoughtfully, could have opened up a pile of fascinating discussion topics: changes in popular artistic taste, changes in elite architectural opinion, survivorship bias in historical architecture, construction productivity, cost disease. Instead, they’re written in a style that seems purpose-built to munge all of these separate issues together and thus to allow the author (and commenters) to add whatever commentary is most pleasing to their pre-existing biases. Which *of course* they do in spades.
The best illustration of this is the absurd framing of the initial post [1] which compares the Taj Mahal to… a random Google office building! No, this is not a joke. But from this frame the piece lays out its real accusation, which feels infused with the perspective that simultaneously (1) pernicious liberals have captured the field of architecture and infested it with ugly modernism, and (2) evil liberal government regulation has made it impossible to build “nice” buildings. *This* is why the Google offices don’t look like the Taj Mahal. But… but… but…
To be clear I’m not even opposed to a discussion of these claims! I think it would be fine to discuss architectural costs or regulation or Baumol’s cost disease. But this community simply can’t do it. Instead they pick an absurd frame that’s clearly the result of many factors, and then proceed to use it as a mirror to reflect their own pre-existing biases. It’s maybe what I should have expected, but somehow it’s worse – because usually this sort of thing confines itself to political discussions.
The most disappointing bit is the highlights from comments. At one point a commenter (who clearly has some actual knowledge) makes the point that the cost of fancy ornamentation has actually gone *down* over the years, at the same time as architects have started using less of it. This would seem to be important data that would refute the “cost disease and regulatory burden is making our buildings less beautiful” theory articulated in Scott’s previous post. But of course there’s no reflection, no analysis, no updating of priors to reflect this valuable new information. Scott just moves on to the next commenter, who is an architect (fantastic: new information and perspectives incoming!) who (ugh!) just wants us to know (without citations or proposal-for-change) that the architectural schools are captured by modernists and heavy regulation is keeping beautiful buildings out of your neighborhood. This post is valuable to Scott, who actually has something to say: maybe we just need more capitalism and fewer liberals.
[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria
Looks like Moloch hacked the account.
damn it’s almost like capitalism is not actually about any sort of efficiency at all, weird, wonder if anyone’s ever written anything about that
lol how long ago was free-market profit-based capitalism replaced by the disruptive monopoly-focused financial speculation economy
and what kind of policies enabled that to happen
You know, with all these posts complaining about “elite taste”, I’m really starting to get the sense that someone told Scott he shouldn’t have worn those brown shoes with a black belt and he’s still seething about it weeks later.
Whoa, who actually thinks this: “Thailand seems to have a daily minimum wage of 0, which probably works out to a little over a dollar an hour, which is probably close to what the West was paying people back when it had Art Nouveau and such. I don’t know if this is a coincidence.”?
Like I’m pretty sure the Thai architects are paying their masons more than minimum wage given the quality of those buildings. Oh, what’s that? There’s data on that? Thai bricklayers for your everyday building projects earn on average 510,918 THB a year times 0.03 is 15327.USminimumwageearnersgetonaverage15080 a year. About 247K us workers earn exactly the federal minimum wage, dwarfed by the 865K paid below the federal minimum. But yeah, let’s change minimum wage policy based upon some stupid hand waving.
I thought the title was a joke of OP. Then I read that no, it’s a quote, he’s actually memeing the “please notice me senpai Curtis” he wrote eons ago. himself
As the famously one/fitieth of an appropriate capitalist Adam Smith wrote,
“It is not from the benevolence of the verbose blogger, of the rationalist, or of the alt right recruiter that we expect our sneerworth material, but from their regard to their own thirst for incestuous inside jokes. We address ourselves not to their
sense of humor but to their addiction to lexicon coinage, and never talk to them of our own fun at sneering, but of their lack of awareness on how any of that actually sounds”
This has pretty much been the standard response to the reality of “trickle down” economics not working^* – i.e. capitalism simply wasn’t deregulated and free marketed hard enough. Just a little bit more would really open ’er up and get things moving.
^* Yes, I know, “trickle down” worked exactly as intended, in that it was an intentional deception to convince incurious people that it even existed, and provided a simplistic talking point to exhaust and wear the rest of us down. But that’s a whole other conversation.
There’s some evidence that income inequality driven by turbocapitalism can bias production of consumer goods towards elite tastes and drive up prices, so fifty capitalisms would probably just bias things towards elite tastes even more.
If one capitalism is liberalism, fifty capitalisms is neoliberalism.