Can somebody explain to me what's the point of the 'modern economy'?

[Winner]

I've become very nihilistic about the way the global economy works. I would like people to stop for a minute and think about what's going on:

• - we're producing millions of tuns of stuff we don't really need (cigarettes, flat-screen TVs, jet planes, hair-dyes, all kids of luxury [and junk] foods, etc.) for which we need to expend huge amounts of natural resources, and we call it 'economic growth'. Entire regions' economies depend on production of things that are simply unnecessary or are excessively consumed by first-world citizens.
  
• - we've created entire sectors of our "service economy" to satisfy every whim of our lazy primitive nature. Some services are of course needed, but other are entirely useless in terms of greater development and progress of humankind. Yet again we count the value of these services and call their expansion 'economic growth'.
  
• - it follows that in the end, there are millions of people who provide non-essential and unneeded services to people who can only afford them by producing and selling non-essential and unneeded goods. All at the expense of the environment that sustains our civilization.
  
• - in the third world, the only thing its nations seem to be able to produce (except raw materials) is more and more malnourished people. Yet there are idiots with degrees in economics who have the audacity to claim that this is a good thing, because it creates a larger market for manufactured goods.
  
• - very few people actually realize that the whole damn "modern economy" is an unsustainable bubble which can only be compared to a wildfire. Once there is no more trees and bushes (i.e. natural resources we depend on) to burn, the forest fire dies out. The 'economic growth' measured in GDP increase is essentially and indicator of our collective idiocy - we've fooled ourselves into believing that expansion of our material wealth is unlimited even though the available resources to fuel this growth are very much finite. How big a fraction of any modern nation's GDP is actually just ballast - unneeded services and production of unneeded goods?

As one professor at my college once said, GDP growth is a nice little number the governments show to the people to convince them that there is some sort of progress, that their life has a meaning, that the society is moving somewhere. That's right - we don't usually measure progress in terms of new knowledge that we've acquired, better education we've provided to our people or healthier environment we've safeguarded, but in the amount of useless stuff we've produced and the number of manhours we've spent doing that and other useless things.



IMO, our only chance to survive as a civilized species in the long term is to realize this, literally cram this fact into our ignorant ape brains, and start acting appropriately:

a) kill consumerism. No more "oh, there's a new fashion trend, I'll throw away all my perfectly good clothes and go buy new ones". Things need to be produced in a way to be durable, not to break two weeks after the warranty expires in order to force you to throw them away and buy new ones. I am not saying people should live without fun and recreation, but the costs of it must be profoundly reduced.

b) reduce our environmental impact to a minimum. The stuff we produce need to be near 100% recyclable, so that we can minimize the amount of waste and reduce the need to extract more resources from the environment. I realize this can never be 100% effective, but it will give us time to eventually get the necessary resources from elsewhere with less environmental impact (yes, I mean the outer space).

c) rethink our values. This will be the hardest part, actually - to teach people that the high ambition of their lives shouldn't be to do whatever is necessary to obtain luxuries. Modesty and temperance isn't fashionable in the first world. Intellectual pursuits are increasingly scoffed at - why bother, when we can enjoy ourselves most of the time with the products of our consumer economy? This need to change - the 'growth' needs to be in the expansion of human spirit, not in the crap we use to enjoy ourselves.

d) reverse the population growth. Negative population growth shouldn't be something to be scared of, but something to be desired. We need to stabilize the world population at some manageable level, which will allow an unlimited coexistence of highly advanced technological civilization and the planet's biosphere. With fewer people around, we will be able to properly invest into them. In other words, we should focus on quality (better educated, healthier, more conscious people), not quantity (masses of under-educated, poor people who can only be used for producing all the things we don't really need just to give them something to do).​

+ other things that haven't yet occurred to me.

(and yes, I am being absolutely hypocritical when I am writing this. Doesn't make it untrue.)

 

[RedRalph]

You are becoming very disillusioned with capitalism, Winner. we'll make a red out of you yet ;-)

I'll give a serious response later

 

[Mise]

I think you underestimate how much intellectual (inter alia) enjoyment people get out of their jobs, when they reach a certain salary. When you start earning enough that you don't have to worry about money anymore, you start looking for jobs that will stimulate you in other ways; people often take pay cuts in order to work jobs they enjoy more. For me, finding a job that's intellectually stimulating and pays the bills is important for me, career wise.

I think you also underestimate just how much people live for their families; they work to provide the best for their children and the ones they love. I can't speak from personal experience, since I'm not married with kids, but my parents certainly worked not to accumulate more stuff, but to make sure I was well taken care of, and that they could afford me all the best opportunities in life.

So yes, you are being nihilistic - a word I tend to use pejoratively

P.S. I agree, however, that a lot of our industry is not sustainable, and that we need to act quickly to avoid environmental catastrophe.

 

[pesgores]

You're wrong. Especially at d). If we stop procriating, the population levels will stabilize but in the future only the elderly will inhabit the world and won't be able to reproduce, which means dead species.

 

[Munch]

You are becoming very disillusioned with capitalism, Winner. we'll make a red out of you yet ;-)

I was going to say the same thing. Sounds a bit like what you want is El hombre nuevo.

 

[Winner]

You are becoming very disillusioned with capitalism, Winner. we'll make a red out of you yet ;-)

Meh, just with the human nature in general. I still believe capitalism is the only thing that can work, but it needs to be restricted and directed to prevent the kind of insanity that has developed - we went from 19th century "workers eat dirt, owners eat cakes, what's the environment?" mentality to today's "workers eat cakes, owners eat still bigger cakes, screw the environment!" attitude.

Socialism in the form the European left practices it is not fundamentally different - just "more cakes for everyone, we'll pay for it later." Communism is even more ridiculous nonsense, so we're stuck with capitalism. We just need to civilize it, and that won't happen until the whole ethos of our first-world society changes (I say "first-world" because the other "worlds" are mostly blindly following its lead, sometimes taking it to absurd levels).

 

[Snorrius]

Winner, within five years you will become Snorrius.

 

[Godwynn]

Winner, within five years you will become Snorrius.

Put that in your signature.

 

[Winner]

You're wrong. Especially at d). If we stop procriating, the population levels will stabilize but in the future only the elderly will inhabit the world and won't be able to reproduce, which means dead species.

Nope. First of all we need to reduce the insanely high population growth rates in some parts of the world. Earth can barely sustain 1-2 billion people living at current first-world standards of consumption.

I'll be an optimist and say that we manage to profoundly reduce our consumption and thus environmental impact. Then the Earth could sustain, say, 4 billion people living pleasant lives in their high-tech societies.

Earth cannot in the long term cope with 6, 7, 8 or more billion people, especially not if they plan on being just as wasteful as we first-world citizens are today.

So, our goal should be to gradually (by means of reducing birthrates) reduce our population to roughly a half of the present day population. This will allow much greater investments into living standards, health, education, etc. Old people won't be useless, they'll be just as productive as everybody else.

Later still, we can realistically hope to prolong human life profoundly, perhaps indefinitely. This would be an absolute disaster in a world with unrestricted population growth.

 

[kosiosko 1]

Meh, just with the human nature in general. I still believe capitalism is the only thing that can work, but it needs to be restricted and directed to prevent the kind of insanity that has developed - we went from 19th century "workers eat dirt, owners eat cakes, what's the environment?" mentality to today's "workers eat cakes, owners eat still bigger cakes, screw the environment!" attitude.

Socialism in the form the European left practices it is not fundamentally different - just "more cakes for everyone, we'll pay for it later." Communism is even more ridiculous nonsense, so we're stuck with capitalism. We just need to civilize it, and that won't happen until the whole ethos of our first-world society changes (I say first-world because the other "world" are mostly blindly following its lead, sometimes taking it to absurd levels).

You can't civilize capitalism, its the nature of the beast, it has to be free or its not capitalism,it is not an ideology, its the free market, the first bible of capitalism, Adam Smiths the wealth of nations forsaw this in the1770's, you can only regulate and contain it by government intervention, unrestrained capitalism as in the sub prime example curently before us dos'nt care who pays for it, whever its now or latter, it took a 150 years of boom and bust, the natural cycles of capitalism, but for 80 years , western governments have regulated and controlled it. changing your society is for people to do, it has little to do with capitalism as such.

 

[RedRalph]

Meh, just with the human nature in general. I still believe capitalism is the only thing that can work, but it needs to be restricted and directed to prevent the kind of insanity that has developed - we went from 19th century "workers eat dirt, owners eat cakes, what's the environment?" mentality to today's "workers eat cakes, owners eat still bigger cakes, screw the environment!" attitude.

Socialism in the form the European left practices it is not fundamentally different - just "more cakes for everyone, we'll pay for it later." Communism is even more ridiculous nonsense, so we're stuck with capitalism. We just need to civilize it, and that won't happen until the whole ethos of our first-world society changes (I say "first-world" because the other "worlds" are mostly blindly following its lead, sometimes taking it to absurd levels).

Well, I'm not going to lie and say that communism has a great record on environmentalism, cause it doesn't. But nit really sticks in my throat that a large amount of the productive capacity of the world is used for producing utter crap, and that's a huge polluter. A hospital pollutes a lot, but it's easier to accept that than a plastic cup holder factory producing so much.

Capistalism is very innovative, and produces an unparalleled variety of things. Unfortunately, because it is profit-driven and not common-good-driven, for every ingenious invention it comes up with, like the net, it comes up with 10,000 crap ones like elaborately-bottled water, Paris Hilton calendars and fake tan. If it was directed in a manner where it produced as much, but was restricted by some notion of benefit for the nation (or continent, or whatever), then I would still hate it politically, but it wouldn't be as bad and destructive as it is now. But then it wouldn't be acceptable to most capitalists, who are completely and utterly repulsed by any idea of them having any social responsibility. And since Thatcher and Reagan made western governments' raison d'etre to facilitate business (the previous post WW2 model still placed the state at the top of the pyramid IMO), that couldnt happen without a real fight. Obama is trying to have that fight and losing.

Honestly, as both a revolutionary socialist and a realist, I just don't think it can be reformed gently.

 

[Riffraff]

Very nice opening post Winner.

Completely agree that a great part of our economic existence seems pointless at best and most likely harmful in general. Not sure any of the proposed solutions seem viable in the near/mid - future, have no alternatives to bring forth though..

 

[crabapple]

I've become very nihilistic about the way the global economy works. I would like people to stop for a minute and think about what's going on:

• - we're producing millions of tuns of stuff we don't really need (cigarettes, flat-screen TVs, jet planes, hair-dyes, all kids of luxury [and junk] foods, etc.) for which we need to expend huge amounts of natural resources, and we call it 'economic growth'. Entire regions' economies depend on production of things that are simply unnecessary or are excessively consumed by first-world citizens.
  
• - we've created entire sectors of our "service economy" to satisfy every whim of our lazy primitive nature. Some services are of course needed, but other are entirely useless in terms of greater development and progress of humankind. Yet again we count the value of these services and call their expansion 'economic growth'.
  
• - it follows that in the end, there are millions of people who provide non-essential and unneeded services to people who can only afford them by producing and selling non-essential and unneeded goods. All at the expense of the environment that sustains our civilization.
  
• - in the third world, the only thing its nations seem to be able to produce (except raw materials) is more and more malnourished people. Yet there are idiots with degrees in economics who have the audacity to claim that this is a good thing, because it creates a larger market for manufactured goods.
  
• - very few people actually realize that the whole damn "modern economy" is an unsustainable bubble which can only be compared to a wildfire. Once there is no more trees and bushes (i.e. natural resources we depend on) to burn, the forest fire dies out. The 'economic growth' measured in GDP increase is essentially and indicator of our collective idiocy - we've fooled ourselves into believing that expansion of our material wealth is unlimited even though the available resources to fuel this growth are very much finite. How big a fraction of any modern nation's GDP is actually just ballast - unneeded services and production of unneeded goods?

As one professor at my college once said, GDP growth is a nice little number the governments show to the people to convince them that there is some sort of progress, that their life has a meaning, that the society is moving somewhere. That's right - we don't usually measure progress in terms of new knowledge that we've acquired, better education we've provided to our people or healthier environment we've safeguarded, but in the amount of useless stuff we've produced and the number of manhours we've spent doing that and other useless things.



IMO, our only chance to survive as a civilized species in the long term is to realize this, literally cram this fact into our ignorant ape brains, and start acting appropriately:

a) kill consumerism. No more "oh, there's a new fashion trend, I'll throw away all my perfectly good clothes and go buy new ones". Things need to be produced in a way to be durable, not to break two weeks after the warranty expires in order to force you to throw them away and buy new ones. I am not saying people should live without fun and recreation, but the costs of it must be profoundly reduced.

b) reduce our environmental impact to a minimum. The stuff we produce need to be near 100% recyclable, so that we can minimize the amount of waste and reduce the need to extract more resources from the environment. I realize this can never be 100% effective, but it will give us time to eventually get the necessary resources from elsewhere with less environmental impact (yes, I mean the outer space).

c) rethink our values. This will be the hardest part, actually - to teach people that the high ambition of their lives shouldn't be to do whatever is necessary to obtain luxuries. Modesty and temperance isn't fashionable in the first world. Intellectual pursuits are increasingly scoffed at - why bother, when we can enjoy ourselves most of the time with the products of our consumer economy? This need to change - the 'growth' needs to be in the expansion of human spirit, not in the crap we use to enjoy ourselves.

d) reverse the population growth. Negative population growth shouldn't be something to be scared of, but something to be desired. We need to stabilize the world population at some manageable level, which will allow an unlimited coexistence of highly advanced technological civilization and the planet's biosphere. With fewer people around, we will be able to properly invest into them. In other words, we should focus on quality (better educated, healthier, more conscious people), not quantity (masses of under-educated, poor people who can only be used for producing all the things we don't really need just to give them something to do).​

+ other things that haven't yet occurred to me.

(and yes, I am being absolutely hypocritical when I am writing this. Doesn't make it untrue.)

I agree what most of you have said The economy needs to go "green" for us to have a future as a species

EDIT: there are alternatives to follow, for example ecological economics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_economics
What is needed is the political will to change

 

[AL_DA_GREAT]

I totally agree. Great post winner. We need a new economic system with new values. Socialism and capitalism have failed. I say we need to scale down the economy. We should focus on small buisnesses.

 

[holy king]

thats a state run capitalism that highly encourages/forces small businesses and destroys any monopolies that would naturally form?

or in what way would that system not be capitalistic?

 

[JerichoHill]

Winner,


On point a, I'll invoke the slippery slope argument. What's a legit taste and what isn't. Is the I-Phone legit? What about twitter? They pretty much conspicuous consumption, but both are also reshaping the world. Folks with I-Phones can now price shop much better than anyone every could before, saving money if you do it. That will revolutionize the way we shop eventually when local stores are truly forced to compete with competitors online. Twitter? Twitter probably saved a few lives is Mumbia during their terrorist attack, and is partly responsible for the continuation of a social movement in Iran. I challenge you to define a set of criteria that will never prohibit the creation of a product that has this kind of potential. It is impossible because no one considered these consequences during the products creation.

b) I'm fine with, but if we're going to go more environmental, prices must rise as the tech is developed.

c) Change our values? Son, the 7 billion people in this world have wildly different values.

d) It is currently the poorer countries in the world that have the highest birth rates. Population growth in western developed countries is nil. Given that these countries are the most "capitalistic whatever", how can restraining capitalism work in the third world where economies are of the command type?

 

[Winner]

@AL_DA_GREAT:

We can't go back before the era of big companies. I am all for tackling the monopolies and reducing their power (since large trans-national companies are much, much bigger threat to our democracy than any terrorist hiding in a cave in Pakistan), but you can't build a fusion reactor in a garage.

What we need are rigorous standards and supervision preventing companies from corrupting politicians, altering the democratic process in other negative ways, escaping environmental/social standards in the more conscious countries and generally being the irresponsible bastards who are destroying everything they touch just to make a little more profit to finance personal jets and the other unneeded luxury stuff.

Sure they have to make profit, that's the reason why they exist after all, but this crazy "hurry, let's chop down that forest before somebody else does it!" attitude must go. The primary function of the government in this respect should be to regulate commerce and ensure that the narrow self-interest of anybody ranging from large companies to single individuals doesn't prevail over the public interest to establish a sustainable (both economically and environmentally) economy.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

You are becoming very disillusioned with capitalism, Winner. we'll make a red out of you yet ;-)

I'll give a serious response later

Ve are making him a corruptnik, da? Tis ist superbnik!

 

[JerichoHill]

thats a state run capitalism that highly encourages/forces small businesses and destroys any monopolies that would naturally form?

or in what way would that system not be capitalistic?

By forcing small business across the board, such a system would raise overall prices and reduce welfare simply by not allotting for economies of scale in production and sale

 

[Karalysia]

Welcome to the Communist Party.