Is technological advancement ultimately compatible with capitalism?

[Naskra]

What was so wrong in that book?

The title page. This guy Friedman is irredeemably unwoke, hence wrong about everything. As Lexicus illustrates, it unnecessary to ever read it.

 

[Lexicus]

Yes, the world was a paradise of human joy prior to the evil ways of capitalism. Greed didn't exist and charity was the world's watchword.

What didn't exist was poverty alongside the means to end it immediately.

 

[Birdjaguar]

capitalism isn't really compatible with anything except for widespread human suffering

Yes, the world was a paradise of human joy prior to the evil ways of capitalism. Greed didn't exist and charity was the world's watchword.

what a wonderfully lazy extrapolation

It was based on a wonderfully short sighted assertion.

 

[miaasma]

you made an extrapolation based on something that wasn't there, because in your brain, criticism of capitalism means glorification of everything before it

super lazy, not worth the return you made to the thread

it's like responding to a "colonialism is bad" assertion with "but the colonized people fought before then!"

try a little harder, thanks

 

[Cutlass]

I don't think they're fundamentally incompatible, but the system will have to adapt. I'm envisioning some kind of social democracy, possibly with a scheme that resembles UBI.

This isn't like when cars replaced horses. This is more like cars are replacing horses, except we are the horses. If not in the near future, then inevitably eventually we will reach a point where automated systems and/or AI can do a better job than humans can.

https://medium.com/@collieravioli/humans-are-not-horses-25dab59e2812

 

[Birdjaguar]

What didn't exist was poverty alongside the means to end it immediately.

To begin, poverty is relative. The imbalance of wealth we see today is more widespread and noticeable than ever before. The forces create and maintain poverty today are the same ones that have always made and kept people impoverished: greed, selfishness and desire for power. Those forces have not much diminished in spite of much better awareness of the plight of the world's poor.

 

[innonimatu]

Suppose you create the first human replacement android and the software. It can be trained faster and cheaper to do anything humans now do including make more copies of itself.

That will take centuries to happen, if it happens at all.

AI has gone through another of its cyclical fads, and by now the people involved have already noticed that "machine learning" cannot escape the old problem of crap in - crap out. Throwing data at some processing equipment does not an AI make. If they can emulate something human, they will be emulating a particularly dump one, on a level useless for actual work. AI for production remains what has been for decades, specialized systems. And so it will.

Mass production, that did reduce the number of jobs. But people just make up new "needs" in order to keep the capitalist system going. As Veblen remarked, invention is the mother of necessity. Capitalism will go on until it wrecks the resources of the planet, or gets overthrown in some bloody way. The people involved in it in commanding positions are utterly incapable of changing away from this social model, their standing depends of keeping it going. "UBI" is a band-aid they're wondering about in case they get enough unemployment to make it unstable, their purpose is to keep the system going.

 

[Lexicus]

To begin, poverty is relative. The imbalance of wealth we see today is more widespread and noticeable than ever before. The forces create and maintain poverty today are the same ones that have always made and kept people impoverished: greed, selfishness and desire for power. Those forces have not much diminished in spite of much better awareness of the plight of the world's poor.

If poverty is relative, then it didn't even really exist before states.

 

[Traitorfish]

I could stand to have a lot less materially, if I was offered something more psychologically. I could stand a certain degree of "poverty" if I was offered security, free time and useful work.

There's a lazy assumption that human beings are prepared to tolerate all the humiliations and insecurities of capitalism because we are acquisitive, but it rests on the untenable assumption that the humiliations and insecurities were ever a choice, that they were something people were ever given any meaningfully opportunity to opt into or out of. The acquisition is consolation; if you're never going to be free, you might as well have an iPhone and nice shoes.

Give people a genuine choice, we might find ourselves surprised.

 

[Birdjaguar]

you made an extrapolation based on something that wasn't there, because in your brain, criticism of capitalism means glorification of everything before it

super lazy, not worth the return you made to the thread

it's like responding to a "colonialism is bad" assertion with "but the colonized people fought before then!"

try a little harder, thanks

In a forum all we have are the words in front of us. I read your words. You said that capitalism only equals widespread human suffering. You apparently did not read mine. Nowhere did I set capitalism on a pedestal. I only used sarcasm to make the point that widespread human suffering didn't originate with capitalism. When you make overly broad and generally ridiculous statements, don't expect a lengthy, thought provoking reply. I have no problem with people criticizing capitalism; I do it myself regularly.

BTW, if you had posted "Colonialism is the root of modern evil." I would have replied more like this: It was just a new way to create bigger empires. Your example has me defending colonialism, which I am not likely to do. My response would have been more descriptive. In the same way your attack on capitalism provoked not a defense of capitalism from me, but a sarcastic expansion of the issue to include other sources of poverty. i am a lot of things, but generally when it comes to posting here, I'm not lazy.

 

[Hygro]

Poll needs to be public.

 

[Birdjaguar]

If poverty is relative, then it didn't even really exist before states.

Not at all. Why would you connect poverty to nation state status?

 

[miaasma]

In a forum all we have are the words in front of us. I read your words. You said that capitalism only equals widespread human suffering. You apparently did not read mine. Nowhere did I set capitalism on a pedestal. I only used sarcasm to make the point that widespread human suffering didn't originate with capitalism. When you make overly broad and generally ridiculous statements, don't expect a lengthy, thought provoking reply. I have no problem with people criticizing capitalism; I do it myself regularly.

BTW, if you had posted "Colonialism is the root of modern evil." I would have replied more like this: It was just a new way to create bigger empires. Your example has me defending colonialism, which I am not likely to do. My response would have been more descriptive. In the same way your attack on capitalism provoked not a defense of capitalism from me, but a sarcastic expansion of the issue to include other sources of poverty. i am a lot of things, but genearlly when it comes to posting here, I'm not lazy.

never insinuated, in any way, that capitalism was the beginning of human suffering. all i said was that capitalism and human suffering go hand in hand

your assumption that, in saying this, i was naively blaming capitalism for all human suffering, was lazy. if you had taken a little extra time figuring out why i might say such a thing, especially if you yourself are critical of capitalism, you may have come to a different conclusion. instead, you decided to sarcastically jab me for saying something that i never did

your post was bad and your reasoning for posting it that you're inexplicably still throwing at me is bad

next time just take the L

 

[Lexicus]

Not at all. Why would you connect poverty to nation state status?

Well, I assumed you knew that social stratification is something that appears in the archaeological record alongside state formation.

Note, not nation-state, just state.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Well, I assumed you knew that social stratification is something that appears in the archaeological record alongside state formation.

Note, not nation-state, just state.

If you mean the rise of agriculture and formation of the first small cities, then I would tend to agree. But keep in mind that even in H&G societies some were richer than others and such disparity created conflicts.

 

[Lexicus]

But keep in mind that even in H&G societies some were richer than others and such disparity created conflicts.

Yeah, but again stratification is basically what happens alongside the development of proto-state institutions like chiefdom and priestly authority.

Anyway if relative poverty is what we're concerned with, then capitalism is worse than anything that came before, by far, because the material gap between the poorest and richest in 2018 is far greater than it was in 1618, or 1218, or 2018 BCE, or 20,018 BCE.

 

[Traitorfish]

If you mean the rise of agriculture and formation of the first small cities, then I would tend to agree. But keep in mind that even in H&G societies some were richer than others and such disparity created conflicts.

The wealth of a hunter-gatherer society amounts to whatever it can carry with it, and whatever it can find as it goes. "Wealth" and "poverty" aren't really meaningful terms until people become sedentary enough to start accumulating goods, or failing to accumulate them, and moreover until people develop societies complex enough that some people can control other people access to the means of accumulating goods.

It's hard to impoverish hunter-gatherers, because it resources are scarce, they just piss off somewhere else. They're as rich as their surroundings, as bountiful or hostile as they might be, and those surroundings change week to week, if not day to day. Whether they're scraping about in a desert or bathing in the whisky streams of Big Rock Candy Mountains becomes a practical rather than sociological question. To impoverish people, to make poverty a characteristic of their life and not just of wherever they happen to be standing, you need to fence them off, to say "you are allowed access to these specific resources, in these specific ways". That, almost by definition, requires social inequality. To the extent that hunter-gatherers can be impoverished, it's that other, alien hierarchies are capable of imposing just these sorts of restrictions on them.

 

[Lexicus]

It's also true that ethnography on hunter-gatherer societies demonstrates that individual private property wasn't really A Thing in hunter-gatherer societies. If anything, my impression from reading about them has been that the dizzying array of different kinds of relationships between people and objects totally defies any attempt at theoretical classification.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Yeah, but again stratification is basically what happens alongside the development of proto-state institutions like chiefdom and priestly authority.

Anyway if relative poverty is what we're concerned with, then capitalism is worse than anything that came before, by far, because the material gap between the poorest and richest in 2018 is far greater than it was in 1618, or 1218, or 2018 BCE, or 20,018 BCE.

I don't think that the Inuit considered themselves poor until they met Europeans. The utility of better stuff became apparent.

I agree that chiefdoms and priestly classes were the beginnings of wealth disparity. Sure today the gap is huge, but if you are poor in a NY slum or in a Mumbai slum, the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire may not be readily apparent. You or I might notice, though. At some point the absolute numbers don't matter at all. One of the biggest changes today is that the wealth disparity is well known and visible to everyone.

 

[Narz]

I don't think that the Inuit considered themselves poor until they met Europeans. The utility of better stuff became apparent.

Social comparison creates suffering. If you always crave what you dont have you'll always feel poor. This is the hedonic treadmill capitalism feeds on.