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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28472 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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So let me start by saying why I do actually think it's very important to litigate whether such a discussion can be had and how it should be had. The reason being that I don't expect anyone on this forum to be the type of world-class expert who could invent an actually workable new system, nor to have the influence and following to get it implemented if they did. We can certainly discuss such thing for fun, but I wouldn't expect them to lead anywhere.

Its all for fun around here. We take the fun a little seriously though, and have discussion norms and rules.

And I think your response here does somewhat demonstrate the problem with the discussion that I'm trying to call out here. Any mention of government involvement gets rounded off to central planning, any questioning of the capitalist class gets rounded off to no private property, everything gets lumped into the category of communism, the whole thing is dismissed because communism never works in practice.

I am not trying to be dismissive. But I was only given so much to go off of. And what you wrote sounds explicitly like central planning. I think you'd be frustrated with me if I said we are going to talk about free markets and private ownership, but only as they theoretically exist, and that you bringing up real world examples of capitalism is just you being dismissive. I also believe I kept my criticisms generally theoretical. The one point where I dipped into the practical was to disagree with your claim that the system you proposed is new or novel.

There are people who say "communism sounds nice in theory, but it doesn't work in practice". I am not one of those people. I say communism fails in theory. Central planning fails in theory. The theory of how it fails was predicted before they were ever tried. The people who claimed it would fail in theory lost the intellectual debate in the early 1900's. And countries went on to try those things anyways. And then they failed in practice as well.

I am happy to stick purely to theoretical discussions. As you said and I agreed, this is a discussion for fun, and getting bogged down in historical fights is usually not as fun for me, and much more of a time sink.

I feel this is kind of unfair to my proposal: the proxy measure I suggest is people actually voluntarily using the thing, which is pretty much how markets work already.

Its similar, and the differences are subtle. But those subtle differences are very important.

  1. Resource scarcity among consumers matters because it allows for niche uses that are highly valued by those users. I've found that there are often free programs that can do just about anything I want available online. However, there are also often paid software products that serve the same purpose, and I often find myself paying for the superior product when I need to save time and effort.
  2. The quality of the product matters, and the wrong usage statistics will reward poor quality. If you went by "time spent using a program" you might create horror shows of programs that are intentionally slow, confusing, and hard to use.
  3. Measurements can be gamed. Just like you discussed elsewhere with weaponzing download counters. Imagine devs were paid by the download or the hours used. They would have an incentive to artificially run up those counts (it would potentially require draconian levels of surveillance to prevent this abuse).

I agree that you can get into Goodhart's law problems if you distribute money based on how many people use/want a thing, but I think they're pretty much the exact same problems you have in current capitalist markets; see the Marvel supremacy, and other trash popular culture.

I'm not 100% sure I follow the point you are making here. But I would say to keep in mind that the system you proposed sounds like it might be a fixed allocation. Like collect $1 billion in taxes and distribute that among the software makers. But markets are not fixed allocation. Everyone could get sick of Marvel movies and stop going to watch them tomorrow, and they just spend their money on something completely different. People could get sick of computers and go outside to touch some grass.

My proposal here was that instead of using money as the scarce resource that people allocate among alternative, we use their time. Entertainment already works this way in practice: more is produced than anyone could ever consume, people decide what to spend their limited free time on. People deciding what to spend their scarce leisure time on is fairly isomorphic to people deciding what to spend their scarce money on; I think you would find the same types of price discovery in such a system.

And I don't think that's really anything like 'central planning'.

You are right, in the new digital world this proposal might not end up being central planning. This sort of thing was impossible before. So you had people whose job it was to figure out which products were needed, and then they'd go tell producers what was needed. These ended up being the central planners.

I think there are two scenarios where your proposal ends up being central planning anyways:

  1. People don't want a draconian level of software surveillance on their machines to determine usage hours, and to make sure they aren't just artificially pumping up usage hours.
  2. The political class does not like the distribution of goods, and steps in to "correct" it. For example, lets say no one produces any software that is usable by disabled people, because it is too much effort for too low of a reward from a small number of users. So central planners add boosts in payouts if it is also usable by disabled people.

And I didn't say no private ownership of anything, I said no capitalists. This was just a parenthetical not really related to my proposal, so I'll explain more:

I think price discovery through free and competitive markets is a great piece of social technology, which I've already said we should keep in place for all scarce resources.

I don't buy that such a market system requires a separate ruling class of capitalists who own the means of production, while everyone else has to sell their labor to those people to survive.

I have to let the real world for a minute. Most Americans are capitalists. About 53% own stocks in a corporation. Most Americans are also workers who sell their labor to someone else. Thinking of these as two separate classes often feels a little outdated to me. I suppose in Marx's time it might have made sense to have this division. It doesn't really make sense anymore.

Having to work to survive is the default state of humanity. Tribal people 10k years ago didn't just lay around all day and have food drop out of the sky onto their laps. They worked.

There is a small class of people that does not have to work to survive. That group has been growing as the total amount of wealth in our society has increased. I get the impulse to say 'thats not fair, distribute it so we all don't have to work'. But the raw numbers just don't work out. There isn't enough money among rich people. Even if you said "screw the rest of the world" there isn't even enough money among the American rich to lift the American poor permanently out of poverty. Probably at the point it is possible it won't be necessary.

I think you could have an equally efficient free market economy where everyone owned (individually or in partnerships) the means of production for whatever they produce, where they did not work for anyone else and their labor was not alienated, but where they still produced goods under their own direction to sell on the market.

I would personally hate this, for multiple reasons:

  1. Its highly risky. There are capital investments that often need to be made into production. When the capital I own and the labor I produce are in the same industry its called "having all your eggs in one basket". Its a bad financial strategy. What makes sense is to work in one industry and have stock and savings invested in a different industry that has opposite reactions to shocks in the market. Its not easy to do, but that is the optimal strategy.
  2. I've often disliked some my co-workers. I don't need to like someone to work with them. There is a whole social etiquette for being polite at work called "professionalism". I would absolutely not want to be in a situation where those people were also my boss in some capacity. Worker co-ops can have nasty in-fighting and politics going on. I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.
  3. I've had lazy co-workers. Shirking is an age old problem. (Real world alert: it was a major problem in soviet factories.) Why work hard when you can instead not work hard and still get paid well? You might say its because they own part of the endeavor, but you also included partnerships. My brother is currently in a business partnership with a guy, they each own 50% of the company. My brother's business partner spends most of his days on the golf course. My brother has a family to feed and can't afford to match the level of effort his business partner is putting in, he desperately needs the business to succeed. The problems with shirking become much worse when you don't have an easily legible way of determining someone's productivity.

The first and third reason are also reasons why a lot of people shouldn't like that kind of system. The second reason might really excite some and scare off others. Depends on how you feel when you hear the term "office politics". If it fills you with dread, then this system would be far worse.

I think the fact that we call competitive free markets (or sometimes, just any type of trading general!) 'capitalism' is basically the result of very successful propaganda efforts by the capitalists elites, intended to make us identify them personally with all our economic success. I think that's a motivated narrative that has much more to do with politics and power relations than it has to do with economics, and I don't think it's actually true. I think free markets are the powerhouse here, and the capitalist ruling class are basically riding its coattails and not contributing much.

Investing capital into useful and productive endeavors is not easy. If you think it is, you must be filthy rich from the stock market.

And the alternative to investing money is consuming it. I almost feel like we've pulled a giant con on the economic elite. We've convinced them that the number in their bank account matters more for their social standing than any kind of actual spending. With the kind of wealth that billionaires have to thrown around, they could be spending it on much more ridiculous things. Trump kinda makes the most sense to me. He had vanity projects, stuck his name on high class but low profitability things like golf courses, used his wealth to stroke his ego on TV, and then used it to run for office and acquire power that wasn't limited by what could merely be purchased. But Trump is not the norm for the ultra wealthy. Many of them hide away, live relatively modestly, and just quietly re-invest the money. And then they pass away leaving the money to their kids who don't have to work for one or two generations.

Again though, most Americans are capitalists and workers. It is ridiculously easy to be a capitalist in America. And it makes sense, capital markets are awesome. Instead of only getting to keep what I earn from work, I can be frugal and have my wealth grow itself. Yes, very people get access to it as well.

First of all, there was a time when feudalism was the best possible economic system, way more productive than anything else anyone had tried. We're not at the end of history yet, there's no reason to think the future can't come up with more improvements just like the past did. And I'm saying that all these appeals to past failures are slowing down that process.

I kinda get the point, but also its wrong. Feudalism was a stable political system in Europe, it wasn't necessarily super productive. But even within Europe the cities were the centers of productivity, and the cities weren't feudal. You are right that history isn't over yet. But I'd heavily bet that the near future is capitalist. And I'd avoid betting on the far future altogether.

Second, I'm talking about how to efficiently distribute digital goods. No kidding no countries in the 1600s or 1800s or 1950s came up with a good solution for that problem, it didn't exist at the time. Again, this demonstrates why I think the tendency to round everything off to communism gets in the way of actually discussing the topic at hand.

Economists have categorized goods for a while, and digital goods fit within these categories.

Rivalrous vs non-rivalrous. (does one person's consumption leave less for someone else. Digital goods are non-rivalrous. So are lighthouses.)

Excludable vs non-excludable. (Can the producer easily stop people from consuming the good. Example: A fireworks show in the sky isn't easily excludable.)

Rivalrous + excludable = private good (most things)

Rivalrous + non-excludable = Common good (the commons. Example: fish in the ocean)

Non-rivalrous + excludable = club good (example: a musical performance in a closed building. But also all digital goods)

Non-rivalrous + non-excludable = Public good (the justification economists give for government to exist is to provide public goods. Military defense is one of the old examples of this. My personal favorite example is asteroid defense.

Economics is an old discipline. Just because some new technology has come along, doesn't mean there isn't already a framework for thinking about it. I don't feel that digital goods are all that unique.

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