The queen does not rule
aeon.co
aeon.co
The same thing turns out to be true of humans. A single human in isolation cannot reproduce. Even a single breeding pair in the wild will (almost certainly) not be able to reproduce. The minimal reproductive unit for homo sapiens is a village or a tribe. So you too are not really an orgnism but an organ, a component of a larger reproducing system that, just like an ant colony, is made of parts that are not physically connected to each other.
This all depends on how you define "life" and "individuality": slippery concepts. And it's hard to not confuse those with emergent behavior once you do get millions/billions of individuals together. Sure you could treat NYC as its own autonomous living organism. Or you could treat it as millions of individuals. It certainly doesn't make sense to treat it as gazillions of cells.
The idea of having free will has been debated for centuries, but intuitively I think it's obvious that a human has more free will than an ant.
The most accurate description is that NYC is part of the phenotype of the human genome.
BTW, this idea is not mine, it's from Richard Dawkins:
It brought to my mind the economic calculation problem [1]. Markets distribute decision making, commanding resources through the transmission of meaningless price-discovery and transactional interactions. This has, so far, outperformed systems which centralize economic planning.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
Worker bees can leave. Even drones can fly away. The Queen is their slave.
https://vimeopro.com/symbolicsound/kiss2016-presentations/vi...
"The man whose whole life is spent in performing a
few simple operations, of which the effects are
perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same,
has no occasion to exert his understanding or to
exercise his invention in finding out expedients
for removing difficulties which never occur. He
naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such
exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and
ignorant as it is possible for a human creature
to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not
only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in
any rational conversation, but of conceiving any
generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and
consequently of forming any just judgement
concerning many even of the ordinary duties of
private life... But in every improved and civilized
society this is the state into which the labouring
poor, that is, the great body of the people, must
necessarily fall, unless government takes some
pains to prevent it."
The problem with capitalism these days tends to be the opposite. The world is changing fast and the economy doesn't really have a need for people who will only do 1 specific simple task for 40 years, to prosper in the long term it is important to be flexible and adapt and learn new things easily.
And a lot of workers dislike this, they would actually prefer the situation described in your quote because it provides economic security even if it's dehumanizing.
Not in the interest of those who rule. Whatever you know is significantly affected by what people with money and power want you to know. Despite all the rhetoric about freedom of thought, etc. Knowledge is socially engineered all the time.
They are being used here as symbols of the idea. We are talking about capitalism, not about Smith or Ford.
Unfortunately this turns into its own feedback loop. Simple intros to Smith talk about free markets, so people associate the name to the idea.
Still reading Adam Smith it is very obvious what he believed. Even if your economics professor were to ignore much of what Smith said (hopefully they wouldn't fail to but in that event...) it would be a pretty poor student that didn't pick up on it.
His 2nd most well know book after Wealth of Nations is called The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/lexington/2010/10/estate_tax_...
If there was one thing the Revolutionary generation agreed on — and those guys who dress up like them at Tea Party conventions most definitely do not — it was the incompatibility of democracy and inherited wealth.
With Thomas Jefferson taking the lead in the Virginia legislature in 1777, every Revolutionary state government abolished the laws of primogeniture and entail that had served to perpetuate the concentration of inherited property. Jefferson cited Adam Smith, the hero of free market capitalists everywhere, as the source of his conviction that (as Smith wrote, and Jefferson closely echoed in his own words), "A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural." Smith said: "There is no point more difficult to account for than the right we conceive men to have to dispose of their goods after death."
The states left no doubt that in taking this step they were giving expression to a basic and widely shared philosophical belief that equality of citizenship was impossible in a nation where inequality of wealth remained the rule. North Carolina's 1784 statute explained that by keeping large estates together for succeeding generations, the old system had served "only to raise the wealth and importance of particular families and individuals, giving them an unequal and undue influence in a republic" and promoting "contention and injustice." Abolishing aristocratic forms of inheritance would by contrast "tend to promote that equality of property which is of the spirit and principle of a genuine republic."
Others wanted to go much further; Thomas Paine, like Smith and Jefferson, made much of the idea that landed property itself was an affront to the natural right of each generation to the usufruct of the earth, and proposed a "ground rent" — in fact an inheritance tax — on property at the time it is conveyed at death, with the money so collected to be distributed to all citizens at age 21, "as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property."
Even stalwart members of the latter-day Republican Party, the representatives of business and inherited wealth, often emphatically embraced these tenets of economic equality in a democracy. I've mentioned Herbert Hoover's disdain for the "idle rich" and his strong support for breaking up large fortunes. Theodore Roosevelt, who was the first president to propose a steeply graduated tax on inheritances, was another: he declared that the transmission of large wealth to young men "does not do them any real service and is of great and genuine detriment to the community at large.''
In her debate in Delaware yesterday, the Republican Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell asserted that the estate tax is a "tenet of Marxism." I'm not sure how much Marx she has read, but she might want to read the works of his fellow travelers Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Herbert Hoover, and Theodore Roosevelt before her next debate.
Also this idea penalizes someone who's parents died when they were born, who would have paid for every opportunity until they were of age, now they have nothing. Meanwhile those who have parents or some other caretaker to pay for and facilitate all kinds of experiences thrive.
If you really think that's the case, then please stop using all the things you've inherited from prior generations (i.e. turn off your computer, electricity, plumbing, clothing you wear, food grown by others, streets built before you).
Please don't use escalating rhetoric like that on Hacker News. We're trying for civil, substantive discussion here. Playing this sort of card is mildly uncivil in its own right and tends to lead to worse.
Rather I'd argue the vast majority of each generation's wealth is created not inherited. Otherwise we'd all be living exponentially worse off than previous generations as the wealth is diluted by population growth.
The moneied interests started that bread and circus brigade because they want to build dynastic wealth. They've succeeded splendidly -- hence the sudden boom of The Dakotas as a banking center for the well to do.
When you look at the human analogy, the queen doesn't have all the resources and food she could ever need. In human society, we prise those people at the top who convince others to give them resources. Human societies are not equal. They never have been. In fact, equality is a completely human social construct that we must actively and consciously pursue:
For example, even in government, how exactly is centralized control maintained? Its a bunch of distributed interactions that cause people to go out and take actions that result in overall changes, but there isn't a "government" per se that is like a giant telepathic mind controlling anyone's actions, its just millions of interactions of people choosing what to do (some soldiers, some merchants, some politicians), flowing in all directions.
The rest of the article shows, including his millet experiment, that our longstanding belief is wrong at least in regards to ants. In fact the only such ant is the queen.