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Comment by bluetomcat | Hacker News Reader

Most of the economy in the so called "developed countries" is nowadays a zero-sum game between winners and losers. Seen from a macro perspective, it resembles a multi-agent system where independent agents compete to provide inessential products and services in exchange for being able to afford basic necessities like housing, food and child care. The finite resource that such companies are fighting for is people's attention and time. Some win, others lose, but the status quo is that we are sweating from work in order to live in a world with smart refrigerators, automatic garage doors and pointless baby toys. And if we had more spare time, why would we even think of that.

What we really need is a change in paradigm because market forces will mostly solve only small "consumer" problems and cannot reorganise our society in a more efficient way.

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I’m sorry that this is your world view, because it is deeply flawed and focusing on such cynicism leads to depression.

Most of HN lives in a tech bubble where everyone is focused on building semi-useless software like you describe. However the majority of society still does “normal” things like construction, manufacturing, sales, etc. and some sort of fundamental reorganizing of society on non-market principles doesn’t change that someone needs to maintain our physical infrastructure and keep the lights on.

The economy is not a zero-sum game. If I make more money there is not someone else losing. The more jobs there are, the more needs fulfilled, the more services provided the better it is for everyone as more money moves around.

It’s not on someone else to tell me what I should and should not want. If I desire it and a company provides it for a price, it doesn’t matter that the smart refrigerator is a waste in your vision. The market demands, and entrepreneurs provide.

>> It’s not on someone else to tell me what I should and should not want.

That's true.

>> If I desire it and a company provides it for a price, it doesn’t matter that the smart refrigerator is a waste in your vision.

People are not good at knowing(or at least acting) on what will make them deeply happy, happier over the longer term, or even just happy. Psychological research tells us that.

Add to that the power of advertising, so yes, people do want many things of little value.

I’d rather trust individuals to make their own purchasing decisions, and let the market experiment and figure out what is best, than reorganize society on non-market principles and let a committee determine what people should and should not want.

Research may state that no one knows what will make themselves happy, but isn’t that one of life’s challenges? Finding happiness and purpose? I don’t need an academic paper to tell me happiness is difficult to attain.

>> Research may state that no one knows what will make themselves happy, but isn’t that one of life’s challenges?

Sure.

But if people don't really know what makes them happy, maybe they'll buy a lot of useless stuff ?

> Research may state that no one knows what will make themselves happy, but isn’t that one of life’s challenges? Finding happiness and purpose?

If this involves things like burning absurd amounts of fossil fuels and shoving new phones down our throat every year, it is absolutely our shared problem that you are bad at allocating resources.

Edit: my → our shared

Is that really true that the majority of people don't know what will make them happy? I mean yeah, there's a lot of tragic and unhappy people out there, but is it enough that we need to question the nature of our society?

I, and most people I know, are pretty happy. Not every choice I make turns out well, but at least it's my choice and I accept the consequences. There are a few chemically depressed people in my social circle, but it's pretty clear to me that they would be depressed no matter how you reorganize society.

>> Is that really true that the majority of people don't know what will make them happy?

Decision and experience: why don't we choose what makes us happy?

""Recent years have witnessed a growing interest among psychologists and other social scientists in subjective well-being and happiness. Here we review selected contributions to this development from the literature on behavioral-decision theory. In particular, we examine many, somewhat surprising, findings that show people systematically fail to predict or choose what maximizes their happiness, and we look at reasons why they fail to do so. These findings challenge a fundamental assumption that underlies popular support for consumer sovereignty and other forms of autonomy in decision-making (e.g. marriage choice), namely, the assumption that people are able to make choices in their own best interests. "

http://mail.im.tku.edu.tw/~myday/teaching/1001/SMM/S/1001SMM...

>> I mean yeah, there's a lot of tragic and unhappy people out there, but is it enough that we need to question the nature of our society?

There's really a lot of unnecessary suffering, and also unrealized potential.

And is the nature of our society so sacred that it's beyond questioning ?

Because it's not a smart move, historically speaking.

Speaking historically, we seem to have a rather large number of examples where societies were reorganized to take away individual decisionmaking (ostensibly for their own good) and they've all gone rather horribly.

BTW, that paper didn't have any numbers in it, and didn't really help answer the question "Is that really true that the majority of people don't know what will make them happy?" The biases it enumerated are I am sure common, but do they dominate the lives of the majority of people? I am doubtful, especially if the proposal is "we will take away all your troubles, just let us make all your major life decisions for you (including, almost always, the ability to revoke the deal)".

I suppose that educating people, especially helping the understand themselves better, is key here.

Letting, or expeting, someone else to make you deeply happy when you don't know what would be it yourself leads to the agency problem. That is, how that someone else knows what your best.interest is, and why observe it.

People have other motives than their own happiness.

>The economy is not a zero-sum game. If I make more money there is not someone else losing.

Depends on your accounting. As a % of GDP, the economy is absolutely zero sum. And some useless sectors (finance) have been taking a greater share of GDP.

That's entirely artificial. At the individual or company level, nobody knows or cares about their percentage of GDP.

The economy definitely behaves in ways that has to do with percent of GDP. Capital allocation is the most obvious factor. Individuals feel the weight of finance on the economy regardless of whether they know it or care.

It's just not capturing anything interesting about how growth in one industry should affect other people's decisions. Consider a factory town in the Midwest. The factory closing is not good for other businesses! Their loss is not a gain for you. Or if some bank decides to put its headquarters there, that is very good for the community.

Generally speaking, being in a rich or growing area is a good location for business because your customers spend more. Similarly, a thriving economy is good for business, not bad.

You aren't going to convince people that good things are actually bad by measuring things in percentages. You're just measuring it wrong.

On the other hand, housing when there's no way to build more units is an example of something that can actually be zero sum. If you move in, that means one less place to live for anyone else.

You're talking as if all economic activity involves building things. That's not the real world. The main question we should be asking about growth is "what happens to productivity gains?" Do they accrue to everyone evenly? Or do they disproportionately accrue to a small number of people?

It turns out that over the last four decades, the answer has overwhelmingly been "accrue to a small number of people", and most people have seen almost nothing in terms of gains. A big part of the reason why is that there are entire industries (finance) devoted to that accrual. As a result, the continually-growing pie doesn't matter, because every time the pie grows larger, a few people keep taking larger and larger slices of it.

GDP ain't fixed.

If you're unsatisfied with merely having more, and only care about how much better or worse you're doing relative to everyone else, then you can make anything zero sum. The fact that you can do this with GDP isn't particularly interesting or revealing.

The GDP grows over time. Yes, we're still dealing with economics based on scarce resources (relatively speaking). That won't change unless we have a technological singularity, and even if that happens, some things of value like land (preferred locations) or esteemed original art pieces will still be scarce commodities.

What's the alternative model? That the government allocates the scarce resources instead of the market? What makes government better at this for most things (allowing for some exceptions)?

The economy that you describe, is the simplified econ 101 version. The market fixes everything, and the invisible hand steers everything to optimality.

The human being you describe in your last paragraph is from the same economics textbook: A perfectly rational human being making rational decisions 24/7.

Both are simplified models that help doing some undergrad economics...but are absolutely insufficient to explain the world correctly and prevent the solutions of a myriad of problems.

The alternative to letting the individual determine what they want is to let someone else choose for them. I’m arguing on fundamental principles because the parent commenter is advocating a reorganization of market-based economies.

I don’t care how complex the system is. If you aren’t letting me, the individual, determine what is best for my life, then you are coming from a place of superiority and belief that you know better than others. And you don’t.

Often the choices made by "the individual" don't account for externalities that aren't built into the price. Viz landfills, climate change, effect on those with less economic resources.

Are you suggesting it's better to ban individual choice because of the existence of landfills and climate change? The market could effectively and efficiently price those into products, if society would pass a law.

No. Did I say that? I like living in a predominantly capitalist society. I would like us to pay more attention to the consequences of consumption. One way to do that is to build it into prices (such as a carbon tax, or upstreaming disposal cost) or by regulation. Building cost into price is actually a very capitalist and arguably libertarian approach as it enables the market to reallocate resources to minimize what would otherwise be an externality.

So you're not disagreeing with the parent. Yes, a carbon tax would be the way to account for that externality while maintaining individual choice.

That part yes, but not this, "Are you suggesting it's better to ban individual choice ...". That's not a fair characterization.

Ah I see, looks like you guys cleared it up/agreed in a sibling post.

Great, so we are in agreement. I was confused because:

> Often the choices made by "the individual" don't account for externalities that aren't built into the price...

You put "the individual" in quotes as if to critique some sort of free-market system based on individuals, and I wanted to emphasize that the system we have can solve those problems.

Ah I see - that wasn't my intent.

Disposal already costs; either you pay directly, through taxes if your local municipality organizes it, or your rent if your property owner organizes it.

The cost of disposal varies by where it is disposed, not where it is purchased or made. It makes no sense to add an arbitrary cost to a product when the receiver of that money is not the one dealing with the externality in the first place.

The same goes for carbon emissions; a properly managed landfill that captures released methane is in fact a method of carbon sequestration. Adding a carbon tax would merely create a new slush fund or dump into an existing one.

Except that disposal costs are highly distorted - depending on where you are, it’s much cheaper than it should be because of cheap land for landfills, cheap shipping to shift the problem away, etc.

Proposals to add cost to disposal are meant to correct for these distortions - to really represent the collective cost to the world. This absolutely should not be done arbitrarily - massive, ongoing research should be done to ensure its correcting for these distortions appropriately. Rinse and repeat for fossil fuels.

BTW, a methane-capturing landfill is, at best, carbon neutral, not sequestering.

Depends what you burying, if it's paper and food waste, it is sequestering. Paper and food contain carbon pulled from the atmosphere, and by preventing it from decomposing by excluding oxygen (e.g most landfills) you get carbon sequestration

That causes anerobic composting which turns the carbon into methane. This is either recaptured and burned or goes into the atmosphere.

Only small amounts of the carbon are converted to methane... enough that capture is worthwhile, but there is certainly a significant portion remaining below ground.

I get the idea but I had learned it wasn’t an effective sequestration method. Do you have references I can check out?

My point was that the added cost should be reflected in the collection of waste, not the point of sale, because there aren't any externalities yet, and so there isn't anything to calculate.

As for landfills being cheap, that isn't a bad thing. That means the externalities at those sites are low. I live near an old one that was turned into a 50 acre prairie restoration space with about 2 miles of walking paths and full of wildlife. As others pointed out, burying carbon does sequester it. Methane capture merely prevents it from getting back out when it is nutrient and water dense (aka food waste).

1. There are tons of externalities at point of sale. Was the item produced using water from a common source like a river? How were non-solid waste products disposed? When it’s source materials were extracted, what impact did that have on the extraction site? Not even counting the fossil fuels needed to make the item...

2. Assuming that certain places have lower externalities doesn’t make sense. Aside from the global footprint of trash in general, there have been tons of rehabilitated sites but they will need maintenance and monitoring for hundreds years.

Producing value has no externalities? That's new!

> As for landfills being cheap, that isn't a bad thing. That means the externalities at those sites are low.

No, that means that most of the actual price is not accounted for and is dumped on the public instead.

No, only to reduce individual choice when it's clearly pushing away from significantly better global optima than individual choice can achieve.

For example, while an individual might benefit from stealing, but hurts overall more than it helps, so we try to block that individual choice despite the fact that we might be hurting somebody who is really good at stealing.

yes. ands this already happens everywhere around you.

you can't import cars from one place to another, because of emissions. you do not have the rigth to roam on most of the world like you have still in some very select places (e.g. scotland), because of property rights and national security. You can't market any food becuase of public health. Etc.

so your capricious question is already done and answered for. individual choice is already banned in many aspects. and you are still choosing to not see it. including in your arguments for buying a smart fridge. you never had the choice either way.

In principle the market has answers for these.

Landfills are a problem because they're subsidized, because we'd rather provide free/cheap garbage pickup than have people throwing their trash in the street or the ocean. The alternative would be to not subsidize it and then penalize throwing trash on someone else's property with 500 hours of picking up trash. Then there isn't trash in the streets because either people don't put it there or there are plenty of people to pick it back up, and trash collection service costs enough that the plastic junk your plastic junk comes in makes it cost more than the alternative that produces less garbage.

Climate change is the same thing. You're releasing CO2 into somebody else's property, which should require their permission. Good luck getting permission from literally everyone in the entire world; might be easier to buy an electric car.

These problems were created by making concessions from the principle that interactions should be voluntary. If you're creating an externality then whoever is paying for that externality should have to agree to it before you can do it, and they're not going to agree to that without being appropriately compensated.

Actually, fairly often, we do. I don't think we need to look any further than the paranoia around vaccinations to see that individuals often don't know what's good for themselves and others. There's any number of businesses that rely on their targets having incomplete information (or downright misinformation) that should probably be regulated out of existence (and many in fact have been).

> The alternative to letting the individual determine what they want is to let someone else choose for them.

In real-world "free" markets, the poor have their choices made for them by the wealthy.

It is less "real-world markets" and just markets. Markets are one dollar one vote.

Right, which without sane wealth (re)distribution is just a plutocracy of the banks and the hyper wealthy.

If one dollar equal one vote, you can't honestly say markets are free because by design they favor those with wealth and power.

There is nothing "free" about a system that favors the wealthy.

Except if you are wealthy, or at least a momentarily embarrassed bilionaire that soon expecta wealth and fortune

Well by that token armchair politicians who make social choices on forums on behalf of the dispossessed, in lieu of actually rolling up their sleeves and doing social work are merely momentarily embarrassed 'benevolent' dictators.

Which can only turn into a true statement after individual inspection of each commenter. Assuming everybody that enters political discourse online is apolitical in their activities offline might turn out a right guess at times, but it stays a guess. As if you are only allowed to say something while you are out in the streets covered with sweat. No. Then they will complain that you say anything at all instead of fixing symptoms that have a systemic origin.

Within any system, be it a society a family or a friendship, communication is important to react to shifts and regain balance (or to restructure the system). Talking is not dictating, talking is talking and the other person can always respond.

Hah, exactly.

Capitalism is not perfect; apparently it is the better of the alternatives we have right now.

In order to effect fundamental change, and find a better alternative to capitalism, each human being needs to fundamentally change themselves--yet apparently no one is willing to do that. As long as we let instinctual passions like desire, and social emotions like envy, hold sway over us so will continue to exist institutions like capitalism and fashion. And forced change (like socialism), without fundamentally addressing the underlying human condition, wouldn't achieve anything fruitful as evidenced from history.

Don’t know why this is being downvoted. To someone who witnessed the transition from forced “socialism” to brutal capitalism in Russia it makes total sense.

> Don't know why this is being downvoted

The key answer is contained in my comment -- to wit: "yet apparently no one is willing to do that [fundamentally change themselves]". Even most intelligently people, the demographics of HN, are unwilling ... hence the (mindless) downvotes.

Probably being downvoted because of the implied stark "socialism/capitalism" dichotomy, and describing the need for a fundamental change of human nature, and the downvoters have seen that a regulated capitalist economy with a strong social safety net seem to work pretty well. :)

What does capitalism actually mean, though? Do you mean capitalism in the US, Canada, France, Germany, China? All have private property, profit oriented companies and markets... It’s such a broad term it’s probably completely useless and it leads you down a false dichotomy. There are significant differences between existing systems and many possible new approaches to taxation and social order in the pipeline. For example, have a look at the book radical markets by Eric Posner and Glen Weyl to get a taste of what is possible in terms of legislative innovations.

So, I am not against and all for personal change and growth but absolving the economic system from change doesn’t make this task any easier. Humans are to a huge extent a product of their environment and it is certainly in everyones best interest to design “humane” or “prosocial” systems which allow humans to thrive and cooperate.

I'd say it's more like the poor have their choices made for them by the polity.

For example, if you are poor and living in the tenderloin in SF, any give California assembly person has way more exertion on your quotidian economic choices than Jeff bezos.

Really? The wealthy are to blame?

Wealthy tell poor mothers to buy junk food instead of healthier (and cheaper) options?

Wealthy tell poor kids to watch TV instead of doing homework?

Wealthy tell poor that having a budget and sticking to it is a dumb idea?

Yes?

Who owns the fast food chains? The marketing agencies? The land where the stores are built?

Who lobbies politicians to allow them to do anything they want in the name of profit? Who owns the media brainwashing the masses into voting for X or buying Y?

I'm sorry but literally everything is done for the wealthy and by the wealthy.

> Wealthy tell poor kids to watch TV instead of doing homework?

No. That happens naturally, while the parents are working at their second jobs.

Teachers do a pretty good job enforcing the homeworks, unless actively obstructed by "you're unfair, he didn't do nothing wrong!" parents.

Yep.

The wealthy control the society that...

a) ...has food deserts where poor people can't access fresh food and vegetables, and in many of these areas, junk food IS the cheapest option.

Learn more: https://www.moveforhunger.org/harsh-reality-food-deserts-ame...

b) ...has tons of enriching and educational and recreational activities for wealthier students compared to poor students. In addition, just being poor has HUNDREDS of correlating factors for poor academic performance -- it's very lazy to just say "poor people are bad parents who just let their kids watch TV, that's why they are bad at school."

Learn more: https://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/education

c) ... does NOT, despite your strawman point, ever tell poor people "that having a budget and sticking to it is a dumb idea." Every financial counseling service for poor people includes budgeting classes. But if you're a single parent of two kids with $1900/month gross income (well above minimum wage) and the median rent for a 2BR apartment in your city is $1200/month, good luck with that budget.

Learn more: https://povertyusa.org/facts

So, we might not blame an individual wealthy person but it's fair to blame the people holding the cards in society.

By the way, when people repeat the arguments above, it reads to many people as incredibly uninformed and displaying an astonishing lack of empathy. I don't mean that as an attack, since many people on this site pride themselves on their lack of empathy and their ability to never have to interact with any lower-class people, other than complaining about homeless poop in the Tenderloin.

One more thing: rarely, there are incredibly driven and talented and lucky poor people who break through every possible disadvantage of childhood poverty and become successful. Sometimes those people will reply to a post like this and say "Well, I did it, so it's possible! [fuck the rest of them!]" But MOST of the people in that situation developed enough empathy and real word apperception to realize the rarity of their success, and agree that society should strive to offer more pathways up for everyone.

Yes to all of those, it's called advertising.

Do you believe all the advertising?

Why poor people would?

Are people really at fault for being persuaded by advertisements when that is their entire point?

Given that the least-healthy food is the most heavily subsidized in America, yes, the wealthy have orchestrated a world in which the poor choose junk food. Some "free market" there.

As for having a budget and sticking to it, no one is better at budgeting than the poor, out of sheer necessity.

How can you be that naive? On the large scale, marketing (which includes paid for by industry, biased scientific studies) is what shapes people’s desires. Vast majority of people are perfectly happy with letting someone else choose for them, and even smart people fall for it. It has truly became a fundamental principle of our society.

Not only this, but the capitalists talk of economic free choice, but you can't just go "start a business"...you need capital. And you can be lucky enough to already have it, or you need to convince someone to give it to you. In essence, we're all either lucky, forced to beg for capital (ie, someone else making decisions for you, there goes "freedom"), forced to sell our labor for less than what it's worth, or live in a van. But, hey, we have 2000 different refrigeration options, yay...

On top of this, the commodification of basic essentials like housing constantly drives prices up to meet productivity levels. So, we're being more productive, but expenses are growing to match because, well, the invisible hand wants it that way, and who are we to argue?

Expanses are growing thanks to government created inflation, by printing money.

I think thats a bad cliche.

If I break down my spending, most goes on food (I have no rent/mortgage), the next biggest item are essentials like utilities/council tax/bills, then car bills (insurance, petrol, repairs), then the kids then personal luxuries for me and my wife.

Marketers might shape how I spend my food budget (ie on which brands/products) but I still need food. Marketers influenced my choice of car, but I still need a car with certain qualities (big, room for kids and bikes, reliable). If I had to pay rent, a vast portion of my income would go on that - how is this being influenced by marketers?

If PR/advertising/marketing became illegal tomorrow, people would still continue to spend most of their income on a place to live, food to eat, utilities, a car and their kids education.

A lot of marketing efforts in various forms are designed to subtly persuade you that owning a car is cool, that driving it is a pleasant experience, that it signals respect and social status. Even people who don’t need cars are influenced by that. Same techniques are used in real estate advertising.

Keep in mind that marketing also influences other people, including those whose opinions you value.

If PR/advertising/marketing became illegal tomorrow, people would still continue to spend most of their income on a place to live, food to eat, utilities, a car and their kids education.

Yes, and the commercial entities providing those services would have devised ways to influence you despite all those restrictions. Unless you’re talking about North Korea style society, where marketing is replaced by propaganda.

I guess I’m saying, marketers aren’t persuading me I need a car. I made a fairly practical choice that I needed a car (maybe I’m not typical?).

But perhaps instead of buying the cheap Japanese one, I bought the expensive German one. So marketers persuaded me to spend 20% more?

The idea that marketers are somehow controlling people’s lives assumes that without marketers, we’d all be living some kind of radically different lives. I doubt we would.

marketers persuaded me to spend 20% more

Exactly. There are basic needs and there are desires. I’m talking about the latter. Note that to afford that extra 20% you might need to modify your life in some way.

Without marketing, people buy a Toyota that's reliable for 20 years, instead of 4 German cars.

Of course fuel-efficiency complicated matters a bit, but in an efficient economy, engines may be replace.

Nope. People's desires shape marketing. Not the other way around. Marketing caters to people's pre existing desires to convince them. Desires have always existed and always will.

You didn’t want to drive that bmw until you saw that ad. Perhaps you didn’t want to drive at all. Now you do.

No one wants to drive a BMW. Everyone wants to a) Travel from point A to point B b) Have fun c) Impress people with status symbols. BMW created something that satisfies those needs.

I suggest you take a but to watch https://youtu.be/PHe0bXAIuk0.

Economics isn't so simple and only from the perspective of the buyer.

I have seen this video and it's well put together. But how does it advocate for reorganizing the economy to eliminate market principles, which is the entire debate we are having? Great video, but wholly irrelevant to this discussion.

There does not have to be a binary choice here.

Markets do some things very well. They do not do everything well.

The basic idea of self governance is we surrender some choice in order to maximize personal freedom.

Applying market principles everywhere results in people being free to live under a bridge, or in an alleyway...

We can and should very seriously constrain markets, and or eliminate them for some things.

What is left will function much better because more people will be able to participate in a meaningful way.

The left is moving this direction, adding economic reform to it's standard social agenda for these reasons. The party struggle over it is plain to see.

Way too many people are in real economic trouble. Markets are killing them.

The video has nothing to do with anything we are talking about, it is about short and longterm debt cycles. That was my comment.

Markets aren't killing anybody, markets don't hold a gun. They are a tool to efficiently allocate resources via price discovery.

Yes they are.

They are a very poor tool in some use cases and are a great tool in others.

Denying that is literally pulling triggers.

No, denying that is at most failing to understand some connection.

Attacking others doesn't help you make others understand the problems you are seeing.

None of that is an attack. It is a statement.

I cannot, nor want to own how others take information like that.

Ignorance takes many forms. Willful ignorance tends to be one of the more painful.

Frame it all however you want to. Does not change the brutal impact we are seeing today.

There is absolutely no reason to coddle, sugarcoat these things.

If that is rough? Not my problem. It is our problem, and being brutally honest about it is the right thing to do.

>> The alternative to letting the individual determine what they want is to let someone else choose for them.

There might be gray areas in the middle. Some rough ideas:

- banning marketing

- Incentivising talented people toward roles that are best for society, and their results will pull people

- Do people really choose what they want ? people want affordable housing, to see their kids more, that the job conditions to be nice, etc. They settle for cheap consumer stuff, because that's what our society is aimed towards. It's a choice.

That's just it. Sometimes you DO know better. Like we know it's better that homes aren't bought and left empty in dense urban housing markets, but wealthy people love to buy them all up.

So, yes. I do. And you do too.

We also don't need humvees. Or diamonds.

Housing is a very complex subject, but in general the biggest issue with housing is that communities block new developments on artificial grounds such as environmental review, ruining their view, or "historical character". If you want to reduce housing prices, build more houses.

On humvees and diamonds - if people want large cars and diamonds, let them buy them. If your unhappy about fossil fuels, would an electric humvee be better? I could go through your or anyone's home and critique the usefulness of any number of possessions based on my own subjective definition of value. That doesn't mean I'm right and you're wrong, or that you don't deserve such things.

We let the individual decide what is best for them.

Look, your original description was basically the textbook definition of supply and demand in a free market. Intuitively it’s explainable, but in the 21st century, at least in many parts of the western world, the wealthy are essentially driving the ship and steering economic and political outcomes to their own advantage. You’re describing a perfect utopia, which doesn’t exist.

>The alternative to letting the individual determine what they want is to let someone else choose for them.

Really because we can’t use policy or regulation to have folks pay some cost for the impact their decisions have on society?

Your black and white view of the world is incredibly misguided. Your post reminds me of a recent commentator on FOX News stating socialism would turn the US into Venezuela... LOL

You are mischaracterizing the top-level comment and presenting a false choice. Nowhere in the original comment did the author suggest that he/she wants someone else to make your choices for you. They simply pointed out a few common, well-understood failure modes of unfettered capitalism as implemented in much of the western world today, namely unaccounted negative externalities and markets that can't be characterized as efficient with any sort of straight face.

It's possible to honestly acknowledge these failures and speculate about possible solutions without being a socialist. But apparently it isn't possible to have this conversation without libertarians asking you if you're a communist for even thinking about possible limits to no-rules-at-all capitalism.

You’re arguing from principles but not ones which are actually relevant to the problems at hand.

Your regurgitatation of economic dogma is far too simple for the authoritative stance you’ve chosen to adopt regarding how to solve one of the most complex and nuanced problems... ever.

Certainly there are complications, but the question isn’t whether the free market is perfect. The question is whether (and in which cases) it’s worse than a grand social engineering program to decide what everyone’s supposed to want. Probably there are some cases where it is, but it’s hard to see what problems would be prevented by rules about how smart of a refrigerator you should make.

What are the alternatives that are credible and widely accepted? No offense meant, but your comment as is just reads as talking down to someone without actual attempting to educate.

>> It’s not on someone else to tell me what I should and should not want.

Let me give you the news: companies have like..., forever, being in the business of telling others what they should want or not. This is called advertising. This is essentially what every company in the so called new economy, large or small, does to make money. In a modern capitalist economy, nobody cares about the needs of others. The goal is to advertise what you want others to do and, if the advertisement and product presentation is good enough, make loads of money. In the end, the need usually is born from the collective pressure of using the same products.

Try running a company this way and we’ll see how long it lasts.

Doing okay so far -Bill Gates

Google is not doing bad...

>> It’s not on someone else to tell me what I should and should not want. >> This is called advertising.

And because that's annoying we have ad-blockers and TiVo and premium streaming and no-soliciting signs. There are better ways to market that don't involve disingenuously telling someone what they want.

> However the majority of society still does “normal” things like construction, manufacturing, sales, etc.

"Normal" is when you build schools, hospitals, community centers and affordable houses and you produce only several kinds of refrigerator for the whole world, streamlining their production and servicing. Not when you construct factories, warehouses, office skyscrapers and shopping areas where those same goods will be manufactured, stored, marketed and sold, by thousands of competing companies. That competition leads to a lot of wasted resources in exchange for product improvements of a questionable value, like, the availability of fridges in a variety of colours.

> someone needs to maintain our physical infrastructure and keep the lights on

Sure, but the strain on that infrastructure would be far less without the need for commuters to commute 2 hours to their job, in order to market the "best smart fridge" in an office.

Everything is deeply interconnected, and we really need to reevaluate our goals and interests as a society.

You are coming from the socialist angle, which is a loaded word that will probably derail the conversation, but essentially you see the free market and competition as a waste of resources that harms society.

The base argument is that we don’t need 80 brands of deodorant, and the fact we have so many is a colossal waste of resources, duplication, and moral failure of society.

Whereas I see 80 brands of deodorant and think it’s a wonderful example of how hard entrepreneurs work to satisfy all manner of wants and needs, ultimately driving down the price of deodorant and giving me a range of options. A government bureaucrat managing the country’s only deodorant factory could never possibly match the range of options and preferences that the market has provided me.

This is the fundamental difference in philosophy between real socialists (aka, not “keep the market but make healthcare free” milquetoast socialists but “make the private sector illegal” socialists) and free market advocates. I prefer a world that constantly competes to satisfy my needs, and all of the “waste” you see is just the process of satisfying everyone’s needs.

> essentially you see the free market and competition as a waste of resources that harms society.

GP made no general statement of this sort. Misrepresenting other perspectives is boring.

> Not when you construct factories, warehouses, office skyscrapers and shopping areas where those same goods will be manufactured, stored, marketed and sold, by thousands of competing companies. That competition leads to a lot of wasted resources in exchange for product improvements of a questionable value, like, the availability of fridges in a variety of colours. [...] Everything is deeply interconnected, and we really need to reevaluate our goals and interests as a society.

Parent poster said this plainly, I'm not sure how you could read it another way.

GP unequivocally did make exactly that statement.

>> A government bureaucrat managing the country’s only deodorant factory could never possibly match the range of options and preferences that the market has provided me.

There aren't only two options - the free market, or soviet russia. there are many more.

I would argue that preventing an individual from creating a new deodorant (or any typical consumer product) because "there is already enough of them" is a defining philosophical difference - either you are for freedom, or you are for collective coercion.

In my opinion, there are never enough deodorant brands. If a new entrant wants to make a new product, it will succeed or fail. It may compete on price or quality, it may drive out another brand, it may expand the market for deodorant by targeting a type of skin sensitivity that wasn't targeted before, it may do any number of things.

But there will never be enough deodorants. There can always be room for one more, and to prevent an individual for trying to make another is the moment we go on the path to Soviet Russia.

You do realize the moment we reform health care, living wages, housing, college, individuals all over the place will be starting shit, don't you?

Look at the impact near free college, the GI bill had on tech. People all over the place started shit.

It can and needs to happen again.

That perfect deodorant is denied us because the person who could produce it is extremely likely to be trapped econonically.

What you are getting is endless variations of the same shit from competing board rooms.

What is worth what to you?

>> either you are for freedom, or you are for collective coercion.

Strong words. I'm somewhere in the middle. i'm not offering to send anybody to any Gulag. But taxing some useless products ? or structuring market competition towards real benefits and not bullshit ? sure.

"either you are for freedom, or you are for collective coercion."

This is a false dichotomy, and the happiest nations on earth have a mix of market regulation and individual freedom.

And, that's an odd dig at life in Soviet Russia. It certainly was not the worst way of life -- I've known quite a few people living in all parts of the world who grew up in the Soviet system and longed for it, wishing for a return to that way of life while knowing it'd never happen.

> I see 80 brands of deodorant [...] satisfy[ing] all manner of wants and needs

I'm not exactly in favor of a command economy, but seriously, how many of these 80 types of deodorant -- or any comparable consumer product -- are fundamentally different from one another, as opposed to being distinguished only by their branding and marketing?

It's not up to me or you to determine why there are so many brands of consumer products. There is not a moment after which we ban all further competition and new entrants. I hope competitors continue to innovate, so we have the best possible choice on a multitude of variables including price, quality, ingredients, etc.

Central production planning and restriction of consumer choice has already been tried. It didn't work. I can't imagine why anyone would want to repeat the same mistake.

Since money represent human work and earth ressources, both finite, yes, when you make money, somebody becomes poorer. Because the total amount of human work and resources and the actual leverage they got on the world becomes diluted.

It may be hard to believe but labor productivity has been increasing!

For example (and bear with me, because this is incredibly hard to believe) it is more efficient in terms of amount of food collected per hour to use a farming machine over a field of wheat than it is to chase a guanaco or some other rabbit with a bow.

But so have resources consumption and money concentration.

Suppose I'm a plumber and you're an electrician. You need your pipes fixed, so you pay me $100. I need my wires fixed, so I pay you $100. At the end we both have the same amount of money we started with, but now your pipes are fixed and my wires are fixed.

You come out ahead as long as the value of the thing you paid for is worth more to you than what you paid for it. And if it isn't then why did you pay that much for it, instead of just not doing it?

This is the regular economy, which is not the topic of this thread. We are talking about wealthy people becoming rich without contributing. Renting has diminushing return for the society. Some things like automatic trading have none.

But that's even better, right? If I pay you $500 for an iPhone, I get an iPhone. If you take that money and spend it, it's "the regular economy" again, and I have to provide whatever you bought. If you don't spend the money then I don't have to give you anything, but I still got an iPhone.

The real problem with this is that then I have to borrow money to buy the iPhone but there is no way for me to ever pay it back, because you never spend the money I borrowed so there is no way for me to end up with it again, meanwhile I'm paying interest on it. So everybody's got a mortgage payment when they should already own their homes.

But this isn't capitalism causing this, it's bad laws. Nobody wants to sell you an iPhone so that Apple will have more money -- they want dividends. Until you tell them that leaving the money inside the company (where it collects interest) results in no taxes but if it's given to the investor to spend or reinvest then the government will be having >40% of it up front. So they take their money as share price appreciation instead. Worse than dividends, but not 40% worse.

That causes capital to accumulate inside corporations, which they then use to buy each other, because what else are they going to do with it? So we get megacorps, which then destroy small businesses and corrupt governments and do evil. Because we tax investing the profits of an existing corporation in a new one, when that's the thing that we need to happen to reduce wealth inequality.

You assume rich people spend all their money. They don't. The accumulate, to buy more renting power to accumulate more. It's getting the economy more and more static.

There are three things a rich person can do with money. They can spend it, they can invest it in a new business, and they can invest it in an existing business.

The third one is the worst for redistributing wealth but it's the one our tax laws give high preference to. That is problematic.

Almost every job i've worked outside of tech is pretty much some non essential service or product. Right now I turn mountains into countertops and fireplaces using large, expensive machines so rich people can have stone inside their homes. I provide nothing that is essential, yet every day customers spend tens of thousands of dollars and my spends thousands so rich people can have nice shiny stone inside their homes.

In order to get this stone, they literally dismantle mountains one block at a time, slice them into slabs and ship them all over the world. Again, all so rich people can have nice shiny stone in their kitchens.

Why aren't you arguing directly that we should all live in soviet-style housing blocks? Concrete is good enough, right? Then we'd all be equal.

I'm not saying they're wrong to have them. I'm pointing out spending $20,000 on some piece of stone for you to prepare your food on is fairly non-essential.

Though again, they remove mountains for this, the shop produces a bunch of toxic, fish killing dust and sediment every day that's slowly killing me and my coworkers and destroying the planet.

But my main point was, the things I create every day are not essential. They are luxury items. Many of the other jobs i've had were also along the same line.

Not that they don't make people happy or improve their lives I suppose,(though the people that got soapstone in their kitchen recently are in for a some trouble the first time they drop something on it or spill something acidic on it.) But, in the end, it's definitely not essential and detrimental to the world as a whole in many ways.

I understand, but from that perspective, pretty much everything in "developed" countries is non-essential, including personal computers (whether desktop, laptop, smartphone, or tablet) and forums like this one to discuss such things. Think of the toxic waste created by all those computers, and the greenhouse gases created by shipping them all over the place! And to what end?

Yeah you're right. I think that's the point the gp comment was making originally. It's not just developed countries either. There are massive industries supporting millions of people that are non-essential. The problem is many of them actually do provide a large increase to quality of life. The improvement granite counters make is questionable, things like computers, phones, vehicles and other large scale damaging things, while not necessarily essential, do bring a dramatic improvement to quality of life and paradoxically enough allow people to make money providing.what is likely another non-essential service or product.

It's always been like this though. In the end, there's no reason for humans to have ever made most of the things we have over the millenia other than because we can and did. Once we had food and shelter and all these things pretty much taken care of, everythong else after was pretty much just for the fuck of it and we've always been at odds with the world and destroyed and altered our environments. The scale has just kept increasing to the point where there are massive global industries devoted to this.

At the same time, humanity still follows our basic survival insticts. We still have that inner subconcious mentality of scarcity when it comes to essentials. So it ends up being treated the same way in our economy as luxury goods and you end up in this situation where people are trading non-essential things for essential things.

If you were supplying things that less affluent people can afford, you might have different but equally strong regrets about the unsustainable ways that business operates. For what it's worth, the full life cycle environmental impact of cheap plastic laminate counters is likely worse than that of polished natural stone.

Yeah probably. I mean pretty much any manufacturing is really at odds with the ecological restoration and ecosystem management degrees I have. I've come to reconcile this dissonance as the non-essential, environment destroying job pays enough money for me to live and have these non-essential things, while trying to help the planet did not. So...there's that. Turns out it's really difficult to live on sparse couple month contracts that are paid with grant money that typically only occur during spring-fall.

> But my main point was, the things I create every day are not essential

A country that only produces essential items (food, shelter) for its population is a very poor country.

Almost by definition, a wealthy country predominantly produces and consumes non-essential goods and services.

It gets really difficult to argue which non-essential goods are worthwhile. Is the art on the wall worth more than the stone lintel? Is it good art? Is it a second hand lintel?

soviet-style housing is a bit extreme.

But what's wrong with being equal ?

So far, all of the experiments to make everyone equal have resulted in soviet-style housing for the many and well-appointed dachas for the few -- and that's at best. I'm doubtful that future experiments will have a different result.

Maybe.

In countries with socialized medicine, access to healthcare services is usually more equal than countries without socialized medicine.

So if some equality can be created in such an important choice, maybe it could be achieved in the less important choice of counter tops, if someone we're to bother.

Why would "equal" matter though? E.g. if noone has access to medicine (probably some African countries), they're all "equal". But... The point is, "equal" is just a buzzword that needs to be deconstructed and analysed in each specific scenario. In medicine in particular, extremes are usually bad (completely private => expensive, completely public => inefficient), and middle ground (public & private) seems to be decent.

People living in equal societies are happier, and less stressed. Maybe it's because differences in status translate to differences in the natural anti-depressant chemical, Serotonin.

No reason to force everyone to be equal, just create your equality paradise and open the doors to the world.

Kibbutz are pretty egalitarian. The New Testament describes the early Christians as living with everything in common ownership. Not every attempt to be equally valued has resulted in the disparities you suggest. The problem is top-down vs bottom-up ... eg https://www.quora.com/How-did-Karl-Marx-define-socialism/ans... .

Genuine question, which bits of the Soviet projects were targetting making everyone equal -- all I've seen are the bits where a dictator rides the coattails of communist ideology to subdue the people. I'm still learning about this part of history, so am keen to understand which bits were started "properly" from a communist perspective. It strikes me that in all cases a portion of society wanted to impose communism, those who didn't want to give up their supremacy (of power or wealth) perverted that system.

As (IIRC) Galbraith says (paraphrase?) "in Capitalism man exploits man, in Communism it's the other way around". The thing is that communism at least seeks to gain equality, capitalism seeks to exploit others up to the legal limits imposed.

> which bits of the Soviet projects were targetting making everyone equal

Private property of means of production and accumulation of capital were outlawed. It was the best attempt to follow Marx tenets.

> It strikes me that in all cases a portion of society wanted to impose communism, those who didn't want to give up their supremacy (of power or wealth) perverted that system.

No. The latter were massacred in 1918. Then the remaining ones executed and sent each other to GuLAGs in several waves. Separation of wealth (even if minuscule on the scale of developed capitalism) appears to be an emergent property.

That mainly seems to happen at the large scale. At the small, community scale, there are plenty of examples of communal societies with many decades of history that continue as an ongoing concern. For example, the Bruderhof's in New York and Pennsylvania: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruderhof_Communities

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

Imagine you take a million humans and you give them a million absolutely identical plots of lands. And each plot of land is, with work, capable of fully sustaining its owner. And you also gave each and every one of them all of the initial tools, training, and resources they'd need to achieve this. And we're also going to assume that these individuals will never experience any health issues or random catastrophes such as weather events, to minimize randomness in our little real life simulation.

And now we set these people free to live as they will. How long will the complete equality last? It'd more likely be a matter of months than years. Some would work harder and produce more enabling them to grow in resources which could then be traded for other things - giving them more than others. Others would go in the opposite direction and behave irresponsibly, such as by indulgence in drink or drug, and find themselves falling further behind. Others would make decisions such as having more children than they could afford to provide for and find themselves in severe issues. Others would simply make better or more astute decisions in general leading them to pull ahead.

It wouldn't take long before our entirely equal society was riddled with inequity. The point of this is that it's impossible for humans to be equal unless somebody enforces that equality. And this brings up two issues. The first is that the enforcer of equality is generally a group or organization that is going to be inherently unequal. Even a completely social system would require 'enforcers' of some sort lest the over achievers dare keep the fruits of their labor for themselves. The second is that you end up with radically warped reward scenarios. If you do better than average, you get stuff taken from you. If you do worse than average, you get stuff given to you. Failure is rewarded, success is punished.

These distorted systems of motivation and the inherent control required to maintain equality are the very fundamental reason that the numerous systems of equality we've tried have all invariably ended up the same. Human society only functions by people spending a pretty good deal of their time doing x when they'd rather be doing y. It's not hard to see what happens when you remove any motivation whatsoever to actually do x. It even explains the ever recurring trend towards authoritarianism and cruel behavior - it's simply an effort to try to force people to do x after you remove all their motivation to do so, and it just doesn't work.

That sounds like very honest and value-providing work.

And, though non-essential (down there on a hierarchy of needs), beauty is important to human lives.

I mean, the alternative is that they take trees or they take oil.. I guess ceramic is probably the most environmentally friendly option unless the wood is harvested sustainably.

> The economy is not a zero-sum game.

Wealth is. I wrote an entire article articulating the point: https://killtheradio.net/economics/wealth-is-mostly-a-zero-s...

> The more jobs there are, the more needs fulfilled, the more services provided the better it is for everyone as more money moves around.

Only if you define cash flow as the goal of the economy and production. If instead it is to provide food, shelter, and services, there is no need to speculate on how effective the (non extant) invisible hand is because it is evidently failing.

"If I make more money there is not someone else losing."

Actually, that's exactly how it works: we can't both own the same dollar. Duh.

No. But if both persons are productive then the Fed is more likely to inject another dollar or two into circulation.

When the money supply increases, the pie isn't growing: There are just more, smaller slices available.

Nope. I'm pretty sure the world is more wealthy by almost every economic measure than it was two centuries ago.

That's not how it works at all. The point of growing the money supply is to match the growth of wealth in the society. The reason central banks have target levels for inflation is it's one way to ensure they're doing that correctly.

Yet somehow there are more (real) dollars worth of stuff in the economy today than 20, 50, or 100 years ago.

Exchanging a dollar for a product means that I value the product more than the dollar. I didn't lose in this trade. Now, if I think the product is overpriced, in the current market I'd wait for it or a competitor's product to lower its price since prices tend to vary overtime. If the product comes from a monopoly, then you're doomed. Anyhow, the zero-sum game does not apply to the free market.

> Actually, that's exactly how it works: we can't both own the same dollar. Duh.

I’m guessing you’ve never taken an economics course. Or if you have, you didn’t understand it.

“Making the pie bigger” (growth) is a thing, and it’s a thing that happens quite frequently. “Getting a bigger share of the same size pie” (zero sum) leaves a lot of opportunity on the table.

Having travelled a fair bit, I have to say that this sort of klepto-capitalism is much more common in western countries (esp Britain, Italy, US, even Mexico) than in still growing eastern countries (e.g. Korea, Japan, China, or even Germany and the Nordics) which seem to still care about their local populations.

The key seems to me is that the political-economic elite (and every society/country has them) in some of the more wealthy, but stagnant economies has decided that extracting money from the rest of their countrymen (including externalized costs) is more profitable (or higher utility) than trying to make productive economic growth. Basically, beggaring your neighbor pays better than a rising tide lifting all boats.

As a result, you still have countries/cultures that invest in education, infrastructure, manufacturing versus those who create influencers, renovate houses, and serve ads. I don't actually put most software/services (even search) in the second boat, because they actually help increase productivity. But don't argue that ad based social media, ad based reality TV, or MLM Yoga (and debt based post secondary educational child care) are more healthy for society than the lower profit businesses they replaced. Also, don't argue "picking winners and losers", because corrupt government officials (and captive regulators) are doing that in every country, but some of them seem to do a much better job of actually making things (and their people better off) for the last 30 years.

It seems to me to be a social thing... and maybe it just comes in waves as large groups of people become complacent and the elite just figure, "I've got mine". The poor and the workers pay for it, and eventually there's likely to be some fairly expensive social upheaval in the reckoning.

Off shoring your workers, exporting your IP for quarterly results, and keeping the kids ignorant consumers may make you a little money or keep costs low, and labor cheap, but only for a few decades. Eventually, you'll need to compete with those who have been investing.

> It’s not on someone else to tell me what I should and should not want. If I desire it and a company provides it for a price, it doesn’t matter that the smart refrigerator is a waste in your vision. The market demands, and entrepreneurs provide.

There needs to be a middle ground between; "the market demands and enterpreneurs provide" means that things society needs don't get done, because there is only incentive to focus on what people want. Some of us would like to live in a world with less crap ideas and products flooding our minds, with more problem-solving with an eye towards social and societal good

I think the hardest part of doing democratic socialism is measuring labor. I think that time is a fine unit of measure but I have no data to back that thought up.

Everything else about democratic socialism is much easier now in the 21st century. Chile had a computer planned economy in the 1970s that was literally just a bunch of telex machines in factories around the nation talking to a central mainframe in the capital.

Also, I think democratic socialism can work on levels other than the national one. Like, neighborhood or town scale. To be embedded in the U.S., such a community would need a to produce some kind of surplus which could entice the neighbors to integrate into the democratic socialist system.

If that's what people (that are not you) wanted, then it would happen.

You could, of course, use political means to force people to fund your preferences, but that kind of a sucky move, don't you think?

> the better it is for everyone as more money moves around

It's not obvious (to me, at least) that more money moving around is inherently a good thing. Money may be moving around in relation to activities that make the world a worse place overall.

>I’m sorry that this is your world view, because it is deeply flawed and focusing on such cynicism leads to depression.

No one in the comment section is going to address this?

It’s a bit exaggerated, but reasonable. Having a nihilistic view that everything is zero sum certainly seems correlated to depression [0]. I’m sure that there are lots of folks who think this way and don’t have clinical depression.

[0] https://academic.oup.com/fampra/article/23/3/369/475828 (although about therapeutic nihilism and not market nihilism)

>It’s a bit exaggerated, but reasonable.

Yeah labeling someone as having a mood disorder because of their economic perspectives -- which are perfectly and reasonably formulated -- is weirdly... cult like. It's not reasonable at all.

>Having a nihilistic

There is absolutely nothing nihilistic about that view point. Not even close? Perhaps choose a different label.

> ...because market forces will mostly solve only small "consumer" problems and cannot reorganise our society in a more efficient way.

Market forces have repeatedly reorganized our society from farms to factories and increasingly from factories to offices..

But we might need to tweak the incentives and refactor regulation.

Silliness. Why has the 40 hour week persisted? Market forces. Climate change? Market forces. The persistence of the slave trade? Market forces. Prostitution and human trafficking, opioids, disintegration of the family, Facebook; all your good friend “market forces”.

Exactly, worship of capitalism is a disease where the afflicted can only see the advantages of this "fantastic" system. Despite the widespread evidence that there are many problems in the world that are directly caused by market forces, with the obvious conclusion that there is nothing a priori "benign" about these market forces that are worshiped by so many.

"Market forces" is just another way of saying "individual choices". Restricting individual choices has certainly been practised across a number of political and economic systems but there is always a question - who decides what to restrict?

Let's start with an entity that doesn't have the first incentive of profit and power acumulation?

> "Market forces" is just another way of saying "individual choices"

This is false because my individual choice matters infinitesimally less in the market than the choice of Coca-cola or any other large big corporation. In the other hand, I have a lot more power in the market than a homeless for example. So the right answer is that market forces are "weighted individual choices", and when a few of these individuals have billions in their bank account my individual choice is worth close to zero.

> Why has the 40 hour week persisted? Market forces.

Mostly zoning laws, burdensome regulations and government subsidies, really. If housing, education and healthcare still cost in real terms what they did in 1950 then people could afford to work 20 hours a week if they wanted to, but they're stuck working 40 hours because of government policies that cause price inflation and cost disease.

> Climate change? Market forces.

Markets require consent to operate. The victims of climate change didn't consent and should have every right to sue.

> The persistence of the slave trade? Market forces.

It was actually market forces that destroyed the slave trade. The rise of factories gave the slaves something much better to run away to, which made "slaves running away" a thing that happened so much more often that the entire system started to disintegrate. It's not a coincidence that the Civil War was between the industrialized North and the slave-owning South.

Also, slavery is obviously the epitome of not being a free market.

> Prostitution and human trafficking, opioids, disintegration of the family, Facebook; all your good friend “market forces”.

Prostitution is dangerous primarily because it's illegal.

Human trafficking is slavery again.

The opioid crisis is caused primarily by the War on Drugs and failed government policies that make it hard and expensive to seek medical treatment while causing black market drugs to have high but inconsistent potency and all the other issues.

Disintegration of the family is mostly a result of social assistance programs replacing the need for social ties with government programs.

Facebook is lame but it's also in decline. That is how the market is supposed to work -- things people hate fall out of favor.

You haven't chosen very good examples.

>Mostly zoning laws, burdensome regulations and government subsidies, really. If housing, education and healthcare still cost in real terms what they did in 1950 then people could afford to work 20 hours a week if they wanted to, but they're stuck working 40 hours because of government policies that cause price inflation and cost disease.

You arguing this is really ironic because the only reason they're working only 40 hour weeks to begin with is labor regulation. The free market didn't give factory workers 8 hour shifts.

Labor regulation has historically followed market trends rather than driving them.

If you tried to pass a 40 hour work week in 1790 you would have been laughed out of the statehouse because it would have caused mass starvation since people had to work longer hours than that just to grow enough food to feed everyone.

Then industrialization rolls around and we slowly get to the point that labor supply starts to outstrip demand, and then we don't need everyone to work 80 hours anymore. Moreover, it doesn't cost much more to pay twice as many people for 40 hours as half as many people for 80 hours, but then you have built in slack if someone is sick or quits or dies because you have someone else to work a double shift temporarily. And research starts to show that not working people as long leads to more productivity. And there is less unrest and more consumption when you have everyone working 40 hours than when you have half of everyone working 80 hours and the other half unemployed. And the people who still prefer to work 80 hours instead of 40 just take two jobs.

Meanwhile you've had labor activists demanding a 40 hour work week for years, and once most businesses were either already doing it or getting ready to, opposition to the law becomes weak enough that they can finally pass it. Then for a hundred years they take credit for the thing that was already happening regardless.

> If you tried to pass a 40 hour work week in 1790 you would have been laughed out of the statehouse because it would have caused mass starvation since people had to work longer hours than that just to grow enough food to feed everyone

This theory that in history the conditions for survival were so much worse as to require much longer working hours is a great myth. Long working hours came mostly at the time of industrial revolution.

https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...

From the article:

... the medieval workday was not more than eight hours. The worker participating in the eight-hour movements of the late nineteenth century was "simply striving to recover what his ancestor worked by four or five centuries ago."

This is somewhat apples and oranges when you go that far back. It's not that they weren't working for most of the day, it's that everything was more laborious. You would work several straight days for your "employer" and then need several for yourself, not to sit on your butt and have a beer but because there was no such thing as a washing machine or a refrigerator and all repairs and maintenance on your dwelling were things you were expected to do for yourself rather than hire out.

It's tempting to think of a "feast" as a party, but even now, and especially back then, it was laborious. Everyone travels to gather in the same location (without cars), butcher the animals, clean them, prepare vegetables that started off as whole plants, chop wood to build a fire to cook with etc. A feast is not a vacation, it's just more working.

Post-industrialization brought specialization, so that instead of working a day for the local land owner and then a day for yourself, you would work both days for the factory and then use your wages to buy appliances and hire a roofer and eat in a restaurant. And then, as automation got better, you got to work for eight hours rather than sixteen and then come home and watch TV and argue with people on the internet instead of needing that time to carry your clothes to the river and then ride a horse several miles to the general store to buy lamp oil and gunpowder.

You’re correct, but for reasons different than you may think.

Economies tend not to be zero sum, but they do float thru it. Here’s what I mean:

As a whole, economies either need capital (countries like Mexico) or produce excess capital (the US). Ignore that hey are neighbors here, that’s just a coincidence.

Countries that produce excess capital are not zero-sum. Countries that need capital can actually be zero or negative sum.

However, what you’ve seen over the last couple decades is an aging demographic curve that had shifted the population for producers to spenders over time. When you retire, you become a spender (you are no longer producing capital, but are spending it). As a result of this shift, many of the countries we think about as developed, are stagnating, and that looks like a zero sum situation. It may be, but it is only temporary- although temporary might last up to 3 or 4 decades.

For a quick reference, Japan is the most obvious example here, dealing with fundamental stagnation. Germany is about to hit that too (they probably already have, but it usually takes a few years for the everyday economist to have the documentation to call it as such). China will follow a couple years later.

The US has some of the same. Gen X is smaller than the baby boomers. As such, it’s hard for the generation to pay for the retirement of the previous generation. Hopefully Millenials will be productive enough soon enough to offset this.

Certainly someone who thinks the economy is zero sum is a terrible candidate for "more efficient reorganization of society."

> Some win, others lose, but the status quo is that we are sweating from work in order to live in a world with smart refrigerators, automatic garage doors and pointless baby toys.

Where do you draw the line as to what is frivolous or not? Technology in the kitchen and the Pill enabled women to go to work and to delay childbirth to a time of their choosing. More to the point, who are you to decide on where the line is?

>> because market forces will mostly solve only small "consumer" problems and cannot reorganise our society in a more efficient way.

That's true.

But also, can most people really, truly, contribute to big, important problems in our society - in the context of globalization and automation ?

Could most people contribute to (solving) big important problems before globalization or automation?

It depends how far back we're talking about, but sure.

Before the industrial revolution, most people made food. That's important.

After the industrial revolution, but before ww2,the standard of living was low, so most manufactured goods we're pretty important - be it a car, a fridge, a pot, etc - but maybe less important than food.

Afterwards, came consumerism, with a lot of low value stuff.

So it seems that with time, many people do less significant things at work.

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