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.
In real-world "free" markets, the poor have their choices made for them by the wealthy.
There is nothing "free" about a system that favors the wealthy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
No. That happens naturally, while the parents are working at their second jobs.
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.
Why poor people would?
As for having a budget and sticking to it, no one is better at budgeting than the poor, out of sheer necessity.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course fuel-efficiency complicated matters a bit, but in an efficient economy, engines may be replace.
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.
So, yes. I do. And you do too.
We also don't need humvees. Or diamonds.
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.
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.
Economics isn't so simple and only from the perspective of the buyer.
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.
Markets aren't killing anybody, markets don't hold a gun. They are a tool to efficiently allocate resources via price discovery.
They are a very poor tool in some use cases and are a great tool in others.
Denying that is literally pulling triggers.
Attacking others doesn't help you make others understand the problems you are seeing.
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.
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.
>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