Jonathan Ledgard Believes Imagination Could Save the World
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Calling up EPFL right now with my pitch for why they should let me hang out with top research scientists to flesh out a vague idea that blockchain can fix the refugee crisis.
One of the World Bank's blogs suggests this, but not much seems to have been done.[1]
[1] https://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/keeping-it-clean...
How would that handle shared ownership of some of those lands? Will that entail their owners now paying tax on these lands whose ownership is now “recognized”? (a negative for some of the people involved, because at this moment they pay no tax on it). Will this registering of lands “help” them be put on the market? If yes, how can we prohibit the sale of those lands to people outside of the village/county? I.e. how do we stop alienating lands that have been owned by the community for possibly centuries?
And these are just a couple of hard to answer questions, because land “ownership” (for lack of a better word) is really complex and ancient and not easy to put into “organizational boxes” dreamed up by our technocratic society.
This is only a feature in a couple jurisdictions. Not all countries ban the sale of land. You might guess those jurisdictions won't be interested in recording land sales, since land can't be sold.
Substitute “American” for “African” and some more palatable-to-Americans word for “jihad” and his could be the USA in a decade.
It's called capitalism. People like to rail against capitalism for rewarding greed, and capitalism does have faults, but they forget that it is the only system (so far) that acknowledges the presence of greed and actively harnesses it for the benefit and advancement of everyone. Some alternative systems are so foolishly idealist that they try to pretend that greed (and the hierarchical systems constructed from it) doesn't exist. And of course it's easy to build those make-believe systems if nobody is actively exploiting it.
This is not what capitalism does. Much of capitalism today and in US history is that of a destructive force that hurts the entire population without consequence, enriching mostly the already wealthy.
The improvements and conveniences of modern society are unevenly distributed and brought to the masses at great cost to our society.
Unchecked global climate change due to infinite-growth-greed-capitalism has dramatically decreased the quality of expected life for much of the world's poor.
Capitalism absolutely does not, in theory or practice, make its benefits available to everyone.
Try to actually think about what would be required, what resources they would have had available to them, instead of just putting hunter/gatherer in a magic box. There are a bunch of different reasons why you can't do it these days, poaching laws being one of the most obvious.
Who's land are you going to hunt/gather on? I feel like you haven't actually thought about this.
Modern colonialism (Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, Belgium, England, France, and to a lesser degree US, Italy, and Germany) was a practice of the emerged capitalist states that started and flourished after the historically agreed upon dawn of capitalism (circa late medieval Italian city states and later the rest of Europe), and fed it.
Capitalism with an egalitarian mindset can work wonders. But it requires humans to be egalitarian - which lets be honest - those with drive and real desire to win are rarely egalitarian.
Could this be breed out of people?
The real question here is: why would you want to?
But hey, at least the poor can buy cheap meat. /s
It also creates poverty at a pace we couldn’t have imagined 200 years ago. This is some Steve Pinker bullshit right here.
What does capitalism mean to you?
Personally I have conscious hedonism down for the win, and returning to very little activity eventually having to be structured through overt transactions, but we'll see.
> harnesses it for the benefit and advancement of everyone
but resources are limited, and so this model was created in a vacuum. Resources will become constrained and many will die and suffer, and not just humans.
Personally, I think capitalism is great, but maybe technology is causing to become too efficient, and its not a fault of capitalism itself?
So i guess i ended up agreeing with you, capitalism is pretty good, but we need a system to limit efficiency and tools.
It's all a ruse, a self fulfilling prophecy. The truth is, simply, people will do as the system rewards. In a society where brute force is glorified, people will be brutes and the world will be cruel. In a society where scholars and scientists and artists are valued and rewarded, there will be more scientific progress and cultural output. The humans themselves are the same as they have been for 100,000 years, its just the culture that changed between cavemen, renaissance Italy, Mongol hordes, and modern day growth capitalism.
In a world where greed and individual selfishness is the one metric that is rewarded, guess how most people will behave. That in a system such as ours most people are still good and altruistic and empathetic speaks volumes to how wrong that thesis is.
Also, you say humans have been the same for a 100,000 years, which seems to indicate that there is a human nature, and that society hasn't really changed them. Isn't that the opposite of your earlier point? It certainly supports the capitalist point, if you actually examine how people acted in history. Especially if you look at what happens to systems of government and economics that rely on people being altruistic and not greedy (the Church, communism, monarchy to an extent).
Also, I'd like to point out that in any society, but especially in a humanist, free society where being altruistic is a choice and not something forced upon you, there is always a reward for being altruistic, whether it's internal conscience assuaging, or extrnal favor-gaining. Furthermore, it is completely possible to be greedy in the persuits of gaining money, and then altruistic later: the whole point of getting money is not to have it, but to use it they way you want to use it. That can include charity.
If the current system is based on rewarding greed, and systems like that make "most people" behave greedily, then why are "most people" behaving altruistically? Either our current system is not one that rewards greed, or you have a contradiction. This contradiction reveals a lot about how you view people and the system.
1) The current system rewards greed
2) Most people will do as the system rewards
3) Most people are not greedy
Nit, but you meant “those with capital” rather than “everyone” here.