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Comment by christophilus | Hacker News Reader

> Institutions can promote well-being and solidarity, or they can encourage competition, individualism, and hierarchy.

Why is this presented as an either / or?

Because they are mutually exclusive. Competition, individualism and hierarchy will make sure that the ruthless will end up on top of the hierarchy, caring only about their individual needs, squashing attempts at solidarity and squandering opportunities to have any kind of well-being for others.

This sounds as if all actors are completely independent, and there is no long-term strategy in their actions.

Henry Ford famously cared for his workers to be well-paid, so that they could afford the cars his company produced.

And there are infinitely more people in similar positions who are completely the opposite.

The fact you have to go back in time as far as Henry Ford proves the point, frankly. It's an exception, not the standard.

You don't have to go that far back. You're assuming something that's not true.

That's a myth. Ford increased wages only to stop the high levels of staff turnover, which was affecting productivity and quality.

That's a market mechanism working well. No need for regulations or benevolent leaders to stay in post. A situation where naturally everyone wins is the best sort of situation.

it doesn't work too well for the employees if there aren't alternative jobs or a social security system for them to go to. They're then at the mercy of the employers.

at least without unions. Henry Ford's anti-union tactics were extreme and quite violent.

This is a narrow, binary view of the world. People are not born employees or employers. Anyone can start a business and also become an employer. Almost anyone can see that their skills are in demand or not and move to new industries. Anyway can become a consultant.

I'm not saying this is perfect, but assuming people are at an employer's mercy is not a great place to start. I don't think people should blame themselves if an industry collapses. Of course people fall on hard times. But I also don't like how little agency we tell people that they have, and we don't teach people the skills and attitude to stay ahead of things rather than just wanting to clock in and clock out and not have to worry.

I suppose that anyone can get that 1 million dollar loan too, for start capital? Heck, make that $100k + student loan + a home.

What you said sounds like a fanfiction. Most people really are at the mercy of their paycheck, even the top of the middle class.

I'm not saying people don't live paycheck to paycheck. I'm saying they shouldn't assume their current employer is their only plan, and should be working to ensure that they are not. That has the nice side effect of what could have been activism effort going into creating value for other people.

I mostly agree with your points, but it takes certain personality traits to be able/willing to take chances with your career when the bottom rung is "eat at soup kitchens and sleep in your car". After all, society doesn't exactly make it easy to live without debts or financial commitments. Few of us are still homesteading.

I'm not convinced the alternatives are net better for the overall wealth of society. But the fact that anyone can sell their services to the market is also something that's hard to view in isolation.

> assuming people are at an employer's mercy is not a great place to start

I don't assume that. It's just a matter of who has the most power under what circumstances. Employees usually only have any power at all if there are alternative jobs they can take.

So when there is lots of unemployment, people are at an employer's mercy.

Neoliberalism has this covered though and maintains a certain degree of unemployment through monetary policy. Look up "Non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment" (NAIRU).

Sorry but you sound like you were beamed down from the mothership yesterday and you got this info from an introductory pamphlet on planet earth :)

The issue isn't that people don't have agency, it's that when they use their agency to enact any actual meaningful changes they get beaten down mercilessly by people which much more wealth and power.

And that's exactly what was happening to workers in Henry Fords era, and it's what lead to an explosion of labour activism which was responded to with murderous brutality that is too well documented to recount in full detail here.

And the question here isn't whether people use their agency or not, or whose side you take or whatever, it's just whether educated onlookers can even talk honestly about it without going off in to flights of abstraction and fantasy.

Edit: added a smiley to clarify I am not trying to be mean, just communicate some level of incredulity about popular conceptions of labour history of the late 19th / early 20th century...

I'm not talking about activism; I'm talking about meaningful changes individuals can make in their own lives to always have a plan b/c/d and not assume their employer rules the roost and should be relied upon to provide.

Henry Ford was a Nazi not the greatest example

And yet there is not another Henry over 100 years in the waiting

This isn’t true unfortunately. I recommend reading a biography of the man because he was, amongst other things, an old school Fascist and this ideological belief helped him succeed.

This can’t be true imo because neither absolute could actually ever exist. There’s always elements of all of these things at play in various aspects of society. Despite being grouped & framed as polar opposites they can’t be mutually exclusive if they’re always intertwined with one another.

As long as 2/3 of all individual actors are honest, consensus can always be reached.

Capitalism acts as a consensus mechanism that solves for efficiency and productivity. To your point, though your take is cynical, it's meaningful to consider the adversarial condition.

In my opinion, what we need is to figure out a mechanism that solves for distribution, which as a byproduct also will solve for well-being (key point: and will be robust even under adversarial conditions).

The problem is that it is based on economic efficiency and productivity, which both escapes from material means and strives to maximally exploit people, potentially ending in one or another kind of a trap - a global minimum of human life quality for most of the people, as there's no profit to be had in getting it higher; or conservatively limiting research that would be threatening to capital owners. (Death of start-ups, ownership of science.)

I think realistically having a high “global minimum” is all we can really achieve that’s sustainable in the long term.

I’ve thought about it quite a bit, and though there’s a certain sense of satisfaction in wanting to bring down the elite / establishment, it doesn’t actually solve anything from the perspective of helping the average person.

They are just as mutually exclusive as saving money and staying alive: You can't save 100% of your money as you need to spend some on shelter and food among other things.

The obvious notion here being that there has to - and CAN be - a balance of the two.

Agree, it’s a common trick to subtly insert some false dichotomy where the real possibility space is continuous.

Competition is like eating. It’s an important part of everything that life touches. Whether or not it’s healthy is entirely contextual. A study which puts competition into the category “bad” is starting off with a highly questionable assumption. Same for individualism. I’m not a fan of hierarchy, and tend to see it as more bad than good, but even hierarchy isn’t one or the other. It’s contextual.

The assumption that "competition [...] is an important part of everything that life touches" seems at least as questionable.

Indeed and was questioned by Peter Kropotkin in his essay collection Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, which argued that cooperation, not competition, was the driving mechanism behind evolution. He would go as far as theorizing a whole kind of organization around this.

Further he was famous while he was still alive amongst scientists for his writings on this topic. It wasn’t until later that he became an icon of the Mutualist / Anarchist movements.

Competitive evolution is seen everywhere, from plants evolving poison to deter animals from eating it to foxes evolving to hunt rabbits and rabbits evolving to avoid foxes. Cooperative evolution is definitely a thing, but you can't say that competition isn't a massive part of evolution.

It was roundly disproven by many schools of naturalism in the 19th century. The notion that competition is somehow inherent to life is convenient to justify zero sum games but not observable, especially within a single species. Peter Kropotkin was famous during his life as a scientist because of how rigorously he demonstrated this.

Capitalism isn't a zero sum game, and competition along with cooperation has existed throughout human history. Even with eusocial insects like ants, there is still competition with other colonies. Lions and hyenas are cooperative in their prides/packs, but they certainly compete for food and territory with each other.

>>Capitalism isn't a zero sum game

Maybe at this moment not, but I suspect that it has tendency to become one (when the tempo of inequality increase surpass increase of total wealth)

You confuse capitalism with trading. Capitalism tends to monopoly and no amount of regulation can fix it, because politicians can be bought or coerced given enough cash.

Sounds like your soul is already profoundly shaped by neoliberalism - Thatcher would be proud...

Why do you think ruthless end up on top? I do not see that follows.

Consider rulers in most countries of the world. Democracy and rule of law is the exception, not the 'normal' state of things as it might appear living in the West.

First off, you can have competition and cooperation. Take a look at any sports team. It's a highly competitive environment that's also highly cooperative. You can't win unless you play as a team. I don't believe the strongest players on whatever football team you follow are squashing or squandering anything. You can't get to good graduates schools, even in garbage dump of politics the social sciences have become, without being more clever, interesting, and intelligent than your peers. It's laughable that people who make it to the more prestigious institutions, because of slavishly hard work for most of their lives, then turn around and say that merit based systems are inherently flawed. Should the Columbia just accept students at random? Even if they did, it wouldn't matter. The irony, in a world that isn't competitive, no one would pay more attention to their paper than a paper from Crappy Backwater University on why peanut consumption makes people more sedentary.

Their result isn't surprising. When you value and reward competition - you get more inequality. However, societies that don't favor competition often have completely rigged and sham economies. I'm racking my brain to think of one economy outside the US, UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, etc, that isn't based on competition that isn't a morass of local bribes to the dictator's cousin's uncle or whatever. In China, for example, "common prosperity" is the cudgel wielded against any perceived alternate power center. It has little to do with actual prosperity.

What I think is right to criticize, is how do we deal with the impact of inequality. It's fine to have inequality as long as certain needs are met. Access to medical care, housing, food security, and education are all things that should be available to everyone. It's okay to have inequality and competition as long as we mitigate the emotional and physical impact of inequality. But the thing that will allow us to pay for that is a highly competitive and effective economy.

>> First off, you can have competition and cooperation. Take a look at any sports team. It's a highly competitive environment that's also highly cooperative. You can't win unless you play as a team.

Sport is probably the worst possible analogy for any fair economic system. It promotes cooperation between people only as far as crushing your opponents team go. How exactly exactly promotes cooperation between FC Barcelona and Real Madrid within it's rules ? Who would want to live in a world where there is place only for one winner?

>> I'm racking my brain to think of one economy outside the US, UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, etc, that isn't based on competition that isn't a morass of local bribes to the dictator's cousin's uncle or whatever. In China, for example, "common prosperity" is the cudgel wielded against any perceived alternate power center. It has little to do with actual prosperity.

I believe that corruption and bribes are orthogonal to economic systems. Capitalism is full of corruption and especially corporations are full of kick back schemes (I have seen few personally that would make comrade Brezhnev blush). My personal standing is that corruption comes from people who have to much decision power and too greedy to play by the rules. Only proper build in control systems can restrict that.

>> Sport is probably the worst possible analogy for any fair economic system. It promotes cooperation between people only as far as crushing your opponents team go. How exactly exactly promotes cooperation between FC Barcelona and Real Madrid within it's rules ? Who would want to live in a world where there is place only for one winner?

Remember when Zidane head-butted the Italian player and France lost the World Cup because Italy got a penalty shot? Because the referee called the foul. Because both teams agree to cooperate and respect the decision of the referee during play. If you didn't cooperate, no sporting even would be fun to watch. Soccer (football) would be about as much fun to watch as a brawl - which is what it would turn into. But both teams agree to guidelines on what makes a good football (soccer) game.

Imagine a world without competition and you'll see a world that's dead inside. You'll see a world that drives Trabants and you have a 5 year waiting list for something like a Commodore 64. It's because Sony and Microsoft are competing for your gaming attention/dollars, or Intel and AMD are competing for your desktop, that I can have a nice graphical display on a computer that, inflation adjusted, cost me 1/5 the price I paid for my first computer in the 1980s.

>> But both teams agree to guidelines on what makes a good football (soccer) game

This seems like a very useless definition of cooperation from the perspective of the discussion that we are having. Sure, following same rules is some form of high level cooperation but You could equally easy switch sport to something more extreme - war would be good example I suppose - and try to convince me that if both sides are abiding by Geneva Convention while killing each other then this is an equally good analogy.

>> Imagine a world without competition and you'll see a world that's dead inside.

I have to bring one of my favorite quotes into discussion, sorry You forced my hand :) :

"That's just like your opinion man".

I understand where you are getting this sentiment (my family used to have Trabant and I remember "good" old socialistic people republic times from my childhood) but I do not believe for a second that this is either or situation. I think that there is place for better, more sophisticated economic systems, that combines rules from current systems. The problem is that ideology is standing it their way.

> laughable that people who make it to the more prestigious institutions, because of slavishly hard work for most of their lives,

Or because of legacy preferences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences

Or because their parents paid off the right people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_college_admissions_briber...

> First off, you can have competition and cooperation.

Given existence of an impartial referee, fair conditions and no metagame.

Capitalism is not just competition, it is literally a fight for one's life. An unfair one, given corruption and marketing metagames.

Even your sports example breaks down in seconds. The team won't get funded unless it brings attention to feed marketing companies that funnel money into the team. You can absolute metagame European football with financial injection (heated lawn to practice off-season, buying better players, trainer, doping and so on).

How do you reconcile solidarity, aka consensus with individuality?

By accepting a compromise between the two, which seems like the only sane way to do it to me. Otherwise if you go too far in terms of solidarity you end up with totalitarianism (everything is the state & the state is everything)

The compromise you speak of is simply neither, which is not reconciliation

It’s sort of a false binary where neither can actually exist, they’re just ideological terms. If you wanted to think about it in a simplified and overly broad way you could model it as a range of 0 to 1 where the actual reality can only ever be a decimal.

Individuals can very well voluntarily donate to charities without having government goons force to give half of their profits

This would work great if we were a species of ants

You mean "spend some time helping others, without being coerced", right?

Are you asking how to make sure that the society is accommodating to those who are not willing to be accomodating to others?

You don't. If the group is too strict, you find another one. Having no borders would sure help.

But yeah, global issues need a global consensus. Can't let someone kill the planet for all of us.

Pretty easily in fact, with old liberal non-aggression principle.

Non-interference unless what an individual is doing obstructs good of others. Includes the expenses if they are high enough. This cannot be defined individually.

The non aggression principle cannot work without a shared definition of aggression.

And, 9/10 times between mutually aggrieved parties there is no shared definition of aggression.

So, no, it's not that easy.

This is actually where a shitload of disagreement and misunderstanding comes from. Due to peoples different perspectives, people have varying definitions of various terms. This makes discussing heated topics like politics super difficult because the people with different perspectives fundamentally generally don't understand the definitions used by the other and assumptions are made leading to disagreement

This is also why defining terms is so important in a conversation. "Robber baron" and "job creator" refer to roughly the same set of people, but have wildly different connotations. Whoever sets the definitions gets to set the framing of the entire conversation that follows. Sometimes, this means that even using the name of a group lean a conversation one way or another. (e.g. The term "Objectivism", Ayn Rand's name for her own philosophy, is accepting that there is something objective about it.)

To paraphrase Fred Brooks: "Show me your arguments and conceal your definitions, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your definitions, and I usually won't need your arguments; they'll be obvious." (s/flowcharts/arguments/ and s/tables/definitions/ from the original.)

That's a great quote from Fred Brooks, thank you for sharing! Do you happen to know where its from?

According to wikiquote[0], it is from The Mythical Man-Month. Also, just to be clear, this is a paraphrasing of the original with the substitutions as mentioned in the original comment. The initial context was of software data structures and software algorithms, emphasizing that the data structures are by far the more important.

[0] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fred_Brooks

That's a feature. Human words are supposed to be flexible. Re-defining and re-shaping them is a key way that we evolve as a society.

Insisting that everyone in the room uses the same definitions for all words, and trying to force some mono-mind of language, rather than actually working to solve problems is counterproductive. It can be productive to discuss and understand how terms are being used differently by different parties, and it is absolutely necessary for everyone in the room to understand that words are different for different people, but then you have to actually start working on the shared problems.

It's incredibly frustrating when people waste everyone's time trying to come up with a completely new shared "compromise vocabulary" that no one is happy with and will get discarded the moment people leave the room.

The problem could be solved by simply discussing definitions at the start of a debate, there's no need to come up with new vocabulary.

Human words should change over time, as that helps communication. However, human words varying across participants of the same conversation drastically harms understanding.

As a non-political example, the first time I heard the term "server-side rendering", I thought it was one of the soonest ideas I had ever heard. With the latency between client and server, needing to go back to the server for every screen draw would make for an incredibly laggy interface. I hadn't known that JavaScript developers use "rendering" to refer to making HTML, whereas I associate it only with making an image to be displayed. Because there was no shared definition, communication was harmed.

Non-aggression is when people who completely disagree don't attack each other.

Solidarity is when people who substantially agree on something act in concert.

I can't see how one can substitute the other.

I think there are too many people that cannot do this reconciliation.

This reconciliation is embodied in phrases like, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

Solidarity is not conformity. You can be different. There is likely no person on this planet with which you truly have no shared interest, no shared objective, no shared sympathy. Even if you find you identify strongly with your difference with another, the ability to see more fundamental shared interests, objectives and sympathies are the underpinning of things like secularism, freedom of speech, and liberalism in general.

I don't think what you're describing here is individualism though.

On the other hand, going a little further with that phrase: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - while it's a benign ideal, looking at applications of that philosophy in practice you often seen it being applied in an inconsistent manner, whereby someone's "right" to say someone infringes on the autonomy of others (essentially a case of competing rights). It's only in cases like that where individualism comes into play.

Through: liberte egalite fraternite

People have been doing it since "at least" the French Revolution, I am sure that you could chuck some Pericles speeches in there too

It reads to me that the true intent is more in restriction competition and individualism more than it is promoting well-being and solidarity. I’m no fan of what they’re criticizing but you do have to consider what the alternative would be and who would be implementing it, and given the current political power structure that doesn’t seem like an attractive option either.

As if 'competition, individualism, and hierarchy' is bad. Well, somebody has to work hard, compete and provide to those who want to enjoy well-being and solidarity. In the meantime, the left wants to use this as a selling point to abuse the power and be the one in control without paying the hard price of working hard and taking risk.

They are mutually exclusive. Solidarity is the opposite of individualism.

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