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The World After Capital

worldaftercapital.org

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Re: The World After Capital

#91

Post by emodendroket »

aninhumer wrote: post #83
emodendroket wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the solution to declining fisheries that involves such "post-scarcity" thinking?

The point isn't that avoiding scarcity thinking magically provides a solution. It's that it's very difficult to implement a solution when you have e.g. a lot of fishers who stand to lose out from it. The idea is that we should work towards a society where the people who currently fish are happy to stop fishing if necessary, because they don't fear for their survival or comfort if they do. I'd agree it's not really a…

I can't see how it would possibly work without such scarcity thinking as saying people can't take too much fish.

Re: The World After Capital

#92

Post by emodendroket »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #90
emodendroket wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Average life spans in the first world beginning to actually fall is a sign of some kind of decline.

Maybe it is an indication of some kind of decline. Saying that decline is the decline of capitalism seems like a stretch, though.

People didn't wake up one morning and say "oh, Rome is gone and it's the Early Middle Ages now." I don't think it's that much of a stretch. At the very least, the postwar order is facing serious challenges.

Re: The World After Capital

#93

Post by aninhumer »

gimmeDatCheddar wrote: post #86
aninhumer wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument being made here is not that we don't need the things we call capital, it's that we have enough capital now that allocating it is not the primary problem we need our economy to solve, and that the current system we use to do so (i.e. Capitalism) is limiting our ability to prioritise anything other than the creation of more capital. Therefore I would read the title not as "after capital ceases to exist" bu…

If capitalism is limiting our ability to prioritize anything other than the creation of more capital, how do you explain ventures like SpaceX, which are highly capitalistic but demonstrably moving humanity forward?

I said "limits" not "prevents". During the Cold War both the USA and USSR developed their space programs extremely rapidly by deciding collectively to prioritise them.

Since that ended, the industry has developed much more slowly in the absence of an obvious profit incentive. Indeed, even now, SpaceX has relied on collectively allocated resources from NASA for many of their contracts, not to mention all the research done during that period.

And in any case, SpaceX is still an example of prioritising capital creation. SpaceX is a privately owned space launch system, which will likely primarily benefit other privately owned space industries in the near future. We may like that this particular capital is being created, but it's only a small part of the wider economy.

Re: The World After Capital

#94

Post by aninhumer »

emodendroket wrote: post #91
aninhumer wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point isn't that avoiding scarcity thinking magically provides a solution. It's that it's very difficult to implement a solution when you have e.g. a lot of fishers who stand to lose out from it. The idea is that we should work towards a society where the people who currently fish are happy to stop fishing if necessary, because they don't fear for their survival or comfort if they do. I'd agree it's not really a…

I can't see how it would possibly work without such scarcity thinking as saying people can't take too much fish.

That's not what is meant by "scarcity thinking" in this context. I suggest you read the chapter about it.

Re: The World After Capital

#95

Post by ameister14 »

gimmeDatCheddar wrote: post #84

If you add a billion users to Youtube or to Facebook or to any other major platform, the marginal costs won't be 0 or close to 0. They'll be substantial. Existing servers won't account for the new demand. Electricity needs to be generated, new hardware needs to be procured, more employees need to be hired, etc. So I'm having trouble understanding how we're entering an age where the digital entities have marginal cost…

As soon as I saw the author wasn't being precise I suspected that this wasn't a serious paper - you can't handwave numbers and say they are 0 when they are provably not 0, then build an entire argument on it.

Re: The World After Capital

#96

Post by aninhumer »

crankylinuxuser wrote: post #89
aninhumer wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Everyone consumes. It's the basis of the economy. Yes that's my point. You can't just say production is a better use of resources than consumption, because people need to consume. The real question is what's the best trade-off between expanding productive capacity, and producing consumer goods? Given that we seem to have vast productive capacity, and yet many people in the world seem to still live in poverty, perhap…

> Yes that's my point. You can't just say production is a better use of resources than consumption, because people need to consume. Exactly. We'll put a cost on how much it is to live per day, and if you fail to exceed that, capitalism will slowly kill you. And for a great many people, it does. It kills by pollution in communities that don't have enough to fight the corporations. It kills by depriving basic health ca…

And of course, people will ignore most of these deaths when comparing capitalism to the alternatives, because the responsibility is distributed, and can often be placed on individuals.

Re: The World After Capital

#97

Post by ameister14 »

aninhumer wrote: post #68
Qasaur wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Asking what should replace Capitalism is a very reasonable question. The problem is that lots of people don't actually explore this question in a spirit of intellectual honesty. It is not a reasonable question because inquiries into this matter start from the assumption that capitalism is a conscious creation by man (and thus replaceable) and not something that, through the laws of human action, evolves spontaneousl…

>not something that, through the laws of human action, evolves spontaneously between free individuals. Because it isn't. There is nothing "spontaneous" about private property. There have been a wide variety of conceptions of property throughout history, many involving notions of collective ownership. The system as it currently exists is enforced by state violence and was created historically by privatising collective…

>An exchange system weights the demand input to market price determination based on the wealth of the individual.

What does this mean? Do you mean that rich people can buy more and so have more impact on overall demand? Or that they can afford to pay more and so cost stabilizes at a higher point than it would otherwise?

Re: The World After Capital

#98

Post by drallison »

Richest 1% on target to own two-thirds of all wealth by 2030: World leaders urged to act as anger over inequality reaches a ‘tipping point’ By Michael Savage Apr 7 2018 " rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/apr/07/global-ineq...

"The world’s richest 1% are on course to control as much as two-thirds of the world’s wealth by 2030, according to a shocking analysis that has lead to a cross-party call for action."

Hard to rationalize the inequalities in the distribution of wealth in a "World After Capital" where the commodity in short supply is attention.

From the webpage for the TL;DR folk: Technological progress has shifted scarcity for humanity. When we were foragers, food was scarce. During the agrarian age, it was land. Following the industrial revolution, capital became scarce. With digital technologies scarcity is shifting once more. We need to figure out how to live in a World After Capital in which the only scarcity is our attention.

Re: The World After Capital

#99

Post by moeadham »

Ixiaus wrote: post #42

We do not live in a post-scarcity world, just the illusion of one. Ecological systems will collapse because humans' unchecked consumption patterns disrupt the homeostasis of those systems. I feel sad that this person writes about "post-scarcity" and "post-capitalism" because it reinforces for me the fact that this person with the resources and station in life to help take responsibility for this accelerating, destabi…

I'm not sure if you read the entire book, but I don't think that this is a fair assessment of the main thesis the Author makes.

Of course we are not in a post-scarcity world. Capital itself will always be scarce by definition.

The question is: If time is not longer a viable means to obtain capital, how to adjust societal norms to compensate?

Re: The World After Capital

#100

Post by ixtli »

Bartweiss wrote: post #88
ixtli wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's fair to argue that scarcity has been reduced significantly, and continues to be reduced. It's been replaced by hoarding. I agree that this book is a little naive in that way (from what i've skimmed) but it's also important not to dismiss the spirit of the claim just because we haven't totally solved all of our dependencies on limited resources. edit: I also wanna point out that i get frustrated when peop…

> we haven't totally solved all of our dependencies on limited resources I think this seriously understates the case. Hoarding certainly matters in terms of shared wealth , but the resource use of the mega-rich is much closer to that of the middle class than their financial position. The common "fourth Earths to live like Americans!" statistics seem to abuse means, but even median first world consumption is basically…

Good comment: I don't really disagree with you. I probably shouldn't have thrown that thing in there about hoarding cause it's more of a gripe than anything. I guess what I was trying to say is that our current relation to power (that is, capital) results in serious inefficiencies like huge amounts of food going to waste because no one near them will pay, or people dying of preventable causes within walking distance of the services to prevent that outcome. This is kinda what i meant by hoarding: the resources that we can easily automate production of are just getting stockpiled instead of given to people.

Even worse, we "hoard" more abstract things like education. The means to pay for free education for all in America is well within the accumulated wealth of a few of those who have been most successful at accumulating it.

For sure I agree, though, that some sort of soviet-era attempt at forced redistribution wont magically solve all our issues. As you say, resources are limited and only further technology development will solve those issues.

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