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The World After Capital

worldaftercapital.org

111–120 of 123 posts

Re: The World After Capital

#111
post #103
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High quality land will always be a finite resource. They aren't making any more of it.

As a real estate investor, this is kind of true. Though for now there’s a lot of undeveloped land, if you venture beyond cities. And we could always build vertically. And some kind of Elysium-like thing. Some of it will have to be farmland, of course.

Most of that undeveloped land is undeveloped for a reason. The high quality locations (climate, natural resources, waterways) are already developed.

All else being equal, the majority of people prefer to have some space and privacy rather than being crammed into dense vertical developments.

Re: The World After Capital

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the argument being made there. Indeed, the argument is that "scarcity thinking" prevents people from addressing those problems, because people are afraid of losing what they have individually, and so are incapable of collaborating on collective issues.

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

Fish farming. Growing fish meat from stem cells. Finding substitutes for fish meat, e.g. via synthetic biology from fungi.

Re: The World After Capital

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

Yes.

(Not OP.)

Re: The World After Capital

#114
post #16
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marx had a good bullshit detector. But as a prophet... let's say that I've seen better.

Please do elaborate.

Please do elaborate.

This one is well known and profusely commented, I'm sure you can google it: Marx considered industrial workers the ones with more class awareness and predicted that Socialism will ignite in the UK first.

On the contrary, it succeeded in big old agrarian countries like Russia and China.

Also predicted that worker class solidarity will make for an idilic proletary dictatorship, no need for democratic checks and balances that only decadent burgeois countries need.

Then came Lenin, Stalin, Mao...

Re: The World After Capital

#115
post #50
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the fact that capitalism, voluntary exchange, and the free market is the _only_ system that is capable of rationally allocating resources in a society Wow. Before one is the _only_ shouldn't one be first _one of_ ? Afaik it's quite clear by now that capitalism and free market are not rationally allocating resources, or is your definition of "rationally" equaling "give more to those who already have too much"?

"giving more to those who already have too much" who are you to say what quantity or quality of goods people should have? That by itself isn't a "rational" allocation but a highly subjective one. When I say rational I mean that objectively, capitalism and markets reward agents who make the right market choices, and that in my book is allocating resources efficiently.

You'll find extensive discussion, and defence, of just this position from Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, amongst many, many, many others.

Re: The World After Capital

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

The former. The rich have more to spend, so in the pricing mechanism their demand counts more than that of the poor. This makes the idea that prices reflect subjective demand highly suspect.

Re: The World After Capital

#118
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh there are lots of ways to show that things are declining, but capitalism has been successful in concentrating wealth in the hands of those who have it. That system is working for those in power and as such I think it's extremely presumptuous to say we're living in the "late stage" or that we're anywhere knowably near the "post-" part of capitalism.

The question is whether that state of affairs can exist forever, or if the system can find a way to adapt and head off any cataclysm.

Genuinely curious, when was the last time humanity pro actively headed off a huge systemic problem instead of waiting for it to become a crisis?

Re: The World After Capital

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do not worry about the decrease in arable land... Apply more technology: agroforestry combined with Boston Dynamics-type robots. Look into published material from/by Ernst Götsch, F. H. King, and Masanobu Fukuoka among others on principles. The techniques they worked out and published can be used to rebuild, reclaim, and build de novo arable land. Main criticism of these techniques is they are too labor-intensive.…

I find it hard to believe that individual actors acting in their own Rational Self-Interest will ever do what you are proposing. Governments, or private actors working hand-in-hand with the government, could do probably do so, even on the framework of a capitalist system, but you'd have to completely reverse the trend of privatizing and selling off everything.

Agreed, and I'm not even certain governments within capitalist systems can handle these challenges. At issue is the presence of scales that our species have not worked with before, both time and populations. We don't even have a good framework to judge relative difficulty between current and past technological eras, except perhaps coarse-grained energy per capita per annum metrics.

The time scale is a real killer IMHO. Many of the challenges involve timescales that are very vulnerable to abandonment by political processes, as progress is achingly slow for our current perceptions. We might be able to grow in bioreactors Memphis Meats-style protein, especially with CRISPR-powered advancements, but even that is a solid 4+ decades away before we see Neal Stephenson-envisioned sashimi for the masses. I don't see any kind of speculative investment trying to solve basic, low-margin deployments like that, on that kind of timescale.

And even then, I don't really see sustainability built into the design and research from the beginning; it is like we rarely see security built into general business software from the beginning. So for the protein availability challenge, I don't see an emphasis on creating the entire "stack" in a sustainable manner, starting from solar energy, building through to the feedstocks into the processes being researched. This perniciously binds us to legacy energy and materials production supply chains for those feedstocks, and creating more externalities into undesirable positive feedback loops.

Re: The World After Capital

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is whether that state of affairs can exist forever, or if the system can find a way to adapt and head off any cataclysm.

Genuinely curious, when was the last time humanity pro actively headed off a huge systemic problem instead of waiting for it to become a crisis?

I think the Great Depression could plausibly have ended with the total collapse of the US government if not for the combination of the New Deal and the WWII-driven stimulus.

I guess the problem with answering this question definitively is the counterfactual nature. Who's to really say what things would have been calamitous that ended up not turning out to be?

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