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Ursula K. Le Guin at the National Book Awards

parkerhiggins.net

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Re: Ursula K. Le Guin at the National Book Awards

#41
post #17

Sorry, I admire her writing, but I call complete and utter bullshit on this speech. Books are commodities, not some magical elixer from the gods. Some are good, some are terrible. I buy mine from Amazon and Audible. New technologies, and they are helping more people to read more books than ever before.

Even from a hardcore free market perspective, you can't really say books are a commodity, insofar as they they have limited substitutability. There is no way to make up for quality with volume. You can't just take a masterpiece of human literature and say: "Suppose the Ulysses was never written by James Joyce, well I can just have the same utility by producing 10^9 pages of teen Twilight fan fiction".

Re: Ursula K. Le Guin at the National Book Awards

#42
post #17

Sorry, I admire her writing, but I call complete and utter bullshit on this speech. Books are commodities, not some magical elixer from the gods. Some are good, some are terrible. I buy mine from Amazon and Audible. New technologies, and they are helping more people to read more books than ever before.

Would you then say that 'The C Programming Language' are 'Structure and Interpretation of Programming Languages' are commodities, no better or worse than the dozens of alternatives?

Re: Ursula K. Le Guin at the National Book Awards

#43
post #32
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a bizarre connection! Disputing the divine right of kings had to be a private act or you faced the consequences; you and I, the consumers, ultimately decide the fate of the millions of businesses that constitute the system we call capitalism within a free market.

She is talking about moving to a new system outside of capitalism, not causing a dip in profits for one particular company.

"Capitalism" is a system in which people are allowed to exchange and accumulate goods freely. Moving to a system "outside of capitalism" involves preventing this, and necessarily involves large scale violence both to take the accumulated capital of savers and to persecute anyone who still seeks to engage in the free exchange of goods. See for example the merchants in Maoist China and Stalinist Russia who were hung or shot for being capitalist traitors, and the landowners who were exiled or killed. It was literally illegal to own a shop, or to grow or make something and exchange it for something else.

Re: Ursula K. Le Guin at the National Book Awards

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a list of "Best-sellers initially rejected", though. Not quite the same as quality initially unrecognized. Some of them could still be books of low quality, that happen to be popular.

Nobody has found a reliable metric to determine the quality of art, not even close, other than what others are freely willing to pay for it.

You might be surprised how many people there are who would consider the quality of art to be inversely proportional to what others are freely willing to pay for it. Particularly those in the business of making art that few are interested in paying for.

Re: Ursula K. Le Guin at the National Book Awards

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody has found a reliable metric to determine the quality of art, not even close, other than what others are freely willing to pay for it.

You might be surprised how many people there are who would consider the quality of art to be inversely proportional to what others are freely willing to pay for it. Particularly those in the business of making art that few are interested in paying for.

Not at all. I've also run into people who put on stage productions who are disappointed if people actually go to see them, feeling that means they "sold out".

While they're entitled to their opinions, I suspect that this is just a rationalization for being terrible artists :-) It's like people who take pride in not knowing anything about technology.

Re: Ursula K. Le Guin at the National Book Awards

#46
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She is talking about moving to a new system outside of capitalism, not causing a dip in profits for one particular company.

"Capitalism" is a system in which people are allowed to exchange and accumulate goods freely. Moving to a system "outside of capitalism" involves preventing this, and necessarily involves large scale violence both to take the accumulated capital of savers and to persecute anyone who still seeks to engage in the free exchange of goods. See for example the merchants in Maoist China and Stalinist Russia who were hung or…

Luckily there's never been any large scale violence within or around capitalism.

Everyone's freedoms - especially the freedom to get paid a fair rate for hard work - are quite safe.

Re: Ursula K. Le Guin at the National Book Awards

#47
post #9

I heard her make remarks in a similar vein at the Washington State Book Awards in 2006: http://jakeseliger.com/2006/10/28/le-guin-at-the-seattle-pub... . Incidentally, though, I think this no longer true: "Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship." It's now easier than eve…

The problem with Le Guin's position is that it's so Manichean, a world composed of good guys and bad guys with no ambiguities. To her, it's either sell books like deodorant or some ideal system where it's quality, not marketability, that makes books sell. This sounds good, but it's tripe. As you say, the Internet in general and Amazon in particular have opened up publishing -- Amazon getting huge credit because it no…

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Re: Ursula K. Le Guin at the National Book Awards

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Capitalism" is a system in which people are allowed to exchange and accumulate goods freely. Moving to a system "outside of capitalism" involves preventing this, and necessarily involves large scale violence both to take the accumulated capital of savers and to persecute anyone who still seeks to engage in the free exchange of goods. See for example the merchants in Maoist China and Stalinist Russia who were hung or…

Luckily there's never been any large scale violence within or around capitalism. Everyone's freedoms - especially the freedom to get paid a fair rate for hard work - are quite safe.

If you add up Mao's and Stalin's bodycounts, that's 50-100 million people, so yes, compared to that we are quite safe. I don't know of any capitalist nation that's inflicted anything in that order of magnitude of deaths on its own citizens, and what deaths there are are usually caused by noncapitalist entities like the state police and army. Noncapitalist because they're not funded voluntarily; I suspect if the military was something we had to pay for as individuals like bread, computers, cars, etc. then it'd be a hellova lot smaller. Similarly I can't imagine many people would pay gangs of private detectives to go around locating and imprisoning drug users.

Re: Ursula K. Le Guin at the National Book Awards

#49
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She is talking about moving to a new system outside of capitalism, not causing a dip in profits for one particular company.

"Capitalism" is a system in which people are allowed to exchange and accumulate goods freely. Moving to a system "outside of capitalism" involves preventing this, and necessarily involves large scale violence both to take the accumulated capital of savers and to persecute anyone who still seeks to engage in the free exchange of goods. See for example the merchants in Maoist China and Stalinist Russia who were hung or…

Not really. Those are reasonable examples of what it takes to try to "force" an entire country out of capitalism "for their own good". Socialism as a part of a general economic or ethical philosophy - embedded within the liberal democratic system - is not quite as bad on its own. The fundamental ideas behind the movement led to things like universal public education, national investment in the sciences and arts, as well as universal public healthcare. These are all things which almost every modern nation recognizes as good ideas. Where it goes off the rails is when you formulate an entire political theory that can be summed as "We shall get a moral and dependable dictator to forbid people from engaging in Capitalism or owning excessive property, thus forcing everyone to work for the common good. This will eventually lead to people naturally working for the common good, because that's what humans naturally do.". The main problem with that one is obvious by word #8, but it contains a few extra fallacies beyond that.

Now, it's perfectly possible to embed socialized literature grants and "literary tenure" within a capitalist system if democratic society believes that is the best way of generating valuable literary works that are not likely to produce an immediate return of investment in the open market. We can even do that simultaneously with a publishing industry producing literary works with a focus towards profitability. Scientific research and some forms of artistic creation already work this way.

As for completely replacing capitalism, as opposed to just having a mostly-capitalist mixed economy? Well, I can't see it happening in a scarcity society, but I can imagine it happening in a post-scarcity one. Suppose we get to the point where robots farm food for us, robots gather natural resources for us and robots keep basic infrastructure working for us. Now, suppose that at one point we mostly trade in "services" and "ideas" (software, books, music, movies, 3D printable designs for all our physical stuff). At what point there does capitalism becomes silly? "Oh, I don't need money to live, I am designing this car to get paid so that I can buy the 3D printable design of my bed. Oh, wait, someone open-sourced the design for the bed I wanted, neat, let me print it. Guess I can open-source my car design too." "But hey, does that mean you are never making another car design?" "Are you kidding? I love designing cars and what else would I do with my time? Besides, I get a kick out of seeing people driving the car I designed!". The beauty is that we wouldn't even need most people to think that way, just a small fixed count from the population. Things like reputation and competition for real state might have to be solved differently in a society without capitalism, but lets be honest, capitalism is a poor system for solving those two anyways, as evidenced by rent prices in the Bay Area and "Am I a failure if I am not worth $1Bn by age 22?" questions on Quora.

Now, capitalism is probably still the best system we know of to solve resource allocation and promote technological innovation in the conditions of contemporary human society. But those conditions are subject to change. So, yes, "we need capitalism because people need to exchange and accumulate [physical, non-duplicable, scarce] goods freely" is true at the moment. But so would have been at a time: "we need the King to keep all the feudal lords and their peasants united in peace and organized in the case of barbarian invasions".

(Note: This rant turned longer than I expected. Also, HN might be the weirdest place on the net to do a Commie rant ;) )

Re: Ursula K. Le Guin at the National Book Awards

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Capitalism" is a system in which people are allowed to exchange and accumulate goods freely. Moving to a system "outside of capitalism" involves preventing this, and necessarily involves large scale violence both to take the accumulated capital of savers and to persecute anyone who still seeks to engage in the free exchange of goods. See for example the merchants in Maoist China and Stalinist Russia who were hung or…

Luckily there's never been any large scale violence within or around capitalism. Everyone's freedoms - especially the freedom to get paid a fair rate for hard work - are quite safe.

What violent acts of capitalism are you referring to? I suppose there is exploitation in the "3rd world", but it is not clear how that is caused by capitalism. How would other economic systems prevent that kind of thing? Or is that rather a problem of law and policies?

I don't think capitalism = everything is allowed as long as it makes money. You are not allowed to kill people because it suits your business in most capitalist countries, for example.

Socialism managed to suck the whole Aral sea dry, so I don't think it has any inbuilt mechanisms to protect against exploitation.

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