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Is everything an MLM
81–90 of 297 posts
Re: Is everything an MLM
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...because market forces will mostly solve only small "consumer" problems and cannot reorganise our society in a more efficient way. Market forces have repeatedly reorganized our society from farms to factories and increasingly from factories to offices.. But we might need to tweak the incentives and refactor regulation.
Silliness. Why has the 40 hour week persisted? Market forces. Climate change? Market forces. The persistence of the slave trade? Market forces. Prostitution and human trafficking, opioids, disintegration of the family, Facebook; all your good friend “market forces”.
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Re: Is everything an MLM
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m sorry that this is your world view, because it is deeply flawed and focusing on such cynicism leads to depression. Most of HN lives in a tech bubble where everyone is focused on building semi-useless software like you describe. However the majority of society still does “normal” things like construction, manufacturing, sales, etc. and some sort of fundamental reorganizing of society on non-market principles doesn…
The economy that you describe, is the simplified econ 101 version. The market fixes everything, and the invisible hand steers everything to optimality. The human being you describe in your last paragraph is from the same economics textbook: A perfectly rational human being making rational decisions 24/7. Both are simplified models that help doing some undergrad economics...but are absolutely insufficient to explain t…
The alternative to letting the individual determine what they want is to let someone else choose for them. I’m arguing on fundamental principles because the parent commenter is advocating a reorganization of market-based economies.
I don’t care how complex the system is. If you aren’t letting me, the individual, determine what is best for my life, then you are coming from a place of superiority and belief that you know better than others. And you don’t.
Re: Is everything an MLM
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m sorry that this is your world view, because it is deeply flawed and focusing on such cynicism leads to depression. Most of HN lives in a tech bubble where everyone is focused on building semi-useless software like you describe. However the majority of society still does “normal” things like construction, manufacturing, sales, etc. and some sort of fundamental reorganizing of society on non-market principles doesn…
>The economy is not a zero-sum game. If I make more money there is not someone else losing. Depends on your accounting. As a % of GDP, the economy is absolutely zero sum. And some useless sectors (finance) have been taking a greater share of GDP.
GDP ain't fixed.
Re: Is everything an MLM
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m sorry that this is your world view, because it is deeply flawed and focusing on such cynicism leads to depression. Most of HN lives in a tech bubble where everyone is focused on building semi-useless software like you describe. However the majority of society still does “normal” things like construction, manufacturing, sales, etc. and some sort of fundamental reorganizing of society on non-market principles doesn…
The economy that you describe, is the simplified econ 101 version. The market fixes everything, and the invisible hand steers everything to optimality. The human being you describe in your last paragraph is from the same economics textbook: A perfectly rational human being making rational decisions 24/7. Both are simplified models that help doing some undergrad economics...but are absolutely insufficient to explain t…
Certainly there are complications, but the question isn’t whether the free market is perfect. The question is whether (and in which cases) it’s worse than a grand social engineering program to decide what everyone’s supposed to want. Probably there are some cases where it is, but it’s hard to see what problems would be prevented by rules about how smart of a refrigerator you should make.
Re: Is everything an MLM
#86Life is a pyramid scheme. Rather than figure out a way to exist in a steady-state forever, our cells divide exponentially, accumulate genetic mutations until they can't take it anymore, and then rather than fix themselves, we just make new humans and let the old one die. Humanity in developed countries at least has the kindness not to make more humans than we believe have a reasonable chance of survival, but that res…
There's another big aspect to this: the orientation of the economy towards growth. When you start asking "What happens when the population and the economy are in a steady state, where we don't expect things to increase at 2% forever", and the answers are pretty grim. Retirement systems, for example, need a certain ratio of productive workers for each retiree, and I can't figure out any math that makes sense for the n…
> What happens when the population and the economy are in a steady state, where we don't expect things to increase at 2% forever
This is a problem that has been studied by every serious economist that looks beyond the existing structure of capitalism. Although we don't know exact shop of the future, the answer is that capitalism as we know, and specially finance, will stop working and we will need a different economic paradigm to organize our lives.
Re: Is everything an MLM
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m sorry that this is your world view, because it is deeply flawed and focusing on such cynicism leads to depression. Most of HN lives in a tech bubble where everyone is focused on building semi-useless software like you describe. However the majority of society still does “normal” things like construction, manufacturing, sales, etc. and some sort of fundamental reorganizing of society on non-market principles doesn…
>> It’s not on someone else to tell me what I should and should not want. Let me give you the news: companies have like..., forever, being in the business of telling others what they should want or not. This is called advertising. This is essentially what every company in the so called new economy, large or small, does to make money. In a modern capitalist economy, nobody cares about the needs of others. The goal is…
Try running a company this way and we’ll see how long it lasts.
Re: Is everything an MLM
#88Most of the economy in the so called "developed countries" is nowadays a zero-sum game between winners and losers. Seen from a macro perspective, it resembles a multi-agent system where independent agents compete to provide inessential products and services in exchange for being able to afford basic necessities like housing, food and child care. The finite resource that such companies are fighting for is people's att…
I’m sorry that this is your world view, because it is deeply flawed and focusing on such cynicism leads to depression. Most of HN lives in a tech bubble where everyone is focused on building semi-useless software like you describe. However the majority of society still does “normal” things like construction, manufacturing, sales, etc. and some sort of fundamental reorganizing of society on non-market principles doesn…
> However the majority of society still does “normal” things like construction, manufacturing, sales, etc.
"Normal" is when you build schools, hospitals, community centers and affordable houses and you produce only several kinds of refrigerator for the whole world, streamlining their production and servicing. Not when you construct factories, warehouses, office skyscrapers and shopping areas where those same goods will be manufactured, stored, marketed and sold, by thousands of competing companies. That competition leads to a lot of wasted resources in exchange for product improvements of a questionable value, like, the availability of fridges in a variety of colours.
> someone needs to maintain our physical infrastructure and keep the lights on
Sure, but the strain on that infrastructure would be far less without the need for commuters to commute 2 hours to their job, in order to market the "best smart fridge" in an office.
Everything is deeply interconnected, and we really need to reevaluate our goals and interests as a society.
Re: Is everything an MLM
#89Most of the economy in the so called "developed countries" is nowadays a zero-sum game between winners and losers. Seen from a macro perspective, it resembles a multi-agent system where independent agents compete to provide inessential products and services in exchange for being able to afford basic necessities like housing, food and child care. The finite resource that such companies are fighting for is people's att…
>> because market forces will mostly solve only small "consumer" problems and cannot reorganise our society in a more efficient way. That's true. But also, can most people really, truly, contribute to big, important problems in our society - in the context of globalization and automation ?
Could most people contribute to (solving) big important problems before globalization or automation?
Re: Is everything an MLM
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's another big aspect to this: the orientation of the economy towards growth. When you start asking "What happens when the population and the economy are in a steady state, where we don't expect things to increase at 2% forever", and the answers are pretty grim. Retirement systems, for example, need a certain ratio of productive workers for each retiree, and I can't figure out any math that makes sense for the n…
Because growth in terms of money which has no inherent value is meaningless. The real growth is in knowledge and technology and connections. The real value is in the systems we create.
How do you measure the value of these systems? The knowledge, technology and connections?