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[Urist McScoopbeard]

@Reelya,

Makes sense! At least academically, but just because the market as a whole operates as a distributed network doesn't mean there aren't players who are so large that they break the model. At least in the self-regulatory sense. Unfortunately, those transgressions rarely get transferred to the consumer (although artificial scarcity and raising prices to falsely imply higher quality or status is a common enough tactic that is frankly, predatory) and instead get dropped on the newest or lowest employees.

Look at Walmart, very competitive from a consumer's point of view, but those cheap prices and volume of product are reliant on a combination of terrible worker conditions (allegedly at one point 70% of new employees left within the first year?), shifty and dangerously monopolistic agreements with their legitimate suppliers (usually to the supplier's detriment), and literal slavery from their overseas ones. And as an American, we ARE very reliant on these types of corporations, but their ease, and excess, and success are based entirely on crimes committed elsewhere.

THAT is what I am getting at. It's almost not-Capitalism, sure they're playing the game within the rules, kind of, but it's like min-maxing a character in a poorly designed RPG, you're just breaking the game using tactics bordering on exploits. Nothing about how large corporations operate reflects a system that is working. Period.

To reiterate earlier, economic theory, ESPECIALLY capitalist economic theory does not do anything to raise the quality of life for those who buy into its system. All the achievements in the rise of the quality of life in the US have been largely incidental to economic progress--and sometimes directly opposed to it, and instead achieved through political reform or exceptional crisis, usually the latter.

Also, the reality is that bargaining, collective or otherwise, is suppressed. It is not a neutral system, and indeed favors the company over the laborer. Make what claims you will about the availability of labor, but it shouldn't work that way. Like I said, the social contract, no one is so unequal that they should have to BARGAIN for a basic life (and income is life in most places), let alone a good one--corporations have too much power and are in many ways treated as if the corporation is the King of some self-encompassing feudal realm or somehow alive. That shit needs to stop, it's not so easy to say "I'll just go somewhere else".

ALSO, if we are referring to investors as Capitalists, it may or may not be true that they are calling the shots. Some of them DO make the pricing decisions, quite frequently, or impose their influence to the same effect. Those agents to which you are referring are not always so free to respond to change in a "natural" way.

In conclusion, what I'm trying to get at here is that Capitalism is an academic theory and the reality is that it's quite broken in operation, which is why changes need to be made. Even if it wasn't, I would still advocate for social democratic intervention (as a first step), because a reactive system like Capitalism will always leave people out to dry when the going gets tough, regardless if there are people breaking the rules or not. Planning doesn't have much to do with it, I only brought it up in the first place (and maybe I should NOT have) because I wanted to point out that the accumulation of significant amount of economic decision making power ANYWHERE will lead to abuses.

[Reelya]

Makes sense! At least academically, but just because the market as a whole operates as a distributed network doesn't mean there aren't players who are so large that they break the model. At least in the self-regulatory sense.

I was just presenting an example of what not-planned looks like as a baseline for how that looks in practice. I know no model is 100% either way. You could argue that the USSR wasn't strictly "planned" because workers received money and could decide how to spend it. In an entirely planned economy, that worker might just receive the rations they require, eliminating money and shopping completely.

Look at Walmart, very competitive from a consumer's point of view, but those cheap prices and volume of product are reliant on a combination of terrible worker conditions (allegedly at one point 70% of new employees left within the first year?), shifty and dangerously monopolistic agreements with their legitimate suppliers (usually to the supplier's detriment), and literal slavery from their overseas ones. And as an American, we ARE very reliant on these types of corporations, but their ease, and excess, and success are based entirely on crimes committed elsewhere.

That's a big issue that separates planned vs unplanned economies: how externalities work. If Walmart sacks you, you're someone else's problem now. They've externalized the problem. Whereas in the Soviet Union everyone worked, because if the state-owned factory sacked you, the state is still obliged to house and feed you, so they'll find something else for you to do.

So it's not really "planned" just because Walmart is big and has a lot of clout. It's unplanned because Walmart makes decisions without having to give a shit what happens to anyone outside Walmart. In a planned economy it's someone's responsibility to determine what's going to happen to you if you lose your job, and that entity has authority over your employer. Any "Walmart decisions" if the USA was a planned economy would be optimized to grow the economy as a whole, rather than doing whatever grows Walmart.

EDIT: so yeah, i get that bargaining is suppressed with the Walmart example. But an unplanned economy doesn't have to be fair. A totally planned economy could have very strict and transparent arbitration processes following clear rules. Capitalism probably works best when the rules are transparent and fair, but being opaque and having unfair rules doesn't actually make it not-capitalist, in that sense.

[SalmonGod]

Scarcity has gone nowhere unfortunately, since the environment remains a scarce resource as we are finding out in all manner of unpleasant ways (Global Warming etc).  The idea we live in post-scarcity is based upon a situation where labour is no longer scarce due to machinery, unfortunately your increased ability to labour does nothing to resolve the fact that the actual resources remain finite.

Oh, thanks for correcting me.  I had no idea earth wasn't a logic-defying anomaly of infinite resources.... /s

*sigh*

But seriously, the point is we are perfectly capable of producing enough basic necessities for everyone on the planet efficiently enough not to endanger the environment.  But to do so would be threatening to our existing power structures, which rely on a certain amount of desperation to function as they do, and will never give up on cutting corners regarding environmental concerns to maximize profits until we're willing to literally start banging on some doors with pitchforks and guillotines in hand.

[Max™]

Strictly speaking, we're a lot closer to infinite than scarce.

Just going by easy vs difficult to access we have a goddamn ridiculous amount of easily accessed resources which are considered off-limits for any number of reasons that all boil down to two things: sane recognition that it isn't easy to un-stripmine a mountain or unmurder an extinct species contributing to a beautiful tapestry worth appreciation, and the insane idea that it's cool to let some fuckers declare they both own X resources AND that they aren't using or selling or doing anything with them because it keeps the price higher so they can make more dollahdollahbills ya'll.

Theoretically speaking, a fairly natural progression of shrinking technology development on 3-D printing makes one wonder how long before it starts getting into nanoprinting stuff, and how difficult it would be after learning how to straight up manipulate shit at smaller scales is a matter of time and energy... we happen to be sitting next to a massive ongoing explosion so energy isn't really something we could run around of, nor is time likely to have a bound at any surface we might reach, which means locally we could just keep rearranging physical material and making new stuff from it at least until the sun burns out and we gotta figure out how to make a new one.

Even easier would be using the huge amount of shit we already have access to, plus the huge amount of energy we have access to, and extrapolating VR type tech to let people experience better versions of reality where artificial scarcity, physical scarcity, accessible scarcity, and even annoying physical laws aren't a big deal.

[Jimmy]

But seriously, the point is we are perfectly capable of producing enough basic necessities for everyone on the planet efficiently enough not to endanger the environment.  But to do so would be threatening to our existing power structures, which rely on a certain amount of desperation to function as they do, and will never give up on cutting corners regarding environmental concerns to maximize profits until we're willing to literally start banging on some doors with pitchforks and guillotines in hand.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Reelya]

That graph's going to look very weird when it suddenly stops going up again, which it will do within the century.

[martinuzz]

Strictly speaking, we're a lot closer to infinite than scarce.

Just going by easy vs difficult to access we have a goddamn ridiculous amount of easily accessed resources which are considered off-limits for any number of reasons that all boil down to two things: sane recognition that it isn't easy to un-stripmine a mountain or unmurder an extinct species contributing to a beautiful tapestry worth appreciation, and the insane idea that it's cool to let some fuckers declare they both own X resources AND that they aren't using or selling or doing anything with them because it keeps the price higher so they can make more dollahdollahbills ya'll.

Theoretically speaking, a fairly natural progression of shrinking technology development on 3-D printing makes one wonder how long before it starts getting into nanoprinting stuff, and how difficult it would be after learning how to straight up manipulate shit at smaller scales is a matter of time and energy... we happen to be sitting next to a massive ongoing explosion so energy isn't really something we could run around of, nor is time likely to have a bound at any surface we might reach, which means locally we could just keep rearranging physical material and making new stuff from it at least until the sun burns out and we gotta figure out how to make a new one.

Even easier would be using the huge amount of shit we already have access to, plus the huge amount of energy we have access to, and extrapolating VR type tech to let people experience better versions of reality where artificial scarcity, physical scarcity, accessible scarcity, and even annoying physical laws aren't a big deal.

My ' optimists have used up the last bit of hope, run for your lives' sigtext is for all those people over the past century who have said things like 'yeah the environment and global warming are a problem, but don't worry, technological advancement will fix that'.
I firmly believe that if we keep up our current levels of population growth and consumption, we will exhaust our planet long before we reach sufficient technological levels to prevent catastrophic decline.

[SalmonGod]

Obviously, population can't just keep growing forever.  I recognize that we have reason to believe it will stop growing at some point, but I don't know that it will stop growing at a point that we still have the capacity to care for.

But it's kind of a moot point for the time being, because I am pretty damn sure we have the capability to care for our current and future population for a good while.  Not at current levels of resource consumption, no.  But that needs to be addressed by moving away from consumer capitalism and wage slavery.  A huge amount of our resource consumption would vanish if we were allowed to live psychologically healthy lifestyles.  Instead, capitalism drives us to live in a terminal state of crisis.  Always on the verge of collapse.  And encourages us to cope with living this way by maximizing convenience and filling the voids it creates within us with products.  Meanwhile, an increasing proportion of the work that we do is superfluous bullshit that just wastes vast amounts of resources for no objectively practical reasons, and huge amounts of the products this system produces, whether essential goods or not, is turned almost immediately into waste... *by design* in order to drive higher rates of consumption because the imaginary numbers must flow.

Population growth is the wrong thing to worry about.

[scriver]

Considering the consumer culture is part of the thing that has created the middle class of the West which is what has ceased our population growth... is it really though?

[Naturegirl1999]

Considering the consumer culture is part of the thing that has created the middle class of the West which is what has ceased our population growth... is it really though?

did you mean ceased or caused? They have different meanings, and autocorrupt can screw things up

[scriver]

Ceased

Population growth stopped because of middle classitude

[Bumber]

Strictly speaking, we're a lot closer to infinite than scarce.

Mathematically speaking, that's impossible.

[Red Diamond]

So the problem is precisely the balance of the distribution of labour/energy/man hours/whatever between self-interest and common interest, right?


Also to reply to Red Diamond,

While not really the gist of what I was saying, I'll point out that the failure of human beings to predict or otherwise convince the proper authority figures of looming disasters and other, less drastic large scale changes--and in turn act on that knowledge does not reveal Capitalism to be a planned market economy in disguise, only that in the examples given human beings are simply more reactive than predictive when it comes to... adjusting to change? The difference between a free market economy and planned economy as far as I can see is who is doing the planning, so to speak, it's all mostly reactive (unless you want to get into marketing, and targetting, and etc.)

Exactly, the difference is who is doing the planning; which makes the 'free market' a planned economy.  Which means you cannot argue against a planned economy, because all economies are planned economies anyway.  Communism does not create any new problems, the information problem where the planners fail to predict consumer demand exists regardless of the form of economy.

Under the 'free market' the shops plan the economy, they are the economic planners.  The productive enterprises are not relying on some magic higher power to make their decisions as to what to produce, they are producing because they were told that the shops would buy those goods and the shops are demanding those things because they think they know what their customers will buy.  It is a objectively a hierarchy with the shops at the top making the decisions and everyone else doing what the shops tell them. 

Except that subjectively speaking this is not what is going on.  In theory the inferiors in the heirachy (the producers) are equals trading with their superiors, in reality they are minions carrying out the orders of those above them, their submission to orders being disguised as equality.  Productive Capital is subordinate to Commercial Capital and Labour is subordinate to both forms of Capital.

It's a little bit different to that. Remember that it's not capitalists making the pricing decision, it's a distributed network of agents all making pricing decisions in response to their own local supply/demand signals. For example, a local shopkeeper can change his prices based on local and short-term changes in supply or demand. All the shopkeeper "knows" is his own inputs and outputs, and he uses those signals to adjust both supply requests and prices. The information is local that's why it's not "planned". A "planned" economy means that you make local decisions based on non-local information, which isn't happening here.

He might run out since he may not be able to order new stock fast enough, but then you just go to the next shop along, and the first shopkeeper knows he should probably increase the amount he's ordering from the wholesalers. If he can't increase the amount he's ordering, say because the supplier says there isn't enough to fulfill that demand, or if his shop is nearing capacity for what he can throughput, then he'll raise prices - as long as nobody can undercut him, in which case he'll just lose that extra business.

EDIT: for example, a local shopkeeper gets 50 watermelons a week, but recently 100 people per week are coming into his shop asking for watermelons. So he calls the supplier and says "you gotta send me an extra 50 watermelons per week". If they have another 50 watermelons to give him, all is good and he won't raise prices - he already worked out the optimal price to sell a watermelon at given the effort required - leaving the price alone and just getting more is guaranteed to double his profits, but raising the price is a lot more risky. If he's even 5 cents more than the next guy, he'll lose most of his business. Only if he can't get more watermelons, then he'll think about raising prices - the reasoning is that if your store can't get more watermelons then neither can the next shop, and if so many extra people are asking for watermelons, there's a shortage everywhere, so raising prices is not risky, in that situation. Conversely, if he's not selling that many watermelons, or if people come in and check out the watermelons a lot but don't buy them, he could drop his prices to make more money. This is how it works, and why it isn't a "planned economy" by another name. It's not planned, because all the information signaling is locally distributed through the network.

The point there is that the consumer can choose their retailier, and the retailers can set their own prices, and the retailers can choose their suppliers, and those different suppliers are also free to choose their pricing, along with workers being able to select from multiple employers, and each employer being able to negotiate with each employee, individually, for how much money they're going to be paid (leaving aside bargaining power: but there is still bargaining going on. That's the point). So you can say it's "planned" in that decisions are being made by someone, but that really goes against the nature of what we actually mean when we say "planned economy". What we actually mean is some architect or organization with a vision of how the whole is going to work. That doesn't exist in capitalism. It's like calling the internet a centralized network, because there are servers.

No, the information is not 'equally distributed' through the network, it never is because that would be too ridiculously inefficient to actually work.  Information about demand goes up from the customers to the retailers and then goes down to the various productive businesses, who in turn pass the information onto the worker who actually produce the goods for them.  To implement a 'planned' economy, all you have to do is replace the retailers with bureaucrats and since the retailers are already basically functioning in such a capacity already very little of the structure actually changes. 

Capitalism however does not want anyone to understand it is a planned economy, so it pretends it is all being carried out market actors who are equals based upon information they magically have access to and spreads various fantasies along the lines you peddling.  Objectively they are not equals but are hierarchically organised, with the shops/suppliers of the shops being the apex of the pyramid but subjectively they are required by Capitalist ideology to declare their imaginary, fantastical equality.

[Max™]

Strictly speaking, we're a lot closer to infinite than scarce.

Mathematically speaking, that's impossible.

It's possible to convert energy into mass, we don't know how to do this on demand yet, but we didn't know how to turn a pile of metal powder and epoxy into an AI optimized lightweight and strong portion of a hypercar suspension at one point either.

At some point, barring humans wiping themselves out, we'll figure out how to begin custom tweaking molecules and printing them on demand, afterwards we should be able to figure out how to directly tweak atomic scale structures, from there we'd move to directly converting energy into mass.

There is no reason to think the universe has a spatial or temporal bound, but we will have to deal with entropy, and eventually worry about shit like proton stability, but this is getting into the 10^40~100 year range, so far beyond what out there sci-fi discusses as deep future as to make it look like tomorrow comparitively.

There are problems wrapped up in all those ideas of course, but none of them involve "running out of stuff" unless we mature fully beyond a Type III Kardashev civ.

Capitalism requires scarcity, in the face of reality it has to argue for artificial scarcity, and it's easy to do this because people are relatively small things with a relatively shit grasp for large numbers.

People act like a millionaire and billionaire are in any way similar, when being a millionaire means you can retire fairly comfortably, while being a billionaire means you can't spend all your money and run out anymore because it makes more of itself before anybody is able to use it.

You've spent most of your life with a horizon between 1 and 5 kilometers away most likely, so at your scale the world seems like it must be a similar size, but you have to be floating around in orbit for the horizon you can see to reach the size of the world itself. It is so massive as to measurably warp what you might normally think of as immutable concepts like distance: the planet is literally a millimeter or so deeper than you would expect by measuring the surface and calculating the radius. That excess radius is a result of enough stuff to curve spacetime around itself, and it is the most wasteful possible use of material you could imagine for the production of a breathable and livable environment.

Spun out into habitable containers you could probably fill a significant chunk of our orbit with all the shit locked up inside the planet, but to actually fill it you'd need to pull shit off the sun, maybe deconstruct a couple of the gas giants/ice giants out there, or figure out how to start printing sunlight directly into mass and spend a long enough time doing it.

Physics allows it, we can understand that it is at least possible, it will probably end up happening eventually unless stopped, so no, scarcity on any scale you have used the word is imaginary until you start seriously discussing stellar masses and whatnot.

[Egan_BW]

And yet, mathematically speaking, 10^40 years is indeed infinitely closer to zero than to infinity, because math is bullshit and doesn't actually have much to do with this conversation~