“don’t you think they would do it if it was profitable??” ignores the numerous examples of companies sleep walking off a cliff due to attachment to their existing way of doing things, or delusional belief that their business model will never need to change, or just sheer idiocy on the part of management.
More you might like
“Capitalism with a Human Face”
lol i bet this is a exhilarating read
Honestly, these sorts tend to overestimate the degree to which marketers are just being desperate.
You Can’t Have It All (even in communism)
In past ages, communists, socialists, and anarchists were usually reacting to a world in which resources were scarce in general as well as in specific and in which the situation of the poor in general was one of miserable deprivation. Meanwhile, the future potential of automation and robotics – machines which might not merely reduce the amount of work that needed to be done, but largely eliminate it – was not really visible.
Today things are… different.
It’s pretty common that I see far leftists more-or-less promising the following after a Revolution:
1. That it will no longer be neccessary for everybody to work, and moreover that people will be permitted not to work, and yet to have enough to live on, without needing to justify not working to anybody.
2. That industry will change to vastly decrease damage to the enviroment
3. That material quality of life and industrial capacity will not catastrophically plummet, especially not in things like medical technology
I think that this is… very optimistic. The kind of optimistic that no wise person would ever bet on.
Some far leftists claim that communism is more efficient and will do better than capitalism. This is unlikely. The Soviet Union did great things – industrializing rapidly after everyone else had a head start and after having the Nazis burn half their country – but they were just catching up to others, and they were oppressive, enviromentally destructive, and didn’t let people not work by any means. It didn’t last.
(However, in the post-Stalin soviet union, there were some labor rights that would make Americans drool.)
If you combine this with confiscationism and the intersectionality thing where anybody’s position in the grand hierarchy of justified people can be questioned, you have a nightmare: a society that continually eats itself, finding new classes of “bourgeoise” and kulaks and “counter-revolutionaries” to force into slave labor or just murder and loot, so that the Beautiful People can have their gleaming solarpunk utopia and their communism of leisure.
I do not wish to suggest that I intend to be the enemy of hope; our current system is unjust and needs to be reformed. We can reform it in a way that will turn automation from a curse into a blessing, and which will improve peoples’ lives now and in the future. But this will not be revolution but counter-revolution, and will have no place for bloodstained red flags.
Endorsed.
“Movies will be free after the revolution!”
Movies take the work of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people. How will we decide where to allocate our resources for the best results?
Centralized committee!
Yes! The State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television smiles upon you!
some kinds of common knowledge are a massively valuable public good, and a centralised authority is typically the most efficient way of providing it.
It’s related to that idea that we all have time and love to comparison shop between everything. It’s basically saying “you’re going to get screwed by that crucial detail you didn’t know was important beforehand.“
and that you have the time and resources and are still alive to pursue damages through the court system against those with deep pockets who have screwed you over.
I’d be interested to learn more about different models for decentralized accreditation services – consumer safety, etc. You see a little of this with professional guilds and etc I guess? But I’m not sure how much money you’d need to throw at meta accreditation to get good trust levels, or how much duplication of work you get in a free market of accreditation services, etc. It really does seem like a central authority is a good way to go…?
I think the tricky part is enforcement and incentives. Structural engineers were complaining about the cladding long before buildings started burning down, and fire fighters were shocked when they tried to put out the fires, but in order for that to translate into it not being sold, purchased, and installed on buildings there needs to be someone who says “no” when the architect says “cheap!”
The thing that gets me with the Libertarianism thing and safety regs is that, precisely because of all the losses of information in the process and limited information resources available to buyers, I feel the regulation process really does have to bottom out somewhere with “men with guns come and say no, you can’t do that.”
And I know they hate that, but their plans often effectively give out huge subsidies in the form of unaccounted-for externalities, information asymmetry, and so on, to capital.
“Make them all buy insurance” requires a strong state to come through and force the issue and also make sure that that insurance will pay out. But if you don’t do at least that, then you allow people to engage in arbitrage against peoples’ lives (more than they do now). One could argue, even, about smoothing out lifetime earnings with loans to help pay for safety, but financial markets are waaaaaay too frictional for that and the future is too unknown.
So I don’t feel too bad about the building safety codes.
And some of the Asian countries prove you can have the building safety codes and even earthquake standards without the part that causes housing prices to quintuple.
Brand loyalty is such stupid nonsense though. Like…we know you’re not a real person, McDonald’s™; we’re not going to swear an oath of fealty to your shitty ass hamburgers.
teens in unison: today we will cast off the corporate shackles
OP may not realize what practical brand loyalty is. It isn’t about swearing fealty, but about not putting in the effort and risk to try another brand. Not a big deal for hamburgers, but, say your family had major issues with a Ford minivan and started exclusively buying all their cars from one Japanese company…
Socialist countries have a really bad track record of human rights abuses and a strange set of failings that are either specific to them or unusually prominent compared to the general zeitgeist, so you can draw decent conclusions like “don’t break systems a lot of people depend on, just cuz” and “freedom of press is actually really important” and “science shouldn’t be controlled by the state’s ideology ever”
instead people realize that Marx was wrong about something and the Soviet Union killed people and then go become tankies but for capitalism
I guess the real question is, “is it possible to avoid these known horrible bugs in Communism/socialism, or is it time to go look for something else and try to make that work?”
The vast majority of Communists I’ve encountered in person or online don’t seem to be trying to avoid the known problems. They either ignore/don’t know/pretend to not know about the historical issues, or they consider eg. genocide a feature rather than a bug.
It’s certainly possible to try avoiding these bugs, or dramatically improve the current social order, or to try and build some other system entirely, but then/instead you get people like @redbloodedamerica openly celebrating fucked up shit because capitalism is good and cool and therefore bonded labor is good and cool also, hence, tankies but for capitalism.
Anarchists say they’re against it, but I’ve never seen them lay out how they would prevent it from happening except to claim they wouldn’t have a state - but Catalonia had death squads, perhaps not Stalin-tier death squads, but apparently it did have them. I think the way to socialism now, the way to actually convince people, is to stop telling people to embrace a Communist revolution and instead buy up a huge tract of land in a country with a weak central government and demonstrate a real, working, unoppressive, prosperous model.
I don’t actually think they have that model, so I don’t see myself supporting Communism over Boring Welfare Capitalism any time soon.
The thing I like about the idea of mandatory safety insurance is that it introduces a new actor with new incentives into the problem.
Let us return to aircraft.
The State has determined that every airline company must carry two million dollars in insurance per passenger per flight, to be paid out in the event that the plane is destroyed and they die. It has set certain rules, for instance that the insurance company must be sufficiently well-capitalized and it can’t just waive paying out because the company did something stupid.
Executive Todd has plans to reduce the maintenance on Tumblr Airlines aircraft. He will be at the company for five years. There is a 90% chance that if he does this, there will be no crash, and he gets a million dollar bonus and leaves. There is a 10% chance that a plane will crash before he leaves and he’ll only have a personal fortune of ten million dollars and a mansion on Hawaii left, which he can retire to.
So Todd orders that the maintenance should be cut.
However, Blue Hellsite Insurance, Inc., Tumblr Airlines’ insurance company, depends for its funding entirely on carefully calculating risk and then charging a bit more than that, on an ongoing basis. To do so, as part of their contract (and thanks to provisions passed in law by the State), they can set insurance agents out to inspect processes, planes, and so on.
BHI’s reaction to a plan that results in a 10% chance of a plane crash is “you WHAT?!” Whereas the risk isn’t necessarily quite so visible or quantified to all others in the organization, or else they may have motivations to ignore it for the same reason as Executive Todd.
So BHI come back and say that either Todd’s plan isn’t going to fly, or the insurance rates are going to go up.
So what was an invisible cost that could have gotten kicked down the road to a successor is transmuted into a stubborn operating cost right now.
Tumblr Airlines makes less profit (upsetting shareholders), raises ticket prices to compensate (thus pricing the risk into the market and making them less competitive), or else doesn’t go through with the plan.
The State could even require that the portion of the cost which is the risk premium is printed on the ticket, informing consumers of roughly how dangerous a given flight is. This is actually an enormous information gain by consumers, who as non-experts find it very difficult to not only judge airline safety, but obtain inside information about aircraft maintenance procedures.
@e8u What about Todd the Insurance Executive?
An astute observation. I actually left off that part in order to conserve length.
This entire scenario still depends on state intervention, which is why AnCaps and most Right Libertarians will not be in favor of it, even though it loosens the details of regulation to the markets and allows riskier behavior (but just prices it more).
Here’s what the State needs to do to cause this to happen:
- Require mandatory insurance on certain classes of products.
- Determine the rules governing the insurance so that the insurance will actually pay out.
- For instance, wrongdoing on the part of the airline does not get the insurance company out of paying the insurance. (It could, however, allow them to pursue damages against the airline without breaking these necessary conditions.)
- Ensure the insurance companies are sufficiently well-capitalized, so that it does not become common practice to make insurance shell companies which immediately fold rather than pay out. Criminal liability may need to be introduced here.
- Create a court system in which it is reasonably feasible for regular people to actually collect the insurance payout. (It isn’t necessary that they collect the full payout, just enough that they’re willing to initiate and complete the necessary legal procedures. Some money could go into an ethical offset fund instead.)
I would say that there have to actually be enough competing insurance companies, but the market will take care of that, since this should be a reasonably profitable field. And the insurance company itself is a longer-term investment vehicle than the airline, since its practice of distributing risk changes when investors will get paid.
So, the question then is, is a system of competing insurance companies with competing insurance regulations more or less efficient and effective than a system of top-down, politically-driven regulation where government decides the details of regulations?
And that question is an empirical one. In systems as complex as economies, we can’t just assume the efficient market hypothesis. After all, this plan is in many ways in response to the existing market distortions of limited liability corporations and destruction of value being easier than creation of value.
Do it right, however, and you can also chip away at information asymmetry - the risk pricing by a moderately profitable insurance company that actually has to pay out if the product is dangerous or defective, as a share of the product’s price, communicates a lot of information that the customer previously often didn’t have.
And then he’s shocked and horrified when people accuse him of being a reacto
The head-slapping part of this is that it assumes that the difficult part about running a government is all the gosh-darned records processing, and not the bit about maintaining the consent of the governed.
States don’t fail because they can’t process paperwork efficiently enough, they fail because the people decide that an alternative offering is more compelling.
(or more uncharitably: this is the most ignorant post X has ever made, and will remain so until X posts again).
Oh, Eliezer, honey kun,
Culture is a wave, government is a wave, nations are a wave, and they’re all a web.
Libertarianism is not the default policy position into which society falls if it isn’t interrupted. Democracy is not the default policy position into which society falls if it isn’t interrupted.
They are both high-level ideological constructs that require constant reinforcement and social, cultural, and material support to maintain.
Demand unsustainable wages, get replaced. Pretty fucking simple.
Lose out on work experience early in life, get penalized for it later, lose opportunities to help the family out, get a degree, go into debt, struggle to find a job that pays decently. But Wall Street is happy so that’s good.
>Get paid minimum wage
>Minimum wage never increases
>Lose job to machine anyway
Wow this is really an improvement, people should starve so I can get a wopper for $2 god bless capitalism wanting to live is for communists
I hear Cuba is nice this time of year.
I got you, though.
#not real communism
Yanks are genuinely this retarded.
Triggervs Medivs, 200 AD: “Slavery is good, slaves just have to outcompete horses while working for less”
In which it is impossible that increasing automation across all sectors simultaneously which arrives at a speed exceeding would-be employee retraining could cause significant unemployment and downward pressure on wages below the levels necessary for long-term wellness.
But don’t worry, Libertarians’ anti-nationalist sentiment means that they’ll bring in ethnic groups that favor increased state intervention (on average), because Libertarianism assumes the political will necessary for itself. The alternative, after all, would involve buying off low income voter groups in clever ways so that they are supported by the nation and support the nation in turn.