The next capitalist revolution(economist.com) |
The next capitalist revolution(economist.com) |
People nowadays throw ideas around thinking they have a good understanding of how systems operate or should operate, when in fact most are clueless and fail to realize their ignorance.
Society, economy, biological organisms, climate, cognition, etc are all complex systems, and no single person can claim to understand how they work, or the types of laws/rules we should adopt to govern their behavior.
Not all is lost though, as we have slowly started to augment our cognitive power, by means of computation, and in the process have improved our capabilities to analyze and understand these ever evolving systems.
I for one, have began to fight my ignorance by studying more books on complex systems. Here's a good one I've discovered recently: "Scale" by Geoffrey West.
Also, a useful collection of resources, courtesy of Santa Fe Institute: https://www.complexityexplorer.org/ (HINT: Go to explore -> browse section)
... and bonus, one of the most underrated channels on YouTube, Complexity Labs: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCutCcajxhR33k9UR-DdLsAQ
"Business Dynamics" by Stermer was surprisingly good.
"How we know what is not so" by Thomas Gilovich is a good tonic against arrogance (as is "Uncommon Sense" by Comer).
I really like SystemAntics (John Gall - Good luck finding the original!) about, mostly, how our arrogance fails us when we try to define systems that are complex and include humans...
There's a PDF scan of this book available through Google search. Not a great PDF scan so it's not a comfortable read but it's doable. Anyway, I was only going to sample the book from that scan but ended up reading most of it because it was so good. Devastatingly bleak. Accurate. Subtle humor here and there. Highly recommended to anybody who hasn't read it yet. I just need to find a hard copy though ...
I mean we can just acknowledge that we have different worldviews rather than everyone having to agree that things are too complex to understand. I agree they are complex but that doesn't mean I can avoid having views on them.
Sure, we all have world views. When it comes to predictive power however, some world views are superior to others. At the end of the day, and at the level of detail we're currently capable of understanding reality, all of our models are wrong, but some are useful, hence why we keep pushing the process of scientific method, even though it has its limitations.
By acknowledging that something is complex, we can recognize we are limited in our ability to understand it – at least for now – which in turn leads us to question our current views and seek to discover and adopt better models, with even more predictive power.
When you are just another commenter on the Internet, your opinion just doesn't matter that much. It can be hard to get used to that.
Instead of just sharing our outputs, we need to share inputs. What did you read or experience?
Powerful and followable ideas at the level individual decision maker, applied many times over can make big changes in systems. But what story can be told to capture the actions needed at an decision level?
BTW: you might find this paper interesting.
Google, Amazon, Apple...they are reducing our IQs by simplifying our lives to the point of stupefaction.
You can't buy any of these from any company, and you definitely can't buy understanding of them.
One interesting thing about the neoliberal era, it seems, is that the things in it seem to be simultaneously very big and very small.
There are some very big things -- cyberpunk-style megacorps that literally have free rein to make and remake entire markets and populations -- and at the same time very small things -- gig workers, freelancers, contractors, and other kinds of "entrepreneurs" that are out on their own in a dog-eat-dog world of hustle.
I think the question is less about whether we should have more competition, and more about whether this can be done safely. As it stands, you basically have two choices, modeled after the above: to become a cog in a machine (or a machine-in-the-making), or be completely out on your own.
Can something sustainably exist in the middle, and without being consumed by the big thing or becoming the big thing?
We'll see. My money is on things chugging along pretty much as they have been. I think this planet can take far more than we can throw at it.
RE: the article - seems like common-sense recommendations but no specifics. We'd all like to see more competition. The question is how to get there with as few side effects as possible. The specifics are the hard part.
Although the amount of resources required to produce $1 of GDP has gone down ~90% in the last century.
Economic growth = figuring out how to do more with less.
How did he do that?
Forget competition... What about market-wide transparent collaboration?
Nevertheless I will state my worldview and hopefully mention a few specifics that might be anchor points for an attempted discussion.
Technology _alone_ cannot solve our societal problems, but I believe that there is great opportunity to address them by better incorporating the right technologies into society.
And I believe that peer-to-peer distributed (and so decentralized) technologies offer quite a lot of promise. Starting with the idea that over-centralization, whether it stems from a more socialist traditional system or a more capitalist traditional system, is one of the main problems, and technologies that are inherently decentralized can address that.
Well, maybe I will just start with a few premises. I would like to suggest that we should re-evaluate all of our societal structures in a technological context. I think that we can usefully think of them all as types of (mostly primitive) technologies.
For example, I suggest that money is in fact a technology. It is probably the most fundamental technology of society. I think that although an over-reliance on traditional money obviously causes problems, the answer is not to simply de-emphasize its use in society, although that can help in certain contexts. I believe that we should upgrade the technology of money and in doing so we can improve the functioning of society.
I also believe that government is another type of fundamental technology for society. It should also have its technology upgraded.
Another idea I have is that there is a fundamental interaction between money and government which we normally refer to as "corruption" with the idea that this is an abnormal state for the relationship. However I believe that the close relation between money and government in their present primitive forms is a core structural element, i.e. corruption is structurally guaranteed.
I realize that convincing people of these views would require quite extensive prose. But it is unlikely that those with different worldviews would be convinced and I am tired of writing this answer so unfortunately I am not going to try right here. However at least I have explained some of my viewpoint.
Anyway, I think that Ethereum and related or similar technologies are moral causes because they allow us the possibility of upgrading core technologies used in society. We can upgrade money with cryptocurrency. We can upgrade government using something like Ethereum-based decentralized autonomous organizations. I think that you need to upgrade money _and_ government at the same time and be sure that your system considers them as closely related so that you can handle "corruption" in a structural way.
Reaganomics is the cause, not solution to, today’s capitalism crisis.
Thanks so very much.
Can you explain your claim 'objectively true'? There are too many non-concrete nouns running around for me to be able to keep track of...
But even when there is a notion of competition you say that to avoid the traps left around by an imperfect (perhaps unavoidably) system of incentives, coordination is necessary, questioning the need for a decentralized system in the first place. But is that really so bad/superfluous? What if the coordination necessary to make a decentralized system work led more easily to a desirable and elastic result than something crafted by hand. Again, maybe it's too abstract, but I picture a decentralized governance system where members would have to coordinate to achieve a proper equilibrium. For example the biggest hurdle to fighting lobbyism effectively isn't coordination from competing interests, it's the lack of resources. Wouldn't a decentralized system negate the power of money, networking, services, preferential treatment (and even blackmail) even if it still ended up causing/requiring coordination?
Maybe you will consider _not_ downvoting my comment because it will fade out and no one will even be able to see it. That means my ideas will be dismissed without consideration by new people to the thread.
I am not downvoting your comment.
Hilarious. What a desperate attempt to pump ETH by some poor bagholder.
Ethereum doesn't exactly have the best track record of being a truly "decentralized" cryptocurrency, does it?
EDIT: I did remove an insult from an earlier draft of an earlier comment that you were probably a kid (as most people here are) that didn't remember the 80s. Since you are apparently not, my question still stands. (I don't have a pin-up of Margaret Thatcher any more, though...)
I'm not seeing the problem here?
From a reputable vendor, no less.
Citation needed.
It would be very difficult to totally wipe out humans - including all remote tribes, all underground sealed bunkers. I'm not saying that's perfect, but the less-bad it gets down from that kind of global catastrophe level, and the less sudden it is, the greater the number of humans who will survive it.
As for the planet, what does it mean for it to be "fragile"? It survived whatever impact split The Moon off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...
"Cod: Over 35,000 fishermen and plant workers from over 400 coastal communities became unemployed.[..] federal government intervened, [..] income assistance [..] retraining of workers [..] Newfoundland has since experienced a dramatic environmental, industrial, economic, and social restructuring, including considerable emigration,[18] but also increased economic diversification, an increased emphasis on education, and the emergence of a thriving invertebrates fishing industry"
and the present status 20 years later is "recovering" up to possibly 10% of earlier levels - nothing like the million years to recover of the previous link.
Change happened, people adjusted to it in many ways. That sounds resilient, not fragile.
My point re: the fishery collapse is that all the tool yielding people didn't forsee the collapse and when it happened were unable to deal with it effectively. You're not gonna have 20 years to figure stuff out if climate changes dramatically, ecosystems collapse or some feedback loop kicks in. The scale/force/power of these changes is well above our current ability to engineer and our illusion of power is going to disappear very quickly once our society and infrastructure disappear. The romantic notion of 50 people in a bunker surviving and continuing the human race while the oceans turn into acid .. not gonna happen.
Whenever the forces of nature hit us our tool wielding seems to matter very little.
55,000 people were displaced or evacuated in California just now, with a current death toll of <100. They didn't just move all at the same time by luck and on foot; vehicles, radio, TV, fire tracking helicopters and satellites all helped keep 50,000+ people alive in the face of a natural force. We reinforce buildings against earthquakes, we build tornado shelters, the Svalbard Global Seed vault, Dutch land reclamation dykes and countless flood defences around the world, earthquake and tsunami early warning systems, storm tracking weather satellites, and every building with lightning conductors since the 1700s.
With the spread of humans around the world, even huge events like the "imminent" Pacific North West USA Cascadia zone earthquake wouldn't affect most people. Something would have to kill 50% of humans just to take the world population down to 1972 levels. 75% of people is still higher world population than it was in 1900.
What's left? Anything which affects the globe. Climate change, which is currently being talked about in a "2C in 100 years" way which is a lot more than 20 years, and ... supervolcano emissions or massive solar flares or meteor impact. And a handwavy "if some feedback loop kicks in and the oceans acidify".
The romantic notion of 50 people in a bunker surviving and continuing the human race while the oceans turn into acid .. not gonna happen.
What about whole countries putting acid rain covers over their crops and water purifiers? One project in Israel desalinates 150,000,000 cubic meters of seawater every year, providing for 1.5 million people.
If we can plan for a colony on Mars, anything that happens to Earth it will still be hundreds of times more habitable than Mars, even if that means everyone who remains living inside some kind of habitats.
It is simply foolish to be pushing on this system for no good reason. I don't want to roll a d100 dice where if it comes out 1 we all die. That's a terrible gamble. Sure 90 out of 100 would only be a hotter world with more storms and fires and vast stretches of land disappearing under the oceans.