Laws can change society, through propaganda. See "Click it or Ticket" campaigns, and the like.

A simple PSA / Propaganda effort of "If you're sick with COVID19, stay at home. Federally mandated leave demands it", would probably go a long way. Maybe something like 'Use your sick days, they're a promised benefit of US Law', or "True Americans stay home when they're sick". (Etc. etc. I'm not good with PSA videos, but give it to some Hollywood artist and have them figure out the details, lol)

The WW2 propaganda levied upon the population was incredibly epic in size and scope, and was key to building US national unity and drumming up support for the war.

--------

There was that Bangladesh mask study, showing that something like 30+% of people would listen to masking advice/propaganda from religious leaders, in that 400+ village study. (200 villages as the control, 200 villages as the experiment. Found a bunch of religious leaders who would push pro-Mask statements and then ran the experiment). 10% of people wore masks before the study, 40% of the experiment-group wore masks after the study (so 30% of people were "affected").

No, that's not 100%. But changing even a fraction of the population would have huge effects.

Second, @pg 10 years ago is not @pg today. People change, and while his latest essays many not be exceptional neither in style nor in content, texts like "What You'll Wish You'd Known" and "What You Can't Say" have been highly influential well outside SV or even US.

P.S funnily, shortly after "What You'll Wish You'd Known" I saw a viral video of Joanne Rowling saying the same thing @pg was barred from saying at a commencement address: Stay Upwind.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism#Other_types_of_commu...

Indirectly yes, right now one of their biggest selling points is not being in the legal realm of government regulated markets.

If the government were to legalize drugs/endorse crypto that dynamic would heavily change, the black variants of these markets would lose quite a big part of their appeal and thus the demand for them and ultimately their market share.

> goverment is but one way to achieve that organization

There has to be some form of authority enforcing rules, or else you end up with a very anarchistic form of "market" where everything goes. That "everything" ranges from mundanities, like making a "business model" out of cheating people, to selling people like property because when there's a buyer, who has the right the stop me from selling?

One of the fundamental reasons this is the case is because trading requires enforcement of property ownership, whoever is doing the enforcing is de facto the government. Private keys and smart contracts allow for ownership which need not be defended, though admittedly only over things in a limited sense. Your keys mean you own your wallet, but an NFT of a bridge doesn’t mean shit.

Most crypto volumes aren’t drugs at all, but are people buying and selling other cryptos using cryptos.

It’s going to be interesting to see if web3 bears fruit but so far that has largely not happened

It’s all part of the history of people getting together to negotiate for their own contracts, worth reading about: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_labor_law_in_the_...

This is such a privileged and arrogant stance to take. The VAST majority of people are NOT free to negotiate.

The interesting things are everything Graeber missed. Which fair, he's an anthropologist and not an economist. Interestingly, none of which really contradicts him.

When Jeff Bezos is worth billions, does he really? He doesn't have actual $, he has an abstract # derived from owning stocks in amazon. But how did you even get there? It's fundamentally debt. Every $ he is worth is the debt someone else has. Society owes him for his contribution. He created something that people love to use. Therefore he will be rewarded for that.

The caveat is that he does not get interest for this debt. He's not holding mortgages or whatever. So inflation is the mechanism in which he gets poorer. He is forgiving that debt like Graeber explains it worked in the olden days. However, he obviously is still operating and continuing to earn, so his worth goes up.

Flipside, if you are someone who holds mortgages, you earn the interest. You're not forgiving debt, so long as inflation is lower than the interest rate. Like right now, the market has bond rates well below inflation. The people holding debt are forgiving the debt. Which are often retirement funds and what have you because they are legally required to buy those.

https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/i...

In the USA, even the 30 year bonds are negative. Whoever holds your debt is forgiving your debt in those percentages. Other countries like Germany have negative interest rates, they have to forgive the debt even faster. Why is this? This is the time when baby boomers are retiring. Germany obviously didn't do well in WW2 and it's going to impact them more.

I guess it makes sense - startups are gold rush, VC's are the ones giving away shovels for portion of gold should there be any, and founders are people who either found gold or believe they will.

I wonder if most of people have political outlook like this. If they do, it is both sad and comforting, because then the humanity is doomed to kill ourselves via climate change, but we would deserve it.

Add to the fact: nothing prevents them from putting their money where their mouth is and living the life, right now, however which way the communes are envisioned. Hell, even the Amish and Mennonites are still doing their thing.

Capitalism seems more or less benign in affluent nations which can afford to value individual life at millions of dollars. You can rest assured that the homeless people you ignore aren't going to starve, that they'll just buy drugs with the money you'd have given them anyway. It's easy to squint your eyes and believe in the system.

It's much harder to look at countries were life is much much cheaper and accept that the system is a net improver of lives rather than one of enforced stagnation. Where getting people fed, clothed and housed is a matter of politics, not logistics. Everywhere you go in the developing world, you see politics, by that I mean rich people preserving their riches, keeping the people willing to do the legwork and work out the logistics, from following through on their altruistic missions.

We need to stop pretending the system designed to make people feel better about exploiting whatever they can in self-interest is the arbiter of human worth.

Scarcity could go away tomorrow if the rent-seekers could just get out of the way.

Edit: here's a partial list of past explanations about this, in case anyone is interested in seeing how it has come up over the years: https://news.ycombinator.com/downvote-reasons

In fact, there are several shortcomings to adopt HN as a model for moderation and debate - it was evidently not the objective. But civilization wise, there is no comparison with many other places.

By the way:

> a story HN members tell themselves to feel special

Please. Accusing others to have unclean grounds in their evaluations, gratuitously? And, when one is "special", it is not out of some free membership that confirmation comes.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years#Cri...

2. https://www.ft.com/content/04e44606-d9a0-11e0-b16a-00144feab...

But if you go looking for it, there is a wide array of work that has been done divising ideas for the systematic change we need to solve these problems. I have a whole bookshelf of authors proposing alternatives. Projects like The Next System project, and the Democracy Collaborate, have been working on divising ways to grow alternative systems with in the confines of the current one.

The challenge of course, remains funding. Because those with the wealth got that wealth through the current system and continue to benefit from the current system.

So actually making change is going to take either a mass popular uprising (electoral or otherwise) or enough people with enough wealth recognizing the problems and being willing to give up their wealth and power to solve them. Knowing that the solutions will forever disempower them and their peers.

Edit:

To provide some clarity of the sort of solutions on offer, I'll provide my favorite. Stop prioritizing capital, start prioritizing labor. Right now, Capital basically gets to call the shots - because we allow for any kind of contract in business formation and you can't start a business with out capital and we don't restrict what capital can demand. This allows capital to take advantage of that power imbalance at the time of business formation to demand control. If instead, we restricted what capital could demand to say - a reasonable interest on a loan - and legally structured businesses as institutions democratically run by those working in them, this would have the effect of empowering labor and disempowering capital.

People would still have the ability to make money from their money, but it would vastly reduce the current multiplier effects on the growth of wealth, and thus the tendency for wealth to concentrate. It would tend to spread wealth out to a much wider proportion of the population - because the people doing the work would get to vote for the leaders of their businesses, and those leaders then have a much, much strong incentive to take care of the people doing the work. Likewise, the people doing the work would have a much stronger incentive to take care of the communities in which they operate, because they are much more likely to live in those communities than distant investors. It has the effect of reconnecting businesses with their neighbors and communities in a much more real way, and empowering those involved in the business who are most aware of the effects it has to change those effects.

Would this system be perfect? Nope. It's really a pretty gentle refactor of the current sytem (though one with wide ranging effects). Would it be better? Yeah, I really believe it would.

There are many other effects this change would have - I've wanted to write a book on it for years, but haven't been able to find the time or bandwidth. Someday. If I ever get to take a long leave of absence or get to cash out, someday.

Another alternative you could consider, one I've played with as a thought experiment many times, what would happen if we simply banned people from making money directly from their money in all forms? It's a challenging thought experiment, because where do you draw the line? Money is just a representation of property, so how do you define money made from money versus, say, renting a machine you own? But it's a worthwhile thought experiment - could we devise a system where you could only make money by working, and not by simply owning property or holding wealth?

There are many more alternatives out there, from gentle refactors to whole rewrites. Some fleshed out, some just thought experiments. And everything in between. They should really - all of them - be a much bigger part of our public dialog than they are.

Further edit: Many threads are on-going but I've been at this all morning so I'm going to call it a day and go make lunch. I've appreciated the dialogs, and maybe I'll write that book some day. If I do find the time to write that book, I know exactly where to come to harden it against criticism. If I can convince a forum full of capital investors and would be capital investors that making capital investment illegal is a good idea, then I'll be able to convince anyone!

> Communism: a theory or system of social organization in which all property is owned by the community and each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs.

Nope. That'd be neo-feudalism, as the super rich will be our defacto oppressive over lords. Anarchism is against oppression.

There are market anarchists, they like markets but in no case they like unlimited wealth accumulation.

Seems like a poor example. If there’s all these unused wires owned by people who are losing money, surely a startup could rent capacity on an existing network, or outright buy it if the capital was already available.

Lets put capitalism vs communism aside.

I imagine a world where we have fully automated producing essential things. Why can't we have a factory farm fully automated using entirely robots producing food at cost. The same can be done for widgets. Robot arms can just do everything entirely. Someone just has to build this; I've been to one of those greenhouses. It picked thousands of pounds of tomatoes, delivered them to packaging, packaged, and shipped every day with only 3 people. The 3 people are for 2 functions. Q/A making sure its not picking rotten stuff and making sure the trucker doesnt do anything.

We can get to the point that the payment for your groceries is watching advertisements or whatever. Simply because the cost of those goods are that small.

If I could be assured my family was fed and such. Maybe I'd quit my job and entrepreneur and do something else. That's the appeal of communism. The idea that innovation and such takes off. The reality is that under communism you have societal collapse. Cuba hasn't built anything in forever. They have no factories, nobody would work in them. They also dont automate, their population has been stagnant and thermodynamics is wrecking their country. In order to have that upward push in communism, you need slaves. Gulags get shit done.

Wow, in the past 200 years, we've seen the eradication of smallpox, treatment for Tuberculosis, vaccines for pneumonia, all issues plaguing humanity for pretty much all of recorded history.

A rural farmer in Nigeria can access price data in real time using a cell phone, while democracy in India allows dozens of politicians from every state argue on live TV simultaneously to get their views heard.

What, pray tell, can you say that the world isn't a better place

It sounds like you saw real poverty and it woke you up to your immense wealth and comfortable existence, so kudos on that. You took the wrong leap though and decided that your life is the default state, when in fact it is in an incredible aberration of history. For millions of years every person was poor, then a few were rich, then more were rich, and now you're one of them.

You're advocating for ignoring research and data in favor of anecdotes. You're not even trying to argue in good faith.

In my experience, the people who are typically 'shocked' by this destitution are people who have lived extremely privileged lives, believe this is the default state of the world, and then see this destitution, and are so moved, that they dedicate their lives to eradicating it, while often misidentifying the cause.

Buddha is the archetypical version of this narrative, and it's no wonder -- as a rich prince, he had no idea what the world was really like.

In reality, most of the problems you see in rural areas all around the world are human-caused problems, typically where humans are interfering with individual freedom (civil and economic).

> It hits you that it's not just that part of rural Colombia that looks like that, rural everywhere does.

Except it doesn't. My parents live used to live in rural America and it was quite nice. My brother lives in the countryside and it's also quite nice. It's no less destitute than the area of Portland I live in. Have you ever been to a city? It's not like they're some model of refinement.

So basically we are abolishing the ability for any business to hire employees? This would be terrible, especially for the poor. Owner and employee are different risk profiles, it's neither useful nor beneficial to impose by law that nobody can be an employee any longer, especially for those who can't afford the risk.

It's also very easy to route around that obstacle if it were made law: just fire everyone and hire them back as contractors, oh, no, sorry, democratically run worker cooperative employing one worker.

You are completely throwing away many layers of protections that are afforded to workers in a system of regulated employment relations.

> Like I said, this is a thought experiment.

It's a thought experiment predicated on paying an enormous social cost that nobody is willing to pay, to get to a point where nobody wants to be. If the first step of your plan directly implies getting rid of all credit, then I frankly don't think it's really a good plan.

In practice of course, none of the freedoms of decision making we typically ascribe to western democratic nations existed despite these labels. The reason, as always, is that significant coercion and force is required to get people to give up control of their property and wealth. This inevitably leads to not only authoritarianism, but also wealth being transferred to the state instead of the people.

I do find it interesting that your social circle is willing to bet their entire net worth on a risky startup where the reward is a salary cut in the worker cooperative + some savings account level interest. The "funding" bit is the key. You waived over it with crowdfunding, but now it's like buying lottery tickets with low payout. Pay $20 for a 20% chance at $40 in 10 years! You'll make the world a better place!

> that this is just the natural state of the world (for which they have thousands of years of evidence to point to).

You write:

> And there was a wide range of economic systems prior to that.

That is my point. every single one of those 'wide range of economic systems' (including the ones directly intended to produce equality) produced inequality.

"99.9% of people accused of a crime ..." -- this is a reference to the fact that the Japanese criminal system's conviction rate is a startlingly high 99.9%. But what's going on here is that about 60% of criminal cases in Japan get suspended without going to court; prosecutors only proceed in cases where they are nearly certain of getting a conviction, so their 99.9% figure isn't comparable to (say) the US's 93% (that's a figure from 2012; I couldn't readily find anything more recent).

(It may also be true that that 99.9% is artificially high, that substantially fewer than 99.9% of accused criminals who go to trial in Japan are actually guilty despite prosecutors' attempts to proceed only when sure of conviction. But even if say 10% of those convictions are wrongful, that's a much smaller effect than the fact that 60% of cases are abandoned without going to trial.)

"... are forced to work in a gulag" -- so the claim here is that literally every person convicted of a crime in Japan then does forced labour. This is not true, for the simple reason that the great majority of people convicted of crimes in Japan (just like everywhere else) don't go to prison. Only about 15% do.

(It is true that most prison sentences in Japan are imprisonment-with-labour. I'm not sure whether it's all of them; I've seen explicit claims that it is and explicit claims that it isn't. I shall not try to adjudicate whether "in a gulag" is a reasonable description of the life of those prisoners. Incidentally, they are mostly paid for the work they do in prison.)

"Why? They implemented loads of socialist policies and blew up their debt."

The Japanese debt-to-annual-GDP ratio hovered around 50% or so until about 1993 and then started rising rapidly, reaching its present level (the figure I've seen is 225%, not 266%, but in any case it's rather high) around 2012. But they had a policy of prison labour before their debt was large; e.g., here's http://www.jca.apc.org/cpr/kaido.html someone complaining about it in 1997 (debt-to-annual-GDP ratio about 70%) using prison labour figures from 1994 (debt-to-annual-GDP ratio about 60%).

(I shall not try to adjudicate whether Japan's big increase in public debt is the result of "socialist policies".)

"The only thing holding Japan together is the government slaves."

About 50k people are in prison in Japan. The population of Japan is about 125M. That 0.04% of the population would have to be incredibly productive for their labour to be "the only thing holding Japan together".

I'm not even going to dispute any other weird claims. But this is such easy to refute by basic statistics.

Japan has ~50k prisoners, for 125m society. USA has 2000k for 325m population. That's 20x bigger rate.

But yes, Japan is the pristine example of socialism, that's why our prime capitalistic USA has only 20x less constitutionally permitted slaves.

Have you ever heard about the US UNICORE program [0]? In some US prisons participation in UNICORE is mandatory for parole review and sometimes even part of the course to pre-release for prisoners.

The UNICORE program consists of inmates manufacturing equipment for the US military for a pay that no free human being would ever accept for the work.

Now, imagine you are somebody who opposes the US military, who's aware of the MIC, and thus part of your political convictions is not supporting an expansionist and aggressive military.

What do you think is gonna be the outcome there? Exactly, people who will stick to their political convictions will be denied a way to be released early, and sometimes even released at all. Something that has been going on for literally decades, yet US Americans will gladly regurgitate the claim how "There are no political prisoners in the US!". [1]

> You only get about 1lb of meat a month. Literally I will eat 1 month's of food in a single meal.

That's not something to brag about, particularly when looking at what lengths US producers go to get the "meat" even cheaper, involving such tasty sounding additives like "pink slime", which is just rotten meat freshened up with ammonia or feeding the livestock questionable additives like Ractopamine.

None of that is good or a reason to brag about, particularly as the US beef sector is heavily subsidized by the US government, so it's not even a good example for a "free market" [2].

> Why does communism(or whatever name) always seem to come with full employment and government slaves in gulags?

It doesn't [3], but when you decide to label anything "communism" you don't like, while then projecting problems the US has on those places, it's no surprise that you end up seeing "communism" everywhere.

While ignoring realities that don't fit into your definition. Case in point: The country with the most and biggest gulags, some of them even privately owned and operated, locking up people at higher rates than any other place, is not Japan, Cuba or Greece, it's still the United States of America [4].

[0] https://www.bop.gov/inmates/custody_and_care/unicor_about.js...

[1] https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...

[2] https://plantbasednews.org/lifestyle/animal-food-industry-ta...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/20/marinaleda-spa...

[4] https://eji.org/news/united-states-still-has-highest-incarce...

It's not "could", it's will. With 100% certainty. The only question is how many and hard they will be to control. We know this because it has happened before.

It means their charges were resolved during that year; very often (guilty pleas plus charges dropped) without trial.

For example, there's the form of Democratic Socialism I propose above: where we replace the current business structure with worker cooperatives funded by regulated loans or crowd sourcing that compete with each other in a free market. We know worker cooperatives work, because there are many successful worker cooperatives operating well in the current capitalist economy. There's no reason to believe they would stop functioning well in a free market economy where all businesses are worker run.

That's just one example. The next system project has collected a number of additional ones: https://thenextsystem.org/systems

And like I said, I have a whole bookshelf full of alternative proposals. Some of which don't make a whole lot of sense. Some of which are very plausible. And some of which are already working in micro, just waiting to be tried in macro.

What a concept.

We don't use worker cooperatives in the same way we don't use corporations. There is no overarching entity that uses any of these things.

If worker cooperatives are so great, they should be outpacing corporations. Some do. For example, companies like Winco and Mondragon exceed productivity of their corporate counterparts. That's fine. More power to them. Their story should encourage others to start worker cooperatives.

Look, I despise amazon and facebook as much as the next guy, but I don't see why their products or their services ought to be heavily regulated. That's a dangerous road. I just want the law applied fairly, so if the case is that facebook and amazon can kick people off their multi-billion dollar platforms due to their beliefs, then it seems only right that bakers don't have to bake cakes.

Currently, the main behavior I see is that corporations seem exempt from the very laws that individuals apparently have to follow. That seems wrong, and moreover it seems illegal (to be treated differently).

Yes. If everyone is actually better off compared to the equal society, then the only problem is jealousy really. So why not attack that instead, people will never be equal anyway since nature is unfair, and some will always be much more beautiful, talented etc, even in a perfectly "equal" society. Capitalism just amplifies the human condition, raises everyone, and raises the best even more.

This strikes me as an excellent way to put it, and is really at the core of why I look upon “alternative solutions” with a cynical eye.

Every proposal I’ve seen results in limiting overall wealth of our society. That just doesn’t pass the smell test for me.

To put it another way - it’s far easier for a wealthy society to achieve equality than it is for an equal system to achieve wealth.

Ironically, this seems to more closely mirror the writings of Marx than the goals of the self-described Marxists I’ve encountered.

Your meaning was not plain, you wrote a few very broad sentences and in your clarifications it seems you were talking about a single problem - equality. The original post was outlining many problems, inequality being one of them and the systems being proposed potentially address many problems.

But that's fine, such is the nature of dialog over text.

> Studies show that family fortunes in the United States do not form dynasties as they do in other economic systems (like monarchist mercantilism, for example). Most family wealth dissipates by the third or fourth generation

This is likely to be an outdated statistic at best. If you go back three or four genenerations, you will find yourself passing through a time when the US had very high inheritance taxes and a 90% top marginal tax rate. That period of time did likely prevent the formation of dynasties across it. However, those policies have since been repealed and current studies show very low social mobility and a significant increase in dynastic formation. [1, 2]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/13/americ... [2] https://inequality.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Billionair...

> Some systems produce little inequality, but lots of destitution. Others produce lots of inequality but little destitution.

If you're just measuring destitution and inequality, then you're getting a very narrow picture. You can't leave out things like environmental degradation from your calculation. The environmental degradation - in climate change - threatens to upend what gains there have been made in destitution and the current system is completely failing to respond appropriately to the threat. So the great likelihood is that if we stay with the same system on the same trendline, there's a cliff coming in our near future.

> For me, there's a hierarchy of needs here. First, destitution must end, then we can talk about equality. But ultimately, if the world is extremely unequal, but no one is destitute, then that economic system is good. And we're very close to that by continuing with current trends.

Saying "first destitution" must end before we consider any refactors of the current system makes very little sense. There are other options on the table than state socialism or returning to mercantalism. Systems that have the potential to increase equality, decrease environemntal degredation, and decrease destitution. All at the same time. Systems that haven't been tried in macro yet, but are working just fine in micro - for example the move to universal worker cooperatives funded by credit unions and crowd sourcing that I propose. And that's just one of many proposed possibilities. Those doing the work of proposing alternatives are absolutely including things like destitution in their calculations.

Throwing your hands up and saying "we can't do better than this" frankly runs counter to the very mindset that this website is supposed to represent. We can always do better.

Why? Uber materially improved my access to taxis. Why does everyone diss on uber's business model (I understand the company itself is a bit meh), but the idea of hailing cab drivers with an app, and then encouraging people to drive (i.e., ridesharing) is a great one.

Ultimately, I'd rather leave it up to individuals to improve their and their community's conditions, then a bureaucrat.

> It's more than a change in legal and ethical norms. We need to not fire people who speak their minds for the social good against the company, then further marginalize the already marginalized community they're speaking up for.

Okay, so I assume you are against the firings of religious employees, standing up for their beliefs? How do you reconcile when a religious employee speaks out against spreading of gender dysphoria as social contagion on facebook, and then a trans employee speaks out against him?

Or is your economic system mainly meant to impose your beliefs on everyone else?

Thanks for being respectful.

I agree.

But there is something that needs to change in order for worker cooperatives become the dominant business form. So long as capital can demand ownership, worker cooperatives will remain a relative niche. What needs to change in markets is we need to remove the ability for capital to demand ownership. That's essentially the core of my proposal for a new system.

Replace the LLC and Stock Corporation with the worker cooperative. Remove the investor stock owner relationship from the economy. Legally mandate that all businesses be formed as worker owned cooperatives. And then regulate the amount of interest that banks and financiers can charge on their loans to limit their power over those worker cooperatives.

What you get is a free market economy where all businesses are democratically run by their workers and the relationship between capital and labor is flipped. It would vastly increase equality, with out increasing destitution. And would likely have some small decrease on environmental degradation.

In some ways it's a very gentle refactor of our existing economy. In other ways, it's far reaching and drastic (stock markets go away entirely and traditional banks become a primary mechanism of savings).

Sigh, sometimes I regret being a liberal rather than a leftist, because I can see all the complaints they have about us. I think I'm really done now, I've heard enough. In a nutshell, it's easy to defend the existing order when we're the one's benefiting from it.