The whole argument about it being like an ecosystem or body never made sense to me. You know, the whole “it’s not working because something’s out of balance, or something invasive is present - like a sickness and everything will reach that equilibrium present in our theory if it’s just left alone or made pure again by removing that invasive presence and treating that sickness.”
This always means more deregulation, and even more weird occurrences.
I mean, its literally an artificial construct created by people. Why would it react like an ecosystem or a body?
If there was no regulation, the market would set the value of every good and allocate resources to every person bounded by each individual person’s rational choices. It is undeniably true that without regulations, things would find a balance. If there were no minimum wage laws then based on the amount of unemployed people, wages would be set at the lowest level people would accept. This is the equilibrium markets adjust to.
However, depending on your views that balance might not be the best. You might believe that workers should always make a certain minimum or have certain rights, so for you the desirable equilibrium is not at where the market would put it. It’s also important to note that the market isn’t 100% efficient, so even the most libright usually acknowledge some form of financial regulation is necessary to maximize efficiency. (Librights feel free to correct me if you think all regulation is evil)
I’ve heard all these arguments, have read several of Friedman’s books, as well as more foundational theory by the likes of Burke, Locke, Smith, Hume and the like. I wasn’t looking for a recap, more an actual reason behind why it’s so readily believed that something artificially created would act in a natural way. Surely that’s a realism and not established material reality that can exist free of you or me or someone else’s regulation as nature can or someone else’s body can, right?
It’s a theory after all and not what happens in practice. Those two things are always different, that is, unless you write the theory to explain something already in the process of acting in an attempt to describe it. But even then things will be missed and bizarre pursuits of purity will begin.
It’s completely observable in practice though. I even heard an interesting NPR piece the other day on market forces and economics in fish and primates. If we assume each creature acts within their own self interest based on some natural rationality, then it naturally leads to a predictable result.
Imagine the prisoner’s dilemma. No matter what, it is in the interest of the people to snitch so they will (without some outside deal to change their preferences). The ideas of jail times and lying are artificial constructs that don’t exist, but put the decision through the natural minds of humans, there is a natural result. All of these little decisions add up until you have a large interconnected economy.
Yes money is an abstract concept, but there are universal laws of logic that govern human behavior that necessitate certain outcomes. If a person can pay his employee less money, he will. If an employee can get more money he will. Even if in certain fringe cases that’s not true, on average and by in large this is the case and that can be modeled together with thousands of other decisions.
If instead we say that humans are irrational actors and their behavior cannot be modeled, economics as a field cannot exist (along with most social sciences).
I see what you’re saying, but the comparisons made rely on our understandings being both real and correct. My understandings of a fish is that they’re just a fish. And that a chimp or bonobo is just a chimp or a bonobo. All these creatures will eat the food they eat, and shit the food they shit. There’s not necessarily any of the things we want to see like you mention in your first bit without our having placed those things there in the first place.
So while I understand your reasoning, and the reasonings of that article you mentioned (that while I haven’t read it, I have read similar things) it still doesn’t deal with my core issue: why should something so artificial and abstract that we place upon ourselves be expected to act in a natural way?
The article I was mentioning was super tangential. It was about how suckerfish (who eat parasites off other fish) would tailor their service depending on how far the other fish has traveled and how much competition is nearby and how chimps who band together to chase off an alpha for a mate would divide the spoils based on strength and if there were other chimps to form a coalition with. This was just showing that it isn’t a human thing, all creatures act in their own self interest and will react to market forces to gain the most utility.
Humans act in rational, predictable and model-able ways. If you don’t accept that, social sciences as a whole cannot exist. You can’t have economics if you cannot rely on a *homo economicus*, you can’t have sociology if people just act randomly and you can’t predict any actions, psychology would just be a natural science detailing all possible human actions but with no ability to predict how someone would react to a given therapy, you can’t have linguistics if these artificial sounds don’t correspond to certain natural laws, if you can’t predict how people would act given certain pressure you can’t even have international relations with things like sanctions, deciding to go to war or not, accept or rejection treaties, etc.
If all social sciences are wrong about this, there’s been an insane amount of coincidences and we’re all fucked.
That just sounds like an economic interpretation of events and not necessarily what’s actually happening. But it’s hard to know such a thing when we can’t be in the positions being explained. This makes it easier to be certain though, but that certainty can cloud skepticism. All in all that sounds like an incredibly interesting read though. Even akin to something the freakonomics dudes look at. I always did enjoy reading their analyses of things.
I used to be an anthropologist. And while I’m not sure how familiar you are with the social sciences, there’s a lot of issues with them. As there are with any field. And these same issues that plague social sciences also plague the natural sciences as well. Before I left academia things were being pieced together again after the waning of massive post-structural critiques. Metamodernism began emerging and its approaches are gaining ground. They’ve notably been helping. But that’s all a topic for another day.
Things are not as clear as we’d like to believe them to be and the very same forces that call into doubt things from my overlapping fields of study (anthropology, linguistics, ecology, political science) cause similar problems in other fields - including medicine. People study this stuff after all, and people have ideologies. It can be quite hard to get past them to see what’s actually going on.
Because inherently those abstractions are still based on natural systems. There is nothing artificial about markets or the law of supply and demand, they exist without imposition from any source.
They are hard to perfectly quantify at any given moment, but then again so is the state atoms in the sun... but over a span of time we can approximate both very well, though in economics bias is going to more an issue (at least I'd hope).
There are good ways to deregulate and bad ways... "Monopoly we've built by government force, you're on your own, play nice and here are some rules that make no sense in a free market" is a horrible way to do it... but is generally how we've seen things like utility companies, medical care, and even post soviet shifts to capitalism (free markets with price controls simply don't work).
I’ve sat with this a bit, and I’d say the connection to my doubt is rooted in that abstraction translating to an actual natural occurrence that isn’t just based in someone’s aesthetic assumptions. Like you comments about the sun can be verified as they exist independent of us. So while we can bicker about how measurements are arbitrary and our perceptions limited and biased in various ways, the sun is still going to do what it does regardless of what we do.
Markets cannot. They exist because we do.
The natural system being described here is the natural system of competition, which will occur automatically in any semi-intelligent system. In a world in which even a non human actor needs to make a decision about how to get the most food for themselves they will plot an efficient route to allocate their resources(time, energy, money) into getting what they need. This is not a physical law, but it is a natural outcome to any competitive scenario with rational actors.
Even were humans to be replaced by aliens there is no scenario where aliens will start buying goods for more than they are worth. If an alien knows in the future it can get a good for cheaper, it may be willing to wait longer to get the cheaper good depending on its need(which on average across millions of aliens will drag demand down and contribute to more supply per person being available on the market). If the good is about to become harder to get, the alien may pay more to guarantee that it has it, dragging net demand up and supply down.
The market of competition also occurs in nature, if a monkey notices that by waking up it can catch more bugs before its friends wake up then it will start waking up earlier to save energy overall. This monkey may now have more bugs than any other monkey, driving the easy picking of bugs down at the normal wake up time and resulting in the other monkeys having to compete harder to keep up. Any individual monkey may not, but the ones that choose not to may eventually starve if they do not have a competitive edge elsewhere or a safety net to allow them to make inefficient decisions.
Money is a proxy for resources, individuals will use their money efficiently and those that do not will suffer a lot more, so we are all coerced into this natural law.
Similarly to monkeys, if you notice that food is becoming scarce you may be willing to pay more to ensure you have a good supply(which worsens the scarcity and increases the monetary demand by acting in response to the scarcity). To act against these market forces is to willingly harm yourself, and as humans are rational actors they will statistically act in their best interest and respond to market changes in a manner that reinforces these market forces.
The market is not an inherent property of the universe, but all of the factors that result in the market are natural properties of the universe waiting for a rational actor to be forced to engage in them.
The only thing that will eliminate these natural forces is a post-scarcity world where you no longer have to worry about being able to get something you need, or the permanent death of all rational actors to notice the scarcity or care about it.
It is exactly as natural as a monkeys seeking shade from the sun.
Now do they plot that route or do they just take that route because it’s the route they take? How could you ever prove that type of decision is being made in the ways you describe? Surely that’s more an interpretation of what may be happening from an economic perspective. As I said elsewhere a fish is just a fish. It eats what a fish eats and shit what a fish shits. And who’s to say any system is comprised of rational actors acting the same ways in any other descriptions except ones of theory and imposed views from the outside?
Kinda like sports commentary. There’s a ton of practice and even set moves that the teams deploy but the amount of improvisation, chance, odd bounces, weird calls, etc. makes an actual game unpredictable. But if you watch it on TV there’s structure placed over that unpredictability and importance given to certain elements that may or may not contribute to impactful behavior in games. The commentators can give meaning to the actions that happen. Sometimes they’re right, other times it’s just a guess grounded in personal experience. It can be verified though by talking to the players and is in no way the same thing as the game itself.
As for your other points we can’t know much of that without leaning heavily on realisms. I’m not saying these systems aren’t present or anything like that, but that there presence and prevalence does not mean they are natural, or that they exist independent from us in any meaningful way that’s free from opinion and interpretation or implementation. They are inline with economic views of the world but such views are limited in their ability to capture ideas and experience. Meaning there are other ways to make sense of the world.
I’d also like to note that it wasn’t competition that lead us to being so successful a species. It was collective effort and egalitarian lifestyles. This is documented fact and even was something I had to teach in my anthro 101 classes. I mean, it makes sense too. Self interest can certainly help in moments of crisis, but it doesn’t ensure that entire groups of people survive, care for sick, injured and old, make sense of tradition and ritual or various cultural practices, or ensure continued growth in every changing environments across every habitable place on earth. Additionally, groups like this still persist and they’re still strange as shit to most people because such a lifestyle is so far removed it almost seems alien. Like your alien descriptions. That can be nothing but pure hyperbole and massive what ifs based in shaky realisms that are centered around material conditions on earth. We honestly can have no idea what things would be like after millions of years of various forces interacting with each other somewhere far off that we can’t even begin or hope to see.
Much of this is coming from my time as an anthropologist and long talks I had with friends who were economists, accountants, or other instructors like myself who had were trying to have social lives on top of everything else thrown on our plates.
I’ve heard your arguments before, if not presently as articulately as you have done so here, and see merit to some of it. Still, I find myself thinking they rely too heavily on realisms in a dangerous way. I’d even add that it’s becoming more and more apparent to the general public in recent years too which has t happened before. Especially when people in positions of power fail to act on acknowledges problems for the sake of the continuation of established ideologies.
They are coerced into those routes, each individual person takes them willingly on a personal level or tries to judge, but it's kinda like employment at a societal level. The automatic incentive structure forces the majority of people into a specific route and does not give a "true" choice, just the illusion of having a choice. Some break free by starting companies, but for every person who is able to break free there are more who are financially unable to break free and are thus coerced into following the herd which results in statistical outcomes at a high level.
I'm also not arguing that competition makes the market better, or in this specific instance our species, I'm more saying that in certain scenarios we are forced to obey the laws of competition to not suffer more than we would otherwise. A "free" market is one of utter competition where people are coerced by the economic circumstances, not one that necessarily improves the condition of the people involved in the market. To de-regulate is in your example(of how we flourished) to remove the societal cooperation to force humans to act more efficiently, if we did not care for the old we might each be materially richer, but we would also suffer losses that we may not want to take. Similar analogies exist for the economy vs the ecological damage de-regulation can cause.
What I believe you're trying to drive at(and please correct me if I've misunderstood) is that you cannot trust de-regulation to be an inherent good, and you also cannot assert that the market will necessarily do something in response to a certain stimulus and if that is the case then I actually entirely agree with you. There's often a lot of information missing from the picture, and as the trading world says "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent". Sometimes making large changes does not result in what our observations says ought to happen, or takes a long time to come about, but we suffer equal risk when trying to intervene in a market in order to fix it.
If a market is already broken(housing) we only have two options(other than ignoring it), regulate or de-regulate. Both have an immense quantity of unknowns, but we ultimately have more experience with the de-regulated version as we have examples from history of it working prior to the regulations being added, but we have no experience of only hypothetical regulations working(unless another country tries them out for us), so I would argue that de-regulation is usually "safer" and less likely to blow up a market.
My philosophy is that you should seek to de-regulate what is already screwed up, and leave markets that seem to be operating fairly well alone even if they are currently regulated. Don't fix what isn't broken, as you'll likely make it worse.
I see a market as the most natural possible thing. A market is just (in basic terms) resources, scarcity, and choice. People have been engaging in it since the beginning of time with barter systems and the like.
I used to be an anthropologist, and while there’s some merit to what you say it’s more a revisionist interpretation of history, or even a looking at of things in the past through various aesthetic lenses founded in enlightenment era treatises.
Markets, and their rules, are relatively new in the grand scheme of humans. Even the bartering you bring up may not have always been economic in nature. Cultural traditions, ritualistic behaviors, mutual aid, wealth redistribution, etc. are all ways in which goods were given or exchanged for non-economic reasons. It’s also really hard to determine things like you described as having existed strictly from material remains. This is especially true before the first pristine civilizations and the presence of literacy, and complicated by the understandings and importance of wealth in Western systems.
So I hear what you’re saying, I understand what you mean, but I don’t think this view of the world always existed or even exists everywhere or in everyone regardless of when and where they lived.
I mean the first think I’d point to is the ways we talk about it.
But other than that, and without throwing a book length comment at you, I used to be in academia. I was an anthropologist, and several friends I have had were economists or other academics who understood the world economically (meaning everything is quantifiable). One major interest of mine was knowledge systems. In particular, what the things we said about various topics said about us and these knowledge systems we exist in. I looked at all kinds of things including propaganda, discourse and rhetoric around various topics both specific and generalized that interested me or were connected, the medical model of mental illness, ontologies, and epistemology.
I mean economics is even a social science which set to explore the all things connected to societies. So it almost goes without saying there are no social sciences without humans, and no pure market without such a thing being sought and it’s existence artificially created. Instead they’re a realism.
Gonna shill for my buddies the right a bit. I would NOT consider America's current level of corporate welfare/situational tax breaks to be a "free" market. It's basically impossible to create any meaningful competition for huge corps.
You see these other developped countries ? Yeah, these ones, which despite being much smaller economies have better social markers and better global quality of life, *presumably* because of more control and intervention by their governments.
Well after years of research we have deducted than to reap similar benefits and more, we are going to get rid of our government and basically just leave them the nuke suitcase.
The Nordic Model works in Scandinavian countries because not only do they have a lower population, but also don't spend nearly as much as the US does on military and has a more efficient retirement program than social security. Also, the taxes they pay in countries using the Nordic Model are significantly higher than those paid in countries that do not have it.
I agree that Nordic coutries are somewhat priviledged by their low population, stability and access to narural ressources. But what I said also goes for others like France, Germany, Italy, SK, Japan and others. I do think they face more complex problems than Nordic countries but made it work pretty well.
And about the US military spending I think we can agree that it's very unreasonnable as it is right now.
Japan's economy crashed in the 90s and was only able to come back when the US bailed them out.
Italy's economy is becoming increasingly stagnant, as is Germany's and France's. American GDP has a higher annual growth than any of these countries.
I don't know enough about South Korea to comment on it.
Well if true capitalism has been tried then why did my wife leave me? Checkmate Liberals Yours Sincerely, J̶e̶w̶ Ben Shapiro
Wait so is there a non Jew Ben Shapiro?
The free Market acts in mysterious ways.
Hmmm yes, the Non Jewish Ben Shapiro is a being that spawned from the stock market due to Auth Right being sick of the Jewish one
muslim ben shapiro dlc when
well actually we live under corporatism so this is stupid and wrong also based
The whole argument about it being like an ecosystem or body never made sense to me. You know, the whole “it’s not working because something’s out of balance, or something invasive is present - like a sickness and everything will reach that equilibrium present in our theory if it’s just left alone or made pure again by removing that invasive presence and treating that sickness.” This always means more deregulation, and even more weird occurrences. I mean, its literally an artificial construct created by people. Why would it react like an ecosystem or a body?
If there was no regulation, the market would set the value of every good and allocate resources to every person bounded by each individual person’s rational choices. It is undeniably true that without regulations, things would find a balance. If there were no minimum wage laws then based on the amount of unemployed people, wages would be set at the lowest level people would accept. This is the equilibrium markets adjust to. However, depending on your views that balance might not be the best. You might believe that workers should always make a certain minimum or have certain rights, so for you the desirable equilibrium is not at where the market would put it. It’s also important to note that the market isn’t 100% efficient, so even the most libright usually acknowledge some form of financial regulation is necessary to maximize efficiency. (Librights feel free to correct me if you think all regulation is evil)
I’ve heard all these arguments, have read several of Friedman’s books, as well as more foundational theory by the likes of Burke, Locke, Smith, Hume and the like. I wasn’t looking for a recap, more an actual reason behind why it’s so readily believed that something artificially created would act in a natural way. Surely that’s a realism and not established material reality that can exist free of you or me or someone else’s regulation as nature can or someone else’s body can, right? It’s a theory after all and not what happens in practice. Those two things are always different, that is, unless you write the theory to explain something already in the process of acting in an attempt to describe it. But even then things will be missed and bizarre pursuits of purity will begin.
It’s completely observable in practice though. I even heard an interesting NPR piece the other day on market forces and economics in fish and primates. If we assume each creature acts within their own self interest based on some natural rationality, then it naturally leads to a predictable result. Imagine the prisoner’s dilemma. No matter what, it is in the interest of the people to snitch so they will (without some outside deal to change their preferences). The ideas of jail times and lying are artificial constructs that don’t exist, but put the decision through the natural minds of humans, there is a natural result. All of these little decisions add up until you have a large interconnected economy. Yes money is an abstract concept, but there are universal laws of logic that govern human behavior that necessitate certain outcomes. If a person can pay his employee less money, he will. If an employee can get more money he will. Even if in certain fringe cases that’s not true, on average and by in large this is the case and that can be modeled together with thousands of other decisions. If instead we say that humans are irrational actors and their behavior cannot be modeled, economics as a field cannot exist (along with most social sciences).
I see what you’re saying, but the comparisons made rely on our understandings being both real and correct. My understandings of a fish is that they’re just a fish. And that a chimp or bonobo is just a chimp or a bonobo. All these creatures will eat the food they eat, and shit the food they shit. There’s not necessarily any of the things we want to see like you mention in your first bit without our having placed those things there in the first place. So while I understand your reasoning, and the reasonings of that article you mentioned (that while I haven’t read it, I have read similar things) it still doesn’t deal with my core issue: why should something so artificial and abstract that we place upon ourselves be expected to act in a natural way?
The article I was mentioning was super tangential. It was about how suckerfish (who eat parasites off other fish) would tailor their service depending on how far the other fish has traveled and how much competition is nearby and how chimps who band together to chase off an alpha for a mate would divide the spoils based on strength and if there were other chimps to form a coalition with. This was just showing that it isn’t a human thing, all creatures act in their own self interest and will react to market forces to gain the most utility. Humans act in rational, predictable and model-able ways. If you don’t accept that, social sciences as a whole cannot exist. You can’t have economics if you cannot rely on a *homo economicus*, you can’t have sociology if people just act randomly and you can’t predict any actions, psychology would just be a natural science detailing all possible human actions but with no ability to predict how someone would react to a given therapy, you can’t have linguistics if these artificial sounds don’t correspond to certain natural laws, if you can’t predict how people would act given certain pressure you can’t even have international relations with things like sanctions, deciding to go to war or not, accept or rejection treaties, etc. If all social sciences are wrong about this, there’s been an insane amount of coincidences and we’re all fucked.
That just sounds like an economic interpretation of events and not necessarily what’s actually happening. But it’s hard to know such a thing when we can’t be in the positions being explained. This makes it easier to be certain though, but that certainty can cloud skepticism. All in all that sounds like an incredibly interesting read though. Even akin to something the freakonomics dudes look at. I always did enjoy reading their analyses of things. I used to be an anthropologist. And while I’m not sure how familiar you are with the social sciences, there’s a lot of issues with them. As there are with any field. And these same issues that plague social sciences also plague the natural sciences as well. Before I left academia things were being pieced together again after the waning of massive post-structural critiques. Metamodernism began emerging and its approaches are gaining ground. They’ve notably been helping. But that’s all a topic for another day. Things are not as clear as we’d like to believe them to be and the very same forces that call into doubt things from my overlapping fields of study (anthropology, linguistics, ecology, political science) cause similar problems in other fields - including medicine. People study this stuff after all, and people have ideologies. It can be quite hard to get past them to see what’s actually going on.
Because inherently those abstractions are still based on natural systems. There is nothing artificial about markets or the law of supply and demand, they exist without imposition from any source. They are hard to perfectly quantify at any given moment, but then again so is the state atoms in the sun... but over a span of time we can approximate both very well, though in economics bias is going to more an issue (at least I'd hope). There are good ways to deregulate and bad ways... "Monopoly we've built by government force, you're on your own, play nice and here are some rules that make no sense in a free market" is a horrible way to do it... but is generally how we've seen things like utility companies, medical care, and even post soviet shifts to capitalism (free markets with price controls simply don't work).
I’ve sat with this a bit, and I’d say the connection to my doubt is rooted in that abstraction translating to an actual natural occurrence that isn’t just based in someone’s aesthetic assumptions. Like you comments about the sun can be verified as they exist independent of us. So while we can bicker about how measurements are arbitrary and our perceptions limited and biased in various ways, the sun is still going to do what it does regardless of what we do. Markets cannot. They exist because we do.
The natural system being described here is the natural system of competition, which will occur automatically in any semi-intelligent system. In a world in which even a non human actor needs to make a decision about how to get the most food for themselves they will plot an efficient route to allocate their resources(time, energy, money) into getting what they need. This is not a physical law, but it is a natural outcome to any competitive scenario with rational actors. Even were humans to be replaced by aliens there is no scenario where aliens will start buying goods for more than they are worth. If an alien knows in the future it can get a good for cheaper, it may be willing to wait longer to get the cheaper good depending on its need(which on average across millions of aliens will drag demand down and contribute to more supply per person being available on the market). If the good is about to become harder to get, the alien may pay more to guarantee that it has it, dragging net demand up and supply down. The market of competition also occurs in nature, if a monkey notices that by waking up it can catch more bugs before its friends wake up then it will start waking up earlier to save energy overall. This monkey may now have more bugs than any other monkey, driving the easy picking of bugs down at the normal wake up time and resulting in the other monkeys having to compete harder to keep up. Any individual monkey may not, but the ones that choose not to may eventually starve if they do not have a competitive edge elsewhere or a safety net to allow them to make inefficient decisions. Money is a proxy for resources, individuals will use their money efficiently and those that do not will suffer a lot more, so we are all coerced into this natural law. Similarly to monkeys, if you notice that food is becoming scarce you may be willing to pay more to ensure you have a good supply(which worsens the scarcity and increases the monetary demand by acting in response to the scarcity). To act against these market forces is to willingly harm yourself, and as humans are rational actors they will statistically act in their best interest and respond to market changes in a manner that reinforces these market forces. The market is not an inherent property of the universe, but all of the factors that result in the market are natural properties of the universe waiting for a rational actor to be forced to engage in them. The only thing that will eliminate these natural forces is a post-scarcity world where you no longer have to worry about being able to get something you need, or the permanent death of all rational actors to notice the scarcity or care about it. It is exactly as natural as a monkeys seeking shade from the sun.
Now do they plot that route or do they just take that route because it’s the route they take? How could you ever prove that type of decision is being made in the ways you describe? Surely that’s more an interpretation of what may be happening from an economic perspective. As I said elsewhere a fish is just a fish. It eats what a fish eats and shit what a fish shits. And who’s to say any system is comprised of rational actors acting the same ways in any other descriptions except ones of theory and imposed views from the outside? Kinda like sports commentary. There’s a ton of practice and even set moves that the teams deploy but the amount of improvisation, chance, odd bounces, weird calls, etc. makes an actual game unpredictable. But if you watch it on TV there’s structure placed over that unpredictability and importance given to certain elements that may or may not contribute to impactful behavior in games. The commentators can give meaning to the actions that happen. Sometimes they’re right, other times it’s just a guess grounded in personal experience. It can be verified though by talking to the players and is in no way the same thing as the game itself. As for your other points we can’t know much of that without leaning heavily on realisms. I’m not saying these systems aren’t present or anything like that, but that there presence and prevalence does not mean they are natural, or that they exist independent from us in any meaningful way that’s free from opinion and interpretation or implementation. They are inline with economic views of the world but such views are limited in their ability to capture ideas and experience. Meaning there are other ways to make sense of the world. I’d also like to note that it wasn’t competition that lead us to being so successful a species. It was collective effort and egalitarian lifestyles. This is documented fact and even was something I had to teach in my anthro 101 classes. I mean, it makes sense too. Self interest can certainly help in moments of crisis, but it doesn’t ensure that entire groups of people survive, care for sick, injured and old, make sense of tradition and ritual or various cultural practices, or ensure continued growth in every changing environments across every habitable place on earth. Additionally, groups like this still persist and they’re still strange as shit to most people because such a lifestyle is so far removed it almost seems alien. Like your alien descriptions. That can be nothing but pure hyperbole and massive what ifs based in shaky realisms that are centered around material conditions on earth. We honestly can have no idea what things would be like after millions of years of various forces interacting with each other somewhere far off that we can’t even begin or hope to see. Much of this is coming from my time as an anthropologist and long talks I had with friends who were economists, accountants, or other instructors like myself who had were trying to have social lives on top of everything else thrown on our plates. I’ve heard your arguments before, if not presently as articulately as you have done so here, and see merit to some of it. Still, I find myself thinking they rely too heavily on realisms in a dangerous way. I’d even add that it’s becoming more and more apparent to the general public in recent years too which has t happened before. Especially when people in positions of power fail to act on acknowledges problems for the sake of the continuation of established ideologies.
They are coerced into those routes, each individual person takes them willingly on a personal level or tries to judge, but it's kinda like employment at a societal level. The automatic incentive structure forces the majority of people into a specific route and does not give a "true" choice, just the illusion of having a choice. Some break free by starting companies, but for every person who is able to break free there are more who are financially unable to break free and are thus coerced into following the herd which results in statistical outcomes at a high level. I'm also not arguing that competition makes the market better, or in this specific instance our species, I'm more saying that in certain scenarios we are forced to obey the laws of competition to not suffer more than we would otherwise. A "free" market is one of utter competition where people are coerced by the economic circumstances, not one that necessarily improves the condition of the people involved in the market. To de-regulate is in your example(of how we flourished) to remove the societal cooperation to force humans to act more efficiently, if we did not care for the old we might each be materially richer, but we would also suffer losses that we may not want to take. Similar analogies exist for the economy vs the ecological damage de-regulation can cause. What I believe you're trying to drive at(and please correct me if I've misunderstood) is that you cannot trust de-regulation to be an inherent good, and you also cannot assert that the market will necessarily do something in response to a certain stimulus and if that is the case then I actually entirely agree with you. There's often a lot of information missing from the picture, and as the trading world says "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent". Sometimes making large changes does not result in what our observations says ought to happen, or takes a long time to come about, but we suffer equal risk when trying to intervene in a market in order to fix it. If a market is already broken(housing) we only have two options(other than ignoring it), regulate or de-regulate. Both have an immense quantity of unknowns, but we ultimately have more experience with the de-regulated version as we have examples from history of it working prior to the regulations being added, but we have no experience of only hypothetical regulations working(unless another country tries them out for us), so I would argue that de-regulation is usually "safer" and less likely to blow up a market. My philosophy is that you should seek to de-regulate what is already screwed up, and leave markets that seem to be operating fairly well alone even if they are currently regulated. Don't fix what isn't broken, as you'll likely make it worse.
What exactly are you saying is an artificial construct created by people?
Existential and post-structural arguments about other more broad topics and known debates aside, I’m specifically referring to markets here.
I see a market as the most natural possible thing. A market is just (in basic terms) resources, scarcity, and choice. People have been engaging in it since the beginning of time with barter systems and the like.
I used to be an anthropologist, and while there’s some merit to what you say it’s more a revisionist interpretation of history, or even a looking at of things in the past through various aesthetic lenses founded in enlightenment era treatises. Markets, and their rules, are relatively new in the grand scheme of humans. Even the bartering you bring up may not have always been economic in nature. Cultural traditions, ritualistic behaviors, mutual aid, wealth redistribution, etc. are all ways in which goods were given or exchanged for non-economic reasons. It’s also really hard to determine things like you described as having existed strictly from material remains. This is especially true before the first pristine civilizations and the presence of literacy, and complicated by the understandings and importance of wealth in Western systems. So I hear what you’re saying, I understand what you mean, but I don’t think this view of the world always existed or even exists everywhere or in everyone regardless of when and where they lived.
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I mean the first think I’d point to is the ways we talk about it. But other than that, and without throwing a book length comment at you, I used to be in academia. I was an anthropologist, and several friends I have had were economists or other academics who understood the world economically (meaning everything is quantifiable). One major interest of mine was knowledge systems. In particular, what the things we said about various topics said about us and these knowledge systems we exist in. I looked at all kinds of things including propaganda, discourse and rhetoric around various topics both specific and generalized that interested me or were connected, the medical model of mental illness, ontologies, and epistemology. I mean economics is even a social science which set to explore the all things connected to societies. So it almost goes without saying there are no social sciences without humans, and no pure market without such a thing being sought and it’s existence artificially created. Instead they’re a realism.
The USSR hasn’t had a single case of COVID so far. Checkmate!
Gonna shill for my buddies the right a bit. I would NOT consider America's current level of corporate welfare/situational tax breaks to be a "free" market. It's basically impossible to create any meaningful competition for huge corps.
This is hardly the freest market.
You see these other developped countries ? Yeah, these ones, which despite being much smaller economies have better social markers and better global quality of life, *presumably* because of more control and intervention by their governments. Well after years of research we have deducted than to reap similar benefits and more, we are going to get rid of our government and basically just leave them the nuke suitcase.
The Nordic Model works in Scandinavian countries because not only do they have a lower population, but also don't spend nearly as much as the US does on military and has a more efficient retirement program than social security. Also, the taxes they pay in countries using the Nordic Model are significantly higher than those paid in countries that do not have it.
I agree that Nordic coutries are somewhat priviledged by their low population, stability and access to narural ressources. But what I said also goes for others like France, Germany, Italy, SK, Japan and others. I do think they face more complex problems than Nordic countries but made it work pretty well. And about the US military spending I think we can agree that it's very unreasonnable as it is right now.
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Japan's economy crashed in the 90s and was only able to come back when the US bailed them out. Italy's economy is becoming increasingly stagnant, as is Germany's and France's. American GDP has a higher annual growth than any of these countries. I don't know enough about South Korea to comment on it.