The Occupation of Wall Street Spreads

[K. A. Pital]

You can state general principles, and review them. I don't think that any single set of protocols is going to be infallible, more so since the people who employ lobbyists are not stupid, and will find ways to get around barriers, regardless of restrictions.

Sort of my position as well. I'm not saying it is pointless to try, mind you.

There certainly is: destroying a viable resource is not economically wise for those who own it. I agree though, that non-sustainability and economic growth needs to be decoupled. Taking nature to be an economic externality and then internalizing it into the economic process is IMHO the way to go, and that would help redress the problem. In other words, ecological problems that arise due to growth do so on account of treating ecological resources and ecological services as being non-scarce, and as a result insufficient market-oriented policies are put into place to deal with the problem, not that the market and economic efficiency are inherently hostile to ecological concerns.

A limited scarcity may not present too much of a problem for overall economic growth. Species extinction due to hunting is a good example of that. That's why. Besides, a hunter's experience is usually multifaceted, so even if hunters hunt down all the elephants, that wouldn't mean they'd be left without a job. So people would need to build better arguments

Of course. But why should anyone have the power to dictate how you shall use your property within what is allowed by law? The ability of others to dictate how you use your property can just as easily be abused as your non-use of your property. Moreover, contracts can be expanded if they are found wanting. As an aside though, your hypothetical capitalist doesn't exactly strike me as a typical profit maximizer.

Because he actually is not a typical profit maximizer. Most economic theories nowaday have advanced towards the understanding that mostly there's profit optimization, not maximization, and with opportunity costs a person facing a multitude of alternative options is first and foremost seeking what's best for himself; i.e. the capitalist may maximize his own welfare at the expense of the company. That act is not reasonable only from a complete classical economic drone point of view where capitalists are nothing but profit-maximizing tools at the top of an enterprise. It is reasonable for a human.

That principle embodies too sweeping a statement, and the implications are too impractical for my tastes. Universally rejecting the use of those with prior experience on principle isn't going to make your system more effective.

I am not saying my system is going to be more effective. *laughs* Effectiveness can be exchanged for a superior moral outcome, for lesser suffering. That is what I've been consistently supporting in all aspects from productive efficiency down to 'staffing government posts with specialists for effectiveness'. A temporary or permanent inefficiency or ineffectiveness is allowed so as long as the outcome is a net long-term, preferrably permanent, utilitarian benefit. That is all I have to say on the matter.

So the ends justify the means in your view?

Do they not in your view? It is hard to support the market and not be a consequentialist. Only by being a consequentialist you can excuse today's suffering because there'll be a better situation and less suffering tomorrow. Being a non-consequentialist is... just strange. I've rarely met people who weren't consequentialists at heart.

[Starglider]

Only by being a consequentialist you can excuse today's suffering because there'll be a better situation and less suffering tomorrow. Being a non-consequentialist is... just strange. I've rarely met people who weren't consequentialists at heart.

You can be a utilitarian and assign utility to people getting the outcomes they 'deserve', which in fact mirrors the natural preference of most humans. With appropriate weighting one person having £100 and nine people having £1 is more desireable than ten people having £50, because the value of the peoples wellbeing can be skewed by the actions they took (e.g. the one person is an entrepreneur, the nine people are welfare leechers etc). The Christian heaven/hell concept of infinite reward or suffering based on a threshold function of a few decades of actions taken on earth is an extreme version of this. Utilitarianism does not automatically favor income equality when the evaluation of outcomes is not context free.

As for non-consequentialist, I've known a fair few conservatives who value absolute 'rights' over outcomes regardless (so they say) of the consequences.

[K. A. Pital]

With appropriate weighting one person having £100 and nine people having £1 is more desireable than ten people having £50, because the value of the peoples wellbeing can be skewed by the actions they took (e.g. the one person is an entrepreneur, the nine people are welfare leechers etc)

That assumes the suffering of a welfare leecher is somehow more justified than the suffering of the enterpreneur; which a humanist would not assume apriori. The whole scheme would then fall apart once you move from parents to children since you imbue the child with suffering for the actions of his parent or grandparent. So the value of "people's wellbeing" will then be determined not by their own actions alone but also by those of their ancestors. It is only a little step and you end up with "the actions of everybody determine the value of wellbeing of a person".

The Christian heaven/hell concept of infinite reward or suffering based on a threshold function of a few decades of actions taken on earth is an extreme version of this.

Yeah, that too. It is the lot of pitiful minds.

As for non-consequentialist, I've known a fair few conservatives who value absolute 'rights' over outcomes regardless (so they say) of the consequences.

I guess I never ran into that sort of folk.

[Lord Zentei]

There certainly is: destroying a viable resource is not economically wise for those who own it. I agree though, that non-sustainability and economic growth needs to be decoupled. Taking nature to be an economic externality and then internalizing it into the economic process is IMHO the way to go, and that would help redress the problem. In other words, ecological problems that arise due to growth do so on account of treating ecological resources and ecological services as being non-scarce, and as a result insufficient market-oriented policies are put into place to deal with the problem, not that the market and economic efficiency are inherently hostile to ecological concerns.

A limited scarcity may not present too much of a problem for overall economic growth. Species extinction due to hunting is a good example of that. That's why. Besides, a hunter's experience is usually multifaceted, so even if hunters hunt down all the elephants, that wouldn't mean they'd be left without a job. So people would need to build better arguments

It really depends on properly defining property rights with regard to prey-species. If the owner of the heard has spent money to obtain such rights, he may be more wary of hunting them to extinction than a hunter who simply buys a license and a gun.

Of course. But why should anyone have the power to dictate how you shall use your property within what is allowed by law? The ability of others to dictate how you use your property can just as easily be abused as your non-use of your property. Moreover, contracts can be expanded if they are found wanting. As an aside though, your hypothetical capitalist doesn't exactly strike me as a typical profit maximizer.

Because he actually is not a typical profit maximizer. Most economic theories nowaday have advanced towards the understanding that mostly there's profit optimization, not maximization, and with opportunity costs a person facing a multitude of alternative options is first and foremost seeking what's best for himself; i.e. the capitalist may maximize his own welfare at the expense of the company. That act is not reasonable only from a complete classical economic drone point of view where capitalists are nothing but profit-maximizing tools at the top of an enterprise. It is reasonable for a human.

What is good for the profits of the company is good for the shareholders. If they don't pay attention to the CEO they elected, then whose fault is that?

That principle embodies too sweeping a statement, and the implications are too impractical for my tastes. Universally rejecting the use of those with prior experience on principle isn't going to make your system more effective.

I am not saying my system is going to be more effective. *laughs* Effectiveness can be exchanged for a superior moral outcome, for lesser suffering. That is what I've been consistently supporting in all aspects from productive efficiency down to 'staffing government posts with specialists for effectiveness'. A temporary or permanent inefficiency or ineffectiveness is allowed so as long as the outcome is a net long-term, preferrably permanent, utilitarian benefit. That is all I have to say on the matter.

OK, but how do you gauge the utilitarian benefit you hope to gain? And regardless, efficiency is very much a utilitarian objective.

So the ends justify the means in your view?

Do they not in your view? It is hard to support the market and not be a consequentialist. Only by being a consequentialist you can excuse today's suffering because there'll be a better situation and less suffering tomorrow. Being a non-consequentialist is... just strange. I've rarely met people who weren't consequentialists at heart.

My objection to the phrase "the ends justify the means" is that it's too all-encompassing. It is entirely plausible that the cost of the means will outweigh the benefits of the ends.

[Simon_Jester]

Maybe "the ends justify the means" needs a ceteris paribus tacked on the end too, or something similar- If the scale of the cost of the means is broadly proportionate to the scale of the value of the ends, then they are considered justified. If not, they're not- and I'm sure Stas could generate plenty of examples in either category.

[NoXion]

And the dramatic August riots in the UK had its roots partially in the excesses of three or so decades of Neoliberal Capitalism, but parts of the public showing their discontent in the streets of the economically destroyed urban areas was very unfocused and very inarticulate, so the street demonstrations quickly degenerated into opportunistic looting and wanton vandalism (with a handful killed as a result).

The Left in the UK over the past 20-odd years has been marginalised both at the ballot box and away from it. Which makes it all the more heartening that some of the rioters and those affected by them could still raise their heads above the immediate drama and have at least somewhat of an inkling that the socioeconomic structure as it currently stands fucking sucks. Hopefully that means that anti-social Thatcherite lessons (promulgated by New Labour as much as the Tories) such as "there is no such thing as society" haven't sunk in too deeply.

With allegedly one in three street properties empty in the UK and chief executives on average earning 236 times more than the majority of employees in a typical FTSE company (also in the UK), there's been a grand economic implosion in the West, excerbated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, India modernising and the West doing business with East Asian quasi/pseudo Communists in the 90s and the 00s, spelling disaster for indigenous Western workers who have been priced out by the flood of cheap labour from the somewhat poorer but developed enough parts of Eurasia that were more remote during the Cold War.

I'm no expert at economics, but the absurd division in wealth and the increasing offshoring of jobs and production seems to me to be something of a synergistic thing - with a greedy minority hoarding all the wealth, the rest of us are left with buying cut-price goods, which further enriches the oligarchs at the expense of everyone else, which increases demand for cheap crap, and so on.

Its seems that economy in large parts of the United States, UK/Commonwealth, and EU in recent years is chronically piss poor at generating reasonably paid fulltime work and providing affordable housing for the young adults and youth (who should also completely forget about the comparatively generous retirement plans their parents and grand parents enjoyed). The business elites will saw away the tree branch they're pearched on . I wouldn't be surprised if the ongoing economic implosion will eventually end in a political explosion, with the UK August riots on hindsight seen as just a practice run...

I'm frankly astounded that our so-called leaders apparently cannot see what's coming along if we continue along our current trajectory. I'm not sure if it's malice, wilful ignorance, stupidity or a slavish devotion to some ruling-class ideology.

[Count Chocula]

Maybe "the ends justify the means" needs a ceteris paribus tacked on the end too, or something similar- If the scale of the cost of the means is broadly proportionate to the scale of the value of the ends, then they are considered justified. If not, they're not- and I'm sure Stas could generate plenty of examples in either category.

Simon, you're talking about Product Management or Cost Accounting 101. The principles of cost-benefit are well understood in business. Executives who forget or ignore basic principles should be brought to heel by their boards of directors before the assholes can do lasting damage. Alas, the Peter Principle seems to militate against that and the shit floats to the top of corporations all too often. It doesn't make the "occupation" of Wall Street any less laughable, but it DOES provide a fair amount of justification for the protestors' actions.

[K. A. Pital]

It really depends on properly defining property rights with regard to prey-species. If the owner of the heard has spent money to obtain such rights, he may be more wary of hunting them to extinction than a hunter who simply buys a license and a gun.

Yeah, but that's the difference between a herd and wildlife, which is by definition wild. We don't realize that the tragedy of the commons is a much more pervasive thing than some people would like you to believe.

What is good for the profits of the company is good for the shareholders. If they don't pay attention to the CEO they elected, then whose fault is that?

The question is not about faults, and the CEO and the chief shareholder may be one and the same, as well. The question is that from a point of view of property rights you cannot see what's wrong with the action. There's nothing wrong with the action, since a person has the right to use property in a way that is economically damaging; nobody demands that the person use his property "the most efficient way", because such demands would obviously infringe on his property rights. Nobody would put a man to jail for destroying his own new TV in an outburst of rage, despite the fact he actually destroyed something valuable and that is, in fact, a loss inflicted on society. That is a bit crude, but the analogy is the same.

OK, but how do you gauge the utilitarian benefit you hope to gain? And regardless, efficiency is very much a utilitarian objective.

By the amount of suffering each option generates. If suffering decreases along the entire society, a benefit is realized. And yes, efficiency is one of the utilitarian objectives. Not the only one, however.

My objection to the phrase "the ends justify the means" is that it's too all-encompassing. It is entirely plausible that the cost of the means will outweigh the benefits of the ends.

What Simon said. And of course, it is a value system after all. If the ends themselves are not good enough to justify even a small loss, these ends are crappy.

...slavish devotion to some ruling-class ideology

Of course. It is extremely unlikely that a person in power would not be devoted to an ideology which would justify his own power. Suffice to say, such examples are few and far between.

[Lord Zentei]

It really depends on properly defining property rights with regard to prey-species. If the owner of the heard has spent money to obtain such rights, he may be more wary of hunting them to extinction than a hunter who simply buys a license and a gun.

Yeah, but that's the difference between a herd and wildlife, which is by definition wild. We don't realize that the tragedy of the commons is a much more pervasive thing than some people would like you to believe.

The tragedy of the commons arises because property rights are not defined and respected, not because the heard is "wild".

What is good for the profits of the company is good for the shareholders. If they don't pay attention to the CEO they elected, then whose fault is that?

The question is not about faults, and the CEO and the chief shareholder may be one and the same, as well. The question is that from a point of view of property rights you cannot see what's wrong with the action. There's nothing wrong with the action, since a person has the right to use property in a way that is economically damaging; nobody demands that the person use his property "the most efficient way", because such demands would obviously infringe on his property rights. Nobody would put a man to jail for destroying his own new TV in an outburst of rage, despite the fact he actually destroyed something valuable and that is, in fact, a loss inflicted on society. That is a bit crude, but the analogy is the same.

Obviously anyone can use their property in a suboptimal way, but that does not preclude the negative effects of such action eroding the power of said individual to the extent that he does so.

OK, but how do you gauge the utilitarian benefit you hope to gain? And regardless, efficiency is very much a utilitarian objective.

By the amount of suffering each option generates. If suffering decreases along the entire society, a benefit is realized. And yes, efficiency is one of the utilitarian objectives. Not the only one, however.

Durr. The question "how do you gauge it" can't be answered "by the amount of suffering", that's just tautological.

My objection to the phrase "the ends justify the means" is that it's too all-encompassing. It is entirely plausible that the cost of the means will outweigh the benefits of the ends.

What Simon said. And of course, it is a value system after all. If the ends themselves are not good enough to justify even a small loss, these ends are crappy.

Cost benefit analysis can well preclude the notion that the ends justify the means. More often than not, they just don't. Case in point: the destruction wrought by the Iraq war could be considered to be justified, since Saddam Hussein was removed from power if the ends justified the means. So, therefore the statement "the ends justify the means" is a bullshit principle.

[K. A. Pital]

The tragedy of the commons arises because property rights are not defined and respected, not because the heard is "wild".

You cannot introduce property on wild animals well enough. The best method - introducing property on land where hunting is done and by proxy on all animals present therein, did not save certain species from being hunted down, because the owners of the land did not think that a particular species constituted enough of a value to keep hunters from exterminating it.

Obviously anyone can use their property in a suboptimal way, but that does not preclude the negative effects of such action eroding the power of said individual to the extent that he does so.

Um... so what? He sold a factory, damaged lots of people but he is personally extremely well-off and can now snort cocaine and fuck whores all day long in a tropical island. His own utility is maximized even when the utility for his workers and society is not; even if it is in fact negative as their suffering increases. Power is not an absolute, trump-all value for the person; he may value the wealth he can personally use much more than the wealth he has to utilize to keep the company running to maintain his "power". If his personal well-being in his perception is best achieved by destroying the company to transforms its assets into personal wealth, so what? And you were asking "what is wrong with self-interest", were you not? You are adding now further valuables, demanding that he has to chase power or that he has to behave responsibly, none of which stems from his property rights. You are saying that this behaviour can be discouraged, but on other grounds than "property rights".

Durr. The question "how do you gauge it" can't be answered "by the amount of suffering", that's just tautological.

If I install a system that permanently extinguishes undernourishment or poverty, I can't "gauge" the benefit that has been received? You're saying that the benefit is completely unquantifiable? Duh. Utility quantification is a huge problem, but it is not huge enough to simply abandon all hopes of making such estimates.

Cost benefit analysis can well preclude the notion that the ends justify the means. More often than not, they just don't. Case in point: the destruction wrought by the Iraq war could be considered to be justified, since Saddam Hussein was removed from power if the ends justified the means. So, therefore the statement "the ends justify the means" is a bullshit principle.

Yeah, that's what most people would say in a consequentialist defence of the Iraq war. Which is perfectly okay if you think Saddam's removal was a goal so good that it justified everything that transpired as a result. If you don't, well, maybe the goal is crap. But "more often than not"? Sorry, but nobody ever did an analysis on how many times the goal has not "justified" the means. You'd have to evaluate millions of human actions in the course of history to do that.

So once again it hinges completely on the goal. If the goal is a benefit so great than it can justify any cost incurred, then the consequentialist argument is absolute. If the benefits are infinite or nigh-infinite, almost anything can be justified by a "cost-benefit" analysis, since to outweigh benefits so huge costs must be enormous as well.

What you're saying is not a critique of consequentialism. Consequentialism is just a method of justification. The problem of goal selection is a completely different issue.

[Lord Zentei]

The tragedy of the commons arises because property rights are not defined and respected, not because the heard is "wild".

You cannot introduce property on wild animals well enough. The best method - introducing property on land where hunting is done and by proxy on all animals present therein, did not save certain species from being hunted down, because the owners of the land did not think that a particular species constituted enough of a value to keep hunters from exterminating it.

That is not entirely correct. Quota systems, while imperfect, can help prevent extermination of species. When done competently, that is.

Obviously anyone can use their property in a suboptimal way, but that does not preclude the negative effects of such action eroding the power of said individual to the extent that he does so.

Um... so what? He sold a factory, damaged lots of people but he is personally extremely well-off and can now snort cocaine and fuck whores all day long in a tropical island. His own utility is maximized even when the utility for his workers and society is not; even if it is in fact negative as their suffering increases. Power is not an absolute, trump-all value for the person; he may value the wealth he can personally use much more than the wealth he has to utilize to keep the company running to maintain his "power". If his personal well-being in his perception is best achieved by destroying the company to transforms its assets into personal wealth, so what? <snip>

Yes, and in so doing has removed himself from power, leaving others in his place.

Durr. The question "how do you gauge it" can't be answered "by the amount of suffering", that's just tautological.

If I install a system that permanently extinguishes undernourishment or poverty, I can't "gauge" the benefit that has been received? You're saying that the benefit is completely unquantifiable? Duh. Utility quantification is a huge problem, but it is not huge enough to simply abandon all hopes of making such estimates.

Yes... and I'm asking you to give some hint of how you intend to do that.

Cost benefit analysis can well preclude the notion that the ends justify the means. More often than not, they just don't. Case in point: the destruction wrought by the Iraq war could be considered to be justified, since Saddam Hussein was removed from power if the ends justified the means. So, therefore the statement "the ends justify the means" is a bullshit principle.

Yeah, that's what most people would say in a consequentialist defence of the Iraq war. Which is perfectly okay if you think Saddam's removal was a goal so good that it justified everything that transpired as a result. If you don't, well, maybe the goal is crap. But "more often than not"? Sorry, but nobody ever did an analysis on how many times the goal has not "justified" the means. You'd have to evaluate millions of human actions in the course of history to do that.

Perhaps the goal was crap, or... the means were too costly to justify the goal. Since the goal was the removal of a dictator who had a history of gassing his own people to death, then yes, his removal was a positive goal, and not crap at all. If the means employed led to the deaths of more people than Saddam killed, then the end did not justify the means, not because the goal was crap, but because the means were crap.

So once again it hinges completely on the goal. If the goal is a benefit so great than it can justify any cost incurred, then the consequentialist argument is absolute. If the benefits are infinite or nigh-infinite, almost anything can be justified by a "cost-benefit" analysis, since to outweigh benefits so huge costs must be enormous as well.

What you're saying is not a critique of consequentialism. Consequentialism is just a method of justification. The problem of goal selection is a completely different issue.

I very much doubt that there's any such thing as a goal that justifies any cost. I'm critiquing not conseqentialism, but the naive buzzphrase "the ends justify the means" and thinking that derives from it. It doesn't hinge completely on the goal, it hinges on the goal and on the means employed.

[Lord Zentei]

GHETTO:
And in the case of the factory, he gains more money from it if he sells it intact to someone who wants to run it, unless it's so unproductive that liquidation leads to more profit. Unproductive businesses should be broken up.

[K. A. Pital]

That is not entirely correct. Quota systems, while imperfect, can help prevent extermination of species. When done competently, that is

Yeah, I agree. However, it is hard, and the very problem that society has not spawned such detailed and well-established property rights in that area is symptomatic. Clear demarcation and fierce fighting over property happens in any area which people deem valuable; they start fighting for dominating, owning, controlling every inch of it. If an area has lax property rights, that means people don't give a crap.

Yes, and in so doing has removed himself from power, leaving others in his place.

So he has been "punished" for the damage he dealt to society by a loss of power but zero personal suffering. Or even a decrease of suffering, if running a company was straining him mentally, whereas good life and lots of relaxation doesn't. Excellent.

If I install a system that permanently extinguishes undernourishment or poverty, I can't "gauge" the benefit that has been received? You're saying that the benefit is completely unquantifiable? Duh. Utility quantification is a huge problem, but it is not huge enough to simply abandon all hopes of making such estimates.

Yes... and I'm asking you to give some hint of how you intend to do that.

Statistics went a long way from where we were before. I already said that I prefer complex indices like the HDI. Even more cool would be a multifaceted quality-of-life index that would take into account things typically ignored. I could elaborate more, but that's really a damn huge subject.

Perhaps the goal was crap, or... the means were too costly to justify the goal. Since the goal was the removal of a dictator who had a history of gassing his own people to death, then yes, his removal was a positive goal, and not crap at all. If the means employed led to the deaths of more people than Saddam killed, then the end did not justify the means, not because the goal was crap, but because the means were crap.

In essence, the means did not bring about a utilitarian benefit, they created more suffering than they were supposed to prevent. Considering Saddam had a history of gassing people but did not actively gas them at the moment, the consequences of action obviously were more damaging relative to "removal of Saddam". Removal of Saddam is an abstract goal, I only consider utilitarian goals. If the removal of Saddam produces too small a utilitarian benefit to justify the deaths that would have to occur to achieve it, then the problem is twofold: one, yes, the means are producing too much harm. Two: goal is not producing enough benefit. It is not a one-sided problem. Both the deficiency of the goal (too little a utilitarian benefit) and the harm caused by the means (which can be so big as to exceed even a sizeable benefit) have to be considered.

I very much doubt that there's any such thing as a goal that justifies any cost. I'm critiquing not conseqentialism, but the naive buzzphrase "the ends justify the means" and thinking that derives from it. It doesn't hinge completely on the goal, it hinges on the goal and on the means employed.

Heh. I would agree that it is naive. However, it is a condensed and brutalized phrase that represents the philosophy of action, which is preferrable for me personally to the philosophy of inaction. However, I did find a better motto.

And in the case of the factory, he gains more money from it if he sells it intact to someone who wants to run it

There can be a situation where a buyer has not been found (for a lack of information) or where it is simply more profitable to liquidate than to sell it running. None of which are impacted by the person's property rights. Those are external factors which may or may not influence his decision. His property rights remain in full force even if he consciously liquidates a profitable enterprise (like for the reason mentioned above, too much stress for him to handle or a myriad of other reasons).

[Lord Zentei]

That is not entirely correct. Quota systems, while imperfect, can help prevent extermination of species. When done competently, that is

Yeah, I agree. However, it is hard, and the very problem that society has not spawned such detailed and well-established property rights in that area is symptomatic. Clear demarcation and fierce fighting over property happens in any area which people deem valuable; they start fighting for dominating, owning, controlling every inch of it. If an area has lax property rights, that means people don't give a crap.

So... properly defined property rights are the way to make things better, yes?

Yes, and in so doing has removed himself from power, leaving others in his place.

So he has been "punished" for the damage he dealt to society by a loss of power but zero personal suffering. Or even a decrease of suffering, if running a company was straining him mentally, whereas good life and lots of relaxation doesn't. Excellent.

Except in the case where the network of contracts would be violated. Otherwise, yes. But it's just as plausible to have a government bureaucracy and/or elected officials getting away with bloody murder, let alone fucking over a single factory.

If I install a system that permanently extinguishes undernourishment or poverty, I can't "gauge" the benefit that has been received? You're saying that the benefit is completely unquantifiable? Duh. Utility quantification is a huge problem, but it is not huge enough to simply abandon all hopes of making such estimates.

Yes... and I'm asking you to give some hint of how you intend to do that.

Statistics went a long way from where we were before. I already said that I prefer complex indices like the HDI. Even more cool would be a multifaceted quality-of-life index that would take into account things typically ignored. I could elaborate more, but that's really a damn huge subject.

GDP is a big part of the HDI, and efficiency is important to raising GDP per capita. And since I've said before that efficiency is not the only criteria, but a very important one, then I guess we're quibbling about where to draw the line. The point I was going for, though, is that there's unfortunately no unequivocal common yardstick that allows us to compare the relative value of efficiency versus equity (much less other criteria).

Perhaps the goal was crap, or... the means were too costly to justify the goal. Since the goal was the removal of a dictator who had a history of gassing his own people to death, then yes, his removal was a positive goal, and not crap at all. If the means employed led to the deaths of more people than Saddam killed, then the end did not justify the means, not because the goal was crap, but because the means were crap.

In essence, the means did not bring about a utilitarian benefit, they created more suffering than they were supposed to prevent. Considering Saddam had a history of gassing people but did not actively gas them at the moment, the consequences of action obviously were more damaging relative to "removal of Saddam". Removal of Saddam is an abstract goal, I only consider utilitarian goals. If the removal of Saddam produces too small a utilitarian benefit to justify the deaths that would have to occur to achieve it, then the problem is twofold: one, yes, the means are producing too much harm. Two: goal is not producing enough benefit. It is not a one-sided problem. Both the deficiency of the goal (too little a utilitarian benefit) and the harm caused by the means (which can be so big as to exceed even a sizeable benefit) have to be considered.

OK, that's a lot better than "the ends justify the means" or "it hinges completely on the goal"

I very much doubt that there's any such thing as a goal that justifies any cost. I'm critiquing not conseqentialism, but the naive buzzphrase "the ends justify the means" and thinking that derives from it. It doesn't hinge completely on the goal, it hinges on the goal and on the means employed.

Heh. I would agree that it is naive. However, it is a condensed and brutalized phrase that represents the philosophy of action, which is preferrable for me personally to the philosophy of inaction. However, I did find a better motto.

And that's fair enough, though I hold that inaction can sometimes be less harmful than well intentioned, though poorly thought out action.

And in the case of the factory, he gains more money from it if he sells it intact to someone who wants to run it

There can be a situation where a buyer has not been found (for a lack of information) or where it is simply more profitable to liquidate than to sell it running. None of which are impacted by the person's property rights. Those are external factors which may or may not influence his decision. His property rights remain in full force even if he consciously liquidates a profitable enterprise (like for the reason mentioned above, too much stress for him to handle or a myriad of other reasons).

The only way that it's more profitable to liquidate it is if it isn't performing and can't be improved. And liquidation isn't exactly a trivial enterprise, compared with just calling your broker and saying "dude, I want to sell my stock".

[K. A. Pital]

So... properly defined property rights are the way to make things better, yes?

By your own logic of cost-benefit analysis, if property rights are not detailed or properly defined, it may simply underscore that the benefit of doing so for people is not big enough to justify costs incurred to do so - the costs of protecting your new property, costs of supporting your legal right to said property, et cetera. Which means that if you're forcing property rights to be defined regardless of whether it is beneficial or not, you're doing it for some distinct reason that most likely lies outside the concept. E.g. biodiversity.

Except in the case where the network of contracts would be violated. Otherwise, yes. But it's just as plausible to have a government bureaucracy and/or elected officials getting away with bloody murder, let alone fucking over a single factory.

Yup. *laughs* I'm not offering a solution, however. I'm so far merely asking a question.

GDP is a big part of the HDI, and efficiency is important to raising GDP per capita. And since I've said before that efficiency is not the only criteria, but a very important one, then I guess we're quibbling about where to draw the line. The point I was going for, though, is that there's unfortunately no unequivocal common yardstick that allows us to compare the relative value of efficiency versus equity (much less other criteria).

Of course there's no common yardstick - that yardstick if it will ever be created will have to be made taking into account practical requirements, and often modified, but the idea of discarding or at least greatly limiting the use criteria that only use one indicator is quite justified. Especially the use of such criteria in an ultimative, policy-determining fashion. I wouldn't feel too well if someone devised a policy that would operate gouging benefits according to a single, very specialized criterion: say, the number of child tears shed yearly. And yet entire policies are devised based on "efficiency" or "growth" alone as single, isolated concepts. That practice is obsolete and should really fade.

And that's fair enough, though I hold that inaction can sometimes be less harmful than well intentioned, though poorly thought out action.

I know, but since you can only estimate the consequences of an action and never predict them in entirety, I tend to err on the side of action. It is more of an emotional thing anyway. I get frustrated by the status-quo.

The only way that it's more profitable to liquidate it is if it isn't performing and can't be improved. And liquidation isn't exactly a trivial enterprise, compared with just calling your broker and saying "dude, I want to sell my stock".

Yeah. Profitability is like that. Personal satisfaction is another thing alltogether. A person suffers no punishment for such acts if he violates no laws, which points to the deficiency of property rights. To me, this signifies a deep division between a rights-based philosophy and a utilitarian one, where a right operates or exists within certain limits so as long as it provides a utilitarian benefit.

[Lord Zentei]

Appending two of three remaining points together, since they are basically part of the same overall point:

By your own logic of cost-benefit analysis, if property rights are not detailed or properly defined, it may simply underscore that the benefit of doing so for people is not big enough to justify costs incurred to do so - the costs of protecting your new property, costs of supporting your legal right to said property, et cetera. Which means that if you're forcing property rights to be defined regardless of whether it is beneficial or not, you're doing it for some distinct reason that most likely lies outside the concept. E.g. biodiversity.

Of course there's no common yardstick - that yardstick if it will ever be created will have to be made taking into account practical requirements, and often modified, but the idea of discarding or at least greatly limiting the use criteria that only use one indicator is quite justified. Especially the use of such criteria in an ultimative, policy-determining fashion. I wouldn't feel too well if someone devised a policy that would operate gouging benefits according to a single, very specialized criterion: say, the number of child tears shed yearly. And yet entire policies are devised based on "efficiency" or "growth" alone as single, isolated concepts. That practice is obsolete and should really fade.

First point: that's not entirely true - cost-benefit analysis requires that we have parameters by which we can gauge the cost and the benefit. These must in turn be expressed in terms of some benefit or other which people are assumed to be entitled to. Moreover, from a purely practical perspective, property rights are a demonstrably effective mechanism for achieving optimization of production.

Second: GDP may not measure specific benefits, but it has the advantage that it's highly adaptable, since it measures the overall potential that a society is capable of achieving, and efficiency maximizes this value. Regardless of what you hope to achieve, the means to that end is best made as high as is possible, ceteris paribus.

You may then assume in addition to this, that people are entitled to such and such additional benefits, but these must be gauged against the property of the people who are being taxed to pay for said benefits, otherwise, there's no way of adequately determining whether you are indeed improving things. Besides which, rights-based and decentralized mechanisms are by their nature far less top-heavy and than interventionist command mechanisms.

The only way that it's more profitable to liquidate it is if it isn't performing and can't be improved. And liquidation isn't exactly a trivial enterprise, compared with just calling your broker and saying "dude, I want to sell my stock".

Yeah. Profitability is like that. Personal satisfaction is another thing alltogether. A person suffers no punishment for such acts if he violates no laws, which points to the deficiency of property rights. To me, this signifies a deep division between a rights-based philosophy and a utilitarian one, where a right operates or exists within certain limits so as long as it provides a utilitarian benefit.

So your hypothetical capitalist would go out of his way to fuck over his underlings and liquidate the firm, even if it is not only more profitable but also easier to just sell the company stock he owns? How exactly is personal satisfaction achieved that way? And how if he's violated contracts that he was required to make in order to gain control of the firm in the first place? If the answer is "he's just a sociopath" and "contracts were inadequate", then you can just as easily have a situation with "the elected official was just a sociopath" and "laws restricting his actions were inadequate".

[NoXion]

...slavish devotion to some ruling-class ideology

Of course. It is extremely unlikely that a person in power would not be devoted to an ideology which would justify his own power. Suffice to say, such examples are few and far between.

By "slavish" devotion I meant a commitment to the principles of an ideology far beyond what is necessary to secure one's own power or reputation, even to the point where the devotees end up indirectly fucking themselves over as well as others in the process. It seems obvious to me that some sections of the ruling classes are more pragmatic than others, but in the case of the current UK government I'm finding it hard to tell.

[K. A. Pital]

First point: that's not entirely true - cost-benefit analysis requires that we have parameters by which we can gauge the cost and the benefit. These must in turn be expressed in terms of some benefit or other which people are assumed to be entitled to. Moreover, from a purely practical perspective, property rights are a demonstrably effective mechanism for achieving optimization of production.

Are you trying to say that any benefit that cannot be monetized is presume to not exist?

Second: GDP may not measure specific benefits, but it has the advantage that it's highly adaptable, since it measures the overall potential that a society is capable of achieving, and efficiency maximizes this value. Regardless of what you hope to achieve, the means to that end is best made as high as is possible, ceteris paribus.

GDP is "highly adaptable"? An indicator which starts malfunctioning like an old broken car when we apply it to any non-market activity? An indicator which completely and utterly ignores anything but production evaluated in a highly specific way? You're surely joking. If the GDP was an "adaptable" measure, the UNDP wouldn't even need the HDI, and estimating GDP of command economies wouldn't be that much of a problem. The GDP of a fully non-market system would be fucking zero. That's how "useful" and "adaptable" the GDP is. In fact, indicators are another shackle of the mind; they make you think in a certain way, reject other features as "insignificant" and put the indicator criteria as "primary". This is why I favor a more balanced indicator that would estimate social welfare on many levels and that could reasonably estimate non-monetized and non-commodified benefits, non-market activity and non-commodified production.

And I fully understand this is biased, and I acknowledge that bias, too. The goal is twofold: not only to create a more complex picture and a more encompassing set of criteria, but also to free the intellectual discourse from market dogmatism and thereby allow non-market activity and non-market systems to become acceptable as alternatives. In essense, it is both a vessel for my ideology and a superior way of looking at things.

You may then assume in addition to this, that people are entitled to such and such additional benefits, but these must be gauged against the property of the people who are being taxed to pay for said benefits, otherwise, there's no way of adequately determining whether you are indeed improving things. Besides which, rights-based and decentralized mechanisms are by their nature far less top-heavy and than interventionist command mechanisms.

Really? Why do I have to gouge the benefit of non-malnourishment, say, against someone's "property"? It is more reasonable to judge it against his suffering. Which is zero. The suffering of a malnourished person is extreme. Yes, that is not easily quantifiable, but it is obvious as hell. Being "less top-heavy" is not an automatic benefit, although survivability which is tightly connected to that, is. However, survivability once again has no bearing on the utilitarian value of the system. A parasite infestation may be quite adept at survival.

So your hypothetical capitalist would go out of his way to fuck over his underlings and liquidate the firm, even if it is not only more profitable but also easier to just sell the company stock he owns? How exactly is personal satisfaction achieved that way? And how if he's violated contracts that he was required to make in order to gain control of the firm in the first place? If the answer is "he's just a sociopath" and "contracts were inadequate", then you can just as easily have a situation with "the elected official was just a sociopath" and "laws restricting his actions were inadequate".

You're adding entities where there were non to salvage a point that you basically already conceded. I specifically said that the capitalist (a) breaches no contracts (or terminates contracts according to the rules of termination!), (b) is not a sociopath, he simply puts his personal well-being ahead of any other goal (reasonable from an egoistic point of view) and (c) does not go out of his way to fuck his underlings; that is a mere side effect of liquidation. That is all I have to say here. You don't need to make a complete caricature of a capitalist to have him behave like this. Like I said, transaction expenses or other factors may preclude selling the stock in entirety (the potential buyer failed to pass the information barrier to get enough information on the deal; few potential buyers, etc.) and keeping the company functional. And "required to gain control of the firm"? Please. The capitalist may have inherited the company (blam! nothing except birth and property rights required to do that) or, in the vein of realistic examples, he may have bought a functioning and profitable enterprise and then liquidate it still. Why? Well, one of the reasons could be that his area of expertise is trade, whereas what he bought was perhaps... a project institute that occupied a piece of land that can be readjusted for trade. It does not matter if the capitalist could gain more profit from the project institute or vice-versa; in any case it is not his area of expertise, he understands trade much better, and then he annihilates the institute to create a mall. That is a bit different from snorting cocaine, but in any case the fuck-over is but a side effect of the capitalists' reasonable self-interest. He doesn't go out of his way to specifically fuck people over.

Besides, since when are capitalists required not to be sociopaths? By what and who? Is that another requirement - "to own property you must not be a sociopath!" - tough luck, but that is not so.

I've been over it before, and since I fully subscribe to "being defines the man", I have noted many times that whenever people get sociopathic comments or sociopathic actions on part of a capitalist and comment on it with utter surprise, I am never surprised, it is most likely that his surrounding and existence requires him to become one. In other words, capitalism breeds sociopathy among the capitalists. As a highly individualistic philosophy and practice it breeds sociopathy on all levels, but it is extremely notable at the top.

You are adding moral requirements to the capitalist. Why? If in your view he is just an economic agent who is supposed to behave so-and-so and the behaviour I described is "bad" simply because it's "sociopathic" (but he didn't break laws or contracts, I specifically added it to make him "clean" in your eyes and you're still not satisfied!), then once again a pure property rights-based system failed to conform to moral requirements.

I already said that personal satisfaction for many people is achieved by maximizing personal welfare, not the wealth of the body corporate which is physically distinct from the capitalist himself. It breeds another set of problems where people's self-interest which you so love does not correspond even with the self-interest of the body corporate that they own or command. End of argument.

And I know this is not a classical Marxist argument, mind you. I picked bits and pieces here and there, and behaviourists as a school influenced my thinking a lot.

[Lord Zentei]

First point: that's not entirely true - cost-benefit analysis requires that we have parameters by which we can gauge the cost and the benefit. These must in turn be expressed in terms of some benefit or other which people are assumed to be entitled to. Moreover, from a purely practical perspective, property rights are a demonstrably effective mechanism for achieving optimization of production.

Are you trying to say that any benefit that cannot be monetized is presume to not exist?

No. I'm saying that a hell of a lot can be monetized, and that doing so as much as possible is desirable, since then we gain a mechanism to measure the relative benefit of diverse goods which otherwise would be ad-hoc and arbitrary, thus leading us to question whether we're really making a rational decision at all.

Second: GDP may not measure specific benefits, but it has the advantage that it's highly adaptable, since it measures the overall potential that a society is capable of achieving, and efficiency maximizes this value. Regardless of what you hope to achieve, the means to that end is best made as high as is possible, ceteris paribus.

GDP is "highly adaptable"? An indicator which starts malfunctioning like an old broken car when we apply it to any non-market activity? An indicator which completely and utterly ignores anything but production evaluated in a highly specific way? You're surely joking. If the GDP was an "adaptable" measure, the UNDP wouldn't even need the HDI, and estimating GDP of command economies wouldn't be that much of a problem. The GDP of a fully non-market system would be fucking zero. That's how "useful" and "adaptable" the GDP is. In fact, indicators are another shackle of the mind; they make you think in a certain way, reject other features as "insignificant" and put the indicator criteria as "primary". This is why I favor a more balanced indicator that would estimate social welfare on many levels and that could reasonably estimate non-monetized and non-commodified benefits, non-market activity and non-commodified production.

Um, what? Getting a bit overboard? GDP is adaptable in the sense that it gauges the potential that an economy possesses, it's the total value of all final goods and services that the population can enjoy. It's not meant as a measure of how "well" the resources are used, but how much is available for use for any given purpose. As such it's neutral with respect to value judgements, and thus can serve any set of value judgements. Naturally, if you also want value judgements to be included, then you can do so, but that doesn't change the fact that GDP is needed to get whatever it is you want. Besides which I've never claimed that GDP and economic efficiency were the only criteria we should use to evaluate

And I fully understand this is biased, and I acknowledge that bias, too. The goal is twofold: not only to create a more complex picture and a more encompassing set of criteria, but also to free the intellectual discourse from market dogmatism and thereby allow non-market activity and non-market systems to become acceptable as alternatives. In essense, it is both a vessel for my ideology and a superior way of looking at things.

Non-market systems need to be functional before they become viable alternatives. Until then, this bias will be irrational.

You may then assume in addition to this, that people are entitled to such and such additional benefits, but these must be gauged against the property of the people who are being taxed to pay for said benefits, otherwise, there's no way of adequately determining whether you are indeed improving things. Besides which, rights-based and decentralized mechanisms are by their nature far less top-heavy and than interventionist command mechanisms.

Really? Why do I have to gouge the benefit of non-malnourishment, say, against someone's "property"? It is more reasonable to judge it against his suffering. Which is zero. The suffering of a malnourished person is extreme. Yes, that is not easily quantifiable, but it is obvious as hell. Being "less top-heavy" is not an automatic benefit, although survivability which is tightly connected to that, is. However, survivability once again has no bearing on the utilitarian value of the system. A parasite infestation may be quite adept at survival.

The suffering of removal of property is not zero. If it were, then poverty would not be a negative effect. Anyway, what yardstick are you going to use for measuring all kinds of different suffering for different negative effects in any case? You are going to need to produce some kind of common measure for these things, if you hope to make rational optimization choices.

So your hypothetical capitalist would go out of his way to fuck over his underlings and liquidate the firm, even if it is not only more profitable but also easier to just sell the company stock he owns? How exactly is personal satisfaction achieved that way? And how if he's violated contracts that he was required to make in order to gain control of the firm in the first place? If the answer is "he's just a sociopath" and "contracts were inadequate", then you can just as easily have a situation with "the elected official was just a sociopath" and "laws restricting his actions were inadequate".

You're adding entities where there were non to salvage a point that you basically already conceded. I specifically said that the capitalist (a) breaches no contracts (or terminates contracts according to the rules of termination!), (b) is not a sociopath, he simply puts his personal well-being ahead of any other goal (reasonable from an egoistic point of view) and (c) does not go out of his way to fuck his underlings; that is a mere side effect of liquidation. That is all I have to say here. You don't need to make a complete caricature of a capitalist to have him behave like this.

Erm, what? What concession do you refer to? And if you can envision a capitalist who isn't bound by adequate contracts, then I can counter with a bureaucrat who isn't bound by adequate rules of conduct. That is my point - I'm objecting to the fact that you're focusing on this sort of "personal benefit optimization" with respect to capitalists specifically and concluding that the market system is therefore somehow inferior.

Like I said, transaction expenses or other factors may preclude selling the stock in entirety (the potential buyer failed to pass the information barrier to get enough information on the deal; few potential buyers, etc.) and keeping the company functional. And "required to gain control of the firm"? Please. The capitalist may have inherited the company (blam! nothing except birth and property rights required to do that) or, in the vein of realistic examples, he may have bought a functioning and profitable enterprise and then liquidate it still. Why? Well, one of the reasons could be that his area of expertise is trade, whereas what he bought was perhaps... a project institute that occupied a piece of land that can be readjusted for trade. It does not matter if the capitalist could gain more profit from the project institute or vice-versa; in any case it is not his area of expertise, he understands trade much better, and then he annihilates the institute to create a mall. That is a bit different from snorting cocaine, but in any case the fuck-over is but a side effect of the capitalists' reasonable self-interest. He doesn't go out of his way to specifically fuck people over.

Right, because he can't hire anyone to take care of that kind of shit despite being filthy rich? Please. And WTF does this say about bureaucrats then? Are you suggesting that a capitalist is less likely to manage his company with maximum profit as a goal than non-capitalist managers?

Besides, since when are capitalists required not to be sociopaths? By what and who? Is that another requirement - "to own property you must not be a sociopath!" - tough luck, but that is not so.

I never made such a requirement. I was pointing out that in your hypothetical example of a capitalist who goes out of his way to fuck over other people even if it's directly against his personal interests to do so, then you can just as easily envision such a person in a government position.

I've been over it before, and since I fully subscribe to "being defines the man", I have noted many times that whenever people get sociopathic comments or sociopathic actions on part of a capitalist and comment on it with utter surprise, I am never surprised, it is most likely that his surrounding and existence requires him to become one. In other words, capitalism breeds sociopathy among the capitalists. As a highly individualistic philosophy and practice it breeds sociopathy on all levels, but it is extremely notable at the top.

You are adding moral requirements to the capitalist. Why? If in your view he is just an economic agent who is supposed to behave so-and-so and the behaviour I described is "bad" simply because it's "sociopathic" (but he didn't break laws or contracts, I specifically added it to make him "clean" in your eyes and you're still not satisfied!), then once again a pure property rights-based system failed to conform to moral requirements.

Again, I'm not adding moral requirements to the capitalist. I'm humouring your scenario, and pointing out that it applies to non-capitalistic systems also.

I already said that personal satisfaction for many people is achieved by maximizing personal welfare, not the wealth of the body corporate which is physically distinct from the capitalist himself. It breeds another set of problems where people's self-interest which you so love does not correspond even with the self-interest of the body corporate that they own or command. End of argument.

What, because you say so? Whatever, man. Of course, maximizing personal welfare is classically assumed to be part of the process of optimizing economic efficiency overall.

[Temujin]

Update on the ongoing situation with video:

Cops Tackle, Mace Wall St. Protesters for No Obvious Reason

Looks like the ongoing #OccupyWallSt protest against corporations got a bit tense on its eighth day, with lots of cops present for today's march to Union Square and the official protest home page reporting at least 80 arrests.



Folks on the ground photographed several of the arrests—which, the New York Times reports, were for alleged disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, obstructing governmental administration, and assault on a police officer. Some Twitterers reported that NYPD officers targeted protesters with cameras and people who tried to film the day's events. Besides maybe getting a bit huffy with a cop (or talking with his hands too wildly?), taking photos seems to be the only "crime" committed by the young man in the above video—who was thrown to the ground while standing in what seems to be a non-threatening manner. Maybe he was much more intimidating in person? Maybe we're missing something? Seems a bit excessive.

Speaking of excessive, the video at left seems to show an NYPD officer spraying mace at a group of quarantined female protesters. This is what democracy looks like!



One Twitterer wrote that that NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly paid a visit, most likely to ask where he could purchase a Guy Fawkes mask. Wonder what he's going to say about these videos.

If you'd like to play armchair legal observer and watch the drama unfold from the safety and comfort of your computer room, this protest live-feed will serve your needs (and probably won't lead to you getting arrested or maced): Link to livestream videos

[K. A. Pital]

No. I'm saying that a hell of a lot can be monetized, and that doing so as much as possible is desirable, since then we gain a mechanism to measure the relative benefit of diverse goods which otherwise would be ad-hoc and arbitrary, thus leading us to question whether we're really making a rational decision at all.

Monetization is prone to the same ad hoc and arbitrary judgements were the value of monetized good, service or an entire sector can evaporate overnight. More than that, monetization only reflects profitability; if something is not monetized, it is most likely it is not profitable. But so what? Bottled water which we all know and love not has a value which is reflected in the price. However, in my view the investment in that sector is counterbeneficial and stupid. Profitability suggests it is beneficial; I think it is not.

Um, what? Getting a bit overboard? GDP is adaptable in the sense that it gauges the potential that an economy possesses, it's the total value of all final goods and services that the population can enjoy. It's not meant as a measure of how "well" the resources are used, but how much is available for use for any given purpose. As such it's neutral with respect to value judgements, and thus can serve any set of value judgements. Naturally, if you also want value judgements to be included, then you can do so, but that doesn't change the fact that GDP is needed to get whatever it is you want. Besides which I've never claimed that GDP and economic efficiency were the only criteria we should use to evaluate

GDP of an economy where people rely on subsistence agriculture, due to its non-commodified nature, would be nigh zero. However, it is obvious that the economy is producing value and the life standard of people is not zero. GDP only makes sense in an economy where commodified values are exchanged in a market. Any deviation from that type of economy would immediately skew the GDP. And no, you can't really include value judgements in the GDP. You can't just substract the impact of self-cancelling activities, you can't substract the production of harmful or useless goods (and if you do, questions will immediately arise why you substracted this or that, but not something else). I said that these criteria are seriously deficient, and you did not challenge my point; instead you said that it is simply a measure of the total value of final goods/services (commodified, obviously).

Non-market systems need to be functional before they become viable alternatives. Until then, this bias will be irrational.

Circulus vitiosus. If a certain system of thinking is so rigid that thinking and operating with its definitions requires a market to exist, then no functional alternative will ever be created, because nobody will even think about it. Orwellian mechanisms in action - remove the ability to think a certain way by employing terminology, indicators and criteria that only make sense in a particular model. Excellent.

The suffering of removal of property is not zero.

Yes, but it is very small (shall I even say vanishingly small) compared to the removal of physical malnourishment. Seriously, the removal of a fraction of wealth and when your skin hangs on your bones are not even legitimately close as far as suffering goes.

If it were, then poverty would not be a negative effect. Anyway, what yardstick are you going to use for measuring all kinds of different suffering for different negative effects in any case? You are going to need to produce some kind of common measure for these things, if you hope to make rational optimization choices.

Physical suffering related to non-satisfaction of lower Maslowian needs gets absolute priority. In the higher needs realms you can have reasonable arguments, but not below that.

Erm, what? What concession do you refer to? And if you can envision a capitalist who isn't bound by adequate contracts, then I can counter with a bureaucrat who isn't bound by adequate rules of conduct. That is my point - I'm objecting to the fact that you're focusing on this sort of "personal benefit optimization" with respect to capitalists specifically and concluding that the market system is therefore somehow inferior.

I am not concluding that the market is "inferior" (to what?); the market is simply an absolutely amoral construct, void of any moral objectives whatsoever. It is a machine, and nothing more. Same goes for bureaucracy, which is simply an amoral construct. And damn sure personal self-interest, which is said to be the "core imperative" of the market system, will come under fire from any critic of the market, and since I am one, that is only reasonable. Indeed the personal self-interest problem constitutes an issue for market and non-market systems alike. However, it is worth noting that the market system openly extolls and glorifies self-interest on all levels as a psychological phenomena, whereas a non-market system can avoid this.

Right, because he can't hire anyone to take care of that kind of shit despite being filthy rich? Please.

Please what? Are you going to deny that this sort of stuff happens?

And WTF does this say about bureaucrats then? Are you suggesting that a capitalist is less likely to manage his company with maximum profit as a goal than non-capitalist managers?

No. Although I would note that satisficing/optimization is a more common behavior in the real world than maximization. And yes, I already noted that the problem of personal interests being detached from the interest of the organization or body corporate is universal. The difference, however, is that only the market openly glorifies self-interest, which makes it reasonable for a massive confirmation bias "what's good for me alone is good" to arise in the head of the individual.

I never made such a requirement. I was pointing out that in your hypothetical example of a capitalist who goes out of his way to fuck over other people even if it's directly against his personal interests to do so, then you can just as easily envision such a person in a government position.

Yes, although one should note that the capitalist does not answer to his workers in any fashion. Unless they come with stones and pitchforks, that is. Not only that, but there is principally no mechanism to put the capitalist out of power. As often evidenced by the market action (the infamous Union Carbide prank, for example), compensating the workers is frowned upon, shitting on the workers is considered good. So-called "conscious consumerism| is absolutely ridiculous and inept when it comes to punishing evils commited by a body corporate, and we've been over that before. A bureaucrat technically answers directly to the people below him, so improving his personal well-being at their expense should be harder. If it is not, there is probably a deficiency in the democratic mechanism. For example, it might be corrupted by the market, actually. Or it is not working for other reasons. In any case, I think I presented my point well enough. Body corporates are not a democracy from the very start.

Again, I'm not adding moral requirements to the capitalist. I'm humouring your scenario, and pointing out that it applies to non-capitalistic systems also.

It does. However, a non-capitalistic system does not glorify personal self-interest so much (or maybe not at all).

What, because you say so? Whatever, man. Of course, maximizing personal welfare is classically assumed to be part of the process of optimizing economic efficiency overall.

Classical paradigms shit on the difference between the individual and the body corporate he owns. That is why concepts such as the iron law of oligarchy, bounded rationality, etc. were even born - they were reflecting a deficiency in the classic political and economic models. But it should be obvious without any laughs (and indeed that is a serious matter) that the person himself and his interests are not equivalent and often diverge from the interests of the body corporate, an organization.

[Lord Zentei]

No. I'm saying that a hell of a lot can be monetized, and that doing so as much as possible is desirable, since then we gain a mechanism to measure the relative benefit of diverse goods which otherwise would be ad-hoc and arbitrary, thus leading us to question whether we're really making a rational decision at all.

Monetization is prone to the same ad hoc and arbitrary judgements were the value of monetized good, service or an entire sector can evaporate overnight. More than that, monetization only reflects profitability; if something is not monetized, it is most likely it is not profitable. But so what? Bottled water which we all know and love not has a value which is reflected in the price. However, in my view the investment in that sector is counterbeneficial and stupid. Profitability suggests it is beneficial; I think it is not.

No. Just... no. Monetization is not prone to the same ad hoc and arbitrary judgements as non-monetized sectors, and it's frankly bizzare to say that they are. And what do you mean by saying that the investment sector is counter-beneficial? As if your opinion counted as fact.

Um, what? Getting a bit overboard? GDP is adaptable in the sense that it gauges the potential that an economy possesses, it's the total value of all final goods and services that the population can enjoy. It's not meant as a measure of how "well" the resources are used, but how much is available for use for any given purpose. As such it's neutral with respect to value judgements, and thus can serve any set of value judgements. Naturally, if you also want value judgements to be included, then you can do so, but that doesn't change the fact that GDP is needed to get whatever it is you want. Besides which I've never claimed that GDP and economic efficiency were the only criteria we should use to evaluate

GDP of an economy where people rely on subsistence agriculture, due to its non-commodified nature, would be nigh zero. However, it is obvious that the economy is producing value and the life standard of people is not zero. GDP only makes sense in an economy where commodified values are exchanged in a market. Any deviation from that type of economy would immediately skew the GDP. And no, you can't really include value judgements in the GDP. You can't just substract the impact of self-cancelling activities, you can't substract the production of harmful or useless goods (and if you do, questions will immediately arise why you substracted this or that, but not something else). I said that these criteria are seriously deficient, and you did not challenge my point; instead you said that it is simply a measure of the total value of final goods/services (commodified, obviously).

Oh, for fuck's sake. A agrarian society does NOT have zero GDP, nether is anyone claiming that they have zero life standard. Though I daresay that their life standard is inferior to that of a society with an active manufacturing and service sector. Moreover, it's painfully obvious that GDP is crucial to evaluating the performance of an economy, since this measure is the aggregate of the market value of the production - and the market value of the production is defined by people's desires and the scarcity of what is produced.

Non-market systems need to be functional before they become viable alternatives. Until then, this bias will be irrational.

Circulus vitiosus. If a certain system of thinking is so rigid that thinking and operating with its definitions requires a market to exist, then no functional alternative will ever be created, because nobody will even think about it. Orwellian mechanisms in action - remove the ability to think a certain way by employing terminology, indicators and criteria that only make sense in a particular model. Excellent.

Is this meant to refute the point? If you don't have an alternative, there is nothing to discuss. End of story. Claiming that the other side has "rigid thinking" and "requires a market to exist" is a bullshit dodge.

The suffering of removal of property is not zero.

Yes, but it is very small (shall I even say vanishingly small) compared to the removal of physical malnourishment. Seriously, the removal of a fraction of wealth and when your skin hangs on your bones are not even legitimately close as far as suffering goes.

So? How does this refute the point I made? I said: "You may then assume in addition to this, that people are entitled to such and such additional benefits, but these must be gauged against the property of the people who are being taxed to pay for said benefits, otherwise, there's no way of adequately determining whether you are indeed improving things." Saying that a starving person is worse off than a taxed person does nothing to refute that.

If it were, then poverty would not be a negative effect. Anyway, what yardstick are you going to use for measuring all kinds of different suffering for different negative effects in any case? You are going to need to produce some kind of common measure for these things, if you hope to make rational optimization choices.

Physical suffering related to non-satisfaction of lower Maslowian needs gets absolute priority. In the higher needs realms you can have reasonable arguments, but not below that.

In other words, basic survival. Here's wondering what mechanisms are most effective at realizing that potential in a society.... presumably ones that maximize production. Rejecting markets outright is not going to help.

Erm, what? What concession do you refer to? And if you can envision a capitalist who isn't bound by adequate contracts, then I can counter with a bureaucrat who isn't bound by adequate rules of conduct. That is my point - I'm objecting to the fact that you're focusing on this sort of "personal benefit optimization" with respect to capitalists specifically and concluding that the market system is therefore somehow inferior.

I am not concluding that the market is "inferior" (to what?); the market is simply an absolutely amoral construct, void of any moral objectives whatsoever. It is a machine, and nothing more. Same goes for bureaucracy, which is simply an amoral construct. And damn sure personal self-interest, which is said to be the "core imperative" of the market system, will come under fire from any critic of the market, and since I am one, that is only reasonable. Indeed the personal self-interest problem constitutes an issue for market and non-market systems alike. However, it is worth noting that the market system openly extolls and glorifies self-interest on all levels as a psychological phenomena, whereas a non-market system can avoid this.

It utilizes self-interest to achieve the desired result of the system, instead of having to work against it at every turn. It's not so much an ethos as fuel. The notion that the market is an amoral construct is a questionable one too, as its objective is to optimize people's individual desires.

And if you mean to judge a system to the point of wanting to throw it out, then OBVIOUSLY it's relevant to point out the lack of adequate alternatives. Also, you didn't answer the question - what concession are you referring to.

Right, because he can't hire anyone to take care of that kind of shit despite being filthy rich? Please.

Please what? Are you going to deny that this sort of stuff happens?

Self-damaging behaviour? Sure it happens. All systems have it, but what's that supposed to prove? That capitalism is somehow inferior to alternatives? Or that it happens principally in capitalism and that this somehow invalidates it?

And WTF does this say about bureaucrats then? Are you suggesting that a capitalist is less likely to manage his company with maximum profit as a goal than non-capitalist managers?

No. Although I would note that satisficing/optimization is a more common behavior in the real world than maximization. And yes, I already noted that the problem of personal interests being detached from the interest of the organization or body corporate is universal. The difference, however, is that only the market openly glorifies self-interest, which makes it reasonable for a massive confirmation bias "what's good for me alone is good" to arise in the head of the individual.

The market doesn't "glorify" personal self interest in the way you're insinuating - it utilizes personal self interest AND transactions made with mutually voluntary and informed consent. That's a pretty huge difference there.

I never made such a requirement. I was pointing out that in your hypothetical example of a capitalist who goes out of his way to fuck over other people even if it's directly against his personal interests to do so, then you can just as easily envision such a person in a government position.

Yes, although one should note that the capitalist does not answer to his workers in any fashion. Unless they come with stones and pitchforks, that is. Not only that, but there is principally no mechanism to put the capitalist out of power. As often evidenced by the market action (the infamous Union Carbide prank, for example), compensating the workers is frowned upon, shitting on the workers is considered good. So-called "conscious consumerism| is absolutely ridiculous and inept when it comes to punishing evils commited by a body corporate, and we've been over that before.

Of course there's a way to put the capitalist out of power. It's called "competition". WTF do you mean by "shitting on the workers is considered good", since when is that the case?

A bureaucrat technically answers directly to the people below him, so improving his personal well-being at their expense should be harder. If it is not, there is probably a deficiency in the democratic mechanism. For example, it might be corrupted by the market, actually. Or it is not working for other reasons. In any case, I think I presented my point well enough. Body corporates are not a democracy from the very start.

A bureaucrat does NOT answer to the people below him. He answers to the people above him. Neither are democratic mechanisms necessarily more effective, and it seems pretty slanted to judge system A because it doesn't use the methods of system B.

Again, I'm not adding moral requirements to the capitalist. I'm humouring your scenario, and pointing out that it applies to non-capitalistic systems also.

It does. However, a non-capitalistic system does not glorify personal self-interest so much (or maybe not at all).

It doesn't make provisions for it either. That's a fail.

What, because you say so? Whatever, man. Of course, maximizing personal welfare is classically assumed to be part of the process of optimizing economic efficiency overall.

Classical paradigms shit on the difference between the individual and the body corporate he owns. That is why concepts such as the iron law of oligarchy, bounded rationality, etc. were even born - they were reflecting a deficiency in the classic political and economic models. But it should be obvious without any laughs (and indeed that is a serious matter) that the person himself and his interests are not equivalent and often diverge from the interests of the body corporate, an organization.

I've already pointed out how corporate bodies are responsible for their own internal regulation. The person at the top of the corporation is essentially a hireling, and his employers are responsible for maintaining scrutiny. These employers are the owners of the capital.

[K. A. Pital]

No. I'm saying that a hell of a lot can be monetized, and that doing so as much as possible is desirable, since then we gain a mechanism to measure the relative benefit of diverse goods which otherwise would be ad-hoc and arbitrary, thus leading us to question whether we're really making a rational decision at all.

Monetization is prone to the same ad hoc and arbitrary judgements were the value of monetized good, service or an entire sector can evaporate overnight. More than that, monetization only reflects profitability; if something is not monetized, it is most likely it is not profitable. But so what? Bottled water which we all know and love not has a value which is reflected in the price. However, in my view the investment in that sector is counterbeneficial and stupid. Profitability suggests it is beneficial; I think it is not.

No. Just... no. Monetization is not prone to the same ad hoc and arbitrary judgements as non-monetized sectors, and it's frankly bizzare to say that they are. And what do you mean by saying that the investment sector is counter-beneficial? As if your opinion counted as fact.

Re-read the above. I'm not sure how one can read "investment in that sector" as "the investment sector". Besides, if you're saying that this mechanism "measures the relative benefit" in a rational fashion, you simply cannot explain market bubbles that are as large as the economy of certain nations. The recent 2008 crisis which destroyed Lehman Brothers that was supposedly worth a multibillion sum is a prime example. Either you admit that irrationality in the system can reach levels that imply enormous amount of value is determined irrationally, or you are faced with a supposedly rational system in theory which generates irrational outcomes in practice.

Oh, for fuck's sake. A agrarian society does NOT have zero GDP, nether is anyone claiming that they have zero life standard.

A subsistence society (subsistence != agrarian, although all subsistence societies are agrarian) would have a GDP of zero, because none of the product is commodified. The GDP of that society would be only estimated, not calculated, in a backwards fashion, by trying to determine how much they produce in natural amount of grain, rice, etc. and then apply certain prices to their produce. If you ever read any World Bank papers on estimating the GDP of African nations, e.g. Kenya, where subsistence farming consistutes a large share of activity, you would note that they specifically say non-market activities cannot be measured as part of GDP, and their value is estimated via various approximations. In a direct calculation, any non-market activity is excluded from the GDP explicitly. That's fucking economics 101.

Note that if you knit yourself a sweater, it is production but does not get counted as GDP because it is never sold.

Therefore, not just any subsistence activity, but any non-market activity and any value that is created, but not sold, is excluded from the GDP. If people's incomes are zero and they get all their goods from rationing, the directly calculated GDP of the system would be zero. End of story.

Though I daresay that their life standard is inferior to that of a society with an active manufacturing and service sector. Moreover, it's painfully obvious that GDP is crucial to evaluating the performance of an economy, since this measure is the aggregate of the market value of the production - and the market value of the production is defined by people's desires and the scarcity of what is produced.

One does not dispute that subsistence farming offers an inferior life standard to an industrial economy with trade of commodities. What is fucking obvious, however, is that the GDP, when measured up front, if the economy is a complete subsistence economy with no market trade, or if market trade is a very small portion thereof and commodities are few, the GDP would be zero or close to zero, which does not reflect the life standard of the people and does not reflect the entirety of production. The GDP makes sense only for a market economy. If something is not sold, or worse yet, produced and consumed directly, it is not included in the GDP. It is absolutely irrelevant if what is produced is necessary or not. The GDP measure would not include that.

Is this meant to refute the point? If you don't have an alternative, there is nothing to discuss. End of story. Claiming that the other side has "rigid thinking" and "requires a market to exist" is a bullshit dodge.

I already said that alternatives actually exist. Command economies, imperfect as they are, actually work. Claiming that they're "non-functional" while at the same time spending every bit of effort to make sure they never arise in practice and even if they do, they should be destroyed, is a very nice position. And yes, "rigid system of thinking" is one that excludes alternatives even before considering them. That is not a dodge. Unless people think and develop alternatives in theory, they will never exist in practice. That is obvious as day.

So? How does this refute the point I made? I said: "You may then assume in addition to this, that people are entitled to such and such additional benefits, but these must be gauged against the property of the people who are being taxed to pay for said benefits, otherwise, there's no way of adequately determining whether you are indeed improving things." Saying that a starving person is worse off than a taxed person does nothing to refute that.

"There's no way to determine" if I'm improving things by taxing one person to make sure another person is not malnourished? You must have been aiming for a Misantropy Ph.D. when you wrote that, right? Once again: anything that results in decreasing extreme, biological suffering is a net gain. A system with zero malnourishment and a heavily taxed rich clas is preferrable to one where the rich aren't taxed, but malnourishment is rampant. In fact, a poor, but non-malnourished command economy is preferrable to a market economy where malnourishment remains. End of story. Anything which removes extremities of suffering (preferrably forever) is good.

In other words, basic survival. Here's wondering what mechanisms are most effective at realizing that potential in a society.... presumably ones that maximize production. Rejecting markets outright is not going to help.

So why is Cuba the only nation with zero child malnourishment in Latin America, despite being hellishly poor?

The existence in the developing world of 146 million children under five underweight contrasts with the reality of Cuban children, recognized worldwide for not being part of this social evil. Alarming figures appeared in a recent report by the United Nations Fund for Children (UNICEF), entitled Progress for Children, a report on Nutrition, launched by the UN headquarters.

The report said the percentage of underweight children is 28 percent in sub-Saharan Africa, 17 in the Middle East and North Africa, 15 in East Asia and the Pacific and seven in Latin America and the Caribbean. The picture is completed by Central and Eastern Europe, 5 percent, and other developing countries, with 27 percent.

Cuba has no such problems, and is the only country in Latin America and the Caribbean that eliminated severe child malnutrition, thanks to government efforts to improve the nutrition of people, especially the most vulnerable.

... The harsh realities of the world show that 852 million people suffer from hunger and that 53 million of them live in Latin America. There are 5.2 million malnourished persons in Mexico and in Haiti, three million 800 thousand, while in the whole world more than five million children die of hunger every year.

According to UN estimates, it would be very expensive to get basic health and nutrition for all peoples of the Third World. However, it would be enough to meet the goal with 13 billion dollars per year in addition to what is intended now, a figure that was never achieved and it is tiny compared to the trillions that are spent annually on advertising, the 400 billion turnover by selling drugs or up to eight billion that are spent on cosmetics in the United States.

For the satisfaction of Cuba, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) also recognized that this is the country with the greatest progress in Latin America in the fight against malnutrition.

I'll choose that over sweatshops that make "necessary goods" and "maximize production" for the White Mister while people remain malnourished, thank you.

What I mean to say is: with adequate distribution mechanisms, malnourishment can be eliminated even in a very poor nation. Therefore, the idea that you need to tolerate malnourishment is absolutely preposterous. If a small and poor nation in a complete economic embargo can eliminate malnourishment, then sure as hell nations that are under no embargo have no excuse. But they still have malnourished children.

You said Somalia is crap because children are malnourished. Now that is an acceptable price for "maximization of production"? I see, I see.

It utilizes self-interest to achieve the desired result of the system, instead of having to work against it at every turn. It's not so much an ethos as fuel. The notion that the market is an amoral construct is a questionable one too, as its objective is to optimize people's individual desires. And if you mean to judge a system to the point of wanting to throw it out, then OBVIOUSLY it's relevant to point out the lack of adequate alternatives. Also, you didn't answer the question - what concession are you referring to.

So do people outside of Cuba desire to be malnourished? Or their desire not to be malnourished is simply of a lower priority than the desires of the rich, and since the market gives priority to effective demand, there will be a distribution that is unfavorable towards the lower classes? As for the concession:

If you fire your workers according to rules of the contracts made with the workers and sell your factory that doesn't change the nature of the act. Property creates no obligations. ... Even if your act is clearly malevolent but you don't break any laws and infringe on property rights of others, from a pure "property rights" ground one may not and will not be able to criticize the act.

Of course. But why should anyone have the power to dictate how you shall use your property within what is allowed by law? The ability of others to dictate how you use your property can just as easily be abused as your non-use of your property. Moreover, contracts can be expanded if they are found wanting. As an aside though, your hypothetical capitalist doesn't exactly strike me as a typical profit maximizer.

So you admit that malevolent actions which do not directly break any laws and infringe on people's property rights cannot be criticized. That is all.

Self-damaging behaviour? Sure it happens. All systems have it, but what's that supposed to prove? That capitalism is somehow inferior to alternatives? Or that it happens principally in capitalism and that this somehow invalidates it?

Once again - the capitalist did not damage his own life. In fact he may have improved it and his personal satisfaction is greater than it was. He did damage society, though, but from an egoistic point of view if he broke no contracts and did not infringe on property rights of others you cannot criticize him. He was acting with his own interest in mind and he valued his own preferences higher than those of the body corporate he had. That happens quite often. The recent saga of "golden parachute"-CEOs is just another sad chapter in the tale. And no, it does not happen principally in capitalism. However, in capitalism you have no grounds to criticize such behaviour if no contracts were broken and no property rights infringed. In essence, no matter how cruel and senseless the act, if the law is silent and nobody's property is damaged, there's no grounds to criticizes. A destructive price war to annihilate your competitor? So as long as you only use prices and your own size, there's no grounds to criticize. Destroy factory to buy a yacht and a villa? No grounds to criticize so as long as you paid out the wages to the last dime - irrelevant what happens to workers thereafter. Speculation? As long as you speculate within what is allowed by the law, no grounds to criticize, even if that speculation can be disruptive even to non-speculative economic activity.

The market doesn't "glorify" personal self interest in the way you're insinuating - it utilizes personal self interest AND transactions made with mutually voluntary and informed consent. That's a pretty huge difference there.

The market does not itself glorify self-interest and individualism. The market is the mode of operation; the corresponding ideology of laissez-faire and individualism glorifies the market and exists to justify the market. You have to be blind to ignore the fact that the market has an ideological apparatus to support itself and a horde of ideologues tirelessly extolling its basic principles, self-interest being one of them. The market lashes out agressively against its enemies. Market economies work wonders to annihilate non-market ones, they spend so much effort on destroying every vestige of non-market mechanisms, be it feudalist remnants in the colonies or former colonies, or former "real socialism" from the Warsaw Pact and its dying remnants. Capitalistic nations annihilated any competition by applying violence whenever they met any resistance. To say that capitalism lacks an ideology is to deny the reality. Capitalism has an ideology, it has a huge ideological apparatus dedicated to the support and preservation of both capitalism itself as a system and its ideology. Capitalism has everything from theory to practice to ideology that supports the practice. It is not some sort of apolitical machine; the market violently works to destroy any barriers that politicians may erect out of populism or ideological dedication to non-market systems. Capitalists will organize economic warfare and blockades against non-market economies, they will tirelessly work to destroy any non-market economies, they would attempt to grab anything that is operating in the state sector and force privatization. They will not do so in person, perhaps, but they will do it through myriads of think-tanks which are funded by their corporations, they will do so through their loyal media and the entire apparatus devoted to the propaganda of capitalist ideology with core principles: market, individualism, economic freedom. Capitalism is not neutral. As any system it fights for survival tooth and nail, and doomed is the foe of capitalism who comes lightly armed to the battle.

Of course there's a way to put the capitalist out of power. It's called "competition". WTF do you mean by "shitting on the workers is considered good", since when is that the case?

Since Union Carbide. *laughs* And "competition"? Please. Only inefficiency will be punished by competition. Not evil or utilitarian harm.

Who put Coca Cola out of power because of their shenanigans in India? Nobody. Are you seriously suggesting that a company is going to be outcompeted for evil acts? You're crazy. IBM's complicity in the Holocaust and BAYER's Nazi doctor chief, blood money in the closets of a whole plethora of uberpowerful corporations suggests that, in fact, evil pays. And indeed, why would competitors punish a company which commited an evil act and went unpunished by the consumer, if that means they can get away with the same? Absolutely zero incentive.

A bureaucrat does NOT answer to the people below him. He answers to the people above him. Neither are democratic mechanisms necessarily more effective, and it seems pretty slanted to judge system A because it doesn't use the methods of system B.

Non-elected bureaucrat does not answer to people below him. That means you have to create a system that wouldn't have too many levels of control. Non-elected bureaucrats should be replaced by elected ones wherever possible. And yes, of course dictatorial methods can be more effective - it mostly hinges on the exact persons in power. I'm not sure, though, how this refutes my point that capitalism by default rejects democratic control of the administration; politics at least envisions a possibility of such.

It doesn't make provisions for it either. That's a fail.

Making provisions for something which is detrimental to the existence of a non-market system can lead to destruction. I agree that this requires thinking on how to make such systems more resilient. I'm spending quite a bit of my time thinking about that thing exactly. *laughs*

I've already pointed out how corporate bodies are responsible for their own internal regulation. The person at the top of the corporation is essentially a hireling, and his employers are responsible for maintaining scrutiny. These employers are the owners of the capital.

The owner of the capital can be also the person at the top. The CEO may not always be a hireling, although sufficiently large and developed corporations tend to use hirelings. It is never a given, though. Jobs isn't a hireling.

[Simon_Jester]

No. Just... no. Monetization is not prone to the same ad hoc and arbitrary judgements as non-monetized sectors, and it's frankly bizzare to say that they are. And what do you mean by saying that the investment sector is counter-beneficial? As if your opinion counted as fact.

The judgements aren't arbitrary in the sense that someone can pull them out of a hat and change them at will, but they're routinely made with no reference to second-order effects, externalities, or long term consequences.

As far as I can tell, Stas has a point about things like bottled water sales. Or the monetized value of luxury commodities- the fact that someone else's Mercedes costs five times more than my Ford does not automatically mean that they get five times as much benefit from owning a Mercedes as I do from owning a Ford. Not in any measurable sense except the recursive one of "A Mercedes costs five times more, therefore it is worth five times more." It certainly doesn't mean a Mercedes would be five times as valuable to me as my Ford is.

But if the benefit to the customer of having a car which costs five times as much money to produce is not five times as large, how can we trust the relative monetized value of the cars?

If the auto industry shifted from producing X cars for everyone to producing X/2 cars that individually sell for twice as many dollars, is the industry's contribution to GDP the same? Or am I just confused here?


Beyond that, there's the point that GDP does not reflect people's desires; it reflects the things they pay money for. If there exists anything that your society does not model as a commodity that you get money for, then providing or not providing that commodity has (in theory) zero impact on GDP. Parents who stay home to raise children have zero impact on GDP, not because raising children is worthless, but because they don't get paid to do it. Does that mean society "does not desire" that parents raise children?

And there's the problem Stas points to of self-cancelling activities. Plainly, if you make a useful physical object and sell it to someone, that adds to the overall value of goods in the economy. The same goes for many services. But there are certain areas where the work of two people cancels each other out- we wind up spending vast sums to advertise Coke and Pepsi, and neither really gains any market share at the other's expense for it, and about all that really happens is that cola products start displacing tap water as "what people drink." Does the advertising budget for the ongoing Cola Wars contribute to GDP? If it does, is this increase in GDP profitable for the people who are getting all that advertising?

It utilizes self-interest to achieve the desired result of the system, instead of having to work against it at every turn. It's not so much an ethos as fuel. The notion that the market is an amoral construct is a questionable one too, as its objective is to optimize people's individual desires.

Market economies walk a fine line between using self-interest as fuel and using it as an ethos. The US has long presented itself as one of the great champions of the market; now it finds itself besieged by corporatists who do seem to regard self-interest as an ethos, or at least as an absolute right that no other national interest or collective need of the public can override.

I'd say "self-interest" isn't a problem with markets, but it's a problem when the love of the market becomes a political philosophy. Because then you wind up with people who say, in all seriousness, that the right of financiers to indirectly destroy the livelihood of millions of people is something which should not be taken away from them, nor should society move to help those millions of people, since if they really valued their livelihood they'd be able to rebuild it.

Markets are quite all right if you don't make a fetish out of them. If you do, you can't do anything about them when they go off the rails.

Yes, although one should note that the capitalist does not answer to his workers in any fashion. Unless they come with stones and pitchforks, that is. Not only that, but there is principally no mechanism to put the capitalist out of power. As often evidenced by the market action (the infamous Union Carbide prank, for example), compensating the workers is frowned upon, shitting on the workers is considered good. So-called "conscious consumerism| is absolutely ridiculous and inept when it comes to punishing evils commited by a body corporate, and we've been over that before.

Of course there's a way to put the capitalist out of power. It's called "competition". WTF do you mean by "shitting on the workers is considered good", since when is that the case?

Here. Someone claiming to speak for Dow Chemical said that Dow was going to reimburse the survivors of the Union Carbide disaster. Dow's stock plummeted, then rebounded when it became clear that the whole thing was a prank and that Dow had no intention of giving the survivors a dime if it could help it. That's what he was getting at.

When corporations' stock goes up if they screw over workers (layoffs, refusing to reimburse people injured by industrial accidents) and goes down if they don't, it's obvious that the incentive structure favors not punishing evils committed by a corporation. The corporation itself needs a huge outside impetus to make it accept punishment, and consumers alone can't really supply that without going outside the market system.

Sure, you can outcompete the company, but you can't feasibly do that just by being more moral than the company, because so many people make their price decisions divorced from morality.

Thought experiment: if I'm being paid a market value for my labor under which I struggle to make ends meet (i.e. food on the table and medicine for chronic conditions and shelter for myself are in my budget, but not much else), and if I do not have disposable income to spare trying to shop around for 'ethical' products, what does this imply about my buying decisions? Does it mean I'm indifferent to ethical concerns, or does it just mean that I can't influence ethical concerns with my purchasing decisions?

[K. A. Pital]

I'm not sure the numbers support him, though.

What numbers, Simon? A direct calculation of the GDP relies only on commodities. If you knit a sweater and wear it, that won't be in the GDP. If you grow your own food entirely, that won't be in the GDP. If the entire nation trades nothing but only lives on subsistence farming, the GDP won't be just "nigh zero", it will be zero par se.

Most other production for own (or one's family's) use is also excluded, with two notable exceptions which are given in the list later in this section.
...
Nonmarket outputs that are included within the boundary are listed below. Since, by definition, they do not have a market price, the compilers of GDP must impute a value to them, usually either the cost of the goods and services used to produce them, or the value of a similar item that is sold on the market.

This is why. If the entire world would be running an non-market economy, its GDP would lower down to zero, as you wouldn't be able to (a) impute any values from costs, since costs could not be monetized (b) no market would exist anywhere and therefore you could not input a price from a market existing elsewhere.

This applies both to subsistence farming, i.e. primitive economies, and hyper-advanced economies that could operate on non-market mechanisms alone. Why? Well:

...if Free and Open Source Software became identical to its proprietary software counterparts, and the nation producing the propriety software stops buying proprietary software and switches to Free and Open Source Software, then the GDP of this nation would reduce, however there would be no reduction in economic production or standard of living.

If the entire world would operate a system of collectivist production and rationing without any prices, markets, sales and the like - GDP would be absolutely impossible to compute. It would lose all meaning.

People would probably shift to some sort of energy accounting or direct by-unit natural resource accounting systems and Human Development indices for life standard, if such a system were created, instead of the GDP that now is used to approximate both economic activity and life standard.

I hope these examples made it more clear. I didn't imagine them to be in Wikipedia of all places, I actually read that in magazines long before, but I guess the Internet evolves.