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| ▲ | MontyCarloHall 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | >The fact of resource extraction from society and externalities like pollution not being counted by capitalist because they "can’t count them" and just bundle them as externalities demonstrably destroy any concept of non-zero sum game The article explicitly addresses this: The fact that Capitalism is non-zero-sum doesn't mean it is necessarily positive-sum. An economy that gets out of balance can produce very negative results (which are still non-zero). Cons of capitalism: — Can not be relied on to provide adequate social services, including healthcare and education. — Can be expected to run at a cost to externalities like the environment. — Can produce products that are detrimental to well-being.
Based on your other comment [0], it seems you have a bad-faith axe to grind against this site.[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46434065 | | |
| ▲ | immibis 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Steel man: GP could be using "capitalism" to refer to the distribution of capital - financial markets - rather than the entire system. Financial markets are zero-sum as they don't produce anything and their consumption (wages, electricity, etc) is paid in by their users. They can influence wealth creation asnd destruction but that isn't part of the market itself. | |
| ▲ | AndrewKemendo 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | ifethereal 18 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm replying without having read the entirety of the text you've referred to by Proudhon, but it looks interesting—thanks. Some raw thoughts of mine if I may (feel free to add seasoning): You mention that capitalism is definitionally zero-sum, and you seem to be facing quite a bit of resistance. I've had similar thoughts (perhaps still premature) that capitalism is zero-sum, but only (?) under a strong definition of "zero". I've not fleshed out my thoughts completely, but I suspect there are intangible/abstract dimensions along which we maintain some kind of equilibrium, regardless of what we do. "Do" here is quite abstract, but as a first approximation in the realm of economics, it might refer to any act of investment, compensation, or labour. (I may be abusing some technical terms in economics here—not my home turf.) A separate question could then emerge as to how significant these intangible/abstract dimensions are. Actually, I'm not even sure that this is specific to the context of capitalism. However, whether something is a zero-sum game would seem relevant to systems obsessed with objective quantification, and where that quantification is heavily involved in steering moral views (or decision making), and I view capitalism as one of them. | | |
| ▲ | AndrewKemendo 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | It’s definitely not specific to the context of capitalism capitalism however makes transactionalism the explicit structure such that it cannot coexist with any other type of ownership regime by function That is to say, if you look at anarcho socialist philosophy it can theoretically coexist with other philosophies inside the same state and action space Historically however, we have not found a stable equilibrium for the lived reality of our experience such that we could map it cleanly onto some discreet and identified philosophical framework So neither anarcho-socialism nor capitalism is a sustainable equilibrium point due to the constraints of a human biological substrate Claiming that “it could” or “can” or “is the best we can do” are all beside the point, because they ignore the intractable fundamental fact of separating human systems from all other systems Every possible game is zero sum because the universe isn’t creating more matter or energy, it’s just moving around. How we move it around is the problem to solve and anyone using weak justifications with bankrupt epistemological foundations is just wasting everyone’s time. |
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| ▲ | nuancebydefault 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I don't believe capitalism is a zero sum game. Capitalism is not the holy grail, but when combined with laws that balance the uneven distribution of the wealth it _creates_, and laws that protect resources and cleanliness, it turns out it is the best system we as a human species employed so far. I'm open to be proven wrong. | | | |
| ▲ | SapporoChris 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If capitalism is zero sum then how do countries with capitalism manage to succeed and grow for hundreds of years? | | |
| ▲ | AndrewKemendo 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | By pillaging and conquering nations that have abundant resources through violence and coercion Like this is the entire history of capitalism and it’s not even close the fact that other organizations (USSR, China) do the same thing (horde property and then use consolidated resources to enforce economic heirarchy) but don’t call it capitalism doesn’t make it any less true They can say “communism” all day but if the functional properties of the system of the Russian Federation or CCP are that Property control is limited to a small group of elites who then use those resources to create a command economy that is purely capitalist philosophy. | | |
| ▲ | zozbot234 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > By pillaging and conquering nations that have abundant resources through violence and coercion That's pretty much backwards. The industrial revolution was the first time in human history where people could get rich on a very large scale via some way other than pillage and conquest. If you think "capitalism" started in the late 18th century and is essentially coterminous with industry (which is quite nonsensical since you had forms of capital as far back as ancient farming societies, but that's the way many scholars choose to use the term) that's exactly what let us choose something that was not plunder and conquest. | |
| ▲ | nuancebydefault 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The hording and eliteness is not a property of the capitalistic system. It might be an unwanted side effect. Imperialism, greed, urge to expand control, subordination of others are unfortunately human traits. You might attribute that behavior to any system, why single out capitalism? | | |
| ▲ | AndrewKemendo 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | Because capitalism explicitly encodes transactionalism into the social structure by alienating labor from the fruits of the labor. There’s no period of time where that has not been true for some portion is society, but we reached a point to which there are no places where that is not true. |
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| ▲ | robocat 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | When you call people ignorant, you are trying to say you know better than them. It is not only rude, but against guidelines. | | |
| ▲ | jibal 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | Certainly some people know better than some other people, and I see nothing in the guidelines that say otherwise, or say that one cannot say so ... expertise is a thing. OTOH, I think there are several aspects of your comment that go against the guidelines. (Perhaps my pointing that out does as well.) Of course, one can dispute specific claims, with facts and argumentation. |
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| ▲ | cowpig 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Calling people ignorant and naive while doing nothing to address the actual arguments isn't going to convince anyone. In the passage you linked to, the author argues that property is impossible, which seems like a rather different argument than the one you are making. | | |
| ▲ | AndrewKemendo 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | in fact it’s the opposite If you read Prudhon thoroughly you’ll understand that his critique is that the entire concept of capitalism is based on the concept of property (undisputed) and the concept of property is an entirely made up mythical thing (disputed) | | |
| ▲ | cowpig 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | Opposite of what? And what does that have to do with non-zero-sum games? |
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| ▲ | Xirdus 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That's a very reductionist view of economy. For starters, it ignores the entire services sector, which is like half of GDP of most developed capitalist countries. Services are an extremely clear example of positive sum - no resources disappeared from the world, as much money was gained as was spent, but on top of it somebody got something of value. | | |
| ▲ | AndrewKemendo 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | You should read about Baumol cost disease if you want to understand why what you just said is totally misguided https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect If I pay somebody to dig a ditch and I pay somebody else to fill it in was something of value created? Unequivocally no. Whether or not that allowed somebody to survive and feed their family is entirely orthogonal to the question of the zero-sum nature of the universe Nothing is free energy comes from somewhere and you have to eat food which takes from the environment, that somebody else can’t eat or some other process can’t utilize, so by a function of your existence you cost energy to maintain that would’ve otherwise gone to some other mechanical process No free lunch theorem describes this mathematically and you can go all day reading about that | | |
| ▲ | Xirdus 19 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Let's stop at the first half. If I pay somebody to dig a ditch. Period. End of story. Let's assume I'm not clinically insane and I actually needed that ditch for something. Is the sum still zero? Just because pointless things are possible doesn't mean not pointless things are not possible. Nothing is free, but the service isn't free either. It's not free because people find it valuable, so valuable they're willing to pay for it. More than the cost of food needed to compensate energy spent. Way more in most cases. Is the sum still zero? | | |
| ▲ | AndrewKemendo 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | You’re describing positive-sum outcomes in subjective preference space. I’m describing conservation laws in physical state space. Preference gains don’t violate thermodynamics, but they also don’t escape zero-sum reality once you include energy, ecology, and time. You’re doing what I’m complaining about separating Economics from ecology - there’s a very firm reason why climate changes the most important topic of our decade is because we have to merge our lived experience with the work experience and kill this embedded dualism that somehow human environments are different than the rest of the universe. It’s like you’re trying to do control theory without energy constraints. | | |
| ▲ | stackghost 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | "Everything in economics is zero-sum because the resources on the plane are finite" is an unimaginative undergraduate-level position that adds nothing of substance to the discussion. If you want to have a constructive conversation about pricing environmental externalities then by all means, but you need to drop this "I'm smarter than you" attitude if you want better reactions to your comments, especially if you're just going to aggressively post lukewarm takes and then insult people. | |
| ▲ | Xirdus 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Ah, so you indeed are doing the extremely reductionist view of economy that completely ignores services. And then calling capitalists wrong. While not even talking about the same subject as capitalists. This is lalala I can't hear you with extra steps. | | |
| ▲ | AndrewKemendo 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | I can’t believe I wasted my time thinking through that thoughtful response to you Thats on me | | |
| ▲ | Xirdus 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm very open to a serious discussion. But only if it's actually serious. I don't consider reducing economy to thermodynamics to be serious. Any statement about any economy is meaningless if you're ignoring services. Especially when discussing the totality of an economic system, such as the question whether capitalism is zero-sum. I am happy to hear actual arguments how the value of services always, necessarily, by definition comes at the cost of some environment somewhere. I'm not happy to hear arguments that dismiss existence of services entirely. I was sure you were a troll yourself after that hole digging line. My bad. | | |
| ▲ | ifethereal 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Not GP author. I'd like to continue the conversation though. However, be warned that my view is actually closer to reducing the economy to thermodynamics. I don't intend to overturn every single point you've made, but I hope this doesn't preclude a productive discussion. > Services are an extremely clear example of positive sum - no resources disappeared from the world, as much money was gained as was spent, but on top of it somebody got something of value. I think it's very hard to fall back on services being positive-sum on a gross basis (i.e., 0 inputs, positive outputs) to justify that it is positive-sum on a net basis. What kinds of services actually consume no resources? I could agree that, in isolation and on a marginal basis, a particular exchange of services for money might deplete a negligible amount of (physical) resources, but when you consider the operation of the entire industry (supposing a mature industry, i.e., that there is an industry to speak of), can it really be said that the entire industry consumes no resources? A prototypical counterexample is any service that relies on physical equipment: I would view that physical equipment always incurs wear and tear, and this is potentially substantial for sufficiently large industries. The wider umbrella here are all the other various externalities of the service. (A good rebuttal to the physical equipment counterexample is actually where we've mastered the materials science well enough that, miraculously, the wear and tear outlasts the lifetime of anyone involved and hence where the equipment feels impervious to wear and tear... I resort to time horizons, which is another aspect of "scale". Something like GDP [growth] tries to normalise for time scales, but sadly I see this as falling prey to the same shortcomings as any kind of prediction activity.) Personally, I consider it reductionist to try and measure every transaction with a currency value and then aggregate for a GDP. (The next key phrase in this train of thought is "Goodhart's law", which happily also gets addressed in the OP site [0].) However, I do also appreciate that this is a really fundamental paradigm in modern implementations of capitalism to attempt to uproot. One way through which I can appreciate that capitalism is non-zero-sum is: across multiple different dimensions/axes/facets of measurement (currency value may be one of them), transactions incentivised by capitalism are not "zero" on all of them simultaneously. Under capitalism, it is that the transaction is positive by currency value which incentivises its own execution. But there are lots of service industries where an undue focus on the currency value pushes us towards undesirable outcomes (necessarily on some axis besides currency value or GDP). For instance, some services are just innately incompatible with commercialisation. (Arts and culture comes to mind as one. Basic research is another.) When you attempt to offer/conduct these services under capitalism, you invariably need to moderate/regulate/limit the offering due to capital constraints. As in everything, moderation is sensible, so the next question is: are there enough people with enough influence thinking about whether we've gone too far? In a system where garnering influence is highly positively associated with accumulating capital, the answer seems self-fulfilling... [0]: https://nonzerosum.games/goodhartslaw.html --- EDIT: I just realised that the "G" in "GDP" is "gross", for being gross of depreciation ("wear and tear"). This is a pretty big revelation for me, since it probably sheds some light on why I think GDP gets undue focus. Nevertheless, I think the principle of what I said above still stands. |
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| ▲ | eru 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Your argument would at most prove that you can't have a positive sum. But it doesn't say anything about not having a negative sum. We CAN needlessly increase entropy without that benefiting anyone. It's easy. The sum doesn't have to be zero. And, of course, once you agree that the sum can go negative. Then we can work on trying to avoid that. Game theory doesn't actually care all that much about any finite offset. Whether the maximum we can reach is 0 or ten quadrillion, it's all the same to the theory. | |
| ▲ | cowpig 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > energy comes from somewhere and you have to eat food which takes from the environment, that somebody else can’t eat or some other process can’t utilize, so by a function of your existence you cost energy to maintain Your assertion that "energy comes from somewhere" seems to be borrowing a concept from thermodynamics and apply it, at the scale of the entire universe, to an opinion about the properties of economic/political system. Our planet, as a system, is unequivocally energy-positive. We are inundated with energy from the sun. Does that mean capitalism is positive-sum on Earth? | | |
| ▲ | AndrewKemendo 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | Humans can’t convert sun energy into biological energy. We aren’t plants. However we eat plants and we eat the things that eat plants. So do you consider plants and animals part of your environment or not? Is the basic requirements for having an economy being a set of humans in a society that has language and culture and exchange? There’s no free lunch Human activity takes from the non-human environment. Under an abstracted society which you could call capitalism if you like these resource extractions are done with no view to externalities and we know this because even in a basic undergraduate economics degree you will be told companies do not price externalities and there are no pricing mechanisms for externalities outside of Reactionary measures historically Again I’ll reference here the entire history of ecology and cybernetics has tried to make this abundantly clear that these are all connected and the fact that you seem befuddled about these connections tells me everything I need to know about this conversation | | |
| ▲ | when_creaks 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | In your opinion which society / nation / government in human history is closest to your ideal of how things should be? | | |
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