Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - I challenge us: Merge Capitalism w/ Communism and make it work.

smooth · 12-29-2005, 02:16 PM

Well, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that you would tell me that socialist systems don't have a market (what?) and then in the same sentence tell me that socialism breeds 'black' (informal) markets...but that's what I've been complaining about all along--your internal inconsistencies. Where do you get the idea that socialist economies don't engage in a market? Or assuming you're correct that black markets would rise (as if they don't exist in capitalist economies), how is that not a "market"? Markets exist in any system where people exhange goods. The difference in capitalism is that the participants individually own the goods being exchanged.

Are you suggesting the US economy is a pure capitalist system? That's the only reason your critique of other systems as non-pure would even be relevent to what I stated.

Actually, I expected you to go look up what I told you. I said it was fact that we are less energy efficient than before. You deny that fact, and you're wrong. Now I have to type a bunch of shit out because you are too lazy to look it up yourself (perhaps that your capitalist persona seeping through, but I sure hope you'd maximize your utility in this conversation and do some of your own footwork when you're talking about something you apparently are only basing on speculation)

"The Transition to Agriculture"
There is a perspective on culural evolution that views the change from hunting and gathering to modern, industrial society less as development or progress and more as a necessary evil. This perspective emphasizes the influences of population growth and population density, the number of people living in a given area. To understand this point of view, we need to examine the transition from hunting-gathering to agriculture, aslo exploring the reasons for the eventual change from relatively simply slash and burn agriculture to more complex labor intensive irrigation agriculture...

...Anthropologist Mark Cohen set out to explain why individuals or groups abandoned hunting and gathering for agriculture, and why so many didi so in relatively short period of time. [synopsis: people roamed around looking for food. Eventually population sizes increased to the point where they started bumping into one another and had to move iaround increasingly larger spaces to gather the food they needed. So they began to cultivate their own crops] Cohen points out that anthropological and archeological evidence suggests they knew how to do this all along, but chose instead to gather crops until the labor involved in traveling to new food sources surpassed the labor involved in growing their own crops. In other words, the historical transition from hunting and gathering to simple agriculture was a necessary consequence of the growth of the population density, rather than a consequence of a discovery or invention that was adopted because it made life better (emphasis mine)...Cohen and others argue that agriculture didn't make life better at all; in fact, it made it worse (we'll explore that claim a little later in this chapter).

[synopsis: H&G transitioned to swidden agriculture (slash & burn). It's highly efficient, but requires huge tracts of land that need to remain dormant after the burn. When population density rises or land decreases, we make increasingly complex methods to produce food. Yet these more complex methods always require more labor. Here's a table:

advanced swidden days of labor per acre (D/a) 18-25
plow cultivation D/a 20
hoe cultivation D/a 58
irrigation agriculture D/a 90-178

(source: Eric Wolf, Peasants[i/] Inglewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall 1966)

Land needed to feed 100 families using different agricultural methods:
swidden 3000
swidden w/ garden plots 1600
irrigation 90-200

/synopsis

"The views of anthropologists such as Cohen and Carneiro suggest that the historica lchange of societies from gathering and hunting to gradually ore labor intensive methods of agriculture was not a matter of choice. S&B wasn't easier than G&H, and plow and irrigation wasn't more efficient than S&B...Isn't it safe to say that Western society, particularly within the US, has ag techniques that are vastly superior to those of small-scale tribal societies?

"Producing Potato Calories"
John Bodley compared the production of sweet potatoes in New Guinea with potato production in the US. They slash and burn and cook the sweet potatoes in fire pits. Sweet potatoes account for 21 percent of their diet and they feed excess to pigs, thus producing protein and acounting for an even larger proportion of their diet. They only use 10% of their arable land and there is no danger of resource depletion. With their technique, the NG populaton can produce about 5 mil calories per acre.
American potato farmers produce more than twice as many calories per acre as NG--about 12 mil per acre. However, the US system also expends vast amounts of non-human energy in this production technique...Thus, while the American system produced more potatoes, the actual energy costs per calorie were lower in NG. Moreever, this doesn't account for hidden costs like health problems from toxic chemicals, soil erosion, and pollution.
Americans must also deal with the distribution costs. Taking the food industry as a whole, calculating all the energy expenditure from machinery and trucking/shipping, refrigeration, processing, and etc. Americans expend 8 to 12 calories of energy to produce a single calorie of food!

Western agricultural techniques are wasteful and inefficient. Examine the production of potato chips on page 45. Examine the cost of a Twinkie on page 77. (a twinkie costs around a $1 but if all the costs of production were included and not subsidized by a nation-state, the real cost would be around $10).

Have fun! And if you want to read more than I've typed out, pick up Cultural Anthropology: A problem based approach 3rd ed by Richard Robbins and read chapter 2, The Meaning of Progress.

But I made two seperate claims: 1) previous systems of "work" were more energy efficient than modern food production (evidence now given) and 2) current manufacturing processes are less efficient in the US than abroad. I'm not going to type out another chapter for you. Go look it up. Workers in Europe are more productive per hour per widget produced than our US workers. They work less hours and they get more done. Sorry to say, whatever our greatness as a nation hinges upon, it certainly is not based on the fact of our efficiency as workers.

Well, if you examine your assumptions you'll be able to discern that, once again, you're holding incompatible views on human labor in the US. If we are the most capitalist system, and capitalism requires greedy people, and greedy people maximize their input while attempting to limit their expenditure, then how could you conclude we have the most efficient worker? You couldn't. The problem is that you want to believe we are the best, have the best workers, have the best economy, have the best governance, and all other things have to be squashed together to make sense of that reality in your mind--even if they are incompatible with one another.

AFAIK, I didn't make any mention of any "socialist paradises." But that comment pretty much demonstrates where you're coming from when you keep arguing with me with baseless assertions. If you want a modern example of collectivism propelling a nation, look no further than up North. And then look across the ocean to the EU. And then look over toward China. And then take a glance at Taiwan....maybe peek at Japan. I guess you can't really spin a globe without landing somewhere where great advances in productivity and progress are being made in a non-individualistic context. The shear magnitude of that phenomena, the notion that capitalism is changing and US flavor of it is not the vanguard, hasn't quite hit the average person in the US yet as your comments indicate. We still, by and large, simulataneously believe that "greed is good" yet discourage it in public spaces. We still think it's necessary to growth, yet the rest of the world is moving on...and we risk being left behind when it does.

12-29-2005, 02:16 PM	#45 (permalink)
smooth Junkie Location: Right here	Well, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that you would tell me that socialist systems don't have a market (what?) and then in the same sentence tell me that socialism breeds 'black' (informal) markets...but that's what I've been complaining about all along--your internal inconsistencies. Where do you get the idea that socialist economies don't engage in a market? Or assuming you're correct that black markets would rise (as if they don't exist in capitalist economies), how is that not a "market"? Markets exist in any system where people exhange goods. The difference in capitalism is that the participants individually own the goods being exchanged. Are you suggesting the US economy is a pure capitalist system? That's the only reason your critique of other systems as non-pure would even be relevent to what I stated. Actually, I expected you to go look up what I told you. I said it was fact that we are less energy efficient than before. You deny that fact, and you're wrong. Now I have to type a bunch of shit out because you are too lazy to look it up yourself (perhaps that your capitalist persona seeping through, but I sure hope you'd maximize your utility in this conversation and do some of your own footwork when you're talking about something you apparently are only basing on speculation) "The Transition to Agriculture" There is a perspective on culural evolution that views the change from hunting and gathering to modern, industrial society less as development or progress and more as a necessary evil. This perspective emphasizes the influences of population growth and population density, the number of people living in a given area. To understand this point of view, we need to examine the transition from hunting-gathering to agriculture, aslo exploring the reasons for the eventual change from relatively simply slash and burn agriculture to more complex labor intensive irrigation agriculture... ...Anthropologist Mark Cohen set out to explain why individuals or groups abandoned hunting and gathering for agriculture, and why so many didi so in relatively short period of time. [synopsis: people roamed around looking for food. Eventually population sizes increased to the point where they started bumping into one another and had to move iaround increasingly larger spaces to gather the food they needed. So they began to cultivate their own crops] Cohen points out that anthropological and archeological evidence suggests they knew how to do this all along, but chose instead to gather crops until the labor involved in traveling to new food sources surpassed the labor involved in growing their own crops. In other words, the historical transition from hunting and gathering to simple agriculture was a necessary consequence of the growth of the population density, rather than a consequence of a discovery or invention that was adopted because it made life better (emphasis mine)...Cohen and others argue that agriculture didn't make life better at all; in fact, it made it worse (we'll explore that claim a little later in this chapter). [synopsis: H&G transitioned to swidden agriculture (slash & burn). It's highly efficient, but requires huge tracts of land that need to remain dormant after the burn. When population density rises or land decreases, we make increasingly complex methods to produce food. Yet these more complex methods always require more labor. Here's a table: advanced swidden days of labor per acre (D/a) 18-25 plow cultivation D/a 20 hoe cultivation D/a 58 irrigation agriculture D/a 90-178 (source: Eric Wolf, Peasants[i/] Inglewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall 1966) Land needed to feed 100 families using different agricultural methods: swidden 3000 swidden w/ garden plots 1600 irrigation 90-200 /synopsis "The views of anthropologists such as Cohen and Carneiro suggest that the historica lchange of societies from gathering and hunting to gradually ore labor intensive methods of agriculture was not a matter of choice. S&B wasn't easier than G&H, and plow and irrigation wasn't more efficient than S&B...Isn't it safe to say that Western society, particularly within the US, has ag techniques that are vastly superior to those of small-scale tribal societies? "Producing Potato Calories" John Bodley compared the production of sweet potatoes in New Guinea with potato production in the US. They slash and burn and cook the sweet potatoes in fire pits. Sweet potatoes account for 21 percent of their diet and they feed excess to pigs, thus producing protein and acounting for an even larger proportion of their diet. They only use 10% of their arable land and there is no danger of resource depletion. With their technique, the NG populaton can produce about 5 mil calories per acre. American potato farmers produce more than twice as many calories per acre as NG--about 12 mil per acre. However, the US system also expends vast amounts of non-human energy in this production technique...Thus, while the American system produced more potatoes, the actual energy costs per calorie were lower in NG. Moreever, this doesn't account for hidden costs like health problems from toxic chemicals, soil erosion, and pollution. Americans must also deal with the distribution costs. Taking the food industry as a whole, calculating all the energy expenditure from machinery and trucking/shipping, refrigeration, processing, and etc. Americans expend 8 to 12 calories of energy to produce a single calorie of food! Western agricultural techniques are wasteful and inefficient. Examine the production of potato chips on page 45. Examine the cost of a Twinkie on page 77. (a twinkie costs around a $1 but if all the costs of production were included and not subsidized by a nation-state, the real cost would be around $10). Have fun! And if you want to read more than I've typed out, pick up Cultural Anthropology: A problem based approach 3rd ed by Richard Robbins and read chapter 2, The Meaning of Progress. But I made two seperate claims: 1) previous systems of "work" were more energy efficient than modern food production (evidence now given) and 2) current manufacturing processes are less efficient in the US than abroad. I'm not going to type out another chapter for you. Go look it up. Workers in Europe are more productive per hour per widget produced than our US workers. They work less hours and they get more done. Sorry to say, whatever our greatness as a nation hinges upon, it certainly is not based on the fact of our efficiency as workers. Well, if you examine your assumptions you'll be able to discern that, once again, you're holding incompatible views on human labor in the US. If we are the most capitalist system, and capitalism requires greedy people, and greedy people maximize their input while attempting to limit their expenditure, then how could you conclude we have the most efficient worker? You couldn't. The problem is that you want to believe we are the best, have the best workers, have the best economy, have the best governance, and all other things have to be squashed together to make sense of that reality in your mind--even if they are incompatible with one another. AFAIK, I didn't make any mention of any "socialist paradises." But that comment pretty much demonstrates where you're coming from when you keep arguing with me with baseless assertions. If you want a modern example of collectivism propelling a nation, look no further than up North. And then look across the ocean to the EU. And then look over toward China. And then take a glance at Taiwan....maybe peek at Japan. I guess you can't really spin a globe without landing somewhere where great advances in productivity and progress are being made in a non-individualistic context. The shear magnitude of that phenomena, the notion that capitalism is changing and US flavor of it is not the vanguard, hasn't quite hit the average person in the US yet as your comments indicate. We still, by and large, simulataneously believe that "greed is good" yet discourage it in public spaces. We still think it's necessary to growth, yet the rest of the world is moving on...and we risk being left behind when it does. __________________ "The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." -- Walter Lippmann "You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." -- Abbie Hoffman Last edited by smooth; 12-29-2005 at 02:21 PM..