alansmithee

But again, they are maximizing their utility by being content in their current position. It just so happens, that they value free time more than the monentary wealth they would accumulate by working more, or in higher stress jobs. They might not be trying to increase their wealth by the highest amount, but that doesn't mean they are not increasing their utility. And now I think you are trying to redefine greed as something that is innately socially undesireable. I don't see it that way-I see greed as something necessary for progression.

If that were true, production would've been much higher then, but production is much higher now. Because of division of labor, people were able to increase production greatly. So there was more total wealth. And from what I remember from Weber, one of his claims about capitalism not being something natural to humanity was based upon the fact that ancient civilizations would pool resources.

Why would they kill off the competition if that very competition would give them a better chance of survival? If I can produce x amount of goods myself, but with my neighbor I can produce 2x+1, it's in my best interest not to kill him off, even if we are competing. Competition does not eliminate the opportunity for cooperation-not all games are zero-sum. And also, by agreeing to not kill your neighbors, you don't enter into situations where they are constantly trying to kill you. So, it increases stability (which is one of the things necessary for any sort of property ownership). Also, there were numerous times where they did indeed kill their competition. It depends on the situation, and what is best for the individual at the time.

smooth

The reason why you need to alter what I said when responding is because you keep telling me I'm wrong and that you dsagree but then you restate what I said in your own words.

Capitalism is not defined by market forces. You can look it up, or you can figure this out for yourself by realizing that a market exists in any economy. The difference is that the actors come to the market with the assets they personally own--capital. Owners own the means of production and workers own their labor power.

It's not a semantic argument. The defining characteristic of capitalism is personal ownership and personal accumulation of capital. You are incorrect that most economists would argue that capitalism has been pretty much the same for the past 200 years. I would hope that no economist believes or states this as fact because that would fly in the face of contemporary proof that various forms of capitalism exist on the planet right at this very moment. The way the US practices capitalism is very different from the way other capitalist nations practice it.

I'm not trying to redefine greed as a socially repugnant value. You stated in your own reply that people often won't mention this valuable quality because of it's negative connotations. The reverse is true, you are trying to redefine it as a necessary component of capitalism. How does your repititon of this 'fact' rebut my contention that capitalists believe people are greedy (the statement you keep telling me I'm wrong about)? It appears to me that you're validating my commentary. I was mainly speaking of the capitalists who respond to these kinds of threads. I know a much broader variety of capitalists in the real world, but the people here often seem to feel the need to disagree simply for the reason to disagree--even when they are going to state something that doesn't mesh with their own assumptions or when they aren't going to write something different from what they disagreed with.

I already explained to you that production isn't more efficient now. You can argue on the basis that more units are being made now, so that is better. But your original argument was that we are more efficient now. We aren't and this isn't something that needs to be hashed out based on your presumptions because empirical data exists demonstrating this fact.

I think it's bizarre that you are hinging our current greatness on our pooling of resources and division of labor and the cooperation of individuals rather than eliminating the competition. All of those are social behaviors--not individual behaviors. But I guess you've told yourself I'm wrong because I'm not an individualist and then defining all of our social behaviors as ultimately better for the individual...so they make sense to an individualist like yourself.

But the point that I made originally, that you so much want to rebut yet remains firmly standing, is the notion that humans aren't innately individualistic (primarily concerned with their own self-interest, or greedy, or any other way of describing the selfishness we witness in US society). It's drummed into our heads from birth and permeates our social reality despite the historical and modern evidence that humans are social creatures. We have to reaffirm that selfishness is necessary to growth or even the best way to exist because once that idea is problemetized, capitalism starts to lose its luster to the far, far, far numerous people who dont get shit by working hard their whole lives except a hard life of work. Lots of people in lots of places don't believe that selfishness is best and they are just as productive, and some moreso, than people who are individualists. The empirical evidence is that US workers are falling behind the curve--we work more and we are less productive than other workers. The fempirical evidence appears to support my position whereas your facts aren't even internally consistent.


BTW, your recollection of Weber's position is incorrect. He didn't sate that capitalism was unnatural. I don't know who you're thinking of, but it wasn't him. In fact, his position on the (hu)man rationality and drive to accumulate affluence mirrors some of your statements in these replies to me.

__________________
"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

alansmithee

Markets are not found in every economic system. In socialism, there is no market. That's one of the main problems with that system-without markets to determine prices and supply, the economy breaks down. The result-"black markets" where goods that are needed can be purchased.

It could be argued that the other nations aren't as purely capitalistic. The usual difference is just in the amount of gov't control that is put in the system, not the system itself.

But without greed, there can be no capitalism. Without people striving for more, capitalism falls apart. How does repetion of any of your opinions rebut anything I've said? You can't assume your opinions are fact, and that anyone who disagrees is automatically wrong.

More units are being produced per hour of labor. That's more efficent. You didn't explain anything, you threw out a statement that you expected to be accepted as fact. Those are two different things. How do you say we aren't more efficient now? Take agriculture for one. One of the major problems facing the ag industry is that we are TOO efficient. The same with manufacturing-we are able to produce so much with so little labor, that many people now are finding jobs being phased out. You just stating something repeatedly doesn't make it true-you aren't Dorothy and you aren't in Oz. If you want to "explain" something, it is usually necessary to provide some facts other than "because I said so". Just saying that people worked less before doesn't prove anything. If I work 20 hours, and produce x goods, and someone else works 40 hours and produces 3x goods, they are more efficient. Efficiency has nothing to due with just time, it's also a measure of production during that time.

Didn't you notice where I said earlier that we were probably more interdependant now than in previous times? Or are you so worried about proving something wrong, you don't have time to waste actually reading things you think disagree with you. If it makes sense personally, a person will cooperate. If it doesn't, they won't. This isn't a hard concept, it comes up repeatedly in history, economics, and game theory. You making some artificial division between "individualists" and... well, you never named this other mythical group is really irrelevant.

What evidence have you given? Are you just making stuff up? Where are these mythical, socialist paradises that you seem to believe in? Can you show one modern example of a country where "selfishness" isn't present, or where that selfishness hasn't propelled the country forward more? You keep talking about some collectivist ideal as if it really exists. You state I'm not internally consistent, whereas you can't even give any examples of what you believe being put into practice.


This is the first thing you've gotten correct. I was thinking of Karl Polanyi, who relied heavily upon Weber.

peterbilt1

If I may--fairness is not guaranteed anywhere in this life and not in the next. There are varying forms of attempts to institutionalize fairness (the modern labor union, for instance) in capitalism. Capitalism is merely the economic expression of the concept of consequences. Supply and demand does not have inherent moral qualities that make it good or bad. People make good and bad decisions in every system, and the consequences of these choices are usually evident. In capitalism, the consequences of daily diligence, planning, hard work, and low debt ratios are largely rewarded in a positive manner. Greed and other excessive expressions are, for the most part regulated by the government, mostly because of past experience. A consequence of Rockefeller's, for instance, resulted in reforms against monopolies (a case of greed matched up with resources). So much depends on motive and personal choice, much like the rest of life...

smooth

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

alansmithee

A black market isn't part of a socialist economy-it operates outside of that economic system entirely. There's nothing inconsistent with that. A "market" in the capitalist sense isn't just something where goods are exchanged. A market is what gives an economy information about what price things are and how much to produce. In socialism, these things aren't determined by markets, they are determined by planning.


I never said that the US is pure captialist. But the US is closer to pure capitalism than many countries in the west.

Nothing there disputes what I said. In the first secion, the numbers you list show that there's less days of labor per acre for simpler ag techniques, but they have far lower yields (based upon the amount of land necessary to feed 100 families). The second you list also produces far lower yields. It adds in outside sources to prove their point, but it's really irrelevant how much non-human energy is used in transport, refrigeration, shipping, processing, etc. That shouldn't be figured into the equation, because they ignore these factors for the New Guinea population.

Not all of Europe is more efficient, there you are wrong. Germany is more efficent by a small margin, and they do work less on average. But most European companies are less efficient than America in terms of production. And much of the reason for the US's inefficiencies has nothing to due with the supposed European greatness, but usually because the large US corporations are older and more resistant to innovation (such as in the steel industry, or automotive industry).

No, you agenda comes through more and more. You don't seek any real discussion, you are seeing things that aren't here, and are trying to show how large your e-peen is in some silly argument that you started for no reason. I think that many US corporations could learn a lot from outside countries in terms of production efficiency. I never said that the US is best-it's your own hatred/bias against the US that has lead you to believe this.

You mention the EU first. The EU is mostly made up of member nations that have stagnant economies. They have higher unemployment, and lower growth than America. China isn't using collectivistic practices-they are a model for the wonders of capitalism. Their economy is booming largely because they are export based, but also because they have started using more market systems (mainly participating in global markets). And as for Japan, their economy is in a fragile recovery from a devastating period in the '90's. Much of those problems actually arose from problems created by their protectivistic tendencies-because they didn't have accurate market information, they were unable to have accurate production, and became inefficient. The companies that are more vulnerable to market forces (generally more global concerns) unsuprisingly were not as heavily affected by their downturn. And you still aren't explaining how the advances in those places aren't in an individual context. I think India, China, South American, and Eastern European growth would show that the "US" model is still thriving in the world. The world isn't going anywhere relying upon tired concepts of communism. And you have yet to give one shred of proof to support your claim-all you have is a pretty simple America-bashing campaign. For someone who pretends to be as well-read as you are, you don't seem to have understood much. Maybe instead of trying to tell everone else what to read, you should work on understanding how things work in the real world. But now I'm sure you will come back with another tired anti-American rant. If you aren't really interested in discussion, and keep having your "individualistic" tendencies of needing to be correct constantly, don't bother.

pan6467

I seriously do not think a hybrid of the 2 could co-exist in today's world. You would have to work very hard to re-educate and and get people to want this. I think it would be impossible because of the hatred and prejudices between the 2 philosophies.

My personal opinion, unrestricted Communism or Capitalism cannot work. Both lead to the same end result as we are seeing here in the U.S. with capitalism and as the USSR saw with Communism.

Unchecked and unregulated both lead to corruption, greed, the need to acquire and control everything and the destruction of any small competition.

Look at soda, look at the media, the car companies, the airline industry, the insurance industry, the pharmaceuticals, the stores, the restaurants, etc. The true goal of capitalism is to have a more even and open ownership, with growing markets and a spreading of wealth.

Instead in the last 20 years we have seen ownership be consolidated and competition either bought or destroyed and a consolidation of wealth among the top 1-5% and wages that haven't kept up to inflation in the most heavily consolidated yet most important markets (Oil, healthcare, education, etc.) thus we see the growth of debt.

True capitalism would not run on debt, because eventually debt leads to the destruction of the economy.

True communism can work in small communities but overall greed and man's need and desire to have a leader and some form of government over a nation leads to nationalistic Facism. The USSR was NOT a communist government. It was very much a nationalistic fascist dictatorship. And eventually the US will if we continue this psuedo capitalism we are following.

The only true mix that could work is a the right combination of a Communism/Socialism/Capitalism hybrid.

__________________
I just love people who use the excuse "I use/do this because I LOVE the feeling/joy/happiness it brings me" and expect you to be ok with that as you watch them destroy their life blindly following. My response is, "I like to put forks in an eletrical socket, just LOVE that feeling, can't ever get enough of it, so will you let me put this copper fork in that electric socket?"

smooth

I didn't start an argument with you, alansmith. You quoted my comments in this discussion and the first thing out of your mouth was an insult that I didn't understand capitalism. That's what started the discussion between us, and everyone reading this has the ability to page back and look for themselves as to who started this "silly argument" despite your contention to the contrary.

You closed with a stream of insults: me still not understanding capitalism, or even what a market is!, that I pretend to be well read, but I don't even understand what I read.

If anyone's got something on their shoulder, or something to prove about an e-penis or whatever, it's clearly coming through in your posts. I haven't once personally insulted you, instead I've sat here and patiently fielded your inaccurate assumptions and allegations about how the "real world" works and what capitalism is or what it ought to do. I even sat here and typed out an entire chapter of a book to support my position, which you casually disregarded as anti-US commentary.

The only thing you took from all of what I've written is an anti-American bashing campaign, which has to make rational people reading this dialog wonder just where the hell you pulled that from. Perhaps you thought that all along and you've just been waiting to lay it out there. It's a non-sequitor to what I wrote, especially since I never once limited my analysis to US capitalism/capitalists; but there it is, wafting like a lingering fart for everyone in the room to smell.

The closest I guess I came to speaking negatively about US in particular was when I said that our culture emphasizes greed but that in general our attitudes about greed are that it's an undesirable trait. How that goes against America is beyond me, especially since you argued back that greed is a necessary ingredient for capitalism, and the US is the closest thing to pure capitalism, and that I'm trying to redefine greed as something negatve (?!).

But much of what you wrote has been beyond me, and I now understand why: evidently I have an inability to understand the things that I read and write. I'm functionally illiterate. Lucky for me, someone on the internet was able to straighten me out about the real world.

smooth is anti-america because smooth doesn't understand capitalism because smooth said that capitalists think things about human nature that don't seem to mesh with how they think their economy works: to wit, people are greedy and lazy but they are driven to maximize their production by invisible market forces

that's a pretty good way to end a discussion, yeah, I agree. When insults didn't work, and I didnt kowtow to your definitions and framing of the discussion, you decided to boldly just tell me to quit talking....way to go, dude.

__________________
"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

Ustwo

Umm lets go back to your post on this...

You brought up marxist theory for some reason, and this is not a true evolution but more of a 'you are what you do, how you work' sort of thing (we had this discussion in philosophy at some point).

So you say that shifting economies will bring about new humans? I say hogwash. We are the same as we have been since before the last ice age. Our motivations, and our nature has not changed. Culture may change but only as it fits our predetermined nature.

So while in many, many, many generations we may 'change' into people who would naturally tend tword a communist system, we currently are not well designed for it.

As for human nature, no you don't set up a government and change human nature to work with it. That is what communism does and that is why it will always fail to achieve anything beyond brutal dicatorship. What you do is pick your government with what works best with human nature. Capitalism does this, and no one will claim its perfect, and its very unfair, but it works well and affords us the most freedom.

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Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host

Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps.

alansmithee

The reason I said you were anti-american, was because at every chance you chose to drop US into the discussion, smoo. I wasn't limiting myself to the US, and it was you who started bringing that up first. I didn't make a single insult, that was your domain. And it was you who was trying to force your distorted definitions into your argument. And I didn't say quit talking, I was merely saying that if all you could do is throw insults and didn't feel like having a conversation, but wanted a podium to measure your e-peen, that I wasn't interested in watching you attempt to stroke your ego. So, way to go yourself, you attempted to turn a discussion into an internet flashing contest.

smooth

I finally found that discussion and I responded to you there. You paraphrased marx, and according to this, "I haven't read Marx in I don't know how long, and without context I'll have some fun with this." -- http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...97&postcount=8

You weren't sure of yourself that you were interpreting what he was writing about.
"We" never had a discussion on that, and you are the only who said Marx' theory is basically 'we are what we do, how we work' and you never mentioned anywhere in that post that it wasn't a 'true' evolutionary theory.

If's odd, he published his theory on the economy at the same time Darwin was publishing Origin. He wanted to dedicate it to Darwin, but didn't receive a warm welcome. A number of analogous points are in both works. I don't know how you conclude that it's not a true evolutionary theory, though, as you haven't articulated your reasoning on that.

I actually didnt' say in my first post that changing economies will change humans, that's Marx. But in the master's I just finallly finished I argued that perhaps the youth deviance I witnessed in my ethnography was due in part to the lack of economic opportunities and formal social structures. Beaurdieu (sp.), long after Marx and still trying to grapple with the tension between agency vs. structure, would write about habitus. Recently, Williams Julius Wilson speculated on the lack of habitus and its effects on urban black youth violence in chicago. there's actually a long trajectory of deviance research coming from chicago. In fact, my discipline has it's roots in what sociologists and criminologists refer to as the "chicago school." They drew correlations between human behavior (deviance, in particular) and the ecology they were developing within. And if you remember your biology, you might remember what biomes were. The program I'm in views that as too deterministic, at least it used to when it was founded, and emphasized the social ecology.

But basically, the only reason I brough marx up at all was to respond to someone's notion that we would have to change the way we think before we could enact any kind of economic change in this thread. So I posed that if Marx' theory of historical materialism was correct, and given the fact that we're changing economic relations right now, both globally and locally, then our relations to one another are going to change and result in new concepts about ourselves.

Some people can take historical materialism without the notion that we move in ever increasing steps of progress. I personally think he made a fundamental error in his logic there on the nature of progress due to his view on human beings (he being a product of a particular social context, himself). But then Weber thought we were progressing too, but toward rationality and beaucracy...which then it'd become more cyclical, as Michel would say All of them thought we were marching forward in a linear fashion. I'd say it's more wavish myself.

__________________
"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

NCB

Communism and capitalism are incompatiable. Just ask the Pilgrims, for they started with the idea that each member of the community was entitled to one share of the output of the community. The community leaders told the villagers what to plant and how much to plant. It failed miserably; people starved, got sick, ect...

They eventually scraped the idea and allowed the community to plant what they want and how much they want. They thrived, and thus began the Thanksgiving tradition.

Bottomline: Communism has failed everytime its tried.

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