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Scientists Warn the UN of Capitalism's Imminent Demise (vice.com)
Capitalism as we know it is over, an anonymous reader writes. So suggests a new report commissioned by a group of scientists appointed by the UN Secretary-General. From a report: The main reason? We're transitioning rapidly to a radically different global economy, due to our increasingly unsustainable exploitation of the planet's environmental resources. Climate change and species extinctions are accelerating even as societies are experiencing rising inequality, unemployment, slow economic growth, rising debt levels, and impotent governments. Contrary to the way policymakers usually think about these problems, the new report says that these are not really separate crises at all. Rather, these crises are part of the same fundamental transition to a new era characterized by inefficient fossil fuel production and the escalating costs of climate change. Conventional capitalist economic thinking can no longer explain, predict, or solve the workings of the global economy in this new age, the paper says [PDF].
Shit's falling down, brah
Get out of the way. You can thank me later.
- CL
I love how people use the word "scientists". It is a completely meaningless term which is supposed to engender feelings of respect. Are these people applying the scientific method to any of their research, or are they just a bunch of lifelong academics looking to avoid real work.
The problem in a sandbox is better seen in Europe where the Euro is building tensions rather than relieving them. Earlier it was Greece that was the problem, now Italy is sailing up as the next big problem with a debt of 130% of the GDP.
Virtual currencies like Dogecoin, Bitcoin, Monero etc. with no actual backing at all will be like ping-pong balls in a hurricane, flying all over the place rendering some people winners and others losers.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
This time socialism will totally work for the whole world, because the *right* people will be in charge and won't be greedy, or self-interested, or power hungry like those awful capitalists. Because they're *scientists.*
TANSTAAFL
Are you telling me that struggles with climate change, scarcity of natural resources and so on will just vanish into thin air by embracing Socialism or perhaps a Fascist dictatorship, or Communist rule? These issues somehow ONLY cause problems for people living in Capitalist systems?
I've got some news for the Capitalist haters out there .... The majority of innovations in technology that will help the whole planet transition to cleaner forms of energy, and possibly even mitigate some of the climate change issues are being developed in Capitalist America.
If the American Capitalist system fails, it won't be for any of these reasons. It'll simply be due to our leaders constantly increasing the levels of our national debt, in efforts to extend and expand the role of central government into all sorts of areas it was never originally intended to get that involved with. The nation only generates so much wealth each year, and it's a recipe for disaster to keep spending more than what's sustainable.
Nothing the U.N. produces is worth anything outside of political agendas.
With sufficient climate change, the demand for resources will fall enough that there should be plenty left for the survivors. /s
These developing countries do not need to begin by dismantling the fossil-fuelled infrastructure that has provided a range of low-cost production and consumption opportunities in rich countries for decades.
This would require economic thinking that enables large public investment programs on the one hand and strong regulation and environmental caps on the other.
Same old leftist/establishment group think, now new and improved with added Scientists!
Stay tuned; next week we'll have headlines about how "science" isn't universally trusted as impartial and what a terrible shame that is.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
[SARCASM] How do we give up our rights as sovereign nations in order to have 1 ruler care for us and the environment?! [/SARCASM]
I would posit that forms of government are much more likely to change more quickly than economic systems. As resources (water and food especially) become more scarce and people become increasingly desperate, I envision that harsher forms of government rule will take hold in places like Central America to try and quash any uprising. Venezuela is a bit of a canary in that regard, showing just what can occur when resources are limited (artificially in their case, since the scarcity is driven by an oppressive government and not the other way around). I would expect increasing mass migration and refugees, putting strains on first-world nations which will, in turn, have to tighten their rule. Capitalism will continue to be around until fiat currency falls due to weak or no government backing, at which time we'll move back into a barter economy until (if) new government is established.
...except for all the rest. Or, at least, that's how the saying goes.
Given that capitalism is fundamentally based on an assumption of greed, which seems to be a fairly consistent trait among humans, it has functioned remarkably well up to this point. But given enough time and not enough regulation, it's inevitable that the greed of some will outpace that of others, resulting in the system approaching a state where wealth has accumulated in the hands of a few, as well as that those who (or that which) are less capable of defending themselves will inevitably be exploited by those who are more capable. For us, that means the exploitation of the middle-class, the lower-class, and the things we share with the wealthy, such as our shared natural resources. Unsurprisingly, this sort of exploitation is exactly what we're seeing happen on a more and more frequent basis.
I think parts of the US are slowly waking up to that fact, but a cultural awakening of this sort usually takes decades or generations to complete. We're just starting to recognize the problem. It'll be decades more before we're willing to fix it. And, at least in the case of the US, the necessary changes will almost certainly require changes to the Constitution, but we won't be able to make those changes until the people are demanding those changes en masse, and we're nowhere close to that point yet.
The problem is the energy and agriculture sector is so far apart from the free market.
There is so much government subsidies to energy that it makes it more affordable vs the true cost.
True Capitalism would let countries die from starvation and freezing to death, because the supply and cost of materials to survive would exceed the wages of the business, due to excessive human supply.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
What kind of scientists are experts on social and government construct, and associated economics? Political scientists?
I hope they wore their white lab coats.
Can someone tell me which hypothesis they tested and what data set they used to draw these conclusions.
This is more like fortune telling the 'science'. Hypothesis, experiment, data , conclusion.
This is a lot of why science gets a bad reputation in some circles. These 'scientists' are speaking far beyond what their data and experiments can prove and instead are pushing the hypothesis as if it were true.
That's not to say they 'aren't' right, just that at some point the fact that a scientist says something unscientific doesn't make it any more 'right' then if an English professor does the same.
Also, to take note of is 'what kind of scientist' the article went down before I could read this maybe someone else will have more luck, by sociologist and economists psychologist are not strictly 'scientist' they are involved is 'soft sciences' are about halfway between a real science and pure philosophy. If you study any of them you quickly find out that they play be a whole set of different 'rules' than physicist or engineers, but they like to claim their conclusions have just as much force, which they cannot because their evidence is always considerably less certain.
Conventional capitalist economic thinking can no longer explain, predict, or solve the workings of the global economy in this new age
Could it ever? Sorry to burst every economist bubble, but apart from pure mathematical models (game theory, etc) economists were able to explain a total sum of zero... sure, it can "predict" events in the past but all models went on to fail miserably predicting future events or tendencies. I call that useless pseudo-science.
And capitalism was always about being reactive and not really predictive... doing good was more a matter of being in the right place at the right time than anything else. All the rest was about being reactive (reacting to markets, reacting to people wants, reacting to shareholders, reacting, reacting, reacting...).
This is talking about how capitalism is driving inefficient and fossil fuel based plans that are leading to climate change?
last I checked it seemed like the biggest polluters were non-capitalist countries (China being one of the biggest).
Capitalism from what I've seen does a lot more to drive innovation and efficiencies. Along with that, unless your vision is very short sited, depleting the source of your future products at an unsustainable level makes no sense. This is again where innovation and adapting come along.
Based on their argument, I really don't see how capitalism really relates to this at all.
It's a short 5 page essay masquerading as research. Dunning Kruger effect is strong with the authors. They effectively think it's too difficult to fix the system, so we should wipe it clean and start from scratch. Obviously, their new system will be perfect.
Now we just need to start educating people on what a social democracy actually is, since we've let thinktank dipshits say everything but rampant laissez faire capitalism means the government just take's everyone's stuff.
You're already living in a relatively fascist society thanks to the right and centrist liberals. You're spied on, can be disappeared with no trial for any reason someone can just make up, the cops can just shoot you dead for any reason they feel like any get away with it about 90% of the time, capital is working on basically owning the IDEA of ideas, and if you're not the top 0.0001% every system is made to deny you any sort of help and funnel your money to said 0.0001%.
I think maybe kicking these people out for people who maybe, possibly think you deserve an ounce of dignity if you're not ultra-rich isn't really that crazy. Yeah- they're all wholly corruptible as any of us but that's not really an excuse for inaction.
We have perverse incentives, where even the real estate agent and health insurance company that should be working for you have a vested interest in maximizing what you pay someone else because it raises the dollar amount of their fixed percentage profit. And never mind that it might be tens of thousands of dollars out of your pocket to get them a couple extra hundred. We can also count un-serviceable consumer electronics and really any product where "planned obsolescence" is a factor.
Moral hazards, where folks who know that someone else will bear the cost of a loss do nothing to mitigate the loss (know anyone who's diabetic that doesn't eat right because they've got insurance that'll cover treating the resulting problems?)â" or even act to cause a covered loss because they've got an angle where they can profit from it. See also any company that knows it's "too big to fail" and any company that's managed to protect it's financials, HR records, and trade secrets while having their customers' data liberated.
And finally, the tragedy of the commons, where common resources are monopolized, damaged, or destroyed for the profit of a select few. Here we have oil spills fracking, water pollution, industrial air pollution, etc.
The problem isn't capitalism. It's that we live in such a hyper-competitive world that old niches are disappearing and it's a struggle to find new ones where we can add value to earn an honest buck and get a decent standard of living. For some it's easier to find and exploit flaws in the system to make a great profit while fob off the actual costs on "the other guy."
what about the report on student loans? or is usa only not fitting into the USA plans.
From what? Do you really live in the illusion you get to choose? Did you choose where you were born? Who your parents were/ are? The language you speak first?
Did you choose education you were given?
There are only two rationally sustainable world views on freedom:
1) Freedom exists as a gift , granted to us by a transcendent and absolute truth which is also a will or a being and is the cause of the physical forces and the whole universe as well as all ethical and moral principles.
We are free in as much as we are allowed by that being to choose or reject what is good.
OR
2) freedom is an illusion , all human beings are simply the composite of their environment and genetics absolute truth does not exist ( or is unknowable) and personal desires of a human being no more or less important then those of an ape or an elephant. In which case as pavlov (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Pavlov) was prone to say. "The sooner we get over this idea that free will exists and go about governing the human race, the better off we will all be".
HINT: If something inside you tells you that the second option 'just can't be true' you are right, because the cause of the universe within the first option has made every creature in such a way that experience draws them towards truth. Your desire can be your first piece of evidence in a long discovery of what is true and false. Or try to embrace number 2 fully and feel the utter coldness and meaninglessness of that world view, perhaps then you will realize it is incorrect.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
But it does seem likely that Capitalism will face a set of challenges mid-late century I'm not sure it's equipped for. Capitalism always requires emerging & growth markets to sustain itself, thus the projection of population leveling off might become a cause for concern.
Resource scarcity seems to be sensationalized constantly but never materialize, peak oil has likely happened but technology has always kept enough of a pace with more difficult sources or we transition to new energy sources.
But population decline? Eventually, you won't be able to convince people to buy more useless material goods and markets will slow. That or AI might decimate your consumer market. Either option I see as pretty likely mid-century and a big challenge to traditional market capitalism.
So... Capitalism is the problem...
All of those extremists that said Global Warming was a proxy for Socialist Communist totalitarianism... were right ?
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
Actually, your headline is about as accurate as the summary's in that calling them chickens is about as accurate as calling them scientists. The lead author, Paavo Järvensivu, is a independent researcher of economic culture which is not science, the next author is a PhD student in the Department of Political and Economic Studies at Helsinki (again not science), and the next two authors appear to be philosophers only the last author claims to be a scientist.
that a Marxist front organization doesn't think Capitalism will last?
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Really? Last quarter in the US GDP growth was 4.1% annualised. Unemployment is so low businesses are crying for a lack of workers, which is awesome for the workers since then they will be offered benefits and training.
Which planet are these scientists living on and why the fuck are my taxes paying for their salaries?
Thanks for being honest: the UN is just using climate change as a tool to push socialist/fascist economic ideas.
Thanks, but no thanks. Civilization can easily deal with 2-5C global warming; civilization cannot survive the kind of totalitarian system these people want to put in place.
Because Capitalism works and communism doesn't.
That's why the Soviet Evil Empire is gone.
Corporatism != Free Market
Have you ever wondered why governments seem unable to solve global problems like climate change, wealth inequality and mass migration?
But have you ever considered that it’s not that governments don’t want to act on these problems, but that they can't? Their need to keep their national economies attractive to international capital and investors makes it impossible for them to prioritize society or the environment, so things only get worse.
What if you could help release governments from competing for capital so they could cooperate for our future? What if you could be part of a global movement that allows us to use our votes in a completely new way to drive governments to cooperate?
https://simpol.org/
at least some of them are likely applying the scientific method to their research.
Which "method" would that be?
Is it the one where they conduct repeatable experiments?
How about the method where they take quantitative readings of known, agreed, observations and then extrapolate the results?
Maybe it is the method where a group of people have a few beers and bemoan the propspects for the world. Then (after a few more beers) arrive at the conclusion that we're all doomed.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Somebody's been drinking the Kommie Kool-Aid again...
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
None of them are economists. They are biological/environmental scientists.
THis is about as stupid as reading the far right scream that AGW is not real, and few of those claiming it, have even a degree in Climate, and most are not even scientists.
Now, with that said, much of what they claim is factual. The environment is being heavily polluted all around. Worst yet, we have boneheads all over claiming that we must allow large portions of the population to pollute, while claiming that a small portion drop to zero (so foolish).
Then they go on to point out how little energy comes on the AE side. Basically, we CAN/SHOULD get energy from wind/solar/hydro/etc BUT, it can/should not be the main sources. Oddly, the one source that can be cheap, is nuclear power and yet, they ignore it.
Without nuclear power, the globe IS in for SERIOUS trouble. We need to STOP ALL building out of new fossil fuel, esp. coal, plants. At its best, coal remains a disaster.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
*cluck cluck* Motherfucker.
I tend to rant.
You have already given up your freedom by choosing to be part of a society. That is literally the point of a society.
Grading poorly written term papers and essays isn't my job.
Let me know when there's something to take seriously.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
Globalism (outsourcing) and automation has made raw labor cheaper, but population growth and perhaps climate change have made (good) land and its resources more scarce. The rich buy up all the land and thus all the profit flows up to the rich, leaving huge inequality. It indeed seems to be turning into a Winner-Take-All economy.
Table-ized A.I.
Supposedly it is the only economic system compatible with mans nature;
Capitalism is "the astonishing belief that the nastiest motives of the nastiest men somehow or other work for the best results in the best of all possible worlds"- jmk
Subject-matter-experts are not necessarily "scientists" in the strictest sense. Good science takes reproducability of an observation or experiment. However, "God" only lets us fiddle with one planet, and if our experiment gets overly bold and goes sour, we are the lab-rats that die.
Thus, a lot of extrapolation and guess-work go into such analysis; and it could be tainted by political bias and group-think. Therefore, we should take such studies with a grain of salt. However, it's good to ponder the possibilities and be prepared rather than caught with our brains down. It's a warning light, not the final say. But warning lights deserve attention nevertheless.
Table-ized A.I.
The part you miss is the banks were almost entirely national banks from fellow Euro nations. The same banks the Greeks would have been going back to for their next loans (or more correctly loan rejections). Leaving the Greeks in the gentile hands of the Chinese bankers...Which would have been as close to justice as the world generates.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Unless you're going to eliminate greed from the human psyche, you're better off with a system designed to harness it, than one that works against human nature. In Socialist systems, you often get a very small set of greedy, power hungry people running the government that get all sorts of benefits while the populace suffers. Once those running the government are entrenched, it's nearly impossible to get rid of them. In Capitalism, you have far more people producing and making decisions. You also have market power to displace those people as others come along with better ideas and products. There's much better balance when you admit people are greedy and accept that fact.
What do you call a system where the rich eat everyone else or burn them in their power plants? Or is this the premise for a science fiction movie / series?
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
The discipline of economics has 'accurately' predicted everything. It has also inaccurately predicted a much larger set of outcomes.
The problem is there is not one 'economics' and politicians pick the ones telling them what they want to hear.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
This.
Really hard to imagine what the "insightful" mod is for. Maybe the sig? Nothing in the story about "socialism", so that can't be it. Some sort of insight in attacking double-quoted scientists? Yeah, that's probably how Slashdot works now.
I think the real problem is that economists are too stupid and lazy. They focus on money because it's easy to count. "The light is better over here." These are not the solutions you're looking for, but you (that's y'all plus the economists) don't know where else to look.
When you rethink things in terms of time, the situation suddenly becomes much more clear. But is a Slashdot discussion worth the effort to rehash Ekronomics 101 yet one more time? I guess not. Yeah, it might lead towards a solution approach, but what's that got to do with the price of tea in China? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_that_got_to_do_with_the...%3F needs a Slashdot version?)
So how about the topic of pro-freedom anti-greedom taxation to help drive the solutions? It's surprisingly relevant if you're thinking about the problems from the time-based perspective. But again, it doesn't seem worth the effort here.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
There are only two rationally sustainable world views on freedom:
1) Freedom exists as a gift , granted to us by a transcendent and absolute truth which is also a will or a being and is the cause of the physical forces and the whole universe as well as all ethical and moral principles.
OR
2) freedom is an illusion , all human beings are simply the composite of their environment and genetics absolute truth does not exist ( or is unknowable) and personal desires of a human being no more or less important then those of an ape or an elephant.
This is a false dichotomy. There could be a deity, and it could be the case that said deity does not grant free will to us (as the Calvinists believe, in essence). It could also be the case that no divine beings exist, but we are self-directed agents. The universe is nondeterministic.
By being in a society you have chosen to accept constraints on your freedom - but there are many kinds of freedom still available in any society, even if you do not have complete freedom.
From 0 to 18000 kronor you have 0 tax. Sure 18000 kronor is not much (2000 dollar yearly!) but then up to 460K kronor, that is 50K dollar yearly the tax rate is only about 30%. So far off your 76%. In fact only the top marginal tax have 76% and ONLY if you count the VAT (the top tax is 57% not 76% and if you count 25% from VAT then only then you come near 70% at most and that is assuming you think all tax goes to the same entity the state, which is untrue as about 20% of that is municipality). So I would qualify your claim as not only untrue, but if the people having less than 70K$ per year have any brain they will vote to continue the system.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
"...large public investment..." - hahahahahaha
nothing to see here - move along
Put ANY economic system in play and there will always be people who game the system to their advantage. Greed, power, whatever your thing is.
So go ahead and blame Capitalism, next blame Socialism, Communism, then Whateverism. (My favorite) If people are involved, there will be corruption and exploitation for someones benefit. (mainly their own)
Proving repeatable, testable hypotheses is indeed doing science.
Extrapolating a trend based on a single and limited metric is statistics but not science. You cannot model the entire system accurately to do extrapolation and whenever we've tried we screw shit up. Nature tends to behave like a PID regulator so it corrects and oscillates.
What does this mean: most likely an extinction event will suddenly (over a timespan of 10,000 years or so) wipe out large mammals. Then large swathes of land and ocean will be barren safe for a few smaller animals that will adapt into the new environment and fill it up again (over 100k-1M years).
What can we do: nothing much. If we've stepped over the threshold then we can't stop the system from responding. If we can't stop hurricanes or weather patterns, we're doomed. We can maybe slow down or delay things by maybe one or two human lifespans but the only solution we can come up with is to simply have less (~50% or less) people on earth which is for various reasons an unsustainable political and sociological situation.
Does a solution exist: yes, but we're not getting there without major wars and conflict in the short term. Nobody wants to give up their military and industry because if they do that they'll be the ones wiped out first. A solution thus has to take care not just of the environmental impact of humans but also the sociological, political and military issues those solutions bring.
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You have not really thought through the problem. Even if the diety existed but did not Grant free will, then there is no freedom. So the belief freedom exist dies not negate the need for option 1.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Your second statement is more intersecting to me because I have no way of defining the terms you used in a way that allows me to tell if what you say is true or false.
What is a self directed agent? What does it mean for the universe to be non deterministic?
Please definite your terms as I'm always interested in learning something new
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Of course, the young kids call that Democratic Socialism, but potato potatoh
Read the Wealth of Nations, all seven books, and realize you're living in Crony Capitalism, which he called Mercantalism, and which is doomed to fail.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Hey hey, capitalism is doing great despite all those people in the world overbreeding in an unsustainable manner because their religion says so. At the very least, the concepts of capital and borders allows smart people with no more than two children to not have to share their wealth.
Capitalism is predatory, it is built to destroy competition and feed on its corpse. Other systems are more benign, they have their advantages, but aren't meant to be aggressive and destructive to those around them. Capitalism dies, when it runs out of things to grow on.
It's like putting a spider with a honey bee in a jar, and then arguing that spiders are obviously better for the world and environment, because it ate the bee.
Prison guard unions donate about 10x the money to political campaigns vs private prisons. The left is leading the way, not following.
Look at CA, one party rule for decades, one party that is _owned_ by the prison guard union. Not the Rs.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
First of all - it is clear that there are more than your two original options, which I will summarize as 1. We have freedom and a god, and 2. We have no freedom and no god. It is certainly the case that we might have 1b. We have no freedom AND a god. This is the Calvinist doctrine of predestination.
On the second statement - the question here is really about the definition of freedom. I tend to be an empiricist, and so for me a useful definition of this property called "freedom" would allow us to detect its presence or absence by observation. In the simplest terms, I would define freedom as the ability of an agent to perform an action at will. Can I decide to raise my right arm, and will my right arm raise? I can, and it will. I can likewise decide not to do that, and see the results I expect.
Based on that observation, I would conclude that I have freedom. And I would say that I am a "self-directed agent".
Now, for determinism. I consider a deterministic system to be one in which we can predict its future state with perfect accuracy, given complete information about its present state. A non-deterministic system does not have this property.
So, is it possible that I am merely a collection of deterministic events, following inexorably from the initial state of the universe? Could I be just a Newtonian ball in a very complex but ultimately predictable billiards game? No, because that's not the universe we live in. Observation has shown us that the universe is fundamentally unknowable AND unpredictable - Heisenberg uncertainty being one of the simplest examples. So the billiards ball argument against free will is not compatible with our reality.
OK that makes more sense. Your definition of freedom derived from materialism begins with assumption 2.
You define a free agent as someone who believes the illusion you choose. If 'you' is nothing more than a collection of parts evolved to optimize certain environmental accidents then what is choice other then a series of electrical signals that terminate in tissue stimulation.
Your definition of deterministic also seems too narrow. Why is the human ability to predict a system part of the definition? Isn't it good enough to have complete predictability if you had complete knowledge,? The uncertainty principle speaks to our ability to observe, it does not mean the information does not exist.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
But the right is way ahead of them, as usual!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
folks in science of being 'power hungry'. You do understand what it takes, in terms of both effort and intelligence, to be a statistician, right? Any one of these guys could make more money running numbers for some kind of financial racket like that 2008 CDS mess than they do warning the country about the impact of global warming.
Their point is that this notion that capitalism raises people's quality of life isn't going to last. The damage down to the climate is going to blow that away. At that point we do one of two things: implement socialism to improve lives or descend into kleptocracy & oligarchy. That's not because capitalism is fundamentally broken, it's because for capitalism to work there has to be lots of growing capital; and climate change is going to do away with large amounts of the stuff.
And go ask Denmark, Germany, Sweden and France how socialism is doing form them. Or maybe ask how Venezuela might be holding up if they didn't have the most powerful nation on earth imposing sanctions on them for no reason (well, not no reason, we did just use their loan defaults to snatch a ton of land and resources Citgo owned, but it's OK when we do it for reasons I'm sure you can elaborate on.).
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I know lots of folks perfectly content with a decent home, food, transportation and the occasional vacation. I know I am. Here's a crazy idea: Greed is not infinite unless you _encourage_ it to be. Hell, look at the Japanese. If anything there's a case where a bit more greed would be a good thing. They keep working themselves to death for little in return.
And speaking of the Japanese (and America too) overpopulation isn't really a problem. Both countries have birth rates below replacement. America is freaking out over it because we're turning brown and there's a lot of folks over here who have a problem with that. But the thing is, when people have something to do (work, hobbies, video games) they drop 1 or 2 kids and stop. It's really only the really poor that crank 'em out as fast as they can. Assuming we don't regress (and believe me, there's a lot of folks trying to make us do just that) we're gonna have to start encouraging people to have kids just to avoid going extinct. Ever read Asimov's robot novels? Remember those weirdos who avoided all human contact?
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2 to write and 1 to make the docs pretty. What's the problem? You do understand that pol science is hard, right? It's essentially statistics. Same with being an Economic cultural researcher. Again, math.
.com boom? The housing bubble? Regular people made money because there was just plain so much of it. But a lot of that money was real and was due to massive increases in productivity. Manufacturing's doubled in 50 years. Farm yields are through the roof. Did you know those farm yields require oil, and not just to run tractors? We use oil by products to replenish soil so we can grow without waiting for the land to recover.
And it's not even hard to imagine why they're saying all this. Capitalism as we practice it today makes people's lives better by growing faster than the ruling class can monopolize the wealth. Remember the
Their point is we can't keep that up. Climate Change won't let us. We can't "grow ourselves out of a recession" anymore. At some point we're going to need social solutions. That means reigning in what we let the ruling class have/do. It means that the scraps the working class has traditionally been left with, which have been mighty tasty scraps of late, are about to go back to what they used to be; scraps. We either fix that with socialism or we go back to feudalism with kings, queens and knights being the crap out of us peasants.
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> The $20,000 luxury car has now turned into a $50,000 subcompact.
You are confusing the United States with Denmark. I bought my last truck for less than $20K.
This kind of deranged hysterical bullshit just makes you look like you've never bought a car for yourself ever in your life and still live in your mother's basement.
It's like you are confusing bad Facebook memes with real life.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Right when my new business is starting to grow, capitalism dies.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
This is almost an exact copy of the propaganda currently being used to brainwash the citizens of China.
No, because it's the UN, and most countries are third-world dictatorships.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
This "Global Warming Will Be The Downfall Of Capitalism" nonsense has been around for a long time. Decades.
There is a very strong correlation between how strongly one believes in Anthropogenic Global Warming and political ideology.
I used to get a lot of chuckles when I'd see the warming alarmists saying "there's a correlation between deniers and right-wing politics!"
When they so obviously did not understand that necessarily means there is also a correlation between believers and left-wing politics.
I'm just plain tired of hearing it. This "capitalism is against the environment" crap is nothing more than that: crap.
Tell me: why is the United States the only country asked which did NOT agree to the Paris Accord, yet it is also the only country of all of them to reduce CO2 emissions?
Chew on that one for a while.
The un produced a lot of worthwhile stuff, mostly on the side of science(particularly medicine and standardisation), children protection. Just dig up and go past US news outfit whim ham on the un andcresearch a bit and you will find lot if sucess. They just dont advertise it like american do each time they habe a little duccess (better said american smear theur success on you and belittle anybody else success).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
You think a command economy is the solution? You want fascism? If the CEOs are so selfish and greedy, why can we trust that the komissars, politburo, and general secretary won't be just as greedy?
I mean, a CEO is a CEO.. Be he the head of a corporation or a country.
We will never achieve anything like a communist utopia. It is against our very nature. People will always aspire to be a little better than those around them. That makes for a pretty tail and very pointy pyramid.. With someone always at the top. ALWAYS.
Do you know how stupid that sounds? Enough vehicles are on the road, so much so that if each one was driven at the exact same time, 88% of the public (in this country) would be on the road.
Pretty much everyone has a car, is my point. Statistically, at least. So yeah, since everyone who could buy a car has, things don't look all that bad to me. And considering the same number of people who have bought a car can only drive one at a time, I don't think it would be markedly worse in this country if everyone who could buy a car, bought 3 of them.
...as opposed to capitalists who would beat you to death with their own grandmothers if it sees them another nickel in quarterly dividends.
It has nothing to do with the use of natural resources, and instead is based on the modern version of what happened in the Industrial Revolution where the wealthy had all the money, and everyone else was poor, with relatively little in between. It doesn't take all that long before there is an uprising against the wealthy who horde all the money and there are relatively few scraps spread out to those who actually work for a living. Of course, this is based on my observations here in the USA where many areas of the country are more like a third world country and where government services are limited by corrupt government officials.
Alternative -> Shared Misery.
ntr
It is so obvious that capitalism is a failure and so rare that smart people are willing to dive into the issue. Thank God for this research as we are on the verge of a horror story and usual politics will not address the problems at all.
Propaganda 101: The first step towards winning any war, regardless of the field of battle... is to convince your opponent that they've already lost. When they stop fighting, then the war really is well and truly over, regardless of who had the high ground -- either physically, intellectually or morally.
Maybe there doesn't need to be a top. Distributed decision making is viable, especially in this age of information. There's also this persistent belief in society that people dealing in higher levels of abstraction, such as managers and executives, should get a bigger share of the pie. Why?
I think the purpose of the report is to get people questioning their basic assumptions of how society should be organized after the reality of finite resources is recognized. Are you doing that, or trying to not think about it?
Think globally but act within local variable scope.
I finally got around to watching Avengers: Infinity War this weekend. Thanos' motivations are certainly interesting when you put them into contexts like this. I realize this is largely off-topic, but... I guess I'm saying I agree with you that near extinction-level events are probably going to be needed for a course correction.
Anyway, I'm feeling nice and cheery now. Time to get some coding done...
What was that about the EU lowering their emissions?
http://www.wri.org/blog/2018/0...
Think globally but act within local variable scope.
http://time.com/money/4777074/college-grad-pay-2017-average-salary/
The article does go on to point out that inflation adjusted salaries from the late 60s were higher, but not that they have ever been in nominal terms. Do you have a source for your claim that graduates earned the same nominal income 15 years ago?
Here's another interesting possibility that the original false dichotomy excluded: What if only some of us had free will? In Quantum Night, author Robert J. Sawyer explored that idea. One of the premises is that around 58% of people actually have no free will at all, and the rest (42%) are divided into psychopaths and fully conscious people with free will.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
The report doesn't indicate that Capitalism is doomed, it's an attempt to argue that it should be. It makes claims that range from the unreasonable to plain 'ol counter-factual. The basic premise of the piece, that we're moving to more expensive energy sources so we have to upend our basic understanding of economics, is prima facie nonsense. Not just because they go on to describe how fossil fuel based energy is more expensive than electric bills suggest, which contradicts everything else, but because it fails to account for the rapid decline in the cost of alternative/renewable energy (thanks to Capitalism) and general increase in efficiency.
It might have taken some mulling over for you, but people familiar with the area will already know the answer is 1) the massive increase in shale gas production and use and 2) the general trend for more cost effective energy efficient devices has a particularly large impact when you start from an extreme high.
Also, the UK which did sign the paris accord decreased CO2 emissions by around 22% between 2012 and 2017 meaning it's emissions are lower than anytime since the great depression.
You define a free agent as someone who believes the illusion you choose. If 'you' is nothing more than a collection of parts evolved to optimize certain environmental accidents then what is choice other then a series of electrical signals that terminate in tissue stimulation.
How else would you define freedom? Remember, it should be testable (at least in theory) for it to be a meaningful characteristic rather than just an invisible, arbitrary ideal. The fact that there's nothing magic or supernatural about chemistry and biology doesn't mean that conscious beings can't experience free will. And there's nothing to say that a supernatural cause of consciousness would make free will any more legitimate - it would just be adding yet another suspect cause. And, if my experience of free will is indistinguishable from "true" free will, why should I care? If there's no way, even in principle, to tell between real freedom and illusory freedom, the distinction seems to be meaningless.
Isn't it good enough to have complete predictability if you had complete knowledge?
Yes, it would be, that's how I intended my definition to be interpreted. The thing is, quantum mechanics shows conclusively that we cannot have complete knowledge OR predictability.
The uncertainty principle speaks to our ability to observe, it does not mean the information does not exist.
That's incorrect. The information truly doesn't exist. A particle's position becomes less defined when it's momentum is measured very precisely, and vice-versa. Read up on EPR some time. It was a thought experiment that showed the fundamental absurdity of quantum mechanics - the math suggested particles didn't have properties in the intervals between being measured. The idea was that this was such an absurd claim that it would discredit quantum mechanics. Unfortunately for Einstein, later work (like Bell's Theorem and associated experiments) showed that the absurd conclusions of EPR were correct - so rather than discredit QM, Einstein gave us one of the best examples of how deeply non-intuitive the world is, and it was in fact the final death of the deterministic Newtonian worldview for physicists.
Quantum mechanics experiments tell us that the information truly does not exist - there are "no hidden variables". Heisenberg uncertainty more or less puts a constraint on even the knowledge of god himself. Here's a good discussion on the subject: https://www.physicsforums.com/...
Here's another interesting possibility that the original false dichotomy excluded: What if only some of us had free will? In Quantum Night, author Robert J. Sawyer explored that idea.
Glad you pointed that out! I actually read that book a while ago myself, very thought-provoking.
I don't think it means what they think it means.
Capitalism is simply a method of exchange that tends to find efficiencies in the system. As we've seen, left unchecked (unregulated) it can lead to wealth inequality through political interference, however that isn't even the point they are trying to make.
What they seem to be talking about is consumerism/consumption and the false assumption that ever increasing growth will continue forever, which is a pretty obvious statement really, though a bit scary when you look at how many markets depend on it being true seemingly.
Anyway as I would see it, even as resources grow scarce Capitalism could still play an important role to make sure what resources are there are used most effectively.
That said, on review I see they do mention rising debt levels and wealth inequality. However as mentioned, that is only tangentially caused by Capitalism, and is more a symptom of corruption and political interference preventing proper regulation. I mean when you look at how things are now, the most wealth is generated by debt now, and that can't really be a good success indicator...
Economists, however, predict the science's ultimate demise. Politicians predict carpentry's ultimate demise. Podiatrists predict wine tasting's demise.
Even _if_ command economies worked, they would still put too much power in the hands of those in command and inevitably lead to totalitarianism. Power corrupts.
Congratulations, you now know the key, unfixable, flaw in socialism and can get on with your life.
Krugman is a moron, there are no Keynesians. Keynesians save during good times. There are just deficit spenders with an excuse: 'Keynesians'.
There is no Nobel Prize in economics. Economists just made one up to lend themselves credibility. Next: 'Nobel prizes' in chiropracty and scientology auditing.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
A drunken failure who made a series of social predictions and is 'batting zero'.
His followers are responsible for more deaths than Jesus's or Mohammed's. Despite having much less time to do their crimes.
Claiming he 'wanted to abolish' government is a religious statement. In practice, he wanted to strengthen it and hope it would someday just atrophy. His single stupidest thought.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
So, Walmart, which is a command economy, and the biggest employer, I think, in the US, doesn't work?
You can lie all you want, and claim no one on the right (who are *certainly* not conservative of anything but rich people's money) never did anything bad.
And nobody but your buds and other suckers believe you. Fascism is extreme RIGHT-WING, not socialism. There's no social control in fascism, it's all top down control.
Just as I said, you don't know anything about it, and all you do is parrot what people making good money, who are working for billionaires, want you to say.
Boycotts don't work because companies just merge until you have to do business with them or starve. There's an info graphic floating around the web that shows 10 companies own everything you buy, but even that ignores the fact that it's the same people sitting on the board of directors for those 10 companies.
There is no such thing as a sharing economy. That is a narrative pushed by Uber and the like to classify employees as contractors so they can strip employees of hard won protections. This is obvious because nobody drives Uber to share, they do it to make a living (such as it is).
Collective Bargaining means Unions. But Unions need large numbers of employees who are employed in a single location and likely a single industry and/or organization (and therefor can organize). The modern economy doesn't work like that. Automation means the manufacturing jobs aren't huge employers outside of third world countries where people are treated so poorly they're cheaper than machines. And that's just the beginning. An entire new class of automation is happening now (and being incorrectly called "AI" because a bit of machine learning is in play) that is going to make 30-40% of workers obsolete.
tl;dr. Your first two suggestions don't work, your last one has been broken down by technology and globalization. That leaves us with socialism as the only viable solution. I know folks don't like it (it feels too much like being told what to do, and about 20% of the population hates that, even though they're tacitly being told what to do by mega corps), but now isn't the time to get hung up on feelings...
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Ahhhh the no true scientist fallacy
I think you need to look up the "no true Scotsman" fallacy again. I'm not trying to redefine scientist to exclude people who write such reports I'm pointing out a factual error that, these people themselves, claim to have professions which are not scientist. This is not a logical fallacy but a factual error.
Ok, that's true for subatomic particles, i'll give you that. But does that scale upwards, is the ultimate question?
It does - quantum mechanical weirdness has been demonstrated with quite massive (in a physics sense) molecules: https://www.sciencealert.com/p...
If this is how the building blocks of reality behave, then the obvious concern is that macroscopic objects have the same bizarre behaviors - which prompted Einstein to wonder if the moon is there when nobody is looking.
1. [citation needed]
2. "Union" doesn't necessarily mean "left wing". There's lots of right-wing unions, including cops & building industry & miners & transport workers. and, yes, prison guards.
Prison guard unions are not, by any stretch of the imagination, "left wing". Prison guards, like cops, tend to be right-wing authoritarian thugs. They're often wanna-be cops with some serious psychological or violent flaw that even cop recruiters can't overlook.