Eric, You explained many of the problems in much more depth and detail than I did. Well done. Thanks.
On Wed, May 5, 2021, 4:46 PM David Eric Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > Yes, agreed, Russ, with amendments. > > I wrote some long awful thing on this yesterday and had the good manners > to delete without sending. > > I think capitalism isn’t even about money; there are two issues: > capitalist property rights and monetary or financial layers in the economy. > > I know Glen doesn’t like the terms “means of production”, but we can > capture a big subset with an everyday term like “tools”. Tools are durable > things, built at cost with the intent that they can be repeatedly used. > They are not a monetary store of value, but they are, in other material > senses, a store of transformational power over things one wants to > transform. > > But as soon as there is a tool, there is a decision problem over how it > can be used and by whom. I think “ownership rights” is the name we give to > any solution to (meaning, “commitment to some protocol for”) that problem. > With ownership then comes at least an incentive, and in many real, > limited-information settings, a realized ability, for the de facto owner of > a tool to guide where the productive output using the tool goes. It’s kind > of the default basic-layer dynamic that follows from tool creation and tool > ownership. We can understand how tricky that instability can be to manage > from study of these intricate and fancy mechanisms in hunter-gatherer > societies to blunt the concentration of power (arrow-sharing that guides > who gets meat; the kind of thing Sam Bowles studies). Ownership provides a > channel for itself to concentrate, and to concentrate other things > (obliquely, referring to “wealth” by whatever measure). That seems to me > the essence of the capitalist problem, which then takes various forms > depending on social institutional choices. > > It seems to me that we don’t want to give up tools, so we can’t give up > the problem of committing to some solution for ownership, and with that, we > have to face up to the complex problem of regulating against the tendency > of ownership to concentrate its de facto power by redirecting the proceeds > of things produced. > > This is why I don’t buy, as an empirical matter, Pieter’s optimism about > things’ becoming too cheap to meter. In some ways, and in projections to > some dimensions, yes, that is a fair description. Computer operating > systems used to be pay-per-version, now many are free. Communication used > to be charge-per-use, now much of it is paid for by advertising (“free” > only in an extreme distortion of what dimensions carry value, but > nonetheless one that has taken most people some years to become aware of). > But the very way the rise of the concentration of wealth in the Tech sector > before, and even more grotesquely so during the pandemic, is raising all > the old arguments about the capitalist class, seems to me to show even in > quite abstract domains of information and coordination services, that tool > ownership has default instabilities that always act unless we can find > effective regulatory strategies to blunt them. > > In this sense I think Glen does make the most important point, which is > that if there is a strong argument about UBI, its context is overwhelmingly > about the problem that innovations in absolute output seem always coupled > to concentrations of inequality. Relative to that, almost everything > Shapiro said in that piece was tropes that, at 15 places in the short talk, > gave me an internal impulse to go cite the person who shows they are tropes > by providing the good-faith and well thought-out counterargument. It is a > bit sad that Yang doesn’t feel able (and maybe isn’t able) to take that > bull by the horns and say that this is where the UBI question lives. > > > To me, money is a somewhat separate question: a mechanism for the > distribution of permissions, communication, authority, etc., which makes > certain coordination problems tractable that otherwise wouldn’t be. I > don’t think we want to give up the ability to use that, and even if some > did, so many others don’t that there probably is no path for society that > keeps it gone. But, as many in the thread have so well said already, money > is a terrible dimension-reducer, and the problems of “store of > transformation power” that come with tool ownership, then take on new > versions as “store of value” which is a kind of exchangeable access to > ownership rights over everything. But again, if we either can’t or (I will > accept the position of) don’t want to give up what it allows us to do, we > again face the complexity and difficulty of inventing or evolving (in > whatever combinations) regulatory strategies to try to limits its default > instabilities. > > Anyway, to say I agree with Russ’s motivation to push this point. > > Eric > > > > > On May 6, 2021, at 8:15 AM, Russ Abbott <[email protected]> wrote: > > Earlier, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ said: If we're stuck with capitalism, then I'm for UBI. > If we can get out from under capitalism, then I'm not. Nick added: it is > the "triumph" of capitalism to reduce all relationships to money. > > I wonder if this is not assuming that there is an alternative to what you > are calling *capitalism*. As uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ points out, co-ops can work on > relatively small scales, but if we are going to live in groups of larger > than ~150 people, how are you imagining that we will arrange interactions > without something like money? Even on small scales, how will a collective > without > money organize itself in anything other than a very static structure? And > on larger scales, what is the organizing principle other than power? It's > not clear to me how an alternative that uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ is supposing possible > will actually work. uǝlƃ ↙↙↙, would you mind elaborating what you have in > mind? > > -- Russ Abbott > > On Wed, May 5, 2021 at 2:17 PM jon zingale <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Yeah, I think it is safe to say that "huge costs" are a sign of progress >> in >> the same sense that smoke is a sign of fire. >> >> >> >> -- >> Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ >> >> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . >> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv >> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam >> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fbit.ly%2fvirtualfriam&c=E,1,RK4SHKG4UwSR2eVfEmLPEpQR-OMf7dd-BiY5K9UxSfhxcR1LmMt0ta1C_RYF2i8GsNwbem9M1V6uuuT9pS5WENqQxKV8dNrCjFOaTUwQ&typo=1> >> un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com >> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fmailman%2flistinfo%2ffriam_redfish.com&c=E,1,zWSbFgBSMywQBhEiPeYpZMK0-NSq7QU07S8ElQOja-b4WQIuI9z0sU3xgOp3Dnwql93s6TY4y2F5DfrGu6FcJGy42dAiGkjqPslUQXENzjFvsplH&typo=1> >> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ >> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2ffriam-comic.blogspot.com%2f&c=E,1,o7oJnliH8UY66S_VIxX5a28UvlWetoD_I8KrLoutZukz2P5VR36VFwKkDfHj27Rj_NiaxL0j2ETtGNFu0dGtQCCvaNOXI9WLEp2lTNQlyMQ7YbhGZOxvSA,,&typo=1> >> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ >> > - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam > un/subscribe > https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fmailman%2flistinfo%2ffriam_redfish.com&c=E,1,HvHemFf2nk0pmKFfepLt4TjD9M0l85-biXwWC8q1bDKUBWfGef5Pp4Z2OaB4yeeC70js6t9PL7JWWobCvanB8lkdtjzzeU5B2MyE71I8yLva0JHOlkvd&typo=1 > FRIAM-COMIC > https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2ffriam-comic.blogspot.com%2f&c=E,1,hJjRlBRGPCYAOdnxTw5QVB4Q0ocBaxbtaEss45GRX4-RlpSNQeL5uf0s3YhCU85yWo5p3xbeZ_FFkfQvinBq4gWd_Qk45IPfkEehh0t_&typo=1 > archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > > >
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