[Pops]

Educate me AD on the "the function of cause and effect in a conscious species "

[americandream]

Educate me AD on the "the function of cause and effect in a conscious species "

Presumably you fed, sheltered and educated your kids and insured yourself to cover them. That is cause and effect. In essence, consciousness enables us to time travel in how we address the future.....it grants us the skills of being able to forwardise.

Those skills then imbue us with a notion of the reasonable and unreasonable and we thus forwardise for what we construe as reasonable reasons. In contrast, animals are on auto pilot, lacking the consciousness software we are coded with.

[Pops]

Hmm, pretty limited example, AD.
I bet I would die and the insurer bet I wouldn't, he won.
The point is I didn't know the future or I wouldn't have bet.
Rational? Yeah.
Dialectic?

LoL. I know that is your buzzword and grant that humans are likely more apt to think about such than animals. Economics is not a force of nature, there are no "laws" — it's a conceit to pretend otherwise.

It is a human abstraction.
Resource limits aren't.

[Ibon]

Educate me AD on the "the function of cause and effect in a conscious species "

Presumably you fed, sheltered and educated your kids and insured yourself to cover them. That is cause and effect. In essence, consciousness enables us to time travel in how we address the future.....it grants us the skills of being able to forwardise.

Those skills then imbue us with a notion of the reasonable and unreasonable and we thus forwardise for what we construe as reasonable reasons. In contrast, animals are on auto pilot, lacking the consciousness software we are coded with.

We use this skill very effectively but incompletely..... for reasons we have been discussing here. Capitalism applies this forward thinking to a very narrow set of parameters that do not include all the externalities that are trashed in the singular pursuit of money and profit. In other words, capitalism is currently very unsophisticated.

In a rational system consequences will create feedbacks that will allow correction. If all the players were sharing the same goal in having a resilient society and environment then the upcoming consequences will provide an opportunity for capitalism to implement the necessary regulations to account for environmental damage and exploitative social inequities. The players however do not have these goals. Their goals are personal enrichment, the motive for accumulating wealth touches on what we discussed earlier; status, security, power.

I think most people can understand rationally the shortcomings of unbridled capitalism. It is also not hard to understand that consequences are bearing down on us.

Nobody on this thread or any other thread however has been able to outline the step by step way we will evolve and forwardise, using AD's term, a more enlightened economic arrangement.

For all the power humans have to forwardise their predictions of the future have been abysmal, time and time again. In that regards I would agree with Pops that we have a bunch of opinions full of certitude and not much humility and doubt. Every generation in recent history gazing into their forwardising crystal ball with predictions of the future have been utterly clueless. Of course this is not ultimately an excuse to surrender our fate to a complexity we cannot control.

We don't know. We cannot predict. Our ability to forwardise is limited because we tend to extend forward in a linear fashion that which we know, almost always getting blindsided by what we failed to anticipate.

I rather like how reality, in reality, is a wryly fox.

[Pops]

Very good.

Our reality is surplus. I just don't see us (the rich) grasping the concept of shortage until it becomes our reality.

[radon1]

Economics is not a force of nature, there are no "laws"

It is, otherwise we would not have to have this discussion, because the economies could develop in absolutely arbitrary fashion, eg. depending solely on our will.

[americandream]

Ibon

Consciousness systems are driven by their own immutable laws and to date have been a reflection of our slow articulation of the consciousness tool. Common throughout all human civilisations has been attempts to capture the fullness of this experience but with little to draw on, we have invariably fallen back on mysticism. Capitalism offers the first glimpse of what it could look like with our judicial processes and sciences of course as well developments in the fields of medicine....ethics for example. Benchmarks for behaviour founded on the most reasonable of relationship standards; all of course underpinned by the value adding machine of capital.

This slow transition to a fully formed global society is threatened by the resource and toxicity leaking sieve that is infinite growth. that is our problem. The other unpleasant components of capitalism, its economic socialisation, its timing function which sits at odds with the timescale of this planets life support systems and resource replenishment as well as the planets own internal recycling mechanisms cannot be reconciled by any manner of reconfigurations.

That does not mean that we then throw out the baby with the bathwater. However any economic system will have to function in sync with this planets clock to work. And that is only possible with needs based circularity. There is no way around that. We will have to use modernity with more consideration. That is an evolutionary challenge that the planet has thrown the gauntlet down on and that is the approach I will be taking.

[Pops]

Economics is not a force of nature, there are no "laws"

It is, otherwise we would not have to have this discussion, because the economies could develop in absolutely arbitrary fashion, eg. depending solely on our will.

if there were laws, there would be proofs, not just "schools" and we would not be having this discussion because you all would have proved me wrong. LoL

This guy makes a good argument I can plea to because he looks authoritative...
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/arc ... st/274901/

[Timo]

Back on topic of an alternative to Capitalism..................i have an idea that's more of a modification to capitalism, than any fundamental alternative. I'll try to be as brief, yet understandable as possible.

BACKGROUND: We're all familiar with the stock market. The stock market functions on purely capitalistic principles, such as the profitability of the company, the prospects for growth of a company, the growth of the market of that company, the management of that company, threats to the resources required by that company, etc.... Each company is assigned a credt rating to give investors a sense of where that company stands relative to its market, management, and debt. These credit ratings are provided by other companies like Standard & Poor's, Moody's and others. States also receive these ratings to reflect on the favoribility of buying bonds inssued by that state. These ratings work in tandem with the normal, capitalistic function of the stock market, giving businesses a large incentive to maintain a good rating in order to lure investors to their business. Ultimately, the function of these ratings, their relationship to businesses, and that businesses participation in the stock market boils down to money, pure and simple. Bad rating = bad for future business. That business has a keen incentive to improve its rating across all rating agencies.

PROPOSAL: My proposal also works in tandem with BAU, utilizing the profit motives inherent in all business, and their participation and utilization of the stock market. My proposal differs from BAU, however, because it introduces other tradable elements to that stock market that allude to the all businesses environmental and social ratings, as well. For example, if S&P gives Business X an AAA credit rating based on its position in the market, that reveals nothing to the stock holder about that business's environmental responsibilities, or its responsibilities to its own employees. If Business X is profitable and dominant in its market because it destroys millions of acres of natural habitat in order to obtain the resources necessary for the production of its widgets, that would not affect its current credit rating. But if you add these other measures into the equation within the stock market, that business would receive an environmental rating of B-, or even C. If it treats its employees poorly, likie denying maternity leave (or be fired for getting pregnant), of consistently paying women less than men for the performance of the same jobs, or any number of other possible measures, that company would receive a social rating of B, or C. So, combined, that business has a credit rating of AAA for money,, a C for its environmental rating, and a B for its social rating. This combination of ratings will be applied in tandem in exactly the same manner in which the current ratings system is applied. Obviously, most investors want to steer clear of an environmentally destructive business. Boycotts are organized because of poor performance of these issues. If investors can add these other ratings into their decisions when investing, all businesses will seek to improve all of their ratings, across the board, so as not to alienate any potential investor. Applied on a global scale, where these additional ratings systems are factored into the daily trade of stocks, businesses will be forced to take notice and act because a bad environmental or social rating will ultimately cost that business money because their stock will be valued less than the stocks of businesses with better ratings, across all three.

In a nutshell, by adding additional components to the stock markets ratings system that address environmental and social issues, companies will be forced to improve their practices across the board because now their practices are exposed and rated for the entire world to see.

To a degree, many industries are already rated in similar manners to what i'm proposing. Business journals rate all number of businesses according to any number of factors, like the best employers for women, or the most environmentally sustainable business, or best community relations with host cities, etc.... My proposal makes those ratings a part of the investment system. In addition to profit, these other factors are also provided to investors, enabling all investors to make more responsible decisions, forcing all businesses to improve all of their ratings to attract more investors, thus raising their stock prices, thus raising their competitiveness in their market.

To make this happen, each nation (the SEC in the US) will need to acquire much more detailed information from each business in order for other ratings agencies to assign the appropriat ratings to publicly traded corporations. Penalties applied for cheating and lying, same as with current info collected, purely on financial info.

This system places environmental performance, and social justice on the same plane as profits. Profits at the expense of people or the environment can be judged accordingly by investors. Other issues matter to investors besides financial return. If high returns come at a severe cost to other issues that investor cares about, they might be less inclined to invest in that company, preferring an alternative company that has a better environmental record, while still making a reasonable return on investment.

Their in nothing transcendatory or spiritual about this proposal (sorry AD). This system simply adds components to BAU that enable investors to make better decisions under BAU in order to achieve a more healthy planet to live on.

Done.

[Ibon]

Ibon

Consciousness systems are driven by their own immutable laws and to date have been a reflection of our slow articulation of the consciousness tool. Common throughout all human civilisations has been attempts to capture the fullness of this experience but with little to draw on, we have invariably fallen back on mysticism. Capitalism offers the first glimpse of what it could look like with our judicial processes and sciences of course as well developments in the fields of medicine....ethics for example. Benchmarks for behaviour founded on the most reasonable of relationship standards; all of course underpinned by the value adding machine of capital.

This slow transition to a fully formed global society is threatened by the resource and toxicity leaking sieve that is infinite growth. that is our problem. The other unpleasant components of capitalism, its economic socialisation, its timing function which sits at odds with the timescale of this planets life support systems and resource replenishment as well as the planets own internal recycling mechanisms cannot be reconciled by any manner of reconfigurations.

That does not mean that we then throw out the baby with the bathwater. However any economic system will have to function in sync with this planets clock to work. And that is only possible with needs based circularity. There is no way around that. We will have to use modernity with more consideration. That is an evolutionary challenge that the planet has thrown the gauntlet down on and that is the approach I will be taking.

I follow your post mostly but I would like you to elaborate please on this "needs based circularity"

Thanks

[radon1]

Economics is not a force of nature, there are no "laws"

It is, otherwise we would not have to have this discussion, because the economies could develop in absolutely arbitrary fashion, eg. depending solely on our will.

if there were laws, there would be proofs, not just "schools" and we would not be having this discussion because you all would have proved me wrong. LoL

This guy makes a good argument I can plea to because he looks authoritative...
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/arc ... st/274901/

True, the "schools" are a weird thing as far as the scientific process is concerned, the authoritative guy is right in criticizing them.

But he takes particular sets of axioms/dogmas (subjective), for some reason calls them "laws" (objective), challenge those axioms and conclude that since the axioms look shaky, the objective "laws" do not exist. Clear logical fail.

His logic is easily refuted with the use of his own approach - it is not consistent with the real world that we observe. If the economic laws didn't exist, we could simply vote for 10% economic growth instead of voting for president, and get that 10% growth next year.

[Pops]

Radon, I take your point — to a point.

The guy in the article quoted various people who assert their particular view is economic law, that was the point of the article. That they are axioms, dogma, buzzwords or whatever framed as laws by their proponents only proves his point. Snip:

Increasingly, our debates about -- and our solutions to -- pressing issues such as immigration, budgets and debt are framed in the context of all-powerful economic laws that dictate what is and is not possible. There's just one slight problem: There are no laws of economics.

But all that is really beside the point since my point to AD was that economic "laws" don't extend to the natural world, but the physical laws that govern resources do extend to our economy, regardless of the assertions of "neoclassical economists."

[americandream]

ibon

Objective socialism has as a tendency, a needs resourcing profile, due to the lack of the accumulative process. It thus facilitates such schemes as community co-ops that function as community coops (for whatever reason.....manufacture, needs ontail, barter etc) and are not subject to corporatist forces which are forever seeking to assetise the intangible for profit.

That is not to say that any decadent urges to get more than your fair share will simply evaporate.....the consciousness tool is not one universally standardised state although it is one universal capacity and we all develop according to our personal physiological limits. There will always be the Cogs of this world. However, just as profit comes naturally to us in a world where objects mediate life; it is unnatural in a world where relationships mediate life.

edit; the bolding for pops is intended to reply to his point. It is our consciousness it has to be said which has brought us to this existential resourcing terminus. Unlike our animal planetary dwellers who do not face and will never face a similarly scoped challenge. This challenge is directly a function of our particular evolutionary capacity and it is reasonably clear that evolution contemplates a culture/environment that utilises its tool in such a fashion that its objectives may be met. And not regression or else that would make the evolutionary process somewhat absurd, scientifically.

[Ibon]

ibon

Objective socialism has as a tendency, a needs resourcing profile, due to the lack of the accumulative process. It thus facilitates such schemes as community co-ops that function as community coops (for whatever reason.....manufacture, needs ontail, barter etc) and are not subject to corporatist forces which are forever seeking to assetise the intangible for profit.

That is not to say that any decadent urges to get more than your fair share will simply evaporate.....the consciousness tool is not one universally standardised state although it is one universal capacity and we all develop according to our personal physiological limits. There will always be the Cogs of this world. However, just as profit comes naturally to us in a world where objects mediate life; it is unnatural in a world where relationships mediate life.

edit; the bolding for pops is intended to reply to his point. It is our consciousness it has to be said which has brought us to this existential resourcing terminus. Unlike our animal planetary dwellers who do not face and will never face a similarly scoped challenge. This challenge is directly a function of our particular evolutionary capacity and it is reasonably clear that evolution contemplates a culture/environment that utilises its tool in such a fashion that its objectives may be met. And not regression or else that would make the evolutionary process somewhat absurd, scientifically.

When I was back in the world of commerce years ago before I retreated to this wilderness I was selling a high end optical instrument, a surgical operating microscope for opthalmology. It was manufactured in Switzerland. The optics and mechanical engineering were top notch. There was a marketing strategy we used with surgeons which we called "creating a need". By demonstrating the optics, the surgeons experienced a depth of field, field of view and illumination which was unsurpassed at the time. They would then go back to their usual instruments and feel unsatisfied. That demo was the act of "creating the need" since the surgeons were no longer satisfied with what they had been using before which was adequate really for cataract surgery and most of the other procedures. They would then decide to purchase our product. I am using this example to raise an issue in regards to technology in how we put the genie back in the bottle.

How will this "needs resourcing profile" actually work in objective socialism? Specifically who and what defines what are the objective needs. A century ago, before the technology of today, a community would define the needs in objective socialism in far more modest terms in reference to resource consumption than what "objective" socialism might define that today after a century of technology enabled by fossil fuels. An example would be advanced health care procedures or labor saving devices. I mentioned this before in an earlier post. Nobody argues about the utility advantage of a washing machine. Who decides however when a device goes from utility to indolence and indulgence? Who plays arbiter in objective socialism in terms of deciding which material objects are enhancing community well being and which objects start to separate and weaken community.

An example from the Amish communities. They do not allow telephones in their homes. They do however install phone booths centrally located between several farms. This way they can use the telephone as a basic utility when ordering hay or calling for help but they do not allow the telephone in the home where they perceive this device as corrupting. Here we have an example where the community decides to set limits on the use of a commodity, in the case of the Amish they weren't focusing on human overshoot but rather on keeping their community tight and free from what they viewed as corrupting technology.

AD, I understand quite well your post and certainly see the difference from a needs resourcing profile vs the corporatist forces that that take profit to the corrupting extremes of designing built in obsolescence in their products for example.

But share with us please who or what defines what is "objective" Please try to take the examples I use above and use them in how you would see objective socialism resolving these challenges. Please do not give us a generic answer. As you can see I am really making an effort to understand your world view here. You need to make a real effort to go from the theoretical and move to the application of your world view in your response.

OK, so who decides that a washing machine is acceptable but a dishwasher for example isn't? And who enforces this?

[americandream]

Ibon

Actually what I contemplate is a blend of your primitivistic socialist tendencies (I dont think you are a reactionary despite what you may think of your ideal set of social relations. You are driven by consciousness but as yet havent formulated these views into a wholistic social and economics complex) combined with the inevitable dialectics of objective fullness as contemplated by evolution.......Reason.

Consciousness is not in reality a spectrum although its state is due to our awkward transition from subjectivity which is not unlike that of a child growing to adulthood. An infant is born fully equipped for consciousness but in a subjective state as it accultarises itself to use that consciousness.

Once we remove the mediating influence of objects, relationships assume their proper place mediating our use of objects on a needs basis. As it is objects mediate our status in social relations with the result that most relationships are hollow versions of their true state. In this context needs facilitators such as co-operatives are no longer compelled to grow in the urge to commodify for accumulation but instead serve our needs. And the core needs in consciousness are inquiry and creativity, needs which are as dynamic as the very cosmos itself. In other words, once freed from the hand of commodification, we are free to inquire as reason dictates. This was the reasoning for the Soviet space program.....the need to ultimately discover our relationship with the material, the cosmos.

It is not unreasonable to suggest that in equipping us with consciousness, the material has entooled us with the capacity to observe and know it. This is a barely tapped aspect of our creativity which is instead directed at our inorganic masters and not ourselves. Consciousness in other words serves goods rather than goods serving consciousness.

edit: A very late edit.......The actual nuts and bots of this exercise will involve money, lots of it hence my perfecting of price discovery for that purpose........and structures and support to get people into the space where one can access them with this sort of information. In other words, I will have to set up something pretty big on the global stage. Of course for me, I will need to ensure that people recognise that they are working for themselves and a greater good and not deify me and I am presently giving that some thought. But it is exciting to use capitalism in dialectic fashion....if all works well, we may be able to hang onto the gains made in the sciences etc.

[SeaGypsy]

I reckon to have any chance of selling your ideas AD you need to do 3 things. 1/ do dialectics, don't talk about them 2/ quit reinventing or repurposing or time transplant language as if your audience has already read the books you are yet to write 3/ demystify, kill jargon & flowery intellectualism, get to the point, the practice & application.

[americandream]

I reckon to have any chance of selling your ideas AD you need to do 3 things. 1/ do dialectics, don't talk about them 2/ quit reinventing or repurposing or time transplant language as if your audience has already read the books you are yet to write 3/ demystify, kill jargon & flowery intellectualism, get to the point, the practice & application.

Conscientising will require some effort from an audience as they are intuiting a new approach to thinking and relating with the world around them.That said, I tend to condense that conceptual exercise in short, succinct points to get to the heart of the exercise.

Thus when I tell you that evolution contemplates pure reason borne of a needs based culture and not reason borne of objects mediated social relations, everything that needs to be said and done is in that one sentence. Of course irs not an easy transition to make but baby footsteps. Grasp the core points first and let them percolate in the background.


edit. I had to break off then to catch London opening. Apologies

So basically, you dont have to do anything UNTIL you have learnt to think in the new paradigm. You are like seeds. If I can seed you to go out there grasping these concepts, you will then take on the dialectic function and live it. It is through that approach that we can actually thwart capitalism and preside over a flowering of new cultural forms.....right within capitals heart.

[Tanada]

I think the Iron Lady said it best,

The trouble with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of OTHER PEOPLE’S money.

[evilgenius]

I read a thing about the 50 choices and how they are so much worse for our peace of mind since we can never be quite sure which is the right one. And after we do pick we become convinced we didn't, LoL

Timo, I'm pretty sure that the old english land based system was pretty strict in doing something similar to what you say. They always kept the estate together and always handed it down to the oldest (boy I presume) and whatever kids came after just kinda hung on the coat tails. Others (Ireland maybe) split the inheritance into pieces with the effect all the kids got the same increasingly worthless, smaller and smaller piece.

That could be way off though...

I think it's part of primogeniture. I recall Fukuyama discussing it in Trust.

You've got two things going on here, choice and primogeniture. They are related, but it takes elaboration to see how.

As far as choice goes the best example of its power to influence the spread of commerce, to meet need, is the one given by Malcolm Gladwell concerning ketchup, or maybe it was spaghetti sauce. Anyway, when you only have a few different kinds, with all of the bland flavors you can only sell so many units. If you appeal to all of the many tastes out there, by offering a huge number of flavors, then you can sell a whole lot more. Of course it costs more to do this, but you make it up by selling a lot more units. Plus, many of the costs people imagine are the same costs being added back in again, when in reality the same production steps are being made each time. There is no extra setup or production cost, except in people's imaginations, because the differentiated products are actually similar in regards to those costs.

But, yes, several years ago Scientific American did a survey and discovered that people have trouble with overwhelming choice. They look at all of those flavors and can't decide which one they want. Do you think they pass by the ketchup or the spaghetti sauce and buy nothing though? I doubt that. It's far more likely they either buy what they are familiar with, or pick the one that's at eye level, or select the one that they think most other people are buying. There probably isn't one set 'fallback' pick, but a range of them. Marketers know how to set up the entire display so that the various kinds of people who do make choices based upon their fallback don't come away scratching their heads. That's why there are so many rules surrounding displays in competitive supermarkets that you aren't aware of.

The problem with choice is not choice, but the fact that people don't know what they like. When they don't know what they like they usually don't have a workable heuristic for figuring out what it is that they would like, if they could try all of the flavors. Your average person hasn't got the memory for it. Man is the same way when it comes to all kinds of things that have nothing to do with buying products, like his prejudices and his allegiances. Instead of looking inside(not that the solution is there, but the beginning of it) and finding out what they want individuals usually seek the approval of the collective. This is the way that extroverted people think, and most people are extroverts. When this goes too far you can sometimes arrive at the tyranny of the majority. At other times, usually, you wind up with deeply seated prejudices and assumptions that are so rooted in normal thought that only activism or somebody else's tragedy can suffice to reveal them. However, as with when we have revealed our prejudices and overcome them, the collective can be a real source of legitimate selection as well.

Primogeniture is the rich man's way of getting around this, except with inheritance. It's about realizing that even a severely retarded oldest male child has all of the family DNA within him. All of the ketchup or spaghetti sauce choices are actually similar enough, after all, that when you throw in what DNA is all about adding merit as well is obviously unnecessary. Instead of getting into a merit based inheritance, who can really tell if it is a game changer after all, rich people just use this default. It's their automatic selection. As long as they pick the same way each time the lottery should work out for them over time. They will only insist that the oldest one can, and will, actually have children.

[kanon]

I think the Iron Lady said it best,

The trouble with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of OTHER PEOPLE’S money.

I don't think it is running out of "other people's money." As we all know, modern money is created by going into debt and there seems to be no problem if the purpose is to protect the oligarch class with corporate subsidies or military spending. According to the Reagan/Thatcher concept, the oligarch class must be motivated with reduced taxes and higher profits, while the lower classes should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Though it appeals to common sense, it really is just a partisan argument. The current financial situation proves that one need never run out of "other people's money" as long as it is "properly" spent. If the quote applies at all, it would actually work the other way as "the problem with [prefix]ism is sooner or later the surplus is completely allocated."