It comes up all the time. But the power of capitalism is that even this idea will itself be monetized by people selling books, giving ted talks, appearing on podcasts, asking for donations for cause, etc. etc.
Okay how about we take off the blinders, stop patting each other on the back and call it "an" evil algorithm since exploitation is economic-system-agnostic?
Mostly the part that brings groups of humans to optimize for wealth, even if this directly makes the life of other humans shittier. It turns humans into automata who blindly want to make the number go up, and not worry about the consequences.
A potential mitigation could be for governments to make the bad consequences more illegal. And in order to do so they need not be influenced by the algorithm, but unfortunately they are.
Good question. Wouldn't it be convenient if this were one of the most written-about political subjects of the last 150 years?
In short: The problem with capitalism is class striation. Society is divided into a capital-owning class and a labouring class. Capitalists, as they control the productive capital in our economy, portion out economic profits as they see fit, paying labourers as little as is necessary while retaining for themselves the maximum possible amount. Labourers, owning negligible amounts of capital themselves, are dependent on capitalists for work and have little recourse.
Hence, power consolidates in the hands of capitalists. They have leverage over politicians through lobbyists, over the public through media, and over their employees through the threat of job loss. The labouring class are second-class citizens. Healthcare is inaccessible to many them. They're frequently mired in debt. If they become disabled, they could easily lose their homes and wind up on the street.
In one sense, the solution is obvious: Dissolve the boundary between these classes so that none of these class inequalities exist anymore. Now, how is that done? Who knows. The traditional answer is, "the tensions in the existing system will exacerbate until the workers all organize and force a new status quo upon society," but that doesn't seem to be happening. Then again, if we had a solution, the problem wouldn't exist anymore, would it.
on HN you can either be a moldbugian reactionary or a utopian socialist, but the important thing is that your ideology remains unimplementable and thus unfalsifiable and safe forever from the dangerous forces of empirical results
The utopian socialists were pre-Marxist, actually. Marx spent a lot of time critiquing them. They're not really around anymore.
Anyway, what does it mean to "implement" a critique? All I did was point out the problems with capitalism, for which there is plenty of empirical evidence.
If you want to know which policies I support implementing, I'm afraid they're relatively dull and incrementalist, since policy can't reorder the global economy by fiat.
Classic thought-terminating cliché. Any critique of capitalism is communism, and communism invariably entails Maoist crackdowns or what-have-you; therefore it's best to "immunize" oneself even against basic critiques of capitalism because they're just a slippery slope to the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
None of my remarks are particularly incendiary—or do you think the idea that billionaires exert control over politics through lobbyists and media corporations is controversial? And I'm pointedly not making any policy prescriptions.
I'm afraid you've immunized yourself against even reading the posts you reply to.
Let's say you are a cart pusher in a free market. After ten years of cart pushing, you land on a trading opportunity and capitalize on it. Then you hire more cart pushers.
Now you have a responsibility. Either keep the business going, or everyone loses their job.
Then others smell profit and eat up your market share. Now you have to stay afloat and the workers suffer.
As the emergent properties build up, we end up with a modern free market society with all the romanticized "class wars" worker abuse and peeing in a bottle drama all because the job market exists.
It is like an ouroboros ironically nibbling on its tail while winking.
No. Greed is inherent to humans. No social order can eliminate greed. They can, however, mitigate the harmful effects of greed on society.
In a democracy, elected leaders are not as empowered to satisfy their greed as monarchs are in monarchies. Socialism extends this logic to businesses: An elected business leader would not be able to satisfy their greed to the same extent that a capitalist business owner can.
You can get rid of money and have communism if you want and guarantee that all have what they need. But somewhere beyond need there is want, and the line is awfully fuzzy.
You can have a barter society if you want, where people trade pineapples for shoes, but you are always going to have people who want more shoes or more pineapples than what others have.
