Does anyone else here like the Wikipedia?

[St Leo]

Originally posted by Darkstar
Even if you shop at 'average' supermarket, you will generally find more choices then two "corporate" makers. Again, unlike our national politics.

Sorry, I didn't realize we were talking about American politics. Yes, in US, voting with a wallet is slightly more effective than voting.

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by St Leo

Originally posted by notyoueither
But, St Leo, do we buy a candy bar? A donut? A box of cereal? A bottle of pop? A six-pack? What? Thousands of choices, and those choices added up have a far larger impact on the course of events than a single ballot cast once every 4 or 5 years for A, B, C, or D.

Which course of events do my purchases supposedly impact?

Say, I vote NDP. The reinstitute a proper national housing programme. This gets some homeless off the streets and into a base from which they can choose to become active members of society again. Maybe they'll write a great novel or finish their PhD instead of getting raped and knifed to death in an alley.

Clear results.

Say, I buy two tonnes of Mars bars and twenty thousand cans of Coca Cola. The board of Coca Mars Inc decides to circumvent American income tax by issuing a dividend. Every intern gets $2 and the CEO get $20 million. The CEO already has enough for food, shelter, and other necessities, so the $20 million just sits in a bank doing nothing special.

Eh.

That is part of your choice, isn't it? Buy a local brand and don't support the shareholders and board of Cola Mars Inc. Or, buy only 'ethical' brands and effect a whole lot of change every time you put a nickle down.

You do have a point about radical political change. That sort doesn't happen very often through the ballot box though.

[Darkstar]

Originally posted by St Leo

Originally posted by Darkstar
Even if you shop at 'average' supermarket, you will generally find more choices then two "corporate" makers. Again, unlike our national politics.

Sorry, I didn't realize we were talking about American politics. Yes, in US, voting with a wallet is slightly more effective than voting.

Hey, the company we give more money to becomes the mover and shakers. Just look at Dole's history, or the Banana Wars. These businesses that operate across political borders are the creatures and the force of our greedy little wills... the want our money, so they do whatever they think will get them more of it. And they move their resource collection and manufacturing to wherever they can get things done the cheapest. That has a much larger effect then voting for some guy that sits in a national office for 4 years or 7 years or whatever. Especially since the movers and shakers get in on the democratic process so that they will be "in" with the people you vote for, getting sweetheart deals and whatnot.

[OzzyKP]

Originally posted by St Leo
[q] Originally posted by notyoueither
Say, I buy two tonnes of Mars bars and twenty thousand cans of Coca Cola. The board of Coca Mars Inc decides to circumvent American income tax by issuing a dividend. Every intern gets $2 and the CEO get $20 million. The CEO already has enough for food, shelter, and other necessities, so the $20 million just sits in a bank doing nothing special.

Eh.

Ahem.

Once again demonstrating how little communists understand of basic economics. Not that I'm a pro, but jeeze, that 20 mil is doing all kinds of good.

Think of that scene in "Its a Wonderful Life" when there is a run on the Savings & Loan, and Jimmy Stewart says he doesn't have the money, the money is in "your house" and in "your car" and in "your business" etc. That 20 million of the CEO is invested and loaned out to many other people to help them buy houses, and cars, and pay for education, and everything else.

Things cost resources. Even in communism. Having excess resources allow others to use them. Kinda like a non-coercive sharing of wealth.

[St Leo]

Originally posted by Darkstar
And throughout most of history, the heart of society's moral code has not been "altruistic". It's been "Shut up, stay in your place, and do what you are told." From your statements, you are not very familar with many societies. Feel free to actually go read a bit about the ancient cultures. We know about the teachings and morality of most cultures that lasted for several generations at least since ancient Egypt.

There's a lot more prehistory to go around than there is history.

[Agathon]

I haven't seen anything from NYE or anyone else that even comes close to an argument against my point.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Originally posted by St Leo

Originally posted by Darkstar
And throughout most of history, the heart of society's moral code has not been "altruistic". It's been "Shut up, stay in your place, and do what you are told." From your statements, you are not very familar with many societies. Feel free to actually go read a bit about the ancient cultures. We know about the teachings and morality of most cultures that lasted for several generations at least since ancient Egypt.

There's a lot more prehistory to go around than there is history.

Is prehistory altruism though? Joining together so you can survive isn't altruism... or else cartels are altruistic.

[Agathon]

The point is that we are altruistic, and that the explanation for this is that it was selected for. There's a reason that all primitive societies are altruistic and egalitarian - the ones that weren't died out. Altruistic behaviour was therefore selected for. Our basic psychology is a biological endowment from our forbears, which is why many people have qualms about the extreme selfishness that is required for a market economy to work.

NYE is claiming that market behaviour is natural. The only sense I can make of that claim is that it means that human psychology is completely self interested in the way it has to be for a market to work properly. The facts don't bear this out and our evolutionary endowment is the explanation why.

None of this has any bearing on the claim that a market system might not work right now, or in the future. The only claim in play here is whether market behaviour is natural behaviour, not whether it is beneficial.

If the desire to truck and barter in the market manner (not in the manner of gift economies or moral economies) was natural, we should expect to find it wherever we find human beings. But we don't - we only find it in large communities of people where the traditional trust and clan relationships that supported the pre-capitalist economies are no longer feasible.

[notyoueither]

Aggy, you are swapping altruism for cooperation for survival. Don't you get it? If you cooperate with them so that they help you survive, you aren't doing anything for selfless motives.

I'm not saying cooperation is not natural, but I deny it is altruistic. I am saying that both cooperation and trading are completely natural things for humans to do. They have been doing them for thousands of years after all.

[Agathon]

I get it just fine.

Co-operation for selfish reasons produces suboptimal outcomes for everyone since the incentive to co-operate lasts only as long as perceived advantage - this is the lesson of the prisoner's dilemma. This is why Hobbes, who thought that all people were selfish, believed that no community could exist without an all poweerful tyrant.

Real co-operation requires mutual trust, and trust that is contingent on perceived advantage is unstable. Everyone is better off if people have some internal restraint for keeping their promises.

That's why people say that there is no honour among thieves and why it's so hard to keep a criminal gang together (notice that the most successful criminal gangs reinvent themselves as surrogate families rather than collections of self interested individuals).

There's a distinction between that which is more likely to serve the interests of a creature and a self interested psychological make up. We can all agree that we are better off because people are kind to each other, without agreeing that their motivation for being kind is a selfish one. Altruistic behaviour evolved as a means of maximizing the probability of individual survival, but paradoxically did so by tempering naked self interest.

But there really is no paradox. If individuals are more likely to survive by being actually unselfish, then this will be selected for and we will end up with natural altruism. It doesn't matter that this is a selfish strategy, because what matters to us is the psychology we have, and that is altruistic. It's no different than sex - people have sex for pleasure, but end up begetting children even though that was not part of their conscious aim.

I'm taking it that you, like most people, often find yourself performing random acts of kindness for strangers. Why do you do this, when you have no real reason to expect reciprocity? You would actually be better off if you were never kind to strangers while still benefiting from their kindness to you (free riding). But you do it because of your evolutionary endowment and there is a peculiar satisfaction in doing so, even though you don't do it for that.


And..

I don't dispute that people have swapped stuff for eons, but that does not a market economy make. A market economy requires people to seek the maximum price they can get for their wares, a moral or gift economy does not - it relies on the expectation of reciprocity.

[Agathon]

Take a community of hunter gatherers.

Not every hunter is going to be successful every day. So a hunter who kills an elk that he can't eat all by himself, will share it with others in the hope that when they make a kill, they will share it with him. But if he is selfish he will try to maximize his own gain by making sure he gets more than he receives (from the selfish point of view, that is rational) as long as he doesn't anger the others enough to expel him from the group. If everyone behaves this way, there will be a suboptimal outcome because there is an incentive to free ride as much as you can on the backs of others (i.e pretend to hunt, instead of really hunting).

It would be better for all of them if God programmed them to be altruistic. That way everyone would be motivated to do his best for the tribe and would benefit because he would have a reasonable expectation of reciprocity from the others (in the way that you know you can trust kind people). In a community like this, selfish people will be punished because they are violating the code of trust; but in the selfish community everyone is going to be busy trying to gain trust for themselves and violate it with others wherever they can which will lead to less overall successful hunting.

Each hunter faces a decision to either hunt as hard as he can or shirk and only appear to hunt as hard as he can. But the best outcome from the selfish point of view is to shirk, because if you do and everyone else hunts, you get to eat without working and if you hunt and everyone else shirks, you've wasted all your time for those free riders. So it's better from the selfish point of view to shirk when you can. But this means everyone will try to shirk, which leads to a worse outcome than if everyone worked.

Of course, God didn't program them, but natural selection did the job.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by OzzyKP
Once again demonstrating how little communists understand of basic economics. Not that I'm a pro, but jeeze, that 20 mil is doing all kinds of good.

Think of that scene in "Its a Wonderful Life" when there is a run on the Savings & Loan, and Jimmy Stewart says he doesn't have the money, the money is in "your house" and in "your car" and in "your business" etc. That 20 million of the CEO is invested and loaned out to many other people to help them buy houses, and cars, and pay for education, and everything else.

About what you are talking?

That money is supposedly sitting in a bank, not loaned out to many other people by the CEO*. The bank may lend that money to other people, but it has absolutely no bearing on St. Leo's scenario, which is an illustration of consumers not having much say in how "the market" work.

Originally posted by OzzyKP
Things cost resources. Even in communism. Having excess resources allow others to use them. Kinda like a non-coercive sharing of wealth.

Wrong. Having an excess means the allocation is messed up, because there is going to be a shortage somewhere. Alternatively, an excess means waste. Take your pick.


* Like CEOs loan money to the common man

[notyoueither]

a: a market economy does not require greed. What happened to your altruistic nature that we all are assumed to have bred into us?

b: Small agricultural communities are built on mutual trust and cooperation. You haul your weight, behave as expected, and you will never go wanting. The restraints on people in those communities is that being outcast is the kiss of death. Failure will be your lot, or outright starvation if you get really unlucky.

As such, people in such conditions are conditioned to behave. That doesn't mean they do the things they do out of some selflessness.

You should really talk to some people who are familiar with small towns on the prairies. You might become enlightened.

Your bits about altruism being ingrained and natural are interesting, but tell me, why do people stray from it so much when ever they get too far from subsistence?

[Agathon]

a: a market economy does not require greed. What happened to your altruistic nature that we all are assumed to have bred into us?

Yes it does. If people don't seek the maximum price for their wares, then that disturbs the price setting mechanism, which sends a message to producers to produce less of them - hence not enough hats or shoes will be produced to satisfy consumer demand.

Consider the case (I got this from some economics book) of the big freeze in Quebec some years back. The Quebec government prevented people who had generators for sale from price gouging. But this was a stupid thing to do because if the price had risen high enough, people outside of Quebec would have found it worth their while to take their generators to Quebec and sell them. Because of the price freeze, many Quebecers went without generators that they were prepared to pay for and people elsewhere were left with generators that they didn't need as badly as the Quebecers. That was an inefficient distribution of resources.

Your bits about altruism being ingrained and natural are interesting, but tell me, why do people stray from it so much when ever they get too far from subsistence.

They don't. People still behave this way towards their friends and family. It only works in small groups because it is only possible to build up trust and empathy with people you see all the time. In large groups things become anonymous and the potential for successful free riding is much greater.

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Agathon
Take a community of hunter gatherers.

Not every hunter is going to be successful every day. So a hunter who kills an elk that he can't eat all by himself, will share it with others in the hope that when they make a kill, they will share it with him. But if he is selfish he will try to maximize his own gain by making sure he gets more than he receives (from the selfish point of view, that is rational) as long as he doesn't anger the others enough to expel him from the group. If everyone behaves this way, there will be a suboptimal outcome because there is an incentive to free ride as much as you can on the backs of others (i.e pretend to hunt, instead of really hunting).

Vastly oversimplified. There are other benefits of being the best hunter, or the best tracker, the best farmer, the best skinner, or the best cook. Recognition is something humans respond to. Being treated better by everyone is another.

It would be better for all of them if God programmed them to be altruistic. That way everyone would be motivated to do his best for the tribe and would benefit because he would have a reasonable expectation of reciprocity from the others (in the way that you know you can trust kind people). In a community like this, selfish people will be punished because they are violating the code of trust; but in the selfish community everyone is going to be busy trying to gain trust for themselves and violate it with others wherever they can which will lead to less overall successful hunting.

Each hunter faces a decision to either hunt as hard as he can or shirk and only appear to hunt as hard as he can. But the best outcome from the selfish point of view is to shirk, because if you do and everyone else hunts, you get to eat without working and if you hunt and everyone else shirks, you've wasted all your time for those free riders. So it's better from the selfish point of view to shirk when you can. But this means everyone will try to shirk, which leads to a worse outcome than if everyone worked.

Of course, God didn't program them, but natural selection did the job.

I think there is a big gap between selfish at one extreme and selfless, or altruistic, at the other. I think most people would fall in between.

Of course, there are a whole lot of other factors in human psychology, like competitiveness, that your scenario completely ignores. However, it is an interesting yarn you weave.