To take over the market companies need to attract customers - i.e. make their lives better. Usually there are more consumers than employees - so I think that measure works quite well with optimising for humans. Profit is a side effect of taking over the market.
But actually to have any employees companies need to optimize for workers lives anyway. And it seems that cooperatives are not any better in this area - otherwise everybody would work for cooperatives.
> companies need to attract customers - i.e. make their lives better.
Companies need to sell the *idea* of making lives better. They don't actually have to make a customer's life better and many don't despite selling lots of product. Profitability is not a strict function of quality. If it were, we'd not give the slightest fuck about monopolies. It takes a great amount of effort to get companies to compete on "making lives better." If bettering lives is not the most profitable it is very often eclipsed by what is.
It's much more complicated than the simple lie that "you get what you pay for."
No, but it's very probable li2uR3ce bought things that were portrayed as being much better than they actually were. These days "profitable" for the seller rarely equates with "good value" for the buyer.
Feels like a false dichotomy? Brand loyalty fluctuates over time and by brand, market, etc. For example, cars are probably the largest repeated purchase in America, and car brand loyalty is nowhere as high as it once was:
People get convinced in the heat of the moment that they want something, when if they had time to reflect/research/etc. they might very well conclude that their money is better spent elsewhere. Marketing in a capitalist system is highly motivated to make you think you want or need something more than you actually do.
One tactic that some people find helpful when they want to buy a discretionary item is to wait a few days/weeks, and make sure that it's not just a whim that they'd regret.
Watch TV commercials over the years. The older ones are laughable. They steadily get more sophisticated as the years go by. That's because the customers get more sophisticated, too. You might call it evolution in action :-/
Political campaigns also get more sophisticated. Scott Adams has an interesting podcast where he breaks down the latest manipulative persuasion techniques used.
> But actually to have any employees companies need to optimize for workers lives anyway. And it seems that cooperatives are not any better in this area - otherwise everybody would work for cooperatives.
There's much more at play than just "cooperatives are not any better". Cooperatives don't get as much funding from investors because investors won't be owning a larger share of them, and taking their returns, they instead invest in a traditional company because then they can extract as much as possible from their investments.
That by itself already puts small scale cooperatives at a competitive disadvantage, you can't raise as much capital as the non-cooperative startup, even if their product could be better and their employers could be happier the lavishly monied startup will try to outcompete them by throwing money away until they get a larger share of the market.
If somehow this situation was improved where cooperatives are not immediately disadvantaged from an earlier stage we could see more of them popping up, right now there's not nearly enough cooperatives for this comparison to be possible, simply because they get extinguished by others with more capital.
>
There's much more at play than just "cooperatives are not any better". Cooperatives don't get as much funding from investors because investors won't be owning a larger share of them, and taking their returns, they instead invest in a traditional company because then they can extract as much as possible from their investments.
Unions should put their money where their mouth is and invest in cooperatives.
> Unions should put their money where their mouth is and invest in cooperatives.
Unions aren't structured for investing, and that's not their reason to exist.
I don't know where you are from so I can't comment on how unions function in your society, where I live they're definitely not in the same realm as a potential investor for cooperatives.
You are also asking for unions to compete against VCs, and banks, let's be realistic that even a large and wealthy union is not even close in terms of wealth management as a small to mid-size bank/investor. On top of that the union has responsibilities to provide benefits to all members, a bank or investor has none of that, tilting the scale even more in disfavor of an union assuming the role of investment.
It's a good thought though, another entity such as a credit union supported by workers in an industry which also takes the role on investing in cooperatives to foment them, would still be an uphill battle but if some good cooperatives came out of it maybe it could be another viable (albeit smaller) model to start companies.
Only partially true. Unions themselves aren't structured for investing, but unions have some of the largest pension funds and the managers of those pensions are some of the largest institutional allocators in the world.
Think CalPERS, CalSTRS, Teacher Retirement System of Texas, Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, and many others.
Typically[1], but both are unions. Had the previous commenter been talking about labour unions then you might have something, but it clearly says "union" and "union" alone.
[1] Although definitely not necessarily. A group of labour unions in these parts collectively own one of the largest hedge funds out there.
Most marriages - a kind of union - also don't invest in cooperatives. Even if they meet the accredited investor standard.
Neither does the Union of European Football Associations, otherwise known as UEFA. They make up for it with a dope anthem.
Neither the Kalmar Union, nor any other personal union of monarchs, ever invested in a cooperative. Although some may have invested in joint stock companies, such as the various East India companies.
Maybe the Soviet Union was into worker cooperatives? Not sure.
And finally, the union of the set of workers at cooperatives and the empty set invests in cooperatives. Hey look, we found one type of union that definitely invests in cooperatives!
(I was just having fun making this as absurd as possible. Sorry, no malice intended).
> Most marriages - a kind of union - also don't invest in cooperatives.
Is that because most marriages exist in urban centres where cooperatives are uncommon to non-existent? Out here in rural country, where cooperatives are the norm, most married people invest in cooperatives as most of the cooperatives are customer owned. You don't have much choice but to invest, assuming you want to be a customer – and no doubt you want to be, given that they provide basic services for the region.
I'm certainly an investor in several co-ops, and not because I went out of my way to do so. That is, with the exception of one co-op, which I provided additional investment to. That particular co-op runs a very successful operation and provides healthy returns in what is a comparatively stable environment to those who provide an over-and-above investment. They attract quite a lot of investment dollars as a result.
Which says something about unions that aren't investing. Why aren't they investing? Simple: The companies they see in front of them aren't worth investing in.
To the extent the bank wants to retain employees, it does need to provide some minimum level of utility. That may be as simple as an hourly wage for some, but both shareholders and employees are participating in the machine.
Unions aren't there for "Ownership" of companies or cooperatives, they're for improvement of member's work lives, it can be training, worker contract negotiations, as go-between when dealing with management or owners, etc.
Also, Richard Wolff has been advocating worker directed social enterprises (WSDE, aka coops?) for a while. Sadly, his now dated arm wavy book doesn't is more advocacy than HOWTO.
We forcibly allocate capital less efficiently; make markets less efficient and less responsive to innovation; with the sole aim of achieving a utopian worker-cooperative owned world?
> make markets less efficient and less responsive to innovation
I wish we didn't force capital to do things like that.
Then it can run wild with Mandatory arbitration which bars access to the justice system, algorithmic manipulation of prices for rents / real-estate (1) and installing spyware on the customer's computers (2) and MITM attacks of your communication (3). They are all free market innovations. Very efficient at doing the wrong thing.
Turns out the only thing we are doing is making more and more monopolies, there are no free markets and no choice for buyers. Your 88 brands of toothpaste are owned by two corporations. But yeah.
Efficiency with regard to what goal? The current allocation of capital in the US is quite inefficient if we're interested in the welfare of the public. Billionaires have far more capital than they know what to do with, and since they're unaccountable for their investment choices, they strongly tend to steer the economy toward vanity projects. Meanwhile, many families can't put food on the table, and infrastructure is falling apart.
Whatever it is about this system that you find "efficient," I don't find it valuable. The Chinese state takes a rather strong hand in allocating capital, and that has treated it fairly well over the past few decades. A mixed economy where private capitalists are not solely responsible for investment choices, and where ownership of that capital is more evenly distributed among the public, could fix a lot of problems.
Is take the American system every day. What is the moral justification for a state stealing private property?
Billionaires get to invest however they want because it's their property. What you see as a vanity project actually employs workers, feds families, and generates tax revenue. They are massively contributing to the economy.
> What is the moral justification for a state stealing private property?
I think it'd be good, is why. Non-intervention with private property is extremely low on my list of moral priorities. If someone's starving, I don't think you really have a right to keep food away from them.
> What you see as a vanity project actually employs workers, feds families, and generates tax revenue.
…and are they actually making anything useful? Or are they wasting everyone's time? Workers could be employed doing any number of things. For a rich person to "creating jobs" means nothing if those jobs are pointless. We could easily take that money away and create jobs doing something more important.
> If someone's starving, I don't think you really have a right to keep food away from them.
I believe in private charity, which would solve this. But I do not believe the state gets to steal from some people to give to others. The only reason for taxiation is to fund public goods.
> …and are they actually making anything useful? Or are they wasting everyone's time? Workers could be employed doing any number of things. For a rich person to "creating jobs" means nothing if those jobs are pointless. We could easily take that money away and create jobs doing something more important.
Who gets to define importance? This argument always devolves into state controlled economies which are charactetized by deadweight loss, corruption, and poor incentives. I'll take my access to private property every time.
Taxation in a sovereign state doesn't fund anything. The state creates the money to pay for stuff. The tax frees the resources so they can be purchased and simultaneously imbues the currency with value, which makes people want to accumulate it.
As an aside, do you also believe in private knocking-you-on-the-head-to-take your-food-you-don't-think-they-deserve?
As a matter of accounting, all the net money in the system was first created by the state before the private sector could accumulate it. You're welcome.
The money in the system was created by the state, but all it does is ease exchange. Value in the system, which the money represents, was created long before the system created money and will continue to exist after the system ceases. The value is created by private individuals trading freely.
As an exercise, I invite you to trade without money: barter your goods or services with others. It's more work but completely doable. But remember the state is still expecting taxes on that transaction. And then ponder upon whether state-issued money is truly the source of private sector asset accumulation.
Money is and always has been a tool of the state in order to exercise power, backed by coercive taxation. The barter myth is contradicted by historical evidence. The broader point is that the money has value precisely because it is inside a system of coercive taxation.
The public sector produces plenty of wealth - security, public goods, law and order, environmental protections, public health measures...
Nobody is obliged to accumulate state pegged money, yet most people do. Feel free to accumulate cheese if you wish.
> A lot of government funds have also been looted by CCP honchos.
Yeah, because they're corrupt and undemocratic. I certainly don't endorse China. But they do put to rest the idea that the freer the market, the stronger the economy.
What are your reasons for thinking that the Chinese economy is well-performing? Chinese per-capita income is slightly less than that of Mexico, and you wouldn't use Mexico as an example of a well-performing economy.
China is strong because of its massive population combined with an economy that performs better than the only other country with a similarly massive population.
No they don’t. China got richer when they implemented free market reforms, proving the idea.
Unfortunately Xi is now focused on saber-rattling about national security and bullying neighbors. He has cracked down on free markets, and China’s economy is suffering due to his incompetence.
It's not a binary. If we say market freedom is a spectrum with the USSR at 0 and the US at 10 (reductive, but let's pretend) then China moved from 0 to 5 and became a global power within a couple decades. This is a strong argument in favour of a level-5 economy, not a level-10 economy..
The system is not perfectly efficient because humans aren’t efficient. I think the idea is, keeping a market relatively free (with a sane amount of regulation) allows capital to seek returns. This leads to a lot of independent, decentralized value production, like startups popping up out of nowhere because some founders have an idea and attract capital.
The thing is, people who pile up capital don’t have to be efficient with it. They can basically do whatever they want with their money. They can build giant vanity estates, which you could certainly call inefficient — who needs 20,000 square feet for a family of 3? But… we also care about freedom, so we let people do inefficient things. The only difference between rich people and poor people is they have more money so their inefficiencies are louder. But everybody spends money on senseless wants and vanity. Who needs manicures and hair extensions? Arguably nobody. The “poor” spend on vanity too. And we let them because we care about freedom.
If you wanted to implement a perfectly-efficient system, would that mean banning the fulfillment of any desire that wasn’t strictly a need? I don’t think anyone would want to live in such a system.
>If you wanted to implement a perfectly-efficient system, would that mean banning the fulfillment of any desire that wasn’t strictly a need? I don’t think anyone would want to live in such a system.
Holy mother of slippery slopes x) Do you think $current_economic_system can be improved? Ah so you want to ban fulfillment of any desire? Sheesh
You’re strawmanning. I was caricaturing the call for efficiency by blowing it up into a monster. I wasn’t saying I want to ban fulfillment of desire, or saying that’s the only alternative to the status quo.
The irony of accusing the other person in the conversation of strawmanning while describing your own strawmanning as "caricaturing" as if that were any different
Efficiency is measured exactly by people maximizing their utility subject to their preferences and constraints.
What you see as vanity, such as hair extensions, may be a high utility item for others. Consider the hair extensions make them a more attractive mate and provide them the opportunity to breed with a better stock, for example.
Similarly, consider that 20k ft sq mansion in context: all the prior owner(s) of that property were traded revenue for the land. And the construction workers were paid. And now the gov gets taxes.
At every step, each contributor to the end product voluntarily participated and maximized their outcomes. That is maximally efficient, economically speaking.
> That is maximally efficient, economically speaking.
It is not. The resources which went towards that mansion would be (by your definition) much more efficiently spent elsewhere. The utility which one wealthy person gets from a 20k sqft mansion is much smaller than the total utility which 20 homeless people would get from a 1k sqft apartment.
Yeah I’m all for these things that I was calling “vanity”. I was only using the word vanity because the comment I was responding to used it pejoratively: “vanity projects”.
> The only difference between rich people and poor people is they have more money so their inefficiencies are louder.
Yes. Their inefficiencies are deafeningly loud and have a massive impact on the rest of us. This is why I am suggesting that we intervene to get rid of the ultrawealthy as a class.
> If you wanted to implement a perfectly-efficient system
Stop right there. Don't pretend that "what if we got rid of billionaires" is a slippery slope towards a society of perfect clones where all individuality is suppressed. You don't really believe that—you're just fishing for gotchas, and it's beneath you.
>The current allocation of capital in the US is quite inefficient if we're interested in the welfare of the public.
The welfare of the public today is not the same as the welfare of the public for all time. The Soviet Union couldn't compete on the development of computers, because the USSR was trying to optimize towards what could computers be used for then and there. It turned out that computers could be used for a lot more than what people thought of at the time.
Drug R&D and patents lead to enormous profits for companies, because they can charge outrageous prices for the drugs. But the benefit to the public is that now those drugs and the knowledge about them exist. That's going to have a cumulative positive effect for hundreds of years in the future.
> The Soviet Union couldn't compete on the development of computers, because the USSR was trying to optimize towards what could computers be used for then and there.
You assume pharmaceutical profits are all funnelled to R&D, rather than to shareholders. I see no reason why we shouldn't slash profit margins on medicine and offer the money back in earmarked grants.
So you see, I'm actually radically in favour of R&D.
No, I'm not assuming that. The profit motive is why they get the capital to do the R&D. I'm not just talking about developing an entirely novel drug but also manufacturing and testing it.
Without the possibility of this outrageous profit we would just get less drug research done. That money would then be invested in something else. Drug prices wouldn't be so outrageous (probably), but we probably also wouldn't have as many treatment options. They might be too expensive now, but there's a chance they won't be in 50 years.
> The profit motive is why they get the capital to do the R&D.
A massive amount of research is funded by public grants. iPhones are a famous example of a private-sector product almost entirely created off the back of public research. It is absolutely not true that private investment is required for pharmaceutical R&D.
> Billionaires tend to steer the economy toward vanity projects.
Musk's only meaningful contribution to SpaceX was money. We could just have raised NASA's budget instead, but we didn't. There are lots of things that we need to spend money on. Space is not our top priority.
Musk, however, is independently wealthy and can spend his money on whatever he wants. So he spent it on rockets, as a vanity project. Yes, some useful innovations came out of that. But what was the opportunity cost? Was this where the money was best spent? I have no reason to believe so.
NASA does a lot of things. If they'd been given SpaceX's capital and a mandate to build reusable rockets, I'm sure they could. They're world-class engineers.
> It was a heck of a lot more than that. See "Elon Musk" by Vance.
I'm not going to read his biography for the sake of your post. Rich people like to act as if they're uniquely good leaders, but it's easy to take credit from a room full of people when they're all on your payroll. If Musk had something to contribute other than fame and cash, name it.
> Becoming the richest man in the world through his investing is a whopper of a reason that it was well spent.
Not at all. Him becoming rich benefits nobody but himself. Funnelling money toward one individual's personal wealth is an extremely poor allocation of resources.
> He's reached cash flow positive.
Barely. And so what? Pet rocks were profitable. Did we actually need SpaceX? Is this really best the direction that so many billions of dollars worth of economic activity could have been directed? Is Elon Musk, the buffoon who ruined Twitter, really the person who should be making that choice?
The market has spent the GDP of Madagascar to fuck over cabbies in a handful of metro areas in the US. Meanwhile "efficiency" in the ISP market has lead to regional near-monopolies and some of the worst residential bandwidth on the planet. Let's not with "efficiency and innovation" yeah? The emperor is clearly buck-ass naked.
Three quarters of a trillion dollars are spent annually on marketing worldwide. Consumers are persistently manipulated into all manner of poor choices.
Ahhh yes, the old "because the market didn't turn out the way I wanted it to once, it means the entirety of the capitalist system and the idea of free markets is fundamentally broken" retort.
I call this the "Jr. developer fallacy." Start a job, encounter some bugs, suggest rewriting the entire codebase from scratch on [insert-trendy-framework].
That's just a couple examples I picked off the pile. You wanna do hyperconcentration of wealth crushing entire small business industries, collusion on pricing, ag services cartels driving farmers to commit suicide at record numbers, centralized manufacturing eliminating meaningful competition in consumer goods markets, or the last 15 years of bullshit where the term "innovation" was rolled out to describe some combination of fleecing dumb money and fucking over low wage workers let me know. Junior developer my ass, I been doing this shit for decades sonny.
You wanna review the track record of market driven healthcare systems vs socialized medicine? Spoiler: the US has one of the worst (by any metric you care to track) healthcare systems of any industrialized nation. Just because someone else's shit is broken doesn't necessarily mean your shit is working.
> Spoiler: the US has one of the worst (by any metric you care to track) healthcare systems of any industrialized nation.
That "by any metric" is just plain wrong. There's several metrics by which the US healthcare system is among the best--in general, if the metric you are tracking is largely covering the success rates of medical procedures (sibling comment mentions 5-year cancer survival rates, for example), then the US generally scores high. If the metric you are tracking is instead covering general population health or things easily caught with preventative medicine, then the US scores abysmally in those metrics.
In other words, the US healthcare system actually turns out to be very good (if perhaps not on a per-cost metric)... but access to the good healthcare system is extremely poor. And that's kind of what you'd expect for a market-driven system: good healthcare if you can afford it, shit healthcare if you can't.
I care to track cancer 5-year survival rates and the number of new drugs introduced per year. By those metrics the US is at or near the top. The US healthcare system has plenty of flaws but it does some things quite well.
Tell that to the folks that are dying because they can't afford off-patent insulin. I know a young lady who passed away in her dorm room a couple years back because she'd been rationing, I could introduce you to her family, I'm sure they'd be delighted for your take on medical profiteering.
Socialized systems are subsidized by the US drug companies. Corporations pour billions of dollars into r&d and other countries end up making cheap generics of the final product, without having to do any of the research.
US Healthcare is expensive, but the quality is better than most other countries.
> Socialized systems are subsidized by the US drug companies. Corporations pour billions of dollars into r&d and other countries end up making cheap generics of the final product, without having to do any of the research.
The American pharma companies also don't do the research, a lot of it comes from scientific institutions funded by public money.
What pharma companies do is provide capital for drug trials which are absurdly expensive, they are more alike investment companies than actual research institutes...
> (by any metric you care to track) healthcare systems of any industrialized nation
That's certainly not true. Of course compared to pretty much every highly developed country if we factor in relative spending per capita you'd be right.
But yeah, purely market/profit driven systems (with extremely poor and inefficient regulation) certainly don't work in certain sectors like healthcare.
Also it depends on what do you mean by 'socialized medicine', if you're specifically talking about single payer, your point is only valid if you ignore all other countries which don't have single payer besides the US. The Swiss and (as far as I can tell) to a lesser Dutch healthcare systems are 'privatized' to a much higher degree than the one in US i.e. effectively fully, there are no Medicare/Medicaid equivalents there. Instead they are very strictly and relatively efficiently regulated. They pretty much have Obama/Romneycare++.
If you mean something else than single-payer then the US system is arguably heavily 'socialized', both through insurance polling (just like in the countries I mentioned) and because the US government itself spends more on healthcare than most industrialized countries even relative to GDP. e.g. if we exclude all private spending (both individual and insurance) government health spending per capita in the US is significantly higher than in Britain and more than 2x higher than in Spain (and still significantly higher if adjusted by PPP GDP per capita)
Socialism does not mean central planning of a whole economy. That was the Soviet model of communism, which doesn't work at all.
I feel that the USA's education system has indoctrinated students so deeply into the red scare that real terms have become meaningless to discuss political and economical systems with the larger American audience, the words simply don't mean the same, they mean what you've been indoctrinated to believe they mean.
> Socialism does not mean central planning of a whole economy
What other forms of semi-stable functional "socialism" are there?
> have become meaningless to discuss political and economical systems with the
Discussing hypothetical pseudo-utopian systems like "socialism" or "communism" isn't particularly meaningful either (from the economics perspective, not philosophical).
IMHO the problem with socialism is that it will pretty always be outcompeted by private ("capitalist") enterprises which can provide goods and services which are both higher quality and cheaper (yes by "underpaying" their workers but also they tend to be much more efficient). Therefore you can't really allow both in the system/country.
So realistically "socialism" can only exist if the state suppresses any alternatives using various degrees of coercion and force. Since no real competition and by extension dissent can exist (i.e. nobody has enough resources to challenge the state without significantly damaging their career/status/wellbeing) the state ends up becoming more and more oppressive/controlling and unavoidable corrupt. I'd love to see any empirical evidence disproving this but as far as I can tell historically that's what always ended up happening.
If cooperatives can survive and compete with private enterprises without excessive regulation and government coercion that limits and competition and leads to lower productivity that's great. As far as I can tell that's rarely (but probably occasionally) the case unless we're also including "guild" like organizations.
However I'm not sure cooperatives are strictly a "form" of socialism, they have been a part of capitalist societies since pretty much the very beginning. I guess it depends where we draw the lines between partnerships etc. and cooperatives, I guess hiring additional workers who don't have an equal stake/share in the enterprise or subcontracting any sort of labor (let's say on a significantly meaningful scale, but still very hard to avoid) would be it.
Capital allocation under capitalism is also not efficient, it's pretty damn wasteful when you consider the resources used to find its "efficiency".
Innovation is also becoming a meaningless word to defend the system, the innovations have their foundations fostered with public money, through funding of scientific research which is then later captured by the industries to develop products. The innovation is productionalising another innovation, the foundation is built mostly on public funding. Very few companies actually do ground-breaking research that innovates, they're pretty risk-averse in this sense, the productionalisation of those discoveries has its own value, not questionign that, but it only gets traction afterwards when the brunt of the work of discovery was done.
Efficiency of markets is a hypothesis of financial economics with much better written criticism than I can write here, Warren Buffet doesn't believe in it, for example. It's not a given whatsoever, nor proven empirically.
"Free markets" and "planned economies" don't encompass the breadth of possibilities of organisation of politics and economics. Case in point: TFA...
This post is precisely about a free market economy where the (imo unnatural) disconnect between working in an enterprise and owning the products of that enterprise doesn't exist. That's all.
Not sure what "command economy" has to do with it.
If you hire a landscaper to redo the landscaping of your property, is he thereby entitled to own a share of your property? How about the guy you hired to fix your water heater? Does he get a share, too? Is that natural?
What's the salient difference between hiring a worker to help your business, and thereby being entitled to a share of your business, and hiring a worker to do some work on your house, and thereby being entitled to a share of it?
Public funding for whatever means the government is picking winners and losers. Whoever pays the piper calls the tunes. Public funding always comes with strings.
The government funded Langley with $60,000 to build a working airplane. It fell into the Potomac "like a sack of wet cement".
The Wrights spent $3,000 and build a working, flying airplane.
The jet engine was invented and developed with private funds. The US government told Lockheed to stop working on jet engines and develop better piston engines instead.
AI, the biggest tech revolution in a couple decades, seems to have been privately funded.
The internet you are using right now was created by public funds.
Compilers, which you work with your whole life, came from research done by public funds.
Most medical research has been done with public funds.
Radios, modems, every single piece of networking we currently use was first researched by public funds.
We can keep cherry-picking examples if you wish go down this road, it doesn't foster much of a deeper discussion though if you are going to keep your dogma.
Public funding is necessary, private funding is necessary, what kind of system we can create that enables the best out of both worlds to evolve and be better? That's a discussion I'd like to see, this end of history bullshit is too boring, and tiring to discuss.
Capitalism as it is has empirically shown it's not the best system humanity should rely on, it has its advantages, it has major flaws, admitting that is a pretty good first step into trying to look what's next, how do we go from here. It's destructive, it's inhumane, it's simplistic, it will become a relic just like any other system that came before.
Being dogmatic about it doesn't take us anywhere, it just conserves a status quo which is not the best we can achieve.
As usual, I think you are a bright person, Walter, you've done tons and achieved a lot more than most, but keeping this dogmatic narrow-view of the world certainly pains me, exactly because you are the kind of mind that should be able to see through the bullshit...
It was an incremental step, followed by other incremental steps. There have also been many, many internets along the way: AOL, Prodigy, BYTEnet, MCI, Gopher, RBBS, etc. Every organization that had more than one computer soon figured out how to connect them. Even I did that.
BTW, Ethernet was invented by Xerox. I use it every day.
Compilers appeared shortly after computers that were capable enough to run them appeared. This suggests an inevitability, not a discontinuous invention. Jet engines were a discontinuity, too.
What I see is that if invention X is derived from inventions A,B,C,D,E,F, and D was funded by the government, the government gets all the credit.
> Capitalism as it is has empirically shown it's not the best system humanity should rely on,
How has that been shown?
> it has its advantages, it has major flaws, admitting that is a pretty good first step into trying to look what's next, how do we go from here. It's destructive, it's inhumane, it's simplistic, it will become a relic just like any other system that came before.
Show an example of any system working better.
Free markets are a chaotic system of creative destruction. There have been endless attempts at "fixing" that. None have worked better.
I think the problem is that nothing has been shown to be better, but so many people can feel their whole lives that there must be something better.
I tend to take a step back and keep in mind that Free Enterprise is not inherently a part of Capitalism and vice-versa. They've gone together pretty well but each might do better with a different partner or different arrangement altogether.
> simply because they get extinguished by others with more capital.
Unless you go to where capital isn't concentrated (i.e. rural areas), then co-ops are everywhere. It is not uncommon to be able to get your groceries at a coop, your gas, your phone/internet services, you name it.
Yes and: IIRC, long-term governance of coops has been a challenge.
Coops have been vulnerable to "hostile takeovers" (I don't know what to call it), transmuting from benefitting members yet another rent seeking enterprise that remains a "coop" in name only.
I was a long time member of PCC and REI. As I understand it, both experienced juntas. Histories I'd love to understand better.
I've read that most farmer coops also fell prey, becoming profiteers, from helping to harming their members. IIRC, there was even a personal account here on HN by a dairy farmer.
In conclusion, I'd LOVE for coops to be the norm. My biggest concern is how to structure coops to remain true to their mission and resilient to enemy action.
New companies have no credit rating. Investors would never buy bonds sold by a new cooperative that needs a huge amount of capital to build a new semiconductor fab or something.
The investment schemes do not have to stay static while only the structure of businesses change.
Even if it did, would it not makes sense that investor priorities would change if their only options beyond cooperative businesses were some very small startups and mom & pops?
A system of public banks could handle investment based on the priorities set by all citizens. Everyone would effectively become a shareholder. Successful businesses could be taxed based off what the public invested in those new cooperatives, and those taxes would be used at least partially be used to fund more startups.
If labor and capital truly are in tension as so much of our social and economic philosophizing says, then it’s no surprise that a structure optimized for labor is less attractive to capital.
Coops work where they work and don't where they don't. Mutual insurance coops also have to fight traditional banks and single-owner insurers and they do just fine. State Farm is huge. Co-ops are just not good at some kinds of markets and so they lose there.
> they instead invest in a traditional company because then they can extract as much as possible from their investments
Sure. And workers extract as much as possible from their employers. And customers go for the lowest price possible, and sell their stuff for the highest price possible.
That's how people are.
In the 50s, my dad was in Italy watching the news on TV. A man had just won the lottery. The reporter asked him what he was gonna do with the money. Before he could reply, another man stepped in front of him, saying "he's a loyal member of the Communist Party, and he's going to give it to the Party!" The winner pushed him aside, announcing "Oh no, I'm not a Communist anymore!"
> To take over the market companies need to attract customers - i.e. make their lives better. Usually there are more consumers than employees - so I think that measure works quite well with optimising for humans. Profit is a side effect of taking over the market.
Quantity of people benefitted isn't the only measure: magnitude of benefit is also relevant. The customer at a 7Eleven benefits in that they get to... what, buy snacks conveniently? Versus the worker who receives their entire livelihood and benefits, it becomes obvious that workers are the primary beneficiaries of a company.
> But actually to have any employees companies need to optimize for workers lives anyway.
This is quite obviously false. All companies have to do is present a united front on keeping pay low and benefits nonexistent to prevent workers from having better options. I.e. USA 2024.
> And it seems that cooperatives are not any better in this area - otherwise everybody would work for cooperatives.
>All companies have to do is present a united front on keeping pay low and benefits nonexistent to prevent workers from having better options. I.e. USA 2024.
Can we leave the cynical antiwork comments out? They aren't helpful. This is obviously not the case for a majority of companies and anecdotes don't help.
Everyone is for the highest pay possible until they run their own company and have to provide payroll.
> This is obviously not the case for a majority of companies and anecdotes don't help.
That isn't obvious at all. The US has the one of the highest pay gaps of any developed nation. Our largest companies with the richest executives have employees on food stamps. I'm not being cynical, I'm talking about reality, and I'm not going to shut up about it just so you can maintain your comfortable naivete on this issue.
> Everyone is for the highest pay possible until they run their own company and have to provide payroll.
If you can't pay your workers a living wage your business has failed in the only way I care about.
This doesn't contradict your point, but fwiw the pay gap of quite a few other nations come before the US. In terms of RP, the US ranks about 35th, behind many African and Asian nations.
> Can we leave the cynical antiwork comments out? They aren't helpful. This is obviously not the case for a majority of companies and anecdotes don't help.
Major companies are regularly prosecuted for conspiracy to suppress wages. It if weren't for government intervention your wages would be much lower and there wouldn't be anything you can do about it.
This blind faith that billion dollar corporations would behave ethically is highly inappropriate
Most companies aren't "major companies". I'm for busting up the big monopolies, but I'm not for throwing the baby out with the bath water and imposing communist reforms on all businesses, most of which are small and generally well behaved, just because some big ones with pathological behavior exist.
So if you acknowledge that pathological behaviors exist, what's the problem with regulating against those pathological behaviors? Given you seem to think most companies are small and well-behaved, it won't affect those companies.
Regulation only shifts corruption, it doesn't stop or prevent it. There is plenty of corruption in and around government including the judicial system.
There's A LOT of daylight between liberal capitalism and communist socialism.
The social democracies, a middle path, as the Nordic countries have experimented with, seem to have done quite well. And there's now strong evidence that our system (neoliberalism) has stunted economic growth.
Regardless...
I support simple social reforms, like sovereign wealth funds (Alaska, Norway) and universal healthcare, greatly reducing the tension between labor and capital. Then these labor, employment, and ownership reforms wouldn't be so fraught.
This discussion is about the proposal to, by law, force all businesses to be workers cooperatives. That's not the liberal capitalism found in Nordic countries, it's communism.
Communism does not have businesses, worker owned or otherwise. It does not even have currency and money at all.
Early form of capitalism didn't have limited liability companies. Just because you have to use Unlimited Liability Partnerships, for example, that does not mean it's not capitalism.
Once we move beyond capitalism, there are other words too, like mercantilism, imperialism, Neo-feudalism (arguably what we are getting to), schumpeterianism, etc. Expand your vocabulary.
>Communism does not have businesses, worker owned or otherwise. It does not even have currency and money at all.
Huh? You seem to know absolutely nothing about how the Soviet Union worked. They certainly did have money and companies. (And don't give me that BS about the CCCP not being "true communists" -- No True Scotsman fallacy)
> You seem to know absolutely nothing about how the Soviet Union worked
I think it’s you who doesn’t. Notice USSR stands for Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It was not a Union of Communist Republics. Have you stopped to think, why is that?
Leaders of USSR were communists, as in they believed in Communism. However, according to them, the country was socialist and they were working towards the goal of achieving Communism. That goal would be achieved eventually, when society or economy or technology was ready. But no official or leader of the Soviet Union would claim that they have already achieved communism.
So you can use USSR to claim that putting communist leaders in charge is a bad idea, but you cannot claim that USSR was an example of communism because not even people running it at the time claimed that it was.
And yes, the eventual goal was to get rid of the concept of money. You can read any of the soviet sci-fi, like Bull's Hour, and see how they imagined it would work.
A "true" communist society like you're talking about has never existed, outside of possibly Israeli kibbutzes and also tribal hunter-gatherer societies before civilization was invented.
In real communist societies like the Soviet Union (which are more accurately labeled "authoritarian socialism"), they need money to control allocation of goods, just like any other modern society. How exactly do you decide how many rolls of toilet paper to give to people? Some people need more than others, so either you have a giant government bureaucracy just to police how much toilet paper people use, how much of every possible type of food to eat, etc., or you just give people money and set prices for stuff, and let them figure it out themselves. These societies were centrally planned, but at some point it's simply impractical to plan everything.
As it turns out, the Federal Reserve chairman happens to be on record as wanting to suppress wages because he blames high wages for inflation[0]. In other words, the current dumpster fire of an economy was the intended goal of the Federal Reserve's interest rate increases.
People like doing meaningful work that benefits their customers. I think that employee owned businesses tens to treat their customers better than companies that are owned by private equity, pension funds or other investors who never touch the product or interact with the customers.
The article you linked doesn't say anything to backup your claim. United was employee owned for a total of only 6 years. Employee ownership was institued over some employee objections and wasn't fully supported by management. The labor relation issues that caused the pilot strike and slowdown duering that period predated the employee ownership initiative.
Nobody is saying that employee ownership is a magic bullet that fixes organization disfunction but data from that first year does show that it can have a positive impact of performance and customer satisfaction.
But actually to have any employees companies need to optimize for workers lives anyway. And it seems that cooperatives are not any better in this area - otherwise everybody would work for cooperatives.