19 Facts About the American Economic Collapse.

[loosecannon]

this is why the disparity between me and e.l. yeager (california bridge contractor) is considerably bigger than between me an my least guy. i'm not stealing from anyone or manipulating inflation. yeager doesn't even know me -- him and his are engaged in greater participation than i have managed, and by far. he's not stolen anything from me either.

stealing? Please. You do help fix your lowest workers wages and you do conspire to insure that you make a profit off of his work.

Meanwhile because a transaction, or far more correctly a series of billions of transactions, may elevate the standard of living of most is in no way an endorsement of capitalism.

Society worked to raise that living standard despite the corrosive effects (immense wealth disparity) of capitalism.

You are entitled to your opinion. But we are both limited to persuasive arguments since there simply is no rational way to measure any of the positions we have taken yet.

Living standards have improved due to technology, economies of scale and increased social organization and perhaps even because of capitalism, or not.

But those increased living standards have been extremely disproportionately distributed, and half of the world's population has realized only modest improvements over iron age living conditions.

Meanwhile whole nations, like ours, bask in luxury that Kings of the recent past could never imagine.

But that is not evidence that capitalism raises all boats.

And certainly not evidence that wealth disparity today is offset by the potentially mythical promise of future rewards.

After all we live in a nation of 300 million people who are quickly waking up to the realization that the dream offered them is dying before their eyes, and their prospects and their children's prospects are hollow shells compared to what was promised just 4 years ago.

Show me the money, don't promise me shit!

 

[loosecannon]

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."~Albert Einstein

 

[antagon]

You are entitled to your opinion. But we are both limited to persuasive arguments since there simply is no rational way to measure any of the positions we have taken yet.

this is not how this seems to me.

i think that you've based your world view on something which is not real, and haven't been able to show how it works, but rather repeatedly contend that because of the way rich people do better that it has to be because they take from the poor. alternatively, i have been able to show why rich people do better and that the process eliminates poverty. this process is one of the most common and repeated ones which constitute an economy. the idea that inflation is effecting your model is all that you have offered, and does not seem severe enough or targeted enough to support your zero-sum/sum-negative argument. i don't think that dialectically equal arguments are being put forward. i think we can witness one model readily or hardly account for the other at all.

stealing? Please. You do help fix your lowest workers wages and you do conspire to insure that you make a profit off of his work.

i dont know about wage fixing. that is way to much effort to go through for a guy who is peripheral to the company. the job/labor markets effect wage stability by themselves. if employees think they can get more money somewhere else, but they like working for you, trust me you will find out. as for the lowest on the ladder, business is a bit slow for a sixth full-timer with no skills) and he was destitute, so as often as possible he gets the broom and shovel or some sandpaper. he also gets $9 an hour which is at least $3.50 better than he could get at labor-ready where he worked out of before. insuring profitability is more about pricing. the guys get paid the same pretty consistently, so the only way to make/break profit is a shitty estimate. this happens.

Living standards have improved due to technology, economies of scale and increased social organization and perhaps even because of capitalism, or not.

But those increased living standards have been extremely disproportionately distributed, and half of the world's population has realized only modest improvements over iron age living conditions.

i think the disproportion, particularly, is due to capitalism. while this abides by a sum-positive mechanism, rather than the ambiguous zero-sum theory to which you abide, it requires social infrastructure to distribute a portion of those proceeds through the parts of the economy which the capitalist end does not penetrate. there is obviously a limitation to involvement in the economy. in the developed world this is supported through social policy; in the underdeveloped or undeveloped world, you pan for gold, poach endangered species or rummage through junkyards. these societies demonstrate what more raw capitalism is like and the disparity shines through even more clearly.

nevertheless, no part of this empowers a characterization of economics as zero-sum or sum-negative. it is the opposite, despite there being a shortage of economic participation (or a surplus of participants) everywhere in the world, in every economy.

 

[loosecannon]

You are entitled to your opinion. But we are both limited to persuasive arguments since there simply is no rational way to measure any of the positions we have taken yet.

this is not how this seems to me.

i think that you've based your world view on something which is not real, and haven't been able to show how it works

My thoughts about your position exactly. You don't even realize that your world view is largely supported by ideological loyalty resistant to reality.

Which is fine, I spent the majority of my teens, twenties, thirties and forties doing the exact same. Then I grew up. Realized I had been a fool on an idealistic mission, and began to see the world as it really is.

Trust me on this, you think well, but everything you think will always be wrong. Always.

The most you can hope for is to be exponentially closer to reality with each passing year, constructing fallacious models of reality that are ever more precise and gaining ever more utility from your still fallacious models as they hone in on perfect accuracy but obviously can never achieve it.

Everybody is full of shit 100% of the time, but some people make steady and even occasionally revolutionary progress in reducing that depth to which their thinking is laughably wrong.

IMO the most intelligent human to ever live was Nikola Tesla and he was still wrong at least 40% of the time. And he was probably at least 40% wrong all of the time.

If you can match that you are world class. But you will have to be wrong a lot before you get to be right.

 

[antagon]

i dont think people are wrong about simple things nearly as often as about the most complex theories. this is how a holistic summary of the way the world works economically is not one of those complex concepts. i see on a daily basis how my pursuit of wealth empowers the same pursuit of those who work for me and who contract our service. i see this all around me. it is dominant to the force of inflation, wage fixing or theft, particularly by the wealthy. these are the possibilities which you've suggested as to how the economy gets the way it is and i dont think it is tesla coil-grade reasoning to take them in demurrer to the larger mechanism of win-win commerce.

you've not explained how this is unreal or a fallacy, just declared it. you've not defended your freeze frame analysis method or how you can be certain that what it is observing is zero-sum, you just declare that as well. you've not answered to the fallacies on which surplus value is based, you've just persisted in abiding by its misleading implications. what to do?

 

[loosecannon]

perhaps you should try listening, in which case you would realize that none of that was true but that my positions are self evident and that you simply have massive resistance to them.

Or not. Personally I couldn't care less if you agree, but in the end people always believe what they want to believe and only brick walls and clever persuasion/marketing/advertising/religion and propaganda ever change that.

It actually is blatantly self evident that capitalism was designed to distribute wealth disproportionately. And that whenever capitalism gets half a chance it does so, while defiling it's own charter in so doing.

Allowing a profit centric self governing mechanism to determine public policy and social advancement is like allowing a super virus to direct medical research.

Capitalism is the cancer which feeds upon social order. As a mechanism of extremely organized crime capitalism is magnitudes more evil than mere unorganized crime and chaos.

Everybody without an agenda or bias to the contrary knows this instinctively. They always have and always will.

But hey, if you wanna believe in capitalism, ignore me and follow your bliss, at the direct expense of most of humanity.

 

[antagon]

its a myth, your position. again you have observed disproportion and attributed it to zero-sum without saying how. magic like this is not common on our planet. contrary to what you propose, it is not wisdom to believe that systems without method actually exist.

this is how what you are contending is not based on how things really work. you can't say how it happens; it is just your hunch. it's not even a popular hunch like you contend. businesses people who operate in accord to your world view end up failing because the implications of zero-sum operation in the real world are not sustainable, often illegal. those who do best by their customers and employees benefit from the sustainability which is required to expand and improve potential for profit in the first place.

 

[loosecannon]

its a myth, your position. again you have observed disproportion and attributed it to zero-sum without saying how. magic like this is not common on our planet. contrary to what you propose, it is not wisdom to believe that systems without method actually exist.

this is how what you are contending is not based on how things really work. you can't say how it happens; it is just your hunch. it's not even a popular hunch like you contend. businesses people who operate in accord to your world view end up failing because the implications of zero-sum operation in the real world are not sustainable, often illegal. those who do best by their customers and employees benefit from the sustainability which is required to expand and improve potential for profit in the first place.

well gee antagon, the whole universe is a system without method, as is the economy. Complex systems don't work one way, they work in millions of ways at once. And the results actually do speak for that fact regardless of whether we can artificially synthesize their means via models and ideas.

"businesses people who operate in accord to your world view end up failing because the implications of zero-sum operation in the real world are not sustainable, often illegal."

That is hardly fair since I acknowledged from the start that there are occasions where it is appropriate to think in terms of future rewards, like career planning etc.

" those who do best by their customers and employees benefit from the sustainability which is required to expand and improve potential for profit in the first place"

that is exactly the kind of foward thinking, making assumptions about the future, promising future rewards for present disparity that I have been discussing. And while it may prove true in lots of cases, it is by no means certain. Sometimes Friday doesn't happen.

 

[antagon]

there's plenty of method to the universe. what are you talking about? results dont indicate a method in your model. zero-sum is a method, and merely looking at winners and loosers cant tell you if it is by way of zero-sum.

i think you're better off banking on likelihoods of credits and debits than on career planning, particularly in microeconomics. you have to realize that wealth is an assessment of worth at a future time. this is how ive been saying that it doesnt make sense to acknowledge some future values and not others, or at least to have better-than-arbitrary selection of which of these is observed. but that is for economic models which aren't hoping to judge a moving economy on static frames.

 

[loosecannon]

is the universe zero sum , or non zero sum?

 

[antagon]

this depends on what respect you have in mind. matter and energy are zero-sum. life and sentient life in the universe cast different relationships which aren't necessarily zero-sum.

 

[loosecannon]

"life and sentient life in the universe cast different relationships which aren't necessarily zero-sum"

how is that, and how do you know?

 

[antagon]

"life and sentient life in the universe cast different relationships which aren't necessarily zero-sum"

how is that, and how do you know?

 

[loosecannon]

if the universe is a closed loop, or zero sum equation then any sub system within it must also be a zero sum equation.

In the example you posted life or sentient life is thriving at the direct expense of imported energy suppliers and the mineral earth. But since it is all actually a part of the zero sum greater universe life and sentient life are actually part of a zero sum, closed loop system in which the sum of the parts = the whole.

There is a caveat you could insert here that I would have a hard time debating: that is that given the same parts life benefits from increased organization producing a qualitative benefit independent of the zero sum analysis.

Which is what I assert society does for humans in an economy, and you assert capitalism does for humans in an economy.

 

[antagon]

if the universe is a closed loop, or zero sum equation then any sub system within it must also be a zero sum equation.

this is a fallacy, however.

There is a caveat you could insert here that I would have a hard time debating: that is that given the same parts life benefits from increased organization producing a qualitative benefit independent of the zero sum analysis.

and you've even figured out how.

Which is what I assert society does for humans in an economy, and you assert capitalism does for humans in an economy.

i see economies as being components of a society instead of the other way around. capitalism is one such setup whereby the constituents of the society are free to express their demand as they please. this pleasure is what makes for a sum-positive distribution. the constituents exchange value for goods and services at rates they are agreed with mutually. there are aspects of society which are aimed at improving the benefits of an economy to the wider society.

i consider the optimization of support to and from an economy to be the point where efficiency of a national economy ought to be measured (per-capita metrics, rates of human resource utilization and growth at greater rates than population growth and inflation). even without health and human services and infrastructure components crucial to this efficiency, capitalist economies do not operate in the zero-sum manner you propose because of the mutually satisfactory outcomes of the commerce mechanism. the social components function to increase participation in this mechanism, in fact.

where marx and others have prescribed taking over this mechanism in pursuit of efficiency, there have been failures and dissatisfaction among social constituents. at the core of the clusterfuck was a failure to acknowledge that economics is not zero-sum and forcing it into that disposition with socialism, for example, only forfeits potential dividends from economic freedom, rather than distributing them as fantasized.

 

[loosecannon]

if the universe is a closed loop, or zero sum equation then any sub system within it must also be a zero sum equation.

this is a fallacy, however.

In game theory and economic theory, zero-sum describes a situation in which a participant's gain or loss is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the other participant(s). If the total gains of the participants are added up, and the total losses are subtracted, they will sum to zero

it isn't a fallacy.

 

[loosecannon]

capitalism is one such setup whereby the constituents of the society are free to express their demand as they please. this pleasure is what makes for a sum-positive distribution.

^^^^ that is a fallacy

Smiley faces does not make the whole greater than the sum of it's parts.

 

[antagon]

if the universe is a closed loop, or zero sum equation then any sub system within it must also be a zero sum equation.

this is a fallacy, however.

In game theory and economic theory, zero-sum describes a situation in which a participant's gain or loss is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the other participant(s). If the total gains of the participants are added up, and the total losses are subtracted, they will sum to zero

it isn't a fallacy.

in economic theory, commerce is not considered zero-sum.

 

[antagon]

capitalism is one such setup whereby the constituents of the society are free to express their demand as they please. this pleasure is what makes for a sum-positive distribution.

^^^^ that is a fallacy

Smiley faces does not make the whole greater than the sum of it's parts.

yes they do. you have to realize that wealth and value are subjective and largely based on future utility or value. in this way when two people enter a transaction and come away agreed, the future values perceived by each actually does constitute the value of the components of the transaction -- that value being greater in sum than prior to the transaction itself.

there is no such thing as universal or objective value.

 

[midcan5]

"Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite." John Kenneth Galbraith

How many would boycott companies who ship jobs overseas simply to make more profit? How many would stop shopping for the cheapest when the more expensive is made by fellow Americans? Americans could solve this but corporate power would fight back hard.


"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary." Adam Smith