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Provocative article title. The book seems more sober.
Goodman warns that “We can’t stop people free-riding, it’s part of our nature, the incurable syndrome… Free riders are among us at every level of society and pretending otherwise can make our own goals unrealistic, and worse, appear hopeless. But if we accept that we all have this ancient flaw, this ability to deceive ourselves and others, we can design policies around that and change our societies for the better.”
The point that resource tangibility/verifiability biased groups toward cooperation is awesome and not one I'd considered.
Goodman points out that our distant ancestors benefitted from risk-pooling systems, whereby all group members contributed labour and shared resources, but this only worked because it is difficult to hide tangible assets such as tools and food. While some hunter-gatherer societies continue to rely on these systems, they are ineffective in most modern societies in our globalized economy.
“Today most of us rely largely on intangible assets for monetary exchange so people can easily hide resources, misrepresent their means and invalidate the effectiveness of social norms around risk pooling,” Goodman says.
What is this communist crap? The problem is the government commits violence on productive working people by forcing them to pay involuntary "charity" through taxes in the form of "unemployment benefits" and food stamps that subsidize the lazy free loaders. The solution to socialist problems is less socialism. End of Story.
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sigh. cooperation is communist?
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105 sats \ 1 reply \ @DannyM 21 Jun
No, but pooling and sharing every resource is.
Human cooperation needs to be VOLUNTARY and between a small circle of people you know and trust.
In the 1990s, an anthropologist named Robin Dunbar estimated that in general, we can only maintain between 100 and 250 meaningful relationships. I'm not exactly sure I agree with the number entirely, but there is precedent throughout history.
One is much less likely to screw over a person in such a small and connected group than they are to screw over millions of people living in the city they live in, which is why pooling resources will never work on such scales, and perhaps why sudonaka had this reaction
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Sadly socialists don’t understand logic and reason.
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