I've been playing some Pokemon Pokopia lately, and when browsing online I came across an article titled "Capitalism is Dead in Pokemon Pokopia, and Tom Nook Isn't Happy About It."
The article is a comparison of the economic systems of Animal Crossing (which infamously features a raccoon named Tom Nook who saddles you with a mortgage), and Pokopia, which has limited buying and no selling at all, and thus a very limited monetary system.
The article is full of communist utopian tropes, including paragraphs like this:
It’s worldbuilding with an added glimpse at what separation from capitalistic society could be. In this way, Pokopia encourages progression and collections without a financial incentive. I didn’t collect fruit to sell it. Instead, I ate it for energy, fed it to my neighbors, or asked a skilled Pokemon to help me turn it into paint. For the most part, I didn’t feel a need to scavenge every item I saw and just took what I needed. I actually wish I could sell some of my surplus items because I have enough sand in my pockets to build a new beach. I quickly learned that in Pokopia, everyone takes only what they need and contributes what they can.
Besides the obvious point that it's just a game, I don't really want to waste my breath objecting to this person's red visions. Truth be told, I can't tell if the article is even genuine or just rage-bait, and as such I'm not even gonna link it.
But what really caught my eye was the author's description of capitalism:
By definition, capitalism is a survival-of-the-fittest system wherein private property owners are free to run their operations however they deem fit in effort to accrue personal wealth
I don't think the author was rage-baiting here. I don't think. Their definition seems to resonate with Sven Beckert's implicit understanding of capitalism (the endless accumulation of stuff), which @denlillaapan has been valiantly reviewing on our behalf. Normie-ville seems to view capitalism as the endless accrual of personal wealth for apparently no reason other than accumulation for its own sake.
This is very frustrating because it ignores the fundamental premise of a capitalist system, which is that it incentivizes resources to flow to their highest-valued use, through the profit motive.
The argument is really very simple, and I teach it to my students in this simple three step process:
- In competitive markets, prices reflect the marginal social value of the good (e.g. the buyers' marginal willingness-to-pay, and seller's marginal cost).
- Profit is the difference between the price of outputs and the price of inputs.
- Entrepreneurship is the act of seeking opportunities to transform lower priced inputs into higher priced outputs, taking the difference as profit. Because prices reflect the social value of a good, this transformation is value-creating, and represents a transformation of resources from lower-valued uses to higher-valued uses.
The key insight is that profit opportunities are both non-obvious, and risky. Thus, without any profit motive, there won't be people going out there to seek these value creating opportunities. The economy stagnates, because resources are not put to their highest valued use. This is exactly what happened to communist Russia, and what happens to every communist society that doesn't embrace entrepreneurial activity and a competitive price system.
If people do not understand how profit-motive and entrepreneurship lead to better resource allocation, it's no wonder they can't understand why capitalist societies flourish while communist societies stagnate. And it's sad that so many people have this negative, bastardized version of capitalism in their minds.
We need better economics education throughout our society, STAT.
Bonus
Also saw this on Reddit.
The way the knuckleheads at CNBC and financial media talk about business & economics doesn't help, either.
Very, very much so.
I'm toying with an idea to explain this insanity. I think it's
Basically, for 1:
when a normie looks at the news or what Elon Musk is up to, or what a successful businessman in their area seems to be doing, it looks like they are "endlessly accruing personal wealth" for no obvious reason... extravagant houses, flashy cars, nice vacations. Always more, always bigger stacks. (My fav Icelandic-village example here is the left-wing anger against heli-skiing... objectively unnecessary, but extremely expensive and "wasteful" -- at least if you care about kerosine consumption and CO2 emissions, but for some reason can't care about adrenaline thrill, extreme awe, or the entrepreneurial skill of assembling resources we have into a service others value highly) Never can they assess that there's a different mindset/theory/framework that equally well (=better) explain the facts.
For 2: the most important thing I ever got from endless exercises in Game Theory class (or other econ modelling) was to flip the game and assess optimal strategy from the other party's point of view. It's an underappreciated way in which I believe those trained in economics are, if anything, more capable of understanding where another human is coming from. And it's a way to understand that the game doesn't end after a single capitalist tries to extort/grab their share via trade... but that it's a competitive, continuous process.
And if you do, you see the endless personal wealth being productive: build larger plants, offer more and wider services, better supply the world with services. For the "conspicuous consumption" and the flashy stuff, I've never understood the hatred... let them. It's the most obvious and harmless redistribution of wealth there is?
Hashtag, SimpleStacker unleashed a Den rant
You're right, it has a lot to do with not putting yourself in someone else's shoes, or not asking yourself how you'd behave in different circumstances, for that matter.
For example, if you owned a company, would you willingly shrink it? No? Because your workers depend on you for jobs? YOu do realize that if you grow your company, your wealth will grow at many multiples of the rate you pay your workers...
When they try to use my favorite games for communist propaganda, you know I'm gonna take it personally.
Look what you have done!
#1457057
Not How I was spending my afternoon -.-
What hath SimpleStacker wrought
You know it was worth it. No one goes to their death bed saying, "I wish I spent more time outdoors enjoying nature and friends." Instead, people regret not writing more economics articles in their life.
Have you ever played Path of Exile? I feel like you and @Undisciplined would get a kick out of the market economy that resets every 3 months or so.
Chaos Orbs and Divine Orbs are our medium of exchange. Like a 1$ and a 100$.
Mirrors, locks, mists are a stores of value.
Someone popular makes a video that uses currency you were using, now the price skyrockets 10x because everyone's caught on.
It's good times.
I think I played the very first one, but only the single player campaign (or maybe on Local LAN with some friends, I forgot).
I've always thought it'd be cool to use the data on video game economies like World of Warcraft. I even applied to work at a video game company once. I didn't get the job, and haven't tried again, and feel that I'm too old / set in my ways for it now.
I haven’t. My jam has always been single player games
That part isn’t terrible but it leaves out the all important “Fit for what?” question.
As you explained well, the standard capitalism holds people to is how well they use scarce resources to meet people’s wants and needs.
...and all the other private property owners undercutting you and trying to improve on your operation.
may as well have been an op-ed by Pol Pot because the Khmer Rouge were trying to go back to a money-free utopia on their 'Zero Day'
@plebpoet
My kids sometimes read the SNZ, and I think they'd get a kick out of this one. Any possibility I could special request this to go into this week's zine?
you could even consider charging for a service like this...
cooool
A world where
You do not need to sell anything
You have no risk of real deprivation
You can hoard or share without consequence
Specialists materialize exactly when you need them
There is no time pressure no inflation no scarcity that bites
That is not post capitalist utopia. That is a world where capitalism labor and even politics have been quietly outsourced to the game designer.
Some invisible adults already did all the hard work. They fixed the rules balanced the numbers removed trade offs and then handed you a safe little terrarium where you can play at virtue. You can be generous and unselfish because the game guarantees your survival and your progress. That is not an argument for communism or against markets. It is an argument for godlike central planning where the god never makes a mistake.
Games are deliberately constructed to mask that machinery. That is fine. They are supposed to be toys not policy proposals. But when someone points to a toy world and says Look this is what life could be like without capitalism they are actually pointing to what life looks like when someone has already done all the economic work for you and then locked away the control panel.
Pokopia is fun precisely because it is not a system we have to build. It has no transition costs no political losers no messy constraints. It is the end stage snapshot without the process that got you there. It is like admiring a finished cathedral and then concluding we should abolish architects engineers and budgets because the final building is so serene