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531 sats \ 5 replies \ @tomlaies 7 Dec 2023 \ on: Anti-Capitalist Fallacies econ
On this topic I can recommend this: Ugh, Capitalism The laziest form of persuasion on the internet
I also wrote a Stacker News post about why Capitalism is good: Late Stage Capitalism? We're just getting started!
Good pieces.
I've been thinking about this claim that "The World is Improving. In Every Metric.", though, and I think there's something big to be grappled with in it. I'm certainly someone who has made claims to that effect and to some degree I believe them to be true.
However, the very fact that so many people feel so unfulfilled by life is evidence that some sort of enormous trade off has occurred and is being missed by our metrics. People are eating themselves sick and scrolling themselves stupid in seriously detrimental ways. The old sources of meaning (families and communities) have been eroded and replaced with nothing.
I don't have a fully formed thesis on this issue, yet, but I do think we're missing something really important with our "things have never been better" claims.
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I'm by no means an ecological economist or radical environmentalist, but Herman Daly offers a persuasive critique of how we currently measure economic progress.
Some prime examples (not necessarily from Daly himself):
- If we generate more trash and that causes us to build more landfills, the economic activity of creating and servicing the landfills is counted as output growth, but the trash is not counted as a cost.
- If Twitter hires a bunch of engineers and designers to steal eyeballs from Facebook, then Facebook hires a bunch of other engineers and designers to steal them back, this is counted as economic value creation. Of course, the disconnect here is whether the offering of a service that captures a person's attention is real value or not... a philosophical debate that can be had. But based on the studies of adolescent well-being and social media usage I'm thinking most of this is not real value creation. Far be it from me to be a paternalist, but we do have to wrestle with the truth that not all of our choices are good. In that sense, I really appreciate the insights from dual-self models in behavioral economics. I'm just not sure what to do about it yet...
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This is partly why some people use more "holistic" indices like the Human Development Index which includes education and longevity. It's an attempt to account for non-monetary goals that people have. The truth is that there just cannot be an objective and accurate measure of human wellbeing, and therefore there can be no true measure of economic progress.
That leaves us with imperfect proxies and resorting to questions like whether similar lifestyles could be afforded in the past.
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However, the very fact that so many people feel so unfulfilled by life is evidence that some sort of enormous trade off has occurred and is being missed by our metrics. People are eating themselves sick and scrolling themselves stupid in seriously detrimental ways. The old sources of meaning (families and communities) have been eroded and replaced with nothing.
This is very wise. I don't know that there's an easy answer, but I think the quest to step back and ask: wtf is all this actually for is well worth doing. We talked about this in some sprawling comment thread, I think about externalities: the market works its magic for goods that can be priced appropriately in the market. For everything else, we have no reason to expect optimality, and indeed, we don't get it, for the reasons you say.
I think the "happiness economics" movement gets undeserved mockery for this reason. A developed nation filled with miserable fucks who become addicts at record rates, obese people who live longer, miserable lives full of self-loathing, and people living hollow lives FOMOing their friends on social media -- this is not an unadulterated success story. Previous generations would not have considered this state of affairs to be a triumph.
I don't care what GDP says. Figuring out how to talk about this in a sane way would be a Good Thing.
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One of the things that attracted me to Bitcoiners is the attention paid to how much of life is "fiat". While I think this is often take too far, I like that people are questioning whether all these expectations and institutions are actually providing value. The optimist in me, thinks we'll rediscover those things that make life meaningful. (The pessimist in me thinks we're already on a runaway death spiral.)
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