The psychopathic economy.
Assume:
The world is not governed by men of power, but by economic necessity.
Economic necessity cares no one whit about humanity.
We are close to arriving at a post-industrial age.
The industrial age has been characterised by the churning of mass-production and mass-consumption by the masses, producing a profit for capital.
The post-industrial age uses robotics and 3D printing, and no longer has a use for mass-production, mass consumption or the mass of humanity. This results in the loss of all power of the masses and the end of democracy.
The disempowered masses vote for a return to the industrial age, which they will not get. What they will get is the encouragement to continue the dying industrial past, producing and consuming, until their complete destruction.
This will be accomplished by global warming raising sea levels to flood major centres of population and most of the arable land, supplemented by repressive government and war.
A minuscule percentage of humanity will survive to enter the post-industrial age. It will not be paradise.
Why won't it happen?
The world is not governed by men of power, but by economic necessity.
Economic necessity cares no one whit about humanity.
We are close to arriving at a post-industrial age.
The industrial age has been characterised by the churning of mass-production and mass-consumption by the masses, producing a profit for capital.
The post-industrial age uses robotics and 3D printing, and no longer has a use for mass-production, mass consumption or the mass of humanity. This results in the loss of all power of the masses and the end of democracy.
The disempowered masses vote for a return to the industrial age, which they will not get. What they will get is the encouragement to continue the dying industrial past, producing and consuming, until their complete destruction.
This will be accomplished by global warming raising sea levels to flood major centres of population and most of the arable land, supplemented by repressive government and war.
A minuscule percentage of humanity will survive to enter the post-industrial age. It will not be paradise.
Why won't it happen?
Comments (84)
However, I'm not sure in the future you have proposed - I think that's too hard for anyone to predict. Furthermore I don't think anyone controls capitalism - I think capitalism is the one that controls people.
I don't understand this part of the apocalypse. Why would the fact that there's no need for human brute force production methods impact the number of people living and how would that then impact the demands of the people? It would seem the result would be that the least technologically savvy rung of society would have limited employment opportunities and those with means would have available to them a plethora of low cost consumer products created through cheap technological means. This would result in a greater chasm between the haves and the haves not, with the have nots using the democratic process to express their displeasure in being lost in the shuffle. They'd to this by voting for a populist who vowed to make America great again.
When the have nots do not see America brought back to the industrial age greatness, they will go back to their relegated role and the haves will continue to support more and more of the system by funding government programs, like health care.
That's my prediction of what would happen.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/jan/16/worlds-eight-richest-people-have-same-wealth-as-poorest-50
Quoting Rich
The concentration of wealth is a 'natural' phenomenon - a surplus accumulates as capital and is 'put to work' creating more wealth. The concentration of wealth is not a 'problem' (to the economy) as long as capital needs labour. If there is a cheaper alternative to a human, it will be adopted, and humanity is not in control of that.
The thesis is that the economy rules, and the economy no longer has a use for the masses. Therefore, 1. the masses have lost the power they had as producers and consumers, and 2. they have no function; therefore 3. they will be scrapped.
Even if the robots are going to be the ones mass producing other robots and 3D printers, I don't think we're anywhere near being able to have robots repair themselves. It would be nice if we could figure out how to make simple appliances that don't easily break first. Until we can do that, I don't think that robots will be taking over--and that means that someone needs to mass produce robots, 3D printers etc.
And as much as I like the idea of things like self-driving cars, given how easily and majorly other sorts of gadgets, including computers, screw up and crash, it would take some sort of impressive mechanical failsafe system for me to trust a self-driving car.
There is nothing natural for private central banks to print $trillions at 0% for a handful of wealthiest people in the world unless one considers thieving bankers a natural phenomenon - which certainly can be argued.
No worries dude. Once 99.9% of the population is gone, the roads will be much safer.
Quoting Rich
Looking upwards from the gutter, it appears that bankers are in charge of the economy, but this is an illusion of perspective. They're just trying to make a buck the same as the rest of us.
Well, and I'd finally be comfortable spending time in India . . . unless that remaining 0.1% decides that they still all need to board the same train as me.
No. It will not be paradise. Understatement of the century.
Your initial assumption is true, in that 7 billion+ economic actors is beyond the control of actual policy-establishing-and-enforcing human agents, like presidents, parliaments, economic unions, Central Committees, treaty organizations, and central bankers. If (more likely when) the major global economic and political arrangements fail, immiseration will fall on the masses, not the elite. And then the deluge.
In a rational economic system, providing for the basic needs and some wants of 7 billion people could keep everyone usefully occupied. Unfortunately, economics is not "rational". Never mind the 8 richest men§ that Oxfam says have as much wealth as 1/2 of the 7 billion others. The richest 10 million people, and the economic and political apparatus that they live within, control more wealth than just about everybody else on earth. They will be able to arrange a more pleasant post-industrial-globally overheated survival
The entire population of the earth, minus the bourgeoisie, mostly lacks class consciousness. We are not a cohesive "class" with well articulated class interests. We have not, and we can't effectively resist or redirect the economic forces that are going to be our Waterloo. (A few scattered small groups are attempting various future-oriented strategies, but these efforts are altogether insufficient. Not wrong, just not enough.)
We're screwed.
§ per the link from Bill Gates (Microsoft); Amancio Ortega (fashion chain Zara); Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway); Carlos Slim Helú (Grupo Carso); Jeff Bezos (Amazon); Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook); Larry Ellison (Oracle); Michael Bloomberg (Bloomberg financial information).
I don't understand how the model works without 'mass consumption'. There have to be people buying the stuff the robots make, supply-side economics only works in a command economy (if at all). There won't be the profits you are imagining unless there's a market for the goods or services. To my mind the likely scenario is that there continues to be 'mass consumption', but that in itself disperses power: where workers once organised at the workplace, there is little comparable consumer-organisation at the consumer-place.
(One of the most loathsome betrayals of us ordinary people was the espousal by supposedly centre-leftists of the need for a 'flexible labour market', something which I think of as a much worse creator of insecurity than your advertising psychology - but that must be the ghost of the old neo-Marxist still stirring in me)
More widely, extrapolation from where one is at present rarely has turned out to be the subsequent case. The history of medium-term economic forecasting is comparable to the history of coin-toss-guessing in its sheer beauty and success rate.
So my reaction is that such crystal-ball-gazing is interesting more as a statement of present mood than of likely future outcomes. To that extent, I agree: my mood is pessimistic, though I imagine things panning out differently.
It doesn't work. The model changes. Robots don't make stuff for workers to consume because there are no workers. Non workers become non-consumers and have no value to capital. Robots are capital and produce products for capitalists. Everyone else fucks off and dies.
The flexible labour market is just the beginning of the end of labour power. Its not a betrayal, but the operation of historical necessity. This is a neo-Marxist analysis - do you not recognise it?
Of course they are trying to make $trillions in bucks - only they are doing it by stealing it with their money printing presses which makes them somewhat of thieves.; It's natural for bankers to act like this which is why they should be locked up just like they did in Iceland. That would also be quite natural.
The robotics part is just plain misdirection by sone hired academia a la Krugman. No different than previous eras of technology change.
Sure. But locking a few people up doesn't change anything much.
Quoting Rich
I don't think so. Trade unions are losing power because heavy industry is being automated. It's a long way from complete, and will probably never be quite complete, but robots get cheaper and cleverer, and the miners, he dockers the car workers will never get back the power they once had. So workers' rights are eroded and wages are going down, and social care is being eroded. It doesn't matter which party is in power because the economy dictates.
The misdirection is the politics that suggest that 'we' can get our country back and revive those declining industries by separating ourselves from those other desperate powerless people, the foreigners. That what we need is strong government - which means rich men and dictators. Which sets us up for civil wars border disputes and so on. Misdirection blames the greens and liberals for all those pesky environmental regulations and the terrible cost of looking after the old the young and the infirm, and all that employment protection that stifles growth.
Perhaps this can be arranged by not taxing profit but requiring robotic production time (50%) to be contributed to the masses. Or (eek) common ownership of the means of production.
It's nice to dream.
Yes. This has been happening since the 1980s. The proletariat is either automated or its Indonesian children. Neither is likely to stage a global revolution. It's true Trump's message wasn't much more than nostalgia with some vague threats of trade war. This is not exactly a news flash.
Try HG Wells. If anybody actually watches the whole thing... I tend to agree with his long-term predictions.
If "economic necessity" means pragmatic scientific reason, governing the world versus our current ideological morass then forget it. Those that survive the cataclysm will find no entertainment value if every issue is dealt with rationally. Humanity almost certainly (?) will not survive the sheer boredom of a world with nothing to do.
Entertainment value seems to have more ideological sway in our society than any rational argument. The drama of the times, the complete horror of Syria, is (I think) our version of the Roman's spectacles in the Coliseum. The recent trend in exchanging establishment figures for individuals who entertain the best, is only just starting, I think.
I'm with Hanover on this point, I don't see how the economy can destroy the masses. To mass is a fundamental attitude of the human psyche, like a herd animal, we find security and consolation in each other. We want, and do, the same thing, and this creates massing, and the mass.
A changing economy will change the mass, but I don't see how it will destroy the mass. You talk about "the masses" though, so your assumption is that the mass has already been divided into the masses. If you can identify how it is that the economy divides the mass into the masses, then perhaps you would have an argument as to how a continuation of this process would dissolve the mass altogether.
Trade unions are losing power because of free trade (free slave) treaties that allow corporations to build factories wherever slave labor is available and the central banks are giving corporations all of the free money they need to build these slave factories.
If you want to go into the psychology of it, then yes the need for security in the group is an important motivation. But the group is not the mass. To get beyond the tribal stage takes an effort of political education. One sees the security benefits of a wider identification, with the trade union, or the nation, or the federation of states, and one makes the effort. But when the benefits are lost, because the collective power is lost, then the identification reverts back to the tribe. See for example the failure of the Arab Spring, or the collapse of Yugoslavia.
So sea levels rise, and London is flooded. The financial district will have already moved uphill - to Switzerland, perhaps. Millions of refugees head for the hills where they will be regarded as immigrants threatening 'our' survival. Civil war ensues, and because the arable land is also flooded, mass starvation mops up most of those who haven't been killed in the conflict. Rinse and repeat simultaneously all round the world.
You are not making a point against me, unfortunately. You are identifying someone to blame, which might make you feel better, but comes under the rubric of 'misdirection' as far as I'm concerned. The 'because' doesn't really matter; it is happening and it isn't going to stop because we all agree to hate bankers and corporations. That only continues the process, and confirms the power of the economy.
You're kind of where I was when I was in my 20s. You're in your 60s? I'm guessing that means you're stuck there.
I'd like to believe it is just a psychological condition I've got stuck in, but you'll have to work a bit harder to convince me.
Because those in power have a better understanding of economics than a random forum dweller spouting out some Marxist's flavoured dystopia, who thinks he knows how the world works by reading some dense literature about dialectical materialism, while being isolated from reality.
That's emotion.
The human race may, by simply following its nature, become extinct by its own hand. There's no recipe for accepting that. But maybe at some point in contemplating it, the beauty of the humanity might peep through for just a second. I'd much rather die with love in my heart than with anger. Especially when I already said: it's anger for things they couldn't help.
What do any of us know about the future?
The world is born, grows, dies and then is re-born. We're at the end of civilisation - this has happened many times in history and will go on happening. There is no stopping this historical cycle. No technology and no society will ever escape this. It seems undeniable that man has a propensity for sin - and sin has a propensity for destruction. Thus ultimately even the best of societies will decay and die. A propensity is just a statistic though - there is nothing actually preventing a perfect society for existing for millenia - it's just not likely. As it happened with our own society, moral decay, the rise of hedonism, the fall of discipline, - these have brought all societies to their knees and will continue to do so. The masses of people are too stupid. Have you ever read this paper?
http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf
Discipline exists when things are hard - people understand why it's needed. When things aren't hard, people forget why discipline is needed. When they forget why discipline is needed, they abandon it. When they abandon it, they stop doing what they did to make things easy. Thus things become hard again. And the cycles repeats.
Quoting Mongrel
Sea levels are rising. Ice is melting. These are not back somersaults but facts. Climate change measures, feeble as they are, are under attack. This is not a handstand. Most of the major centres of population and most of the arable land are very close to sea level. All in all, the conclusion is supported unless someone can either remove some of the supports or find some factor that I have neglected. I don't think I am being over-emotional; rather, I think it's the responses are favouring emotion over argument. As if my personality or qualification is a crucial part of the argument.
So how did you solve the cloud problem professor? Exactly how much higher is the mean temperature going to get? When exactly will London be flooded? How long will it take? How long will it last?
Meantime: remember that Rome ceased to be a republic and basically became a monarchy. Under what circumstances did that happen and what else what happening at exactly the same time some distance to the east? Who in 1 BC would have guessed how things would be three centuries later?
You did know there's a delay between the time the CO2 is released and the when the effects are actually felt... I'm sure you did.
None of what I said are insults. It is a simple observational fact having read your post. You show a lack of understanding in economics. Have you heard of the The Luddite Fallacy (which is closely linked to the Lump of labour fallacy) -- both are well known and accepted among economists.
What you portray is the equivalent of Trump stating that climate change is a Chinese hoax. Pointing out that he severely lacks basic understanding of climate sciences would not be an insult, but rather an obvious observational fact.
Another obvious fact is that -- provided that no one wants to come off as painfully ignorant -- Trump has probably never taken an honest look at climate change. Parallel to you, it is bloody obvious that you have never looked up what technological advancements do to the economy, especially regarding jobs. And when I say looked up, I mean reading up some proper economic papers. So, why is it that you start a discussion about factual notions, but you can not be arsed to look up the actual facts? Your interests do not lie in becoming better informed about the world, but to confirm and reiterate your own predisposed narrative. "Intellectuals" are probably one of the most ignorant people of the world, Chomsky takes that throne with pride.
I will help you, this is a decent start.
Around 2060 -70 if sea level rise does not accelerate, which it might well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Barrier
And London is one of the best protected coastal cities in the world.
There are many unknowns, but not knowing everything does not equate to not knowing shit. It might not happen, It might be worse than I suggest. We might build a new barrier, or someone might bomb this one. But again, what I don't know, plus what science does not know does not add up to an argument. We do know that sea levels are rising and that the rate has been increasing.
It's really a sort of miracle that countries actually can look past GDP growth for the sake of preserving the environment for higher GDP growth (e.g Paris climate agreement).
However, I believe that we are past the point of no return in terms of climate change. I guess we'll just to adapt and learn how to live in a new environment.
Personally I don't think matters are that settled. It may very well be possible that the planet has a self-regulating mechanism which is capable to dispose of the warming effect and we just haven't thought of it yet. Us humans are terrible terrible at predicting anything. We can't even predict economic crises - much less how the planet will react to warming.
Ah this one is an absolute gem. Every time someone brings this up, you know they have zero interest in understanding a complex phenomenon such wealth creation.
Wealth creation (and I'm talking about real wealth creation, not peanuts), just like empire building takes the right circumstances, the right positioning and a bit of luck. If you have all that, it's actually not that hard assuming that you also have sufficient intelligence to approach the situation in the right way.
Add up to an argument? Dude. Sea levels were rising right before the Younger Dryas. There's a 100% chance that everybody alive now is going to die. There's a 100% chance that the next century is going to be different from this one. If you want to dwell in some certainty that the present situation is the worst thing that's ever happened.. ok. It might be.
Is this some innuendo to Ayn Rand and Objectivism?
Think about what "wealth" means -- without equivocating. How it is calculated/determined. Everybody assumes the colloquial terminology, which makes this report -- provided by the Guardian, what a surprise -- extremely misleading.
Why won't it happen?
And btw... if you can't explain why it won't happen, that means it's inevitable.
[quote=Autor]A final point, typically neglected in recent dismal prophesies of machine-human substitution, is that if human labor is indeed rendered superfluous by automation, then our chief economic problem will be one of distribution, not of scarcity. The primary system of income distribution in market economies is rooted in labor scar- city; citizens possess (or acquire) a bundle of valuable “human capital” that, due to its scarcity, generates a flow of income over the career path. If machines were in fact to make human labor superfluous, we would have vast aggregate wealth but a serious challenge in determining who owns it and how to share it. One might presume that with so much wealth at hand, distribution would be relatively straightforward to resolve. But history suggests that this prediction never holds true. There is always perceived scarcity and ongoing conflict over distribution, and I do not expect that this problem will become any less severe as automation advances. [/quote]
But distribution and not scarcity is already the problem, and the engine of fair distribution is collective power which is in decline, and inequality is correspondingly rising. The decline in manufacturing jobs is compensated by a rise in service jobs (simplifying as usual). I notice a sudden increase in nail-bar establishments round here. But service jobs leverage little power in terms of the effect of a strike.
I'm probably being old-fashionedly ignorant again, but it seems to me that the service industry must piggyback on manufacturing, in the sense that we can all do each others nails and clean each others premises and sell each other goods as busily as we like, but if we do not produce anything, our economy is fucked. This is the problem of declining industrial regions. So the automation of manufacturing becomes a problem of distribution, because the industry, even though it may continue, does not export wealth to its surroundings, but only to its owners. I'm not seeing a lot of will to solve the problem of distribution.
It won't happen because the Guardian says that Godzilla is not real, and ebythink the Grauniad sais is ture.
Where's marxism when you actually need it, eh?
Ok. So things aren't looking up but I don't think the majority of the rich elite are so detached from the world that they don't care about anybody else. If I look at the giving pledge, for instance, and the amount of good Bill and Melinda Gates do for others, there is hope right there.
But we are living in the entitlement generation. Where the rich blame the poor for thinking they are entitled to social benefits and the poor blame the rich they are entitled to a disproportional share of the profits. I'm in the camp of the poor as I'm always reminded that we drink water from wells build by others. The individual accomplishment is greatly exaggerated and the humbleness of the great men of the 1900-1920, who "were standing on the shoulders of giants" is gone from our societies. Great intellectuals and researchers who advanced society without any profit motive are no longer social heroes, they've been replaced by business men. And those business men aren't evil or bad but the society that worships them just isn't that great.
Thinking about it Trump looks uncannily like Godzilla.
Insofar that any firm can produce profits -- has a flow of value -- and requires human operators within that flow (whether they be employed by the specific firm or not -- they can fall anywhere in the line of production) then there exists labor-power.
Walmart as of late has had workers organize within it and even though Walmart could go the route of Amazon, replacing their workforce with robots, the organizing within Walmart has brought about better working conditions for Walmart employees.
Labor still has the potential to organize and gain power through where they've always had power, regardless of what commodity they produce -- at the point of production. If that be acrylic nails, hoagies, or back massages then the fact that profits can be made through any of these commodities gives labor that potential to build power and leverage it.
I'd say that this doesn't mean your scenario won't play out. Only that it might not. It really depends on to what extent working class people can be organized not just within national parties, but across national barriers -- as capital is not limited to nations, labor can't, strategically speaking, limit itself to nations. At least that's what I think.
And honestly while capital has slowly dismantled labor, labor orgs have played their role too -- within the U.S. at least. It's been labor's increasingly parochial vision for the labor movement. Where communists were active in the labor movement and understood these general principles they had been expunged and replaced by petty bureaucrats who have moved the labor struggle from the point of production, where workers have power, to the negotiating table, where bosses do.
Could start making more rock to counter this: http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-are-again-turning-co2-into-solid-rock-to-fight-climate-change
Not sure science can help with this though...
I'm a Green leftie and once knew a fair amount about economics. I don't think the future looks at all rosy but I don't think it looks like your vision in all sorts of ways. One fundamental thing is that yours is indeed a neo-Marxist argument and just like many of them, it's very weak on understanding the 'demand' side of macro-economics. 20th century capitalism defied Marx's predictions by thriving because (a) the nation-state spent a great deal more on non-transfer payments for welfare than in previous centuries, on transfers like pensions, and on the military; and (b) mass markets opened up, in a virtuous circle where better-paid workers bought everything from Henry Ford's cars to Amazon's books. These were the two fundamental sources of vastly-increased aggregate demand that made a lot of people richer than their forebears.
I don't see why there won't continue to be mass markets. As China and other countries advance, their growing middle-classes provide a bigger market. (They're buying up quite a lot of resources in northern England, for instance, where we might have made Manchester great through the invention of graphene) Perhaps short-sighted elites like the British will make their fellows poorer, they look pretty incompetent at the moment, but even on a falling global market, I'd expect a large middle-class to carry on doing well. The end of the Soviet Union, for instance, caused terrible, largely unreported poverty, and a steep fall in life expectancy, especially among men, but it furthered a burgeoning bourgeoisie, brought St Petersburg if not Moscow back into the great European cities, and no collapse of civilisation was reported, even though the effect on the rural poor was in my view disgusting.
If you look at economics through an ecological lens, which I've taken to be the better lens as I've got older and understood more, then there are profound (as apo would say) constraints, and it remains to be seen how they will be dealt with. Fossil-based energy gradually runs out, rare metals get rarer, so you can't keep making toy phones in such quantity, and you can't drive this many cars on solar power, so major structural change will occur. Climate change kicks in so there will be big climate events, though I think poor Bangladesh is in bigger danger than London, the metropolitan elite are quietly spending a fortune on making London safer (see this on how the South East has most flood defence spending). I daresay other metropolitan elites are doing the same.
What's to be done? Me I'm just plugging away, putting Green leaflets through doors (though it always seems ironic to use leaflets), doing my bit for civil society, conscious that long-term predictions are usually our present fears or hopes writ large, and bugger all to do with how things will turn out. And really, my lifetime has been pretty good: relatively peaceful, affluent, free. If we can pass some of that down the line to our grandchildren, that's the best we can do. Alarm stokes up populism and motivates only despondency.
I haven't explained that very clearly. The virtuous circle came about because of labour power, not the efforts of capital. Organised labour was able to demand better pay and redistribution by governments. Now if I am right that the source of wealth is production, which means agriculture, mining, manufacturing and so on, then the automation ofthose processes, and never mind that lawyers and janitors are not going to be robotised, means that 1. wealth is not being distributed through wages, and 2. labour demands for redistribution lose their power.
So one sees the roll-back of worker protection, of progressive taxation, and so on. My local economy is almost entirely service industry. The product is holiday services - bed and breakfast, shopping, entertainment. This works fine as long as the holiday makers have money, which they get ultimately from production somewhere else. Robot production cuts off the source. Now that source could easily be replaced by a basic income, say, financed by a capital/wealth tax. But I don't see much sign of it, or of any power that has the interest to demand it.
Quoting mcdoodle
The question is more so, 'who is going to do it?' The what is easy; good environmental policies and strong redistributive policies. The problem is that governments are national, and capital is global and we are going to become the tragedy of the commons because of it. And the rise of nationalism is exactly the wrong way to be going.
Edit: This is too cryptic even for my taste: "The problem is that governments are national, and capital is global and we are going to become the tragedy of the commons because of it." The worker/consumer is the 'commons' that producers all make use of but none has an incentive to invest in. It's a twist, but I think it still bites.
A simple example is whether a 60 year old with 1 billion contribute more to growth an prosperity, regardless if you believe in trickle down, than say ten 30 year olds with 100 million?
This is beside the fact that, who the hell needs 1 billion? Let alone 100 million?
I'm not sure either. But perhaps I could just direct attention to the title of the thread, for a last thought. The economy is not a person, and does not treat people as persons. In this respect it is like the weather (or the climate). If it had a psyche, it would be psychopathic, in having no empathy or consideration for another. And perhaps here can be seen the connection with my other recent threads. The economy is being put above humanity by humanity.
It is as if we are playing a giant game of monopoly, and are close to the end of the game. The eight richest have more wealth than the poorest 50% we are told. Well when all the wealth is in one place, the game is over. There is nothing for it but to collect up the pieces and do something else, or redistribute and start again.
This is the moment to awaken to the fact that we are not talking about tokens on a board, but people on a planet. There is no getting up and walking away, we go bankrupt and die, or we change the game. But I am not expecting the incredible winners to be changing it, not even the clever and philanthropic ones.
[quote=Jerry Garcia] The best way to have a revolution is to pretend it has already happened.[/quote]
The way to awaken people is to talk to them as if they were awake, to respond to them as if you were awake, to reclaim the authority of the subject, and reject the objectification of the other. I don't think politics can help if we don't do this. But once we are awake, the solutions are almost trivial.
You've never been that angry. You were never driven to try to understand why the world is the way it is. That's why you now act like you just discovered Marxist alienation. Your answer to why it's this way? Everybody is asleep.. except of course for you. To my mind, that's little more than mental masturbation.
Instead you berate me for berating you. Awesome.
I wish I could find it but there was an article titled something along the lines of runaway capitalism where it talked about since the cold war just ended that the industrialize world would assume that 'capitalism worked' instead of socialism working and such an assumption was bound to create an unbalance economy (since there was no other ideology to contrast capitalism to) until there was another economic paradigm to put everything back into perspective.
In reality (or at least my interpretation of it), capitalism is really kind of a feudalism 2.0 where the rich and powerful are able to use their resources to take advantage of the poor and the working class to better themselves. Without anyone in authority to challenge the 'status quo' and cronyism (since the people in charge of that kind of thing answer to the rich themselves), nobody can really do anything.
Without any real checks and balances, 'democracy' reverts to 'might makes right' and plutocracy which seems to be the real model of government for Western civilization for the past several hundred years.
If you have a chance watch some of the following clip on YouTube and skim some of the other links:
Poor Us: an animated history - Why Poverty?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxbmjDngois&t=0s
It's the Inequality, Stupid
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph
Why Screwing Unions Screws the Entire Middle Class
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-labor-union-decline
Overworked America: 12 Charts That Will Make Your Blood Boil
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/06/speedup-americans-working-harder-charts
I tell you what. I'll do my best to completely ignore you in future. What the fuck do you think I'm doing with this thread? That's a rhetorical question; I'm trying to come up with an understanding of how it comes to be the way it is.
https://antidotezine.com/2017/01/22/trump-knows-you/
To be honest I should be thanking you since usually people consider any anti-capitalist rhetoric (even if it is mere questioning the ideology) as somewhere along the lines between conspiracy theory and communist propaganda and having someone willing to even consider that there could be rational reasons behind such arguments is kind of a relief.
Since you found the last links useful, I spent a few minutes looking up some related material such as the studies showing the rich behaving less ethically than the rest of us (which contradicts the idea that they can "watch themselves" without the need of check/balances, oversight from arbitrators, etc) and an book on the economy that more or less talks about the problem in general:
Economix
==========================================
(Economix more or less talks about the problems and biases in
our economy, some of how it can be fixed but why it isn't)
Economix: How Our Economy Works (and Doesn't Work),
Paperback – Sept 1, 2012 by Michael Goodwin
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0810988399/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Studies show why the rich are unethical
==========================================
Studies show why the rich are unethical
https://www.google.com/search?q=studies+show+why+the+rich+are+unethical
New Study: The Wealthy are more Unethical
http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/new-study-wealthy-are-more-unethical
Rich People More Likely to Lie, Cheat, Study Suggests
http://www.livescience.com/18683-rich-people-lie-cheat-study.html
Why the rich are unethical
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Why the rich are unethical
https://www.google.com/search?q=why+the+rich+are+unethical
Are Wealthy People Less Ethical?
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wealthy-people-ethical/story?id=23758468
Why the Rich Are Less Ethical: They See Greed as Good:
A new study suggests that being wealthy primes people to act like jerks.
http://healthland.time.com/2012/02/28/why-the-rich-are-less-ethical-they-see-greed-as-good/
Are rich people more unethical?
http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/27/health/rich-more-unethical/
STUDY: Rich People Are More Unethical Than Poor People
http://www.businessinsider.com/infographic-how-unethical-are-the-wealthy-2012-3
I hope you find some of them useful. :)
Anyways I think the realities of the problems outlined in Economix and studies showing that a lot of the super wealthy are playing a game of "Do as I say, not as I do" (ie. double standard) are about as close as someone can get to 'scientific proof' when it comes to problem of morality in society. Of course whether anyone cares is another matter.
It didn't increase my level of paranoia.
It isn't the collectors, analyzers, and correlators of big data that worry me. Advertising companies have been working toward individual tailored ads for quite a few years. (Target Corporation can now tell within 60 days when a female Target card user has become pregnant based solely on purchases of certain products that do not have anything to do with pregnancy or child care.)
What worries me is big data's bad-actor customers -- people like Donald Trump, or the Brexit campaigners. Their clear-enough stated political goals are what is scary, not so much how they go about targeting ads.
I want the politician to be truthful about who they are, what he or she believes, what he or she has done in the past, what he or she plans to do, and how he or she plans to do it. That's what I'll vote on.
[quote=article]And just as Kosinski had established that men who like MAC cosmetics are slightly more likely to be gay, the company discovered that a preference for cars made in the US was a great indication of a potential Trump voter[/quote]
Men who like makeup likely gay, trump supporters more likely to prefer US-made cars. This is some sophisticated stuff. Amazing that they discovered these correlations.
It's not the discovery that is significant, it's that messages can be targeted. If you're gay, you'll get messages about Islamic gay persecutions, if you like US cars you'll get messages about foreigners dumping cheap cars.
People will swallow your lies if they are crafted to match their expectations. The Enlightenment was all about fostering the social institutions of critical thinking. Now Facebook is ushering in the new Dark Ages. The world of checkable facts is turning into the echo chamber of your own opinion. :)
So yes. Targeted messaging is nothing new. And yet it makes a difference when the ability to target folk is increasing at an exponential rate.
It is a good sign that the story of Cambridge Analytics has been picked up and exposed in this fashion. I've just started getting the Vice channel and have been very impressed by its Gen Y journalism.
So long as freedom of speech is allowed to exist, at least there can be a reaction to match the action.
But how does this cash out concretely? You get some extra, tailored political ads on your facebook if your data points show you undecided? It just doesn't seem that scary to me.
Especially since cambridge analytica, running Cruz's digital campaign, lost handily to Trump. And, as the article informs us, Trump, at that time, had essentially no digital campaign. So if, in the primaries, he beat cambrdige analytica without much Big Data at all, then I'm skeptical about how big their effect really was on the general election.
Well, that's because politics is still not an online thing. Us, or rather, me "kids" like to joke around and play around with those fun meme's and such. The internet is primarily a form of escapism from reality, or at the very least tends to distort it, warp, and modify it to make us feel good.
I suppose where your mind is "changed" is when you view the TV or talk at the workplace. Even though reality is thoroughly distorted on TV, as Chomsky would say, you still find the majority of voters making up their minds through manufactured consent. Why this didn't win this time according to Hillary's wishes is still being researched and debated.
Yep.
On the contrary, that phrase is hackneyed.
Then who mentions it?
That may be but, no one is doing anything about it.
education is stuck in the industrial period - Google Search
So why is everyone just writing articles and not protesting in front of schools? Why are schools not being boycotted until they stop with the ignorant way of teaching as if we're still living in a time that's passed? Everyone protested against Trump but, the education system has been there for decades after the industrial revolution. People write an article here and there but, no one protests???
Me, for one.
You want to make a difference, let teachers teach.
What are you doing about it?
Also that's why I come to these forums to encourage people to take action. I'm only one person if I only did it then it would look ridiculous but, if I had 20 to 30 people in my local community doing it I'm sure it would get the attention it deserves.
I went to school and graduated with honors?? Then went into a job market and I had no idea what to do. So what's your point exactly? I'm sorry but, I feel a bit of assholiness coming out of you?
Again, you want to make a difference, let teachers teach.
And the answer is that they need to be taught ignorance and hatred, so they will be happy to wipe each other out. This is best done by starving schools of funds and stressing teachers to the max, while spreading the notion that the education system is broken, out of date etc. As long as people of good will are turning on each other, protesting that something should be done, parents against teachers, liberals against conservatives, geniuses against idiots, the job is being done. Keep up the good work chaps.
"Assholiness". Is that a word you learned in your honours studies?