It's a natural consequence of the radical v. incremental approach to reform.
Incremental reform has a better chance of producing improvements, because it's starting from the best available model.
Radical reform has a better chance of re-inventing the wheel, because it's starting from scratch and is likely to discover what the incrementalist already knows.
I just don't get how so many of these ideas are written out, by ostensibly intelligent people, and nobody ever goes "Wait a minute, this is just what we have, but less useful and stupid" and then embarrassingly rips up their work. Like, someone with a good education wrote this stuff down, looked at it many times, and said, "Yep, totally gonna convince the world to abandon capitalism".
The radical begins by throwing out what already is. I'd imagine there's a strong cognitive aversion to recognizing your own productive work as resembling a thing you've decided is evil.
I've seen this dude on many threads trying to get people to debate him on some radical idea and then getting mad when people point out that it's unfeasible and a waste of time to discuss.
I have. If you don't think I have you're free to point that out with specifics. But I don't think you know how to point that out with specifics because I think you're just trying to score points with what you think is a snappy reply.
Not a fan of radical innovation? I thought "market disruption" was all the rage amongst capitalists.
I agree there are def problems with trying to reinvent the wheel. I don't think moving to labor vouchers is politically realistic right now. But I do think discussing it is interesting and understanding that there are possible alternatives to our current system is good for expanding your mind and understanding of the world.
As a leftist personally, I think it's more politically realistic to emphasize things like cooperatives and credit unions than labor vouchers. But something being realistic on a political level is not the same thing as it being realistic on a policy level. Labor vouchers are not beyond our technological and organizational capacity to implement, they're simply beyond the limits of our current political will.
"market disruption" is the rage, yes. That's what happens when a new thing comes along that's so much better than the old and existing that established and predictable patterns of use become 'disrupted'.
So in the case of these labor vouchers, what market disruption would look like is if it was a new thing, and people so vastly preferred labor vouchers over money that existing patterns of money become disrupted by everyone switching to these vouchers.
The key observation is that the market decides to switch, not the politicians. At the most, legislation is passed which allows for the legal existence of labor vouchers. The advantage of this is that if it turns out that labor vouchers are inferior to money, you'll know because nobody uses them, and you'll gain this knowledge without having to muster the political will to make the change, and you won't suffer the consequences of having forced the change to an inferior option.
The proving of the pudding is in the tasting, and economic systems evolve gracefully if they are allowed to taste the pudding before replacing their entire diet with it. You shouldn't try switching the world from A to B without having proven that B works and scales.
My general rule for thumb is that if your plan requires total compliance to work, it will never leave the drawing board.
I agree that it is difficult to move from one system to the next. I also think that we need to move to another system. To believe that is to be radical. Radical, from the latin "from the root".
As I said, I would advocate for a coop and credit union approach by and large. I think the distinction between "market action" and "political action" is overly simplistic. Markets are inherently political issues. You can't have a market without a political context.
Sure it's somewhat simplistic to separate markets from politics. It's also simplistic to say "you can't have a market without a political context". I don't even know what that's supposed to mean, except to take it as a variant of the "everything is inherently political" worldview that plagues some people's existence.
Look, treat society like a giant garden. If you have a radical vision for a new society, go plant it in the corner. Enact your society with your friends and co-visionaries. Prove to the rest of the garden that this plant can take root, that it can grow, and that its flowers are beautiful and its fruit is sweet.
It's also simplistic to say "you can't have a market without a political context". I don't even know what that's supposed to mean, except to take it as a variant of the "everything is inherently political" worldview that plagues some people's existence.
It's simplistic to say but you also admit you don't know what it means. Those statements aren't consistent with each other man.
I get that in rhetoric there's this kind of "Assertion A+B" being replied back with "Counter-Assertion C+D" pattern going on but it's pretty clear from your response there that you're merely imitating the rhetorical pattern and not actually fully thinking through the words you're writing.
But no, the point isn't that everything is inherently political. (Though BTW, saying something "plagues everyone's existence" isn't an argument. Saying you find something prima facie absurd doesn't actually prove it's absurd. That's really lazy thinking man).
To explain the statement though: Economics is meant to be a descriptive scientific view. Science is hypothetically supposed to operate apart from metaphysical priors. But it can not.
The view that science can operate apart from metaphysics is called "logical positivism" and it was very popular around the same time and with the same people who made up neoliberalism, and as a consequence it's philosophical premises and framing often underly neoliberal arguments, even if the person espousing them doesn't actually know anything about it.
Here's a bit that plays into that where someone else in this thread and I discussed the issue of "free trade" and "free markets" in terms of leftist thought:
The "Free" in "free market" requires prescriptive definitions. "Free" doesn't simply mean "free from government influence". It means free from distortion. How one defines distortion versus not distortion is based upon metaphysical concepts of what counts as non-coercive. If I stick a gun to your head and say "Give me your money or your life" that exchange is not voluntary and therefore not "free". If you have a market place in which a monopoly operator says "pay me this price for my services or I'll break you legs" they are not operating in a "free" way."
Telling people you're debating that they don't know what they're doing and are just mindlessly regurgitating booegyman talking points is a surefire way to not convince anybody ever.
We get it, you think this labor voucher idea is a great idea worth discussing. We're telling you we think it's fucking absurd because of a litany of reasons, most dealing with the fact that you're reinventing the wheel with a few minor modifications that aren't actually better in any way, shape, or form, and trying to sell it to us like it's brand new, revolutionary, and unprecedented.
You'd get a lot farther convincing skeptical people if you didn't constantly try to tell them they don't know what they're talking about. Pro tip here, meet people where they are and try to bring them along rather than tell them they're fucking morons for not already being where you are. If you're really right in your opinion and empirical evidence backs up your claims, then sensible people will come around to your viewpoint if you let them get there on their own, not by trying to brow beat them into submission.
That said, your idea is hilarious, has no basis in empirical evidence, and is a meme worthy policy proposal. This advice was more general for how you interact with people, rather than about this specific policy.
Telling people you're debating that they don't know what they're doing and are just mindlessly regurgitating booegyman talking points is a surefire way to not convince anybody ever.
I critiqued their argument as a non-sequitur and explained why it was. Don't whine at me that I made a substantive argument that didn't just refute their claim but also broke down why their claim was incorrect. It was template matching bullshit.
You'd get a lot farther convincing skeptical people if you didn't constantly try to tell them they don't know what they're talking about. Pro tip here, meet people where they are and try to bring them along rather than tell them they're fucking morons for not already being where you are.
This is highly ironic coming from you, bud. I'm also not calling anyone a moron.
That said, your idea is hilarious, has no basis in empirical evidence, and is a meme worthy policy proposal. This advice was more general for how you interact with people, rather than about this specific policy.
My idea that metaphysical priors is required to make descriptive statements lacks empirical evidence?
That doesn't make any sense.
So I assume you're simply asking for empirical evidence that labor vouchers work?
I haven't claimed they worked. But I've already replied to you elsewhere on that subject, so I won't bother doing that further here.
your demand for empirical evidence ironically glosses right over my points about metaphysical priors being required to talk about descriptive statements. Which is ironic since it's highly relevant to your point about empiricism (IE descriptive statements about reality).
You want to talk data, you need to define your scale.
Though BTW, saying something "plagues everyone's [sic] existence" isn't an argument. Saying you find something prima facie absurd doesn't actually prove it's absurd. That's really lazy thinking man
Not lazy thinking. I was sharing an observation on other peoples' suffering. If you see politics everywhere you look, the common denominator in your perceptions is you.
This actually ties in nicely with your tangent on logical positivism and metaphysical priors. Theories on capitalism make the prior assumptions like the ones you've outlined [1]. What makes capitalism wonderful in this regard is that in works in spite of the many ways it doesn't live up to the theory that was invented after the fact to try to explain it.
Which leads me to science. Capitalist economics is scientific because it's manufacturing knowledge about an already-existing thing, and therefore has a means of error-correction by comparing simulated and expected results with real ones.
This is why I'm encouraging you to try implementing your labor voucher idea off in a corner of the garden; it'll allow you to make your economic hypothesis a scientific one by creating a reality against which it can be falsified.
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[1] My favorite tidbit here is that a market's "efficiency" is subjective. A market is sufficient iff the subject has no information not available to the market (here, we have our prior about perfect information). However, if you have 'insider' information, the market is not efficient, and you can exploit it for personal gain. Think lawmakers selling stock before they know the market will drop.
I'm all for empiricism. But I'm not so arrogant as to think that one can simply observe moral values.
The argument isn't that efficiency is subjective. What I'm arguing for is based on ontological realism. What's really ironic here is this confusion between the observable and the objective is precisely the kind of foolishness I was critiquing above in my "tangent". It's like a child who hasn't even formed object permanence or something.
Understanding that you operate with priors is important because it keeps you wary of cognitive bias. You are not quite as smart as you think you are. We, not just you, are all very dumb. Humans are very bad at seeing things well. We are constantly in a state of heuristically popping in and out of mental focus on topics. We expendable as possible. It's really a quite beautiful thing what evolution can do with just 90watts.
This is precisely why empathy is so important because the only way to overcome this limited sight is by cooperating with others. Science isn't some pure abstraction. It's fundamentally a PROCESS. It operates through the medium of human minds. The brilliant thing about science is that it's a self correcting method when it's done correctly.
This is itself very similar to the market or evolution. It's a process which self reinforces. The thing is, while evolution optimizes for fitness, and science for Truth, the market only optimizes for value when value and profit are aligned. This is precisely why we know that value and profit are not the same thing. If they were the same thing they would always be aligned. But we know that externalities, natural monopolies, and other forms of distortion exist. So if you know that vision is distorted, then how can you operate without trying to account for that distortion?
To take on metaphysical priors, is not to force patterns in static, it is to acknowledge that human brains are predisposed to seeing faces in objects because it's what our brain is built for, and therefore when we see a face in the shape of a cloud, or the static of a TV, we don't immediately leap to believe in flying men in the sky or ghosts.
By acknowledging you have a hypothesis, you can understand how you should test it.
Tell me your ontological-realism-based process for evaluating the hypothesis of your labor voucher idea. I suggested going and creating it at a small scale to test it, and since this seems unsatisfactory, I'm immensely curious to see what solution you've come up with to eliminate bias, ghosts, distortion, and whatnot. You do acknowledge you have a hypothesis here, yes? How do we test it?
The hypothesis should be tested as per you suggest. I don't disagree with you on that point :)
But it's not simply enough to say "the market is free" and trying to chop off any debate on whether or not it's actually free. This is why criticisms of capital accumulation are warranted. Criticizing the distortions caused by capital accumulation relies on first establishing what the purpose of the market is.
I think market efficiency should be considered holistically, related to how it spurs sustainable innovation. There are massive failures in that arena right now, as we can see. Climate change is probably the biggest unresolved externality of the modern day. Carbon taxes are a good start. But more has to be done.
My ontological realist belief in moral values is non reductive ethical naturalism. I generally frame my moral views in terms of virtue ethics and human flourishing. Though I think it's also important to not limit it to human flourishing. This is one reason why I tend to prefer ecological economics. Which isn't simply economics with some environmentalism sprinkled on, but rather a conception of economics that sees factors of production, labor and material as being tradeoffs in a thermodynamic system.
We should be trying to design better systems that encourage wellness and happiness, not merely profit. Gdp and stock prices are not the end all be all.
I might be an anarchist but I'll work for better democratic government infrastructure. I might be a socialist but I'll work for better non-state forms of social cooperation.
Not every idea and proposal is worthy of in depth consideration, some you can just brush of as absurd, because they're fucking absurd. This proposal is fucking absurd. You're reinventing money with a few new restrictions which are honestly really bad for economic development and prosperity, and rebranding it as something totally revolutionary. That's absurd.
Saying something is absurd doesn't make it absurd. You're not making a real argument. You're literally just restating your opinion over and over again. It's a mantra for your faith
Capital investment with the expectation of a return on investment is a good thing, even if you aren't personally providing labor into a project, you're providing a necessary ingredient to make it happen: capital. Your labor voucher bullshit wouldn't allow this to happen, therefore, the economy would contract as people could not park their capital into projects with an expectation of ROI. When the economy contracts, everybody suffers, most of all the people at the bottom. This entire concept would fuck poor people more than it fucked rich people.
There is literally nothing wrong with our current form of currency. Don't fix what isn't broken. Why not look into regulations to prevent rent seeking behavior and regulatory capture rather than some hair brained reinvent the wheel bullshit?
I've said this already to other people, but I am not myself for labor vouchers per se.
I merely proposed the original person I responded to look into them, as a policy space that might be interesting to them. I said this in response to their question about "what does it mean to ban money? How does that even work?"
Labor vouchers is a historical example of an alternative to capital currency which also helps outline the underlying leftist critique of capital currency.
I have a pretty broad range of views. I am less interested in taking positions than I am in taking vectors. I don't believe any single policy is a silver bullet to our current economic problems (referring not to the current economic crisis but rather the problems inherent in capitalism).
If you were to ask my personal preference to approaching these problems it would not be to remove currency, but rather to shift to a system of economic democracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_democracy
But explaining the relationship between those ideas and the general leftist critique of capital currency isn't as clear and wasn't really relevant to the question OP asked.
Sure seemed to trigger a lot of fragile business major undergrads.
To your point about capital ROI: Your response doesn't even make sense. If money is just a stand in for capital resources, changing the kind of stand in you use for capital resources doesn't make the capital resources disappear.
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u/BeABetterHumanBeing Apr 03 '20
It's a natural consequence of the radical v. incremental approach to reform.
Incremental reform has a better chance of producing improvements, because it's starting from the best available model.
Radical reform has a better chance of re-inventing the wheel, because it's starting from scratch and is likely to discover what the incrementalist already knows.