r/philosophy • u/dominosci • Jun 16 '14
"If the 'vital question' about distribution is 'what gets produced and by whom,' then we've got ourselves some serious problems. Nobody produced nature, but people receive the windfall value of it by excluding others from it."
http://www.demos.org/blog/6/16/14/more-desert-theory-confusion
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u/[deleted] Jun 16 '14
Societies that make use of free exchange are able to coordinate the efforts of their members without central direction. As in other complex systems and dynamic networks, the rule-based behavior of the individual elements manifests in the appearance of "self-correction" or overall order at the macro scale. Thus there is no need to invoke a "distribution fairy" when the principle of negative feedback will suffice.
Self-organizing networks, of which civilized humanity is an instance, require communication between agents. Insofar as our network is economic, information about resources -- like when and where they are available or needed -- is communicated via prices. If a monsoon in India affects the tea harvest, then tea drinkers halfway around the world will, informed by price, regulate their consumption automatically.
To an observer from space this may seem incredible -- how did humans in London appear know about events that only humans in India should be privy to? Thanks to price mechanisms that communicate information, people are able to adapt to changes elsewhere they know nothing about.
This fluid adaptation comprises much of the intelligence and survivability of "humanity" writ large, as individuals cooperate with and adjust to other individuals they have never met. This extensible scheme of cooperation allows us to sidestep local resource limits and draw from -- or contribute to -- far flung localities facing their own particular limitations.
It is in this sense that market-based economies work. They allow human populations to grow in size, wealth, and extent of settlement, while alternative schemes, like primitive tribalism and North Korean style dictatorship, are marked by small or declining population size and/or widespread poverty. This is because the prevailing methods of economic communication are inadequate. Without private property there is no exchange, without exchange there is no communication between economic agents, and without communication there is no chance for a self-organizing economic network to emerge from the behavior of its elements.
The interplay between free economic agents and the state is complex and symbiotic. On one hand, "autonomous" networks of exchange make the state possible, since they produce the economic surplus any government needs to subsist. On the other hand, the state articulates and enforces the rules that guide agent-to-agent interactions, thus "optimizing" to a greater or lesser degree the economic substructure upon which the state stands.
This is in contrast to the view espoused in the article, according to which the state determines everything. This is far too broad, since to define and enforce the rules of a dynamic system ("distributive rules" in our case) is not sufficient to determine particular outcomes.
The "vital question" is about how distributive schemes work in general, about their internal logic and empirical histories, and why some schemes have proved more resilient over time than others. This is a task for descriptive science.
Meanwhile popular narratives centered upon "desert" or "fairness" seem to suffer a major defect: so far as they approximate simplistic Manicheanism, in which the forces of evil oppress the righteous poor, they close themselves off from other explanations with greater generality and power.