We have an aging population and many places have a flat birthrate. We need to solve how to deal with this consequences.
Who will care for these people? How will we deal with the consequences of flat population growth? How will we deal with the stock market's expectations of perpetual growth when the underlying population itself is not growing (and especially since productivity has also been relatively flat)?
This aging topic is very important. Re: stock markets, economies need to shift from eternal $ growth to share holder wallets, to providing equitable outcomes for all people and the planet - that will be very interesting to watch, i can’t see it going well.
Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered
is a collection of essays published in 1973 by German-born British economist E. F. Schumacher.
The title *Small Is Beautiful* came from a principle espoused by Schumacher's teacher Leopold Kohr (1909–1994) advancing small, appropriate technologies, policies, and polities as a superior alternative to the mainstream ethos of "bigger is better".
Overlapping environmental, social, and economic forces such as the 1973 energy crisis and popularisation of the concept of globalisation helped bring Schumacher's *Small Is Beautiful* critiques of mainstream economics to a wider audience during the 1970s.
In 1995 The Times Literary Supplement ranked *Small Is Beautiful* among the 100 most influential books published since World War II.
It's not about scale, it's about balance. You can run a small an beautiful country with zero economy growth and zero decline, all in a perfect balance, and 70% of population younger than 65. Everything works out.
But when 50% of the population is older than 60, the picture changes a lot; the percentage of economically productive population is much lower, and the need to care for people who can't sustain themselves any more grows. Take a look at how Japan fares today.
Fair point, in hindsight it seems I may have thrown this book recommendation in under the wrong comment.
It's relavant to this Ask HN question at large as we very much need to move away from blind pursuit of unlimited growth in population, resource consumption, waste byproducts, etc. and address the question of how to live well within our means.
Aging population demographics is a challenge, but one that we must address and then move beyond to a move persistent and sustainable low term distribution.
As for the current situation, I am 60, my father was born in 1935 and lives here in the same town as I do. He takes meals on wheels to the older folks who aren't all that mobile (yes, he's almost 88, walks 10km per day, and maintains a 15 km long section of a 1,000 km long walking trail) which is indicative of the entire community which has the highest median age in this country.
There is scope to employ able older people to look after less able older people which gives provides purpose, companionship, and reduces the demand for younger pople in care roles, etc.
This is not a full solution but it is a partial path forward.
We'll we're going to have to learn how to deal with it.
At the start of the 1900s the world was set for a population boom and overshoot. We went from families having 6-12 children to 2ish children in a few generations. This is going to lead to those 'boom' generations having a far older population and there is not really anything that can be done about this unless you want your population to continue growing forever.
You might be interested in the work of Steven Hail and Gabrielle Bond. There's an online course they run through Torrens University that covers a lot of this stuff:
Problem is, if you're being fair, the 90% bottom that will actually have to do the work, also don't want to care for elderly.
A decent fraction would need to become nurses, and frankly, with less pay/worse conditions than they currently get. A small fraction will need to study a lot more so more treatments can be provided, which requires doctors and researchers. And we'll all have to do with less (much less) because this will cost a lot even disregarding wages.
Given limited resources exponential growth will always hit saturation. It is time we structure out economic systems in a way that aknowledge this reality.
"Fair" is just an arbitrarily-applied constant in your sentence.
Why is meritocratic more "fair" than equitable? Perhaps more precisely, why do you deem meritocratic to = fair? Someone could just as easily (and supportably) deem equitable to = fair.
Because “equity” (communism) requires violence. Taking away from those who create more and giving to those who create less. Something that is non-consensual and requires violence is by definition unfair (unless you’ve a wicked moral compass).
Well... how do you enforce meritocracy? A pride of lions is meritocratic, in the "might makes right" sense. What definition of "merit" are you ordering your population by?
You don't need to enforce meritocracy. That's the beauty of it, it's based only on mutual consensus and transparency of information (a.k.a. free market).
Would you rather go to a doctor who's good at surgeries or one that's bad at surgeries? One that got into medical school because of affirmative action, or one that was discriminated against and still got in (e.g. Asian doctors in the US)? Would you rather go to a car mechanic that's amazing at juggling but bad at fixing cars, or one that's bad at juggling and good at fixing cars? See, the "definition of merit" just takes care of itself (driven by the self-interest of customers).
> So it's ok if I come to your house and take your stuff because I'm bigger than you?
No, stealing is immoral.
> Because that's what meritocracy does - it gives more resources to people who fit an arbitary definition of merit.
The system itself doesn’t give anyone anything, the market is free to determine that. A doctor who helps more patients (your arbitrary definition) will face higher demand than one who doesn’t help many patients, since people are free to place the value they see fit on their personal health.
a) So is stockpiling resources that other people need. b) Who's going to stop me?
> the market is free to determine that
So we don't drag this out any further, I'm going to explain the place I'm trying to get to, as best I can: markets aren't physical laws of the universe, they're human constructs that are defined, regulated and policed by governments (I'm using a very wide definition of government here, think "governance").
If you think the market is the fairest way to allocate resources, you have to accept that people who "cheat" the market (inside traders, muggers, etc) are subject to state-sanctioned violence. That's the violence that a "free" market, and your vision of meritocracy, requires.
>So is stockpiling resources that other people need.
Owning property is not immoral. Stealing and coveting your neighbor's property are sin and very immoral.
>Who's going to stop me?
Any authority we've democratically elected to uphold that task. Probably the police, in many cases. Or me with a weapon of course, seeing as you're bigger than me in this hypothetical. In reality, you are not bigger than me.
>That's the violence that a "free" market, and your vision of meritocracy, requires.
Yes, societies require laws that are ultimately enforced through the use of physical violence and restriction of freedom if it comes to that. Mostly to stop people from doing immoral things at the cost of other people.
Insider trading is a tough nut to crack, since it could be seen as just another tool to reach a more efficient market. Envy comes very naturally to humans, and if someone makes more profits than you in the marketplace, it's very easy to call it unfair and get mad about it. Then you're looking at the definition of "fairness" - in my opinion it's fair that anyone can pursue the kind of information that will help them make better sales in the market. Deceiving or lying to other people are different topics entirely, but the term "insider trading" doesn't entail those things.
>markets aren't physical laws of the universe, they're human constructs that are defined, regulated and policed by governments
I don't really understand your point here. Yes, our society runs on top of some underlying systems that we've agreed upon. Freely trading your labor and property go all the way back to the beginning of our evolution, and for good enough reason - it's the best system we've ever come up with and used.
Communism (at least in an ideal Marxist form) has no relation to equity, it’s more of a liberal concept than anything else.
People use the term Communism (both upper-case and lower-case) in various ways nowadays, but Marx’s original ideal form of society was "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" The ultimate goal is to create an affluent productive society that can provide all amenities for all people, so they can unleash their potentials as individuals without being enslaved by capitalists as wage workers just to survive. And socialism is only an intermediate step before realizing this ideal state, socialism wasn’t intended to be ideal even for the leftists (In this sense communism has never been tried anywhere yet).
> In this sense communism has never been tried anywhere yet
From my knowledge of European history, this is not true.
Marx also said that there should be a dictatorship of the proletariat, who should seize the means of production.
The difficulty is, is that absolute power corrupts absolutely, to steal a phrase.
The worker's union movement working inside a capitalist system has brought more benefits for workers, than communism, which proved to kill millions wherever it is attempted.
My particular familiarity is with the German Democratic Republic. There were many true believers in communism, who in their attempt to construct a communist utopia created and contributed towards a police state.
Jordan Peterson said it shows arrogance to suggest that people just weren't doing communism right, and that if only they got the theory right, then they would usher in the utopia.
I would tend to agree.
> Which should be temporary, right? Do you have an example where it was actually temporary? That would answer my point above.
Your point was to assert that communism has never been tried.
Mine was that it has been tried, and is always unsuccessful. So the failure of temporary dictatorships is proving my point, not yours.
I think we're talking past each other. You say "communism doesn't work because we can't reach it", and I say "it's not entirely clear if communism doesn't work because we haven't managed to reach it".
Don't you think that you risk missing interesting ideas if you reduce communism to temporary dictatorships?
> communism doesn't work because we can't reach it
No, I'm saying it has inherent problems that means it doesn't work, and "doesn't work" is putting it lightly, given the number of people who have suffered and died under the ideology.
> Don't you think that you risk missing interesting ideas if you reduce communism to temporary dictatorships?
No, I've already mentioned that workers unionising under a capitalist system has brought more benefits to workers than communism.
The "this will require violence" argument makes no sense. If you live in the US, everything you have is the end result of some horrific violence. Inferring a need for violence to achieve some ideal is a completely useless analysis.
OTOH systems not going as far as communism, but still with far more equitable outcomes than e.g. US system, have been tried as well and have been quite successful.
Did the American revolutionary war require violence? Who chose to be violent?
Violence is not bad. Violence to oppress is bad. Violence to seek justice is good.
That's why the 2nd amendment exists.
> Something that is non-consensual and requires violence
War is ultimately dispute resolution between two parties, at least one of which, has decided "might makes right."
Ukrainian violence is justified and good, while Russian violence is abominable and evil.
So it's important to think past words like violence or war or 'take' and instead frame conversation around justice.
If a billionaire bribes a supreme court justice to rule that they can pollute drinking water with a chemical that causes cancer, is that violence? A billionaire should not have enough money to corrupt the fabric of society. Extreme wealth inequality is injustice, especially if they use their power to say "we'll crash the economy if you don't bail us out."
Taxing the rich and funding social programs while otherwise retaining property rights isn't communism.
When a measure becomes a target, it becomes useless as either. What is "productivity"? Does your definition accurately encapsulate all externalities? I'm going to tell you the answer: it doesn't. Stop using productivity as a proxy for that which is "good".
Everyone deserves equal investment, yet investment is not distributed equitably at all.
Education, internships, mentorship, etc are all investments, but more importantly, they snowball.
An executive branch cabinet official likely had a high profile job, and a high profile job before that, and a job with mentorship before that, and several internships before that, and admission to a great college before that, and potentially private school before that, and potentially community clubs or community help before that, maybe they had a parent in a position of power.
Every opportunity helps you get more opportunities in the future, and those who have capitalized on opportunity are those people you would say "have merit."
So merit ultimately does not measure productivity, but investment. With this understanding strictly "meritocratic" systems are systems that do not promote social mobility.
Communism is often maligned (and it should be, because it empirically always results in authoritarian rule) and our schools did indoctrinate us with "communism is bad" and "there must be profit motive for people to work," but we have a blindspot for oligarchy which is a system with no social mobility and little public investment which is a much more likely outcome than communism. Wealth disparity results in oligarchy and we are very much on our way.
If people have no hope for their future they become a drag on society as a whole, so it is important that it is not just productivity, but willingness and ability to work that is taken into account. It is our responsibility to lift our fellow man up, so they do not drag us down.
If merit is the sum of opportunities capitalized on, then it's important to distinguish between those who have merit because they had many opportunities, and those who have merit because they capitalized on the limited opportunities they were given.
What you're describing is authoritarianism, not communism. Authoritarian communists certainly exist, but there are plenty of anarcho-communists who directly oppose anyone having absolute power, including themselves.
It's a shame GP decided to miss the point so badly. They do indeed describe authoritarianism not communism.
I think there are very good reasons that every time some regime self branded as communism it very quickly devolved into dictatorship. Reasons that many of the solutions proposed were unworkable and naive. And I am not sure those reasons can be overcome.
Communism should maybe be more of an ideal to be strived for but impossible to ever achieve.
I think it is fair to at the same time accept the self labeling of historical regimes as communist when discussing history yet also recognize that none of them ever achieved the communist ideal and became dictatorships instead when discussing philosophy.
The values of communism are aligned with democracy yet a democratic communist regime has never been implemented.
How could you ever implement it democratically? What happens when people vote for the capitalists?
The reality is that communism requires centralised power, centralised power attracts bad actors, and bad actors are significantly more comfortable wrestling control of that power by force than good ones are.
Communism isn't inherently totalitarian, but according to all the experiments we've run so far as a species (at the cost of several hundred million lives), it does seem to inevitably lead to totalitarians.
Capitalism works as a socio-political system because its decentralised.
> What happens when people vote for the capitalists?
You mean what happens if people vote for the capitalists. Why do you assume that people will vote for the capitalists?
Historically, we know what happens if people vote for the communists: if this happens at any scale, the US steps in and sets up a capitalist dictator. Examples:
1. The US displacement of Lyuh Woon-Hyung to set up Syngman Rhee. Rhee was "democtratically" elected in a US-controlled election which was boycotted by other candidates because voting was limited to property owners and tax payers or, in smaller towns, to town elders voting for everyone else.
2. The 1948 Costa Rican civil war, where the CIA helped stage a coup against Christian Socialist Rafael Ángel Calderón Guardia. However, the most conservative leader they could find was still pretty close to a communist, and he reinstated democracy, leading to a more equitable democracy, albeit still hampered by CIA interference, in 1950.
3. The 1949-1953 failed operation to overthrow the democratically-elected Albanian government with US/UK trained Albanian anti-communists.
4. Operation Fortune, the 1952 CIA operation to overthrow democratically-elected Jacobo Árbenz, followed by the more successful 1954 CIA coup which instated the capitalist dictator Carlos Castillo Armas, after the US-based United Fruit Company approached the CIA with concerns that Árbenz's anti-exploitation laws would hurt its ability to exploit workers in Guatemala.
5. The 1953 CIA/MI6 Operation Ajax/Boot (a.k.a. 28 Mordad coup), which overthrew a constitutional monarchy headed by Mohammad Mosaddegh's parliamentary government after the parliamentary government nationalized the Iranian oil pipeline. The coup saw the transition of Pahlavi from a constitutional monarch to an authoritarian, who relied heavily on United States government support. That support dissipated during the Iranian Revolution of 1979, as his own security forces refused to shoot into non-violent crowds.
6. The 1961 overthrow of democratically-elected Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, followed by the systematic US-supported genocide of democratic separatists in two separate rebellions.
7. 1970-1973 Chilean elections. Both the US and USSR were funding elections in Chile, so it's difficult to describe this process as purely democratic, but ultimately Salvador Allende was elected along with a right-dominated congress (i.e. congress was capitalist-majority, while the president was communist). This balance wasn't acceptable to the CIA, who in 1973 helped enstate Augusto Pinochet as dictator. Pinochet went on to commit one of the largest genocides in history.
8. The 1976 overthrow of democratically-elected President Isabel Perón in Argentina, starting the military dictatorship of Jorge Rafael Videla, which committed multiple crimes against humanity, with explicit support from the US including multiple visits from Kissinger during its reign of terror.
> The reality is that communism requires centralised power, centralised power attracts bad actors, and bad actors are significantly more comfortable wrestling control of that power by force than good ones are.
Capitalism is just centralized power by other means, where power becomes concentrated in those with enough wealth to enforce their will. At least with communism there's a chance that the centralized powers can be democratically elected--with capitalism, there's no pretense that corporate executives are democratically elected, with corporations being able to withhold people's basic needs if they don't comply.
> Communism isn't inherently totalitarian, but according to all the experiments we've run so far as a species (at the cost of several hundred million lives), it does seem to inevitably lead to totalitarians.
As seen above, this is not the case. Numerous large-scale democracies have elected communist leaders--followed by US interference and instatement of capitalist dictatorships. At a smaller scale, there are numerous examples of successful democratic (or even consensus-based) communism. With corporations funding political disinformation and buying candidates, it's questionable whether a capitalist democracy is even possible.
But, if people really vote for the capitalists, you have a capitalist government. That's how democracy works: the majority might not be correct in their beliefs, but they still get to put those beliefs into action. The question is, why does the US brand of capitalism not seem to believe that? Why is it that when communists get elected, western capitalists suddenly don't believe in majority rule any more?
Show me a single example of a democratic communist nation that has not descended into some form of totalitarianism or anarchy...
All you posted was a long list of things that failed because of interference from the west. That's not what the question was though, show me ONE that didn't fail... ONE
Look, I think communism sounds great, but the problem is that it simply doesn't work in practice. In other words, it has been tried, it just doesn't work.
To see why, you can categorize the forms of government as so:
- Monarchy/Dictatorship: Power in the hands of one, one person is authority
- Oligarchy/Republic: Power in the hands of a few, aristocrats are authority
- Democracy: Power in the hands of many, majority is authority
- Communism/Anarchy: Power in everyone's hands, everyone is equal in authority
In reality, society only works when there's a power hierarchy; it's the natural order of things. The more you equally distribute power amongst people, the more dysfunctional/less orderly/more bureaucratic society becomes.
In particular, notice all the forms of government (except for communism) has a way to settle disputes without resorting to violence. For example, in Democracy, you settle disputes by voting, where the majority wins, and the rest don't get their way. This ability to settle disputes without violence, is what makes us civil and what makes society a society. Without it (such as with communism), you are in complete anarchy, where raw might/ability (eg successful violence/persuasion) is the only thing there is left to settle disputes. Thus, those who wield it typically end up becoming the "authority", and is why over time, communism/anarchy will naturally change into one of the other forms of government.
"For example, in Democracy, you settle disputes by voting, where the majority wins, and the rest don't get their way. This ability to settle disputes without violence, is what makes us civil and what makes society a society. Without it (such as with communism), you are in complete anarchy, where raw might/ability (eg successful violence/persuasion) is the only thing there is left to settle disputes. Thus, those who wield it typically end up becoming the "authority", and is why over time, communism/anarchy will naturally change into one of the other forms of government."
In the US only 50% of the population votes. The church doesn't pay taxes but lobbies the gov via proxies. Rich people definitely have more rights than the others. Just because they fight in court doesn't mean it's not called violence. Rich people are the authority in the US. They decide what you watch, what you buy and where you can spend your money. Just because they work for corporations doesn't mean there isn't a hierarchy. Rich people own America and they behavior of it's citizens, because they shape the contexts in which you live. They also own the rest of the world via Hollywood.
You're right. The US isn't a democracy, it's predominantly an oligarchy/republic. And as matter of fact, no national government is purely a democracy (because a pure democracy at such a scale also doesn't work, because of how bureaucratic it would be). Most governments are hybrids to varying degrees. The way I categorized the governments here was just to show how things work, nothing prevents it from being a spectrum.
Actually Yugoslavia and Pre 1978 Romania were not that bad. They produced a lot of their own things. Yugoslavia had a strong economy with lots of industry. Same for Romania and their prospects for oil development.
The issue came in because the US wanted to break up the soviet bloc so the World Bank went to town and made sure that happened.
We will never know what would have happened if Tito and Ceausescu would not have been squeezed by debt and foreign interference.
Maybe the reason you don't see a good example of Communism besides maybe China/Viet Nam is because the west is actively engaged in making sure that doesn't happen.
I do not know about Yugoslavia but it is certain that the Ceausescu regime would have ended up in misery either way. Having as a ruler an idiot who is capable of playing opponents against each other and who was enthralled by the prospect of having a personality cult ensures things will never end well for the people.
I would argue that China and Viet Nam aren't good examples either.
disclaimer, i dont think communism could ever work on current humans (there will always be people who will exploit system), it works great on paper or for ants etc.
That said can you give me an example of the communism you described as
"Power in everyone's hands, everyone is equal in authority"
The best example i can think of is a 'proto' communist fraction in Spanish civil war as Orwell described in Homage to Catalonia.
I agree with both things. I think communism is unlikely to be achieved by current humans.
Also that quote really does not describe either the ideal of communism nor does it describe the historical regimes under the communism brand. In fact, I think none of the 4 categories Rury described are truly correct.
1. "Monarchy/Dictatorship: Power in the hands of one, one person is authority" is wrong simply because no one ever rules alone. Monarchy is just oligarchy with extra steps. Most historical communism is here.
2. "Oligarchy/Republic: Power in the hands of a few, aristocrats are authority", equating these two is wrong because the second is supposed to have time limits and accountability. Oligarchs are aristocrats, senators are not aristocrats.
3. "Democracy: Power in the hands of many, majority is authority", democracy is much more diverse than that.
4. "Communism/Anarchy: Power in everyone's hands, everyone is equal in authority" this is anarchy not communism. And anarchy is indeed inherently unstable. There were branches of communist thought that were anarchist but by being anarchist they were doomed to failure.
In practice we have only ever had variations of oligarchy that were more or less disguised and variations on democracy that were more or less direct.
What has not been tried and is unlikely to be tried is a democratic communism.
"In reality, society only works when there's a power hierarchy; it's the natural order of things. The more you equally distribute power amongst people, the more dysfunctional/less orderly/more bureaucratic society becomes." That's a pretty bold claim to make without and real evidence, perhaps humans have been conditioned to operate within a power hierarchy and attempts to realize a just society without a centralized authority holding monopoly on violence is simply due to material conditions being such that people cannot transition to a free lifestyle without a power hierarchy. Communism/Anarchist societies based on voluntary association are possible if humans are healed from the collective mental trauma of generations of systematic oppression by the power hungry oppressing them under the guise of Hobbesian necessity or sheer selfish personal interest. TLDR: Don't assume Hobbes without first providing an actual argument against Rousseau.
You don't need real evidence. Just the most simplest thought experiment in the state of nature (which is anarchy). How do two wild animals win a dispute over something? They either fight violently, or intimidate (ie persuade) their opposition into getting their way. The act of avoiding violence (giving into intimidation), is an act to ceding to the other as the dictator.
> perhaps humans have been conditioned to operate within a power hierarchy
Yes, exactly! No human, nor animal, wants to be perpetually in violence, as it is very risky to living. So, if they wish to avoid violence whenever a dispute arises, they naturally subject themselves and cede to the other as the superior authority in the matter, letting them get their way. However, if a human/animal ever thinks the reward for winning a fight outweighs the risks of violence, they will indeed risk the fight. Repeated disputes where one continues to be the victor, conditions those in the matter who is superior and inferior, and a power hierarchy is naturally established.
The only way communism can ever work, is if there is never any disputes. That is not a practical scenario outside a power hierarchy, and hence why it does not work in practice. And for those that don't see how "communism == anarchy", just look at how "public == many", and "private == few".
Communism has never been tried? Could you explain a little bit more? I don't know if you are joking or lacking knowledge. Or maybe I lack some knowledge you know about
I don't agree with the poster--I think communism has been tried, sometimes even successfully (i.e. kibbutzim).
However, the examples of communism which capitalists like to point at as failures, such as Stalinism or Maoism, didn't ever actually distribute wealth, instead merely changing the concentration of wealth. This points to a failure to actually achieve communism, rather than a failure of communism to work.
Unfortunately I don't think there are very good explanations of this out there. The best I can find is this[1] but that's pretty dense, assumes a lot of prior economic knowledge, and is (ironically) behind a paywall.
I will read up on what you posted. But to answer GP, I basically agree with what you posted.
From a philosophical pov, the well known regimes (Stalinist USSR, Maoist China, Varsovia pact regimes, DPRK) were dictatorships and they were failed attempts at communism.
From a historical point of view it is fine to call them communist.
I did not argue that communist regimes didn't fail. I even think that was inevitable. And I even think that it was inevitable that the communist ideal would be immediately abandoned by every single regime once they gain power.
That doesn't change that none of the well known historical regimes under the communist brand ever came close to the communist ideals. The betrayal of their original ideals was decried by communists themselves very early on.
My argument is actually that there are good reasons that humanity as it was 100 years ago and as it is now is incapable of achieving the communist ideal and therefore we need better philosophical theory on how to get closer to that ideal. I think the idea that revolution can bring about the communist ideal was naive.
There are comments here about smaller scale communist social systems claimed to have worked I did not know about and about which I will read.
The important bit is that every communist country tried to implement communism and every single time it led to one-party authoritarian nightmares where actual thoughtcrime was illegal and brutally enforced. That indicates a fundamental problem with the ideology to me, and one that isn’t ever worth trying again.
I do not think it indicates an unfixable problem with the ideal. It does indicate fatal flaws with the plans to get there. That is why I believe we need better theory on how the communist ideal can be achieved in a democratic way. I do not know if this better theory can be developed. And I do not know if humanity will ever align with this ideal. The communist ideal of a classless society is in many ways unnatural and presupposes that we will overcome some of our vices. Note that this does not solve all of our problems and therefore I think it is outdated. The 17 UN SDGs are a far more up to date set of directions we need to work on.
Just to make it clear, I think the 10 planks/10 point action plan of communism from the actual manifesto is simply WRONG and would never have achieved the communist ideal (and nowadays it is also outdated). An authoritarian nightmare is the direct result of that plan, points 1, 3, 4, 8 and 9 ensure that. Even more damning and depressing is that many communist regimes did not actually implement point 10 by actually having mandatory child labour even if education was free.
But also note that most capitalist countries actually implement to some degree point 5 (having a national central bank) and many to various degrees implement point 10 (free education, no child labour) and several implement 6 (state controlled transportation and communication). And this was for the better.
No system has managed to reach the point where it could be called "pure communism", because it was "interrupted" in the middle (e.g. by becoming authoritarian).
Saying "communism fundamentally cannot work because I know examples that did not work" is similar to saying "democracy fundamentally cannot work, look: Hitler was democratically elected".
I think it is inevitable. Why would anyone willingly give up their rights to tools of production? Correct me if this is a gross misunderstanding, but how can you get people to invent things in their garage when statesmen are trotting around looking for "unearned surplus"? And if the wealth will somehow end up being distributed to you anyway, and more work doesn't have any meaning, why try anything at all?
Well, productivity today is actually the biggest problem humanity is facing, if you think about it: productivity is directly linked to fossil fuels, which are not unlimited (that will soon be a problem) and also are the cause of climate change (that will soon be a problem too).
So I could ask it differently: why would you want anyone to spend a lot of effort keeping us in the direction that will globally make our society collapse?
The only two choices aren't "status-quo vs mediocrity", that's just a false dichotomy. Why can't people invent clean bio-energy, low-powered computation, space travel, cure for all kinds of cancer, or free desalination? Does every invention need to burn society down?
Apparently, yes. That's called "rebound effect". I don't know of an invention that did not suffer from it.
5G is more efficient than 4G for the same usage, but it allows us to use more, so we will use more. Reusable rockets are more efficient, but they will allow us to launch a lot more rockets, so we will.
We don't know how to constraint ourselves. That's probably also why we won't be able to voluntarily degrow, and therefore we will just continue until it all collapses.
You mean the "why can't people invent <place here some cool technology we don't have>" part?
Not sure what to say to that, to be honest... would be cool to live in peace in a sustainable way, that's for sure. But I don't see that as an argument.
I think this fallacy you displayed is in fact core to the discussion in this thread. The whole thread started from the need for equity and then user tomp basically went (paraphrasing) "why would you ever want equity? communism bad".
Some people want to dismiss the entirety of the thought behind communism and behind equity and use the historical regimes as justification even if those regimes did not in fact achieve or uphold communist ideals.
People will invent and will create regardless of whether that results in wealth or not. In fact the current capitalist regime is te perfect demonstration of this. People continue to invent things and continue to create art of all kinds despite the fact that most of the times the royalties are captured by corporations. And before IP was created, people did invent and create because that is simply what they do.
Also people will continue to work even without the threat of starving. An example of this is Japan where plenty of retired people engage in community work even if they have no personal need to do so, they do it for the community. This level of care for the surroundings and for the community makes Japan spectacular. Even the most anti-work will eventually get bored and start doing stuff.
This fallacy is used to dismiss all kinds of anti-capitalist ideas not just communism.
A society without intellectual property is against capitalism. A society with UBI is against capitalism. A communist society where workers can control the means of production and where things are redistributed according to needs is against capitalism. All three ideas are against a small group of people maximizing the captured (by themselves) value of the work of everyone else.
This view that humanity is some sort of herd of kettle that will not do anything unless threatened with starvation by a group of wealthy capitalists controlling the herd is bleak and disgusting. To bring it full circle, of course capitalists are against equity.
Capitalism has been tried more times than communism and has failed to reward productive people more times.
It's 2023. The absurd idea that, for example, the billionaires pushing the Metaverse or burning Twitter to the ground got there by being productive, is thoroughly disproven. Stop pushing this motivated ideology.
Capitalism has lifted billions out of poverty. Even China, who is communist in name, only started experiencing high economic growth once Deng Xiao Ping started reforming the state to be more market oriented, ie capitalism-lite.
I would love for capitalism to stop being treated like a child with all these monetary policies, interests rate massage, bank bailouts, etc. Ludwig Von Mises was right about the business cycle. Hands off the free market dammit!
It's not clear that capitalism was a necessary component of globalisation or the progress of technology, both of which are adequate to explain any benefits capitalism might claim.
What is clear is how many billions capitalism has kept in poverty while the top 1% get absurdly rich. 10 men had more wealth than 3.1 billion people in 2021[1]. The US, supposed beacon of capitalism, can't even provide housing, healthcare, or education for its people, despite having the largest GDP of any country in the world. You claim capitalism a success, but the only way you can do that is by turning a blind eye to the capitalism's total failures.
> Even China, who is communist in name, only started experiencing high economic growth once Deng Xiao Ping started reforming the state to be more market oriented, ie capitalism-lite.
You claim China has experienced economic growth: who in China has experienced that? Capitalists love to lump everyone in a country together in their measures of economic growth as if everyone is benefiting, but that's not the case.
And the thing is, I'm not even a communist, per se. But I sure as hell am against a few lucky capitalists getting fat off the labor of billions of people.
> We need to solve how to deal with this consequences.
I'm hoping that we start to see an increase in pro-family policies. A couple rough ideas to look into would be decreasing taxation (or giving refunds/payments) based on how many children a productive family has, providing financial support so families can buy homes, and promoting wage increases so a single income can support a family to allow one to work and the other to focus on raising the children.
Housing policy is dead simple (not easy): build more homes.
The problem is, when you build more homes, the price of homes go down.
Great for people that want homes and people who are just joining the workforce. Not great for grandma and her retirement planning.
If you frame your housing policy around anything but building more, then housing is fundamentally zero sum. If it is zero sum, that means those couples with a children are being subsidized at the cost of that 20 year old new grad or people who earn minimum wage without a family. Those people look at their finances or their mental health and make decisions about their future. So if people new to the work force are subsidizing those with children you could be harming their mental health to the point where they don't want children.
Why would any sane person bring children into a world that is almost guaranteed to be worse for their children than it is for them? I wouldn't.
So from a systems thinking point of view, the only cogent housing policy is to build more homes.
> Great for people that want homes and people who are just joining the workforce. Not great for grandma and her retirement planning.
I think policies that encourage families from passing their property down to their children rather than being used as an investment vehicle should definitely be considered. The strategy of buying a home young and dumping it later seems to cause bad behaviors that result in families spreading out which prevents a healthy familial support network to form.
I see people always talking about the economics of starting a family, but they're missing the real reason for low birth rates: opportunity cost borne by women.
Women who choose to have a child put their careers back several years at the age when they are making the most important advancements in their careers. They choose not to have children because doing so doesn't just mean they have to pay a bunch of money in childcare costs, it means they will likely never achieve the dreams and goals they set for themselves. It will become much harder for them to travel, climb the corporate ladder, create things, and be someone. Many women want to achieve all these things and then have children later in life, but it becomes biologically infeasible for them to do so.
This is harder to solve. We can force maternity policies with hiring mandates, but that would be VERY expensive for smaller businesses (having to pay 2 salaries to get the work of 1 for a year or more).
I'm just not sure what other policies exist to solve the opportunity cost issue. You can give people as much cash as you want but government can't give away free self-actualization
I lived in Singapore for a little while and this was one thing I noticed they did there. For example, by giving preference in subsidized housing to people who were married and further preference to those who had kids.
In the U.S. (and broadly, the western world) we seem to have a really hard time using economic incentives to encourage certain behaviors. I think it's partially because we don't want to implicitly judge a given lifestyle choice as better than another.
However, I think there is much we can learn from a place like Singapore. Singapore simply does not stick to any single political dogma - they choose a mishmash of policies based on the outcome they want to achieve.
That is a down-right evil idea, in my opinion. It means those who cannot find partners to make families are further punished, making their chances to create families even lower. They're turned to a literal slave caste to provide for other people's families.
Remove taxation on young and productive people instead if you want to help them create families.
> It means those who cannot find partners to make families are further punished, making their chances to create families even lower.
Incentivization of family formation would push people to get married, it would not make family formation less likely. The entire point of incentivizing a behavior through providing benefits is to make it easier for people who partake in that behavior, therefore drawing people to it.
> They're turned to a literal slave caste to provide for other people's families.
I'm single, and due to various factors it's unlikely I'll be getting married in the immediate future. I'm one of the people who would be "punished" by my "down-right evil idea" but I still think it's good. Economic pressure would definitely make me more invested, not less, in getting married sooner. Calling this a creation of a "literal slave caste" is an extreme emotional exaggeration since I'm definitely not calling for myself to be enslaved by any meaningful usage of the term.
The end result is that a class of people live and die to provide for others. That's against nature, unless we reduce ourselves to the existence of ants.
Down-right evil is what the consequences would be, but I retract that comment regarding the idea itself, because I don't think any malice is intended.
Economic incentivizing by the government often have awful side effects. Let me make a comparison: Business is good for the economy and nation. Therefore the government should incentivize people to have businesses. Let's therefore give a million dollars to every successful business owner. We take the money by taxing those who don't have businesses.
I think most do not like that idea, but it's basically the same thing.
Let's not pit young people against each other furthermore.
I don't agree with the person your replying to but its clear that they aren't using "nature" to mean "things happening outside" or "things happening to non-humans". When people say "against nature" almost always they are saying that something runs contrary to the nature of man in such a way as to inhibit an ordering towards flourishing. Against nature means something not conducive to the proper ordering of the human person, so a house is not in principle "against nature" since it acts in accord with human nature and furthers human flourishing rather than frustrating our natural faculties.
As someone who has worked at meta in privacy, I don't think this would be hard to figure out for a small startup. The issue is that you can't share data between different apps, which is not a problem a small company would have since they wouldn't have multiple apps to begin with.
Meta, on the other hand, has data intertwined between Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and other platforms. Plus, Meta's internal bureaucracy and ownership model is an absolute hellish mess.
I don't really feel too comfortable sharing specific details, but suffice it to say I've worked at a few large companies and my experience with Meta was one of too many cooks in the kitchen. Lots of overlap in ownership and the boundaries between teams IMHO was not very clear nor well thought out. This meant that launching anything required a lot of work across many teams (more than necessary IMHO).
> Also, can you elaborate on this?
As a simple example, the EU mandated that if you signed up for Instagram and you also signed up for Facebook using the same e-mail address, your personal information could not be shared (or used for targeting) between apps, unless you explicitly agree to link those two accounts together. This was a pretty clear-cut case, but it got much less clear when talking about Facebook vs Messenger (they are different apps, but direct messaging is also integrated into the Facebook website). Now if you start adding in things like Threads, Oculus, etc you can imagine the implications for how you share data will continue to get more complex.
Yes, there are many examples if you simply google "china imprisoned business trip".
When the Canadian government arrested a Huawei exec who was ignoring Iranian sanctions and lying to US investigators, the Chinese government arrested 2 Canadians as spies. Authoritarian governments fucking love to arrest people on "espionage" charges, since it is hard to prove and they can pretend to not be able to share because of national security.
You forgot to mention how valuable they are as bargaining chips for mutual releases of prisoners.
Case in point, the American basketball player Brittney Griner was arrested in Russia on accusations of having a cannabis vape pen - and was exchanged for the world's most notorious arms dealer, Victor Bout.
No there aren't. There's like ~150 cases of exit bans of "foreigners" in PRC in the last 20 years. Vast majority of exit bans are ex Chinese (primarily financial) criminals who thought western passport would protect them only to be coerced back into PRC to face justice. Or established expats who gets dragged into legal issues, especially with local interests. Some of which might be sus. Just about the only westerners rounded up and severely punished in PRC during travel are drug smugglers. Statistically, a westerner (not ex Chinese national) has less chance of being thoroughly fucked with in PRC than an ethnically Chinese scientist in the US via China Initiative.
On the two Michaels', of course they were spies, with the customary NGO cover. Useful idiots who lap up western propaganda love to think PRC... a surveillance state with extremely competent state security organ that completely dismantled CIA spy network this decade somehow needs to capture innocent westerners when they could just snatch up legitimate spies. There's a reason CSIS, Canadian CIA, publically celebrated their release on twitter [0]. Not to mention this tidbit:
>Edith Terry: Michael Kovrig is a friend, and I am very conscious of the privations he has endured. And while his background is complex and possibly included intelligence gathering for the Canadian government during his diplomatic career, he was very open about his research interests and contacts. [1]
The other Michael ran NKorean pertaining NGO out of PRC. Connect the dots.
Like it's not hard to stay out of severe trouble in PRC as a foreigner. Don't traffic drugs, don't spy i.e. don't take pictures of military. Almost all the other small shit you get to drink tea with cops and sign some paperwork which is basically kid glove treament. The only real exception is journalism, hence most foreign media has left the country.
> Statistically, a westerner (not ex Chinese national) has less chance of being thoroughly fucked with in PRC than an ethnically Chinese scientist in the US via China Initiative.
That has not been what I have observed with people I am friends with, nor the experience of other people I have worked with who go to China regularly.
You call them useful idiots, but then call them spies. Which are they? Unknowingly assisting intelligence agencies or illegal spies?
Where is the evidence, the PRC refused to provide any... and I'm sorry, but CSIS celebrating the release of a Canadian citizen isn't evidence they are a spy. Look at their feed, it's full of Canada related stuff all the time.
How many of your associates who goto PRC reguarly have exit bans or in prolonged legal limbo with the PRC security apparatus. I hazard to guess zero. If more than one, that's more reflection of who you are associating with. Charitably we're talking about 0.01% of the mainland expat population, realistically lower because majority of exit bans are ex PRC nationals who aren't connected to actual expat community. The reason why the Michael's arrest was even news is because they were anomolous incidents in the first place.
I'm referring to people who believes western narrative that Michael's weren't spies as "useful idiots" for believing the innocent Michaels propaganda. Spavor was accused collecting info on PRC military on behalf of Korvig who used NGO as cover for intelligence work. That's about normal level of disclosure for national security, comparable to what US intelligence discloses on source and methods whenever they announce capture of PRC national taking photos of US defense installations. So yes, given all the context, CSIS celebrating their release + their NGO background + literal associate/friend admitting they had intelligence background + their subject matter interests all point to them being spies. It takes surpreme cognitive dissonance to assert otherwise in order to support the even less tenuous assertion that PRC security apparatus is so incompetent they have to hostage "innocent" westerners.
One was followed by police while he was in country, then detained by customs officials (I assume it was MSS) on exit, and was told in no uncertain terms not to come back. This is a regular cybersecurity person who was there to speak at a conference. He was given no records and when his company tried to dig into why he was detained, they unsurprisingly had no records of him being detained or questioned.
I also done incident response for a number of companies targeted by Chinese state sponsored actors going after industrial and financial IP.
You keep calling them spies, but in both cases it's not as clear as you make it out to be and there is no evidence they were spying. The US provides quite a bit of information when they charge someone with espionage. Kicking someone out of your country for taking photos of sensitive sites (US) and keeping quiet about sources/methods is different than arresting someone while refusing to show evidence of their crime(PRC).
You act like someone with a regional interest will always be a spy if they have done intelligence work... there are tens of thousands of people who work for intelligence agencies in Canada and many more former employees.
I'm not even denying they might have been spying or providing trip reports afterwards, but without evidence I have a choice between believing the Canadian government or the Chinese government... I'll choose to believe the Canadian government.
Which comports with my statements of kid glove treatment. PRC did not want your associate in the country, invited them to drink tea and then booted them out of the country aka the opposite of hostage risk. Are some fields subject to increased national security scrutiny? Sure but arbiturary detention risk is rarely on the cards vs getting kicked out. No different from US booting out PRC academics/students for association with defense connected/adjacent institutes. Even IP espionage does not detain people to give up goods since that’s counter productive, i.e. thousand talent program works only if targets come to PRC willingly. And they do, because the risk of detainment is virtually non-existent hence the US gov has to deter via shenanigan like China Initiative to disincentivize people to people exchanges. It's not the prospect of PRC punishment but the reward that fuels their indy espionage efforts and why the west is playing up arbitrary detention risk.
The US also doesn't show evidence for PRC nationals prosecuted for photographing sensitive infra. They're not releasing said photos, only allegations/prosecutions because of course not. And per script PRC MFA will deny and claim they're just tourists with bad english who can't read signage. That's how the game is played. Choosing to not believe PRC is assuming the default position that western spies aren't operating or if they are, are never caught which we already know not to be true per CIA debacle. At the end of the day damning quack like a duck associations are as good as these scenarios will permit. And in Michaels case, involve literal people with acknowledged intelligence backgrounds. which is close to smoking gun threshold. Obviously we'll disagree but I choose to believe a surveillance state with a proven record of counterintelligence is good at surveilling.
> The US also doesn't show evidence for PRC nationals prosecuted for photographing sensitive infra. They're not releasing said photos, only allegations/prosecutions because of course not.
That's provably false.
> And in Michaels case, involve literal people with acknowledged intelligence backgrounds. which is close to smoking gun threshold.
Smoking gun in what way? When you look at the geopolitical issues at the time, it's obvious they were arrested with the intent to put leverage on Canada, whether they are spies or not is irrelevant. In fact them not being spies, but related to connected people is actually even better.
Please prove it. You'll find is some redacted district court documents which is as credible as PRC MFA statement with respect to counter intelligence shenanigans.
> In fact them not being spies, but related to connected people is actually even better.
Except it's manifestly not, especially if you look at geopolitcal messaging at the time. PRC's retaliation over Meng was specifically calibrated to message business community was NOT targetted. Apart from Michaels ther was the Canadian drug trafficker with proven traffic activy in Canada. And when media was frenzing over some passengers (I think teacher) having issues transitting via PRC airport, there was rapid messaging from PRC end to assure it was procedural and not part of the Meng drama. PRC messaging could not have been clearer. The Michaels being spies mattered precisely because the point of PRC retaliation was to segregate from commercial activities. This was during time when PRC was fighting hard against decouple efforts from US.
Smoking gun in sense that if an ex MSS member got arrested in US, was returned to PRC during exchange, followed by MSS publically celebrating their return and their associate saying they used to conduct intelligence activities, the parsimonious answer is US security apparatus caught a PRC spy. If that's not enough damning context then there's nothing else to say.
One problem is that the instructions are not visible until you click on the question mark icon (at least on mobile) so I didn't even realize there were instructions until I read your comment.
Can you share more details on this? It sounds a bit overly optimistic, but I admittedly don't have a lot of experience in this space. If you have some links to news articles or publications talking about progress and cost, I'd love to read them.
Seems like cool stuff. Photolithography is very expensive compared to offset printing, so it would be interesting to see low-efficiency but very low cost solar modules using processes more like offset press.
Israelis also tend to be very direct in my experience working with them. I'm not Israeli (in fact, I hold a passport for a country that doesn't even recognize Israel), but it's something I've always admired about working with people from the region. I think the Israeli culture is really good at cutting through fluff and focusing on getting things done.
Genuine question: if Google is a last resort, what are your more preferred alternatives? I've tried many search engines and haven't really succeeded in finding a better alternative. Wondering if I'm missing something.
Kagi (paid) and Brave search have both been good to me.
I never really liked DDG or Bing. They both suffer from the same SEO gaming that Google does.
There are also a number of smaller search engines that have been posted to HN that are kind of interesting for certain niches.
I think what will happen over the next five years is that instead of Google being the one-stop shop for search, it will be a number of smaller players + the different chatbot engines like ChatGPT and Bard and others.
I tried many alternatives, and finally settled on Kagi Search. It's a paid option but it's well worth it. They also have tools like FastGPT which I'm using more and more. It's a GPT model that has access to their search results. You can't use it for conversation like you'd do with ChatGPT, but for searching and summarizing it's amazing.
I agree it can be very confusing to set all of this up from scratch, but if you're using something like Vue CLI, all of these dependencies and configs are generated for you.
If you stay on the same version of the init script, you're still marginally better than rolling your own.
On the other hand, if you learn it once and then allow updates to occur, you'll still understand the process in the abstract. You'll just have to let go of the notion of knowing all details of your stacks from top to bottom. This is why we have teams and specializations. Computing long ago exceeded typical human capacity for complete knowledge. Now we learn as much as we can including the wisdom of who to trust when the solution is bigger than we can individually muster.
We trust compilers and browsers and libraries and frameworks all the time. When they break, hopefully the broken area is in our wheelhouse or at least well-documented. But the issue of complexity isn't going away if we want to continue making forward progress.
My frontend dev setups perform auto reload on save in my IDE within a second, have clean integration with testing suites and CI/CD, and do so much beyond my ability to build on my own. Even if I were dedicated to dev build environments and had the sufficient skill to make a stable and complete solution, I will have incurred the opportunity cost of not actually solving my initial frontend problems the clients are paying me for.
Change happens.
"Dr. Strangedevelop" or "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Vite"
Also, things seem to be converging towards simplicity in a positive way, comparing e.g. Vite to Webpack.
But without any disagreement:
the churn is real.
Not upgrading is only an option if you
1) are sure you don't run vulnerable code on a server (e.g. through SSR) - if any code is public-facing, ignoring most "npm audit" reports ceases to be an option.
2) don't need new packages to change your build setup that are significantly newer than your previous setup.
To repeat, I don't disagree and I prefer the spirit of your comment to my critique.
Almost all of the time it is a good idea to settle on versions and evaluate when upgrading is worth it.
Update costs can also vary a lot depending on the project.
In other words, preserving behavior while fixing dependency conflicts, breaking changes etc after updating major versions.
If one avoids to do clever stuff with the bundler and if the project requirements are simple, it can be easy upgrade or even swap tools (e.g. Webpack for Vite).
This rings very true for me, bravo:
> My frontend dev setups perform auto reload on save in my IDE within a second, have clean integration with testing suites and CI/CD, and do so much beyond my ability to build on my own. Even if I were dedicated to dev build environments and had the sufficient skill to make a stable and complete solution, I will have incurred the opportunity cost of not actually solving my initial frontend problems the clients are paying me for.
> Change happens.
> "Dr. Strangedevelop" or "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Vite"
Who will care for these people? How will we deal with the consequences of flat population growth? How will we deal with the stock market's expectations of perpetual growth when the underlying population itself is not growing (and especially since productivity has also been relatively flat)?