Nice! Congrats.

What's the difference between those links? Will check later :)

Never mind.

And congratz. You're [name removed as per user request-KJK], right?

Yes

Can you send us a link to a readable version?

http://www.the-philosopher.co.uk/republicanism.htm

Think I already posted this before tho.

Woah, when you said "first publication" I thought you meant like some blog or something, but that stuff is freaking PRINTED! Both kudos and respect!

Nice job, it's a good article. Sounds like you're talking about a compromise between socialism and "laissez-faire" economics? It's an idea I fully support, but a difficult one to implement. The economy has to be regulated enough to prevent corporations from gaining too much control, but too much regulation hurts businesses. The government must be able to walk that fine line and thoroughly evaluate the effects of any proposed regulation.

Anyways, congrats on your achievement! I can imagine how much this means to you! :)

Great article. Congrats.

Huzzah for [name removed as per user request-KJK]

Congratulations on getting your article published, SYnapse!

I don't think I understood your critiques of the current system very well. Are you saying, for example, that tobacco was a fixed-demand product, like energy or transportation, and that this allowed the kind of manipulation you speak of? (By the way, demand is not fixed in energy or transportation).

And then, I just did not follow the points about corn syrup or the ipod nano at all. What kind of regulation would you propose to prevent these things from happening, for example? Would you, for example, forbid a company from coming out with a new product that made only minimal improvement over the last one? Do you not think this might ultimately stifle innovation? (Consider, for example, the PC. The PC has evolved many orders of magnitude, all funded by incremental but expensive steps that were not notably huge compared to the previous one).

In general, I would really have valued seeing some examples of the kind of regulation you're speaking of, and also a discussion of how they would be made, and how you would keep this process geared toward the stated goals. I think everybody can appreciate the idea of a good regulation that sets out toward a good end and is well-taylored to achieve that end. But I don't think you really engaged any of the longstanding criticisms, with substantial empirical weight behind them at this point, that (a) regulatory bodies are by nature ill-equipped to foresee the real consequences of their regulations, even if they're good-willed, and (b) nobody really knows a way to constitute a government with the sort of power you're discussing and keeping it fixed single-mindedly and rationally on the goals you discuss.

You and I probably also take slightly different lessons from historical egalitarian revolutions, but let's not digress too much.

So anyway. I'd be especially interested in examples of the sorts of regulations you propose to address the example abuses you mention.

Hey semck, good post.

In fact I did address quite a few of those points, but my editor removed a lot of the detail and thought it should be more ideological and broad-sweeping critique of left and right wing economics, rather than specific political points.

But as someone who studied law, I know we do have many laws to prevent certain monopolies and oligarchy in politics. Consumer law and the laws governing political donations to name 2 examples. But they do not do enough. Laws protect companies from illegal activities but not from market forces. Capitalists argue that a company should be allowed to fail, not bailed out by a government, but what about market forces like the sheer capital that allows one company to dominate and suppress invention and new products? For example a huge company uses journals and pressure groups to convince the public that new competitor isn't good, even if their product is a step forward. That's why free-market powers cause ultimately corruption.

Secondly, what about that wastefulness I mentioned about new products? Well that's philosophical in nature, rather than legal. You can't stop companies producing new goods but you can stop people wanting them. This comes from education, and a natural social consciousness that develops from suppression of the market. The less free our market is, the less people want to be rich to buy stupid things. So you promote social class based upon contributions, and you make nurses and manual workers better paid positions than footballers and moguls - maybe integrate it into the tax system so people who "build" up society pay less taxes. After all it is harder to be a manual worker than an office worker, and yet it is more necessary.

So really my utopia if you're asking is a social model in which the market is based upon rewarding those who make society better, make better inventions, revolutionize the way we live, instead of one that revolves around "demand", which has been proven to be a variable you can influence for sinister motives, rather than a constant determinate of public preference. A free market is not a democratic market, I think that's the main point.

Thanks SYnapse. You answer some but not all of my questions. I'm still interested in your analysis of the tobacco/energy analogy that you seemed to point to, for example.

Anyway, how do you dry up demand for "stupid things" by education? I think that the evidence that educated people want stupid things less than uneducated people is tenuous, at best.

Next, who gets to make decisions about who "builds up" society more, and what would the algorithm be? You say, for example, that manual workers "build up society" more than office workers, and are more necessary. That is utterly unclear to me, especially relative to the natural supply of both types (which is super important to account for when designing incentives).

I think of the multi-billion dollar road project being done in my city. There are, of course, thousands of workers working on this. If a few hundred quit, it would be reasonably easy to replace them. On the other hand, if a few hundred of the engineers who designed, priced, and enabled the project had quit, it's far from clear that there would be any big project at all. At the very least, it would be much harder to replace them. But already as it is (when engineers make quite a bit more than back-hoe operators), people have to go through quite a lot of trouble and schooling to become an engineer. Why are they going to bother doing that if society rewards operating a backhoe more, because it "builds up society more" (whatever that means)?

Sure, they get to work in air conditioning, and that's nice. But that's already true, and it's not like we have too many engineers. Similar remarks could apply to accountants, etc.

I don't even allow that a single footballer builds up society less than a single teacher. I think he builds it up quite a bit more, because he brings a bit of pleasure into a huge number of people's lives, instead of a large amount of potential into a small number of people's lives. I think the intuition to the contrary is just based on people's failure to grasp large numbers.

I also don't think you really addressed the fact that often it's not clear till much later who was building up society more, and it is only the hope of huge reward from a singular vision that leads to this. Once again, consider the PC. A large number of voices considered this very stupid, because they could not conceive of any reason people would want a computer at home. And unquestionably, the early PCs were mostly bought for reasons that would appear inefficient -- they were cool, fun, and people liked to play with them. If this had not occurred, we would not have the internet right now.

So I really don't see how your "democratic market" isn't just an old-school command economy of the kind that collapsed so spectacularly in the 1970s. Nor do I see a single benefit. I think you should try to clarify these two points.

(Well, at least if you care about my opinion, which you very reasonably may not at all!)

Semck, I do care about your opinion!

I don't believe that society should allow free market forces to reign and thus derive from that their social model. That results in the kind of society with those problems as addressed. Manual workers get paid lowly wages and do a much harder job than myself, who works as an accountant incidentally. They probably couldn't do accounts, but I'd sure as shit fail to work on a building site for a week. And without accountants, life would still succeed, right?

But you're right, who determines those values? Well they're subjective, but they need to be determined, so I believe that to some degree a government should have a set of moral values that they wish to promote, and that promotion of values will replace the market's place as being a kind of pseudo-head of state for morality. What values? It doesn't matter, they could be imperialist and evil, or promote the environment, or communist values like kinship and contribution - the point is that there need to be SOME values not provided by the market which some academics believe occurs. So like your supply and demand doesn't *create* a harmonious society. It creates wealth and in the current age, wealth is not an issue but many other things like warfare and the environment are.

I guess your and my opinion on the value of footballers doesn't really matter, but you can surely see how the market could financially reward a completely useless thing right? Or do you have faith that all the money generated is from honest need and want? Because behavioral economics has shown that people don't buy the best product, they buy the one with the best packaging. Footballers are a shitty product in a nice shiny package, like Pepsi or chocolate.

You agree that chocolate is bad right? But vegetables aren't a good market. I think that beneficial things to society are not necessary the most profitable. But we could argue about what those are all week.

SYnapse,

Thank you for the post. By the way, you didn't answer my question about why educated people are less likely to want stupid things.

Moving on: your argument seems to be, "I'm for anything but what we have." Or more specifically, "the imposition of any system of values instead of none." That this is a terrible idea seems self-evident to me. If you don't have a particular set of values to argue for, a way to determine them, and a reason they're better, then all you're arguing for is to give fiat economic power to a board with no guidelines at all. Not only is this an obviously bad idea, but it's actually been tried anyway, and it turned out to be as bad an idea as it was obvious it would be.

"And without accountants, life would still succeed, right?"

Certainly not.

You say that there have to be SOME set of values -- any set of values -- not determined by the market. Why on earth should there be? Why would we believe this would be better than the one determined by the market? At least, with the one determined by the market, each person is able to choose what he believes to be in his best interests (even if it's not really). You want to replace that with somebody telling him what's in his best interests, but with no kind of rationale to argue that it actually would be.

You have also completely failed to address my example of computers and the internet. As I pointed out, talking heads largely agreed, and for fairly good-seeming reasons, that personal computers were a silly idea in the early 1980s. Presumably, this is an activity that boards would have chosen not to give a lot of resources to. Do you or do you not believe that it would be unfortunate if this had occurred and we did not now have computers or the internet?

"I guess your and my opinion on the value of footballers doesn't really matter, but you can surely see how the market could financially reward a completely useless thing right? Or do you have faith that all the money generated is from honest need and want? Because behavioral economics has shown that people don't buy the best product, they buy the one with the best packaging."

Yes, I believe that money is generated by honest need and want. I believe that many of those wants are not terribly rational, such as the desire that you mention here for things in shiny packaging. But I believe it exists anyway. Moreover, I don't believe there's a shred of reason to believe that some central board somewhere would be a whit more rational. In fact, I think it would be less so. Boards of academics like shiny things in nice packages, too; they're just different kinds of packages, like unsupported academic trends.

"Footballers are a shitty product in a nice shiny package, like Pepsi or chocolate."

That, again, seems far from clear. To this day, I see people getting genuine enjoyment from remembering and rewatching Michael Jordan's basketball accomplishments. Unless you are going to argue that their enjoyment is somehow unreal or undesireable, I just don't know what this claim would be based on. I think a more accurate description would be that people paid money (and time) because they thought they would get a ton of enjoyment out of watching Jordan play basketball, and they were right, and they did.

"You agree that chocolate is bad right?"

Heavens no.

Anyway, I still haven't seen anything approaching a description of how you would actually do things -- just a lot of complaining about the status quo. I also haven't seen an argument for why your ideas would be better (partly because you haven't actually given any ideas for how things would be). Unless you are going to produce such an argument, this looks a lot like sound and fury.

Thank you for responding!

I fear my last posts digressed a bit.

That the main intention of the article is to point out criticisms of the status quo you are correct. It is to point out that "an ideology more suited to pioneer trading posts[...]now presents itself as a dangerous orthodoxy amongst academics and politicians". However I couldn't do that without talking about the problems of the socialist system which presented a major rival to capitalism in recent times.

So, to address solutions in detail. Problems with the market are that companies can grow to the point where they are no longer beneficial to society. Repressing new products and cheaper companies by buying them out and swinging policy in their favour. For example tobacco companies.

So let's talk about tobacco. Each year around 400,000 people are prematurely killed by the effects of tobacco smoke. That's clearly not what any sane person would call "good" for society. So why do people smoke? It's not because they derive pleasure from it - or if it is, then it's because they are told that it is pleasurable, as smoking really isn't nice (fresh tobacco leaves maybe, not cigarettes.)

People smoke because of an aggressive marketing policy persuading the public to consume this new product, tobacco from overseas justifying the trade links etc. that made it possible to import. Companies wanted profits, not social benefit. So to pursue profit they invested capital into the MOVIES, packaging, advertisements, the Malboro Man, pressure groups, you've seen Thank you for Smoking right?

Well can't the same thing happen with virtually anything? When you have a profit motive, if you can package dogshit up and tell people it's good for their health, they'll buy it. I guess you have faith in people choosing the right products, history has proved that they don't. That's why governments step in to stop companies selling arsenic medicines or lead water pipes. Because their job is to make society safe and sensible, not destructive.

So extend that process to other things that do not benefit the public but which the public enjoy. As you don't agree with me that profit doesn't benefit the public, I'm afraid we are at a dead end.

The solution is clearly to ban or regulate the sale of cigarettes, like we have banned the sale of asbestos, dynamite etc. I am only extrapolating that there are things that are morally bad instead of physically bad, like racist publications. It wouldn't be a hugely Orwellian step to begin to regulate in that way as well. We already ban many extremist publications like the Anarchist Cookbook. So why is it such a big step for a government to regulate what goes on TV (has to be factual instead of untrue/has to depict realistic presentations of people). The market is the only thing standing in the way.

"That's clearly not what any sane person would call "good" for society. So why do people smoke? It's not because they derive pleasure from it - or if it is, then it's because they are told that it is pleasurable, as smoking really isn't nice (fresh tobacco leaves maybe, not cigarettes.)"

This is surely one of the most elitist things I've seen here. I have heard a very large number of very long-time smokers talk about the pleasure they (unfortunately) get from cigarettes. Can you give me any good reason why I should take your word for it that they actually aren't?

"Problems with the market are that companies can grow to the point where they are no longer beneficial to society."

Examples that don't include elitist fiat assertions? Certainly the largest few companies in the world are benefitting people in pretty much the same ways they ever were.

And by the way, you still haven't said a thing to me about my computer/internet example. Are you going to at any point?

"Repressing new products and cheaper companies by buying them out and swinging policy in their favour."

Swinging policy in their favour isn't even a free market, though -- so that could be addressed already on the laissez-faire model.

"I guess you have faith in people choosing the right products, history has proved that they don't."

I have faith in neither people nor in academics for choosing "the right" products, as I would view "right." But unlike you, I don't see why I should possibly impose my view of "the right products" on anybody else. You still haven't given any kind of rationale for this, either.

"So extend that process to other things that do not benefit the public but which the public enjoy."

You still haven't given any reason why, when people disagree over what is or isn't a benefit, the opinion of academics should receive preference over the opinion of the people whose enjoyment and welfare is actually at issue.

One of the major sources of error in modern political, psychological, and economic analysis seems to me to be academics' forgetting that all of their own studies apply to themselves as well, and they are not some kind of external actor, unaffected by the same problems as those they study.

The pleasure that comes from cigarettes is:
a) taste - which is certainly true of fresh tobacco, but not of cigarettes. To compare it's like saying that people enjoy alcohol, and using it to justify $0.10 moonshine.
b) social/psychological - which is caused by the marketing of the product and social conventions, which CHANGE -- smoking isn't cool any more
c) biological response - which is caused by repeated exposure to a product which if banned, would not create the need, so nets itself off.

"Certainly the largest few companies in the world are benefitting people in pretty much the same ways they ever were."

Nope. Prices are going up in terms of energy companies, squeezing working class families who are now struggling to get by. BAE/Lockheed continue to produce machines of war making lives miserable for people in the Middle East and Africa. Can I give an example of companies that make the world worse? Companies that produce chemical weapons. Companies like Hill & Knowlton who hired an actor to create popular support for the Gulf war funded by Kuwaiti money. Meds companies whose medicines are rushed through testing with awful side effects and companies that invest in mental institutions and prisons creating a demand for them etc etc etc.

Reiterate the computer/internet example? Oh, people thought it was stupid at the time? But according to your supply and demand, it was the demand that made computers popular.

"But unlike you, I don't see why I should possibly impose my view of "the right products" on anybody else"

Because I'm a human being, and if I see my neighbour about to chop his arm off with a chainsaw I have an obligation to warn him about it, same as if I see him smoking a cigarette.

To your last (which I didn't see before replying): sale of cigarettes is regulated, at least in the US.

We do not ban the anarchist cookbook in the US, of course, thank God.

Your whole concept of regulating art or press to make sure it's "true" or "factual" is just appalling, and vastly commits the error I mentioned before about academics forgetting their own humanity and their own blinders. We already have a preview of this: there are "fact check" websites run by various smart people; and they are completely appalling in how biased they can be. "Facts" entail a whole worldview, background arguments, and interpretation.

It is utter nonsense to talk of requiring "realistic portrayals of people." Who gets to decide who's realistic? Art has been decried in its day as unrealistic that was later realized to be epic in its realism and its depth. The people doing the censoring would by nature be part of the power structure. They would be uniquely ill qualified to realize the truth in the critiques and portrayals that they rejected. Do you seriously doubt that art portraying unhappy black people and other minorities would have been banned by such a board before the 1950s, on grounds that it portrayed an unrealistic and dissent-stirring view?

You are offering an apologetic for horrifying tyranny.

"Reiterate the computer/internet example? Oh, people thought it was stupid at the time? But according to your supply and demand, it was the demand that made computers popular. "

[Many] experts thought it was stupid and pointless. Ordinary people liked it because it was cool (even though it was, of course, stupid and pointless).

If anything is going to get achieved in terms of making people better, yes I use the word making, then someone needs to have a stance and I believe that people are better alive than dead. Therefore they shouldn't smoke. I do not have a source to back this up it is just right and that is where our debate falls apart because you will say some crap about how I am enforcing my opinion and everything is up for debate. Typical postmodernist cynicism preventing any sort of progress. I do believe in moral enforcement while we live in a world that is completly devoid of moral values because everyone has a conflicting opinion. Power is the only thing that stops those conflicting opinions cancelling out to a nil opinion.

^ the above paragraph stands independent to the rest of the debate and I'm not sure how serious I am about it.

"After all it is harder to be a manual worker than an office worker, and yet it is more necessary."

Actually, under the soviet system, manual laborers were paid more than, say, engineers. Yet people still went into engineering etc. so they didn't have to work with their hands. Either is OK when you're 20, but when you're 50+, having a sit-down job is infinitely better. Pay isn't the only consideration for going into a job.

I previously worked for a municipal government where, due to systemic wage discrimination against woman-dominated jobs, a method of rating job duties vs. pay was developed. Front-line workers were paid more due to the stress of dealing with the public, whereas in traditional free-market jobs, they would be paid less (waitress, fast food). The system worked OK. It's main flaw was, once it was developed, there was a lot of resistance to change it due to forgetting some factor or over representing something. There was also a very limited amount of flexibility to change rate of pay due to market conditions.

I'm not proposing either of these as the ultimate model, I'm just adding some ideas to the discussion.

Certainly free-market forces haven't ended various kinds of wage discrimination. Legislation has done more than that has.

But enforcing pay rates from above, even if well-done, just leads to subtler discrimination. I'd argue that's there would be less discrimination under enforced pay rates than free-market, since the variables that went into the wage calculation would be open to all to see. However, balancing all of variables that went into paying more for remote locations and pay rates for millions of types of jobs would likely cost society more through the inefficiency of overhead of paying all those accountants than the benefit of equal pay for equal work. Generally, it's better to put checks and balances as low in the system as possible (the end user or the worker) than impose a bureaucracy from above.

You could make the same argument for any kind of value-imposed rule. Not that I'm against values in society, just the manner of implementing them is tricky, and top-down may not be the way to go.

Great discussion guys, I've enjoyed reading both sides so far. I see where both of you are coming from, and I think you both have made some good points.

@SYnapse
Thank you for expanding upon your thoughts; I wish your editor would have let you keep some more of the specifics in your article. I share your frustration with the way our resources are often wasted in our current economic system. It's sickening to observe the obscene amount of time and resources that our society dumps into sports and entertainment. There's nothing wrong with sports and other recreational activities, but their benefits are not worth what we invest in them. I agree that in order to fix this, morals need play a bigger role in deciding what we spend our money on; but I don't think the government should be the ones telling us what to buy. As Semeck said, government economic regulations often have unintended repercussions; no matter how noble the intentions behind them were. I could go more into detail on why extensive governmental regulation doesn't work, but the U.S.S.R. thankfully has provided us with excellent evidence for this. (As I'm sure you're aware of.) I'm curious as to why you would promote this kind of economic ideology now when it clearly didn't work in the past. (Perhaps I misinterpreted what you were advocating for?)

Anyways, I believe that the people themselves should employ moral discernment when deciding how to spend their time/money. Yes people are often incredibly stupid creatures, but letting the individual decide for themselves results in a less flawed system then when the goverment decides everything for them. A free-(ish)* market system, where the individual makes the economic decisions, isn't hindered by potentially harmful goverment regulations and realizes more of capitalism's potential. If the government wants to help people spend their money better, they can best do so through education.

(*Obviously some regulation is needed, but I disagree with you on how much that is.)

"You could make the same argument for any kind of value-imposed rule. Not that I'm against values in society, just the manner of implementing them is tricky, and top-down may not be the way to go."

Well said Theo. SYnapse your same argument for value-imposed economics could be used as an argument for a government ban on abortion. (Which wouldn't actually bother me but that's different issue.)

(Plus you stated that you think people are better off alive then dead...)

Oh god you had to drop the abortion bomb. Yes we all believe in life over death, none of us advocate mass death of adults, however abortion is an exceptional circumstance as the status of the foetus (BLA BLA Let's not go there).............

I think that the purpose of a government is to protect people from undue influences of power, "Machiavellian forces" we might call them, which result in their exploitation or imprisonment. Thus we have constitutions or types of law which prevent dictatorships taking over, and we have laws to stop industrialists selling washing machines which explode in the home, and we have regulations that stop them dumping nuclear waste in the rivers. The mandate of a government is protection of it's people right? So we're just debating where that line is, and I believe that the public is not currently protected enough from the free-market's natural tendency to create monopoly and capital consolidation (rising prices, falling levels of service).

"Chocolate is bad"

http://youtu.be/VDW0ZnZxjn4