#sociopaths — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #sociopaths, aggregated by home.social.
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Somewhere I recall Adam Smith making the point that if morality is to be had in capitalism, it must be encoded in law because those of means will become tyrants if just left to manipulate their power without rules. Maybe it was when he was talking about relationships of employers and employees, though really it's quite a general point. (If someone does know the quote I've been trying to find, please let me know because I often cite this observation, but from only vague memory.)
Morality is not something that would be discovered by capitalism, which is nothing more than window dressing on a gradient descent optimization engine. Any morality that is discoverable by capitalism is unnecessary because profitability will compute the same thing. But morality and profitability clearly come into conflict, and capitalism has no mechanism for recognizing that morality should win. Presently it does not.
"Fiduciary Duty vs The Three Laws of Robotics"
http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2009/02/fiduciary-duty-vs-three-laws-of-robotics.htmlEven a mathematical optimization engine has limitations. It tends to prefer local optima (the hillclimbing problem, for those who want to google that) and they compute nonsense solutions if you don't bound them well. The same for capitalism. The problem with capitalism as practiced now is what I refer to as reductionism, the idea you have an abstract goal and that it's OK to substitute a model even though that model only approximates the abstract goal.
So you decide that a market solution to global warming is some sort of carbon offsets or a carbon tax or both, and then you stop caring whether the planet is warming and assume (wrongly) that it is sufficiently only to care whether you're making money. Doing so usually leads to regulatory capture as the answer, leading to you getting loopholes or lax enforcement that then make you richer and sure you're solving a problem you've never actually been trying to solve.
Regulation is needed, but also meta-regulation that makes it clear that while you can establish profit goals, other measurables must matter. To that extent, I think shareholder capitalism needs to go and stakeholder capitalism needs to be part of a solution (given that it's unlikely that capitalism itself can be removed). I'm not big on -isms (capitalism, socialism, etc). If I were, it'd be hybridism (right tool for right job).
"Losing the War in a Quiet Room"
http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2012/01/losing-war-in-quiet-room.htmlThere's also just the issue of what we value. Right now the public conversation is always that we value growth. That is unsustainable and we need to somehow change that discussion to value sustainability. Until we recognize that sustainability is more important than growth, we're going to be investing in the wrong things. I don't have a specific writing on this, though it has involve taxing megawealth and making sure that if we're going to be a rich society, that wealth is better distributed, so maybe:
"Tax Policy and the Dewey Decimal System"
http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2009/02/tax-policy-and-dewey-decimal-system.htmlIt probably also involves UBI. I didn't write the following to promote UBI (or any solution), just to analyze a particular issue from the bottom up. But after-the-fact it has seemed to me to function well as a partial defense of UBI because I think people's inability to know they'll survive regardless of their life choices, and their subsequent need to scramble for a job, even a sociopathic one, just to make sure they can eat, causes a lot of problems. If people felt more secure they'd be fed and housed and all that, they could afford to make more moral decisions. Morality tends to become more practical with surplus:
"Corny Economics"
http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2012/05/corny-economics.htmlSorry this was so long, but I hope you find something useful in those articles.
#politics #capitalism #UBI #taxation #sociopaths #sustainability #environment #socialism #ShareholderCapitalism #StakeholderCapitalism #morality #economics
