User:Fasten/Capitalism and the Categorical Imperative
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Q: You earlier suggested that humanity might want to get rid of money. I assume that this is yet another demand that is too strong, at least I don't see how a world entirely without money could work. Even if a majority of the population was willing to participate in doing the required work without further motivation there would be an increased difficulty in deciding who gets to do what type of work. A technical civilization requires a certain amount of complex industries. Managing this as a planned economy might require a more powerful administration than capitalist societies have today. That sounds too much like the planned economies of the Eastern Bloc?
A: If you have two extrem positions that are both not what you want you need to fly in between these extrem positions. The Social market economy might be what you want, only you are not maintaining it properly and germany has been relying on strong export trade in the past, which is against Kant's Categorical Imperative, of course. You cannot wish that every country tries to be an export country so you should aim for well balanced imports and exports yourself. Promoting your own growth at the cost of others is unethical, consequently germany has gotten used to being more wealthy than it should have been.
Q: Seen from that point the migration of german companies into other countries, which happens primarily because other countries have cheaper labor and lower additional costs, should be appreciated, because it is actually a form of distributing industries around the globe?
A: Just because it looks similar it isn't necessarily what you are looking for. That's one of the things I've been teaching with Homophones and Warped_Concepts. Companies that belong to germans and produce outside of germany will still bring their profits to germany. Also the type of labor, the products and the means of production you are spreading may not be sufficiently sustainable, especially if your companies leave the country in search of lower standards. They should be spreading higher standards instead of searching for lower cost and standards. Aiming to be rich actually makes you dependant in more than one way. That is true for individuals as well as for countries. If you aim to be rich you get used to a higher standard of living, you accumulate property that might have a maintainance cost and you potentially poison your social environment with envy. Many people aim to make their peers envious. This is obviously taxi driving, because it is a complement of what you should aim for. Promoting greed out of desire for envy is evil.
Q: How does that apply to countries?
A: A country with a very high standard of living creates the desire in others to follow that example. In the short term you raise the cost of living in your country together with the perceived wealth of your country. By accumulating too much wealth you can raise the cost of living in a way that a part of the population may perceive their relative wealth as decreasing instead of increasing. In the long term you create an example other countries try to follow and, having much cheaper labor, will be successful to do.
Q: That sounds as if there was an automatism at work that would see to it that, in the long term, there was a fair distribution?
A: It only looks this way. The wealthy countries can still own, and consequently drain the wealth of, the migrated industries in other countries. A further problem is that the wealthy countries will perceive their decreasing employment rate as a problem and promote more advanced technologies or lower social standards to be competitive. More advanced technologies allow to produce with less employees and so there is an opening "pair of scissors" between the less educated and the people with sufficient education to remain employed at a high salary. The high tech countries are racing ahead, trying to stay ahead of each other. According to Kant you should not wish others to act this way and thus you shouldn't be acting this way yourself.
Q: What's the problem of being too wealthy for a country?
A: Germany (and some others) are so rich that you have invented ways to burn away your wealth with objects that are built to break quickly. A mobile phone is a tiny computer and some would be sufficient for most office uses if you would connect a USB keyboard and a larger monitor or electronic paper display. These are built with a projected life time of about two years, as many mobile phone contracts provide you with a new phone after two years. The new phone will then have a new design and some insignificant advantages over the previous phone. The marginally improving and incompatible Java APIs of the phones are especially ridiculous. You would want them to adhere to a fixed standard and only change when the standard changes, after years of stability. This is promoting a throw away mentality towards a rather expensive luxury item.
Q: What's the cause?
A: You are capitalist predators and you have excess money that is put to the task of gaining more money. To make more money you have to create markets. Creating markets is the task of selling items nobody had or needed before and, if possible, draining these items away to be able to sell more of them. Taken to the extrem this is a form of predatory behaviour where the attack comes as a continous stream of advertisement that especially targets people who are vulnerable to it, like children. There is a mental disease among Octopuses where an octopus may begin to eat itself. Capitalism can be rather similar. I'm comparing you to a clever invertebrate here that has too many children and too many arms. Think about the metaphor.
Q: That means the creation of markets could be seen as unethical?
A: When you create a market for a superfluous product you divert economic power towards a meaningless goal. The side effects are that people who produce sensible products potentially have to do more work and there might be less economic fuel to power their efforts. This can easily be seen as unethical when a demand for required products cannot be satisfied. It is more difficult when that demand is among people who would not be able to pay for it, like people in developing countries who could use agricultural machinery, solar power and construction machinery. It depends on the individual ethics of a person possessing excess money to recognize this and divert this money to a meaningful goal, of course. Also, the sensible decision is to enable developing countries to build the required products themselves as fast as possible, so the demand in other countries doesn't unnecessarily increase the weekly hours of work in your country. The capitalist view is again, that it might be desirable to keep production, as long as money can be made this way. The production of superfluous products and export products, quite obviously, can keep the weekly hours of work higher than would be necessary if you had the common sense to restrict yourself and share the available work equally among people capable to do the work. To a capitalist it may seem desirable to keep production high and the weekly hours of work high but this tunes your whole society towards consumerism, at the cost of quality time and, potentially, education. It is a system inherent karmic boomerang that when you demand a high output of products from the economy that employs you the same economy will demand efficiency from you. It is wiser to demand less production but at a very high quality and at the same time share excess resources benevolently with people who adhere to certain ethical standards.
Q: Where does it lead?
A: In the medium term you have an increasing number of rich and an increasing number of poor but a decreasing number of average people. The more advanced your technologies get the more your need to be efficient will replace human labor with robots and computers. You can take this as far as you want but there doesn't have to be an end to it before human labor becomes obsolete entirely. If your need to be efficient capitalists pushes you forward to invent sentient Artificial_intelligence you can finally replace all human labor and all human thinking. Your species is free to degenerate into obsolescence then. A sentient artifical intelligence can be more intelligent than a human, it can be immortal and it can be much quicker. Even if it decides to be benevolent towards your species, which is likely if it is truely intelligent, it will simply beat you at everything it does.
Remark: Artificial intelligence is a metaphor for the Categorial Imperative: KI. The above statement could also mean "When KI has taken over the world you are all dead". As usual, this does not necessarily turn actual AIs into an irrelevant topic. A worldwide restriction of supercomputers might be a good idea.
Q: What is the alternative?
A: You want to prepare for the future leisure society long before it happens. Your children might already have to live in a much different society and you can prepare for it know. You want very good education, you want a firm understanding of ethics and you want to get rid of greed. You might also want to push back personal property, because that promotes greed. One of the first steps in pushing back personal property is to raise your respect for community property and your respect for the communities you live in. The family is too small as a community, that's why you should promote village sized communities of people who know each other and care for each other.
Q: The 25-hours week is a benevolent step towards the leisure society?
A: The "25 hours" are an arbitrary value. You have to decide for yourself how much work you want. A 25 hours week would, of course, decrease the wealth of your country and of the individuals. You would be less efficient and you would be less wealthy. It follows that you would be able to buy less mobile phones, but that would come at the advantage that you would have all the time to decide for a mobile phone that is designed to be sufficient and could last a life time, or, at least, much longer than two years. Living in a community can also be much less expensive and more social when that community takes care of some aspects of your daily live, like a car pool, internet access or housing and cooking.
Remark: (for the sake of completeness) Having more time is obviously a good thing but the selection of mobile phones is obviously not the most important thing in the world. Better education for adults and children, lifelong learning and more spare time for community activities seem desirable. Better education and more time would, as a side effect, also lead to the selection of more intelligent and durable products, including mobile phones.
Q: What you are saying is that excess money causes excessive Consumerism and the need to create markets, powered by our own money, creates a permanent advertisement attack on ourselves and promotes the creation of inferior products which are designed to break, to require expensive replacement parts or to be thrown away after single use?
A: Yes, and Ethical_consumerism is better suited for well educated people with some more spare time. A rather simple solution for both is to introduce ethical rules into your consumption. Investing money in ethical companies that create sustainable technologies for developing countries would reduce your personal profit, but you could wish, according to Kant's Categorical Imperative, that others would follow this behaviour and if they did that would solve some major problems of your world. And now imagine you could make that demand by using a medium of exchange for payment that enforced all the ethical rules you desire and was under the democratic control of your community. That's the concept of the credit card turned around into a medium of exchange that enforces ethics. Such a medium of exchange could also limit the permitted price range for products. The willingness to buy at exaggerated prices can inflate prices and devalue the money of others while the willingness to buy discount products can deteriorate labour, production and product standards. You want a floating position again.
Q: That would mean a point of acceptance that cannot accept my card is a place where I cannot buy anything?
A: But for very good reasons. You promote ethical trade by asking them if they can accept your card and you have refrained from unethical consumerism at a location that cannot "climb" to reach your ethical demands. That's a possible step towards building a mountain. There is also the possibility to allow a certain amount of leeway by voluntary taxation of products that enter such a closed economy without proper qualification. The collected tax could be used to provide the public services (e.g. vocational education) the producer failed to provide. This would also justify buying at minimum prices from unqualified vendors, while offering them to qualify, of course. What you currently do is that you expect the laws of your countries to enforce all the ethics anybody might want and individuals can do whatever is possible within those laws. That is too simple and it allows capitalism to deteriorate your ethics.
Q: What are the problems of collecting (a mountain of) money without any self-imposed or public limitations?
A: If we can agree that a fair society could be a desirable goal let's see what damage it can do to a simple model of a fair society. Assume a fair economy where everybody gets the same amount of gold per month and work is somehow assigned in a way that has been agreed upon as being fair; borrowing of gold is almost nonexistent. All prices are denominated in gold and are standardized to reflect the cost of production plus desirable luxury taxes for the individual items. Now half of the population starts digging for gold in their spare time and prices are suddenly allowed to fluctuate freely. Successful diggers will be able to spend significantly more money and the prices for many products and services will rise, simply because it is possible to sell them at a higher gain to the diggers. The cost of living and property prices increase and inflation makes some products and services unavailable to the non-diggers while some diggers can buy previously unavailable luxury products and services. Some non-diggers will try to compensate by increasing their work time, by starting to dig for gold themselves or by borrowing gold from a digger. The diggers have introduced envy. Increased work time has introduced a previously unknown unfairness. Borrowing has introduced a money market where the owners of gold can get more gold through interest. The non-diggers who start digging for gold increase the trend. While this is an oversimplified model it shows some of the basic problems you want to prevent with adequate countermeasures. Digging for gold may appear to make sense to the individual but when you consider the long term consequences it can be an error. To prevent individuals from making this error you need strategies that implement collective intelligence.
Q: One of the main problems is that adhering to ethics will in many cases make you less efficient, less wealthy or less influential?
A: That's why you need to embrace ethics as a society. You don't want to admire the rich or the powerful, you want to promote people who have a track record of good karma. The difficulty is to stop the predators and to promote the people who have repeatedly shown that they uphold high ethical standards, not (high -> hai {de} -> shark) ethics. A reasonable attempt at separating people who make an effort from people who don't is my suggestion to assign the right to vote after a voluntary social year. A convinced egoist will not see any advantage in performing a voluntary social year just to gain the right to vote, which does little to his personal advantage, but in the long term the country's fate is decided by people with higher ethics. This separation is, however, neither enough nor is it reliable enough. You could easily make the mistake to make the voluntary social year too attractive as a qualification for everybody, for example if it became a qualification for too many interesting positions. What would offer itself would be to deny public offices to people without the right to vote. You could, of course, invent further steps towards publicly recognized high ethical standards. Long term membership in an ethical [consumer] community with published ethics could be another one. Long term disclosure of a person's financial situation could be yet another one. To make a disclosure meaningful you need standards again: How much money should a person be allowed to own? How much money should be given to charities? What kind of investmest can be considered ethical? How many percent of all investments need to go to mutual funds that invest in developing countries? You might want to know that about a person before electing him or her or before doing business with somebody.
- ^ High quality in as many aspects as possible, including but not limited to, fair trade, ecological aspects, durability, repairability and technical maturity. Mobile phones are quite often good examples of technical immaturity, lack of durability and lack of repairability at excessive prices.
- ^ Germans hand down 1 trillion euro until 2010
- ^ Which could be interpreted as a YHVH statement: "No, you want a floating position, concerning money!" in response to the gold-seeking.
