There are more opportunities now but why would expect this mindset to change so much? Especially where would people get the optimism, the sense of empowerment to believe they can make any sort of difference in the world?
The industrial revolution changed that, and the pace of change ever since. We see the world visibly changing around us from year to year. We can see that more and better is possible without having to be a lone visionary.
Yes, but look at how people see the industrial revolution! There is the optimistic view of this enriching everybody and making lives easier and the pessimistic / envy-oriented view that it all is just about exploitation, profits and greed. Some see goods going to customers, and some see broke-back workers and fat dividends. It is all perspective.
I have learned enough economics to be closer to the first view, but you cannot really expect the average person to learn econ. And even I, despite having learned econ, feel on the gut level that cheering for a corporation would be incredibly gullible and materialistic, that the only “cool” way to read corporate mission statements is in the tone of sarcasm, that advertisements that see people somehow happy about their washing machine are lying because you cannot possibly be happy about such a mundane and material thing, and so on…
When Ole Nydahl (from Denmark) was travelling in Nepal in the 1960′s he was utterly shocked that a local lama, rinpoche, “holy man” who would give them spiritual teachings and blessings and being all pure and lofty would change hats when they wanted to buy large bricks of tea from the monastery and haggle furiously about every cent like a vendor in some bazaar. They were under this typcially Western idealist impression that money is dirty, spiritual people should not be materialistic and so on. They were thinking it would be far more befitting a holy guru to gift them tea and then they will donate the monastery money instead of haggling.
Some see goods going to customers, and some see broke-back workers and fat dividends. It is all perspective.
And some, in the poorer and more unstable parts of the world, see paradise and will do almost anything to get here. If they get past the barriers, they mostly do not want to return.
Yes, but look at how people see the industrial revolution! There is the optimistic view of this enriching everybody and making lives easier and the pessimistic / envy-oriented view that it all is just about exploitation, profits and greed. Some see goods going to customers, and some see broke-back workers and fat dividends. It is all perspective.
It is not all perspective. There are socialist economists just as capitalist ones. The argument is over how to make standards of living rise for the masses.
Mistake not hipster douchebags for a serious critique of political economy.
Hm, I did not necessarily want to steer this in this direction, but generally speaking one large subset of the argument is over, namely centralized control does not work. However, it is also true that many anti-capitalist thinkers were rather going in a different direction, such as abolishing fixed property rights in favor of temporary usage rights, and having an “economistically” normal free market on top of that. This is actually one possible reading of the word socialism, although of course a far, far less popular and historically far, far less influential than the centralized-control type of reading. I would not put much trust into it either, just saying this aspect is not really that nailed-down yet as the dysfunction of centralization.
Ok? I mean, I’m a good deal more pro-centralization than most “free market” or left-anarchist people, but my point is, these are questions of fact, amenable to study.
Well, kinda. Economics studies these kinds of things and you can see for yourself how much agreement is there about “facts” and how rigorous the papers are.
The problem is that you don’t have entirely stable facts and processes like you have in physics. In social studies, technically speaking, each situation is unique and will never repeat again. Therefore a core activity for a social scientist is separating persistent features of the situation (including figuring out on which time scale are they persistent) from irrelevant and labile—and those are usually swept into one large bin labeled “noise”. This is a very non-trivial exercise given that this persistency is often conditional on some factors and that you typically can’t do interventions.
So, “amenable to study”, yes. “Established beyond reasonable doubt”, err… I’m not going to hold my breath.
The industrial revolution changed that, and the pace of change ever since. We see the world visibly changing around us from year to year. We can see that more and better is possible without having to be a lone visionary.
Yes, but look at how people see the industrial revolution! There is the optimistic view of this enriching everybody and making lives easier and the pessimistic / envy-oriented view that it all is just about exploitation, profits and greed. Some see goods going to customers, and some see broke-back workers and fat dividends. It is all perspective.
I have learned enough economics to be closer to the first view, but you cannot really expect the average person to learn econ. And even I, despite having learned econ, feel on the gut level that cheering for a corporation would be incredibly gullible and materialistic, that the only “cool” way to read corporate mission statements is in the tone of sarcasm, that advertisements that see people somehow happy about their washing machine are lying because you cannot possibly be happy about such a mundane and material thing, and so on…
When Ole Nydahl (from Denmark) was travelling in Nepal in the 1960′s he was utterly shocked that a local lama, rinpoche, “holy man” who would give them spiritual teachings and blessings and being all pure and lofty would change hats when they wanted to buy large bricks of tea from the monastery and haggle furiously about every cent like a vendor in some bazaar. They were under this typcially Western idealist impression that money is dirty, spiritual people should not be materialistic and so on. They were thinking it would be far more befitting a holy guru to gift them tea and then they will donate the monastery money instead of haggling.
And some, in the poorer and more unstable parts of the world, see paradise and will do almost anything to get here. If they get past the barriers, they mostly do not want to return.
It is not all perspective. There are socialist economists just as capitalist ones. The argument is over how to make standards of living rise for the masses.
Mistake not hipster douchebags for a serious critique of political economy.
Hm, I did not necessarily want to steer this in this direction, but generally speaking one large subset of the argument is over, namely centralized control does not work. However, it is also true that many anti-capitalist thinkers were rather going in a different direction, such as abolishing fixed property rights in favor of temporary usage rights, and having an “economistically” normal free market on top of that. This is actually one possible reading of the word socialism, although of course a far, far less popular and historically far, far less influential than the centralized-control type of reading. I would not put much trust into it either, just saying this aspect is not really that nailed-down yet as the dysfunction of centralization.
Ok? I mean, I’m a good deal more pro-centralization than most “free market” or left-anarchist people, but my point is, these are questions of fact, amenable to study.
Well, kinda. Economics studies these kinds of things and you can see for yourself how much agreement is there about “facts” and how rigorous the papers are.
The problem is that you don’t have entirely stable facts and processes like you have in physics. In social studies, technically speaking, each situation is unique and will never repeat again. Therefore a core activity for a social scientist is separating persistent features of the situation (including figuring out on which time scale are they persistent) from irrelevant and labile—and those are usually swept into one large bin labeled “noise”. This is a very non-trivial exercise given that this persistency is often conditional on some factors and that you typically can’t do interventions.
So, “amenable to study”, yes. “Established beyond reasonable doubt”, err… I’m not going to hold my breath.