In Tale of Two Pegasi, I said:

I mention one of the simplest and oldest solutions to the problem of the distribution of capital ownership: worker co-operatives. After investigating the literature on co-operatives, I don’t think they serve as a sufficient solution. Here’s why:

A co-operative is an enterprise where the workers and the owners are the same people. Each individual contributes their labor-power to the firm, as well as an equal share of the firm’s capital. Capital income is thus distributed evenly across the firm’s members, rather than accruing to distant capitalists. Let’s assume the following co-operative into existence: one with one hundred employees and ten million dollars worth of capital. Each employee provides 50,000 dollars worth of labor a year, and owns a share of the company equal to 100,000 dollars, paying some yearly dividend, which the firm votes on whether to reinvest or to distribute as income.

If the firm is considering hiring a new worker, a dilemma suddenly arises: Where does the new worker’s share come from? If the firm chooses the first horn of the dilemma, it gives the new worker an equal share of the firm’s capital, meaning that now each of the 101 employees has a share worth 99,009.90. Each employee lost a thousand dollars in order to hire this new employee. So the firm is incentivized not to hire new workers, even if it would increase the total revenue of the firm, because it would dilute the capital share of each pre-existing member of the co-operative. This is not a problem of democracy mind you. The issue is that the workers are required to give away something valuable for free. It’s the same issue as taxing capital income at 100%. Capital is not being priced, so it’s not being allocated effectively. Its owner can only ever either give it away for free, or keep it for themselves, so they will always do the latter unless taken by a fit of altruism. Jaroslav Vanek is pretty confident that this “never-employ force” was responsible for the chronic extremely high unemployment rate in Yugoslavia, which had an economy consisting of worker co-operatives. I think he is probably right.

The second horn of the dilemma is if the co-operative tries to price capital, and says, fine, we’re not giving away capital for free. From now on, new members must buy their share of capital. This is how Mondragon, the largest and most successful co-operative in the world, operates. Here is how the system is described in “Making Mondragon”:

A similar system is in place in most other successful co-operatives. In the worker-owned pickle company Real Pickles, each employee has to buy a whopping 6,000 dollar membership share to join the co-operative. The problems with this horn are obvious. It’s no surprise that this system of corporate governance has not seen much success. Most unemployed people looking for work don’t have 6,000 dollars to spend. And the ones that do would be much wiser to invest that money in a different firm, to reduce risk. Worse still, the member-owner cannot sell their share until after they leave the company. They can’t just sell it on a secondary market and use the money gained for consumption like any other stockholder can. The second horn, if scaled up to a whole economy, would be nothing more than just capitalism again, except people are forbidden from buying shares in any company unless they work for said company, in which case buying a share is now mandatory. There is no benefit to this system whatsoever to anybody.

Except for this: management in worker co-operatives is elected by the workers, rather than by shareholders, meaning that the firm is run in the interest of the workers rather than the capitalists. In the spherical cow textbook economic model, this shouldn’t make any difference at all, because in the spherical cow world labor and capital are on entirely equal footing. In the real world however, the capitalists hold an enormous amount of market power that the workers don’t have. It's very easy to switch investments if you don’t like the returns a firm is giving you. It’s much harder to switch jobs when you don’t like how your boss is treating you. Selling labor has much much higher transaction costs. There is clearly an enormous advantage in providing management rights to those who provide labor to the firm rather than those who provide capital, even as a social-democratic reform in a capitalist society. The capital market could look the same as it does now, except all shares of companies would be non-controlling shares. This would accomplish the same things unions accomplish, but more elegantly. The workers would no longer even need to bargain for better conditions and pay. They could make the decision themselves, democratically, if doing so was in their interest. Also, economic profit and schumpeterian rents exist, and in a labor managed firm those rents would go to the workers, which is Good For Utility. This wouldn’t be socialism, but I think it would be an improvement over the current state of things.

This seems equivalent to saying that the co-operative isn't incentivized to hire a new worker if hiring a new worker isn't profitable. If the new worker consumes $100,000 worth of pay, benefits, enabling capital, etc. it only makes sense to hire them if they increase productivity by <$100,000, in which case the incumbent members would lose $1000 but get back <$1000 from the return on the increased productivity being spread equally around the co-op. At face value this seems like the system working the way we'd want it to?

This discussion is talking about "capital" as if it's some kind of easily divisible liquid unit, like money, but a very important thing about capital is precisely that most of it isn't that, and if I stop thinking of capital as like money the idea that workers would benefit from keeping capital idle so they can own more of it starts feeling a lot less credible. Like, if the co-op is a cafe and they all own a 20% share in the blender, yeah, you could say in a sense hiring a new worker makes them less rich cause the blender is now shared among six people instead of five, but nobody actually benefits from owning 20% of an idle blender instead of 16% of a working blender (and thus nobody actually loses anything they're likely to care about by trading a 20% share in an idle blender for a 16% share in a working blender), capital sitting unused is basically just a straight-up loss unless your plan is to sell it or use it for speculation or if you're trading off productivity for leisure, and the last thing would create the opposite incentive (maintaining a high worker to capital ratio). The same would apply to industrial machinery and so on.

These are very basic objections, so I assume I'm missing something?

Productivity and Inequality Thought Experiment

The year is 1900, and you are the Finance Minister of Argentea, a mid-sized country in the Americas. You care deeply about the standards of living of the poor. You can choose one of two economic growth paradigms:

In both cases, growth is a normal variable with given mean and SD 3%. Which spherical cow do you choose?

Your Data Genius runs a simulation and you get the following:

Near-catchup at 40 years, permanent crossover from the high-growth regime around 50, and then it leaves the other in the dust.

---

Growth rate parameters and the value of redistribution are arbitrary, as is probability seed, but these are largely favorable to the redistribution case. Growth rates are low for a 1900s poorish country on some track of development, and probably high for one going on a redistribution spree.

The point of the exercise is that the long-run gap between different economic growth rates is massive, even for small rates. If you accept GDP/Capita as a dominant proxy for standards of living (which I do, and think everyone should), and value long-run human wellbeing, then mental effort and advocacy should go towards growth rate boosting policies rather than mere (*scoffs*) redistribution.

Why would giving the poor more spending power reduce GDP growth?

two mechanisms:

possible that less poverty might negate these disadvantages but certainly not guaranteed

Sure, those are possible bad effects of increasing equality. On the other hand, all else being equal, in a more equal society the average person will be wealthier, better nourished, healthier, better educated, and less stressed, and this will result in more economic growth, both through higher labor productivity and (as @feotakahari indicated) through increased consumer spending which functions as indirect investment in productive capacity.

High inequality is bad for economic productivity and economic growth because it diverts resources to resource-intensive luxury goods that are inaccessible to most of the population and to positional goods. One of the problems with high inequality is the rich need mass production less than the poor and their spending patterns and priorities reflect that. In a high inequality society a big chunk of money is likely to get spent on $10,000 purses, ultra-expensive gourmet meals, private jets, etc., and this will divert resources to production of those things and away from production of the kind of goods normal people consume and use. In a more equal society, the same money is likely to be spent on a much bigger quantity of $20 purses, normal meals, normal airline tickets, etc., and this will be an indirect investment in mass production. And then you have to look beyond mere decadent and trivial Veblen goods to all the resources oligarch classes tend to spend on maintaining their own class position and internal positional jockeying. In Medieval Europe this would have been all the resources that got spent equipping all those knights in shining armor, and all the productive capacity that got literally burned or otherwise destroyed when some of those knights went on chevauchee. In a modern context it might be corporate lawyers, advertising and political propaganda, political donations, arguably large chunks of the budgets of various police forces and the US military, etc..

Basically, on this Greek philosophy level of discourse where we're talking about things we think logically might happen, I think the argument that trying to increase equality will speed up economic growth is about as strong as the argument that trying to increase equality will slow economic growth. To have a really useful version of this conversation, we might start by comparing trends in GDP and GINI of various countries over time and see if we can find any patterns. My impression is that's probably going to be a bit of a wash; the USA is richer than more equal European countries, both were richer than the more equal Soviet bloc, but then there are a lot of countries that are both poor and highly unequal. But, like I said, to have a really useful version of this conversation we'd need data. And then teasing out cause and effect would probably be difficult; both increasing inequality and increasing equality might be effects of changes in wealth instead of causes of them, and national economic success has a lot of confounding factors.

Also, point 1) really easily leads to an argument for some kind of market socialism/syndicalism. "Taxing the rich might cause the rich to spend more on yachts and less on building factories" is only a problem if you leave control over investment in productive capacity in the hands of a small owner class who have economic interests opposed to those of the general population, so maybe we shouldn't have that class structure.

Another issue I see with the analysis in the OP is, as somebody here already kind of said, it's deriving conclusions from an actually very historically unusual period; the kind of fast economic growth that happened over the twentieth century is a historical anomaly. If you convinced e.g. some third century BCE king to try to maximize economic growth but weren't able to teach his people how to make the enabling technologies of the industrial revolution, it's likely you'd accomplish very little and would have done more good if you'd convinced him to adopt some policies that would have increased economic equality instead. In this case choosing a historically unusual period is very defensible, cause we're still in it, but sooner or later development and technological innovation will become diminishing returns curves (we may already be at the beginning of this), so (especially when suggesting policy for First World governments) I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that pro-growth policies are going to have the same return on investment over the twenty-first century that they had over the twentieth century.

As with that "skeleton of Marxism" post, it'd be interesting to see what people on the "other side of the aisle" like @leviathan-supersystem and @saamdaamdandaurbhed might say in response to this.

I also see a couple of other possible counter-arguments to the OP that I didn't get to in my first response:

First, contra the OP's statement that they've selected assumptions "largely favorable to the redistribution case," they've chosen an assumption that heavily loads the dice against the case for caring about equality: 1% economic growth for a century with more equality vs. 3% economic growth for a century with more inequality. That's a big difference! Yeah, no kidding any policy that would triple your economic growth rate for a century straight would probably be such a huge long-term net good its advantages would outweigh almost any plausible competing consideration, but assuming a trade-off between equality and growth that dramatic is being extremely generous to the argument that we should care about growth more than equality.

I tried doing a little quick Googling to get a sense of where 3% economic growth vs. 1% economic growth would fit in a real world context. Here's the first graph and table Google turned up for Japan's growth rate 1961-2024; looks like 3% growth vs. 1% growth is comparable to the difference between the "steady increasing stage" of "the Japanese economic miracle" and Japan's "lost decades"!

What if we picked a less dramatic difference, like 1% growth with more equality vs. 1.3% growth with more inequality, which is still a significant difference? Playing around with this compound interest calculator, looks like 1.3% growth instead of 1% growth gives you an economy 1.35 times bigger after a century. I find it quite plausible that a highly equal country might be a better place to live for most people than a high unequal country with 1.35 times its per capita GDP. Now, it's true that in the very long term even quite small differences in growth rate eventually swamp any merely linear effects because of the nature of compound interest, but, as I said, development and technological innovation are going to become diminishing returns curves sooner or later, so it's not a foregone conclusion that significant intensive economic growth (as opposed to extensive economic growth like colonizing the rest of the solar system) can continue for many centuries.

I dedicated most of my previous response to saying that assuming equality trades off against economic growth at all is being generous to the "we shouldn't care about equality but should just focus on economic growth" position. But even if you grant that economic growth vs. equality is a real trade-off (and sure, that seems plausible), slipping in as an unjustified background parameter of the scenario the assumption that not caring about equality will triple economic growth for a century straight is being immensely, unwarrantedly generous to the position of "we should just focus on economic growth and not care about equality."

Uncharitably, the OP seems like an exercise in "if we slip in as an unquestioned and unjustified parameter of our simulation the assumption that libertarian economic assumptions are completely correct, we achieve a result that seems to validate libertarian economic ideology."

Second, equalizing policies face more consistent opposition from the rich than growth-promoting policies. It's therefore quite plausible that if you want to do the most good the optimal distribution of resources to political advocacy to pass the right mix of growth-promoting policies and equalizing policies is something like 70% to advocating for equalizing policies and 30% to advocating for pro-growth policies even if growth-promoting policies are more important in the grand scheme of things, because implementing growth-promoting policies is an easier fight that can be won with less resources and less effort. Like, as an analogy for this, if you were fighting a two-front war against a random shitty right-wing dictatorship and an omnicidal unfriendly AI and the random shitty right-wing dictatorship had ten times the resources of the omnicidal unfriendly AI (and this wasn't a setting with "hard take-off" assumptions), it would make perfect sense to send more soldiers and war material into the fight against the shitty right-wing dictatorship even though the fight against the omnicidal unfriendly AI is clearly the much more important one in the long-term.

Productivity and Inequality Thought Experiment

The year is 1900, and you are the Finance Minister of Argentea, a mid-sized country in the Americas. You care deeply about the standards of living of the poor. You can choose one of two economic growth paradigms:

In both cases, growth is a normal variable with given mean and SD 3%. Which spherical cow do you choose?

Your Data Genius runs a simulation and you get the following:

Near-catchup at 40 years, permanent crossover from the high-growth regime around 50, and then it leaves the other in the dust.

---

Growth rate parameters and the value of redistribution are arbitrary, as is probability seed, but these are largely favorable to the redistribution case. Growth rates are low for a 1900s poorish country on some track of development, and probably high for one going on a redistribution spree.

The point of the exercise is that the long-run gap between different economic growth rates is massive, even for small rates. If you accept GDP/Capita as a dominant proxy for standards of living (which I do, and think everyone should), and value long-run human wellbeing, then mental effort and advocacy should go towards growth rate boosting policies rather than mere (*scoffs*) redistribution.

Why would giving the poor more spending power reduce GDP growth?

two mechanisms:

possible that less poverty might negate these disadvantages but certainly not guaranteed

Sure, those are possible bad effects of increasing equality. On the other hand, all else being equal, in a more equal society the average person will be wealthier, better nourished, healthier, better educated, and less stressed, and this will result in more economic growth, both through higher labor productivity and (as @feotakahari indicated) through increased consumer spending which functions as indirect investment in productive capacity.

High inequality is bad for economic productivity and economic growth because it diverts resources to resource-intensive luxury goods that are inaccessible to most of the population and to positional goods. One of the problems with high inequality is the rich need mass production less than the poor and their spending patterns and priorities reflect that. In a high inequality society a big chunk of money is likely to get spent on $10,000 purses, ultra-expensive gourmet meals, private jets, etc., and this will divert resources to production of those things and away from production of the kind of goods normal people consume and use. In a more equal society, the same money is likely to be spent on a much bigger quantity of $20 purses, normal meals, normal airline tickets, etc., and this will be an indirect investment in mass production. And then you have to look beyond mere decadent and trivial Veblen goods to all the resources oligarch classes tend to spend on maintaining their own class position and internal positional jockeying. In Medieval Europe this would have been all the resources that got spent equipping all those knights in shining armor, and all the productive capacity that got literally burned or otherwise destroyed when some of those knights went on chevauchee. In a modern context it might be corporate lawyers, advertising and political propaganda, political donations, arguably large chunks of the budgets of various police forces and the US military, etc..

Basically, on this Greek philosophy level of discourse where we're talking about things we think logically might happen, I think the argument that trying to increase equality will speed up economic growth is about as strong as the argument that trying to increase equality will slow economic growth. To have a really useful version of this conversation, we might start by comparing trends in GDP and GINI of various countries over time and see if we can find any patterns. My impression is that's probably going to be a bit of a wash; the USA is richer than more equal European countries, both were richer than the more equal Soviet bloc, but then there are a lot of countries that are both poor and highly unequal. But, like I said, to have a really useful version of this conversation we'd need data. And then teasing out cause and effect would probably be difficult; both increasing inequality and increasing equality might be effects of changes in wealth instead of causes of them, and national economic success has a lot of confounding factors.

Also, point 1) really easily leads to an argument for some kind of market socialism/syndicalism. "Taxing the rich might cause the rich to spend more on yachts and less on building factories" is only a problem if you leave control over investment in productive capacity in the hands of a small owner class who have economic interests opposed to those of the general population, so maybe we shouldn't have that class structure.

Another issue I see with the analysis in the OP is, as somebody here already kind of said, it's deriving conclusions from an actually very historically unusual period; the kind of fast economic growth that happened over the twentieth century is a historical anomaly. If you convinced e.g. some third century BCE king to try to maximize economic growth but weren't able to teach his people how to make the enabling technologies of the industrial revolution, it's likely you'd accomplish very little and would have done more good if you'd convinced him to adopt some policies that would have increased economic equality instead. In this case choosing a historically unusual period is very defensible, cause we're still in it, but sooner or later development and technological innovation will become diminishing returns curves (we may already be at the beginning of this), so (especially when suggesting policy for First World governments) I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that pro-growth policies are going to have the same return on investment over the twenty-first century that they had over the twentieth century.

As with that "skeleton of Marxism" post, it'd be interesting to see what people on the "other side of the aisle" like @leviathan-supersystem and @saamdaamdandaurbhed might say in response to this.

documenting a phenomenon i’ve been seeing a lot of on tumblr

here’s an example in case you’re curious what I mean:

some additional examples (from a few different angles even)

The one about liberals and cutting taxes doesn’t actually fit. The reason the “liberal” in the piece objects to cutting taxes is that the phenomenon of “only rich people pay taxes” is not wrong because poor people shouldn’t have to pay taxes, it’s wrong because someone has to pay taxes or society falls apart, and rich people benefit more from society, have more to give, and do objectively weirder and more fucked up things with their money when a lack of tax paying allows them to keep all of it. So yeah, it is actually possible to hold the two opinions “poor people pay all the taxes” and “we should not lower taxes” at the same time without contradiction, because the solution is “rich people should be made to pay their fair share and therefore, we should be increasing taxes, but specifically on the rich”.

And the one about the anti-sjws is, sadly, something they actually do, because they’re not even slightly interested in moral consistency. Note that the people who spent years ranting about activist judges actively support extremely activist judges throwing out years of judicial precedent if it supports conservative causes.

The rest of this is absolutely correct, though. See also “white people like to wear fashions from other countries and ethnic groups but attack the ethnicities and natives of those countries who created those fashions in the first place!” White people aren’t a hive mind and that’s two separate groups of white people; the ones who give Indian people shit for wearing saris aren’t wearing saris themselves. White people who want to wear dreadlocks do not give black people wearing dreadlocks a lot of shit, that would be clean-cut white people wearing white people haircuts.

What the taxation example doesn't understand (or, less charitably, deliberately elides) is that the primary issue isn't who pays taxes, it's extreme inequality and the fact that money has diminishing returns in its ability to purchase survival, safety, and pleasure. Gaining or losing $100 means very different things to somebody who has $1000 and somebody who has $100,000.

If you take one of those people in the Third World who survives on the equivalent of a few dollars per day and you raise their taxes from 25% of their yearly income to 40% their yearly income you might literally kill them, because they might not be able to afford enough food to survive afterward.

If you take somebody who gets paid $200,000 per year and you raise their taxes from 25% of their yearly income to 40% of their yearly income, you probably haven't harmed them much at all; $120,000 per year is still rich, still enough for them to have a standard of living that's very good and much better than that of most people on this planet. At worst, they might have to get a less stylish apartment and send their kid to a less posh private school.

Let's say we take both of these people and cut their taxes instead, from 25% to 15%. The person who lives on $2 per day now has an extra $73 per year. The person who gets $200,000 per year now has an extra $20,000 per year. The person who lives on $2 per day is a little less poor now, but they're still very poor. They'd still be very poor even if they paid no taxes at all; you can't lift them out of poverty by cutting their taxes, cause getting taxed too much isn't their (primary) problem, not getting paid enough is.

Alternately, you could cut the poor person's taxes to zero (it's not like you're getting much money out of them anyway, a mere few hundred dollars per year, you might actually save money by not bothering to collect from people like them), raise the taxes on the person who makes $200,000 per year to 40%, and use 10% of the extra $30,000 per year you collect from the rich person to more than quadruple the poor person's yearly income, likely completely transforming and radically improving the poor person's life (especially if they're able to leverage the extra money into starting a business that further enriches them while also providing goods or services to other people like them or something like that). When leftists and left-liberals complain about the rich not being taxed enough, they're saying they want their governments to take this kind of approach (when they say that the rich "don't pay any taxes," they usually don't mean that literally).

Places like the USA don't have much of quite the kind of grotesque inequality in this example, but 1) there absolutely are countries where it's a live issue, 2) a similar calculus applies to somebody who makes $20,000 per year and somebody who makes $200,000 per year.

everybody knows the major inflationary episodes in history like Weimar Germany, but what are the go-to examples of major pathological deflation? seems rarer overall and I don’t have a good idea of what might cause it

It's not exactly pathological deflation, but isn't "pathological inflation-resistance" a decent-ish description of the problems with bullion standards (e.g. the gold standard)?

I'm reminded of something from David Graeber's Debt: the First 5000 Years:

"But how exactly did the new global economy cause the collapse of living standards in Europe? One thing we do know: it clearly was not by making large amounts of precious metal available for everyday transactions. If anything, the effect was the opposite. While European mints were stamping out enormous numbers of rials, thalers, ducats, and doubloons, which became the new medium of trade from Nicaragua to Bengal, almost none found their way into the pockets of ordinary Europeans. Instead, we hear constant complaints about the shortage of currency. In England:

This was the case in most of Europe. Despite the massive influx of metal from the Americas, most families were so low on cash that they were regularly reduced to melting down the family silver to pay their taxes.

This was because taxes had to be paid in metal. Everyday business in contrast continued to be transacted much as it had in the Middle Ages, by means of various forms of virtual credit money: tallies, promissory notes, or, within smaller communities, simply by keeping track of who owed what to whom. What really caused the inflation is that those who ended up in control of the bullion - governments, bankers, large-scale merchants - were able to use that control to begin changing the rules, first by insisting that gold and silver were money, and second by introducing new forms of credit-money for their own use while slowly undermining and destroying the local systems of trust that had allowed small-scale communities across Europe to operate largely without the use of metal currency." - David Graeber, Debt: the First 5,000 Years, Chaper 11.

"You shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold," etc.

My understanding is the basic idea of insurance is a lot of people get together, put a little of their money into a common savings account every month (or whatever), and then if one of them requires a particular type of product or service it gets paid for from that common savings, or if one of them loses some of their money or valuables in a particular way they get compensated out of that common savings. So it's a way of avoiding Vimes's boot problems, and it's a way of spreading out large and unpredictable costs so they become minor regular expenses to a lot of people instead of huge unpredictable expenses to a few people.

Reminds me of that bit in James C. Scott’s Against the Grain where he speculates that while ancient monumental defensive walls like the Great Wall of China and the Repeller of the Amorites were ostensibly to keep out the barbarians a large part of their purpose was actually to keep the empire’s population in and keep them working for the king and prevent them from joining the barbarians (and, of course, keeping people in was infamously the main functional purpose of the Berlin Wall).

@loving-n0t-heyting, I don’t think secrecy is the crucial variable in “UBI might end up functionally mostly just an indirect subsidy to landlords” type problems. The real problem is that in a market economy prices naturally tend to equilibrate to the highest price that people are willing to pay, and for something like housing the highest price people are willing to pay can be quite high, because what’s the alternative, sleeping on the street? Also, housing is a durable good which’s primary expense is “front loaded” in the construction, so it can be far more profitable to make money from controlling access to existing housing than to make money from building new housing, so it’s relatively easy to end up with situations where landlords profit from restricting the expansion of housing supply and lobby to distort government policy toward that end (e.g. lobbying for single family detached house only zoning for two thirds of the city and a height limitation of four stories on any new buildings and lots of red tape to gum up the process of getting permission to build anything). Even if landlords were forbidden from asking about your income or wealth, the “system working as intended” price discovery mechanisms of the market would work to equilibrate the cost of housing at the highest price people were willing to pay, and it would be relatively easy for landlords to lobby for policies that would drive up that price, or just drive up that price by acting according to their class interests in semi-coordinated fashion (e.g. just not funding much new construction). By implication, the same thing could easily happen in a society where the primary method of wealth redistribution is relatively illegible informal patronage networks instead of a nice legible monthly UBI check. A landlord doesn’t need to know that you have an average income of $2000 per month to know they can charge you $1200 per month in rent; they just have to take a look around, see that lots of other landlords have no problems filling their vacancies while charging $1200 per month or more for a one bedroom apartment, and set their price accordingly; somebody will probably take it even if they’re wrong about what you’re able or willing to pay.

Similar dynamics apply to other goods and services that tend to eat up a lot of people’s income like medical care and college educations, and this is one of the big problems I see with the liberaltarian “just give people money” solution to poverty.

What you really need is to intervene at the price discovery mechanism level. One obvious way to do it might be for the government to build lots of housing and then rent it out at approximately the cost of maintenance plus repaying the cost of construction over a few decades or sell it at approximately the cost of construction. Build enough of this to house a significant fraction of the population and the market will shape itself around it; landlords who charge rents very much in excess of the costs of construction and maintenance will lose their tenants to the public housing and will thus be incentivized to lower their rents or offer extra amenities to give tenants a reason to put up with the higher rent. Another way to do it might be to have apartment buildings collectively owned/controlled by their tenants, thus establishing a tighter relationship between the price people pay for housing and its actual value to them.

Equivalent solutions for things like medical care and college would likely follow somewhat similar lines (e.g. “public option” is basically the equivalent of “build lots of rented out or sold approximately at cost public housing” for medical insurance).

This is all a very lovely idea, but am I the only person who, when they think about “public housing” has the knee jerk thought, “Eaaaagg! I don’t want to live in a concrete box that smells like piss, has shit and rapists on the stairs, used needles scattered around, almost as much lead in the air as Kosovo, the schools can’t teach kids how to read, the kids who live there have to join gangs to not get killed by gangs, and the cops and social services consider you inherently a problem rather than a person for living there, and who the fuck does want to live there?”

Like, “public housing” to me means the kind of place Nice™ people only enter on missions work or to buy drugs or sex, and nobody who isn’t a ganglord actually wants to live there.

And to be clear, I’ve worked security at some government housing that didn’t suck, and rather more that did, and the housing that didn’t suck was specifically for the elderly. And it was still sketchy enough they had security.

I’m aware of the bad reputation of “the projects,” and that’s definitely a concern with the “build a lot of publicly funded/owned housing and rent or sell it more-or-less at cost of construction and maintenance” idea. I haven’t researched what went wrong with historical US public housing, but my offhand guess is that what they did wrong was they built it specifically as housing for poor people, with the result that they became ghettos, with the problems ghettos tend to have. Just looking at the first result on a Google search definitely strengthens that impression, it mentions among other things, “The rental revenue gap was widened further as households were forced to move once their incomes exceeded maximum requirements, perpetuating concentration of poor households together.” Yeah, if you’re running your public housing as a means-tested welfare program specifically for poor people and kicking out anyone who isn’t poor, no wonder it turns into a ghetto, with the ills of the ghetto!

So if my guess is right the lesson I’d take from that is to not do it that way. Build public housing for multiple income brackets, and mix them together somewhat to discourage strong class segregation. Build it well mixed with private development; you want it well integrated into the fabric of the rest of the city or town so it doesn’t become its own segregated ghetto. Build lots of it, so it becomes the sort of place average people live. Sell or rent it at or slightly above cost of construction and maintenance so it’s financially self-supporting so there’s less political pressure to reserve it for people who “really need it”; people who can’t afford decent housing at the cost of construction and maintenance can get a discount, but structure the program so it can at least get a significant part of the way to being financially self-supporting.

That is exactly what Vienna does with it’s quite expansive public housing. Trying to get not only poor people but also middle class in them keeps them from becoming worse for a variety of reasons (not only preventing ghetto formation, but also making it so that the middle class has a stake in the outcome; there are cases of politicians still living in a public flat that they got when they were young and poor, that helps too). But the other big difference I think is scale. If 0.5 percent of your housing stock is public houses, it is much easier for it to turn in a ghetto since it’s easy to get exactly the reputation that @isaacsapphire mentioned. In Vienna about a third of the population lives in public housing and another third in flats that are built by “Genossenschaften”, i.e. Non-Profits that build and rent out in the way mentioned by @random-thought-depository: trying to finance upkeep and construction, but nothing more. And it all works very well! Our prices are rather low for a city of that size, especially compared to nearby cities like Munich.

Ooh, this is an unusually good understanding of economics. Bless y’all. I think I’ll still support UBI (specifically in the form of a carbon fee and dividend) as long as we can subsidize a large variety of new housing just like this, and/or shred the zoning laws that discourage new housing tho

Thanks, though I expect this is pretty common knowledge/beliefs on the left and most people just aren’t pedantic enough to spell it out the way I did.

I think UBI or some other mass-access money subsidy on a similar scale would probably be a big improvement over the status quo, so I’d love to see it implemented. A lot of it might end as an indirect subsidy to rent-seeking elites, but I doubt they’d be able to capture all of; I expect at least a decent chunk of it would go to actually seriously improving the lives of vast numbers of poor people (and maybe middle class people as well if the program is generous enough). Existing welfare programs and minimum wage laws are the obvious existing precedent, and they seem to pretty clearly improve the lives of poor people, and just giving poor people money has a lot to recommend it. I just don’t think “just give poor people money” is a panacea; you can’t fix everything that way.

@loving-n0t-heyting, I don’t think secrecy is the crucial variable in “UBI might end up functionally mostly just an indirect subsidy to landlords” type problems. The real problem is that in a market economy prices naturally tend to equilibrate to the highest price that people are willing to pay, and for something like housing the highest price people are willing to pay can be quite high, because what’s the alternative, sleeping on the street? Also, housing is a durable good which’s primary expense is “front loaded” in the construction, so it can be far more profitable to make money from controlling access to existing housing than to make money from building new housing, so it’s relatively easy to end up with situations where landlords profit from restricting the expansion of housing supply and lobby to distort government policy toward that end (e.g. lobbying for single family detached house only zoning for two thirds of the city and a height limitation of four stories on any new buildings and lots of red tape to gum up the process of getting permission to build anything). Even if landlords were forbidden from asking about your income or wealth, the “system working as intended” price discovery mechanisms of the market would work to equilibrate the cost of housing at the highest price people were willing to pay, and it would be relatively easy for landlords to lobby for policies that would drive up that price, or just drive up that price by acting according to their class interests in semi-coordinated fashion (e.g. just not funding much new construction). By implication, the same thing could easily happen in a society where the primary method of wealth redistribution is relatively illegible informal patronage networks instead of a nice legible monthly UBI check. A landlord doesn’t need to know that you have an average income of $2000 per month to know they can charge you $1200 per month in rent; they just have to take a look around, see that lots of other landlords have no problems filling their vacancies while charging $1200 per month or more for a one bedroom apartment, and set their price accordingly; somebody will probably take it even if they’re wrong about what you’re able or willing to pay.

Similar dynamics apply to other goods and services that tend to eat up a lot of people’s income like medical care and college educations, and this is one of the big problems I see with the liberaltarian “just give people money” solution to poverty.

What you really need is to intervene at the price discovery mechanism level. One obvious way to do it might be for the government to build lots of housing and then rent it out at approximately the cost of maintenance plus repaying the cost of construction over a few decades or sell it at approximately the cost of construction. Build enough of this to house a significant fraction of the population and the market will shape itself around it; landlords who charge rents very much in excess of the costs of construction and maintenance will lose their tenants to the public housing and will thus be incentivized to lower their rents or offer extra amenities to give tenants a reason to put up with the higher rent. Another way to do it might be to have apartment buildings collectively owned/controlled by their tenants, thus establishing a tighter relationship between the price people pay for housing and its actual value to them.

Equivalent solutions for things like medical care and college would likely follow somewhat similar lines (e.g. “public option” is basically the equivalent of “build lots of rented out or sold approximately at cost public housing” for medical insurance).

This is all a very lovely idea, but am I the only person who, when they think about “public housing” has the knee jerk thought, “Eaaaagg! I don’t want to live in a concrete box that smells like piss, has shit and rapists on the stairs, used needles scattered around, almost as much lead in the air as Kosovo, the schools can’t teach kids how to read, the kids who live there have to join gangs to not get killed by gangs, and the cops and social services consider you inherently a problem rather than a person for living there, and who the fuck does want to live there?”

Like, “public housing” to me means the kind of place Nice™ people only enter on missions work or to buy drugs or sex, and nobody who isn’t a ganglord actually wants to live there.

And to be clear, I’ve worked security at some government housing that didn’t suck, and rather more that did, and the housing that didn’t suck was specifically for the elderly. And it was still sketchy enough they had security.

I’m aware of the bad reputation of “the projects,” and that’s definitely a concern with the “build a lot of publicly funded/owned housing and rent or sell it more-or-less at cost of construction and maintenance” idea. I haven’t researched what went wrong with historical US public housing, but my offhand guess is that what they did wrong was they built it specifically as housing for poor people, with the result that they became ghettos, with the problems ghettos tend to have. Just looking at the first result on a Google search definitely strengthens that impression, it mentions among other things, “The rental revenue gap was widened further as households were forced to move once their incomes exceeded maximum requirements, perpetuating concentration of poor households together.” Yeah, if you’re running your public housing as a means-tested welfare program specifically for poor people and kicking out anyone who isn’t poor, no wonder it turns into a ghetto, with the ills of the ghetto!

So if my guess is right the lesson I’d take from that is to not do it that way. Build public housing for multiple income brackets, and mix them together somewhat to discourage strong class segregation. Build it well mixed with private development; you want it well integrated into the fabric of the rest of the city or town so it doesn’t become its own segregated ghetto. Build lots of it, so it becomes the sort of place average people live. Sell or rent it at or slightly above cost of construction and maintenance so it’s financially self-supporting so there’s less political pressure to reserve it for people who “really need it”; people who can’t afford decent housing at the cost of construction and maintenance can get a discount, but structure the program so it can at least get a significant part of the way to being financially self-supporting.

Saw yet another person on Tumblr claim that billionaires only donate to charity for the tax benefits.

Just so you know: that's not a thing. Tax deductions on charitable donations mean that you get back *the taxes you paid on the money you donated*, which is less than the amount you donated, because there aren't any >100% marginal tax rates.

The idea here is that someone who makes $3M and donates $1M of it is effectively counted as having $2M of gross income for tax purposes. But they're still out the $1M, they're not making a profit somehow.

Please stop accusing people of getting rich by giving away their money. That's not a thing you can do.

(a) charitable donations fund things that the donor would pay for (e.g., your name on a building) or which are impossible to price at fair market value (e.g., unique goods, memberships or admissions)

so not only do rich donors get the things, they get a tax deduction for buying them -- it's nice to be able to take a bite out of your income when you're buy something nice for yourself!

(b) charities can keep assets out of your (taxable) estate without depriving you and your heirs of substantial control.

Bill Gates runs the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Mark Zuckerberg runs the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. Gates and Zuckerberg control the use and management of the assets in their charities.

they don't put them in their estate. they don't pay taxes on that capital income, unlike a regular inter vivos trust. in fact, Gates and Zuckerberg took a big tax deduction when they donated to them.

they shield those assets from other taxes too. no gift tax. no estate tax. no probate. I don't know how unrealized capital gains work when there's a charitable disposition, but I'm sure it's slimy.

and control goes with whoever the trustees choose. which means, of course, whoever the family chooses. they still have their name on it.

(c) that's if everyone's playing by the book. but some people just cheat. like Trump, with the Trump Foundation.

some people charities to pay for their own consumption. to hire children or family. or game transfers of impossible-to-price goods to secure just the right deduction.

(d) whether or not these guys cheat, they absolutely donate to charity for the tax benefits.

none of these guys got rich donating to charity. that's true. but charity helps them stay rich, powerful, and tax-free.

it's not great!

conservation easements, don't we love them, folks?

This reminds me of this: Anand Giridharas on why the plutes hate to pay taxes but love to donate. Rich people use “philanthropy” to purchase power, and that may be even more pernicious than when it’s a straightforward scam. I’ll just transcribe the whole thing:

“What we see in France is part of a larger pattern: the plutes often hate to pay their taxes but love to donate.

Now, you might say, what’s the big difference? Why do you hate paying $100 million in taxes but relish paying $100 million in a philanthropic gift?

One reason is that the donation is tax-subsidized, in many cases. So the $100 million donation may actually cost you way less than $100 million, even though it will be reported in the media as such.

Another reason is reputational. Paying taxes doesn’t give you much esteem. To paraphrase Chris Rock, one doesn’t get credit for doing what you’re supposed to do.

But donations, especially well-publicized ones, buy you reputational benefits that in effect also defray the cost.

What I mean by “defray the cost”:

If you’re rich and powerful, you may have various interests that make you dependent on decisions by public actors, and various things you want to avoid (antitrust rules, regulations).

So, having a moral glow, being seen as a good guy, pays.

So when you donate, you may drop $100 million. But (a) you get some of that back via deduction. And (b) many donors will also derive some intangible reputational and access benefits. If a $100 million check makes it easier to call a senator, that could be worth millions.

So you're now out only $50 million, but you have stories out there saying you spent $100 million, and maybe you have general reputational benefits or specific access benefits that help you get a project approved or avoid some legislative crackdown, which sweetens the deal.

But we haven't yet talked about the biggest differentiator for many of the plutocrats I have reported on. The biggest differentiator is control.

The problem with taxes is that you wire them in, and they go into a big pile with everyone else's, and they go where they go.

This offends many plutocrats in a few distinct ways.

One, they just like controlling things, deciding things. That's often how they make and keep their money. They are, or think they are, good at it. They want to do the same deciding here.

But with taxes, they can't.

Even if you pay a lot of taxes, your money isn't special when it takes the form of taxes. More of it doesn't buy you more esteem, more discretion, more of a say in how the money is spent.

But when you donate, that can get you a board seat, an advisory role, the right to decide.

"I feel much more comfortable with our ability as a private foundation to allocate these funds than I do giving them to the government," Michael Dell said in Davos, which is a conference similar to that Saudi Future Investment Initiative, but on a Swiss mountain.

What so attracts many plutocrats to causes like Notre Dame and so repels them from taxation is a feeling they have that the society is best-off when they, rather than the society, decide how and where resources are spent.

Which gets us to the heart of the matter.

They are happy to part with some of their money as long as they don't have to part with any of their power.

In fact, through the donation, they increase their power - reputationally, access-wise, and in the administration of the gift.

They are willing to make a difference so long as you do not interfere with their right to make and keep their killings.”

- Transcript of writings by Anand Giridharas, credit belongs to them.

me: "writers are workers, and just like any other worker, we deserve to get paid for our work. if you justify piracy by saying that there are 'too many' creative workers out there, you're being a Karen; stop"

someone: "this doesn't apply to the third world where our choice is 'buy overpriced original fiction or eat'"

my guy

my buddy

i guarantee you, there are authors working in your country right now who deserve to have their work seen by the rest of the world and who deserve to get paid for their work

I also guarantee you, most authors on Tumblr talking about how they want to get paid are not selling their books for full cover price. I don't have anything for sale on Amazon right now that's more than $0.99 USD and most of my work is available for free/pay-what-you-want on Smashwords. i am not selling $25 hardbacks here.

(and frankly when we talk about pricing, most books are underpriced for the amount of labour it takes to get them out the door; publishing industry folks work their asses off for peanuts. but that's a whole nother story.)

the point is: it does not matter how much you want or need to read something; if you pirate it, the author does not get paid for their work. and most authors are not wealthy. losing sales can mean financial stress at best and the end of their career at worst.

no matter where you are in the world, piracy of indie media (and books in general) is not a victimless crime. it may be worth it to you- that's between you and your conscience. there are things I can and will pirate! but there are consequences. if you care about a writer's work, you should not pirate their books.

I just hate the assumption this is going to get me to buy your book. You don’t want me pirating it; fine, I’ll go read AO3 some more.

I mean, I don't think you're going to buy my book. You're not obligated to do so.

but like I said. If you care about a writer's work, do not pirate their books, because the more you pirate, the less of their work you will have.

I went to an ice cream place once that had some of the best ice cream I ever had in my life. I never saved up the money for it again, and now it’s a paint shop. If I’d somehow gotten the recipe and made my own ice cream at home, that wouldn’t have caused any more damage. The damage was because I paid for movies and video games when I could have paid for ice cream instead. And conversely, the damage would be to movies and video games if I bought ice cream. You can’t make this into a cause-and-effect framework unless you identify the cause. And if it’s a deontological framework, then say that instead of talking about cause and effect!

(Honestly, I think the logic works in the opposite direction. If there’s a moral reason you should give someone money, then that reason should still hold even if they’ve never given you anything at all.)

Well, a book or a movie is a one-time purchase (unless you rent it over and over again), so it’s more analogous to that single first stop in the ice cream shop.

Regarding cause and effect, I think this gets back to stuff I referenced in that post I made outlining an argument for NFTs being evil. Capitalism is intended to operate by a sort of law of karma that requires scarcity to function: to make money you have to sell products, good products get bought a lot causing their makers to become rich, bad products sell poorly causing their makers to become poor, thus the system incentivizes the creation of good products. This system can work more-or-less as intended by default with physical products, but even with nineteenth or twentieth century media technology it tended to break down when you applied it to artists. A default way for capitalism with 1920-90s tech to handle the best song ever written would be for a recording company to set up some microphones while the person who wrote it is singing it at a night-club for like $50 per night, record it, and then capture like 99.9999999% of its market value through distributing physical records or cassette tapes of it. Any price the original artist could effectively demand of the recording company would have to be price-competitive with the costs of just doing something like that. The result is that even with twentieth century technology capitalism would by default fail to incentivize the creation of good art through the “more popularity = more sales = more money” mechanism, because the default price of most artist labor would be so low that even the producers of the most excellent art would be very poor.

IP law was the patch for that bug, bringing the social reality of capitalism back into line with capitalist and producerist ideologies of how capitalism “should” work. With IP law, the artist is now legally empowered to artificially bottleneck production and distribution from their end, and this allows them to set a price for their labor that’s high enough for the “more popularity = more sales = more money” mechanism to work. Popular concepts of the proper moral order of capitalism are restored, popular artists are rewarded with wealth while unpopular artists are punished with poverty, system working as intended again!

That patch worked OK until the internet came along and made physical reproduction of information so cheap that you didn’t need a lot of capital to do it. All of a sudden, it wasn’t just artists that were threatened with not being able to make money off art, it was traditional distributors that captured value by owning the physical infrastructure required to physically distribute information. How is a printing company supposed to make money if twenty million randos can put a copy of their book through a scanner and distribute PDFs of it for free? How is a record company supposed to make money if twenty million randos can just share free downloads of their songs with their friends, or worse, put up free downloads of all their songs on some GeoCities website? By default paying for art now just means the money you pay to AT&T or Comcast or whatever for your internet connection.

I’m simplifying in a way that probably understates how much the biggest beneficiaries of IP law were IP-holding corporations instead of artists even before the internet (20 million randos with access to cheap copy machines are also a threat to traditional publishing houses), but you get the idea.

I think a lot of ideologically pro-piracy people are leftists and a huge implicit part of their politics around IP is they want society to reject the “popular artists should be rewarded with wealth while unpopular artists should be punished with poverty” principle. Like, the obvious way to square “artists should be compensated for their labor” and “I should be able to buy art for its natural default price in the internet age, i.e. more-or-less cost of an internet connection” would be to have society subsidize artists with something that would functionally resemble a UBI, perhaps supplemented by voluntary donations as gestures of appreciation. Personally, I think I might prefer something like that arrangement, maybe with some minimalistic IP law that’s more about making sure people are properly credited for stuff than about money or controlling reproduction.

But in the society we actually live in right now, the mainstream way we have to compensate artists for their labor is very deliberately designed to make the relationship between an artist and an art consumer work like the relationship between a baker and a bread-eater.

I guess I’m kind of an ambivalent centrist on this issue, not sure where to stand. Like, on the one hand, yeah, piracy does hurt artists in the same way shoplifting hurts bakery employees and owners. On the other hand, that isn’t some neutral fact of nature, the system was very deliberately set up so the relationship would work that way, the fact the relationship works that way is a political choice that expresses moral ideas about how society should work, moral ideas I don’t really endorse (or at least only endorse with a lot of caveats and reservations), so when I see people doing that “a real leftist would understand that IP is a labor rights law” thing, my reaction is “could you please try and think about what you’re implicitly endorsing here before you lick that boot so enthusiastically?”

Like, do you endorse as a moral principle the idea that popular artists should be rewarded with wealth while unpopular artists should be punished with poverty? If you don’t, then maybe you should on some level disapprove of IP law, because IP law is among other things an attempt to use the law to make society work that way.

And in a sense this isn’t special, all of capitalism is like this, it’s all a series of political choices that express compromises between powerful interest groups and ideas about how society should work, but as I said in the NFT post, this all becomes much more obvious when we’re talking about art and information on the internet because there the scarcity is so obviously artificial and hence so obviously political.

I get that there is a broader conversation to be had here, but I am talking about the world we live in now, not the world as it ought to be.

in the world that we live in now, if you pirate a writer's work- or an artist, or a musician, or an indie game dev's work- you are hurting their ability to make art. whether or not you think that is the way things should be, it is the way they are now.

i really, really, really don't appreciate people coming onto a post I made to vent about the way things are and saying "but have you considered, things should not be this way, so I'm not going to pay you, because you don't deserve it?"

Yes! Yes, I have fucking well considered it! Things should not be the way they are now! But that does not change the fact that they are what they are, and that piracy in the system we have does, in fact, make it so that creative folks cannot continue to create.

I do not appreciate y'all coming onto my post to tell me that my labour is worthless because it's in the arts; I really do not appreciate the snide implication that my art is bad, either.

Anyone who pulls this crap on me again is getting blocked.

To clarify a few things here:

- I generally don’t pirate stuff myself, partly precisely because I do think it’s important that artists be paid for their work. So this wasn’t a defense of the way I, personally, do things.

- As I said, even in a hypothetical what I’d consider better system I’d very much want artists to have money (or at any rate access to resources) - if anything I expect under some sort of “in practice UBI-like arts subsidy” most artists would be getting a lot more money for making art, that would kind of be the point of it.

- I’m not saying that poor artists are bad artists - I’m saying that’s one of the assumptions that’s baked into the morality and worldview implicit in IP, and that’s precisely one of the things I dislike about it. When it comes to art, capitalism assumes that popular = good = deserving, and I question that chain of assumptions at multiple points (to be clear, when I say “capitalism assumes” I mean “the structural features of the system create outcomes consistent with this view,” not “there’s a capitalism catechism somewhere and it says this”). Under present socio-economic conditions, art is a “superstar” economy that produces a few winners and many (financial) losers, and all that really says about the losers is that they’re not plugged into nepotistic “networking” machines, they’re not exceptionally lucky, and they’re not in the 20% to .001% of the population most willing and able to ruthlessly optimize for marketability (a different thing than quality, which in art is a much more subjective concept). Insofar as I think we should abolish IP and replace it with something better, it’s in large part because I think that depressing landscape is a natural consequence of compensating artists through profits derived from IP + other features of our society.

- When I say “insofar as I think we should abolish IP and replace it with something better,” the “and replace it with something better” part would be a necessary load-bearing part of that plan. I probably would not support just getting rid of IP and changing nothing else, and to me one of the more compelling moral arguments against piracy is that it’s functionally equivalent to just getting rid of IP and changing nothing else.

I’m sorry if I upset you, I respect you and I did not come into this to pick any sort of fight with you.

me: "writers are workers, and just like any other worker, we deserve to get paid for our work. if you justify piracy by saying that there are 'too many' creative workers out there, you're being a Karen; stop"

someone: "this doesn't apply to the third world where our choice is 'buy overpriced original fiction or eat'"

my guy

my buddy

i guarantee you, there are authors working in your country right now who deserve to have their work seen by the rest of the world and who deserve to get paid for their work

I also guarantee you, most authors on Tumblr talking about how they want to get paid are not selling their books for full cover price. I don't have anything for sale on Amazon right now that's more than $0.99 USD and most of my work is available for free/pay-what-you-want on Smashwords. i am not selling $25 hardbacks here.

(and frankly when we talk about pricing, most books are underpriced for the amount of labour it takes to get them out the door; publishing industry folks work their asses off for peanuts. but that's a whole nother story.)

the point is: it does not matter how much you want or need to read something; if you pirate it, the author does not get paid for their work. and most authors are not wealthy. losing sales can mean financial stress at best and the end of their career at worst.

no matter where you are in the world, piracy of indie media (and books in general) is not a victimless crime. it may be worth it to you- that's between you and your conscience. there are things I can and will pirate! but there are consequences. if you care about a writer's work, you should not pirate their books.

I just hate the assumption this is going to get me to buy your book. You don’t want me pirating it; fine, I’ll go read AO3 some more.

I mean, I don't think you're going to buy my book. You're not obligated to do so.

but like I said. If you care about a writer's work, do not pirate their books, because the more you pirate, the less of their work you will have.

I went to an ice cream place once that had some of the best ice cream I ever had in my life. I never saved up the money for it again, and now it’s a paint shop. If I’d somehow gotten the recipe and made my own ice cream at home, that wouldn’t have caused any more damage. The damage was because I paid for movies and video games when I could have paid for ice cream instead. And conversely, the damage would be to movies and video games if I bought ice cream. You can’t make this into a cause-and-effect framework unless you identify the cause. And if it’s a deontological framework, then say that instead of talking about cause and effect!

(Honestly, I think the logic works in the opposite direction. If there’s a moral reason you should give someone money, then that reason should still hold even if they’ve never given you anything at all.)

Well, a book or a movie is a one-time purchase (unless you rent it over and over again), so it’s more analogous to that single first stop in the ice cream shop.

Regarding cause and effect, I think this gets back to stuff I referenced in that post I made outlining an argument for NFTs being evil. Capitalism is intended to operate by a sort of law of karma that requires scarcity to function: to make money you have to sell products, good products get bought a lot causing their makers to become rich, bad products sell poorly causing their makers to become poor, thus the system incentivizes the creation of good products. This system can work more-or-less as intended by default with physical products, but even with nineteenth or twentieth century media technology it tended to break down when you applied it to artists. A default way for capitalism with 1920-90s tech to handle the best song ever written would be for a recording company to set up some microphones while the person who wrote it is singing it at a night-club for like $50 per night, record it, and then capture like 99.9999999% of its market value through distributing physical records or cassette tapes of it. Any price the original artist could effectively demand of the recording company would have to be price-competitive with the costs of just doing something like that. The result is that even with twentieth century technology capitalism would by default fail to incentivize the creation of good art through the “more popularity = more sales = more money” mechanism, because the default price of most artist labor would be so low that even the producers of the most excellent art would be very poor.

IP law was the patch for that bug, bringing the social reality of capitalism back into line with capitalist and producerist ideologies of how capitalism “should” work. With IP law, the artist is now legally empowered to artificially bottleneck production and distribution from their end, and this allows them to set a price for their labor that’s high enough for the “more popularity = more sales = more money” mechanism to work. Popular concepts of the proper moral order of capitalism are restored, popular artists are rewarded with wealth while unpopular artists are punished with poverty, system working as intended again!

That patch worked OK until the internet came along and made physical reproduction of information so cheap that you didn’t need a lot of capital to do it. All of a sudden, it wasn’t just artists that were threatened with not being able to make money off art, it was traditional distributors that captured value by owning the physical infrastructure required to physically distribute information. How is a printing company supposed to make money if twenty million randos can put a copy of their book through a scanner and distribute PDFs of it for free? How is a record company supposed to make money if twenty million randos can just share free downloads of their songs with their friends, or worse, put up free downloads of all their songs on some GeoCities website? By default paying for art now just means the money you pay to AT&T or Comcast or whatever for your internet connection.

I’m simplifying in a way that probably understates how much the biggest beneficiaries of IP law were IP-holding corporations instead of artists even before the internet (20 million randos with access to cheap copy machines are also a threat to traditional publishing houses), but you get the idea.

I think a lot of ideologically pro-piracy people are leftists and a huge implicit part of their politics around IP is they want society to reject the “popular artists should be rewarded with wealth while unpopular artists should be punished with poverty” principle. Like, the obvious way to square “artists should be compensated for their labor” and “I should be able to buy art for its natural default price in the internet age, i.e. more-or-less cost of an internet connection” would be to have society subsidize artists with something that would functionally resemble a UBI, perhaps supplemented by voluntary donations as gestures of appreciation. Personally, I think I might prefer something like that arrangement, maybe with some minimalistic IP law that’s more about making sure people are properly credited for stuff than about money or controlling reproduction.

But in the society we actually live in right now, the mainstream way we have to compensate artists for their labor is very deliberately designed to make the relationship between an artist and an art consumer work like the relationship between a baker and a bread-eater.

I guess I’m kind of an ambivalent centrist on this issue, not sure where to stand. Like, on the one hand, yeah, piracy does hurt artists in the same way shoplifting hurts bakery employees and owners. On the other hand, that isn’t some neutral fact of nature, the system was very deliberately set up so the relationship would work that way, the fact the relationship works that way is a political choice that expresses moral ideas about how society should work, moral ideas I don’t really endorse (or at least only endorse with a lot of caveats and reservations), so when I see people doing that “a real leftist would understand that IP is a labor rights law” thing, my reaction is “could you please try and think about what you’re implicitly endorsing here before you lick that boot so enthusiastically?”

Like, do you endorse as a moral principle the idea that popular artists should be rewarded with wealth while unpopular artists should be punished with poverty? If you don’t, then maybe you should on some level disapprove of IP law, because IP law is among other things an attempt to use the law to make society work that way.

And in a sense this isn’t special, all of capitalism is like this, it’s all a series of political choices that express compromises between powerful interest groups and ideas about how society should work, but as I said in the NFT post, this all becomes much more obvious when we’re talking about art and information on the internet because there the scarcity is so obviously artificial and hence so obviously political.

im really not trying to be mean here but this one tag from a reblog just so colossally missed the point i cant let it go unacknowledged

the whole message of this post is that the clothes are being made regardless of whether anybody is going to be purchasing them. they’re made in sweatshops, shipped to the other side of the globe, put on racks in thousands of stores, and whatever doesn’t sell is dumped in the fucking desert to make room on those racks for the next shipment.

“buy secondhand only” in response to this is such an egregious misunderstanding and it’s doing the exact fucking thing that is implicitly being criticized by this tweet, which is that individual consumer choices are totally disconnected from the global production of consumer goods and therefore moralizing about making the Correct choices and imploring people to go to fucking goodwill instead of tj maxx is meaningless

Slave labor and borderline slave labor allow cheap junk to be made for so little that some companies can make up for the loss several times over by claiming it on insurance, getting government subsidies, or even selling certain things as scrap or filler to other industries. Companies are so frequently part of some vast network of brands owned by the same entity that they can waste a billion dollars without batting an eye. Just saturating a market with *your* unsellable shit can be seen as advantageous if it helps push out a competitor. Someone buying one new pair of shoes for $20 can mean they just covered the manufacturing cost for 500 pairs. Passive boycotting isn’t going to work ever again at this point. The only ways any of this can change will unfortunately require vastly, vastly more work from more people than just telling Twitter to stop buying pants or switching a fast food chain to paper straws.

Funny how as economic inequality increases capitalist society starts to look more and more like the dysfunctions we associate with the Soviet Union. Like, “socialism is bad because it causes production to become decoupled from demand” is one of the biggest right-wing and libertarian anti-socialist talking points.

There does however seem to be a difference between producing 100 million left boots and 25 right ones, or thousands of tanks while people don’t have food, versus producing such a humongous surplus of usable clothes as to saturate all demand for them, however.

I mean isn’t “producing mountains of surplus clothing while people don’t have food” the same criticism as “producing thousands of tanks while people don’t have food”?

People aren’t just complaining that we’re overproducing these clothes and they’re going to waste. People are complaining that we’re overproducing these clothes and therefore underproducing things people desperately need. All the paid labor that sewed these clothes could’ve been put to use doing something that helps people.

I’m not going to pretend like the inefficiencies of globalized capitalism are equivalent to the kind of bonkers bureaucratic shit that was going on in the late Soviet Union. But you’re not really addressing the issue if you’re acting like these mountains of unused clothes are a pure testament to how great and productive capitalism is, that it can produce clothes in such abundance. Abundance amidst starvation is the one of the primary problems of capitalism that critics identify.

im really not trying to be mean here but this one tag from a reblog just so colossally missed the point i cant let it go unacknowledged

the whole message of this post is that the clothes are being made regardless of whether anybody is going to be purchasing them. they’re made in sweatshops, shipped to the other side of the globe, put on racks in thousands of stores, and whatever doesn’t sell is dumped in the fucking desert to make room on those racks for the next shipment.

“buy secondhand only” in response to this is such an egregious misunderstanding and it’s doing the exact fucking thing that is implicitly being criticized by this tweet, which is that individual consumer choices are totally disconnected from the global production of consumer goods and therefore moralizing about making the Correct choices and imploring people to go to fucking goodwill instead of tj maxx is meaningless

Slave labor and borderline slave labor allow cheap junk to be made for so little that some companies can make up for the loss several times over by claiming it on insurance, getting government subsidies, or even selling certain things as scrap or filler to other industries. Companies are so frequently part of some vast network of brands owned by the same entity that they can waste a billion dollars without batting an eye. Just saturating a market with *your* unsellable shit can be seen as advantageous if it helps push out a competitor. Someone buying one new pair of shoes for $20 can mean they just covered the manufacturing cost for 500 pairs. Passive boycotting isn’t going to work ever again at this point. The only ways any of this can change will unfortunately require vastly, vastly more work from more people than just telling Twitter to stop buying pants or switching a fast food chain to paper straws.

Funny how as economic inequality increases capitalist society starts to look more and more like the dysfunctions we associate with the Soviet Union. Like, “socialism is bad because it causes production to become decoupled from demand” is one of the biggest right-wing and libertarian anti-socialist talking points.

I tried to look up the thing about "medieval peasants worked less than the average american" and there are a bunch of blog posts and stuff that are like "well, medieval peasants did get Sundays off, lots of holidays, and couldn't work when it was dark, but they also had to deal with these terrible things! *lists a bunch of things that can easily be applied to the modern American*

Here's a blog post seeking to refute the claim that Americans work more than medieval peasants.

The first thing to note is that this is going on the assumption that the average American works 34.4 hours per week.

Yeah.

I googled this claim and the average is being driven down by several things: 16-19 year olds are being included, which includes high school students; stay-at-home parents that work part time are being included, college students are being included.

And of course, all Americans are included regardless of economic class, which, now that I think about it, in a world with such wealth inequality that doesn't really make sense for a comparison specifically about medieval peasants.

Now, on to the terrible things which the writer says separate us from medieval peasants:

"...the peasant owed fees for everything he used: for grinding his grain in the lord’s mill, baking his bread in the lord’s oven, pressing apples in the lord’s cider press, settlement of disputes in the lord’s court..."

Hmm. That's pretty harsh. Imagine if you had to pay for every single thing you needed to live, even if it was something that didn't actually cost much to the person controlling the supply, and was just a way to squeeze money out of you.

"A deep grievance of the peasant was the contempt in which he was held by the other classes."

Hmm. Yeah, we don't have that anymore. Imagine if people hated poor people for being poor, and blamed their plight on their being morally defective.

"Chivalry did not apply outside the knights’ own class. The records tell of peasants crucified, roasted, dragged behind horses by the brigands to extort money. There were preachers who pointed out that the peasant worked unceasingly for all, often overwhelmed by his tasks, and who pleaded for more kindness, but all they could advise the victim was patience, obedience, and resignation."

Wow, you're right, that's terrible. Imagine if the class of people who were supposed to "serve" and "protect" us did nothing but make sure our brutal power structures stay in place. Wouldn't it be terrible?

...I trust that my sarcasm is evident here.

But there's another huge hole in this argument, which is that the 34.4 hours which are supposedly "average" come nowhere close to actually describing how much time Americans actually spend "working." That is, how much time is not actually "free time" and is instead spent:

and a whole shit ton of other essential "work."

This isn't a scholarly or academic blog post, obviously, and there's a lot more sources that would need to be explored, but I kinda appreciate how much it failed to demonstrate that Americans' work schedules suck less than a medieval peasant's

also, important lesson: always look into where a statistic is coming from

I remember reading somewhere that the problem with the “modern Americans work more hours than Medieval peasants” estimate was that it only counted as work the service Medieval peasants owed to their feudal lords (I think @funereal-disease said something about this a while back?). It didn’t count the work peasants had to do to grow their own food, manufacture their own clothing, obtain their own heating and cooking fuel, etc., when that was actually the majority of a Medieval peasant’s “job.” If it was harvest time or planting time getting a day off didn’t mean you could relax, it just meant all your long hard day of backbreaking labor would be spent tending to your own crops. Even outside those periods, on “days off” cows might still need to be milked, firewood might still need to be gathered, spinning and weaving and sewing might still need to be done, etc. (IIRC, in agricultural societies women who weren’t rich tended to spend a lot of time on textile/clothing manufacture and repair).

So if you wanted to be really uncharitable to the argument, you could say an apples-to-apples comparison would be the number of hours an average American spends earning the money that they owe to the government in taxes. Though I think there’s a decent argument that a more appropriate comparison is the number of hours a Medieval peasant spent working for their lord vs. the number of hours an American worker spends earning the money that they owe as taxes to the government, rent to their landlord, payment for their medical and car insurance, payments on their student debt, etc.. That seems like an apples to apples comparison in a way; how much do you owe to the authority figures in your society and the institutions they control? And I think there’s a pretty good argument for also including commute time, the time spent shopping on clothes they only wear at work and the amount of money spent on those clothes, some or all of the unpaid labor they do as part of their K-12 and college educations, etc. as the equivalent of the taxes, labor, and fees a Medieval peasant had to pay.

Alternately, if you’re going to consider a Medieval peasant’s “job” to be all the household and farm labor they do, an apples to apples comparison might include the time American laborers spend cooking, grocery shopping, doing laundry, cleaning their homes, etc. as part of their “job.” Which gets you into: trying to estimate how many hours a Medieval peasant worked gets you into “a time and motion specialist studying how long it takes a bear to eat some berries would not know when to punch their clock” issues. Is a Medieval farm wife doing her job when she’s weeding in the kitchen garden? What about spinning? What about cooking? The whole idea of a job in the sense we think of it is kind of a product of industrial society and inappropriate to what a Medieval peasant did, their society didn’t work that way (given some present trends I wonder if the era when most people have jobs as we understand them will ultimately be a relatively short-lived historical anomaly; a brief blast of factory whistles and punch clocks between a long past of foragers and subsistence farmers and a long future of fanfiction writers and hobbyists and Let’s Play YouTubers and exhibitionist camgirls with “If you enjoy my work please think of giving me a few social credits to supplement my Social Wealth Fund dividends!” links on their websites).

I honestly don’t know which side of the debate would “win” these various comparisons (and I suspect it would change depending on somewhat arbitrary decisions about what to count and not count). Certainly modern technology has made a whole lot of common tasks (cooking, laundry, etc.) much less labor-intensive, so it seems plausible that the American worker would win the “literally everything from tending the lord’s crops/the actual salaried job to cooking the evening meal is labor” comparison. On the other hand, precisely because of that the modern worker might spend a lot more of their time doing what Marxists would call surplus labor.

Anecdotal impressions on what preindustrial farming was like seem mixed on whether “Medieval peasants worked less hard than American workers” passes the smell test. On one hand, farming has a very common reputation as a brutally hard backbreaking job with long hours and lots of hard physical labor, and I figure there’s probably some fire with all that smoke. People seem to tend to abandon farm life quickly when urban industrial jobs become open to them, even if those urban industrial jobs feature long hours and bad working conditions, which is suggestive (though it might just be because farmers who aren’t big landowners tend to be very poor and most people would rather work hard to make $5 per day than have less work but have to live on the equivalent of $2 per day). Anecdotes about farm life in the nineteenth or early-to-mid twentieth century seem to prominently feature stuff like having to get up before dawn to milk the cows (and that’s farmers with access to better technology than Medieval peasants would have had), and across a gap of a few thousand years this seems consistent with Proverbs 31, where one the attributes of an “excellent wife” is that “she rises while it is yet night.” On the other hand, I remember one of my professors saying that subsistence farmers often have a lot of free time so backwater rural regions tend to have extreme poverty but well-developed folk art traditions (though he was a professor of literature, not agriculture or history or economics). Possibly this is something that varies with political, economic, and ecological conditions (thinking about the stuff Sarah Taber said about how the US family farm model is a recipe for terrible economic precarity - that’s the socio-economic arrangement where those anecdotes about children having to get up before dawn to help Dad milk the cows come from)?