Ok, while I also support a guaranteed basic income, I feel the need to side with the Wal-Mart haters here. Our case is more sophisticated than you’ve presented here.
Our case is not, “Wal-Mart pays wages that are too low to live on, therefore they’re leeching from the public dole, therefore they’re capital-E Evil.”
Our case is a basic case against neoliberalism itself, the principle that the outcomes of unregulated markets are just deserts. We are, as in many other cases, pointing out the fundamental lie of neoliberalism: that unregulated markets aren’t. Wal-Mart pays wages that are too low to live on, therefore, whatever increased productivity (which isn’t very much, frankly) we can say they’re adding to the total economy, however much they’re reducing the theoretical additional dole burden, they are not an independent firm earning profits on a “free” market without government disturbance. They are, at a fundamental level, receiving a public subsidy.
Now, in our view, there are plenty of good reasons for the State to give a firm public subsidy. However, since we of the Left are, by definition, pro-labor and anti-capital, we cannot and do not hold that “in order to increase profits by decreasing wages” is such a reason. It can’t be, after all; think of what it means for a Low Wage Subsidy to exist: both Wal-Mart’s workers and the taxpaying public are thus making pro-bono donations to the owners of Wal-Mart at a net-negative benefit to their/our selves.
Why is this a net negative for the public? Don’t we receive lower prices at Wal-Mart via this subsidy? Well yes, but even if we assumed that everyone shops at Wal-Mart in order to realize that gain, it’s financially impossible that the drop in prices thanks to the subsidy is equivalent to the value of the subsidy. If it was, Wal-Mart wouldn’t be realizing any additional profits by taking the subsidy, and the company would thus refuse it!
The only way the “Food Stamps subsidy” of Wal-Mart makes sense for the fiduciary interest of Wal-Mart itself is if the subsidy acts as a transfer of wealth from the public and the workers to Wal-Mart. This isn’t just the kind of behavior that had Karl Marx calling for revolution, it’s the kind that made Adam Smith cry out against state favors for business and in favor of genuinely free markets.
Thus, in conclusion, if Wal-Mart is not an independent firm but a publicly-subsidized one, how can we possibly say that the public does not have a moral, financial, and political stake in their business practices? Does the public not have the right to regulate the spending of its own money? Certainly, we ought to be able to pass a policy saying that any business accepting State funds - possibly even at more than one level of remove—has an obligation to use labor and environmental practices the public finds morally acceptable.
(By the way, “free market” is a term that really cannot make any consistent sense if we use it to mean that capital owners are free and labor sellers are forced by threat of starvation and also jail to work or die. At the very least, a “free market society” has an obligation to legalize vagrancy and, in general, remove all State-imposed penalties for the crime of being poor!)
They are, at a fundamental level, receiving a public subsidy.
I think the reasoning here would benefit from being made more explicit. (I think it’s basically correct, but at a glance it doesn’t look that way.) The argument goes like this.
Wal-Mart pays most of its employees so little that without government help they would starve, or at least have really intolerably bad lives. [Note: I do not know whether this is factually correct, but the argument here is about what follows if it is true.]
If the government didn’t provide welfare to people in this situation, Wal-Mart would not be able to pay such low wages because few workers would be willing or able to work for so little. (They would starve, or start a revolution, or something.)
So if we compare a hypothetical world without government welfare for Wal-Mart employees to the actual world, the difference is that in the actual world the employees have somewhat more money and so does Wal-Mart. Although all the government aid nominally goes to the employees, some of its actual effect is in enabling Wal-Mart to pay less and still find workers.
Therefore, Wal-Mart is effectively receiving a public subsidy.
That is indeed how the argument goes. Thank you for clarifying. I just want to add a single further clarification to (1): if the workers were paid so little they became homeless, we can presume they would be arrested for vagrancy at some point, and thus be unable to consistently come to work.
This is important to note, because our current-day ultra-inegalitarian cities like New York and London actually often have a large class of working homeless who really do face this problem.
Well, there is precedent for using incarcerated inmates as a captive work force, although admittedly that’s more common for jobs that don’t involve meeting the public.
Many people’s ethical intuitions about using incarcerated inmates as a captive work force vary depending on the language used and the specific rules governing it. Many Americans, for example, would agree that slave labor is evil but support UNICOR. So I’m not quite as convinced as you seem to be that this sort of thing isn’t worth specifically addressing.
To me, it’s worth addressing in the sense that, if necessary, it is worth being able to argue that prison labor is slave labor and slave labor is evil. I don’t see any reason to believe there’s even the tiniest speck of good in it.
I would say it’s also worth addressing in the sense that presuming that people arrested for vagrancy are unable to come to work may lead to false conclusions.
But, sure, if you believe that because this is an ethical discussion it goes without saying that organizations like UNICOR are presumed not to exist, since they don’t have even the tiniest speck of good, then I understand why you make that presumption without further qualification.
Putting people in prison and financially benefitting from them is an inherent conflict of interest and this certainly applies to UNCOR, especially if you get to ignore minimum wage laws.
Wal-Mart pays wages that are too low to live on, therefore, whatever increased productivity (which isn’t very much, frankly) we can say they’re adding to the total economy, however much they’re reducing the theoretical additional dole burden, they are not an independent firm earning profits on a “free” market without government disturbance. They are, at a fundamental level, receiving a public subsidy.
This makes the unexamined assumption that all jobs in a free market must deliver a living wage. This is not true. A completely laissez-faire society would still have plenty of jobs not paying enough to support a single adult, because not everyone needs that sort of job: Teenagers getting some spending money during the summer, students supplementing a college grant, adults getting a second income in a household that can already support itself.
Yes, true. And in a completely laissez-faire society, the majority of current low-wage workers who do not fall into those categories would simply drop dead.
Hence why I’d think that over time, wages would rise to the level of subsistence. Even Wal-Mart doesn’t like having to clear dead bodies out of the store or having to continually train new workers because their most devoted ones, the ones who choose to stay, keep dying.
Yes, true. And in a completely laissez-faire society, the majority of current low-wage workers who do not fall into those categories would simply drop dead.
In such a laissez faire society, why would you “blame” the entity that employs them at some wage, instead of blaming the millions of entities that won’t or don’t employ them at any wage? You don’t work at Walmart for minimum wage if someone else will pay you $10. How is Walmart the bad guy for being the private entity that is willing to give you a better deal than any other entity in society (including government which is also an employer)? How is it not the “fault” of the non-employers of the minimum wage earners that they make so little?
I don’t claim that’s necessarily a reasonable reaction, but you certainly ought not be as surprised by it as you are signalling here. If I’m suffering, Sam is ignoring my suffering, and Pat is benefiting from my suffering, it’s a pretty common reaction to judge Pat worse than Sam.
I don’t claim that’s necessarily a reasonable reaction, but you certainly ought not be as surprised by it as you are signalling here.
OMG, you essentially agree with me but don’t like your reading of what you think I am signaling about the unreasonable reactions?
What are your priorities here?
Is being surprised at this sort of deep meta- wierdness also not to your taste? If so feel free to interpret my feelings as appalled, disappointed, or frustrated if that seems to you more appropriate.
In such a laissez faire society, why would you “blame” the entity that employs them at some wage, instead of blaming the millions of entities that won’t or don’t employ them at any wage?
Because the Third Option is being left out: independent living off the commons. This is what disappeared with the Enclosure Movement and thus signalled the rise of capitalism. Wal-Mart is the entity withdrawing this worker from subsistence on the commons, and also partially responsible for the elimination of the commons, therefore they are responsible for “beating” the Commons Offer.
I have to concur with Ms Lebovitz here; what do you mean living off the commons?
Talking about enclosure strongly implies farming/herding on public land, but that seems like an unlikely argument for you to make. What common goods have been privatized by Walmart in this situation, and how were people living off of them before?
Edit: Oops, replied to wrong comment. Was meant for the parent.
Ok, let’s see. Firstly, the enclosures were a completely English, not even Anglo-American, phenomenon; nobody else even had any commons. Secondly, the commons were just about sufficient to support something like 10% of a population of around 10 million. Thirdly, wow, I would much rather have a Walmart wage than try to scrape together meals from the land that nobody cares about enough to claim for themselves. To suggest that this is a viable alternative all over the world and in industrial times is silly.
It is exactly the pre-capitalist norm. You cannot discuss the iniquities of capitalism without reference to what happened before and outside capitalism.
My impression is that in medieval and ancient Europe, the bulk of the population were serfs or slaves with very limited legal rights—the opposite of independence. They also had well defined land holdings—they did not “live independently off the commons”.
I have the impression that there are hunter-gathering or herding societies where the population “lived independently off the commons”—but are there examples of societies with farming and cities where this was a routine or comfortable way of life?
To find a society “before and outside” capitalism in the relevant sense, requires going very far back in the history of our civilization. Are there examples from other parts of the world that you have in mind?
Well, “outside” of capitalism was pretty thoroughly explored in the 20th century and while they produced some really splendid music the 200 million dead by the hands of their own governments was admittedly a bit of a bummer. But maybe “before” has a better answer?
Well, capitalism’s immediate predecessor, mercantilism, was a pretty sweet setup all told (although I doubt it would seem particularly appetizing to you). Divine right of Kings and the virtues of a natural aristocracy is admittedly a tough sell, but the results were pretty phenomenal; each of the great golden ages of the European empires, one after another, for centuries. But still, going a bit further back couldn’t hurt.
Well now we’re in pre-Renaissance times, pretty good for our third bullet point, but the results aren’t so encouraging. Manorialism was a pretty inefficient system even in it’s own time; it’s probably for the best that the serfs were emancipated and all those usury laws got repealed, that would really put a damper on a post-industrial society. Still you can’t argue that all those Castles and Gothic Cathedrals weren’t a blast, and you could still find some un-enclosed Commons to farm if you wanted them. Put that one in the “maybe” column then.
Before that we’re into the Classical era and they didn’t even have a proper economic system, not to mention the way slavery choked off incentives for developing labor-saving technology. And the way masters choked off the slaves, er, literally… maybe best to just slide past that one too.
Maybe go all the way back to the Bronze Age; they must have had to have had something really interesting if they were cool enough to convince aliens to help build all those monuments. Well there was a lot of collective farming, that sounds right up your alley, although the whole Pharaoh thing seems like a bit of a drag. At least you get lots of nice pyramids and ziggurats, that’s pretty bad-ass.
Well what about if we go Full Environmentalist; leave the neolithic behind and embrace the hunter gatherer! There’s certainly something to be said about it nutritionally, that’s to be sure, and there does seem to be a bit of truth to the idea that it builds a man’s heroic character. Still, that doesn’t seem likely to scale well for 10 billion people and there’s that whole “no internet or penicillin” thing to consider too. I’m still a bit attached to looking at cat pictures and not dying of diarrhea, makes it hard to get into the back-to-the-earth spirit.
So I guess you were right; a little look at history really does put “the iniquities of capitalism” into perspective. Thanks!
Well, “outside” of capitalism was pretty thoroughly explored in the 20th century and while they produced some really splendid music the 200 million dead by the hands of their own governments was admittedly a bit of a bummer.
So every possible system other than capitalism leads to genocide? Surely you can’t actually believe that.
Out of all alternatives to capitalism that have actually been tried in practice during the last several centuries, is there one which you like and which you think is clearly superior to capitalism?
No, I’d go so far as to say that out of the six non-capitalist systems I mentioned only four were unarguably guilty of democide (the case against the mercantile powers relies on a stubborn refusal to understand how epidemiology works) and one of them is wholly innocent of murder on anything greater than the scale of a village.
The case for hunting and gathering just gets better and better.
they [Walmart] are not an independent firm earning profits on a “free” market without government disturbance.
Of course they aren’t. They follow OSHA and all the other regulations. They pay a corporate income of 35% of their profits and their employees pay federal and state income taxes on their pay.
They are, at a fundamental level, receiving a public subsidy.
If Walmart stops employing a given minimum wage employee, that employee costs government MORE in aid, not less. So even though for every min wage employer Walmart takes on, government spending goes DOWN, you still refer to that as Walmart being subsidized?
If I give a poor guy enough food for a week and he starves two weeks later, is that my fault? Somehow by giving him anything I took on full responsibility for his getting enough?
Of course they aren’t. They follow OSHA and all the other regulations. They pay a corporate income of 35% of their profits and their employees pay federal and state income taxes on their pay.
Ok. If we accept that these laws are justified, why not a law requiring all business to pay livable wages?
To me it is not whether such a law would be justified, but whom it would hurt and whom it would hurt.
Anything that makes hiring the bottom end of the labor pool more expensive will decrease the amount of that pool that is hired. There are some who claim studies that show this is not true. I claim these studies are dopey. If it were not true that raising minimum wage causes fewer from the bottom to tbe hired, why not raise it to $20/hr? $50/hr? Can anybody who even bothers to fully oxygenate their blood fail to see that if you raised the minimum wage to $50/hour there would be massive unemployment? Well tickling the wage down around only $7, $8, or $9/hr is the same thing, only writ small enough so that what is blisteringly obvious with bigger numbers can be missed by people who want to pretend it isn’t there.
If the minimum wage is raised, it will LOOK successful in the sense that the people who still have jobs, who still get jobs, will be paid more. Guess who will lose jobs? The hardest to hire. The least capable.
So if you feel more comfortable pretending that everybody can work and make a certain amount of money, AND it is easier for you to ignore the people that can’t get jobs than to pretend that $7/hour is enough, then keep going down this road. Put the hardest to hire out of the labor force entirely, pay for them on welfare, and pretend they don’t exist while congratulating those that still do have jobs on what a good job you did for them.
since we of the Left are, by definition, pro-labor and anti-capital
I don’t think that’s a correct definition.
Even limiting ourselves to attitudes to “labour” and “capital”, I suggest that to be on the Left it suffices to care more about the former and the latter. Personally, I try to be (approximately) pro-everyone, but I think the world would be improved by giving more weight to the interests of ordinary people relative to those of the rich and powerful (and of the businesses they own); that is one of the things that (as I understand it) puts me on the Left rather than the Right. No need to be anti-capital for that.
(Note: It is no part of my purpose here to advocate for the positions described in the previous paragraph. I’m just saying that I think they are left-wing rather than right-wing positions, and that they don’t require me to be anti-capital.)
I disagree, but my disagreement requires explanation.
I do not mean we on the Left are/should be anti-capital in the sense of “We hate rich people” or “We hate money”. The issue is not the particular people who hold capital, but the processes of capitalism itself. To use local terminology: we can taboo the word “capitalism” and instead say, “optimization process implemented as a social system of human societies, which maximizes the accumulation of capital”.
We can even go further than just “capital” and say “liquid wealth” or “potential human-usable optimization power”, by analogy to potential energy. We then get: “optimization process, implemented as a social system, which maximizes the accumulation of potential human-usable optimization power.”
Once we have this definition, the observed behavior of capitalism comes into a much clearer light. Yes, capitalism generates massive amounts of wealth, because it you need to generate massive amounts of wealth in order to liquidate it into potential world-shaping power. Capitalism can be industrial, when money (the definitionally most-liquid form of capital) is backed by a fixed commodity (forcing the system to physically produce large sums of that quantity and trade them around in order to accumulate capital) or financial, when money is virtual (allowing the system to “eat its own tail” by accumulating vast sums of financial wealth without engaging in real production).
We can also see, in such a definition, why anti-capitalists are anti-capitalist and why I think LessWrong-style rationalists should be anti-capitalist (in the limit): it’s a human-unfriendly optimization process operating here and now! What purpose in worrying about futuristic cyber-monsters if the social monster is already biting our heads off?
The issue is not [...] but the processes of capitalism itself.
In which case I suggest that “anti-capital” is a misleading term, especially when accompanied by “pro-labor”. There is a meaningful opposition between labour and capital (meaning, roughly, the people who work and the people and institutions that tell them what to do) but not between labour and capitalism; one is a class of people and the other is a process or ideology.
(For the avoidance of doubt, by “opposition” there I don’t mean that the two have to be enemies or that their interests are always opposed; I mean that they are two things of somewhat the same kind, which might sometimes come into conflict, and for which one can meaningfully ask “which do you favour?”.)
it’s a human-unfriendly optimization process
Yes, it is—but, just as with the prospect of AI, I suggest that the question to ask might not be “how can we defeat this powerful hostile thing?” but “how can we stop this powerful thing being hostile and make it act for our benefit?”. The answer might turn out to be that we can’t—that no broadly capitalist system can really produce a society that works well for anyone other than the favoured few. But I wouldn’t bet on it. Not least because the actually-existing societies that seem to do best at providing a decent life for most of their people are broadly capitalist, with various mechanisms attached that try to fix raw capitalism’s tendency to screw over all but the wealthiest.
no broadly capitalist system can really produce a society that works well for anyone other than the favoured few.
It’s worse than this. Capitalism only even works for the particular capitalists on a temporary basis. As the system works, the class of people owning any capital at all is narrowed, which Marx called “proletarianization” (to wit: owners of small shops are pushed out by, say, Wal-Mart, and thus forced to become wage-laborers instead). To the extent that capitalism is doing something decent for humans, this is fine; to the extent capitalism is just a big societal paper-clipper, we vitally need to stop it.
just as with the prospect of AI, I suggest that the question to ask might not be “how can we defeat this powerful hostile thing?” but “how can we stop this powerful thing being hostile and make it act for our benefit?”.
I disagree slightly: AI is far more beneficial than capitalism ;-). AI is a blank optimization process, so to speak, an AIXI implementation doesn’t come with an unfriendly utility function built-in, you have to add one and then unleash it yourself. With AI there at least exists the possibility of specifying Friendliness and getting it right; the “evil by default” behavior isn’t some cosmic force that hates us, it’s just that we only like a tiny subset of possible universes.
Not least because the actually-existing societies that seem to do best at providing a decent life for most of their people are broadly capitalist, with various mechanisms attached that try to fix raw capitalism’s tendency to screw over all but the wealthiest.
I think we need to speak seriously about the varieties of social optimization processes.
I agree that social democracy has produced the best observed results for human beings, and in fact contains explicit mechanisms (ie: democratic participation in allocation of the means of production) for ensuring human-friendliness. I also wish to note that markets should be considered a mere component of capitalism, and that pro-capitalist ideologues who focus primarily on markets are, essentially, rather like mechanics who focus on getting the greatest horsepower rather than on what the engine is for. So we can assume that the category of human-friendly economic systems contains at least social democracy, and also probably cooperative-based market systems, syndicalism, possibly democratic state-socialism, commons trust-based systems, and many others.
However, there are many variables that go into a market system. What we currently have is neoliberal financialized capitalism: liberalism level = state compels labor but subsidizes capital accumulation, definition of money to be accumulated = virtual credit-money rather than industrial production, allocation of the means of production = private profit-maximizing companies, donation-funded NGOs, state agencies, and almost nothing else.
Slavoj Zizek said in 2011, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. David Graeber has characterized neoliberalism as an ideology which, when given the choice between making capitalism seem the only possible economic system and making capitalism a long-term viable economic system, will always choose the former. It is not enough to simply rail on behalf of “free markets” or “workers’ revolutions”, we need to be rationally unpacking the variables that make social optimization processes function one way or another, and determining what values for those parameters result in something we actually like.
It is not enough to scream, “Another world is possible!” Dozens of other worlds are possible, which is why it’s imperative to stop pretending that this is the only or ideal world despite the fact that so many don’t like living here.
I think what you go on to describe is part of what I meant by “[doesn’t] work[] well for anyone other than the favoured few”. Indeed, the identity of the favoured few changes over time—though typically the really favoured are quite safe for a good while.
AI is far more beneficial than capitalism.
AI, at the moment, isn’t anything. (Or, rather, it’s a term that’s sometimes applied to a wide variety of things, mostly beneficial but nothing to do with what we both mean by AI in this context.) If and when “real” AI arrives, it has the potential to do either a lot more good than capitalism or a lot more harm or both.
AI is a blank optimization process
No. “AI” as such doesn’t say what’s being optimized, but any actual instance of AI will be optimizing for some specific thing(s) (or acting in some specific ways, or whatever; it might be an optimization process only somewhat metaphorically). A genuinely blank optimization process wouldn’t actually do anything.
I agree that more details of the merit function are built into the term “capitalism” than into the term “AI”. But I bet that a randomly chosen merit function is a lot worse than capitalism’s. Capitalism isn’t a cosmic force that hates you any more than AI is. You’re just (if I may repurpose an aphorism of Eliezer’s) in possession of dollars it can use for something else.
If you’re reasonably content with social democracy then I don’t see how you can both hold that capitalism is intrinsically disastrous and hostile and agree with Žižek that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than of capitalism. The end of capitalism might look like turning everywhere into Sweden. That might be difficult to achieve, but it’s not harder to imagine than the end of the world.
We seem to have drifted rather a long way from the original point at issue, namely whether being politically on the left requires one to be “anti-capital”. I haven’t seen anything so far to change my opinion that it doesn’t. Opposed to some important features fo neoliberal financialized capitalism, by all means. Opposed to capital (especially in the sense in which that’s naturally contrasted with “labour”), not so much.
Walmart’s low wage workers would disappear, drop dead, if not for the government subsidy? Billions of people survive on $2/day or less WITHOUT medicaid or other government subsidies. At more than $50/day in the US, survival is NOT the issue with minimum wage and government subsidies.
Billions of people survive on $2/day or less WITHOUT medicaid or other government subsidies.
Billions of people survive on $2/day in places where the cost of living is adjusted to incomes that low. They survive, by and large, in such conditions that they are often willing to do nearly anything (including things we would consider ourselves in the First World much too good for, like working for organized crime syndicates) to move up beyond that income bracket.
At more than $50/day in the US, survival is NOT the issue with minimum wage and government subsidies.
You need to account for the cost of living in the US, especially the cost of housing, since one can be arrested for not having any.
(including things we would consider ourselves in the First World much too good for, like working for organized crime syndicates) to move up beyond that income bracket.
That’s actually a fun statement!
1) Many people getting this far in this thread will be surprised to learn the the First World does not have organized crime!
2) it is widely stated that the source of a disproportionate number of criminals in our society are unemployed “lower class” youth, where for these purposes if is sufficient to read “lower class” as meaning hard-to-employ.
You need to account for the cost of living in the US, especially the cost of housing, since one can be arrested for not having any.
THere are a bunch of homeless people in Sandy Eggo (where I live) that manage to evade police. Are you SURE being homeless is a crime?
Ok, while I also support a guaranteed basic income, I feel the need to side with the Wal-Mart haters here. Our case is more sophisticated than you’ve presented here.
Our case is not, “Wal-Mart pays wages that are too low to live on, therefore they’re leeching from the public dole, therefore they’re capital-E Evil.”
Our case is a basic case against neoliberalism itself, the principle that the outcomes of unregulated markets are just deserts. We are, as in many other cases, pointing out the fundamental lie of neoliberalism: that unregulated markets aren’t. Wal-Mart pays wages that are too low to live on, therefore, whatever increased productivity (which isn’t very much, frankly) we can say they’re adding to the total economy, however much they’re reducing the theoretical additional dole burden, they are not an independent firm earning profits on a “free” market without government disturbance. They are, at a fundamental level, receiving a public subsidy.
Now, in our view, there are plenty of good reasons for the State to give a firm public subsidy. However, since we of the Left are, by definition, pro-labor and anti-capital, we cannot and do not hold that “in order to increase profits by decreasing wages” is such a reason. It can’t be, after all; think of what it means for a Low Wage Subsidy to exist: both Wal-Mart’s workers and the taxpaying public are thus making pro-bono donations to the owners of Wal-Mart at a net-negative benefit to their/our selves.
Why is this a net negative for the public? Don’t we receive lower prices at Wal-Mart via this subsidy? Well yes, but even if we assumed that everyone shops at Wal-Mart in order to realize that gain, it’s financially impossible that the drop in prices thanks to the subsidy is equivalent to the value of the subsidy. If it was, Wal-Mart wouldn’t be realizing any additional profits by taking the subsidy, and the company would thus refuse it!
The only way the “Food Stamps subsidy” of Wal-Mart makes sense for the fiduciary interest of Wal-Mart itself is if the subsidy acts as a transfer of wealth from the public and the workers to Wal-Mart. This isn’t just the kind of behavior that had Karl Marx calling for revolution, it’s the kind that made Adam Smith cry out against state favors for business and in favor of genuinely free markets.
Thus, in conclusion, if Wal-Mart is not an independent firm but a publicly-subsidized one, how can we possibly say that the public does not have a moral, financial, and political stake in their business practices? Does the public not have the right to regulate the spending of its own money? Certainly, we ought to be able to pass a policy saying that any business accepting State funds - possibly even at more than one level of remove—has an obligation to use labor and environmental practices the public finds morally acceptable.
(By the way, “free market” is a term that really cannot make any consistent sense if we use it to mean that capital owners are free and labor sellers are forced by threat of starvation and also jail to work or die. At the very least, a “free market society” has an obligation to legalize vagrancy and, in general, remove all State-imposed penalties for the crime of being poor!)
I think the reasoning here would benefit from being made more explicit. (I think it’s basically correct, but at a glance it doesn’t look that way.) The argument goes like this.
Wal-Mart pays most of its employees so little that without government help they would starve, or at least have really intolerably bad lives. [Note: I do not know whether this is factually correct, but the argument here is about what follows if it is true.]
If the government didn’t provide welfare to people in this situation, Wal-Mart would not be able to pay such low wages because few workers would be willing or able to work for so little. (They would starve, or start a revolution, or something.)
So if we compare a hypothetical world without government welfare for Wal-Mart employees to the actual world, the difference is that in the actual world the employees have somewhat more money and so does Wal-Mart. Although all the government aid nominally goes to the employees, some of its actual effect is in enabling Wal-Mart to pay less and still find workers.
Therefore, Wal-Mart is effectively receiving a public subsidy.
That is indeed how the argument goes. Thank you for clarifying. I just want to add a single further clarification to (1): if the workers were paid so little they became homeless, we can presume they would be arrested for vagrancy at some point, and thus be unable to consistently come to work.
This is important to note, because our current-day ultra-inegalitarian cities like New York and London actually often have a large class of working homeless who really do face this problem.
Well, there is precedent for using incarcerated inmates as a captive work force, although admittedly that’s more common for jobs that don’t involve meeting the public.
Since we’re in an ethical discussion, slave labor shouldn’t even be raised as an issue. Of fucking course slave labor is evil.
Many people’s ethical intuitions about using incarcerated inmates as a captive work force vary depending on the language used and the specific rules governing it.
Many Americans, for example, would agree that slave labor is evil but support UNICOR.
So I’m not quite as convinced as you seem to be that this sort of thing isn’t worth specifically addressing.
To me, it’s worth addressing in the sense that, if necessary, it is worth being able to argue that prison labor is slave labor and slave labor is evil. I don’t see any reason to believe there’s even the tiniest speck of good in it.
I would say it’s also worth addressing in the sense that presuming that people arrested for vagrancy are unable to come to work may lead to false conclusions.
But, sure, if you believe that because this is an ethical discussion it goes without saying that organizations like UNICOR are presumed not to exist, since they don’t have even the tiniest speck of good, then I understand why you make that presumption without further qualification.
Putting people in prison and financially benefitting from them is an inherent conflict of interest and this certainly applies to UNCOR, especially if you get to ignore minimum wage laws.
This makes the unexamined assumption that all jobs in a free market must deliver a living wage. This is not true. A completely laissez-faire society would still have plenty of jobs not paying enough to support a single adult, because not everyone needs that sort of job: Teenagers getting some spending money during the summer, students supplementing a college grant, adults getting a second income in a household that can already support itself.
Yes, true. And in a completely laissez-faire society, the majority of current low-wage workers who do not fall into those categories would simply drop dead.
Hence why I’d think that over time, wages would rise to the level of subsistence. Even Wal-Mart doesn’t like having to clear dead bodies out of the store or having to continually train new workers because their most devoted ones, the ones who choose to stay, keep dying.
In such a laissez faire society, why would you “blame” the entity that employs them at some wage, instead of blaming the millions of entities that won’t or don’t employ them at any wage? You don’t work at Walmart for minimum wage if someone else will pay you $10. How is Walmart the bad guy for being the private entity that is willing to give you a better deal than any other entity in society (including government which is also an employer)? How is it not the “fault” of the non-employers of the minimum wage earners that they make so little?
Because the employers benefit.
I don’t claim that’s necessarily a reasonable reaction, but you certainly ought not be as surprised by it as you are signalling here. If I’m suffering, Sam is ignoring my suffering, and Pat is benefiting from my suffering, it’s a pretty common reaction to judge Pat worse than Sam.
OMG, you essentially agree with me but don’t like your reading of what you think I am signaling about the unreasonable reactions?
What are your priorities here?
Is being surprised at this sort of deep meta- wierdness also not to your taste? If so feel free to interpret my feelings as appalled, disappointed, or frustrated if that seems to you more appropriate.
Because the Third Option is being left out: independent living off the commons. This is what disappeared with the Enclosure Movement and thus signalled the rise of capitalism. Wal-Mart is the entity withdrawing this worker from subsistence on the commons, and also partially responsible for the elimination of the commons, therefore they are responsible for “beating” the Commons Offer.
I have to concur with Ms Lebovitz here; what do you mean living off the commons?
Talking about enclosure strongly implies farming/herding on public land, but that seems like an unlikely argument for you to make. What common goods have been privatized by Walmart in this situation, and how were people living off of them before?
Edit: Oops, replied to wrong comment. Was meant for the parent.
Ok, let’s see. Firstly, the enclosures were a completely English, not even Anglo-American, phenomenon; nobody else even had any commons. Secondly, the commons were just about sufficient to support something like 10% of a population of around 10 million. Thirdly, wow, I would much rather have a Walmart wage than try to scrape together meals from the land that nobody cares about enough to claim for themselves. To suggest that this is a viable alternative all over the world and in industrial times is silly.
What do you mean by living off the commons?
That doesn’t resemble any reality I’m familiar with.
It is exactly the pre-capitalist norm. You cannot discuss the iniquities of capitalism without reference to what happened before and outside capitalism.
Is Wal-Mart drawing its workers from pre-capitalist societies?
My impression is that in medieval and ancient Europe, the bulk of the population were serfs or slaves with very limited legal rights—the opposite of independence. They also had well defined land holdings—they did not “live independently off the commons”.
I have the impression that there are hunter-gathering or herding societies where the population “lived independently off the commons”—but are there examples of societies with farming and cities where this was a routine or comfortable way of life?
To find a society “before and outside” capitalism in the relevant sense, requires going very far back in the history of our civilization. Are there examples from other parts of the world that you have in mind?
Well, “outside” of capitalism was pretty thoroughly explored in the 20th century and while they produced some really splendid music the 200 million dead by the hands of their own governments was admittedly a bit of a bummer. But maybe “before” has a better answer?
Well, capitalism’s immediate predecessor, mercantilism, was a pretty sweet setup all told (although I doubt it would seem particularly appetizing to you). Divine right of Kings and the virtues of a natural aristocracy is admittedly a tough sell, but the results were pretty phenomenal; each of the great golden ages of the European empires, one after another, for centuries. But still, going a bit further back couldn’t hurt.
Well now we’re in pre-Renaissance times, pretty good for our third bullet point, but the results aren’t so encouraging. Manorialism was a pretty inefficient system even in it’s own time; it’s probably for the best that the serfs were emancipated and all those usury laws got repealed, that would really put a damper on a post-industrial society. Still you can’t argue that all those Castles and Gothic Cathedrals weren’t a blast, and you could still find some un-enclosed Commons to farm if you wanted them. Put that one in the “maybe” column then.
Before that we’re into the Classical era and they didn’t even have a proper economic system, not to mention the way slavery choked off incentives for developing labor-saving technology. And the way masters choked off the slaves, er, literally… maybe best to just slide past that one too.
Maybe go all the way back to the Bronze Age; they must have had to have had something really interesting if they were cool enough to convince aliens to help build all those monuments. Well there was a lot of collective farming, that sounds right up your alley, although the whole Pharaoh thing seems like a bit of a drag. At least you get lots of nice pyramids and ziggurats, that’s pretty bad-ass.
Well what about if we go Full Environmentalist; leave the neolithic behind and embrace the hunter gatherer! There’s certainly something to be said about it nutritionally, that’s to be sure, and there does seem to be a bit of truth to the idea that it builds a man’s heroic character. Still, that doesn’t seem likely to scale well for 10 billion people and there’s that whole “no internet or penicillin” thing to consider too. I’m still a bit attached to looking at cat pictures and not dying of diarrhea, makes it hard to get into the back-to-the-earth spirit.
So I guess you were right; a little look at history really does put “the iniquities of capitalism” into perspective. Thanks!
So every possible system other than capitalism leads to genocide? Surely you can’t actually believe that.
Out of all alternatives to capitalism that have actually been tried in practice during the last several centuries, is there one which you like and which you think is clearly superior to capitalism?
Yes: social democracy.
Social democracy does not involve capitalism? Sweden (or whatever your favorite example is) is not a capitalist country?
Very astute of you to notice that.
No, I’d go so far as to say that out of the six non-capitalist systems I mentioned only four were unarguably guilty of democide (the case against the mercantile powers relies on a stubborn refusal to understand how epidemiology works) and one of them is wholly innocent of murder on anything greater than the scale of a village.
The case for hunting and gathering just gets better and better.
Of course they aren’t. They follow OSHA and all the other regulations. They pay a corporate income of 35% of their profits and their employees pay federal and state income taxes on their pay.
If Walmart stops employing a given minimum wage employee, that employee costs government MORE in aid, not less. So even though for every min wage employer Walmart takes on, government spending goes DOWN, you still refer to that as Walmart being subsidized?
If I give a poor guy enough food for a week and he starves two weeks later, is that my fault? Somehow by giving him anything I took on full responsibility for his getting enough?
Ok. If we accept that these laws are justified, why not a law requiring all business to pay livable wages?
To me it is not whether such a law would be justified, but whom it would hurt and whom it would hurt.
Anything that makes hiring the bottom end of the labor pool more expensive will decrease the amount of that pool that is hired. There are some who claim studies that show this is not true. I claim these studies are dopey. If it were not true that raising minimum wage causes fewer from the bottom to tbe hired, why not raise it to $20/hr? $50/hr? Can anybody who even bothers to fully oxygenate their blood fail to see that if you raised the minimum wage to $50/hour there would be massive unemployment? Well tickling the wage down around only $7, $8, or $9/hr is the same thing, only writ small enough so that what is blisteringly obvious with bigger numbers can be missed by people who want to pretend it isn’t there.
If the minimum wage is raised, it will LOOK successful in the sense that the people who still have jobs, who still get jobs, will be paid more. Guess who will lose jobs? The hardest to hire. The least capable.
So if you feel more comfortable pretending that everybody can work and make a certain amount of money, AND it is easier for you to ignore the people that can’t get jobs than to pretend that $7/hour is enough, then keep going down this road. Put the hardest to hire out of the labor force entirely, pay for them on welfare, and pretend they don’t exist while congratulating those that still do have jobs on what a good job you did for them.
I don’t think that’s a correct definition.
Even limiting ourselves to attitudes to “labour” and “capital”, I suggest that to be on the Left it suffices to care more about the former and the latter. Personally, I try to be (approximately) pro-everyone, but I think the world would be improved by giving more weight to the interests of ordinary people relative to those of the rich and powerful (and of the businesses they own); that is one of the things that (as I understand it) puts me on the Left rather than the Right. No need to be anti-capital for that.
(Note: It is no part of my purpose here to advocate for the positions described in the previous paragraph. I’m just saying that I think they are left-wing rather than right-wing positions, and that they don’t require me to be anti-capital.)
I disagree, but my disagreement requires explanation.
I do not mean we on the Left are/should be anti-capital in the sense of “We hate rich people” or “We hate money”. The issue is not the particular people who hold capital, but the processes of capitalism itself. To use local terminology: we can taboo the word “capitalism” and instead say, “optimization process implemented as a social system of human societies, which maximizes the accumulation of capital”.
We can even go further than just “capital” and say “liquid wealth” or “potential human-usable optimization power”, by analogy to potential energy. We then get: “optimization process, implemented as a social system, which maximizes the accumulation of potential human-usable optimization power.”
Once we have this definition, the observed behavior of capitalism comes into a much clearer light. Yes, capitalism generates massive amounts of wealth, because it you need to generate massive amounts of wealth in order to liquidate it into potential world-shaping power. Capitalism can be industrial, when money (the definitionally most-liquid form of capital) is backed by a fixed commodity (forcing the system to physically produce large sums of that quantity and trade them around in order to accumulate capital) or financial, when money is virtual (allowing the system to “eat its own tail” by accumulating vast sums of financial wealth without engaging in real production).
We can also see, in such a definition, why anti-capitalists are anti-capitalist and why I think LessWrong-style rationalists should be anti-capitalist (in the limit): it’s a human-unfriendly optimization process operating here and now! What purpose in worrying about futuristic cyber-monsters if the social monster is already biting our heads off?
In which case I suggest that “anti-capital” is a misleading term, especially when accompanied by “pro-labor”. There is a meaningful opposition between labour and capital (meaning, roughly, the people who work and the people and institutions that tell them what to do) but not between labour and capitalism; one is a class of people and the other is a process or ideology.
(For the avoidance of doubt, by “opposition” there I don’t mean that the two have to be enemies or that their interests are always opposed; I mean that they are two things of somewhat the same kind, which might sometimes come into conflict, and for which one can meaningfully ask “which do you favour?”.)
Yes, it is—but, just as with the prospect of AI, I suggest that the question to ask might not be “how can we defeat this powerful hostile thing?” but “how can we stop this powerful thing being hostile and make it act for our benefit?”. The answer might turn out to be that we can’t—that no broadly capitalist system can really produce a society that works well for anyone other than the favoured few. But I wouldn’t bet on it. Not least because the actually-existing societies that seem to do best at providing a decent life for most of their people are broadly capitalist, with various mechanisms attached that try to fix raw capitalism’s tendency to screw over all but the wealthiest.
It’s worse than this. Capitalism only even works for the particular capitalists on a temporary basis. As the system works, the class of people owning any capital at all is narrowed, which Marx called “proletarianization” (to wit: owners of small shops are pushed out by, say, Wal-Mart, and thus forced to become wage-laborers instead). To the extent that capitalism is doing something decent for humans, this is fine; to the extent capitalism is just a big societal paper-clipper, we vitally need to stop it.
I disagree slightly: AI is far more beneficial than capitalism ;-). AI is a blank optimization process, so to speak, an AIXI implementation doesn’t come with an unfriendly utility function built-in, you have to add one and then unleash it yourself. With AI there at least exists the possibility of specifying Friendliness and getting it right; the “evil by default” behavior isn’t some cosmic force that hates us, it’s just that we only like a tiny subset of possible universes.
I think we need to speak seriously about the varieties of social optimization processes.
I agree that social democracy has produced the best observed results for human beings, and in fact contains explicit mechanisms (ie: democratic participation in allocation of the means of production) for ensuring human-friendliness. I also wish to note that markets should be considered a mere component of capitalism, and that pro-capitalist ideologues who focus primarily on markets are, essentially, rather like mechanics who focus on getting the greatest horsepower rather than on what the engine is for. So we can assume that the category of human-friendly economic systems contains at least social democracy, and also probably cooperative-based market systems, syndicalism, possibly democratic state-socialism, commons trust-based systems, and many others.
However, there are many variables that go into a market system. What we currently have is neoliberal financialized capitalism: liberalism level = state compels labor but subsidizes capital accumulation, definition of money to be accumulated = virtual credit-money rather than industrial production, allocation of the means of production = private profit-maximizing companies, donation-funded NGOs, state agencies, and almost nothing else.
Slavoj Zizek said in 2011, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. David Graeber has characterized neoliberalism as an ideology which, when given the choice between making capitalism seem the only possible economic system and making capitalism a long-term viable economic system, will always choose the former. It is not enough to simply rail on behalf of “free markets” or “workers’ revolutions”, we need to be rationally unpacking the variables that make social optimization processes function one way or another, and determining what values for those parameters result in something we actually like.
It is not enough to scream, “Another world is possible!” Dozens of other worlds are possible, which is why it’s imperative to stop pretending that this is the only or ideal world despite the fact that so many don’t like living here.
I think what you go on to describe is part of what I meant by “[doesn’t] work[] well for anyone other than the favoured few”. Indeed, the identity of the favoured few changes over time—though typically the really favoured are quite safe for a good while.
AI, at the moment, isn’t anything. (Or, rather, it’s a term that’s sometimes applied to a wide variety of things, mostly beneficial but nothing to do with what we both mean by AI in this context.) If and when “real” AI arrives, it has the potential to do either a lot more good than capitalism or a lot more harm or both.
No. “AI” as such doesn’t say what’s being optimized, but any actual instance of AI will be optimizing for some specific thing(s) (or acting in some specific ways, or whatever; it might be an optimization process only somewhat metaphorically). A genuinely blank optimization process wouldn’t actually do anything.
I agree that more details of the merit function are built into the term “capitalism” than into the term “AI”. But I bet that a randomly chosen merit function is a lot worse than capitalism’s. Capitalism isn’t a cosmic force that hates you any more than AI is. You’re just (if I may repurpose an aphorism of Eliezer’s) in possession of dollars it can use for something else.
If you’re reasonably content with social democracy then I don’t see how you can both hold that capitalism is intrinsically disastrous and hostile and agree with Žižek that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than of capitalism. The end of capitalism might look like turning everywhere into Sweden. That might be difficult to achieve, but it’s not harder to imagine than the end of the world.
We seem to have drifted rather a long way from the original point at issue, namely whether being politically on the left requires one to be “anti-capital”. I haven’t seen anything so far to change my opinion that it doesn’t. Opposed to some important features fo neoliberal financialized capitalism, by all means. Opposed to capital (especially in the sense in which that’s naturally contrasted with “labour”), not so much.
Walmart’s low wage workers would disappear, drop dead, if not for the government subsidy? Billions of people survive on $2/day or less WITHOUT medicaid or other government subsidies. At more than $50/day in the US, survival is NOT the issue with minimum wage and government subsidies.
Billions of people survive on $2/day in places where the cost of living is adjusted to incomes that low. They survive, by and large, in such conditions that they are often willing to do nearly anything (including things we would consider ourselves in the First World much too good for, like working for organized crime syndicates) to move up beyond that income bracket.
You need to account for the cost of living in the US, especially the cost of housing, since one can be arrested for not having any.
That’s actually a fun statement!
1) Many people getting this far in this thread will be surprised to learn the the First World does not have organized crime!
2) it is widely stated that the source of a disproportionate number of criminals in our society are unemployed “lower class” youth, where for these purposes if is sufficient to read “lower class” as meaning hard-to-employ.
THere are a bunch of homeless people in Sandy Eggo (where I live) that manage to evade police. Are you SURE being homeless is a crime?