When the commons are small enough, community pressure can work just as well. The issue is largely that of scaling. Communism works pretty well inside a nuclear family. Somewhat less well but sort of doable between roommates who are good friends. After careful selection of truly communal minded people, it can be stretched to the Dunbar number i.e. the kibbutz movement. Beyond that number, not at all.
I have this impression that succesful capitalisms often rely in microcommunisms on the nuclear family, extended family, close friends, or old-employees-who-are-almost-family-now level. When you have to transact for everything, things get tiresome and wasteful quickly. So it is useful to have small units of highly communal minded people work together and not transact but rather have on their micro level a to each according to needs, from each according to ability attitude (this is how a normal family works) because they know each other very well and know their needs and abilities, they cannot really be faked. And transacting being done between these small groups, not between individuals.
Ironically, also tragically, I think the problems of Eastern Europe partially come from Soviet type communism breaking down these natural microcommunisms, so now you see all these sad things like siblings fighting over inheritance instead of solving it amiably, or even tiny businesses operating on the boss gives orders to everybody level instead of the everybody notices what needs to be done and does it level (which would be natural for a family type small business where people are on good relations). This saps energy and effort away from focusing on transacting where it needs to be focused on i.e. between these groups.
Look, the fact that a given group of people can do X in a given situation is not a solution to other people doing Y in another situation. Just because you or I would not litter anyway, it does not mean no-littering signs are unnecessary nor that there is not a difficulty with enforcing them. It is different people, probably in different situations, circumstances, even with different litter.
This is a common problem IMHO and generally I think the best conceptual model is to think that the good part and bad parts of human nature don’t cancel each other out, they exist side by side. So for example power-hunger or aggression and charitability are both being parts of human nature, but not canceling each other out, but operating side by side.
Another big problem is that unregulated capitalism will happily let me become sick/homeless/dead, if the market price of my labor is lower than the minimum required to keep me healthy/housed/alive.
A couple days ago I was hanging out with some friends and we watched this new movie “Nightcrawler”. It’s about a “creepy” guy. The first scene of the movie is him begging for a job or even an unpaid internship, and being turned down. Then he turns to a “creepy” occupation to keep himself alive, and the general tone of the movie is “c’mon everybody let’s hate him”. Each of us, completely independently, had a reaction more like “WTF America, you’re using money as a motivator and then you act offended when people go to extremes?”
In technical terms, capitalism provably maximizes economic efficiency under certain assumptions, but doesn’t maximize aggregate utility under the same assumptions. These two things are not the same, because money has diminishing marginal utility. If poor Alice needs a loaf of bread to survive, but rich Bob can pay more for the loaf because he enjoys watching bread burn, then Alice just dies. A centrally planned system of 1 loaf per person would’ve worked better in this case.
The biggest issue I see with unregulated capitalism is its poor handling of the tragedy of the commons. (in the shape of global resources)
Um, the capitalist solution is to privatize and fence the commons. This isn’t always practical but I’ve yet to see another approach that works.
When the commons are small enough, community pressure can work just as well. The issue is largely that of scaling. Communism works pretty well inside a nuclear family. Somewhat less well but sort of doable between roommates who are good friends. After careful selection of truly communal minded people, it can be stretched to the Dunbar number i.e. the kibbutz movement. Beyond that number, not at all.
I have this impression that succesful capitalisms often rely in microcommunisms on the nuclear family, extended family, close friends, or old-employees-who-are-almost-family-now level. When you have to transact for everything, things get tiresome and wasteful quickly. So it is useful to have small units of highly communal minded people work together and not transact but rather have on their micro level a to each according to needs, from each according to ability attitude (this is how a normal family works) because they know each other very well and know their needs and abilities, they cannot really be faked. And transacting being done between these small groups, not between individuals.
Ironically, also tragically, I think the problems of Eastern Europe partially come from Soviet type communism breaking down these natural microcommunisms, so now you see all these sad things like siblings fighting over inheritance instead of solving it amiably, or even tiny businesses operating on the boss gives orders to everybody level instead of the everybody notices what needs to be done and does it level (which would be natural for a family type small business where people are on good relations). This saps energy and effort away from focusing on transacting where it needs to be focused on i.e. between these groups.
The commons itself works. Read the ‘Comedy of the commons’ which was written as an answer to Garret Hardin’s ‘tragedy of the commons’.
Look, the fact that a given group of people can do X in a given situation is not a solution to other people doing Y in another situation. Just because you or I would not litter anyway, it does not mean no-littering signs are unnecessary nor that there is not a difficulty with enforcing them. It is different people, probably in different situations, circumstances, even with different litter.
This is a common problem IMHO and generally I think the best conceptual model is to think that the good part and bad parts of human nature don’t cancel each other out, they exist side by side. So for example power-hunger or aggression and charitability are both being parts of human nature, but not canceling each other out, but operating side by side.
I think this lecture and paper might better get across what I mean: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2009/ostrom_lecture.pdf http://www.kuhlen.name/MATERIALIEN/eDok/governing_the_commons1.pdf That is, I am advocating a certain type of management rather than just hand waving it away and saying ‘social guidelines will make it work’,
The issue is that the solution to tragedy of the commons situations always seems to be moving more things into “the commons”.
Yeah, that’s one big problem.
Another big problem is that unregulated capitalism will happily let me become sick/homeless/dead, if the market price of my labor is lower than the minimum required to keep me healthy/housed/alive.
A couple days ago I was hanging out with some friends and we watched this new movie “Nightcrawler”. It’s about a “creepy” guy. The first scene of the movie is him begging for a job or even an unpaid internship, and being turned down. Then he turns to a “creepy” occupation to keep himself alive, and the general tone of the movie is “c’mon everybody let’s hate him”. Each of us, completely independently, had a reaction more like “WTF America, you’re using money as a motivator and then you act offended when people go to extremes?”
In technical terms, capitalism provably maximizes economic efficiency under certain assumptions, but doesn’t maximize aggregate utility under the same assumptions. These two things are not the same, because money has diminishing marginal utility. If poor Alice needs a loaf of bread to survive, but rich Bob can pay more for the loaf because he enjoys watching bread burn, then Alice just dies. A centrally planned system of 1 loaf per person would’ve worked better in this case.