[Gnu-arch-users] [OT] responsibilities of the human society

[Roman Zippel]

Hi,

On Sun, 7 Dec 2003, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

>     Roman> This is the same ignorance of social realities as one can
>     Roman> find with Ayn Rand. It completely ignores the social effect
>     Roman> of economic forces.
>
> No, it does not.  I do not reach the same conclusions that Ayn Rand
> does, but I am not _ignoring_ the social effect of economic forces,
> either.  What I am doing is equating the moral irresponsibility of the
> poor who consistently vote for those who bribe them with the moral
> irresponsibility of those who shelter under the umbrella of the
> "invisible hand."  That's a somewhat spurious procedure, but I think
> it's (literally) good enough for government work.

You blame the poor for being poor, this _is_ ignoring social realities.
You expect from the poor to do A to get B and if they don't do A as you
want, you label them as "morally irresponsible". Far more interesting
would be a look at why the poor keep doing C instead and understanding the
forces that keep them from doing A. I don't see you doing this and just
shifting around blame is only pub talk (even if it's done at an
intellectual level) and achieves as much.

>     Roman> We have reached a higly specialized society,
>     Roman> which requires years of education and socialization. One
>     Roman> cannot simply abandon this. What you call "bribes", is the
>     Roman> choice between a comfortable life and a failed
>     Roman> existence.
>
> rms and Tom are neither comfortable nor failed.  Nor does one have to
> fight the good fight 24 hours a day, as they do.  The choice you
> present is a straw man.

I dramatised, but it's not a straw men. You cannot pick a few exceptions
(your straw men) to draw conclusions for the complete group. Why does the
average member of that group keeps doing, what everyone else is doing? A
look at this would result in better understanding of the social realities,
what keeps them on the one hand so stable and what is required to change
the behaviour of the group.

>     Roman> Social responsibility also implies the means to do so,
>     Roman> without the resources to act responsible, it cannot be much
>     Roman> more than helpless gesture.
>
> In the U.S. the median family by income has plenty of resources to
> take more responsibility than it does.

Oh, is that why the private debt reaches new records every year? ;-)
The question is why are they doing this and what forces them to do this?
For an economist it's easy to say "nothing", as they usually live in a
different world of superhuman beings, who have an absolute free will,
making decisions based on cold, hard facts and if their world doesn't
match reality, then reality is of course at fault and not their model.

> We _can_ (economically) ask for more social responsibility from the
> non-rich, at the same time that we ask for it from the rich.  Whether
> that's what we should do is an open question, but I think it's the
> right way forward.

So all we need to do is to spend our money a bit differently to save the
world? Maybe you're forgetting that the current economic system favours
the strong participants. The easy answer is usually that the weak should
combine their forces to overpower the strong, but what should happen next?
What should prevent the weak from separating again into strong and weak
participants and let the cycle begin again? One possibility which was
tried in eastern europe is to keep everyone from getting too strong, but
it didn't overcome the system, it merely kept it from working with the
known results.
The kind of social responsibility you demand here, is useful to fix the
worst emergencies, but it's not a solution, as it will always reproduce
the problems after a temporary relief.

>     Roman> The individual has to learn again to act socially
>     Roman> responsible, what also includes a socially responsible use
>     Roman> of available resources and not that the majority of
>     Roman> resources are used for a relative minority. This will not
>     Roman> be an easy process, as the "bribes" are so much more
>     Roman> tempting.
>
> Isn't that exactly what _I_ said?

No, because I'm not talking about monetary resources, I'm talking about
natural resources (or property if you want). As long as a minority owns
the majority of resources, they can also control how these resources are
used. The market mechanisms don't leave much room for social responsible
use of these resources and the discrepancy between the group of the people
in need and the ones who can pay is getting worse and worse.
An interesting example is the behaviour of the pharmaceutical industry
about aids medicine for africa. Does it make economical sense to give away
the medicine or even to allow them to produce generics themselves? How
should social responsible behaviour look like? Should we all collect
money, so we can buy it for exorbitant prices? Or should they be forced to
forgo the profit, but what economic sense would that make (and even worse
if this getting a habit)?

>     Roman> It would be a big mistake to think that with the burst of
>     Roman> the "new economy" bubble the worst is already over.
>
> True, but your reasons are entirely wrong.  The reason that things are
> going to get worse (for Americans) is that there are 1 billion Chinese
> and 1 billion Indians, each as smart as any other human being, in
> societies with traditions of good education that are rapidly gathering
> the resources to implement good education on that scale, but they
> consider an income 1/20 of the advanced economy median princely.
>
> In other words, what should scare you is not market failure, but the
> "normal" functioning of a well-ordered labor market.

Actually it's the market that works so well, that soon won't be enough
left to work with (by making more and more labour unprofitable, as I wrote
directly before above sentence).
Asia is extremely dependent on the export and they produce far more than
they are able to afford to consume themself. There is a reason they are
buying the dollar to support its value. On the other hand Americas stock
market is still massively overrated, America has become the biggest
conasumer and is living vastly behond its possibilities, it's rather
unclear how it wants to put their finances in order. Should it continue
consuming? How will it pay for it? Should it stop consuming? The rest of
the world would lose its best customer.

> The problem that we face is that we have no known mechanism other than
> the market for managing the purely economic side of the global
> village,

That's because we didn't need one so far, the social problems haven't
become big enough yet, but the social systems are about to collapse and
the governments have become to powerless to do anything about it. What
happens if we have reached such a productivity level that there simply
isn't enough work for everyone, whose responsibility should it be take
care of them and what rights should these "redundants" have?

bye, Roman