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ChristianKl comments on Why capitalism? - Less Wrong Discussion
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It's a mistake to assume that efficiency of production isn't important because there's no money.
Social rules aren't very flexible. You could have a social rule that a person is supposed to travel at maximum two round trips by plane per year.
That would prevent overconsumption but there are people who I want to ride plains 40 per year. I want a high class Salsa dancing teacher to have the opportunity to be every weekend in a different city to teach at a different Salsa congress.
Markets that price plane rides provides the necessary flexibility of not having everybody consume the same amount and still prevent overconsumption. They also provide incentives for companies to compete with each other to be more efficient at offering plane rides.
Economies of scale mean that you get more efficiency. That means that you need less resources to get to the same result.
If that would be true than capitalism would pressure companies who want to make flats to use that technology. Currently that doesn't seem to be happening.
In fact I observe that rents around me rise rather than that housing get's cheaper.
One of the reasons that capitalism is considered to be the best economic paradigm rather than the Commons was because of an influential paper written about half a century ago called the tragedy of the commons. Another paper written later as a rebuttal was called the 'comedy of the commons' and you might want to give it a read, because it would be much better structured/backed up than my responses.
And 3D printing houses was just accomplished. Its just getting of the ground, but its expected by industry experts to make a huge impact on the construction market. If I remember rightly, its estimated that around 2025 it will become the dominant construction technique.
No, that's a very misguided view.
Capitalism is considered to be the best economic paradigm because it helped many societies generate huge amounts of wealth in reality.
hmm, i thin I phrased that poorly. What I meant to say is'X is part of the reason why the Commons was dismissed as an economic paradigm'.
You don't think the experience of Marxist countries had something to do with that? X-/
Some socialist 'countries' were successful though, on an economical point of view. Anarchists often refer to revolutionary Spain and the CNT. Although they were ultimately destroyed in war by the alliance of fashism and the moderate left, the economical development boomed during the short Republic life. Even the USSR, which is not usually considered socialist in anarchist circles (see first comment) went from an economy based on agriculture to a huge industrial power in less than 50 years.
The main reason why capitalism is considered to be good is that it works in practice. It's not about a single paper.
If you argue that efficiency of battery production isn't important, than that corresponds to waste. Not using economies of scale to produce chips and batteries means wasting resources.
I don't even argue that every commons problem should be solved by markets.
Having electricity priced by the market allows entrepreneurs to do things with electricity that 99% of the population consider a waste of energy. It's enough that the entrepreneur believes that he can make a profit with investing energy that way.
If you had social rules preventing energy waste, that's not possible. The social rules prevent the entrepreneur from doing his project. The prevent innovation that most people consider to be crazy.
SpaceX needed to get special laws passed because it couldn't simply buy the usage rights for a public beach. At the scale at which SpaceX operates that's okay. It's okay for them to go to the legislators and ask them to pass a law that gives them special rights. In a lot of cases it's not that easy for entrepreneurs to get special usage right to a public good.
It's okay that our society uses different paradigms to solve different issues.
I like David Ronfeld's IN SEARCH OF HOW SOCIETIES WORK. It illustrates how we use different paradigms of markets, hierarchies, tribes and networks to solve different issues.
It's a much better intellectual framework then to think in the Marxist terms of capitalism vs, socialism.
Could you link to source for that estimate?
Dr. Berokh Koshnevis, a professor of industrial and systems engineering in the university of Southern California, with support and funding from the US department of defence and NASA for creating techniques for 3D printing buildings was quoted as saying that after 20,000 years of human construction, 'the process of constructing buildings is about to be revolutionised' link:http://singularityhub.com/2012/08/22/3d-printers-may-someday-construct-homes-in-less-than-a-day/ It should give you all the info you asked for.
There is a different issue with construction, which Robert Heinlein pointed out 70 years ago. Basically imagine that buying a car would mean a bunch of workmen going to your site and hand assembling one there. How inefficient it would be. I.e. the issue is the lack of mass manufacturing of (obviously modular) houses from subassemblies, like every sane manufacturing process.
Of course prefabs exist but they should have became the dominant model long ago.
3D printing is another custom-assembly thing at the end. Why can't we just prefab?