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gjm comments on Estimate the Cost of Immortality - Less Wrong Discussion
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There's nothing in the scenario described by Xyrik, or the scenario described by Tem42, that says the people involved are doing only "meaningful conscious-expanding profound activities" and neglecting the necessities of life. (Nor, so far as I know, was that the intention of Marx whom you cited as a prominent exponent of similar ideas.)
Trying to do what Xyrik describes might produce a lot of starving-to-death (1) because no one has yet come up with a coordination mechanism better than markets for deciding how much effort to put into what, and (2) because many people will not in fact want to work hard without the prospect of personal gain. But #1 has nothing to do with what you describe here and #2 amounts to considering a different more plausible scenario rather than the (admittedly unlikely) one raised by Xyrik.
The whole point of the communist paradise is freedom from need. That, as you correctly point out, leads to an incentives problem and a coordination problem. The lack of incentives (which, I think, exists in Xyrik's scenario as the alternatives are... much less palatable) leads to people over-doing pleasant things (meaningful, profound, conscious-expanding -- or simply hedonic) and under-doing unpleasant things (e.g. mucking in the dirt). At the current level of technology a society without appropriate incentives will soon start to starve.
It works for small communities which mooch off larger societies (hippy communes, Burning Man, etc.), but convert the entire world to this system and I would recommend getting a lot of ammo and beans ASAP.
Perhaps. (I'm not convinced; I can imagine someone saying "In a communist system we will all be slightly poorer because central planning doesn't work as well as markets, but it would be worth it because of the reduction in inequality" or "... because we would all have the lovely warm glow of knowing we were working together" or something. For the avoidance of doubt, I am not agreeing with those claims.)
My interpretation of Xyrik's question was more like "Imagine that by some unspecified magic we have solved that problem, so that everyone willingly pitches in to do their bit. What are the drawbacks then?"
I agree that what we're then being asked to postulate is really improbable, and can't think of any plausible non-horrible ways to make it so, but I think the question is a reasonable one to ask anyway. (E.g., perhaps Xyrik is writing some science fiction about a hypothetical race genetically engineered to be much more willing to cooperate with one another than humans typically are, and wants to know what might happen if they tried communism.)
And I agree that if Xyrik were proposing to try this on a large scale in the real world the appropriate response would be somewhere between laughter and terror, depending on our estimation of how far s/he could actually get in making it happen. But that's not the question at issue.
Depends on the nature of the magic. Most of the obvious ones I can think of basically require the destruction of all individuality.
Using Marxist terminology, that's not communism, that's mere socialism. Communism is pretty much defined by "To each according to his need".
I don't see this anywhere in Xyrik's comment. I am not sure that at the time of writing it he was even aware of the incentives problem.
And once you start specifying elven magic as the reason a particular problem doesn't exist, you can't have any unsolvable problems because elven magic, done.
It's what I took this to mean:
but maybe you understood it differently.
I don't see any obvious absurdity about saying "suppose problem A only resolved by elven magic; then what would happen to problems B, C, and D?".
I do see an obvious incoherence. Xyrik's scenario was;
This is a highly complex scenario, made apparently simple because the complexity is hidden inside the words. What is the problem A that is the only thing hypothetically solved? The "get rid of the concept of money or currency", the "pooling collective resources and ideas", the "without worrying about who owes who". What do these look like -- what do you see if you follow a few people around in the hypothetical world? What do these phrases mean, to be able to say, these things B, C, and D are not part of that? How can you say what would happen to them, without any description of what the elven magic actually did to produce something described by A?
The scenario is too vague for these questions to be answered.
Yup, agreed, it's vague and that's bad. This seems to me an entirely different objection from "there's no point saying 'suppose such-and-such is dealt with by elven magic' because elven magic could solve all the other problems too".
I'm not sure I understand your objection. I wasn't imagining anything other than an attempt at "To each according to his need". That might still leave many people poorer than under capitalism. (I said "all" but that was silly, and maybe that's the cause of any misunderstanding; I should have said something like "we will collectively be slightly poorer", which is what I actually meant.)
Nope. The promise of communism is the satisfaction of all your needs, not just satisfaction of what we can afford to, given the limited amount of stuff/services which we have available. It is supposed to be a place of plenty, not just a place where thin gruel is shared fairly.
I suppose you can, if you want, define "communism" so narrowly that nothing counts as communism unless it brings about an early paradise of perfect plenty. To me, that seems much too narrow a definition.
Imagine that someone tells Karl Marx that the economic system he advocates will not bring about a permanent end to all kinds of want. Which is the more likely response, supposing he believes them (of at least is willing, arguendo, to stipulate that they're right)? "Oh, then it turns out that what I've been advocating isn't communism after all" or "Oh, then it turns out that communism doesn't work as well as I hoped"?
This is the canonical, traditional, classic, orthodox, and correct definition of communism in Marxism.
I feel we're veering into the If my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle territory...
I am far from being an expert on Marxism. But my impression is that what you say is at best an oversimplification. For instance, in the Communist Manifesto I find no claim that nothing should be called communism unless it successfully offers limitless plenty to all. I do find things like this:
and this:
You will notice that nowhere in that second quotation does he add "3. Communists believe that they will successfully bring about an end to all forms of economic scarcity.". (So: Marx may perhaps have believed that an end to scarcity was inevitable, or something of the kind, but he doesn't appear to have thought that such a belief is a requirement for someone to be called a communist.)
I don't (of course) deny that an end to scarcity was a goal of communism. For that matter, it is (or should be) a goal of capitalism too. And Marx, fond as he was of the idea that his preferred system was a matter of historical inevitability, may well have believed -- or at least found it useful to say -- that when communism is fully implemented scarcity will be at an end. But none of that is the same as saying that if you abolish private property, social class, etc., and this regrettably fails to bring about a total end to scarcity, then what you did wasn't communism after all.
First, let me point out that there is a terminological mess here. I was careful to specify that I was talking in Marxist terms which do not match terms used in contemporary Western political discourse. Note, by the way, that we are not talking about theories (one of which is named "communism"), but about forms of society.
Marxists call "communism" a particular form of future society which has never (yet) been realized. It's an aspirational form, the carrot in front of the donkey, the light at the end of the tunnel, the heaven in which the worthy will find themselves. The realized, intermediate form is called "socialism". The USSR was a socialist country.
In Western political talk, "communism" and "communist" refers to real societies like Soviet Russia and Communist (!) China, while "socialism" means a capitalist state with a generous welfare system, e.g. Sweden.
In any case, a Google search will give you lots of Marxist definitions of communism. Let me quote you Wikipedia to start:
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It wasn't. The Russians, for example, who abolished private property, etc. did not call their society "communist". They called it "socialist" and said that they are only building communism.
That was indeed what I was proposing. Like I said, this system were to assume that somehow humans solved that problem and are all willing to pitch in. I guess that would probably take some severe altering to our brains, potentially do the point to which we're all some hive-mind, which would be a debatable downside.
Basically the idea is that everyone realizes that if we do this that we could vastly accelerate the speed at which we develop, and thus solve many of our problems such as over-population, food, etc. by spreading among the stars, after which people could once again live a more free life and create their own systems, including but not requiring a governing body.
Do what? Let's suppose we abolish money this evening. What are you going to do tomorrow?
This seems obviously, patently false to me.
Even if you have in mind a far-reaching remaking of humanity into enthusiastic slaves of some god-like entity, I don't think that it would either "vastly accelerate the speed" or would lead to "more free life" in the future.
Yet you present no arguments why you believe such as acceleration will happen. Especially when it comes to the productions of commodieties such as food money driven markets are very efficient. The market consistently manages to kill companies that don't effectively produce goods.
The problem with that viewpoint is that you assume that the only reason - or, even, the most important reason - that people work is to make money.
But our understanding of human behavior tells us that other factors like status games, feelings of personal achievement or 'having a purpose in life', and so on are equally as important, if not more important, than the money-making aspect of work. Further, something that someone considers 'work' could be considered enjoyment by someone else.
Believe it or not, many people farm or tend gardens or animals simply because they enjoy doing so. They may even give away their produce for free. I currently have several trees and I pick and give away their fruit for free. I used to have chickens and I gave away their eggs for free. Both of these I did because I enjoyed doing them, and the hard aspects of the work averaged out. Of course I am not saying that a system based on everyone doing this would be sustainable. It wouldn't. It would probably lead to food shortages. However, it offers a counterpoint to the idea that humans will always choose meditation or video games or somesuch over 'mucking in the dirt' if given the choice.
I think Xyrik's scenario is too radical but a system of universal basic income where everyone gets a minimal amount of money sufficient for survival is quite tenable and sustainable. In such a system, you don't have to work to survive, but working produces a better, more satisfactory form of survival. Experience shows that systems like these do not run into problems of food shortages (in fact quite the contrary).
No, I do not. You're wrong.
I assume that the work that people do for money is important for the society and that a lot of it wouldn't get done if people worked just for pleasure. Basically, without money you'd get too many DJs and too few plumbers. Money fixes that balance problem.
Of course, so what? Small-scale agriculture is remarkably inefficient. Specifically, it cannot feed the current population.
Not always. But too few people will choose mucking in the dirt and without money I'm not sure how are you going to persuade a sufficient number of people to go and do what they don't like.
Do tell me about that experience. I'm curious.
That's a very good point, and I hadn't thought of that. This was basically why I made the post. Although I think I was mentioning somewhere that a scenario like this would only actually work if we had some AGI that could reliably judge who needed what resources when, in order to further the overall human endeavor.
Wouldn't the AGI also need the ability to compel obedience to its diktats? Or do you imagine that everyone will do whatever it tells them to do because it must be the best thing to do?
Money itself doesn't fix that balance problem. It's the allocation of money. I don't disagree with the idea that some type of work is unpleasant and necessary for society so there has to be some system of incentives to make people do that type of work. I disagree with the notion that the 'communist paradise' necessarily reduces such incentives to the point that society starves and dies.
As I said, I think Xyrik's scenario (evenly dividing wealth among everyone) is too radical. But you could definitely engineer systems where people are freed from basic survival needs yet still have incentives to work for the benefit of society. I see no contradiction here.
Again, I already mentioned this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_pilots
What actually happens is, of course, a bit different. If you take money out of the picture (as e.g. the USSR, Communist China, etc. did), another currency becomes dominant. That currency is power and the society becomes reliant on just force to make things happen. Recall that being unemployed was a criminal offense in the USSR.
Sigh. Let me quote myself from upthread:
Not at all. It's clear that you didn't even look at the examples. A lot of those examples were largely self-contained. For instance, the one in Madhya Pradesh was done on a set of villages that provided their own food and necessities.
Did they provide their own food, no trade with the outside world? I think you're mistaken.
The experiment in Madhya Pradesh provided a small unconditional cash payment to everyone in a set of villages. The outcome was entirely unsurprising -- people in those villages became a bit richer and spent that money to improve their lives.
There was some positive effect on the productivity of people in these villages -- I quote the UNICEF report:
which is fine and is a legitimate advance. However all this is, basically, injection of a bit of capital into a very very poor village and it does not tell us much about what would happen in a more advanced society with the basic income that is, presumably, sufficient to live on.
Keep in mind that basic income is redistribution -- you need to create the wealth to start with.
Indeed they did. This is mentioned in the report.
In fact cash-grant villages were more likely to grow their own food than control villages. A large part of the cash grants were spent on procuring better seeds and upgrading their livestock. Cash-grant villages were also more likely to undertake productive economic activity like starting businesses.
They did undertake trade with other villages, if they wanted to.
I think the fact that you say this hints at what may be the crux of the problem. Sure, cultural and socioeconomic differences are a huge factor, but believe it or not, 'advanced societies' do have poor people, and lots of them, and experiments like these hint that a universal basic income cannot simply be dismissed as 'eliminating incentives and leading to mass starvation.'
UBI is obviously not going to do much for rich people.
It's not clear that that the villagers were "more likely" to grow food for their own consumption rather than growing cash crops to sell. But if you want to dive into that level of detail, I would like to see the original report with all the data. I don't particulary trust this UNICEF report which looks a bit biased to me.
I'm not saying that UBI is a bad idea. I'm not saying it's a good idea, either. At this point I don't know -- I can see both good points and bad points and it's not clear to me how they will balance out in real life. I suspect the details of implementation will make a lot of difference. Those "pilots" that you mention are much too limited to draw any conclusions.
And please go easy on straw, no one claimed that UBI would lead to mass starvation. A full-blown scheme of no property, no money, etc. is likely to and that's what the "will starve" claim referred to.
What experience are you talking about in relation to a system of universal basic income?