What Makes People Do What They Do? (2013)
freakonomics.com
freakonomics.com
For insurance they put a sizeable early leave monetary penalty into the contract. I thought just giving my word would be sufficient but I had no plans to leave so didn't matter either way.
During the contract I did well on an online programming contest that turned out to be a recruiting tool. I was made a now or never offer I shouldn't refuse but I did explaining that I was committed to my current contract. When discussed, they we're willing to payout the penalty to have me start earlier.
At this point I thought hard about my personal ethics on this and it came down to if it was based on trust, I would have stuck it out to the end but since they made it monetary I was playing by their set out rules and had no qualms (well maybe still a little) about going before the end.
Money is a type of distilled power, but it's often better to use non-monetary power to influence behavior if possible.
Furthermore, this article isn't at all about finding "a way out of Capitalism". It just shows that to a certain degree, people value not being burdened with guilt.
Does that mean a society would work without money, and with people just "doing the right thing" so as not to be burdened with the guilt of not having done the right thing?
No. History has shown — over and over — that this just does not work.
If your idea of human potential is an iPhone and an app for controlling your washing machine from the sofa, you're going to disagree with this.
If your idea of human potential is a peaceful and sustainable culture with the resources to maximise education, personal inventiveness, and creativity; to make consistently game-changing leaps in scientific understanding; and to colonise the solar system, you're not going to be quite as impressed.
The idea that there's a trade-off between money and "people doing the right thing" is not convincing.
Belonging to a successful culture requires some form of dues-paying. That's not avoidable.
The challenge is to make sure that the dues aren't just a tithe to bad-actor opportunists - which is the basis of the current system, especially in the US - but provide unquestionable economy-of-scale opportunities and benefits that are disproportionate to their "cost" - however that cost is realised in practice.
Trade has also done more than anything else to keep nations at peace. It’s not just apps and iPhones, and it reveals your naïveté for having suggested it.
Before capitalism, violence used to solve more problems than any other means.
Slavery also lifted people out of poverty. Because, you know, the slaves weren't considered 'people'.
I'm not suggesting it does. There might well be a system that works more favourably, but I don't know what that would look like and I have never heard anyone suggest anything that isn't some flavour of Communism hiding behind the extremely arrogant position of "but it's never been tried! It would work if we did it my way!".
Many philosophers in normative social theory would argue that we have to treat their proposed societies as hypotheses. Consider the analogy to Fermat's Last Theorem - although for hundreds of years we tried to crack its proof, many proofs ended disastrously, but some of them actually opened up whole new areas of mathematics despite not reaching their goal. As such, they also served as learning experiences.
I think the same can be said for normative social theory.
A few fun facts:
At the height of the Genocide Ukrainians were dying at a rate of 25,000 per day.
Nearly 1 in 4 rural Ukrainians died as a direct result.
The Soviets dumped 1.7 million tons of grain on Western markets during the Genocide amounting to nearly 1/5 of a ton of grain was exported for each person who died of starvation.
Over 3,000,000 children born between 1932-1933 died of starvation.
I would rather just start shooting right now than risk a single day under communism in any form. Right. Now.
In current days Venezuelans are re-living the horror. The hell they are living there, it is beyond comprehension.
Communism's historic death toll is far from encouraging either.
> as is the disdain for "It would work if we did it my way!"
That "my way" invariably boils down to "oh, people just wouldn't be corrupt if I'm in charge." That's the recurring utopian vision. Then when it doesn't exactly go to plan, you get forced labour, internment, and executions.
> The whole concept of "working if we do it my way" is the history of all mathematics
Completely irrelevant.
I do not dispute death tolls, but I do dispute the idea that you should argue using this point in favour of capitalism, which has similar consequences out of issues such as structural poverty and imperialism.
>"oh, people just wouldn't be corrupt if I'm in charge."
No serious academic Communist/Marxist/Socialist claims this. The fact you think that's what the claim is shows that you get more information about arguments for Communism from Internet memes and fora than you do from people who work with the topic.
>Completely irrelevant.
No it's not. Your point was that "it'll work my way" is fallacious logic. My retort was that this same logic is used in all normative social theory and indeed many other areas of human endeavour too.
Ah, yes. Quite so.
Tell me, must a "serious" academic Communist also be a True Scotsman?
I often hear this, but is it really true?
The millions lifted from poverty in USSR and China, was not due to capitalism.
How many people do you think control all of the media? Do you think the goals of these 0.00001% are aligned with ours?
The American laissez faire system seems to be falling apart at the seams. Power and wealth is becoming more concentrated while seeking to solidify that position through limiting the freedoms of the lower classes.
Regular people are burdened with student debt and health care costs all within a back drop of little to no social support. Unions striking for better working conditions have their corporate controlled health insurance stripped away. Banks write balance sheets as they see fit, devaluing your wealth and causing financial crises. The list goes on.
Being forced in to wage slavery to survive in this system doesn't sound particularly free.
That's like saying I was forced into heroin addiction because I felt bad. Let's be real for a second: people have choices, and the concept of being forced to do something or be something simply does not exist. Or, alternatively, you could say that everyone is forced to do everything they do. But either way, it means the same thing.
The article points out what happens if you put a monetary value on it. In this case perverting the relationship between the parents and the caretakers, by removing empathy and introducing economic status into the equation.
A way out of capitalism is the realization that physical resources are always worth more than money. How to make that concept scale, I don't know, but it gives me hope to see a daycare center take a small step towards that direction.