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Comment by normalnorm | Hacker News Reader

> Modern medicine, with the way hospitals and health insurance are run, do not and cannot address, for economic reasons, a pretty important aspect, albeit subjective, which is well-being.

The "economic reasons" are just the preferences of the rich & powerful. Resources could be allocated in other ways. It is just that those that call the shots are not interested. In the US, they also managed to convince a large part of the population to act against its own interests.

I dream of an economic system that serves human beings instead of the numerical abstractions behind which the rich and powerful hide their extreme selfishness.

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  > I dream of an economic system that serves human beings instead
  > of the numerical abstractions behind which the rich and
  > powerful hide their extreme selfishness.

So did Gene Roddenberry. Most of his work is based on that premise.

He was not alone in literature of dreaming of a socialist utopia, enforced by a military dictatorship (Starfleet, in this instance).

The Culture novels also dive deeply here, and are IMO better literature, despite both canons carefully avoiding the sticky problems associated with scarce or finite resources (which is easy to avoid in storytelling if not philosophy, once you’ve gone post-scarcity). I think Roddenberry patched over it by not having precious metals being able to be produced by replicators, so the rest of the unwashed not-military-dictatorship can still engage in trade.

I’ve still never seen a solution to post-scarcity finite resource allocation, though. Banks dodged it wholly for the Culture. Not even Doctorow, who grazed up against it in Down and Out, has tackled it head-on. You can’t really have eg Georgism if you don’t have a system of money.

I've heard this before .. in his books so the senior officers get luxurious quarters as they did in the TV series? That seems to be a contrast with basic egalitarianism?

Not sure about TOS as I didn't watch much of it, but from TNG onwards, everyone has luxury quarters on Starfleet starships, of roughly equivalent size. I remember watching some youtuber calculating how much space of Enterprise-D is used for various purposes; from there I've learned that a typical quarter would be ~35 sqm if you were single, 45 sqm if you were a family.

(With the exception of the Defiant, TNG-era Starfleet ships tended to be luxury liners.)

I dream of a species which doesn't use tribal psychology to explain complex phenomena.

Yes yes, "the rich and powerful" are "greedy and selfish". Yes yes, they brainwashed everyone.

You look at limited resources and are disheartened by your conspiratorial fantasies explaining their limitation.

I look at you and I'm disheartened that you mistake limitation for conspiracy, and sustainable distribution for greed.

What a disappointing species -- only able to think clearly and accurately in a jungle. The tools of our thought are stupid instruments for explaining a world of billions. When faced with difficult choices we retreat from understanding them into gossip, conspiracy and dumb outrage.

Couldn't the truth be somewhere in the middle?

Clearly both are different ways of looking at the same phenomenon. Emphasizing different parts of the whole truth.

Disappointment is good. It keeps us (atleast some) looking for ways to change, upgrade those tools of thought, push against those limitations and breakthrough.

But it's not the only driver, so it's not necessary. Perhaps it's the strongest motivator, but I look for improvements in many things, often they're systems I don't use or products I'll never be able to afford. It's not disappointment that drives that (arguably it might be historic disappointment).

"economic reasons", I'm glad I'm not the only one that gets triggered by a formulation like that.

There is such thing as "economic reasons", it's probably the shortest way to describe "prioritization of what's most demanded, under condition of limited resources". Demand is expressed with money, which rich have more of, so in this way, it boils down to preferences of the richest people in the group of facility's customers; but this is an equivalent to observing that market isn't democracy.

You dream of Capitalism?

No, of course not. People who say "an economic system that serves human beings" never mean an economic system that actually serves human beings... except in the "To Serve Man" sense.

>I dream of an economic system that serves human beings instead of the numerical abstractions behind which the rich and powerful hide their extreme selfishness.

This is what capitalism is in its essence - a complex decentralised pricing mechanism where every human's choices is taken into account on the free market. The problem is that it has been corrupted by cronyism which has indirectly destroyed the human element of it (through centralisation and the formation of unnatural state-sanctioned monopolies and rent-seekers) and instead, as you put it, abstracted people into numbers.

I don't think anyone actually wants to be treated as a number, and I strongly believe that personal and bespoke service is a quality that most people seek in the services they choose (especially medical and caregiving services). These preferences would normally provide strong competitive pressures. However, in the medical field at least, enormous barriers of entry (largely instituted and enforced by the state) has fortified incumbent corporations and removed the competitive pressure that startups and newcomers would provide. Just look at medical education/licensing and the enormous costs involved.

When it's good we call it self-interest. When it's bad we call it cronyism.

We define capitalism in terms of markets because we would rather not discuss the more fundamental question of who owns what.

When capitalism produces spectacular exaggerations of human cruelty, it has been corrupted. When a socialist system produces it, it is intrinsic.

> When capitalism produces spectacular exaggerations of human cruelty, it has been corrupted. When a socialist system produces it, it is intrinsic.

Nobody blame socialism for cruelty in good faith. Cruelty has nothing to do with economic system.

What socialism (or any government trying to replace or severely restrict private sector) really does way more worse is empty shelves, deficit and terrible recourse misallocation.

There are more fundamental questions than the leisure ones like "who ownes what". Such as how come my parents lived in the second largest economy in terms of GDP and only few years later the whole country had nothing to eat, and we had a humanitarian crisis without any war or natural calamity.

> This is what capitalism is in its essence - a complex decentralised pricing mechanism where every human's choices is taken into account on the free market.

That's what capitalism is in a world populated by Homo economicus. We have to deal with it in a world populated by Homo sapiens, who are notably clumsy at separating capital allocation concerns from social dominance concerns (when we even bother to try).

There's also the small matter of us valuing ourselves rather highly regardless of whether there's a million others like us that could equally create more wealth for which ever capitalist we'd have the misfortune of being owned by.

Some people may be content to consider themselves grist for the capitalist mill, but some very few I imagine.

> This is what capitalism is in its essence

Whose capitalism? We (americans anyway) live in a corporate welfare state, and the market isn't even remotely "free."

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