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The root of the problem is the question of whether social values should have weight in a situation of limited supply, ie. when taken to its extreme: should one person be allowed to fuck up the whole planet because they have more monopoly money, thereby destroying the whole species and all future generations.

Conventional capitalists will say yes without thinking, then spout whatever view-confirming stuff they can find (like this URL). Market-libertarians say a market will evolve to cater for the resource impacted that all people value, though we haven't actually seen that happen yet (observe the failure of the carbon credit scheme). Socialists say yes, we should treat one another with respect because fundamentally we're all in this together.

All views have some credence.



No, that is not the root of the problem at all.

The root of the problem is that humans have evolved anti-market biases that served us well when living in tribal communes but which are Pareto inefficient when living in large billion person societies.


I'd call that a capitalist view. In all its brevity, it exhibits one of the absolute top fallacies of capitalist thinking when in "have evolved anti-market biases" you allude to markets being some kind of 'natural' state of affairs. This falsity was neatly summed up by George Soros: Classical economics is based on a false analogy with Newtonian physics... by which he means, if you listen to or read any of his numerous interviews, that there is no 'equilibrium' and self-regulating nature of the market is fundamentally more a well-spun, oft-repeated tale than a self-evident truth. Further smackdown can be applied through reading Debt: The First 5000 Years (which conventional capitalist economists positively hate).

Leaving that aside, you'll note that I alluded to the ugly truth (the world is inherently limited; ie. there's sure to be critical resource shortages given current trajectories). From my perspective, any so-called anti-market bias will evolve right about the time we see mass starvations due to stupid short-sighted environmental management, potable water shortages, etc. - ie. if you think we've got anti-market bias now ... my wager is that you'll be shocked at how hollow the notion becomes in the relatively near future.

But the view does have some credence, ie. some forms of decision-making don't scale. But the obvious answer to that, far from assuming a self-evident path of decoupling historically present social, environmental, cultural and other local factors from economic decision-making across an inherently globalized god-like market that will deliver us from all ills as you imply (clearly, it won't), is perhaps to evolve newer and more subtle modes of collective decision-making that include market-like consideration of these factors and scale more effectively. That would be more like the market-libertarian view.




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