I think the major cultural drift happened well before AI.
Culture was once reinforced by scarcity and repetition. A society might have had three television networks, five major radio stations, a few newspapers, common schools, common institutions, and relatively homogeneous local communities. People did not agree on everything, but they were repeatedly exposed to the same stories, public figures, rituals, and reference points.
Cable television, satellite TV, YouTube, and eventually social media broke that shared environment apart. Once everyone could choose among thousands or millions of channels, culture stopped being something a society broadly received together and became something each person assembled for themselves.
That brought real benefits. Minority interests could find communities. Gatekeepers lost control. More voices could participate. But it also meant that cultural selection no longer happened primarily at the level of the society. It began happening inside increasingly isolated attention markets.
We now live in overlapping bubbles with different facts, heroes, moral priorities, enemies, and definitions of success. The problem is not simply that culture drifts. It is that there is no longer one cultural environment doing the selecting.
AI may intensify this by giving every person an endlessly personalized media universe, but it did not originate the process. It is the next stage of a transition from mass culture to individualized culture.
That makes deliberate cultural steering harder than managing a corporate culture. A company can define membership, leadership, incentives, and objectives. A modern society cannot easily decide who is steering, which values count as adaptation, or whether a shared culture should even be the goal.
I doubt a highly fragmented information environment is capable of producing a coherent culture at all.
I'd really love to see some of your collection, rather than just the generalizations. What are great examples of overcoming cultural drift? Also a sharper definition of culture in this sense.
I've worked with a number of different companies and one of the things it has convinced me of is that the culture that led to success almost always decays. And successful companies have their culture profoundly changed by the scale that comes with success.
I have a long relationship with a company that I have watched grow from $800 million in revenue to $4 billion. They will tell you that the culture is the secret of their success, and I believe it is. But aspects of that culture have changed dramatically. The incentives structure is still sound though, so it all works.
Do you have any great examples of companies or organizations that have "turned their culture around?" I would love to read about them.
All of my anecdotal experience leads me to conclude that it is almost always easier to build a new company than it is to redress the culture of an old one.
Re. this: " Aside from these, I now see our most promising fixes as modest variations on the same general approach: replace accidental variation and selection of culture with deliberate steering." -- I've also put years of thought into this issue, although I've always phrased it as "development of values" rather than "cultural evolution". I reject this as the worst-possible approach, because it is not the steering of evolution, but the end of it. This is clearer when you use the word "value" instead of "culture", because the circularity is immediately obvious in "We should use our values to choose our values." It is the renunciation of progress.
"Therefore, the third big thing we must accomplish, and the hardest, is to change common values to more favor adaption, either directly or indirectly." -- "Valuing adaptation" is not meaningful in this context. Adaptation comes from evolutionary theory, in which adaptation is defined as higher reproductive success. *There are no other choices for a utility function here.* If you define adaptation as anything other than higher reproductive success, then you've specified the target of your utility function, and *you have arrived at the end process of cultural evolution*, because you now have the perfect utility function. So just maximize it, analytically.
It is hard to make this point clear without switching to use the word "value" everywhere Robin says "culture", but saying "we will value adaptation", without saying how you measure adaptation, is meaningless. Reproductive success is itself a final value, and a dubious one; but it is an evolutionarily stable one, and one which leads, empirically, to an ecosystem of increasing complexity (despite anything Stephen Gould tries to sell you).
I see that there's a paper from 1980 called: "Cultural Drift: A Primary Process of Culture Change". It pictures drift as a fundamental form of cultural change - along with mutation and selection - by analogy with genetic evolution. An early use of the term. Ref: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3629615
The big problem is that if 1) is achievable, then you have to contend with lots of rival visions of 2) and 3) yanking the steering wheel away from each other.
Yeah, if your idea for fixing cultural drift is "we'll just figure out good governance and let it establish adaptive culture instead" I'm not sure you replaced the hard problem with an easier one.
"Deliberate steering [of culture]" does sound like an authoritarian or totalitarian solution, which you have generally not favored in the past. Given the rest of what you said I don't think that's your intention but you shouldn't be surprised at people hearing it this way.
I'm more pessimistic than you are (well, maybe). I think we've built civs that are too far outside the hardware specifications for homo sapiens and we're going to have to reset civ structures somehow (maybe the regression/restructure won't be as bad as you fear though). I could be wrong, the pessimists have been wrong over and over since the industrial revolution and I hope I am. Rooting for you.
I have mostly focussed on step zero: understand meme evolution and meme-gene coevolution.
Re: "replace accidental variation and selection of culture with deliberate steering" - this seems like one part of a more general principle: "replace accidental variation and selection with deliberate steering".
At some suitably abstract level, maximally valuing convergent evolutionarily-adaptive goals is stable. Valuing anything else is at best metastable until there's a sufficiently large source of competition or other shocks. This does not actually tell me which of those paths I *should* aim for. Though, both would benefit from much of the conceptual infrastructure you're laying out.
With biological evolution, the only way to direct it toward an outcome we want is to exert total control: control over what propagates, when, and how. This is selective breeding and genetic modification and they work very well.
Would this not apply to culture evolution as well? That is, a direct relationship between the amount we can steer the outcome, and the the degree of authority we apply. It doesn't seem a coincidence that political leaders trying to effect large culture changes usually employ authoritarian methods (Stalin, Hitler, Mao, McCarthy). Those efforts generally don't result in durable culture change because people resist authority.
The one kind of authority that many people seem accepting of is religion. Which is why I think a successful effort to direct culture will have to be dressed in religious or sacred terms.
Smarter meta-managers won't fix this, and neither will handing capital a say over our reproductive lives. The problem is how far centralized power reaches.
That's the thing to shrink.
Culture and safety get built from the bottom or not at all. Give people room... no cops breaking up the block party, no landlord skimming off the top... and they build the things themselves: meal trains, childcare swaps, the unwritten rule about who checks on the neighbor nobody's seen in three days. None of that comes off a dashboard. What you can actually do is get the boot off their necks and let them work.
Regardless of labeling it futarchy, corporate governance, or prediction markets, using top-down architecture to engineer human values and fertility isn’t a market solution. It is high-modernist central planning in a technocratic trench coat.
When you task any central system with controlling culture, it must enforce compliance. A corporate board managing societal fertility will build the exact same monitoring, policing, and penal apparatus that state bureaucrats use today. Any institution given the power to steer culture will eventually optimize for its own survival and control.
"...replace accidental variation and selection of culture with deliberate steering." Isn't that what has been happening for the better part of nearly two centuries now? Hasn't society been 'steered' here, by the oligarchs and the robber barons, I mean, JD Rockefeller famously quipped "I do not want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers." And our very own CIA's involvement in the Modern Art movement bankrolling ppl like deKoenig and Pollack not to mention the Music Industry promoting the objectification of women, violence, drugs...
"Cultural Drift", as you call it, HAS BEEN ORCHESTRATED by the very paragons and scions of society ostensibly seeking it's betterment. There is no 'drift', we're here as a direct result of very rich ppl doing bad things, so that they can keep their money and power. The ugliness you see around you was planned. Thank you.
Regarding 'letting capitalism run everything.' Have you read reviews of or discussed with anyone the book by Bowles', Understanding Capitalism? It's a textbook, so I assume you would not have actually read it, since you are an academic economist and the book is an introduction to political economy -- just asking an opinion of its view; Since Bowles and colleagues advocate *not* letting capitalism run everything.
DISCLAIMER: Once again, I went off on a tangent which was inappropriate as a response here, because "letting capitalism run everything" is interpreted as laissez-faire capitalism, which I believe is worse than the largely socialist capitalism we have in the US today.
I think that the word "capitalism" today is all connotation and almost no denotation, and we shouldn't use it. "Free market" is more-accurate; "capitalism" is the economic equivalent of a racial slur.
Many socialist policies naturally develop in a "capitalist" society. The argument that we call "capitalist vs. socialist" is, I think, actually freedom vs. authoritarianism. "Capitalism", understood as freedom provided by liberal democracy, can naturally produce some things we might call socialist, like standing armies, highway networks, insurance, welfare, merit scholarships, and inheritance tax. What goes by the name of "socialism" today produces some of the same things, but implements them differently. "Capitalism" and "socialism" can both try to make wealth distribution more just, but "capitalist" justice prioritizes individual equality of opportunity, and focuses on reducing the effects of randomness and founder effects; while "socialist" justice prioritizes group-level equity of outcomes. "Socialism" is correlated with a Platonist ontology of absolutes and eternal essences, which leads people to consider a person's essence to be their group identity, and the individual person as relatively unimportant; while "capitalism" is associated with an empiricist epistemology, which sees groups as just abstractions, and individuals as the things that actually exist. Really we should probably be talking about rationalist authoritarians vs. empiricist individualists.
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original text:
Change the word "capitalism", an inaccurate word deliberately overloaded for nearly 2 centuries with horrible connotations, to "freedom and security". "Capitalism" just means the freedom to control your own body, and enough security from bandits to keep the things you make with that body. That's it. Anybody who says they aren't a capitalist is opposed to at least one of those two things.
People often mention a need for law enforcement here, but the conditions for capitalism take care of that, as proven by the way "capitalism" originally evolved: as a growing network of people, originally all kin, making contracts with each other based on personal acquaintance, trust, and accepting the consequences of their own bad decisions on who to make contracts with. "Law" is actually a large set of contracts which, in a truly capitalist nation like the US, are all bootstrapped from some initial set of contracts which were in some meaningful sense consented to by a large majority of those to be governed by them.
I will pre-empt various objections by noting that, if one group of people make contracts with each other to become bandits and take things from other groups, that is no longer capitalism for that other group, because they no longer have security from bandits.
When you understand that's what capitalism is, it's obvious that objection to "capitalism" is always gross immorality, because being opposed to "capitalism" by definition means you want to control other people and/or take their stuff.
There are a wide variety of ways of implement a free market, and a lot of known problems with it--and a lot of known ways to reduce those problems, all of which work by making and enforcing contracts. Here we must distinguish between capitalist governments, which are based on contracts like the Magna Carta or the US Constitution, and non-capitalist governments, which don't have the consent of most of the governed and are not contracts. No capitalist government contract is signed by ALL of the people who are then ruled by it. But the ratifying of the US Constitution was a great example, with a process for specifying citizenship, electing representatives, and interpreting their votes, with very broad agreement and consent. The imposition of communism on an entire country by a tiny cabal of conspirators, who order armies around with only vague promises instead of a contract they will in fact honor, is a non-capitalist government.
The real edge cases for the free market occur because not everyone /can/ be allowed total freedom to control their own body. In fact, no one can be. Babies can't be set loose into the wild; they must be raised, which requires denying them liberty. And this opens the door for many years of child abuse on a large scale, which increases the number of antisocial people who will abuse other adults and their own children. Then there are people who choose to be bandits, and nearly everyone will choose to be a bandit if a society isn't self-sustaining. It turns out you have to severely constrain the freedom of a significant fraction of the population for anybody to be secure from bandits, because a population of something like 2% bandits is one where everything is taken by bandits.
So "capitalism" isn't pure or easy. But anyone objecting to it, wants either to control you, or to take your stuff.
...."capitalism" is associated with an empiricist epistemology? Historically, the defenders of free-market capitalism were the Rationalists who railed against empiricism. Ayn Rand and other gods of libertarian capitalism believed economic laws can be deduced purely through abstract logic without ever looking at data or real-world statistics.
The foundational text of modern socialism is Karl Marx’s Capital. Marx’s philosophy is Historical Materialism. Marx didn't look at "eternal essences" or abstract ideas. He looked at concrete, material things: coal, iron, factory working hours, and bread prices. Socialism grew out of an empirical observation of how industrialization was physically harming the working class.
Capitalism is a specific economic system requiring private ownership of the means of production, wage labor, and state-enforced contract law. Capitalism requires a massive, centralized legal system to enforce contracts and protect property, meaning it is fundamentally an institutional system, not just 'freedom from bandits.'
I just checked multiple academic sources and economists do not define capitalism this way: "Capitalism" just means the freedom to control your own body, and enough security from bandits to keep the things you make with that body."
Yes, I know they don't. I argued that is how it should be defined. Dictionaries today are mostly controlled by the left, because inverting the meanings of words has been a leftist tactic not just since Rousseau talked about "forcing people to be free", or since Christians redefined "faith" (/pistes/ originally meant "having strong evidence for something") as meaning believing something with /no/ evidence; but all the way back to Plato's Republic, in which he redefined "dike" (justice / tradition / morality) as "everybody does whatever Plato tells them to without asking questions or they'll get killed".
Perhaps I should instead argue that the right way of clustering modern societies should partition them along the divide I'm proposing, which is authoritarian vs. democratic, and that "capitalism" is an exemplar of democracy, although the term itself is closer to "valuing personal freedom". The systems of government on offer today which we call "capitalist" are distinguished primarily by being based on freedom to control your own body and own what you make, and freedom from bandits. All systems which say they are against "capitalism" turn out to systems in which some small group controls the masses and/or steals from the masses. So the argument over capitalist vs. anti-capitalist systems which we have today is identified more-accurately as an argument between people who want general freedom, and people who believe some subset of elite people (who "know best") should control other people and their stuff.
But I shouldn't have made that argument in response to your comment, because the phrase "letting capitalism run everything" is very poorly-chosen. It suggests what we call laissez-faire capitalism, which I certainly oppose. I need to state more clearly how to distinguish "economic system" from "system of government". My definition above implicitly argued that any government formed by capitalist contracts (contracts made by mutual consent, rather than enforced one-sidedly) is subsumed by the word "capitalism", so for instance the US representative democracy, formed by an incomplete but very broad mutual consent in its ratification, should be considered "capitalist" even when its people choose representatives who pass laws creating welfare, a socialized military, highway network, and health insurance. That means that what socialism we have in the US is capitalist socialism.
I think I still believe that--that rather than seeing our argument as one between capitalism and socialism, we should see it as being between capitalist socialism and authoritarian socialism. People who claim to want "socialism" today are nearly all people who believe that, rather than giving people freedom, a minority of "enlightened" people should set the rules for all people, most of whom are evil and need to be governed by the elites, as children should be ruled by adults. This division is not pure; due to historical accidents, people who want "capitalism" today also have that view of some issues, such as abortion rights, drug laws, regulation of medical practice, and the view that the US should return to a government based on the Latin New Testament as translated by St. Jerome, which is still held by a shocking number of people today.
I believe the argument between liberal democracy and authoritarianism is the real disagreement today, as evidenced by the fact that all our major disagreement are ones in which one side promotes policies which either are justified by an appeal to absolute morality, absolute value, or metaphysical doctrine, rather than to pragmatism or majority opinion (saying athletic competitions should be divided by gender rather than by sex, opposing freedom of speech, opposing abortion rights, supporting inheritance rights); or are naked theft (price ceilings, rent freezes) or subsidies to distort markets (government-owned supermarkets, tax deductions for home mortgages).
But I am having trouble working this out in a way which doesn't erase the actual distinctions people use today to make political decisions. I don't have time today for this, so I'm going to post a disclaimer on my comment above.
You explained your understanding of capitalism. What do you think of how political economists like Bowles understand capitalism? [Since Bowles' textbook is actually called 'Understanding Capitalism '].
The "Capitalists" have had their chance, all 'We the People' have gotten from them is more wars and more poverty. Despite what Ayn Rand might think, capitalism has been a very big drain on society. (Sst doesn't register when i click 'like' on a comment).
This is completely false, historically, all around the world, and all throughout history. Capitalism gave us the first boosts to the Indus Valley civilization; the Athenian miracle in math, philosophy, science, literature, and sociology; the Renaissances and the British Enlightenment; the abolition of starvation in capitalist nations; the amazing wealth that capitalist nations enjoy today.
I don't understand why it suggests we need to value adaption more or even what that means in this context. I get the idea that adaptation means something like ability to respond to evolutionary pressures but once you no longer have cultural evolution I don't understand what that even means.
I mean imagine we can manage culture in a really productive and efficient way but that only works because there is a single global culture, ie, the practice could be exploited if we ever had to again compete against a different culture. Does that mean that is an anti-adaptive practice because it would be disfavored in a system of cultural adaptation?
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More generally, I think this is what I don't understand about this whole view. I agree that in some sense there are dangers associated with losing the prior competetive environment but you seem to think we can derive that some specific property we need more of -- adaptation.
Is this trivial and you just mean something like good or efficient or what?
I think the major cultural drift happened well before AI.
Culture was once reinforced by scarcity and repetition. A society might have had three television networks, five major radio stations, a few newspapers, common schools, common institutions, and relatively homogeneous local communities. People did not agree on everything, but they were repeatedly exposed to the same stories, public figures, rituals, and reference points.
Cable television, satellite TV, YouTube, and eventually social media broke that shared environment apart. Once everyone could choose among thousands or millions of channels, culture stopped being something a society broadly received together and became something each person assembled for themselves.
That brought real benefits. Minority interests could find communities. Gatekeepers lost control. More voices could participate. But it also meant that cultural selection no longer happened primarily at the level of the society. It began happening inside increasingly isolated attention markets.
We now live in overlapping bubbles with different facts, heroes, moral priorities, enemies, and definitions of success. The problem is not simply that culture drifts. It is that there is no longer one cultural environment doing the selecting.
AI may intensify this by giving every person an endlessly personalized media universe, but it did not originate the process. It is the next stage of a transition from mass culture to individualized culture.
That makes deliberate cultural steering harder than managing a corporate culture. A company can define membership, leadership, incentives, and objectives. A modern society cannot easily decide who is steering, which values count as adaptation, or whether a shared culture should even be the goal.
I doubt a highly fragmented information environment is capable of producing a coherent culture at all.
I'd really love to see some of your collection, rather than just the generalizations. What are great examples of overcoming cultural drift? Also a sharper definition of culture in this sense.
I've worked with a number of different companies and one of the things it has convinced me of is that the culture that led to success almost always decays. And successful companies have their culture profoundly changed by the scale that comes with success.
I have a long relationship with a company that I have watched grow from $800 million in revenue to $4 billion. They will tell you that the culture is the secret of their success, and I believe it is. But aspects of that culture have changed dramatically. The incentives structure is still sound though, so it all works.
Do you have any great examples of companies or organizations that have "turned their culture around?" I would love to read about them.
All of my anecdotal experience leads me to conclude that it is almost always easier to build a new company than it is to redress the culture of an old one.
Re. this: " Aside from these, I now see our most promising fixes as modest variations on the same general approach: replace accidental variation and selection of culture with deliberate steering." -- I've also put years of thought into this issue, although I've always phrased it as "development of values" rather than "cultural evolution". I reject this as the worst-possible approach, because it is not the steering of evolution, but the end of it. This is clearer when you use the word "value" instead of "culture", because the circularity is immediately obvious in "We should use our values to choose our values." It is the renunciation of progress.
"Therefore, the third big thing we must accomplish, and the hardest, is to change common values to more favor adaption, either directly or indirectly." -- "Valuing adaptation" is not meaningful in this context. Adaptation comes from evolutionary theory, in which adaptation is defined as higher reproductive success. *There are no other choices for a utility function here.* If you define adaptation as anything other than higher reproductive success, then you've specified the target of your utility function, and *you have arrived at the end process of cultural evolution*, because you now have the perfect utility function. So just maximize it, analytically.
It is hard to make this point clear without switching to use the word "value" everywhere Robin says "culture", but saying "we will value adaptation", without saying how you measure adaptation, is meaningless. Reproductive success is itself a final value, and a dubious one; but it is an evolutionarily stable one, and one which leads, empirically, to an ecosystem of increasing complexity (despite anything Stephen Gould tries to sell you).
Agree. re: Rockefeller, Rhodes, Rothschild, et al., All guilty of "steering". (Sst doesn't register when i click 'like' on a comment)
I see that there's a paper from 1980 called: "Cultural Drift: A Primary Process of Culture Change". It pictures drift as a fundamental form of cultural change - along with mutation and selection - by analogy with genetic evolution. An early use of the term. Ref: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3629615
The big problem is that if 1) is achievable, then you have to contend with lots of rival visions of 2) and 3) yanking the steering wheel away from each other.
Yeah, if your idea for fixing cultural drift is "we'll just figure out good governance and let it establish adaptive culture instead" I'm not sure you replaced the hard problem with an easier one.
"Deliberate steering [of culture]" does sound like an authoritarian or totalitarian solution, which you have generally not favored in the past. Given the rest of what you said I don't think that's your intention but you shouldn't be surprised at people hearing it this way.
I'm more pessimistic than you are (well, maybe). I think we've built civs that are too far outside the hardware specifications for homo sapiens and we're going to have to reset civ structures somehow (maybe the regression/restructure won't be as bad as you fear though). I could be wrong, the pessimists have been wrong over and over since the industrial revolution and I hope I am. Rooting for you.
I have mostly focussed on step zero: understand meme evolution and meme-gene coevolution.
Re: "replace accidental variation and selection of culture with deliberate steering" - this seems like one part of a more general principle: "replace accidental variation and selection with deliberate steering".
At some suitably abstract level, maximally valuing convergent evolutionarily-adaptive goals is stable. Valuing anything else is at best metastable until there's a sufficiently large source of competition or other shocks. This does not actually tell me which of those paths I *should* aim for. Though, both would benefit from much of the conceptual infrastructure you're laying out.
With biological evolution, the only way to direct it toward an outcome we want is to exert total control: control over what propagates, when, and how. This is selective breeding and genetic modification and they work very well.
Would this not apply to culture evolution as well? That is, a direct relationship between the amount we can steer the outcome, and the the degree of authority we apply. It doesn't seem a coincidence that political leaders trying to effect large culture changes usually employ authoritarian methods (Stalin, Hitler, Mao, McCarthy). Those efforts generally don't result in durable culture change because people resist authority.
The one kind of authority that many people seem accepting of is religion. Which is why I think a successful effort to direct culture will have to be dressed in religious or sacred terms.
Smarter meta-managers won't fix this, and neither will handing capital a say over our reproductive lives. The problem is how far centralized power reaches.
That's the thing to shrink.
Culture and safety get built from the bottom or not at all. Give people room... no cops breaking up the block party, no landlord skimming off the top... and they build the things themselves: meal trains, childcare swaps, the unwritten rule about who checks on the neighbor nobody's seen in three days. None of that comes off a dashboard. What you can actually do is get the boot off their necks and let them work.
Regardless of labeling it futarchy, corporate governance, or prediction markets, using top-down architecture to engineer human values and fertility isn’t a market solution. It is high-modernist central planning in a technocratic trench coat.
When you task any central system with controlling culture, it must enforce compliance. A corporate board managing societal fertility will build the exact same monitoring, policing, and penal apparatus that state bureaucrats use today. Any institution given the power to steer culture will eventually optimize for its own survival and control.
"...replace accidental variation and selection of culture with deliberate steering." Isn't that what has been happening for the better part of nearly two centuries now? Hasn't society been 'steered' here, by the oligarchs and the robber barons, I mean, JD Rockefeller famously quipped "I do not want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers." And our very own CIA's involvement in the Modern Art movement bankrolling ppl like deKoenig and Pollack not to mention the Music Industry promoting the objectification of women, violence, drugs...
"Cultural Drift", as you call it, HAS BEEN ORCHESTRATED by the very paragons and scions of society ostensibly seeking it's betterment. There is no 'drift', we're here as a direct result of very rich ppl doing bad things, so that they can keep their money and power. The ugliness you see around you was planned. Thank you.
Regarding 'letting capitalism run everything.' Have you read reviews of or discussed with anyone the book by Bowles', Understanding Capitalism? It's a textbook, so I assume you would not have actually read it, since you are an academic economist and the book is an introduction to political economy -- just asking an opinion of its view; Since Bowles and colleagues advocate *not* letting capitalism run everything.
I have read many things by Bowles, but not that thing i particular.
DISCLAIMER: Once again, I went off on a tangent which was inappropriate as a response here, because "letting capitalism run everything" is interpreted as laissez-faire capitalism, which I believe is worse than the largely socialist capitalism we have in the US today.
I think that the word "capitalism" today is all connotation and almost no denotation, and we shouldn't use it. "Free market" is more-accurate; "capitalism" is the economic equivalent of a racial slur.
Many socialist policies naturally develop in a "capitalist" society. The argument that we call "capitalist vs. socialist" is, I think, actually freedom vs. authoritarianism. "Capitalism", understood as freedom provided by liberal democracy, can naturally produce some things we might call socialist, like standing armies, highway networks, insurance, welfare, merit scholarships, and inheritance tax. What goes by the name of "socialism" today produces some of the same things, but implements them differently. "Capitalism" and "socialism" can both try to make wealth distribution more just, but "capitalist" justice prioritizes individual equality of opportunity, and focuses on reducing the effects of randomness and founder effects; while "socialist" justice prioritizes group-level equity of outcomes. "Socialism" is correlated with a Platonist ontology of absolutes and eternal essences, which leads people to consider a person's essence to be their group identity, and the individual person as relatively unimportant; while "capitalism" is associated with an empiricist epistemology, which sees groups as just abstractions, and individuals as the things that actually exist. Really we should probably be talking about rationalist authoritarians vs. empiricist individualists.
==========
original text:
Change the word "capitalism", an inaccurate word deliberately overloaded for nearly 2 centuries with horrible connotations, to "freedom and security". "Capitalism" just means the freedom to control your own body, and enough security from bandits to keep the things you make with that body. That's it. Anybody who says they aren't a capitalist is opposed to at least one of those two things.
People often mention a need for law enforcement here, but the conditions for capitalism take care of that, as proven by the way "capitalism" originally evolved: as a growing network of people, originally all kin, making contracts with each other based on personal acquaintance, trust, and accepting the consequences of their own bad decisions on who to make contracts with. "Law" is actually a large set of contracts which, in a truly capitalist nation like the US, are all bootstrapped from some initial set of contracts which were in some meaningful sense consented to by a large majority of those to be governed by them.
I will pre-empt various objections by noting that, if one group of people make contracts with each other to become bandits and take things from other groups, that is no longer capitalism for that other group, because they no longer have security from bandits.
When you understand that's what capitalism is, it's obvious that objection to "capitalism" is always gross immorality, because being opposed to "capitalism" by definition means you want to control other people and/or take their stuff.
There are a wide variety of ways of implement a free market, and a lot of known problems with it--and a lot of known ways to reduce those problems, all of which work by making and enforcing contracts. Here we must distinguish between capitalist governments, which are based on contracts like the Magna Carta or the US Constitution, and non-capitalist governments, which don't have the consent of most of the governed and are not contracts. No capitalist government contract is signed by ALL of the people who are then ruled by it. But the ratifying of the US Constitution was a great example, with a process for specifying citizenship, electing representatives, and interpreting their votes, with very broad agreement and consent. The imposition of communism on an entire country by a tiny cabal of conspirators, who order armies around with only vague promises instead of a contract they will in fact honor, is a non-capitalist government.
The real edge cases for the free market occur because not everyone /can/ be allowed total freedom to control their own body. In fact, no one can be. Babies can't be set loose into the wild; they must be raised, which requires denying them liberty. And this opens the door for many years of child abuse on a large scale, which increases the number of antisocial people who will abuse other adults and their own children. Then there are people who choose to be bandits, and nearly everyone will choose to be a bandit if a society isn't self-sustaining. It turns out you have to severely constrain the freedom of a significant fraction of the population for anybody to be secure from bandits, because a population of something like 2% bandits is one where everything is taken by bandits.
So "capitalism" isn't pure or easy. But anyone objecting to it, wants either to control you, or to take your stuff.
...."capitalism" is associated with an empiricist epistemology? Historically, the defenders of free-market capitalism were the Rationalists who railed against empiricism. Ayn Rand and other gods of libertarian capitalism believed economic laws can be deduced purely through abstract logic without ever looking at data or real-world statistics.
The foundational text of modern socialism is Karl Marx’s Capital. Marx’s philosophy is Historical Materialism. Marx didn't look at "eternal essences" or abstract ideas. He looked at concrete, material things: coal, iron, factory working hours, and bread prices. Socialism grew out of an empirical observation of how industrialization was physically harming the working class.
Capitalism is a specific economic system requiring private ownership of the means of production, wage labor, and state-enforced contract law. Capitalism requires a massive, centralized legal system to enforce contracts and protect property, meaning it is fundamentally an institutional system, not just 'freedom from bandits.'
I just checked multiple academic sources and economists do not define capitalism this way: "Capitalism" just means the freedom to control your own body, and enough security from bandits to keep the things you make with that body."
Yes, I know they don't. I argued that is how it should be defined. Dictionaries today are mostly controlled by the left, because inverting the meanings of words has been a leftist tactic not just since Rousseau talked about "forcing people to be free", or since Christians redefined "faith" (/pistes/ originally meant "having strong evidence for something") as meaning believing something with /no/ evidence; but all the way back to Plato's Republic, in which he redefined "dike" (justice / tradition / morality) as "everybody does whatever Plato tells them to without asking questions or they'll get killed".
Perhaps I should instead argue that the right way of clustering modern societies should partition them along the divide I'm proposing, which is authoritarian vs. democratic, and that "capitalism" is an exemplar of democracy, although the term itself is closer to "valuing personal freedom". The systems of government on offer today which we call "capitalist" are distinguished primarily by being based on freedom to control your own body and own what you make, and freedom from bandits. All systems which say they are against "capitalism" turn out to systems in which some small group controls the masses and/or steals from the masses. So the argument over capitalist vs. anti-capitalist systems which we have today is identified more-accurately as an argument between people who want general freedom, and people who believe some subset of elite people (who "know best") should control other people and their stuff.
But I shouldn't have made that argument in response to your comment, because the phrase "letting capitalism run everything" is very poorly-chosen. It suggests what we call laissez-faire capitalism, which I certainly oppose. I need to state more clearly how to distinguish "economic system" from "system of government". My definition above implicitly argued that any government formed by capitalist contracts (contracts made by mutual consent, rather than enforced one-sidedly) is subsumed by the word "capitalism", so for instance the US representative democracy, formed by an incomplete but very broad mutual consent in its ratification, should be considered "capitalist" even when its people choose representatives who pass laws creating welfare, a socialized military, highway network, and health insurance. That means that what socialism we have in the US is capitalist socialism.
I think I still believe that--that rather than seeing our argument as one between capitalism and socialism, we should see it as being between capitalist socialism and authoritarian socialism. People who claim to want "socialism" today are nearly all people who believe that, rather than giving people freedom, a minority of "enlightened" people should set the rules for all people, most of whom are evil and need to be governed by the elites, as children should be ruled by adults. This division is not pure; due to historical accidents, people who want "capitalism" today also have that view of some issues, such as abortion rights, drug laws, regulation of medical practice, and the view that the US should return to a government based on the Latin New Testament as translated by St. Jerome, which is still held by a shocking number of people today.
I believe the argument between liberal democracy and authoritarianism is the real disagreement today, as evidenced by the fact that all our major disagreement are ones in which one side promotes policies which either are justified by an appeal to absolute morality, absolute value, or metaphysical doctrine, rather than to pragmatism or majority opinion (saying athletic competitions should be divided by gender rather than by sex, opposing freedom of speech, opposing abortion rights, supporting inheritance rights); or are naked theft (price ceilings, rent freezes) or subsidies to distort markets (government-owned supermarkets, tax deductions for home mortgages).
But I am having trouble working this out in a way which doesn't erase the actual distinctions people use today to make political decisions. I don't have time today for this, so I'm going to post a disclaimer on my comment above.
You explained your understanding of capitalism. What do you think of how political economists like Bowles understand capitalism? [Since Bowles' textbook is actually called 'Understanding Capitalism '].
The "Capitalists" have had their chance, all 'We the People' have gotten from them is more wars and more poverty. Despite what Ayn Rand might think, capitalism has been a very big drain on society. (Sst doesn't register when i click 'like' on a comment).
This is completely false, historically, all around the world, and all throughout history. Capitalism gave us the first boosts to the Indus Valley civilization; the Athenian miracle in math, philosophy, science, literature, and sociology; the Renaissances and the British Enlightenment; the abolition of starvation in capitalist nations; the amazing wealth that capitalist nations enjoy today.
Ah yes, the same trope they dish out to all the first year undergrads. Thank you for your contribution.
I don't understand why it suggests we need to value adaption more or even what that means in this context. I get the idea that adaptation means something like ability to respond to evolutionary pressures but once you no longer have cultural evolution I don't understand what that even means.
I mean imagine we can manage culture in a really productive and efficient way but that only works because there is a single global culture, ie, the practice could be exploited if we ever had to again compete against a different culture. Does that mean that is an anti-adaptive practice because it would be disfavored in a system of cultural adaptation?
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More generally, I think this is what I don't understand about this whole view. I agree that in some sense there are dangers associated with losing the prior competetive environment but you seem to think we can derive that some specific property we need more of -- adaptation.
Is this trivial and you just mean something like good or efficient or what?
I probably have the wrong definition of cultural drift in mind. Because why would you not want that? Do you want culture to be entirely planned?