Reddit reviews Debt: The First 5,000 Years
We found 47 Reddit comments about Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
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Reddit reviews Debt: The First 5,000 YearsWe found 47 Reddit comments about Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
I'm not sure if you're getting this from David Graeber or not, but he addresses the issue in Debt: The First 5000 Years. His answer is a very clear "no".
EDITED: Fixed the errors
Actually, nobody should be afraid of anyone.
Most politicians are good people, and they joined politics because they wanted to change the world for the better. But they got stuck in the debt-based system. Just like everybody else. This leaves very little room for real change.
Everybody wants out of this system. But most don't realise, or don't know how.
Perhaps you've seen Oliver Stone's Nixon. There's this scene where president Nixon meets a bunch of young people, and they give him shit for Vietnam etc. He then realises that he was just like those kids twenty years prior, but once in office he simply wasn't left with much choice - he had to act like he did, that's what the system required him to do. (Stone's message, not mine - although I agree.)
Nobody is out to get us right now, nobody is our enemy, everybody realises that the banking system is shit at best, or downright evil at worst. Including most politicians. All we need is a way out.
Recommended books:
http://www.amazon.com/Economics-Good-Evil-Economic-Gilgamesh/dp/0199767203
http://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1381395901&sr=1-1&keywords=debt
http://www.amazon.com/Currency-Wars-Making-Global-Crisis/dp/1591845564/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1381395926&sr=1-1&keywords=currency+wars
And please read these articles:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-30/bitcoin-the-perfect-schmuck-insurance.html
http://rt.com/op-edge/bitcoin-money-future-fad-761/
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/05/20125309437931677.html
Great post OP! I haven't seen the video in question (sorry) but as an anarchist I do feel confident in giving some of my views. First off, there are no right answers to these questions. Even within the same school of anarco-socialism, you'll likely get different answers to these questions from different people (ask 10 anarcho-socialists and you'll get 11 different answers) and in my view, that's a strength, not a weakness. However because I haven't seen the video, I don't know how much of what I'm about to say is addressed by it. I'm sorry!
I personally don't believe that lazy workers are as much a problem as you believe they will be and I base this on my personal experience. I have visited anarco-communes and also "temporary utopias" like climate camps and anti-globalization convergences. And, no, they were by no means perfect. In anarchist households dishes often don't get done to the extent that it's kind of a running joke. But there are lots of reasons for that. Houses aren't designed with communal living in mind. Under capitalism most of us suffer from depression and anxiety and it's hard to be motivated with that kind of thing when you're worried about your next deadline at your unfulfilling job or paying the bills by the end of the month. A more collectivist society could do things like ensuring no one ever has to do menial jobs alone (even by the simple provision of bigger sinks and bigger kitchens--ever notice how classically houses in western society were designed for use by a single-occupancy gendered labour force; my kitchen is barely twice the size of my wardrobe, but the living room, where the man of the house was expected to spend his off-labour time, is huge). And ultimately I would expect that anarchist societies would not only have a good working understanding of the sexism of gendered labour (most menial jobs are traditionally performed by women) but also be more lenient around all labour. Like maybe you can skip the washing up for that day if it's your period or if you're nursing, both of which are labour neglected by capitalism, just to choose a stereotypical and thought-provoking example. Going back to my own experiences, there were plenty of problems with places like the convergences and anarchist camps, but they never actually suffered from not having clean toilets because people understood that cleaning them was as important an activity as any other type of labour which needed to be undertaken. Ultimately, I agree with the point raised by the WNDWU (youtube link--above): "So you're asking me, who will do the dishes when the revolution comes? Well I do my own dishes now and I'll do my own dishes then. Funny that it's always the ones who don't, who ask that fucking question."
There are a lot of different thoughts about how economics can work in anarchist societies at large-scale. Most likely there would be several different economic models, possibly even within the municipal area, but certainly within different ones. In the future, Kim Stanley Robinson describes a system where small consumptive goods are created in situ, then optionally exchanged as gifts with traders. Underlying this, potassium is used as an exchange of hard currency and reserve, regulating the flow of resources throughout for the production of goods the solar system. Meanwhile, Ursula Le Guin envisaged a society organised by collectives (syndicals) where work was undertaken out of a sense of duty. Less speculatively, David Graeber has done a lot of good work documenting the use of gift economies throughout human history and it's hard to believe there's nothing there, given the overwelming preponderance and importance of gift economies to advanced human societies so far.
But I myself am not an advocate of gift economies. Michael Albert and co. have done a lot of writing on how non-gift participatory or democratic economies could be run and I highly recommend checking out his work. Albert's work is pretty much the closest to what I would like to see myself, I think and he also talks a lot about the psychological benefits of job rotation, e.g. a system where doctors also clean toilets. There is also a form of anarchism known as mutualism in which productive work is carried out by coops instead of companies or conglomerates owned by shareholders or an owner or owners. A coop can be structured along purely democratic grounds, where every decision requires a consensus meeting from relevant workers, through the whole gamut to a system with middle managers and bosses basically being like a company except that the workers form and control the board instead of vice versa. After producing goods, they are exchanged through a free-market mechanism as under capitalism. I myself am not a mutualist but really even mutualism would be a huge step forward compared to what we have under the current system, where productive labour is essentially organized by unaccountable and undemocratic corporate oligarchies.
The invention thing is quite interesting, I think. Just as in an anarchist society you might get several economic systems, so today we actually have several economic models under capitalism as well. One which I am quite familiar with as a software engineer is the open-source model of software development. Last year I invented a new and pioneering method for installing Wordpress websites using a fairly obscure collection of deployment software. The mechanism I invented is so niche that even I struggle to develop the enthusiasm to explain its benefits even to people within the same field but I was excited enough to develop it that I spent three months of my free-time doing that, and now that it is done I am still pleased with the effort even though no one uses it. So basically I invented something and released it for free which was the very definition of a project for which I receive no thanks: no economic compensation, no fame within my professional circles, etc. And yet I was still happy to create and distribute it for free, even allowing others to modify it if they found it useful. So I think that when you are very invested in a particular problem field it's actually very easy to develop the enthusiasm to figure out an invention for a better way of doing something, even if you know you'll receive nothing for it but the personal satisfaction of having simplified a particular problem. And of course in an anarchist society you could expect that most techniques and methods are open-source, and able to be modified and improved upon for free by any interested party. Receiving fame among one's professional peer group, being invited to prestigious conferences within your field to talk about your invention, maybe even being interviewed by the news media--these are all extremely good motivations for creating something, arguably a lot stronger than money actually. (Considering most invention these days is IP-protected and ultimately owned by corporations, I'm kind of surprised the myth of the solo inventor made rich by his own success succeeds actually.) And this happens a lot in software. The most common operating system software globally across all devices? By far, Linux. Windows only leads in the desktop, and that only because of entrenched capitalist user lock-in paradigms.
Well, I'm reading that book.
Link: https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290
> My means are rules that allow voluntary relationships with minimal violence.
There are two problems with this model:
That said, I'm not going to claim Chomsky's solutions are necessarily realistic. However, there is a wider spectrum of potential community and social systems than what we have become accustomed to, and it is this history from which Chomsky draws. I recommend David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years for exploring the history of money and its relationship to war, slavery and the state, and the multitude of primitive currency-less societal systems for managing responsibilities and resources (spoiler: it wasn't barter).
While I have no illusions about the possibility or desirability of reverting to pre-industrial, small-scale social systems, I don't think we should be content with prioritzing the rights of capital as an end unto itself, and I am confident in our ability to create superior and more equitable post-state social structures.
If you have an interest in the topic, I'd encourage you to read Debt: The first 5000 years
Mr. Graeber argues that contemporary major religions: Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam were spiritual reactions to an increasingly material world -- which really didn't exist prior to the invention of money, and debt, debt peonage, and ultimately slavery. And indeed, into the middle ages, Christian thinkers were even questioning the godliness of private property itself.
Which is why "And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors" makes a lot more sense in the Lord's prayer.
Really fascinating book. He also debunks the idea of a barter economy you mentioned up thread.
Not quite my friend, as David Graeber reveals in his study, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, for the most part debt/credit create these incredibly high gaps only when there is an institutional attempt to artificially create wealth by the elite, for the sake of the wealth creation. In our modern times, it would be called speculation. In the past, it was fucking with the relationship between currency and precious metals.
There are interesting theories about the beginnings of money where it wasn't really adopted until it was used as the sole way of paying tax before that everything was based on credit/debit. A state would pay its soldiers in 'x' currency but also would require their taxes to be in 'x', that drove adoption.
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https://www.amazon.co.uk/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290
To understand money you need to first understand debt.
Read "Debt: The First 5000 Years"
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1612191290?pc_redir=1409142733&robot_redir=1
I can't recommend Debt: The First 5,000 Years enough.
Oof, that's a tough one. I really like Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber, This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin and Whipping Girl by Julia Serano.
> Dogecoin is up 75% in nine days. A nocoiner told me that's a reason why crypto is a complete joke. What do I say back?
Vitalik Buterin kept referencing this book in his tweets:
Debt: The First 5,000 Years
It's interesting throughout history what has been accepted and worked as money/currency. I think that we only have recent history as a reference so only trust government issued fiat which keeps having diminishing purchasing power because of its endless supply.
Basically it seems anything can work as a currency as long as there is network effect and trust is developed. There's even examples of silver that is stored but never ever even moved that act as a store of value while grains act the medium of exchange that are back up by silver in Sumerian civilization.
Money is a debt obligation. So when we take care of each other we get money. It is not when we get money we will take care of each other. Cart before the horse
As I mentioned in my other comment, here's a breakdown of Bitcoin's security model. Before Bitcoin was created, everyone thought that it was impossible to provide such guarantees. Satoshi's solution to the Byzantine General's Problem was a breakthrough in Computer Science.
"Money" is just a collective agreement that something has value and functions well as a medium of exchange. If you think that money is something that must be provided by a government, I'd recommend that you educate yourself more about the history of money. A book I recommend is Debt: The First 5,000 Years
Mortgages on houses are a special situation, and treated differently then all other debts here. And what you are saying about just walking away from houses is only the law in a few states, and in those states, the worst of the housing bubble happened (Florida, Nevade, etc.). So I agree with you on that count. Here in New York, if I stopped paying my mortgage and walked away, the bank would sell my house, and if they didn't get all their money back, they would sue me for the rest.
With regard to other debts however, it isn't that you just walk away, and they are gone. You file for bankruptcy, and then a judge takes over your money situation to settle debts the best way possible. So the court will sell all your stuff to pay you creditors, and then they will work out a reasonable payment plan where a reasonable portion of your income goes to pay more of your debt. You will also not be able to borrow any money for at least 8 years. If there is just simply too much debt, some of it will get discharged. But since lenders are aware that this is how the system works, it should make them be careful who they lend to, so that they don't lose money.
So it isn't that you just get away with not paying, it is just worked out so you can not end up homeless and a permanent debt slave. Think about someone who bought a house in Spain a few years ago, and now their house is worth 1/3 what is was. The economy is terrible, and you lose your job. You want to do the right thing, and try to sell your house to pay the bank back, but you still end up owing them hundreds of thousands. Because you can not get a good job again, you end up cleaning toilets for very little money. The bank will keep taking your paychecks for the rest of your life, and you will never recover. Your family will have no future, your kids will be screwed and the whole lot of you will end up on welfare, costing the government money. The whole time this is going on, the bank barely gets paid anything, because you make so little money, so it isn't like they will ever get paid back.
In this scenario, everyone loses, the bank, the family and the government. And it isn't like this person did anything wrong, they bought a house for their family, and then the economy went terribly bad. This person would be much happier being employed and paying his mortgage, but he just can't.
This permanent indebtedness is what gave birth to the feudal system, where people ended up trading their lives and land to the lord of the manner. If you would like to read up on it, I suggest this http://www.amazon.com/dp/1612191290
I also should have mentioned that the bankruptcy court will take into account if someone did try to just walk away or commit fraud, and will impose very harsh terms on them. The whole point of American bankruptcy is not to punish people literally forever, who were making sounds choices, and taking reasonable risks in good faith. It has really prompted entrepreneurship, and been very benfical to us.
I like this book by David Graeber where he talks about whole economic systems are necessary to support civilizations with technologies. The pattern has been that they unwind on a multicentury cycle when too many people get into deep debt to the point that they can't support themselves enough to efficient work or participate. Rome is just one example - there were a striking number of advanced technologies during that time, but after the empire fell apart, society couldn't use them even though they were still described in books. So during Rome they had technology but also slavery, debt etc. During the middle ages they were illiterate but there was less prostitution and slavery. https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290
Graeber was talking about what he called "everyday communism". In context he wasn't talking about ideology so much as a natural human propensity towards mutual aid. "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine", that sort of thing. The book (absolutely worth a read by the way) is about the history of money, but that bit was referring to how human societies functioned before it came about. That kind of behavior is something we needed to survive as a species and it forms the basis of of our daily interactions with each other. He calls it communism because whether you're comfortable with the notion or not that is the basis of communism.
>This idea that capitalism is inherently opposed to private charity
It's more that capitalism is a system that produces massive disparities in wealth that make charity both possible and necessary to begin with. Whatever one's personal politics, that capitalism concentrates wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people over time is self evidently true. And by "wealth" keep in mind we are not talking about money but the material basis of survival itself.
So naturally a bunch of people end up with nothing, some people end up with a lot, and the latter ends up "benevolently" trying to make up for that shortfall.
In the context of capitalist inequality the human instinct towards mutual aid gets transformed into something somewhat condescending, if you really examine it. "I'll flip that bum a coin, but I won't give him a house"
>Capitalism in itself has no position on who deserves what, merely who shall retain what property.
You don't see a contradiction here?
Of course capitalism makes claims on who deserves what: it says people with money deserve whatever they want and people without it deserve nothing. If this wasn't at the heart of it poverty wouldn't exist.
What you believe might be one thing. But we're talking about an economic system that is most assuredly not you. And every system has a guiding ideology. That certain chronically dishonest economists try to pretend that capitalism makes no claims about morality or the nature of mankind doesn't change this. Of course it does. Everything that is a product of people does. Nothing is without politics, nothing is without morality, nothing is without ideology.
>Hogwash. They vote for the Republican Party, and voting is not the same as worshipping
The republican party of today is not a political party so much as a kind of messianic cult that views the power of the party as being a prerequisite for a "good" world. As such all moral, political, and social concerns come secondary to the continued control of said party. Barry Goldwater (arguably the man who created the modern GOP) has a whole bit in his book Conscience Of A Conservative about how conservatives are people who value their conception of morality over any practical concern. In pretty much those words.
And their conception of morality just so happens to be whatever the party apparatus wants. Hence most evangelicals have no problem with a thoroughly ungodly and corrupt person like Donald Trump.
I have a friend who went to a Trump rally recently. He saw a lot of t-shirts putting christ and "trump" in the same sentence. That's not a coincidence. These people see Christianity embodied in the power of the republican party. Their idea of the kingdom of god is whatever an otherwise totally godless and nihilistic party wants.
The modern GOP is a cult. One millions of Americans have gladly sold their souls to.
Keep in mind, I'm not a Christian. I don't much care what the political leanings of christianity are. Whether it jives with communism or capitalism or not is to me pretty irrelevant except on an intellectual level. But no, I don't see how anybody can read the gospels and come away with the impression that the rabidly materialistic and power hungry version of free market capitalism espoused by the republicans is in any way, shape, or form "christ like"
I think you would get a lot out of reading Debt: The First 5,000 Years... It speaks to "nation that is built on money that I will never be able to make" and your feeling of defeat being by design... I found the conclusion surprisingly hopeful/helpful.
Here's a book from an anthropologist who has studied the evolution of economies throughout world history. Humans are actually much more likely to simply use a debt-based system instead of bartering for exchanges when they do not have money to represent transactions. Bartering never happens in real time as you described. You don't wait for me to actually go get the roof fixed before you fix my PC. You just do the favor, and I owe you one.
https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290
It's also worth noting David Graeber's argument that the historical record actually shows that debt existed before currency did.
Read this: "Debt: The First 5,000 Years." The model of efficiency that you mention is pretty new to the scene and pretty much a big illusion.
http://www.amazon.com/Debt-The-First-000-Years/dp/1612191290
LOL, no, its a good book but there are many better recommendations.
For example, if you wanted to understand the tools of state/religious oppression and its consequences in modern context I may recommend; Why Nations fail
Or if you desired to have greater understanding of the consequences of inventing money; Debt, the first 5000 years
Or if you felt that religion was cool but the idea of God was wrong you could read; Change Your Thoughts - Change Your Life: Living the Wisdom of the Tao
Or if you wanted to read about the decline of world wide violence; The Better Angels of our Nature
He wrote a book, called "Debt, the first 5000 years". It is not a bad read, I enjoyed it. I know he did take some flack for it though.
https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290
Anthropology is the study of human society, their development, the cultures, the history... and economics as a discipline and its impact to how we behave is one of his interests.
This history is actually false. For a good accounting of why, see David Graeber's excellent "Debt: The First 5000 Years."
There actually isn't any evidence whatsoever that economies operated on barter initially. Barter appears to only arise in societies have had money but then do not have enough access to it for some reason. In other words, Barter is what money economies are reduced to when money becomes scarce or worthless. It appears this whole myth of Barter, then commodity money, then commodity backed money, then credit money can be traced to Adam Smith, who appears to have simply deducted back in time that it must've been barter because if you take away money, what do you have? However, we do not have any evidence of barter based economies in actual historical or anthropological studies.
Current anthropology suggests that credit came first, then money, and only barter in situations where money cannot be found. Really, read Mr. Graeber's book, it's really interesting.
definitely, but the cycle of infinite growth in capitalism seems to be coming to an end. it seems pretty unlikely that developing countries now will ever reach UK standards of living
if you'd like to read more here are some good books:
The End of Growth - Adapting to Our New Economic Reality
The Limits to Growth
Debt: The First 5000 Years
Governments can and do invent money (in their own currency) at will. There's a rather long winded chat about it here https://www.amazon.co.uk/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290. Venezuela demonstrates quite nicely what happens when they invent too much compared to how much they collect.
The problem is, this never actually happened. Anthropologists have been looking for this kind of barter society for a long time, and have never found it. The story really originates, in its modern form, from Adam Smith, who unfortunately wrote at a time when nobody could read anything that came before Homer (ca. 800 BC), and was doing the best he could at developing a history of money and debt. Once we could translate ancient languages and learned that nearly all ancient writing consisted of "Adad-Sin owes me four measures of barley," it became clear that debt predated money, which really predated organized barter. Barter is so horribly inefficient and dangerous (it's so clear that everyone is able and motivated to screw everyone else), it really only ever takes place between strangers (who might never meet again, lowering the certainty of debts), and among societies who have already used money but have lost a good money supply. In money-naive societies, that stranger barter is so dangerous and stressful, it usually has to happen in a highly ritualized context--first we dance and feast for two days, maybe trade female cousins around for a night, then start trading items, often with the language and motions of elaborate gift-giving.
Credit and debt come first. Then money. Then, in some places--or at the same time, on a limited scale between strangers--barter.
Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years
First thing: find me a list of the billionaires who donate to real charities that aren't just tax shelters so you can stop using Bill Gates as the image of your idols.
Second: Read this book http://www.amazon.com/dp/1612191290
If for some reason you cannot find yourself able to check it out at your local library, or even purchase it for yourself, I'll ask you to consider the process of how your shoes were made. The entire process from where the rubber was harvested, or leather if you are so lucky, to the lacing, the fabric, even the tag. Also consider who you bought those shoes from, and from where.
And then I want you to think really hard about America's current healthcare situation. I'll give you a headstart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Health_Organization_ranking_of_health_systems
After that, I want you to think about who lobbied the most against social healthcare not just during the Obama administration, but also the Clinton era. I'll give you a head start on that as well http://www.publicintegrity.org/2010/02/24/2725/lobbyists-swarm-capitol-influence-health-reform
Then, after all that, if you really wanna debate this, I want you to compare the list of billionaires that donate to charities to the companies they own and, most important of all, the lobby groups they are represented by.
If you still think that the 300 (299 since you want to keep singling out Bill Gates) deserve to keep all of their ill-gotten gains and that the poor are only poor because they choose to be, like gays choosing to be gay, you have my pity.
I would highly recommend the book Debt: The First 5,000 Years if you want to think more about the topic in general.
Read Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years.
TL;DR: debt's relation to slavery.
If you want an amazing (and often rage-against-the-world-inducing) book on this topic I would highly recommend David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years. It is in the top five books I recommend everyone to read.
>This is one of the secret strengths of right-wing populism. You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against tube workers for paralysing London during contract disputes: the very fact that tube workers can paralyse London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people.
You'd probably like the rest of the article too, it's by Michael Graeber the author of Debt: The first 5000 years which is also well worth reading.
> With better conditions it is less likely that the worker change jobs[...]
When the cost of improving conditions is lower than the cost of retraining/replacement, when there is no pressure from competition/unions to improve conditions, when your workers are still working for you despite poor conditions, why invest in improving conditions? It would be an investment with little immediate reward. Even if you manage to poach some workers from the competition, you are still limited in your hiring ability. You don't have infinite job positions available. If your competition is able to hire new workers to fill the gaps left, then your poaching offers no competitive benefit, and in fact is likely to have been detrimental. You spent money your competitors didn't, and that gap has to be made up somehow. These poaching techniques only work in positions where there is already high demand and low supply. This is not a condition that exists for the majority of job positions in the labor market. That is why, in most cases where conditions/wages improve, it is a result of either government pressure or union pressure.
> ok but this is not really socialism.
I didn't say it was.
> I don't oppose in public hosing or food bank or some form of negative income tax, for example.
Do you oppose unions?
> What is the percentage of population in the US that are "missed"? According to Washington Post it is 13 million in the US. So it is about 4% of the US population.
That is the percentage of the population that is homeless. One in eight Americans (13%) suffers from food insecurity. And as I said, Americans are better off than most. Human Rights Watch has declared the food insecurity situation in the UK to be a hunger crisis. Nearly one in five (19%) UK children under 15 face food insecurity.
> When you factor in the other 3 factors (no good boss, no skill, many worker to choose from) you are basically talking about workers in 3rd world countries.
Most workers live in developing countries. Most capitalist countries are developing countries.
> So how can socialism solve these problem? Lacking of resources are not going to be solved without their countries putting in serious effort.
Socialist revolution in the first world removes the boot that keeps the third world down.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-44252655
https://allafrica.com/view/group/main/main/id/00053163.html
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/flashback-when-hillary-clinton-moved-to-aggressively-block-haiti-from-raising-minimum-wage-to-62-cents
https://afrolegends.com/2017/05/01/the-11-components-of-the-french-colonial-tax-in-africa/
https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290
Plus, in a production-for-use economy resources can be directed towards the places that need them the most. Resources for developing infrastructure, agriculture, production, etc. can and should be directed towards poor countries.
> I don't understand why people in this sub always talk as if companies are invincible, when bankruptcy is the norm, rather than exception.
I didn't say the business was invincible. For the business to succeed it is wholly dependent on workers. But even bankruptcy rarely leads to the employer becoming homeless or otherwise poor, whereas failing to secure a job often does for the worker.
> And how is the capitalist ideology conflict with the existence of labor union?
Unions are unprofitable, and capitalists act to prevent them from organizing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_busting
http://killercoke.org/
> Please study worker retention strategies, "assholeish" boss are the one that is punished by the market.
As I said, worker retention strategies are only profitable in a situation where the pertinent skills are in high demand and low supply. They are unprofitable when the pertinent skills are abundant in the labor market.
> Of cause the boss want to pay as little as possible, but worker abuse generally lose money for the boss.
That's only because worker abuse generally leads to government and union intervention, which is why businesses often lobby for deregulation and anti-union legislation (such as, in the US, the [Taft-Hartley Act].
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act))
> You want to work with a boss that will leave you alone, rather than a boss that verbally abuse you every day, although they may pay the same salary.
I'm not talking about verbal abuse, I'm talking about poor conditions, low pay, long hours, and little to no benefits, all of which are continually profitable.
> If you compute the annual death rate vs the world population it is not that big of a deal. It is not even in the top ten death cause.
Even one person dying of hunger when we produce enough food for 10 billion is one death too many. These deaths are not due to a lack of food, they are due to food being distributed based on profit rather than a desire to feed the hungry.
> So what is your proposed solution, that will lower this number faster?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_for_use
http://www.amazon.ca/Debt-The-First-000-Years/dp/1612191290
I disagree that capitalism reflects human nature. I think that living in a capitalistic society for tens of generations makes people have a skewed perception of human nature. I recently read https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290 which gives anthropological evidence of non-commercial societies and it paints a very different picture of human nature. It isn't all good, but it is different. I believe Marx makes a similar argument in Capital.
that's a different way of looking at it than I thought you meant; I can see how we'd be talking past each other now.
traditionally, there's been a lot of debate of what aspects of human behavior are "nature vs nurture"; what do our genetics dictate (or influence) vs the environment we're set in.
the "natural environment" is a particularly thorny phrase... political theorists like Hobbes and Locke were very concerned about the nature of humanity in a "natural environment," i.e., one that would reflect only the genetic disposition of humanity, rather than the combination of that and society.
and I actually have started reading Graeber's book, and it is phenomenal. just provoking the idea that holding people responsible for their own actions (rather than the denizens they "represented" as despotic "leaders") is revolutionary. the Magnitsky Act comes to mind as a practical implementation of that, and it certainly has caused ruckus.
> But that group of people who are tuned in and educated on the topics in depth with knowledge unavailable in the mainstream want the truth. That's their audience.
Except these sources do not provide in-depth knowledge; quite far from it. The video this thread is about is an excellent example of just how vacuous and shallow the "alternative media" is. The attorney, Beck, just lists a series of random facts with no analyses or conclusion, and the infowars guy just free associates with the term "organ transplants."
The strongest argument against the infowars and Sargons of the world is a comparison of them against actual books researched over years, like Debt: The First 5000 Years, Nixonland, or Capital in the 21st Century. These books are what "in-depth information" looks like, not super-secret conspiracies that only the blessed can discern.
> Because otherwise it is very hard to know who to trust and who not to trust.
You don't have to trust anyone. This is the main problem with conspiracy theorists: they have discovered that one source cannot be trusted, therefore another can be. But don't trust anyone; evaluate all the claims. In the case of this video, what claim is being made? There is no claim -- they want you to rely on your imagination to conjure up scary images.
^The linked tweet was tweeted by @VitalikButerin on Apr 03, 2018 07:28:56 UTC (96 Retweets | 513 Favorites)
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3. "Money always evolves in the following four stages, collectible -> SoV -> MoE -> UoA" - no, no, no! Seriously, read David Graeber's Debt. Amazon link for the lazy: https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290
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^^• Beep boop I'm a bot • Find out more about me at /r/tweettranscriberbot/ •
While many of the books I would suggest have been mentioned previously throughout the comments, might I add a sort-of different take on history? Check out David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years for a unique view on economic evolution and the role its played in the development of human society (particularly, how debt has been a major driving force behind politics for millennia).
>But the author is wrong if he imples that "money" has always been dematerialized, just "credit".
Actually the author is correct. Believe it or not, "credit" was actually invented before "money". Have you read David Graeber's Debt the first 5000 years or any of Michael Hudson's books on the ancient middle eastern economies?
> They knew that a goat was worth so many of these coins, or so many of those other coins. Debasing and coin scraping was not their concern, as long as it was not so extreme that the thing could no longer be considered a whole coin.
People using these items didnt worry so much about the specific weight or metal content of these coins because, as the author states, they were used as "tokens" representing a specific value of "money".
If it makes you feel better, debt and credit are actually older than money. They had debt and credit in ancient Babylon 5000 years ago, but coins weren't invented until about 2300 years ago:
https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290
Kinda fascinating really... Gold coins mainly took off because it was a really good way to pay soldiers while they were invading foreign lands.
Yes, read Piketty etal for how the wealth disparity is now at the worst time in history, This will lead to revolution eventually as it worsens.
A good read here about the rise of bullshit jobs
and a good read here about the rise of bureaucracy in business and how stifling it is and from that book to this one.
Yes. Check out Debt: The first 5,000 years, by David Graeber. It's an extended take on this theme by an anthropologist. I'd take some of what he says with a grain of salt, but it's mostly excellent.
http://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1377099139&sr=1-1&keywords=debt+the+first+5000+years
Check it out. I don't agree with his interpretation of economics, but as an anthropologist his reporting on how people actually shared goods is very strong.
https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290
My advice to you is to read a book. The ones I pointed out would be a good start, but if you can't handle actual scholarly works yet, the Bible and Doctor Seuss aren't going to get you terribly far. So try finding a library. Pick up Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke. Then maybe you can graduate on to Jack Diamond and Graeber before tackling Pinker, Sagan and Krauss.
Read a book.
> A woman hitting a man is not necessarily concerning (inasmuch as a man hitting a woman is concerning) because (on average) the woman doesn't pose a serious threat to the man.
I think it goes deeper than that: Within living memory, women were effectively property of their husbands, and a certain amount of violence by husbands towards their wives was expected. You can even find people today seriously arguing that it is acceptable for a man to rape his wife, and I personally remember people being acquitted on the basis of this reasoning. So for a woman to attack a man is perceived in much the same way as a cute pet attacking its human owner — if the pet were serious, it would get crushed.
This is observed across societies. This is an interesting excerpt from Debt: The First 5000 Years:
> Most of us don't like to think much about violence. Those lucky enough to live relatively comfortable, secure lives in modern cities tend either to act as if it does not exist or, when reminded that it does, to write off the larger world "out there" as a terrible, brutal place, with not much that can be done to help it. Either instinct allows us not to have to think about the degree to which even our own daily existence is defined by violence or at least the threat of violence (as I've often noted, think about what would happen if you were to insist on your right to enter a university library without a properly validated ID), and to overstate the importance-or at least the frequency-of things like war, terrorism, and violent crime. The role of force in providing the framework for human relations is simply more explicit in what we call "traditional societies "-even if in many, actual physical assault by one human on another occurs less often than in our own. Here's a story from the Bunyoro kingdom, in East Africa:
> > Once a man moved into a new village. He wanted to find out what his neighbors were like, so in the middle of the night he pretended to beat his wife very severely, to see if the neighbors would come and remonstrate with him. But he did not really beat her; instead he beat a goatskin, while his wife screamed and cried out that he was killing her. Nobody came, and the very next day the man and his wife packed up and left that village and went to find some other place to live .
> The point is obvious. In a proper village, the neighbors should have rushed in, held him back, demanded to know what the woman could possibly have done to deserve such treatment. The dispute would become a collective concern that ended in some sort of collective settlement. This is how people ought to live. No reasonable man or woman would want to live in a place where neighbors don't look after one another.
> In its own way it's a revealing story, charming even, but one must still ask: How would a community-even one the man in the story would have considered a proper community-have reacted if they thought she was beating him?() I think we all know the answer. The first case would have led to concern; the second would have led to ridicule. In Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, young villagers used to put on satirical skits making fun of husbands beaten by their wives, even to parade them about the town mounted backwards on an ass for everyone to jeer at. No African society, as far as I know, went quite this far. (Neither did any African society burn as many witches-Western Europe at that time was a particularly savage place.) Yet as in most of the world, the assumption that the one sort of brutality was at least potentially legitimate, and that the other was not, was the framework within which relations between the sexes took place.
> () True, in many traditional societies, penalties are given to men who beat their wives excessively. But again, the assumption is that some such behavior is at least par for the course.
Gold is not important. It's 2014. Gold is just a yellow, shiny metal with occasional uses in electronics and as a tacky status symbol for vapid consumerists.
The primary reason gold was used as the token of currency in history was simply because it was relatively difficult to fraudulently create more. I.e., it was the early security strip. And people didn't even use gold for day-to-day transactions anyway.
TL;DR: gold is just an unimportant mostly-useless heavy metal. Get this shit off the front page. It's not news.