Comment by chii
3 days ago
> We need a better economic system
none has been found. The command economy is inefficient, and prone to corruption.
informal/barter systems are too small in scale and does not produce sufficient amounts to make the type of abundant lifestyle we enjoy today possible.
As the saying goes - free market capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others.
We haven't really been trying to find such a system. The technological progress that we've had since the last attempts at a different kind of a system has been huge, so what was once impossible might now be possible if we put some effort into it.
There is no system that fulfills your requirements.
It is even easy to explain why: Humans are part of all the moving pieces in such a system and they will always subvert it to their own agenda, no matter what rules you put into place. The more complex your rule set, the easier it is to break.
Look at games, can be a card game, a board game, some computer game. There is a fixed set of rules, and still humans try to cheat. We are not even talking adults here, you see this with kids already. Now with games there is either other players calling that out or you have a computer not allowing to cheat (maybe). Now imagine everyone could call someone else a cheater and stop them from doing something. This in itself is going to be misused. Humans will subvert systems.
So the only working system will be one with a non-human incorruptible game master, so to speak. Not going to happen.
With that out of the way, we certainly can ask the question: What is the next best thing to that? I have no answer to that, though.
Cheating happens in competition based systems. No one cheats in games where the point is to co-operate to achieve some common goal. We should aim to have a system based on recognizing those common goals and enabling large scale co-operation to achieve them.
3 replies →
> What is the next best thing to that? I have no answer to that, though.
i argue that what we have today is the so called next best thing - free market capitalism, with a good dose of democracy and strong gov't regulations (but not overbearing).
>The technological progress that we've had since the last attempts at a different kind of a system has been huge
And, dare I say, mostly due to capitalism.
> we’ve tried three whole things and are all out of ideas!
Guess it’ll just have to be this way forever and ever.
Free market capitalism does not exist anywhere.
In fact, free market and capitalism are opposites.
Lol no they aren't, they're orthogonal, almost entirely unrelated.
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