Economies I’d Like to See
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I’m not much on labels; I tend to have disagreements with nearly any group that fits comfortably under a given designation. I don’t know of any distinct philosophy that represents my particular views.
I like the free market. It’s a good system for allowing any individual or organization to rise to the level of their own competence; capitalism is fairly closely modeled on the system of nature, which has had a few billion years of natural selection to work out its process, after all. And it provides a nice effort-reward feedback that motivates me and plenty of other people.
There are places that it breaks down, though. Monopolies in business are bad in the same way that monocultures are bad in farming— consider the Irish
potato famine and the numerous worms and viruses that propagate among popular operating systems. The tragedy of the commons becomes a serious issue when the commons is our atmosphere or oceans. And while all the problems that these create are ultimately self-correcting, I don’t want to be around during the self-correction process. That’s one place I want a degree of regulation: enough to keep the economy flexible, not so much that it’s prohibitively difficult to start new businesses, and certainly not a centrally planned economy.
Advocates of corporate social responsibility often talk of a triple bottom line. If we attached a dollar value to all externalities and required accounting for them— whether it be dumping mercury in the air or carefully engineering jobs to avoid paying for health insurance— we could get a single bottom line. Maintain a good standard for that and the invisible hand will steer a more sensible course than it is now.
It also makes sense that people should get together as cities and provinces and nations to leverage the economies of scale for good and services that we all want. Examples include health care, police services to provide security internally, national defense to provide security externally, keeping the economy on an even keel, educating children to become productive workers, and retraining adults when their industries change and they need to find a new line of work.
Some of these things require a careful balance: it’s good to provide support for people who are left as casualties of a shifting economy, but the safety net needs to be sufficiently uncomfortable that people would rather work than stay there. Build it well enough— so people who are training between jobs can still keep roofs over their heads and food in their bellies and their children in school— and we could abolish some of the regulations that make the labor market less flexible, even the minimum wage, making it easier for people to get off the safety net. The guideline I would seek in making these changes is that each change should come with a decrease in risk for the people affected.
I like the free market. It’s a good system for allowing any individual or organization to rise to the level of their own competence; capitalism is fairly closely modeled on the system of nature, which has had a few billion years of natural selection to work out its process, after all. And it provides a nice effort-reward feedback that motivates me and plenty of other people.
There are places that it breaks down, though. Monopolies in business are bad in the same way that monocultures are bad in farming— consider the Irish
potato famine and the numerous worms and viruses that propagate among popular operating systems. The tragedy of the commons becomes a serious issue when the commons is our atmosphere or oceans. And while all the problems that these create are ultimately self-correcting, I don’t want to be around during the self-correction process. That’s one place I want a degree of regulation: enough to keep the economy flexible, not so much that it’s prohibitively difficult to start new businesses, and certainly not a centrally planned economy.
Advocates of corporate social responsibility often talk of a triple bottom line. If we attached a dollar value to all externalities and required accounting for them— whether it be dumping mercury in the air or carefully engineering jobs to avoid paying for health insurance— we could get a single bottom line. Maintain a good standard for that and the invisible hand will steer a more sensible course than it is now.
It also makes sense that people should get together as cities and provinces and nations to leverage the economies of scale for good and services that we all want. Examples include health care, police services to provide security internally, national defense to provide security externally, keeping the economy on an even keel, educating children to become productive workers, and retraining adults when their industries change and they need to find a new line of work.
Some of these things require a careful balance: it’s good to provide support for people who are left as casualties of a shifting economy, but the safety net needs to be sufficiently uncomfortable that people would rather work than stay there. Build it well enough— so people who are training between jobs can still keep roofs over their heads and food in their bellies and their children in school— and we could abolish some of the regulations that make the labor market less flexible, even the minimum wage, making it easier for people to get off the safety net. The guideline I would seek in making these changes is that each change should come with a decrease in risk for the people affected.
One problem for me was that there was an old, climbing rose on the spot-which as a rule, I avoid because they need too much care and are disease prone. Then there is the constant feeding and watering which costs me money.
That said, it was covered with an amazing blaze of upwards of 70 red blossoms...Wow, how I enjoyed this and those bumble bees drifting from flower to flower collecting that golden pollen. But I continued my skeleton plan on minimum up-keep really only fit for a hardy perennial and hoped for the best next season.
Now fast forward three years with my attitude. My climbing rose which I began to appreciate was dropping all of its leaves, which were a sick yellow with black spots, leaving behind naked spines of branches with shrunken buds that also all fell off.
I called Dr Eisner a "plant doc" to check-out the Oaks on the property whose leaves were wilting. Well, he spotted my black-sooty rose and He stopped before it and told me it was now "contagious" to the other plants and they would die too, plus any fungicide required to stop the disease would kill the climber...Further-more, aphids had attacked the buds and so now it had multiple diseases-all due to my neglect. He advised me to burn the plant and any contagious debris.
So that is what my minimal care plan had wrought-now all my hardy perennials were at risk. I suppose some weed would live on as nothing can kill a weed. While the rose, was more "needy," it was still a stupendous plant also, privately, I felt I did not deserve to be the keeper of any garden after this. I went ahead to save the rose anyway instead of burning the plant.
It took me three years to treat, feed and water the plant properly, while all the while, making sure the cure was not lethal...Finally, this summer its' blooms counted well over the usual 70-plus and covered the rose all summer. My perennial plants survived as well. I decided it was worth it all. To my surprise the bumble bees came back too.
1) capitalism modeled after nature: I think this is up for debate, and this is a real key part of your post. I'm willing to bet a lot of the economics differencee between conservatives and liberals comes down to your definition of the natural world (and "human nature" to be more specific... i.e. are humans naturally good or naturally bad??)
2) children: in any economic system we need to be most aware of children being born in our society. They do not have choices of "how hard to work" or how "well to perform." They are simply dealt their hand at birth, and have no self-determination whatsoever. Any successful economic system will take this truth into account.
Pure capitalism looks to me a lot like the normal functioning of nature: it is equally uncaring and lethal to beings that can’t keep up with natural selection. I believe that it is human nature to take care of our own in lean times and to be generous in prosperous times— I’d say we’re naturally pragmatic. Modern technology has brought us to a time of amazing prosperity, and we now have the power to declare all of humanity our own. I’m hoping that if the argument from compassion doesn’t win people over, the argument from long-term investment in human capital will.
Certainly, children should have the opportunity to make the best use of their inborn talents; that’s a win-win for them and society. Developing those is a matter of both nutrition and education. What I’d like to see is a feedback mechanism that acknowledges the role of teachers in creating economic prosperity by educating children that go on to become productive workers. For example, information technology is now good enough to track the set of schools a person attended; imagine diverting a small percentage of taxes a person pays to the schools they attended and to the teachers that taught them, from preschool through college. The return on investment is at a remove of decades, but in the long run it could provide a valuable incentive for education.