Quote from: LightRider on May 06, 2012, 12:16:42 PM

Quote from: dvide on May 06, 2012, 12:00:20 PM

Quote from: LightRider on May 06, 2012, 10:08:59 AM

Quote from: dvide on May 05, 2012, 08:55:28 PM

Quote from: LightRider on May 05, 2012, 07:41:10 PM

What do you do when 99% of all labor is "divided" into the responsibility of robots, automation and AI? What kind of economy do you expect to have then? Shall all 7 billion people continue to compete for the remaining positions of labor just to live? What kind of sickness are you people promoting who still cling to the ancient and useless ideas of pre industrial society and economic theory? Why don't you start recognizing what is actually happening and start participating rationally?

If nobody works or needs to work because machines are doing everything then you're already living in utopia. What's the problem? Isn't that the whole goal of the Venus project you're so fond of? A fine goal, but the thing is without money you have no way to do economic calculation and so no rational way to allocate resources to where you're going to get the biggest bang for your buck. You get more scarcity, not a magical post-scarcity utopia.

Economic calculation is an abstraction and distorts our perceptions and values. This ideology has run rampant for decades and we can plainly see the results. In a resource based economy, we measure things scientifically, empirically and rationally. We don't need to distort, hide or ignore reality to fit our preconceived economic notions because we would recognize the danger in doing so. It's time to stop living in the past and embrace the technological and scientific realities of our time so that we can all benefit from them. Clinging to ancient economic religions leads only to your detriment.

But you realize you're not actually saying anything meaningful? Unless you can take a more reductionist approach to your explanations you're not going to convince anyone, except people who also think the way you do. You're just speaking in this meaningless holistic way that makes no sense to someone who knows to use methodological individualism as a basis for the explanation of social phenomenon.

Evoorhees has explained with methodological individualism the Mengerian account of why money is a naturally emergent phenomenon that serves an actual purpose, and how it would come about naturally even to a society of people who have no prior concept of money. He's not even really being prescriptive about it; he's being descriptive. It is explained by reducing the account to simple non-controversial statements, i.e. so that the explanation doesn't even assume some hyper-rational cooperation of people to come up with it. It just comes about on its own by individual humans being merely rational actors, and that is to say human action isn't just arbitrary action but goal-driven. Now, this isn't a rejection of the existence of collective groups -- of numbers of people lower than Dunbar's limit at least -- but it's just saying that any form of collectivism isn't even necessary explain money in a sufficient way.

And the Wikipedia link on economic calculation explains -- again using methodological individualism -- why money prices are needed for profit/loss accounting, and why profit/loss accounting is needed for a society to rationally economize and allocate resources, and for entrepreneurs to coordinate, on a macro scale. Prices actually mean something; they're not just arbitrarily set things (at least in a free market). They're a bottom-up reflection of the intersubjective valuations of things to the people in an economy, and of the availability of such things. Without prices you lack the necessary information to be able to calculate what is economically profitable to produce and what isn't. You won't get that information any other way than through the emergent processes of the price system. Certainly no central computer could have it because it doesn't have access to the dynamic minds of everybody in the society. So when you say 'Economic calculation is an abstraction and distorts our perceptions and values', I don't even know what that means. I'd say it's the complete opposite, but I'm not merely asserting it like you're doing. You can't just holistically dismiss any inconvenient economic explanation outright that comes your way as being some mere historical baggage. You actually have to criticize it, and use the same reductionistic approach to explain why what we're saying isn't actually true and why the Venus project ideas are right

Lecture: Calculation and Socialism | Joseph T. Salerno

Individualism is a fraud used to promote economic theories. We behave, think, believe and promote that which is prominent in our environment, both physical and social. You can't even form the basis of the most rudimentary community on the ideas of individuality. We must share similarities with others if we are to survive as individuals, period. Appealing to such baseless ideas is what perpetuates the abhorrent behavior we see today.

That's not what methodological individualism means; don't confuse it with a sort of prescriptive individualism of going off by yourself and being selfish, etc. And you absolutely can explain community by methodological individualism, by explaining that man is a social animal and has instincts that lean that way. In fact that is the whole point:

Quote from: Mises

It is uncontested that in the sphere of human action social entities have real existence. Nobody ventures to deny that nations, states, municipalities, parties, religious communities, are real factors determining the course of human events. Methodological individualism, far from contesting the significance of such collective wholes, considers it as one of its main tasks to describe and to analyze their becoming and their disappearing, their changing structures, and their operation. And it chooses the only method fitted to solve this problem satisfactorily.

The economic calculation problem explains, with money and the price mechanism (both of which have an even more reductionistic explanation), how entire societies -- and even the entire world now -- are able to cooperate together well beyond Dunbar's number, economize on a macro level, and how this cooperation would not be possible without those price signals. After all we are not linked by a hive mind: we are fundamentally still individuals, and groups only form when individual action coincides to make groups form. You still have to give a satisfactory explanation of why and how that happens, and a holistic one isn't sufficient.