I’m beginning to think that the left has been too obsessed with GDP as a broken economic metric governing the global shitshow, when inflation is more insidious. Deflation may be a more radical demand than degrowth. Burst bubbles. Deflate the price of fossil fuel infrastructure.
More from pete wolfendale
This is what happens when you let philosophers try to write about real life. This ridiculous, game-playing, feigned innocence. Journals have been full of this for years, this elaborate performance of *doing philosophy* and saying nothing. I cannot adequately express my contempt pic.twitter.com/ciDeWuEkET
— Jack (@jackeselbst) January 14, 2021
This is a secular problem in the discipline. It's got nothing to do with the Analytic/Continental split in the anglophone world. They've both got the same ramifying signal/noise problem, it's just that the styles (tics and connotations) are different in each pedagogical context.
And this is before we start talking about tone policing and topic policing, which are both rife and essentially make the peer review journal system completely unfit for purpose, populated as it is by a random sampling of pedants selecting for syntactic noise over semantic signal.
We've allowed a system of self-reinforcing and ratcheting filters to evolve that effectively *fuzzes* our contribution to the growth of human knowledge (https://t.co/VmW15pGt7J), because it selects for properties only loosely related to those we claim to want. Let that sink in.
This is literally the opposite of what a filter is supposed to do: extract signal from noise, syntactic compression that preserves semantic content. Instead we are awash in syntactic artifacts optimised for minimal criticisable content and maximal pedantic posturing.
Which human societies, past or present, come closest to your ideal of how we should live together?
— Keith Frankish (@keithfrankish) January 15, 2021
I suspect that the vast majority of the answers to the original question will fall foul of the tendency to project ideal social arrangements that reflect our own style of social understanding and engagement, and that this will lead them to talk past one another.
Consider the perspective of someone far away from you on in the neurological map, who doesn’t overlap with your socially calibrated genetic resources for social intelligence: the social heaven of an autist introvert may be the social hell of a bipolar extrovert, and vice versa.
I’ve had many good conversations about this with people in different parts of the map who overlap with me in different ways (h/t @tjohnlinward, @dynamic_proxy, @maradydd, @mojozozoe, @UnclePhobic) whose personal heavens I would like to visit, but maybe not live in full time.
We get to see glimpses of these heavens not merely in the past, but in the present, and abstract their geometries, both in spatial/architectural terms (https://t.co/aTcRgtJOVJ) and in temporal/dynamic terms (). The physical/computational platforms around us configure our agency.
More from Economy
For 400 years inflation has NOT been in a "mountain range" of up and down, but rather stair-stepped in giant increases, always associated with major transformations in economic arrangements.
The only way that debt comes down is if rest of world flips to trade deficit status w/US (I.e., trades accumulates $USD from prior trade surpluses w/US for actual goods & services). Not likely anytime soon. $USD as global reserve currency requires massive public debt.
— David "Most Vicious Dogs & Ominous Weapons" Herr (@davidcherr) January 15, 2021
You get the impression from the eco-socialists and degrowthers that humanity wouldn\u2019t face the threat of climate change or biodiversity loss if it weren\u2019t for capitalism (or rather, if it weren\u2019t for capitalist modernity).
— Leigh Phillips (@Leigh_Phillips) February 2, 2021
But I see no evidence to suggest this is the case.
The historical counterfactual also in not totally convincing. So let's assume Germany and Europe went socialist. The world economy would have evolved exactly the same way it did? 🤔 I doubt it, this is too deterministic. Examples: /2
We do not know if the transition from coal to oil would have taken place when it took place, the way it did. From Timothy Mitchell we know that oil was a fix for capitalism to bypass the labour strikes of coal workers. One would think that socialists would treat workers better /3
We also do not know if socialist governments would strong arm the Middle East the way capitalists did, starting wars to secure cheap oil, and setting up puppet governments. One would want to think that Rosa Luxembourg would not go down that path..../4
We also do not know if they would have continued colonial unequal exchange, extracting raw materials as cheap as possible from the rest of the world. Without cheap oil and cheap materials, it is anyone's guess if GDP and CO2 would be where it is now. /5