The enlargement of the middle class has been the real factor as when you talk about a demographic transition, the timescale is far longer than we usually use. — ssu

But this is in a shrinking middle class. I take your point: you're more considering differences between rich countries and poor countries over a longer time period. However, the historical capacity for capitalism to self-destruct is not what it has been in the last 100 years, and a given country unable to replenish its own recruitment pool isn't much aided by poor countries with high reproduction rates. (I was thinking of introducing the relationship between low birthrate and xenophobia, e.g. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/let-s-talk-about-the-link-between-immigration-and-low-reproduction-rates-1.2926375 , since immigration is the obvious solution to that. Do you know of any data on such correlations? I just assume you have all data at all times.)

Here I think both I and you have to be careful on just what the reasons are as it's a complex issue. If this would be the (only) case, then countries with free education and housing programs would have different statistics, but I'm not so sure they have. — ssu

Yes, I'm only speaking of the UK where free higher education was replaced first by low-cost education at the end of the century, then by high-cost education ten years ago, over a period when house prices inflated 200%. I think the trends in other countries should be compared, but then by virtue of being other countries, different factors will weigh in.

I wonder if the first two bars on that graph are related. "I'm not ready. Ah shit, I'm old!"

The market mechanism ought to handle these kind of difficulties. Or then you use migrant labor as the UK did, which had political consequences in the form of a Brexit vote. — ssu

"The market mechanism" is a tad vague and hopeful. Do you mean that, if there's a competition for resources, there'll be winners and losers? True, but that's market contraction, precisely the sort of self-destruction I'm talking about. Immigration is the means the UK used, but yes Brexit showed that that's not a long-term solution either. Trump too, I guess.

:up: A good, if depressing, reminder, that those who most need of reform will invariably end up opposing it.

It doesn't look circular, and nor is it. — Bartricks

Well, it is. You force an asymmetry in by hand, then claim to have discovered an asymmetry. That is circular.

This is where you introduce an asymmetry by hand:

Well, although one will also be creating pleasures by procreating, those pleasures - most of them, anyway - do not seem deserved. — Bartricks

And here you uncover an asymmetry from which antinatalism apparently follows:

So, an act of human procreation can therefore be expected to create undeserved suffering and non-deserved pleasure. — Bartricks

But you avoid the more vital point, which is your unjustified jump from justice to morality. If a meteorite lands on my leg while I'm sunbathing, that is undeserved suffering, but there's no moral agent involved. You will no doubt respond that in fact there is: the parents who chose to have me. But again that's the conclusion.

I’m not sure how that tells the opposite story. It tells the same story. — NOS4A2

So if a socialist country vents bodies, that's proof that socialism leads to emigration. And if it doesn't then stops being socialist and THEN vents bodies, that's proof that socialism leads to emigration.

Interesting. You have a black box in which whatever you put in, "socialism leads to emigration" comes out.

The depositors would have been bailed-out, the debt written-off (what needs to happen!!), — synthesis

By whom, if not the state?

Had they let the banks fail, nothing would have happened other than the system would had gone through a much needed re-set (as happened in Iceland). — synthesis

Iceland seems a bizarre example to choose if you're claiming that letting the banks fail would be fine. That didn't just poke Iceland: that had a massive impact on other countries, especially the UK. 500,000 people worldwide lost the contents of their accounts in Iceland, precisely one of the disastrous effects I mentioned that you're claiming wouldn't happen. And that was in spite of government efforts to nationalise and underwrite the failing banks, precisely the state intervention you're claiming didn't happen. The Icelandic market fell by 90% and its currency plummeted. The country was brought to the brink of collapse, saved largely by massive cash injections from other countries' central banks and the IMF.

The notion that Iceland is a great example of the market sorting itself out without intervention is curious.

Yes, and as long as capitalists are willing to adapt, this is not a problem for them. — baker

Again, this isn't how they react though. Long-term falling and plateauing stock prices don't end well. The faith that they'd adapt for the sake of the market seems ill-placed. The actions of stockholders aren't those of stock traders: they're not based on the relative value of the company wrt the market; they are based on the relative value of the company wrt yesterday's value. If that value plateaus, the results can be disastrous even if the business is profitable, especially if it depends on outside financing as many businesses do. It doesn't matter if the competition is failing commensurately or even if the current profit is perfectly sustainable: sustainability and competitiveness are not good enough for a large business to be viable.

In good times for a market, when a company's stock plateaus or falls, that company can rely on borrowing, essentially selling a part of its future growth. However if a long-term contraction is inevitable, that is no longer an attractive investment.

Beyond the obvious incentives of lenders to turn away and owners to cut and run, plateauing and falling stock prices effect employee retention. If the job market is already an employee market due to a contracting recruitment pool, this will exacerbate the problem. Either stock incentives will have to be replaced with hard cash incentives, or businesses will lose employees.

If you want to see what falling prices in a contracting economy looks like, check out the Lehman Brothers.

I feel that the battle between capitalism vs socialism needs to be transformed altogether to meet the needs of humanity in the widest sense
possible. — Jack Cummins

Hear hear.

Thank you? :wink: — ssu

You've arrived, how lovely!

The most important reason is that with prosperity and women joining the workforce people don't need offspring to take care of themselves when they are older. — ssu

And yet what we see in the UK data is the opposite: birth rate is highest where the mother either has a middle-management position or does not need to work full time, and lowest where women are unemployed or employed full-time in dead-end jobs.

More affluent people have had far less children than poorer people for a very long time. — ssu

The most affluent and the poorest have tended to have more here. It was generally the middle classes who had the least children, which speaks to precisely the concerns I raise in the OP. Aspirational middle class parents want their children to be well-educated home owners. This means focussing resources on usually two children. The rich can afford as many degrees and houses as they want, and the poor hope for neither.

What I think we're seeing is that the middle- and lower-middle class couples are reducing the number of children to one, because they can only afford to school and house one child. It's not the case that those children can fend for themselves: most of my and later generations cannot afford to join the housing market and rely either on inheritance or the Bank of Mum and Dad.

I don't think this a problem for capitalism, the private ownership of industry, but for the monetary system and the financial system. — ssu

Well let's say you run a business and you need to recruit, but your recruitment pool has contracted. This means that the probability of a potential employee choosing you over a competitor will shrink unless you offer more financial incentives to join your business. The same number of recruitments, but at more cost to the company, or else fewer recruitments.

What we might see is a return to human investment from the private sector, such as a lowering of qualification requirements, a return to training, more apprenticeships. But again this is at the company's expense (although apprenticeships, in my experience, offer good value for money).

Also it's an obstacle for a pay-as-you-go social welfare system that would need to function correctly a growing population. — ssu

In some ways that's already happening. The shrinking birthrate in the UK has left a small number of taxpayers to foot the bill for a large number of state pensions which, last time I checked, accounted for almost a third of the annual budget.

But a smaller recruitment pool driving up prices and/or increased human investment from the private sector seems to me likely to alleviate the welfare bill.

If the younger generations are smaller than previous ones means simply that more of that capital is inherited by them. — ssu

That is not the direction capital seems to take. Here as in the US and elsewhere, capital is moving from the many to the few. The proportion of UK wealth owned by the top 1% is soaring.

It's a problem for that business, but not for capitalism on the whole. One business fails, and another one flourishes. That's capitalism. — baker

What you're describing is equilibrium. But what's being discussed is not an equilibrium condition. Irrespective of how individual businesses fare, the market as a whole would contract. (Pending elaboration on Josh's objection.)

:up:

Likewise purists will disagree, but don't start with primary sources. Find good introductory texts on the bits you're interested in.

But the consequences of not bailing out the banks would have been catastrophic, not just for the market, but for the entire country. And that of course was the scam. Banks provide an essential public service, and so cannot be allowed to fail.
— Kenosha Kid

That's total bullshit. This is what the politicians and bankers were telling everybody. I wonder why?? — synthesis

As an addendum to this, and perhaps an opportunity to bring it back to the OP, consider those countries for whom it was genuinely catastrophic, i.e. those that couldn't bail themselves out, like Italy, Portugal and Greece, the three countries in western Europe that also have the steepest decline in birthrates.

Phew! I caught up! Time to do the dishes.

I think more people try to escape from socialist states than move to them. The Venezuelan refugee crisis and Cuban exodus give us reasons as to why this occurs. — NOS4A2

And, again, the mass exodus from former communist states after the fall of communism in Europe tells the opposite story. And let's not neglect those rapist Mexicans. At best, you've hit upon an irrelevancy.

Which is still not a problem, as long as the capitalist aims to be proportionally/relatively wealthier than others.
Ie. for such a capitalist to be successful, wealthy means to have x-times more than others. Whether this means having 10 billion when others have 10,000, or whether this means having ten horses while others have one donkey. — baker

Take a look at the typical fate of a business with falling or static stock prices. It's a problem.

That's total bullshit. This is what the politicians and bankers were telling everybody. I wonder why?? — synthesis

Because it's not total bullshit. Growth depends on banks loaning money. After the collapse, even after we bailed the banks out, recovery was protracted because banks were cautious to lend. So how could that have not been worse if there had been far fewer banks to lend?

Most homeowners in my country have mortgages. Banks can recall those loans at any time, and seize those homes upon default. The alternative would be to flood a failing market with mortgage deeds. Possibly many homes could have been protected this way with a massive transfer of collateral from the few to the even fewer, but a lot of people would have lost their homes (in fact, a lot of people did, but scale that up).

Even governments depend on lending. Unlike the aforementioned Switzerland, the UK has been essentially bankrupt since the second world war, exacerbated by Thatcherism and the financial crisis.

And that's before we get to savings, which would have been wiped out.

The idea that all would have been well had the banks been allowed to fail is, in your parlance, total bullshit.

Banks used to fail all the time (and good riddance to them). — synthesis

When they were small enough to insure, to fail, and for insurers to be able to pay out the odd failure, yes. Insurers would no better have weathered the collapse of the entire sector.

Among other things, robotization is a cause of this trend , which I think will only accelerate. — Joshs

Well, I for one welcome etc.

I also think that, as a reflection of choices people make for their own benefit , it will benefit capitalist economies. The current panic-mongering among economist over
population decline is the result of relying on old and outdated models to understand the relationship between economic growth and population. — Joshs

Can you bring us up-to-date? For instance, a rebuttal to:

If the worker pool contracts, rather than many people competing for the same jobs, you'll have corporations competing for the same workers, which drives up wages. This is already evident in some job roles in rapidly expanding industries, such as IT. There hasn't been a bad time to be a programmer ever, even after the dot-com bubble burst.

Likewise if you have less people to sell shit to, you have less profit. So from both ends, a contraction in the population is a contraction in the markets. — Kenosha Kid

I know, the problem is that the state cannot do such. — synthesis

This is what needs to be argued. The most sustainable economy in the world is Switzerland, which no one would consider a socialist country: it has the most corrupt banking sector in the world and a regressive corporation taxation approach. However... it also has one of the most progressive human development programmes, the tightest environmental safeguards, and a progressive income taxation effectively set by the people in the most progressive parliament ever. It is a little anomalous, but even here a pluralistic approach is evident: let banks and corporations do as they will, but invest in the people from the proceeds.

Next are Sweden and Denmark, both progressive countries with strong socialist and environmental policies to complement their capitalism.

Fourth is here, the UK, which also has a strong history of socialism: the National Health Service, the welfare state, and an on-again off-again progressive taxation system. (Even the regressive Conservative government that scammed its own people by riding on a ticket of economy savings before undervaluing and selling banks nationalised in 2008 and cutting tax for the richest and frontline services saw the benefit of the bankers bonus tax.) However, right now, all of that is under threat, although we are currently enjoying the most environmentally conscientious government we've had for a hundred years.

Governments are great at taking money from other people and (doing whatever...good, bad, or indifferent), — synthesis

Well, that's what the OP is arguing for: take money from the rich and the corporation's to invest in those people who are retreating from raising children in order to sustain capitalism in the future.

But, as we’ve seen, rather than reduce the welfare state or better focus its spending on an aging population, the welfare state will seek to protect itself and move to replace its declining labor force through policies such as immigration. — NOS4A2

To get immigration, you have to be a nation that is attractive to live in. If it were true that socialist states have more, that would suggest that the world's workers are betting on those states.

Welfare states will certainly suffer from declining birth rates. — NOS4A2

This doesn't appear to be the case. Eastern Europe has the fastest declining birthrates in the world since emerging from communism. After that, Japan.

The banks should have been allowed to fail in 2008. — synthesis

Should, according to capitalist theory, yes. A few banks (Barclays being one iirc) refused the bailout, but most took it (and used it to pay banker bonuses), so corporations cannot even be trusted to adhere to this capitalist ethic.

But the consequences of not bailing out the banks would have been catastrophic, not just for the market, but for the entire country. And that of course was the scam. Banks provide an essential public service, and so cannot be allowed to fail. What I'm arguing for is an environment in which banks can be allowed to fail, properly, and people can choose (freeeeeedom!) between trusting capitalist banks and risking failure or underwritten, regulated banks which will not perform as well in the short term but will abide such catastrophes.

As long as there are so many people on the planet, there is no danger to capitalism. — baker

So part of the OP is on this point. Capitalism depends on growth, on consumers, and on cheap labour.

If the worker pool contracts, rather than many people competing for the same jobs, you'll have corporations competing for the same workers, which drives up wages. This is already evident in some job roles in rapidly expanding industries, such as IT. There hasn't been a bad time to be a programmer ever, even after the dot-com bubble burst.

Likewise if you have less people to sell shit to, you have less profit. So from both ends, a contraction in the population is a contraction in the markets.

And let's not forget, we're talking about the future here. The number of people in a given market is not the problem: it's the direction that number is going and the speed it is moving there.

I'm not sure whether birthrates are just a symptom of that same problem - lack of resources does seem part of it, but it's not like it's a simple linear relationship. There also doesn't seem to be a direct correlation between the countries worst affected (which as far as I know are Japan and South Korea) and a certain kind of capitalist practice. There is clearly a cultural element playing into this. — Echarmion

For sure, it would be too difficult to consider every country which is why I narrowed down to my own. It would be great to consider others though, even if a broad picture is out of reach. Affordability is my interpretation of the data but it makes sense to me. When you have to afford university and house deposits, that has to place a severe cap on the number of children you can afford on lower incomes, especially when the probability of survival of one child is extremely high.

If we're moving toward a hereditary mortgage system, only one child can keep that mortgage going. Again, that's going to have an impact on decisions about how many children to have.

I think the problem with birth rates might be less one of capitalism in theory, and more one of where capitalism has ended up in practice. — Echarmion

I think all problems with capitalism are practical ones. I think the attraction of pluralism is that you can let capitalism adhere to theory, let it succeed or fail in practice, and, if it fails, not bring everyone down with it. The ideal, and the theory, is that the failure of a trader will destroy that trader, not the market or the country.

What I am reasonably confident of is that most people no longer implicitly trust that their children will have it better than they will. That "american dream", seems very much dead. And that has an obvious implication for having children. — Echarmion

Same here. My generation is the first for a long time to be less well off than our parents, and it's by quite some margin.

I know what you want to say here, just want to note that capitalism has always been backed up by the state in practice. The idea that capitalism represents a free economy in opposition to the state is a myth. — Echarmion

I know, but the counter-argument tends to be along the lines of "the market takes care of itself" when history tells us it does no such thing. In this sense, a pluralist approach allows for a more capitalist capitalism, just not as the only gun in town.

(You can extend this idea beyond birthrates and climate change. Take cyber security, for instance. The state is being forced to intervene because corporate practices are both a commercial and national security issue. Capitalists might shudder at the regulation coming in, but a pluralist approach would allow for state-approved corporations that obey regulation and cooperate with inspection in return for not being fined millions when they're hacked.)

I couldn't possible take offence from anything you have said. — synthesis

Phew!

The point is that society is based on an infinite number of things going on at the same time. Nobody can understand this kind of complexity, yet proscribe solutions for it. — synthesis

That's fine, but note I'm not arguing that the state should run everything. I'm arguing that the state should create an environment in which capitalism runs things more sustainably.

Redistribution of wealth, to whatever degree, does not require precise knowledge of the markets. In the case described by the OP, the state already knows better than anyone where birthrate is falling, and I'm suggesting that it's not difficult to figure out why.

If capitalism is driving plummeting birthrates, we don't need the state to step in and run industries, i.e. take over from capitalism. Instead we need the state to address the problems capitalism is causing. One way might be progressive taxation and investment. Another might be means-tested housing or education credits. The precise details and pros and cons we could get into. What is obvious is that a capitalism that destroys its own worker and consumer base is not capable of sustaining itself.

I'm afraid that this is a matter of ideology.
How are people going to change their consumer habits if they don't first change their minds? — baker

Well, we at least can do better. :) I was just trying to steer synth to a more critical mode of discussion. It's understandable that everyone is a bit defensive atm.

But yes beyond whatever we say here, there are definitely ideological barriers.

State intervention prevented the market from cleaning-up much some the problem. Capitalism (like everything else) sucks when you massive corruption coupled with state intervention. — synthesis

Although actually this is worth treating. When the financial sector self-destructed this century (due entirely to its own practices, and from which it was unable to react constructively), the affected nations faced two alternatives:

1. take capitalism seriously and let the banks fall, bringing down every saver, every mortgage payer, every business depending on provision of loans with them.
2. inject taxpayer money into the sector, allowing the banks time to recover and ride out their own wave of destruction.

Neither are good options, but the first was, rightly, seen as the worst.

There was a perfect opportunity to ensure that this never happened again using a pluralistic approach. Ethical banks that followed a more stringent, preservative set of regulations could be guaranteed to be underwritten by the state, just as banks effectively are now, since if they fail again, we must bail them out again).

Meanwhile freer, more reactive (short-termist) banks could carry on as usual, but should they fail, market forces hold without the intervention of the state.

Customers who want security could opt for the state-secured banks; those who don't can risk the casino banks. The latter are free to exemplify capitalist dogma... Until they die, as they should and would. New ones can rise up and take their place, and the people who used them have lost out, but with fair warning.

This to me shows how pluralism, not capitalism, exemplifies choice. Capitalism underwritten by the state is not capitalism at all: it's just a scam to part taxpayers with their money. Capitalism as part of a pluralism can be as free as capitalists pretend capitalism already is, including free to die.

Just the same, in the end I believe that the country with freer market will win-out in the long run. I am not sure anybody wants a poor environmental outcome, so the mistakes made (via greed/corruption) become self-correcting as the market figures it out and demands change. — synthesis

Here's the deal, freedom is ALWAYS the answer, be it in personal matters, matter of the state, or the economy. Allow people to make decisions and take responsibility for themselves. There are certainly needs for a state, but not so many. The last thing that is needed is somebody telling everybody what they need. This is when it starts to get ugly. — synthesis

Okay, it looks like curiosity has encountered religiosity and no synthesis is likely.

If you look at the medium to long term, it seems pretty clear that capitalism (even though it is political corruption that causes most/if not all of the difficulties) is a system that provides the best life for the most people. — synthesis

I did look at the medium to long term, e.g. the 2008 economic collapse, its obstinate reaction to the climate crisis. The blind faith in capitalism to react is simply not something that can be taken very seriously in light of the evidence. As I said, I didn't raise the question to start a religious war between fervent capitalists and fervent socialists, since I am neither. Facts, evidence, argument based on those... good. Ideology (including ideological historical revisionism per your follow-up post)... not helpful. Sorry. No offense meant, just not the sort of discussion I was fishing for. Others might take you up on it though.

No, they encouraged by state intervention, such as through subsidies for "green technology". — baker

Actually, yes, I suppose there were general electric car battery subsidies that inevitably funded lithium ion battery research.

The state, if it would be a moral agent acting morally, would intervene with 1. this demand, and 2. the response of corporations to it. — baker

Okay, so you are in favour of state intervention. In this case, I suppose more would be desired, e.g. more specific terms for subsidy, regulation on batteries.

To defend the use of lithium ion batteries for a moment, I don't see anything particularly wrong with solving a big problem with a lesser problem. I agree that at best it should be a transitional technology while better ones are developed. That industry would put their weight behind its most mature and transferable technologies (since lithium ion batteries were already mature for other use cases) is, from one angle, precisely the sort of short-term thinking that we want from them. The downside is industry's likely inertia in moving from lithium ion to other, better technologies once they're so heavily invested.

In the UK btw we've set a deadline for abolishing the sale of petrol- and diesel-only cars. This will obviously push industry into investing more in alternative technologies, which will in turn keep those industries going longer. Little comfort for those malaffected by lithium ion battery manufacture, I agree, but biggest problem first.

Except that the damage is done elsewhere on the planet. Parts of Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina are destroyed in the process of producing lithium for batteries for electric cars. — baker

As opposed to all of the planet being destroyed by burning fossil fuels? Also, this doesn't strike me as relevant to the question. Lithium batteries in cars aren't produced by state intervention, but by corporations responding to demand for cars that don't burn fossil fuels.

"Hey, BLM - there's no genocide being committed by the police." — counterpunch

No one is accusing police of genocide. A fine example of the straw men that must be resorted to when reality is too much to handle.

The point of the market "being in control" is that it can react much quicker (and with a great deal more accuracy) to the needs of all concerned. — synthesis

Another, perhaps more pertinent example of capitalism's ability to seed it's own destruction due to its inability to react to long-term problems is the financial crisis of 2008. From a short-termist viewpoint, it obviously made a lot of sense for financiers to carry on with their legalised pyramid scheme. However it was pretty obvious that such a scheme would self-destruct.

In the end, it was state interference which was required to save the day, with the taxpayer bailing out most of the failing banks. In fact, it surprises me that people still tout the reactivity of the markets and ineffectiveness of state intervention when capitalism's inability to react and the necessity of the state to stop the country being brought to bankruptcy is a fresh memory.

Even systems are (and need to) change constantly. The problem with social planning is that it cannot predict what changes will take place and therefore socialist systems accumulate errant plan after errant plan until the whole thing comes crashing down. — synthesis

As I think I pointed out elsewhere, this isn't obviously the case. Countries with the strongest socialist policies tend to be more reactive to problems. The obvious example is environmental concerns. More progressive countries are even at the stage of buying in waste from other countries for green reuse. This strikes me as a success for the reactivity of the state to emerging crises. The same cannot be said for more capitalist countries which keep kicking the environmental can down the road.

On which:

The point of the market "being in control" is that it can react much quicker (and with a great deal more accuracy) to the needs of all concerned. — synthesis

That might be the idea but evidence doesn't weigh it out. Capitalism is extremely myopic and, left to its own devices, will pollute indefinitely, poison its own customers, lobby against long-term solutions in the legislature, buy up and bury long-term solutions in the market, all for the sake of maximising profit in the short term.

This is precisely why I think capitalism might destroy itself. The long-term future of capitalism is, by virtue of being long-term, outside of capitalism's area of interest.

Progressives have it right when they see the need for change, but they have it wrong when they believe that they know what the change needs to be. — synthesis

I'm not seeing a credible alternative on offer. I'd intended the OP to address a specific issue that pluralism might resolve (up for debate). It's not a generic mudslinging against capitalism, nor is it obvious that generic feelings against socialism are going to be enlightening. But if you have something more concrete in mind, I'm sure that would be interesting.

That would be natural selection at its finest. — baker

Haha! Although they might also be best placed to survive the collapse of capitalism. :worry:

For whom? Says who? — baker

Says anyone who doesn't consider justice when deciding whether it's ethical to reproduce. Anyway, Says who? is not an argument for accepting a proposition. Since the proposition is presented without grounds, and no grounds are obvious, it can be dismissed without grounds.

Lawns are a bourgeoisie decadence, fill your boots.

You're a left wing, political correctness ideologue. It's a dogma you cling to despite the fact communism has failed, and repeatedly run to genocide - despite me showing you that the anti-capitalist, eco commie approach to sustainability can't work, and despite me showing you the many obvious hypocrisies of political correctness. — counterpunch

So that's a no to my invite to the Annual Kenosha Death of Communism Lament then? There's free vodka and schnapps? Top prize in the raffle this year is a plough?

Ah well.

So, having reflected and the way in which material possibly is more ambiguous, do you think my question would have been of a different nature, from your point of view if it it has been posed as is the physical world the absolute reality? — Jack Cummins

From the materialist point of view, no, there's not really any difference. Things like energy, space, information are considered part of the material universe. It's just that sometimes you see people use the word in the more traditional sense, which these days equates to massive matter, excluding other ideas of 'state, like position, momentum, etc.

I'm not here to make friends. — counterpunch

Or good arguments, apparently. But congrats on the not making friends thing. You've overachieved if anything.

True, which is why I’m not against markets, nor against privately owned means of products per se, but against concentration of the means of production into few hands, such that some people own more than they themselves use, and others own none and instead use the unused excess that others own — Pfhorrest

Again, that strikes me as a perfectly possible consequence of markets themselves, for instance a more successful trader edging out a competitor who becomes more peripheral. You could add regulation to avoid it, but that's not market forces at work, quite the opposite. Markets are about surplus: you have to start with more than you can use of *something*. There's no guarantee of also having less of the same value of something else you need.

Love is the only basic emotion. — Garth

Evidence suggests love is neither basic nor an emotion. It is an aggregate of drives.

No, that’s craving. — Wayfarer

:up:

If I punch a wall in frustration at just how stupid some people can be, then that will cause me some suffering. But that suffering seems to be of a non-deserved kind. — Bartricks

Seems perfectly deserved to me.

Like more traditional arguments for antinatalism, this looks circular. The asymmetry detected is in fact entered by hand. A person treats people with kindness and as a result, on her birthday, is thrown a lovely surprise birthday party which she takes pleasure in. But we define this pleasure to be undeserved without reason, making it qualitatively the same as a bully who steals a winning lottery ticket.

More broadly, the argument rests on the notion of justice as being central to ethical decisions about reproduction, although you claim an unjustified link to morality here in a second circular argument:

And then there's all the suffering we humans inevitably visit on others, not least other animals, in the course of our lives. All of that is undeserved suffering. And there's a lot of it. And it's very morally bad. — Bartricks

No matter how coherent the argument beginning from this premise, the argument can be dismissed as being not well-grounded: justice is not a concern in the ethics of reproduction.

P.S. Meant to tag @ssu to defend capitalism for us. [EDIT: rather, to defend capitalists.]

True. But what renders a certain configuration as "informational" is something external to the configuration itself. — Pantagruel

I don't think I'd agree with that. I think a more modern take has information physically encoded irrespective of its meaning, that is it is useful to talk about information passed from one system to another without an interpreter. Meaning is the interpretation of information (straight line, ring). I think perhaps this is just a difference of terminology.

Even if you are talking about physical entropy, some states may be more "improbable" than others, but that is a long way from containing meaningful information. — Pantagruel

That is true, entropy alone does not tell you anything about the probability of the state, which reinforces the point that information (number of microstates explored) is distinct from meaning (probability).

No, I didn't mean to say that it does. — Echarmion

I didn't think you did, I was just jumping on for clarity and an excuse to weigh in :) I generally find little to disagree with in your posts. (Really enjoyed your conversation with Isaac btw.)

And that's why I was saying there seem to be two contradictory statements which both seem obviously and necessarily true. I did not mean to imply that there are no solutions to this problem, only that it seems at the heart of the philosophical problem. — Echarmion

For sure.

Sure, I get what you're saying. But I feel like the best way to resolve the dilemma is a compatibilist one. I consider my experience as if it was a true representation of a material world, but at the same time I take seriously my own experience of myself as an acting subject. — Echarmion

Ah, here we may diverge. My evaluation is almost the opposite. The mind seems to me pretty excellent at interpreting everyday sort of phenomena but exceedingly poor when it comes to less localised scopes of enquiry. Philosophy and science naturally lead us away from the everyday and toward what for the mind is quite abstract (and we want to go there). Understanding how the brain and mind work is one of those areas where inevitably we can't rely on everyday reasoning, since we're reasoning about the thing that does everyday reasoning. It's a Plato's cave kind of deal. At some point we have to get behind the capacities with which nature blessed us in order to understand those capacities. An example of where the brain falls short is in comprehending the counter-intuitiveness of quantum theory, for instance. The usual advice is to stop thinking about it and follow the maths and the evidence.