Since when is social science a physical science? — jgill

Inasmuch as it aims to be a descriptive science and per physicalism everything descriptively real is physical.

And your division of mathematics is naive. — jgill

It’s an adaptation of the Quadrivium’s “arithmetic”, “geometry”, “music”, and “astronomy”, as it interprets those as meaning “number in itself”, “number in space”, “number in time”, and “number in space and time”. But I’d like to hear what you think is wrong with that.

I may be wrong, but isn't the whole point of filing for bankruptcy to get off the hook for debt, and the entire purpose of the limited liability that comes from incorporation to protect the owners from being on the hook for the company's debt?

For a sole proprietorship or partnership or something, yes, the owner and company are the same and the assets of the owner are the company's assets that can be repossessed or foreclosed upon when they file for bankruptcy to cover as much as possible of the outstanding debt. In an LLC or C-corp or other limited company it's different.

I was never expecting an actual coup. I was expecting a sad Trump temper tantrum while cooler heads (even among the GOP, who never followed Trump but only let him be useful to them) would prevail.

Of course it's over. It's been over for a month now, and everyone but Trump and his most deluded followers have known it.

It was never Trump in particular stacking the Supreme Court, it was the GOP more generally, especially Mitch McConnell, who is far worse than Trump could ever be.

Metaphilosophy is the philosophy of philosophy, which is to say the philosophical examination of philosophy itself. It is the study of questions about the definition of philosophy and its demarcation from other fields; whether and how progress is made in philosophy; how philosophy is to be done; what it takes to do philosophy; who is to do philosophy; and why it matters to do philosophy. — The Metaphilosophy of Analytic Pragmatism

Short version of mine (long version at the link above):

Philosophy is not religion, nor sophistry, nor science, nor ethics, nor math, nor art. Philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom, where wisdom is the ability to discern the true from the false, the good from the bad; or at least the more true from the less true, the better from the worse; the ability, in short, to discern superior answers from inferior answers to any given question.

Philosophical progress is made by devising useful methods of answering questions about what is real or what is moral, and consequently the related issues of the meaning of such questions, and the importance of those questions.

The best method of philosophy is to analyze concepts in light of the practical use we want to put them to, asking why do we need to know the answer to some question, in order to get at what we really want from an answer to that question, and so what an answer to it should look like, and how to go about identifying one.

The faculty needed to do philosophy is just sapience, i.e. self-awareness and self-control, the ability to have opinions about your opinions, to be aware of what you are thinking, to assess whether you are thinking the correct things, and if you deem that you are not, to cause yourself to think differently

Philosophy is to be done by everyone, as individuals and generalists, but it's also good for there to be organized professional academic bodies of philosophers who specialize in particular sub-fields, so long as some generalists still keep abreast of the developments in those specialties and tie things back into a cohesive whole, and so long as that academic world of philosophy still connects with the common individuals and doesn't fall into its own navel.

And the use of philosophy is twofold, one intrinsic and one extrinsic. For its intrinsic value, it's like mental martial arts, improving mental health and fitness and preparing one to defend against "attacks" from false claims, fallacies, etc. For its extrinsic value, philosophy is the keystone of the entire structure of human endeavors, bridging the abstract fields of language, art, and math, to the practical fields of science, engineering, technology, economics, entrepreneurship, business, and the trades, a la:

transition comfortably from a financial growth economy to whatever a non-growth economy might look like — Janus

I never said anything about a "non-growth" economy. Rent and interest don't drive growth, they just extract wealth from those who already lack it for the benefit of those who already have it. Growth is driven by working more efficiently, i.e. by technology. And technology can continue to advance in a world without rent and interest.

But if you split up the kingdom each generation, the royalty should eventually become paupers. — frank

That's assuming that the wealth of the "kingdom" isn't growing faster than the "population" of it. If the wealth is compounding at around a 5% rate annually, and every couple has 2.5 kids every generation, and a generation is 20 years, then each new generation would be (1.05^20)/(2.5/2) ≈ 212% ≈ over twice as wealthy as the previous generation. So as long as they don't waste more than about half of their inherited wealth per generation, the family will keep getting richer indefinitely.

So it’s only a theory and wouldn’t actually work in the real world unless someone could snap their fingers and say “ Behold, I give you widely distributed ownership”. Like God creating the world. — Brett

No, you’re just asking questions about how things would work in a world that was like that, so I’m discussing a hypothetical world that is already like that. You can’t then ask how people in a world that’s already like that got to the state that people in such a hypothetical world are already in. They were born into that state, because that’s the normal state of people in their world. E.g everyone just inherited around $400k, and everyone’s annual income is around $50k. Because that’s just how things would be if the present wealth and income were only distributed more equally, with no other changes.

I’ve already earlier discussed how I think we could gradually transition to a world like that from a world like ours, but you’re not asking about that process, just about how a world like that would function once we had one.

Why would someone buy a failing business — Brett

Your competitors would be obvious candidates, since they evidently can operate a business like that more profitably than you can.

Well assuming you had other investments. There’s a lot of investing going on here with very little capital. — Brett

There’s the same amount of capital as in the real world, just spread over more hands.

The difference now is that the CEO might plan a new direction. He/she might go to the bank with a plan to diversify and seek a loan big enough to carry out that plan over five years. In your new world you couldn’t do that. — Brett

No, but you can ask for investment either from the existing owners or new investors, either of whom would have to sell off some other investments of theirs to fund that. Basically, you can try to convince people that it’s worth risking their money on this instead of something else.

The main difference is that instead of one executive convincing another executive to lend a bunch of other people’s money (bank deposits) at another bunch of other people’s expense (interest paid out of profits, that gets passed on to customers and taken out of wages), you’ve got the joint owners of the company trying to convince each other and other potential partners that it’s a worthwhile venture to invest in.

In other words, it’s more democratic. Socialism is often described as economic democracy.

If prices fall, for whatever reason, then the owners/workers lose their profit margin and therefor the capital they have for investment shrinks. They’re caught in a position of not having the money to trade out of it, or reinvest in new equipment or whatever may be needed to stop the fall in profits. This time it’s not the capitalist who takes the loss on the chin but the collective. What should they do? Do they take a wage reduction, or work more hours to produce more product or borrow money to trade out of it? — Brett

How does your theory address this situation? — Brett

That is exactly the choice that owners of businesses today face, and there's no difference in my hypothetical world, except that the equivalent of "borrow money" would be "sell other investments for money". Or alternately, if they don't want to compete in that business anymore, sell off their investment in that company and use it to start something else, perhaps combined with some other sold-off investments. Because they shouldn't have all of their capital in just one business, but spread around. You did see this post right above yours right?

Where did they get the money to buy there homes outright? — Brett

You're once again presuming that we start in a situation where everything is owned by someone else, and people have to come up with the money to buy it for themselves from nothing. The point of this thought experiment is to imagine a world where that isn't already the case, where ownership is already widely distributed, and how things would function there.

Another point: would you lend your capital as a collective to another factory? — Brett

I would invest my capital in companies besides my own, yes. I wouldn't just lend it for free out of the goodness of my heart, but I'd buy a stake in them. I'd buy lots of little stakes in lots of other people's companies, because that's smart investing. And I'd hope lots of people would buy little shares of my company too, finding it a good investment, and looking to diversify their risk.

Or rather, I'd probably just do as I do already and invest in an index fund that in turn passively allocates its holdings in proportion to market capitalization and so tracks overall market performance. And I'd hope everyone else would do likewise, because that's smart investing. So everyone would end up owning lots of little pieces of each other's businesses, and profiting together from their joint economic activity, as well as the profits of their own company, and their wages from their work.

If the price is set by the market, the consumer, then it’s going to be as low as they can get it. Competition will also determine the price. — Brett

That is already the case now, and I'm not proposing changing that.

If the price is low then how much is the factory going to make in profit, bearing in mind that the workers/owners are on good wages and working less hours? — Brett

The factory will make excatly as much in profit as it does already, because nothing that would affect its profit is changed in the hypothetical scenario. The workers have higher incomes because they get paid that profit instead of someone else besides the workers. (And they have lower expenses because they own their homes etc outright and aren't paying a landlord or bank to borrow that capital from them). And they can work less because they get paid more (and have lower expenses), so they can trade some of that extra money for extra time instead. (Someone else will have to take up the slack of their time, and they will get the difference in their money in exchange, and it all balances out).

The only thing changed between the real world and the hypothetical world is who owns what. (Well, and what kinds of contracts are enforcable, but that is the means to the end of changing who owns what, and keeping it from changing back to what we have now again).

I repeat it because you seem to have missed the point in its entirety.

someone else is paying the price — Brett

Right now someone is already paying the price: the workers and consumers (who are the same class of people). Their losses go to the owners' profits.

Without (in the process of constructing this hypothetical scenario) changing the prices of anything, just who owns the businesses, those profits can be redirected (in the hypothetical world) to the new (relative to our reality) owners: the same people who are the workers and consumers.

So instead of having to ask a rich person to lend them money from the profits those owners have saved, people -- who are all owners themselves now, in this hypothetical scenario -- can spend their own money from those same profits that they've been saving, to start new businesses or improve existing ones or whatever else they might otherwise have needed to borrow for.

we don’t know what that capital amounts to — Brett

We know exactly what that capital amounts to: the same thing is currently amounts to. All that's different in the hypothetical scenario is who holds that capital.

What would you consider a reasonable mark up on products — Brett

This is an irrelevant question that shows exactly how you miss the point. It's nobody's place to be saying exactly what markup is or isn't reasonable. Let the market bear whatever price it will bear. Just make sure that ownership of the means of production in that marketplace is widely distributed. Then whatever profits can be made from whatever prices the market will bear go to lining everyone's pockets instead of just a few rich people.

(But note also that if the people in general are wealthier, the market will be able to bear a higher price... which is good, so long as the profits from that are coming right back around to the same class of people).

We went over all this four days ago:

Consider for a moment society as a black box, with no insight into how anything is distributed inside of it. There's a certain amount of capital in use, and another amount available to be used for new things; and a certain amount of labor in use, and another amount available to be used for new things. To get a new thing done, that society needs to get some of that reserve capital out and apply some of that reserve labor to it.

Now let's peek inside that black box. As we have it now, that reserve labor is poor unemployed people, and that reserve capital is rich people's savings. To get anything new done, someone has to borrow that reserve capital from the rich, and pay some of it to the unemployed poor for their reserve of labor, but not pay too much of it to the poor workers because they need enough left over from the produce of this new activity to pay back what they borrowed from the rich owners plus interest.

There could instead be a society where that reserve labor is leisure time that all people have on their hands because they can all meet all of their needs with less labor than their maximal output (because their jobs pay them so well and their fixed expenses like rent are so low), and that reserve capital is the savings that all those people have because they're all capable of earning more than they need to get by (because their jobs pay them so well and their fixed expenses like rent are so low). So to get anything new done, you just need to get enough people to agree to pool their time and money together to make it happen.

There's the same amount of labor and capital in society in either case, and the same amount needs to be unused in reserve in order to make new ventures possible in either case. It's just the distribution of it that's different between the two scenarios.

So if there is enough reserve capital and enough reserve labor to enter into new ventures, but we don't have that idyllic scenario where everyone has leisure time and money saved up, both of which they can contribute to new ventures that they like, then that's entirely because something about the distribution of spare time and spare money is screwed up somehow. If we really can afford to enter into new ventures, then necessarily we have enough spare time and money to do that, so necessarily we could afford to have that idyllic society. And since we don't have that idyllic society, there's a lot of poor and overworked people for no reason other than that some people who get to make those decisions decided they would rather have even more leisure time and extra money at the expense of everyone else.

Or possibly it is the case that there actually isn't enough reserve capital and enough reserve labor in society altogether to really be able to afford to enter into new ventures, but we're nevertheless entering into them anyway, because some people get to make the decisions on what money gets spent on and what gets worked on, so the things they want made and done get made and done, while other things that many many other people desperately need made or done don't get made or done because those many many other people don't get any say in the direction that society's resources get used. — Pfhorrest

In today’s world, they would have to borrow it from someone else who had been saving it. In a better world, they would be the ones who had been saving it in the first place. In our world it’s the people who own the factories etc who have the excess capital that everyone else borrows. In a better world where the people who own the factories etc are the same people who work them, they could just “borrow from themselves”.

when institutional slavery was abolished, the desperate newly free could be exploited as cheap labour. — Janus

Only because plans to grant them land from the plantations they had been working were scrapped,
basically substituting chattel slavery for rent-and-wage slavery. It’s precisely the lack of ownership of capita that made them such desperate cheap labor, and that was intentional on the part of the plantation owners who wanted to keep as close to slaves as they could.

How are you going to go about convincing all the landlords and rental companies in the world to stop legally enforcing rental payments from their customers and tenants? — Janus

There are more renters than landlords, so if we have a real democracy then we don’t need to convince the landlords. If we don’t have a real democracy, we need to do something about that first anyway.

The only chance would be to greatly increase people's education and understanding of the world — Janus

Like by talking to them and explaining why things like this would be good ideas worth trying? Like... what I’m doing now?

Just as an example, say someone wants to start a new business but doesn't have the funds; they will need to borrow money, right? Who is going to lend anyone money interest-free? — Janus

The point is to get the capital distributed enough that people don’t have to borrow in the first place. We went over that earlier in this thread already.

Yes but contractual slavery is not an institution upon which we depend. — Janus

You’re just begging the question if you’re implying that we do depend on rent and interest, i.e. there is no possible way to have a society without it.

And contractual slavery has been a common institution in the past. We got rid of it and society didn’t collapse.

The idea that any individual could create a system that could foresee consequences in an economy so complex — Janus

That’s why I advocate a gradual change. So that we can see the consequences as they start to emerge and react to them as needed. Even reversing course if necessary.

And as I said before it is not "your idea"; you are not the first to realize that financialization of an economy inexorably leads to concentration of money in the hands of a few. — Janus

I know that. I’m just owning up to my own version of it being my version, and not imputing my thoughts on anyone else who might disagree with my in varying degrees.

Apart from any of those considerations, anything like you suggest simply aint going to happen because people won't want ti, so why waste your limited intellectual resources on toying with such ideas? — Janus

That’s a just defeatist attitude. Let’s never try anything new even when everything old is failing all around us, because nobody will ever agree to try anything new.

How would we ever get anyone to consider trying some new idea without first talking about its merits?

How would it be possible to create a situation where a society had no laws in place to enforce only certain kinds of contracts? — Janus

There are already certain kinds of contracts that are not legally valid. You can’t sell yourself into slavery, for example.

It might be possible not to enforce payment of rental of property, but then no one would rent their property. — Janus

That is the intention.

A transition to such a state of affairs would seem to be practically impossible from where we are today without collapsing the entire system. — Janus

I don’t advocate just suddenly switching to my system, but transitioning there gradually using existing governmental apparatuses. Namely, an additional tax on net income from rent and interest, that goes negative for people who pay more than they earn from it. Start that tax low, then gradually ramp it up to 100%. That creates a gradually increased incentive for rentiers to sell instead of rent, to avoid the extra tax. Once the tax is ramped up to 100%, the incentive is the same as if rental contracts were just invalid (because you can’t make money from renting out in either case), so you can just switch to that.

You seem to be just enamored with your idea; while giving no consideration to the unforeseen, indeed unforeseeable given the complexity of the system, consequences if it were to be put in place. — Janus

I have given extensive consideration to the consequences, and if we weren’t already off topic for this thread I would welcomed further questions as to how I would handle any consequent you think I haven’t considered.

As I said earlier, my hunch would be that most are neoliberal capitalists, with a good portion Christian or otherwise secularists. — Xtrix

I agree, but that also sounds like a good description of much of the American populace as a whole.

And we see how this propaganda tickles down to millions of people — Xtrix

This sounds like a good explanation for the above.

I think you're over-complicating the issue with technical jargon. You say you're against rent; but if you're not against people accumulating property, and you are against government regulation (command economy), what's to stop owners from renting their property? — Janus

The technical language is necessary to properly understand the nuance of the situation, but I can try to dumb it down for you a little.

I'm not against people having some property. I am against people accumulating property, as in, property ending up more and more concentrated. I'm against that in the sense that that is a bad end. The question at hand is what means lead to that end. What is going wrong, deontologically, that is causing that bad outcome, consequentially?

I think the answer to that is government enforcement of certain kinds of contracts. People are free to let others use their property, and other people are free to give them money for that if they want, but in absence of a valid contract someone can't actually owe money for the use of someone's property. If they just decided to not pay, that would be legally okay, and the owner would have no recourse. As such, this would be untenable as a widespread business arrangement. Nobody would ever rent to strangers who can't be trusted and can't be legally obligated to pay them anything.

If you think that they have the same psychology as us and you think they’re parasites and sociopaths then I guess you would have to say that wealth turned them, because you can’t see how anyone like us could make all that money. — Brett

This misses the point. Even now that they're rich, I don't expect that they're statistically very different from people who aren't rich, psychologically. It's not like being rich "turned" them. The things that they do are the same things that most ordinary people would do in their position. Even the bad things. Because people in general are not shining bastions of morality, but will exploit a situation to their benefit when given the chance, even at someone else's expense, and then try to rationalize away why what they're doing is perfectly fine.

What's bad is that we systemically, as a culture, give some people that chance, and internalize those rationalizations, and act like everything's fine.

The problem is not some people just choosing to be evil because they're bad people, not even because wealth made them bad people or anything like that. The problem is a social structure that gives some people the opportunity to live the high life at the expense of others, and gives those others almost no opportunity to escape that, and then praises or blames people for their position in that hierarchy as though they got there by choice and merit alone.

So, according to you, is a "free market" an unregulated market? Is there ownership of property in your model? What does your notion of a free market look like? — Janus

To have a market at all requires that people have claims (first-order passive rights) to property, and powers (second-order active rights) to trade those claims with each other.

To have freedom in general requires that people have liberties (first-order active rights; limits on others' claims) and immunities (second-order passive rights; limits on others' powers).

Freedom of a market is especially about immunity against anyone else but you transferring your claims to anyone else; that's the usual sense of "unregulated" that's meant when most people talk about free markets.

The absence of such immunities is the cornerstone of a command economy, where someone else can order you to sell something and tell you what you may get in exchange for it.

Capitalism vs socialism has nothing to do with any of these kinds of rights in general, but only with how the specific instances of claims to property are distributed. When they're concentrated in few hands, you have capitalism. When they're spread across many hands, you have socialism.

Since claims are limits on others' liberties, having claims concentrated in few hands (capitalism) gives those few people vast liberties at the expense of limiting everyone else's liberties, while having claims spread across many hands (socialism) provides equal liberty to all.

The thing that I think leads to the rise of capitalism, even in a nominally "free" market, is the absence of certain immunities (and so the absence of a certain kind of freedom), or conversely the presence of certain kinds of powers, to contract; especially contracts of rent and interest.

I went into greater detail on why earlier in this very thread:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/476042

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/476855

That's largely what I've been trying to say in this thread as well. My expectation is that the 1% are ordinary people as far as psychology goes. Unlike what Brett seems to think, I don't get the impression that anyone here is saying that the 1% got where they are by being evil. They just didn't get there by being some kind of special super-hardworking genius either.

But I’d like to know if you think that the free market and Capitalism evolved together at the same time or whether the free market existed first. — Brett

I think capitalism is the last vestiges of feudalism still clinging to the freer markets enabled by a post-agrarian economy. There has always been a struggle between freedom and authority, and I don’t think there is any teleological path that history has to go in: there have always been free markets, there have aways been people trying one way or another to seize control for themselves, and that battle can go either way depending on what we the people oppose or support.

The desire for Socialism is understandable but that too has failed to offer a real alternative to Capitalism. — Brett

The problem here is failing to distinguish a free market from capitalism, and a command economy from socialism.

Free markets have helped pull people out of poverty. Command economies have failed. But capitalism, which has thus far always accompanied free markets, has also failed. What's left out of the combinations of those possibilities that we haven't really tried? Market socialism.

So let's try that. Free markets with no capitalism. Socialism with no command economy.

That was in relation to my thoughts that you were putting the effect before the cause, that money makes these people what they are instead of the other way around. — Brett

You earlier seemed to agree with my elaboration upon that thought: that it's growing up with wealth that shapes people's personalities, even if dumping wealth suddenly on an adult won't suddenly change their personality. And with my response about necessity and sufficiency regarding the entrepreneurial personality and actually attaining wealth from poverty.

Those two things together are pretty much the same point Xtrix is making. Wealthy people are the kinds of people they are because having (a history of) wealth makes people like that; while being like that is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for being wealthy.

I think the source of this problem is the existence of gendered language to begin with.

Imagine for a moment that we spoke some alternate English where it was not possible to speak about a person without implying either that they are fat or that they are skinny; this alt-English is "weighted" the same way that ours is "gendered".

In the world of this alt-English, you have a person who has a fat body, but they really really dislike that fact, and are trying very hard to be skinny, and it hurts them every time someone refers to them with the language variants for fat people. They feel like "do you have to remind me that I'm fat every damn time you talk about me?"

But to the people talking about them... well, there isn't a way to talk about them without calling them either fat or skinny (in this alt-English), so they look at someone and see whether they look fat or skinny, and use the respective variants of language as appropriate. Being asked to call someone who looks fat "skinny" feels like being asked to deny empirical reality, to lie to someone for the sake of their feelings.

I expect that most of the latter group of people would have no problem changing their language to refer to the person as skinny instead of fat if they actually got skinny. So any fat people who are able to get skinny can just avoid the problem: everyone will just see them as skinny and address them with skinny terminology.

But meanwhile, you have the group of fat people who want to be skinny, who feel like fatness is not an essential part of themselves, that it's even contrary to themselves, who hate having to live life in their fat bodies and dream of some day being able to walk around as a skinny person, and in the meantime, just wish people would stop constantly addressing them as a fat person.

It's the fault of this alt-English that the only options are to address someone as a fat person or as a skinny person. This alt-English doesn't have a way to address or speak about people without referring to their weight.

We who speak real English hopefully recognize how ridiculous alt-English is, but the genderedness of our own real English is every bit as ridiculous, and causes exactly the same kinds of problems.

Even if it turns out that all of your "new" ideas have already been had by someone before, if it's someone who hasn't received enough attention for those ideas that you had already heard of them, then the ideas you (and they) came up with are still probably "new enough" that it's worthwhile for you to have thought of them and spoken about them.

Instead of thinking in boolean terms of ideas that have been had at all or never before, it's perhaps more productive to think in terms of how well-known ideas are. If you independently come up with an idea that is not well-known, or if you just stumble across someone else's mention of a little-known idea, that's still a kind of useful "discovery" in that it strengthens the connection between that idea and realm of well-known ones.

reality has been made dependent on observation, which actually smacks of idealism. — unenlightened

Or at least phenomenalism, which I see as a feature, not a bug. Proper physicalism is phenomenalist; proper phenomenalism is physicalist.

The real questions underlying the question of whether physicalism or not are:

is there anything that’s real but completely unobservable?

and

is there anything that’s real to one person but not to another?

Physicalism is the position that says “no” to both of those, or conversely says that there is a universal, non-relative reality, but that it’s entirely phenomenal, non-transcendent.

So someone is given a pile of cash and then they become more extroverted, and then they become conscientious, and then they become emotionally stable, and then they become more self centred. — Brett

It's not necessarily just giving someone a pile of cash that does this, but having a long history of wealth (especially during early developmental years) that can. It's easier to be emotionally stable when your life is materially stable. It's easier to be conscientious when you're emotionally stable. It's easier to be self-centered when you're at the top of the social pyramid and everyone treats you like you're better than other people. And it's easier to be extroverted when all your interactions with other people are always full of praise like that.

But dumping a pile of cash on someone who's already spent their entire life being jerked around and treated like shit probably isn't going to miraculously make them think and act like someone who grew up wealthy, no.

it’s not being the way that they are that made them rich, but being rich that made them the way that they are. — Pfhorrest

So you disagree with my “supporting evidence”? — Brett

The two bits you posted look like they're suggesting two things:

- one, that entrepreneurs have certain personality traits

- and two, that people who have plenty of money still have motivation to do things for reasons other than to earn more money.

I believe both of those conclusions, without even reading the evidence in detail; they just sound clearly plausible to me.

Other things that need to be accounted for alongside those facts, however (and if you're not disputing these, that's great, I just think they need stating for full context):

- Nowhere close to all entrepreneurs, even those who have those personality traits, go on to become self-made millionaires, and nowhere near all millionaires (never mind the billionaires who are the real topic of the OP) are self-made. Having those personality traits may be a necessary condition of entrepreneurship (at least in our present system), and entrepreneurship may be a necessary condition of being a self-made millionaire (at least in our present system), but being self-made is not a necessary condition of being a millionaire; and even more to the point, having those personality traits is not a sufficient condition for being an entrepreneur, nor is entrepreneurship a sufficient condition for being a self-made (m|b)illionaire.

- All people have motives to do things besides just for money. It's just that for many people, their material needs, which they require money to fulfill, are so threatened that they need to focus largely on that priority. It's having that priority already taken care of that allows the ultra-wealthy to prioritize other things instead. Which is in keeping with my post you're replying to.

(Disclaimer for perspective first: I'm nonbinary/pangender/genderfluid/genderqueer/something I don't really care what, and don't give a crap about my own pronouns.)

I think empirically, most people historically and continuing down through today probably intend to refer to sex, both with their use of pronouns and their use of the terms "man" and "woman". If shown e.g. a series of images of a person with feminine gender presentation undressing to reveal that they have a masculine body underneath their clothing etc, I expect that most people, both historically and probably still today, would think "that's a woman" at the first picture and use female pronouns to refer to the person in the picture (something often used in support of "man" and "woman" referring to gender the social construct, not sex), but then "oh, no I was wrong, that's a man" at the last picture and use male pronouns to refer to the person in the picture (which of course runs counter to that preceding parenthetical). That suggests to me that people are aiming to describe sex, and merely using gender presentation as a proxy for sex.

And I think that needlessly fighting to change the use of language from that historical course has caused little other than harm for the trans (and nonbinary) community. (But that fighting back against that in turn only causes more harm, so I don't really know what to do besides just speak however least bothers one's present audience).

Chomsky says they aren't organized, but behave as if they are. Human nature on display? — frank

That was sort of the point of my last comment about direction of causation. I expect that rich people tend to be just like anybody else would be if they were rich, because it’s not being the way that they are that made them rich, but being rich that made them the way that they are.

Whatever personality traits there might be in common between rich people, it’s worth bearing in mind the different potential causal relations there. Does being a certain kind of person make you rich, or does being rich make you a certain kind of person? There are probably at least a few causal relationships in each direction, but I would suspect that wealth has a far greater impact on personality than personally has on wealth, because there are many other systemic factors besides personality that are causally influential on wealth, but most of the factors that causally influence personality are in turn themselves influenced by wealth.

To clarify Kenosha's point, I think:

If dark matter exists at all, it is necessarily a kind of matter.

It still might not exist at all. Something else might explain the observations.

But dark matter existing but not being matter is not a possibility, because something that existed but wasn't matter would not be dark matter, but something else instead.

Regarding the new title: all valid arguments show in the conclusion nothing more than was present in the premises, which seems to be what you mean by "circular" here. That's what validity means.

If you take "physical" to mean "empirical", and "real" to mean "empirical", then of course all and only physical stuff is real.

things that are *not* perceivable, like dark matter — Wayfarer

We can perceive the effects of dark matter, which counts as perceiving dark matter.

Otherwise the only things we ever perceive are photons, since all the interactions of the world with our senses are mediated by photons, and we infer everything else about the world through the patterns in those photons.

Almost everything we perceive, we perceive indirectly, through its effects on other things (which we also perceive through their effects on other things, and so on until you get to the final photons that impart energy to the molecules of our sense-organs), and dark matter is no different in that regard.

What I’m saying is why not one of those 1% being given the challenge to fix it, even if it was a 50 year contract. Who else would have the ambition, the drive, the ability and imagination to make something so big happen if they were given a clearly measurable objective? — Brett

If one of them honestly wanted to do that, then more power to them. But I find it unlikely that someone with such immense power would voluntarily work to unmake their source of that power.

Now at the risk of name calling I’m going to suggest that the someone who could make this happen is someone who everyone seems to despise. — Brett

I’m not sure if you’re suggesting Trump would unmake landlords? The guy whose main business has been being a landlord?

to bring and end to the renting situation as it is requires action by the government — Brett

Technically it requires inaction: it needs to stop doing something it already does (enforcing certain contracts). But yeah, practically speaking it should really do some kind of gradual transition from this to that, which would require doing something. And I don’t trust them enough to expect they would do it right. Nevertheless they are currently doing something wrong, so I would still like to see them try to change.

when a house becomes an asset, even owned by an individual not a landlord, then the market heats up. — Brett

Only to the extent that there is value to that asset. If the only value you can get out of a house is your use of it, there is no value to you in owning more housing than you can use, so no motive for you to buy it, so no heating up of the market from that.

I think home ownership for those who want it would be a good beginning. — Brett

I agree completely. Inaccessibility of home ownership is my #1 economic concern, and the biggest root of pretty much all the other problems IMO.

However, the irony is they need other people’s money to get started. — Brett

Or we could just stop letting other people take their money.

That's the principle behind my invalidation of contracts of rent and interest. If just owning something (to lend out) can't be a source of free income, then there is no market for those things (like housing) except for the people who need it for their own use, so those who currently own more than they're using (to lend out) would have no use for it other than for its sale value, and no way of getting that sale value except by selling on terms that people who need it for its use value -- those who would otherwise be renting it -- can afford.

So, looking just at housing here though this principle applies to all capital, if contracts of rent were not valid, those who currently own rental housing would voluntarily sell it to those who would otherwise have been renting it on terms that are as affordable for them as their rent would have been, because the only alternative is taking a total loss on it.

Or looked at the other way: the validity of rental contracts gives those who already have more capital than others both means and motive to acquire more and more still, at the expense of those others, distorting what the natural free market would otherwise look like. Invalidating those contracts would restore the natural, more egalitarian equilibrium of the market, and keep it that way.

I agree except that the GOP blowing up means the Democrats won't offer real policy changes because they won't have too. — Benkei

...until another second party takes the place of the GOP, as is inevitable under our FPTP system. And that second party may very well be a progressive party, if the Democrats split into a corporatist side and a progressive side.

Who are these people working for that pay them so well that they have enough excess money to save and eventually pool their money for some other collective venture? — Brett

The collective venture that they already work for, of which they are part owners. Or in other words: themselves, with nobody else siphoning all the cream off the top.

If you're wondering how to get to there from a state of affairs where everyone works for someone else (and so has no spare time or money) except for the tiny fraction of people at the top: that's a good question. That's the question of how to change from what we have now to something better.

Perhaps another question could be illustrative on answers to that: how did we get from the initial conditions, that weren't like this, to this? In the beginning there were just naked people wandering around hunting and gathering, nobody owned anything, everyone was equal, all they got was the product of their own work, and what their tribe would share with them of the product of their work, both of which were consumables, because all productive activity was about collecting food.

Then agriculture was invented, and people had to claim little plots of land for themselves to grow food on if they wanted to jump on the agriculture bandwagon. To begin with, anyone could just claim any plot of land, because nobody owned anything, and you couldn't very well stop someone from using some bit of land while also tending to your own; you could only really defend what you yourself could use.

But fast forward 11,000 years or so and somehow (that I'm sure others here will be happy to elaborate on) by then instead of everyone farming their own little bit of land, a few people with armies at their behest own all the land, and anyone who wants to farm on it has to give a share of their crop to their land-lord, or else fuck off... to some other land, where some other lord will give them the same deal. Or you can just die. Your choice.

Fast forward a few more centuries of industrial progress and now there are productive things to do besides farm, the product of which you can trade to a farmer for your food, and for a historical moment it's a bit like the dawn of agriculture, you can just do something else besides farming using other stuff that isn't all owned by the lords, which is glorious freedom in comparison.

Until a few more centuries down the road and now all of the stuff you need to do any of that stuff is also owned by a tiny handful of people, and you're back to accepting your new lords' deal or fucking off... to some other lord who will give you a similar deal. Or you can just die. Your choice.

How do we get from there back to a world where ownership is widely distributed again, and keep that from falling back into this shitty situation again? I think I know an answer to the latter, but if you're got an answer to the former I'd love to hear it. Closest thing to an answer I can think of is "convince everyone that it's possible and desirable", because when the rubber hits the road everything is a democracy, whether it's the ballot box or the ammo box the people are using. Whatever cause has the most people for it and the fewest against it wins.

And if their jobs pay them so well and their fixed expenses are so low why would they want to go any further, what could drive them when they already have enough. — Brett

You can always have even more. Maybe someone has an idea for something that will let them get the same work done in even less time. Or more work done in the same time to have more and better stuff for the same work. So long as there is still something that someone has to do that they don't want to do, or things people want to do but can't, there will be motive to try something new to make that better.

And if we do eventually get to the point where nobody wants for anything, well then we don't need to start any new ventures from there, do we?

Sure they can pool their own savings, but it’s unlikely to be enough to buy a factory and machinery. — Brett

Because all of the wealth is held by someone else instead. Which is exactly the problem.

Consider for a moment society as a black box, with no insight into how anything is distributed inside of it. There's a certain amount of capital in use, and another amount available to be used for new things; and a certain amount of labor in use, and another amount available to be used for new things. To get a new thing done, that society needs to get some of that reserve capital out and apply some of that reserve labor to it.

Now let's peek inside that black box. As we have it now, that reserve labor is poor unemployed people, and that reserve capital is rich people's savings. To get anything new done, someone has to borrow that reserve capital from the rich, and pay some of it to the unemployed poor for their reserve of labor, but not pay too much of it to the poor workers because they need enough left over from the produce of this new activity to pay back what they borrowed from the rich owners plus interest.

There could instead be a society where that reserve labor is leisure time that all people have on their hands because they can all meet all of their needs with less labor than their maximal output (because their jobs pay them so well and their fixed expenses like rent are so low), and that reserve capital is the savings that all those people have because they're all capable of earning more than they need to get by (because their jobs pay them so well and their fixed expenses like rent are so low). So to get anything new done, you just need to get enough people to agree to pool their time and money together to make it happen.

There's the same amount of labor and capital in society in either case, and the same amount needs to be unused in reserve in order to make new ventures possible in either case. It's just the distribution of it that's different between the two scenarios.

So if there is enough reserve capital and enough reserve labor to enter into new ventures, but we don't have that idyllic scenario where everyone has leisure time and money saved up, both of which they can contribute to new ventures that they like, then that's entirely because something about the distribution of spare time and spare money is screwed up somehow. If we really can afford to enter into new ventures, then necessarily we have enough spare time and money to do that, so necessarily we could afford to have that idyllic society. And since we don't have that idyllic society, there's a lot of poor and overworked people for no reason other than that some people who get to make those decisions decided they would rather have even more leisure time and extra money at the expense of everyone else.

Or possibly it is the case that there actually isn't enough reserve capital and enough reserve labor in society altogether to really be able to afford to enter into new ventures, but we're nevertheless entering into them anyway, because some people get to make the decisions on what money gets spent on and what gets worked on, so the things they want made and done get made and done, while other things that many many other people desperately need made or done don't get made or done because those many many other people don't get any say in the direction that society's resources get used.