I doubt very much that they see themselves as mustache twirling, but the fossil fuels industry has been instrumental in lobbying against efforts to fight climate change. They’re not going to render humans for raw materials, but that doesn’t get them entirely out of existential threat territory. They have literally put their short term self-interest ahead of species survival.
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LOL - if it was up to me it would all be science, art, and history 
Fair point - but I also don’t want to be one. Though I could do something in arts, writing, and with more education, write something on history.
But while I feel I could adapt to those things, other don’t have the aptitude, nor a lot of people have the interest. Then again, I am guessing most people don’t have the interest in working at their jobs. Now I am imagining a world where people dread going to their 9 to 5 to compose sonnets or write about Celtic kings…
Interesting side note, in Japan where one is often expected to join and then die at one company, some people fall from grace and are transferred to a job that they literally do nothing all day.
That’s about the closest you’d get alright, but still an order of magnitude away from the worst case scenario on the other side. At worst it’s probably an existential threat to modern civilization, would be very hard to kill the entire species with CO2 alone.
Really? You sure about that? Some of the couldn’t possibly be econoically self-interested in the technology and its proliferation? They’re all well aware of the positives and pitfalls of capitalism and the changes to the economy? Even were this true, shaping automation isn’t just happening in places where such conversations are normal, they are happening in board rooms and in parliaments, too. Automation has already happened and has already put people out of work, and I doubt conversations about that in board rooms focused on the real people they put out of work, except as an unfortunate consequence that they don’t see as their fault, despite making the decision to actually put people out of work.
Atlanta, GA, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, New York City, etc, are not “outlier” places. These are some of the places where the slave trade is happening right now.
Well, what reason do you think the US invaded Iraq, then?
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Really? You sure about that? Some of the couldn’t possibly be econoically self-interested in the technology and its proliferation? They’re all well aware of the positives and pitfalls of capitalism and the changes to the economy? Even were this true, shaping automation isn’t just happening in places where such conversations are normal, they are happening in board rooms and in parliaments, too. Automation has already happened and has already put people out of work, and I doubt conversations about that in board rooms focused on the real people they put out of work, except as an unfortunate consequence that they don’t see as their fault, despite making the decision to actually put people out of work.
You’re moving the goalposts here, we were talking about learning from the past, about specific historical moral failings that aren’t likely to be repeated, I think they’ve learned pretty well from all of that. The other stuff you mention above we’ve already addressed, and I agreed is a potential problem.
[quote=“anon61221983, post:126, topic:101902”]
Atlanta, GA, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, New York City, etc, are not “outlier” places. These are some of the places where the slave trade is happening right now. [/quote]
In terms of your US examples, are you referring to the criminal people trafficking I already mentioned, or something else?
Not to steal their resources anyway, but this isn’t really the place for that discussion, we’ve had it before in another thread some time back.
Sounds good to me. It would be nice if we could all spend our time doing things that interest us and puts food on the table. I see no reason we can’t try and figure that world out, honestly speaking. I just think there are plenty of people who don’t care enough or think that someone else having something means that they don’t also get good things.
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True. Probably more than once.
I agree. The problem is that the current unsustainable economic consensus will require some sort of UBI to be implemented before (perhaps long before) the efficiencies you envision will be reached. That leaves a big opening for the greedheads and their conservative political and religious allies to cry “moral hazard” as one of the reasons for putting the nasty UBI system I describe in place. Once it’s in, they’ll do everything in their power to keep it in place, because any additional efficiencies will just translate into more profit for them.
I’d like to think that in the next 15-20 years the country will wise up and finally stop listening to the supply-side bozos, but I was thinking the same thing in 2001 and things haven’t improved.
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Supply side is still the common sense ideology that runs the world.
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And a core part of the global neoliberal consensus since “the end of history” in 1989. But at least the Europeans temper it by maintaining the Keynesian welfare state and labour market policies that both the GOP and the DLC Dems have been dismantling in this country. Those who would put in place the kind of UBI I discuss are not moustache-twirling tyrants but just short-sighted greedheads who know how to rig the system in their favour.
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All true. Though I’m not at all confident that Macron won’t start the process of dismantling the Keynesian consensus there. Don’t get me wrong, I’M VERY GLAD HE WON!, but we’ll see how his roots in finance means he’ll actually govern.
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What I’ve been saying since 2003: an insecure son’s vendetta, the PNAC fantasy of the neoCons, and profits for the oil services and munitions industries. Only the third one yielded as intended.
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Indeed. Makes sense to me.
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I wouldn’t be surprised if Macron travelled along some variation of the Third Way route that Clinton and Blair took, albeit with greater resistance from more empowered and entrenched trade unions and student organisations. Not great, but better than the alternative of brain-dead right-wing populist economics.
If things continue in this direction only Germany, Canada and a handful of Scandinavian and small northwestern European states will remain as the last bastions of post-war Keynesian liberal democracy with real middle classes.
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Can’t disagree there. I think that the mainstream parties everywhere are so unresponsive to most people’s realities that we’re going to see people turning to alternatives like the hard right and outsiders like Macron more often now. Here it could mean the rise of new parties, like in the 1850s. But we’ll see.
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“Powerful interests” are pretty limited in what they can achieve by the constitution, even if you added a few more conservative judges to tip the currently balanced scale there are still massive limitations on what anyone could achieve. The current US president is actually a great example, there’s nothing unthinkably dystopian about Trump him at all, and his impotence in enacting any of his actual campaign policies is a good reminder of the success of the US system of checks and balances (there’s still time of course for him to screw everything up, but it’s holding firm at the moment and seems more likely he’ll be impeached than permanently bugger up the country at this point).
Do you? Do you have any examples? This isn’t a no true scotsman situation either, the things you describe are literally the opposite of the kind of things an actual neoliberal would be in favor of.
I think you misunderstood me here, I was saying the only people who really use the term neoliberal are on the left, and they usually apply it to people who aren’t actually neoliberals, but people like the crony capitalists and the rotarians you describe, they also apply it to the actual neoliberals, but they jumble them all together in their incoherent criticism, despite the fact that they hold largely diametrically opposed views.
Finally, neoliberalism is not a “myth”, it’s a descriptor of (as the name implies) the new and extreme form that economic liberalism (or laissez-faire) took in praxis during and after the Reagan and Thatcher years. Some hold the appellation proudly, some obscure it, some practise a watered-down version, but it is a legitimate description of a rather extreme economic philosophy.
Nope, you’ve not got a good hold on what it means at all. You really should read that article I linked.
The TL;DR version is this: neoliberalism was first used to describe Keynesianism, in response to the laissez faire liberalism that came before it, this then became the the standard model of European social democratic free market capitalism, then in Latin America the term started being applied to the Chicago school people, whose ideas were nowhere near as radical as the early laissez faire stuff (I don’t think most people who criticise those guys have actually read anything about what they say about the welfare state and the size of government programs they were willing to endorse), it then started being used to apply to Thatcher and Reagan many years after the fact (despite neither of them fully implementing neoliberal policies, they dabbled around the edges, but mostly the same social democratic contract remained in the UK - Thatcher merely saved the UK from regressing towards full-blown socialism, and the US government didn’t shrink either, it actually kept expanding). Now the term has no real meaning, it no longer represents any coherent ideology, it isn’t being enacted by any governments, and people aren’t self identifying with it as a concept, it’s little more than an intellectually dishonest rhetorical device.
Well, the machine might be capable of looking beyond the next quarter…
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FTR: Crony capitalism = capitalism.
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I agree but the scale we are talking about is pretty dramatic.
Isn’t that already the case for most movies? Hasn’t it been the case for most of them since the beginning of the business? Also for books, music, sculpture, etc.
In all of these a few items get a lot of attention and a lot get very little.
The little town (6000 people) where I live puts on an open air play every year. It’s been doing it for a number of years now and it is very successful but almost no one outside the town knows it exists. A lot of what is loosely called the entertainment industry exists for the benefit of the performers and their immediate surroundings, not for society at large. But it doesn’t get big headlines so it somehow seems less important than yet another blockbuster super hero film.
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