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Re: The PIIGS still fly
One man's nitpicking is another man's genocide...I suppose... I still insist it's odd to lump the whole together like that. It's as if WWII were just about one people beating on themselves or something. It really makes no sense.
As for the Turks...maybe things would have gone the other way if men other than Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin were at the helm...who knows?
But I still think words matter. I think they have meaning. And I think when we get all fuzzy with them, we lose track of clear thinking.
See, you're lumping capitalism in with "free markets" and "Protestant ethics." Maybe there's some relation. But they can't all be the same concept. To me they are three different things.
1. Capitalism is a specific thing in my mind. It refers to the post-feudal development of the idea of land, labor and money as commodities that began in the Netherlands (hence the namesake of this website), and spread to England. The process began roughly in the 15th century in the former and the 16th century in the latter. It grows in about a hundred-year process. It begins with closing off the commons and ending serfdom. Then land is capitalized. Then serfs end up landless and congregate in urban areas. From there you get wage labor. And at this point you begin to get the seeds of land and large labor-employing concerns as the bedrock of capital. The first stock exchanges usually pop up around this point. And legal protections for private property expand. Meanwhile taxpayer-funded social welfare and dedicated police forces arrive on the scene around the same time to mitigate the fallout from the process. A society in which this transformation has occurred--in which land, labor, and money are treated as legally-enforced commodities--is a capitalist society. You might have some other definition. But this one at least is rooted in the history of capitalism.
2. Free Markets are another thing entirely. This is a much newer and much more complicated concept. The phrase itself comes to life in the 1920s as propaganda for business concerns. But soon Markets take on a life of their own and a very different conceptual meaning. By the 1940s, this idea is rooted in the ideas of physical equilibria and inspired by classical thermodynamics. Roughly the idea is that supply and demand of goods (and eventually services) will reach an optimum price equilibria if left alone, assuming all agents are rational maximizers and economic systems tend to a 'natural' equilibrium. So, it rests on the assumptions that individuals and businesses are utility maximizers and that supply would exactly meet demand for any given good or service with free trade if there was no interference. "Markets" generally refer to this abstract economic system which has a natural equilibrium (but cannot be seen or measured by any human means in physical reality), and "Free Markets" generally refers to situations in which outside agents (most likely governments) are prevented from interfering with that abstract economic system. This means you can have capitalism without free markets, and you can have free markets without capitalism. This was not a controversial idea until very recently. Market Socialism is an old idea, for example. In fact, there might be times (and I firmly believe there are) that free markets are bad for capitalism...
3. The Protestant Work Ethic is an idea conjured up by Max Weber in the 1900s in The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. So it's a bit newer than Free Markets. But actually, it lays some of the framework, and maybe is where some of the confusion comes from. Weber basically says that the spirit of capitalism (see how we're getting religious and spooky already) favors the rational pursuit of material accumulation (this is almost, but not quite, the rational utility-maximizing agents in the free market model). Unlike the free market model, which assumes all individuals are maximizing utility all the time, Weber doesn't think everyone has this spirit. In fact, he thinks it's a very individual thing, and that it's not even confined to the West. BUT, where he does find it in large groups of men is within Protestant cultures. Especially Calvinists because of predestination wherein it's assumed God gives poverty to the sinners and riches to the pious here on Earth, because your fate is sealed and it is already known whether you are going to heaven or hell. Therefore, even if only to signal religious virtue, Calvinists would seek to accumulate material wealth more than other groups of people. That's literally the Protestant Work Ethic. That's what it means. Catholics meanwhile insist that people have free will and their choices on earth determine whether they go to heaven or hell, which means the poor and kind have better odds than the rich and mean. So Weber figures the Catholic Ethic leaves less incentive for individuals to maximize wealth. And so that's how Max Weber rationalizes why England is wealthier than Ireland and The Netherlands are wealthier than Spain, etc.
So see what I mean? These are 3 different, if related, concepts. And by just blanket-labeling them the same thing, we're losing any sort of meaning here.
So I don't understand--I mean I truly and honestly don't understand--what you mean when you say:
I think maybe you mean American culture or Anglo business culture or something like that? I really don't know.
When you say:
I am certain I have less experience than you. But I have done it, if only for a few months. I'm not monolingual. And while I believe that Greece is more corrupt than the US, I'm pretty sure the US is more corrupt than, say, Germany.
And I'm not trying to rail against the US either. I'm really not. None of this was a screed against capitalism nor was it against America. In fact, if you've followed my posts over the years, you'd see I'm a pretty big America-booster.
I'm trying to rail against magical and sloppy thinking. We cannot afford to just lay back comfortably numb, joint in hand, waving the smoke away saying, "Capitalism, free markets, whatever man, it's all the same thing, dude..."
Because then people who worship free markets and blindly believe that this magical equilibrium exists always and everywhere even in cases where it is obviously failing to materialize and under conditions where it was never meant to work in the first place (monopoly, oligopoly, cartels, monopsony, etc) and with items and services that were never meant for material gain or to be private property in the first place (people, air, space, water, etc), end up really messing capitalism up badly while thinking they're rooting for it and doing it good.
One man's nitpicking is another man's genocide...I suppose... I still insist it's odd to lump the whole together like that. It's as if WWII were just about one people beating on themselves or something. It really makes no sense.
As for the Turks...maybe things would have gone the other way if men other than Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin were at the helm...who knows?
But I still think words matter. I think they have meaning. And I think when we get all fuzzy with them, we lose track of clear thinking.
See, you're lumping capitalism in with "free markets" and "Protestant ethics." Maybe there's some relation. But they can't all be the same concept. To me they are three different things.
1. Capitalism is a specific thing in my mind. It refers to the post-feudal development of the idea of land, labor and money as commodities that began in the Netherlands (hence the namesake of this website), and spread to England. The process began roughly in the 15th century in the former and the 16th century in the latter. It grows in about a hundred-year process. It begins with closing off the commons and ending serfdom. Then land is capitalized. Then serfs end up landless and congregate in urban areas. From there you get wage labor. And at this point you begin to get the seeds of land and large labor-employing concerns as the bedrock of capital. The first stock exchanges usually pop up around this point. And legal protections for private property expand. Meanwhile taxpayer-funded social welfare and dedicated police forces arrive on the scene around the same time to mitigate the fallout from the process. A society in which this transformation has occurred--in which land, labor, and money are treated as legally-enforced commodities--is a capitalist society. You might have some other definition. But this one at least is rooted in the history of capitalism.
2. Free Markets are another thing entirely. This is a much newer and much more complicated concept. The phrase itself comes to life in the 1920s as propaganda for business concerns. But soon Markets take on a life of their own and a very different conceptual meaning. By the 1940s, this idea is rooted in the ideas of physical equilibria and inspired by classical thermodynamics. Roughly the idea is that supply and demand of goods (and eventually services) will reach an optimum price equilibria if left alone, assuming all agents are rational maximizers and economic systems tend to a 'natural' equilibrium. So, it rests on the assumptions that individuals and businesses are utility maximizers and that supply would exactly meet demand for any given good or service with free trade if there was no interference. "Markets" generally refer to this abstract economic system which has a natural equilibrium (but cannot be seen or measured by any human means in physical reality), and "Free Markets" generally refers to situations in which outside agents (most likely governments) are prevented from interfering with that abstract economic system. This means you can have capitalism without free markets, and you can have free markets without capitalism. This was not a controversial idea until very recently. Market Socialism is an old idea, for example. In fact, there might be times (and I firmly believe there are) that free markets are bad for capitalism...
3. The Protestant Work Ethic is an idea conjured up by Max Weber in the 1900s in The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. So it's a bit newer than Free Markets. But actually, it lays some of the framework, and maybe is where some of the confusion comes from. Weber basically says that the spirit of capitalism (see how we're getting religious and spooky already) favors the rational pursuit of material accumulation (this is almost, but not quite, the rational utility-maximizing agents in the free market model). Unlike the free market model, which assumes all individuals are maximizing utility all the time, Weber doesn't think everyone has this spirit. In fact, he thinks it's a very individual thing, and that it's not even confined to the West. BUT, where he does find it in large groups of men is within Protestant cultures. Especially Calvinists because of predestination wherein it's assumed God gives poverty to the sinners and riches to the pious here on Earth, because your fate is sealed and it is already known whether you are going to heaven or hell. Therefore, even if only to signal religious virtue, Calvinists would seek to accumulate material wealth more than other groups of people. That's literally the Protestant Work Ethic. That's what it means. Catholics meanwhile insist that people have free will and their choices on earth determine whether they go to heaven or hell, which means the poor and kind have better odds than the rich and mean. So Weber figures the Catholic Ethic leaves less incentive for individuals to maximize wealth. And so that's how Max Weber rationalizes why England is wealthier than Ireland and The Netherlands are wealthier than Spain, etc.
So see what I mean? These are 3 different, if related, concepts. And by just blanket-labeling them the same thing, we're losing any sort of meaning here.
So I don't understand--I mean I truly and honestly don't understand--what you mean when you say:
The best way to understand the Protestant ethic, free markets, capitalism, or whatever you want to call it
I think maybe you mean American culture or Anglo business culture or something like that? I really don't know.
When you say:
is to move abroad to an entirely different culture and speak the native language and make a living there.
I am certain I have less experience than you. But I have done it, if only for a few months. I'm not monolingual. And while I believe that Greece is more corrupt than the US, I'm pretty sure the US is more corrupt than, say, Germany.
And I'm not trying to rail against the US either. I'm really not. None of this was a screed against capitalism nor was it against America. In fact, if you've followed my posts over the years, you'd see I'm a pretty big America-booster.
I'm trying to rail against magical and sloppy thinking. We cannot afford to just lay back comfortably numb, joint in hand, waving the smoke away saying, "Capitalism, free markets, whatever man, it's all the same thing, dude..."
Because then people who worship free markets and blindly believe that this magical equilibrium exists always and everywhere even in cases where it is obviously failing to materialize and under conditions where it was never meant to work in the first place (monopoly, oligopoly, cartels, monopsony, etc) and with items and services that were never meant for material gain or to be private property in the first place (people, air, space, water, etc), end up really messing capitalism up badly while thinking they're rooting for it and doing it good.
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