Re: Chuck Moore news

On Mar 31, 1:16 am, Jonah Thomas <jethom...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
rickman <gnu...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Jonah Thomas <jethom...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Systems tend to do better when they:

1. Allow lots of people the chance to take initiative.
2. Allow those people to get rewards when their initiative produces
results that somebody wants.
3. The better the system links up people who take initiative with
people who wish to reward them for the results of that initiative,
the quicker complications will ensue.
I feel stupid for getting involved in this discussion, but the point
is that capitalism creates an economic structure that allows all of
the above to take place.

Yes, to a large extent. You don't notice the examples where the system
does inhibit those things, but sometimes it allows them.

We have Chuck's example where it looks like things aren't quite working
out well....

We know *nothing* about what "Chuck's example" is about. So how can
you say that it has anything to do with the capitalistic system? It
is entirely possible that it is a simple contractual issue where the
contract says one thing and the parties (or one party) thought it said
something different.


The independent research by those who wish to cure disease, the
research by government, and even the great arms of today's baseball
pitchers, were all created by the wealth of our capitalistic system.

They were all allowed by the system. Meanwhile, some people who want to
do research do not get the opportunity. Some researchers want to cure
diseases that mostly attack poor people, and they have a lot of trouble
getting funding. Some people who might have been great baseball pitchers
do not get the chance. How well does our system make those choices? It's
very hard to tell. But there are some successes.

Not just "allowed" but made *possible*. Capitalism is a system of
managing wealth and resources. The rest of it is what you *do* with
capitalism. Don't blame the system for how people use it. I don't
blame cars for the way some people drive them. Don't blame capitalism
for how some companies and people use or mis-use the system.


If we were stuck in a system like the Soviets or the Chinese had been
using in the past decades, we would not have had as much free
resources to be able to create so many of the things that we have
created.

That's probably true. There have certainly been worse systems than our
mixed economy.

 Of course, none of this is possible if people don't have the
intelligence, the creativeness and the drive to do the things you
mention (or the arm to be trained).  But they also would not have been
able to do them if they were spending 10 hours a day making a living
by some other means, like farming.

Currently we have some people spending 10+ hours a day working two or
more part-time jobs because no better opportunities are available to
them. Ideally these would be people who lack intelligence, creativity
and drive. I don't know how to measure how much that's the case.

I have honestly thought long and hard about exactly that problem. I
feel very lucky to be where I am today. I feel, more now than ever
before, that if some small thing had gone differently for me, I would
be in the street living in a cardboard box. Instead I am living very
well and don't even need to work if I choose not to.

But what to do with the people I've met who do work three part time
jobs to just be able to afford rent and food? I don't have an answer
to that question. The capitalistic system provides for creating goods
and services. How we distribute them is up to us. We have some
programs that help people who need, and many don't even try to take
advantage of these programs. But the ones who do get the benefit.
They may not be living well, but they are not living in the street.
Here, if you can't afford housing or food, it will be provided. It's
nothing I would want to have, but it is better than starving.

Beyond that, yes, the capitalistic system is just one step away from
the jungle, but without legal murder.


Meanwhile, rather many high school graduates are employed as health
insurance adjustors. They look at medical records and decide which
procedures health insurance will not pay for, based entirely on
precedents and on the limited data about the case that shows up in their
computer files. Someone who used to supervise a windowless office of
these girls said that in his office they did not have a quota of
procedures to deny. However, his office as a whole was supposed to deny
enough procedures to demonstrate that it more than paid for itself. This
work is done redundantly by multiple corporations who each have their
own somewhat-arbitrary precedents and guidelines.

This is a perfect example of blaming the system for what the users do
with it. The system is not responsible for looking out for people.
It is just a means of providing for an economy that is not based on
chaos. We make all sorts of exceptions and rules to help make the
system more humane, but that is not its purpose. That is how we want
it to be, so we bend it to do those things.


And rather many innovators are employed to generate patents. The
corporate lawyers look for ways to make money with the patents. I talked
with a man who does medical equipment research, who said he had a quota
of four patents a week but when he was in the swing of it he could often
generate ten or twelve a week without much trouble. Corporations with
sufficient money and patents don't have to worry too much about other
people's patents. But -- could this system be interfering with some
people's initiative? Could it perhaps be slowing innovation? It provides
employment to lots of people. People to file patents, people to do
patent searches, and of course lawyers....

There's room for lots of innovation in finding new kinds of patents,
but....

I'm not at all sure we have the best possible economic system. I'm
pretty sure that a system that had nothing but the things capitalist
theory describes would not be better.

If we wanted to make improvements, wouldn't we need to actually test
the improvements? At a minimum, controlled experiments. Very hard to do
them double-blind.... And if we could find consistent differences in
results, which results should be considered better? Wouldn't it be the
people who currently have the most money who'd get the most say in how
to change the system? They might prefer economic systems that let them
have a bigger share of the wealth, more than systems that produce more
wealth. This stuff is hard to test and hard to interpret the results.

I'm not sure what you are saying here. What changes would you like to
see? Patents are a PITA for an engineer, but they are important.
Many people only see the negative effects of patents when lawsuits are
filed. But without patents, many companies that invent and produce
real products would not be able to compete against companies who are
just good at stealing others ideas and producing them cheaply. If
that were the case, there would be little incentive to invent and
absolutely no reason to ever share inventions. That *is* what patents
are about, providing protection from theft of an invention in exchange
for the full release of information about it. So everyone wins... the
inventor gets the economic benefit for some number of years and the
public gets the benefit of it for perpetuity.

Rick
.

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