Kate Raworth's "Doughnut Economics"
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Raworth is pronounced "rey worth". She's from the UK.
"At the heart of these workshops is a focus on design: not the design of their products and services, or even of their office buildings, but the design of the organisation itself."
When we advocate for different voting systems than the harmful one currently in place, we are doing exactly that, trying to change the design of organizations including polities.
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@jack-waugh yes, sadly pushing to the exterior of the doughnut is the most pertinent prisoner’s dilemma of today. Not an easy problem to solve without cooperation.
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@cfrank, I agree.
When I argue about voting systems to people who haven't thought about them much, one of the hardest hurdles, I think, is getting them to notice how the concept of the Prisoner's Dilemma can be generalized to more than just two-count of prisoners. And that the more-count of prisoners there are, the harder it is to trust them all to behave according to collective interest instead of individual interest.
And it's very hard to get people to share my opinion about the relative importance of power relations over other factors in what drives people to decide what to pay attention to. In my latest face-to-face conversation on this, I repeated Warren D. Smith's rhetorical question, that given that in today's environment, for a candidate for office to publish her claims of qualifications and her ideology and positions on the issues costs almost nothing on the internet, why are more and more millions of dollars spent on campaigns? I wanted to argue, as Warren does, that it's because of the power relations that include vote splitting. But my satan counterargued that regardless of the power relations, many hardworking voters are not going to go to the Internet to research candidates' positions. They are just going to soak in whatever is the loudest on television.
The Abrahamics teach that the god Yaweh knows everything, can do anything, and knows right from wrong. If this is all true, Yaweh must truly hate and want to torture the human race, because he hasn't explained to people how to cooperate. I don't believe he's real, but if he were, he'd deserve damnation into his own hell.
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@jack-waugh there’s definitely a lot to say about the prisoner’s dilemma, it’s a very deep concept and its implications extend well beyond pure economics, for example having relevance in biology and evolutionary psychology (I tend to think biology and economics are far more similar disciplines than many biologists might like to admit).
I’m agnostic on the God matter, but I agree with your sentiment. As the Beatles say,
“Christ you know it ain’t easy
You know how hard it can be
The way things are going
They’re gonna crucify me.”And in some respects they might as well
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@cfrank I think it would be interesting if you were to start a new topic here and elaborate a bit on prisoner's dilemma(s).
I learned about Raworth's writings by querying ChatGPT as to whether anyone was writing about economics from a perspective that treats it as an engineering problem about how to fulfill human needs.
The New York Times offers a morning newsletter even to those who do not have a paid subscription. And this morning's is by one David Leonhardt. He quotes himself from earlier, regarding the economic history of China:
"Eventually, a rising economy needs to take two crucial steps: manufacture goods that aren’t just cheaper than the competition, but better; and create a thriving domestic market, so that its own consumers can pick up the slack when exports inevitably slow."
In my opinion, Leonhardt teases his readers by leaving out an important distinction. Is this domestic market to be created by convincing people to buy things they don't need? If so, that's not a net gain. People worldwide have to think about how to assure that the species lasts for more than just a couple of generations more. At least, it would be to my taste if that is what they would do. If someone is a nihilist, and doesn't value human survival, I know of no way to argue them into switching values. I think that facts of the world are arguable, but basic values are not. If two people agree on some values, they can argue about whether other values follow from those.
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@jack-waugh I agree soundly with you. There are many ultimately nihilistic profit seekers who are driving destructive tendencies of the global market, and that’s a full euphemism. It isn’t clear whether that nihilism is actually a value construct (well, it seems if anything to be quite rightly the opposite of one, really) or whether it’s due to a typical lack of awareness or contemplation. But a third alternative is also available, which is a simple (and in enough cases, severe) deficiency in moral character.
Another related topic I consider in this area is the attention economy. You allude essentially to addiction and what I don’t have vocabulary for beyond “post-modernist consumerism.” In my opinion, global attention is a public good that is now being subjected to the tragedy of the commons, and that is all resulting from a de-compartmentalization of access points to attention. It’s also another prisoner’s dilemma. Space and time no longer serve the functional roles of localizing attention to natural social public spheres and communities, and this only drives the lack of awareness and other issues related to mental health (I.e. attention starvation on a global scale, with concomitant depression, I.e. “influencers,” onlyfans, TikTok, etc.). More and more pornographization, commodification and exploitation of human life, even people exploiting themselves.
The only thing I can see that could possibly supplement those barriers is either an artificial enforcement of barriers (a frightening thought) or awareness and personal character. In other words, externally imposed barriers, or barriers of personal choice. Interesting times we live in. Anyway I’m glad at least that others can see this is all more than “just” a moralistic issue.
On a side note, while we’re at the water cooler, I will just mention that I watched a portion of the first Republican candidate debate. I will summarize my thoughts as, “Wow.”