Traditional Capitalist Values

This is something I've remarked upon before, with respect to "the terrorists hate our freedom" or "the suicide hijackers were cowards" (statements that are sheerly silly).

I think the terrorists et al. probably do hate our freedom -- e.g., our freedom to watch DVDs of people having sex. This fact may not be particularly useful in keeping from being attacked again (I for one am not willing to give up the right to watch DVDs of people having sex).

On the other hand, I agree that "the suicide hijackers were cowards" is sheerly silly, and I think it's pretty stupid that Bill Maher lost his job for saying the same.

the terrorists et al. probably do hate our freedom -- e.g., our freedom to watch DVDs of people having sex. This fact may not be particularly useful in keeping from being attacked again (I for one am not willing to give up the right to watch DVDs of people having sex).

A witchhunt tells us a lot about those doing it but little about those who are the target of it.

Eliezer: I regard finance as more of a useful tool than an ultimate end of intelligence - I'm not sure it's the maximum possible fun we could all be having under optimal conditions.

Good post. I don't think that #18,

"Create value so that you can capture it, but don't feel obligated to capture all the value you create. If you capture all your value, your transactions benefit only yourself, and others have no motive to participate. If you have negotiating leverage, use it to drive a good bargain for yourself, but not a hateful one - someday you'll be on the other side of the table."

is a real capitalist value. I think that the capitalist value is to strike the best deal that you can, no matter what. In game theoretic terms, there's no reason to assume repeated play, or that one day you will be on the opposite side of the table. You should encourage the people you are transaction with to want to come to the table again, true, but I don't see why the word "hateful" has to enter the conversation.

What Aaron Brown said.

Anyone who wants to make blasphemy a crime is probably guilty of "hating freedom".

I guess it can all be summarized by one word 'competition', where everyone is not a winner and personal utility is God.

I think when most people complain about capitalism it has more to do with the monetary policies and banking systems of certain implementations of capitalism then with the capitalist ideals themselves.

For instance, fiat money that is created by the governing body and interest charged on the lending of that money is a specific condition that allows for wealth inequalities and the aggregation of power. I think alternative currencies have an absolutely amazing potential to change society but governments violently suppress any competition that will result in them losing control and power over the system.

Interest was lauded by the founders of the USA and Benjamin Franklin himself remarked that it is the 8th wonder of the world, but as fascinating as compound interest is, it ultimately creates cycles of debt and unsustainable behavior.

An example case that is cited often is the use of alternative currencies in the towns of Spain during their civil war. When banks shut down and money was not available, the towns began to fall apart and enter deep depressions. As a response, the towns took the initiative to create local exchange trading systems, and almost immediately their situations began to improve and prosperity started to return to the towns. The governing bodies, deeply afraid of losing control, shut these systems down, choosing to purposefully let them fall into a depressed state rather than lose power.

Now, if you believe that friendly AGI is around the corner and will result in the singularity occurring sometime before our current social systems collapse, then you probably do not want to rock the boat. You would not care for sustainability, you would want to keep accelerating innovation at all costs and keep the system as is till our friendly AGI savior arrives to save the world.

If, on the other hand, you are skeptical that such a singularity is inevitable or you weigh the probabilities higher that our social systems which are allowing such accelerating innovations will collapse before such a singularity arrives, then thinking about sustainability starts to become really important.

The post wasn't narrow enough to make a point. Elizier stated: "I regard finance as more of a useful tool than an ultimate end of intelligence - I'm not sure it's the maximum possible fun we could all be having under optimal conditions." Are we talking pre or post a nanotech OS running the solar system? In the latter case most of these "values" would become irrelevant. However given the world we have today, I can confidently say that capitalism is pretty awesome. There is massive evidence to back up my claim.

It smells like Eliezer is trying to refute a strawman. Specifically, I mean that there are probably few intelligent people who think of capitalism as a win-win all around. Capitalism is a compromise, it's the best we could come up with so far.

"Maximise profits by competing on the margins of price and quality" is a useful moral rule just like "keep promises". We can deviate from these rules when we have excellent knowledge of local conditions, but the less local knowledge we have of the consequences of our actions, the more closely we should follow them.

"It smells like Eliezer is trying to refute a strawman."

PK: Elizier isn't really refuting anything, he's just saying that personally he's not sure this is the best system, without going into too much detail as to why he thinks that.

PK, I thought Eliezer's post made at least one point pretty well: If you disagree with some position held by otherwise credible people, try to understand it from their perspective by presenting it as favourably as you can. His worked example of capitalism might be helpful to people who are otherwise inclined to think that unrestrained capitalism is obviously bad and that those who advocate it do so only because they want to advance their own interests at the expense of others less fortunate.

I agree that he's probably violating his own advice when he implies that capitalism amounts to treating "finance as ... an ultimate end".

Capitalism IS a win-win, at least it would be in the absence of coercion (And coercion is not part of capitalism). And government is the main source of coercion in the modern world. I am of two minds as to whether eliminating government would reduce coercion overall - that is, I do not find "Machinery of Freedom" really convincing.

One you missed: free trade is the only known means of creating a positive-sum game with no need for mutual benevolence. This means it can act as a connective between people with wildly diverging values, providing neither is in a position to wield superior force. Capitalism and trade is a universal meta-cultural microkernel. Pebble-sorters and humans could trade.

It may not sound like much of a quibble, but there really is a difference between regarding capitalism as a virtue-in-itself powerful enough that we ought to be doing it - that any future in which, say, money fades and people go back to ad-hoc barter, is therefore sad regardless of whether standards of living have otherwise gone up or down - versus regarding capitalism as a powerful tool suited to current conditions.

Think of the virtues of rationality. I'd be therefore sad if no one ever had cause to resort to them again, post-nanotech, regardless of whether standards of living had gone up or down.

This firmly identifies me as a member of the Bayesian Conspiracy rather than the Capitalist Conspiracy.

Post-nanotech, the nanotech practices the virtues of rationality or it fails to achieve its goals.

Doesn't count unless the nanotech is having fun.

Sarkozy's quote should be placed in a context of his typical statements. What he's probably referring to are high CEO wages, lack of "socially responsible" practices, etc. Sure, taken by itself, it's a great quote, but it's most emphatically NOT directed to evil capitalists mingling with the state, which he encourages.

I have yet to see a satisfactory definition of fun applicable to minds (or agents or optimization processes) very different from mammalian (or vertebrate) minds. And I suspect I will not be seeing one any time soon.

"..people refusing to contemplate the real values of the opposition as the opposition sees it..."

Popular news and punditry seems saturated with this refusal, to the point that I desire to characterize the media's real values in a wholly unbecoming and unfairly generalized manner. It would be a nice evolution of society if we introduced a 'rationality' class into the public school curriculum. Or perhaps developed a 'Bayes Scouts' with merit badges.

haha - damn - you beat me to it: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2008-March/042369.html

So, Eliezer's humanism -- or mammalism -- is showing.

"""Make things that people want, or do things that people want done, in exchange for money or other valuta. This is a great and noble and worthwhile endeavor, and anyone who looks down on it reveals their own shallowness."""

Yes it is a noble and worthwhile endeavour. Unfortunately (as I noted some time ago) there are in general two ways that firms can make profits: by making something people want, or by rent-seeking. The former is usually beneficial: it increases the sum of human happiness and welfare. The latter is usually harmful.

A society can be seen as a mechanism for incentivising things that benefit people and disincentivising things that harm people; and the success of a society is largely determined by how well its rules achieve this. It follows that if the rules of a society allow a firm to make profits without making something people want -- for example a firm whose only business is patent litigation -- then those rules are probably harming that society and should be changed.

If the only way a company could get rich was through making things people want, I suspect there would be less criticism of capitalism.

I could not live under a non-capitalist system. I believe people should be able to keep what they earn and charity should be a private affair.

Ian C: Where on earth do you live that people keep what they earn and there's no public charity?

Richard: Humans are pretty cool, I'm down.

Ok, maybe my last post was a bit harsh(it's tricky to express oneself over the Internet). I will elaborate further. Eliezer said:

"So here are the traditional values of capitalism as seen by those who regard it as noble - the sort of Way spoken of by Paul Graham, or P. T. Barnum (who did not say "There's a sucker born every minute"), or Warren Buffett:"

I don't know much about the latter two but I have read Paul Graham extensively. It sounds like a strawman to me when Eliezer says:

"I regard finance as more of a useful tool than an ultimate end of intelligence - I'm not sure it's the maximum possible fun we could all be having under optimal conditions. I'm more sympathetic than this to people who lose their jobs, because I know that retraining, or changing careers, isn't always easy and fun. I don't think the universe is set up to reward hard work; and I think that it is entirely possible for money to corrupt a person."

So if we come back to Paul Graham, while reading his essays I've never got the impression that he... -regards finance as the ultimate end of intelligence, -thinks capitalism is the maximum possible fun we could all be having under optimal conditions, -is not sympathetic to people who lose their jobs, -thinks the universe is set up to reward hard work(proportionately as a physical law), -or that money doesn't corrupt people.

That's why I think the post gives off the vibe of a strawman. Look, capitalism isn't perfect but you need better arguments to dismiss it. Am I being too harsh again? Alright, maybe Eliezer isn't trying to dismiss capitalism in his post but then what is he actually trying to say? All I got from the post was a weak attempt at refuting things nobody actually believes. If I misunderstand please explain.

Thanks for the thoughtful post Eliezer.

A recent economic novel on this topic is The Price of Everything by Russell Roberts. It's about how our economy is a self-organizing system, which works pretty well without a single central authority. And, it's an enjoyable read.

A few more sources for the economic thought behind this are:

Hayek, Friedrich A., "The Use of Knowledge in Society" available online. "What is the problem we wish to solve when we try to construct a rational economic order?..." I suspect readers of this blog would find this article educational.

Read, Leonard E., "I, Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read" available online No single person knows how to make a pencil. How do they come about? Another enjoyable article.

Smith, Adam., The Theory of Moral Sentiments. available online The author of The Wealth of Nations's equally dense book on the morality of economics and trade.

Do many people see capitalism as an end rather than a very good means?

The phrase "Terrorists hate our freedom" is not that far from truth. A lot of terrorist activity is perpetrated by religious groups with a conservative approach to moral values. From their point of view a lot of things we perceive as freedoms are actually abominable sins. All that's wrong with the phrase is that it is a bad generalization.

If you can summon up just one moment of empathy with those awful, awful people, you will realize that Osama bin Laden would be far more likely to say, "I hate pornography" than "I hate freedom". Which makes him not much different from a Western politician, in that sense.

Eliezer: I simply KNOW numerous people for whom the phrases "Real value systems - are phrased to generate warm fuzzies in their users," and "They will sound noble at least to the people who believe them." are simply untrue. In such people, there is often a DIRECT conflict between "generating warm fuzzies" and "not being mocked", as they consider the generation of warm fuzzies to be sufficient grounds for mockery. Do you want me to call them and get THEM to post on the comments thread?

Seriously Eliezer. You have NO IDEA how the main bulk of the finance industry thinks about life. I have been there, you have not, and you are mistaken about this. Hitler and Stalin did get warm fuzzies from their ideology, so that creates a lot of confusion. One CAN be a bastard AND like warm fuzzies. That doesn't mean that every bastard does so. It's pretty clear that the Marquis de Sade was NOT after warm fuzzies. Much more normal, neither is Genghis Khan or the typical "most popular girl in school".

Not all people are constructed so that the word-concept 'noble' is linked to notions of desirability and value. Such people will reject the idea that their chosen ideological positions appear 'noble' to them, or were selected because of their properties of 'nobility'.

'Virtuous' would be a better choice of words, but it renders the statement near-tautological. As it should, because the concept that ought to be expressed here is tautological: any consistent system of values will, upon evaluating itself, perceive itself to be the perfect manifestation of virtue.

Bin Ladin would be FAR more likely to say "people who use pornography should be killed and then tortured forever" than a Western politician, even if the latter endorses an ideology that says the same thing.

People who write about their ideologies are a VERY select sub-set of those who associate with those ideologies. The Paul Graham's and Warren Buffets of the world do like capitalism and think it benefits everyone. So do I relative to most plausible alternatives. That doesn't mean that the people who actually work in the day-to-day jobs as traders etc think that they are doing anything productive or care whether they are.

http://www.theonion.com/content/opinion/just_this_once_lets_stay_up_all is MUCH more common, and IS what they really believe in.

Michael, I hadn't intended the generalizations here to cover all capitalists, or all "value systems" in the sense of minds with motivations - just those people who would regard themselves as having a morality in the first place.

Do those to whom you refer have actual anti-moral moral systems, or are they just doing whatever? If there are people out there with actual antimoralities - not just "virtue of selfishness" Randian types who are actually around as decent in their private lives as the average - but people who do actual evil deeds with elaborate philosophies around them... Well, I don't think I'd want to meet them, and I don't think I'd want them to post here, and I don't think I'd want anyone to mention my name to them, but I confess myself actually quite intrigued as to what goes on inside their minds.

Isn't part of the point of capitalism that people don't have to want it to produce valuable outcomes for society as a whole for it to do so? That people don't have to be willing to sacrifice for those valuable outcomes (although they might have to restrain themselves if they want to be successful), and that society doesn't need to burn through a limited supply of altruistic people to remaining functioning if it uses capitalism to run itself?

f there are people out there with actual antimoralities - not just "virtue of selfishness" Randian types who are actually around as decent in their private lives as the average - but people who do actual evil deeds with elaborate philosophies around them...

People generally use them as empty pointers to refer back to their private belief systems... which is fine for communication, as long as you know what those systems are. If you don't, they communicate nothing.

What is "actual evil"?

The "virtue of selfishness" Randian types actually mean a lot like what you posted, Eliezer. Ayn Rand just sounded really really angry when she wrote it, and used "selfishness" as a technical term where someone else might have said "enlightened self-interest." If you have not seen it, she wrote an essay about virtues that reads a lot like the virtues of rationality, except she tended to package it with her version of the "if you do not live up to nature's demands, you die" essay. And then the angrier parts about how partial success is still death by degrees, and anyone against those values was a mystic of meat or muscle, a below-human creature richly deserving of its inevitable doom. (Or am I mentally combining several of her essays in the book of that title?)

With respect to "warm fuzzies": I interpreted that broadly. Believers in the importance of manly honor and martial virtue would never call their sense of righteousness "warm fuzzies," but they still have that warm glow of "I believe this, therefore I know The Good."

@Caledonian

How can you ask this question "What is actual evil?"? You must know. Perhaps not definitively, but surely well enough, that we others would recognize it and agree.

What is the function of this false barrier that is no barrier?

May I suggest that the asking of this question is an example of the answer, (whilst I accept, that evil done, does not have to be intended)?

you will realize that Osama bin Laden would be far more likely to say, "I hate pornography" than "I hate freedom"

There's a difference between hating freedom and saying you hate freedom. There's also a difference between hating freedom and hating our freedom; the latter phrasing rules out Bin Laden misredefining the word to suit his own purposes. And thirdly it's possible to hate freedom and hate pornography more than freedom.

I, too, am down with the mammals. I don't mind seeing whole galaxies transformed into clouds of superintelligent matter and energy and dedicated to mammalian happiness and mammalian preference.

I've raised this before when Eliezer made the point, and I'll raise it again:

There most certainly is truth to "Suicide bombers are cowardly". Someone who chooses to believe a sweet, comforting lie, and go to the grave rather than face the possibility of having to deal with being wrong, is cowardly, or the term has no meaning. They might have been less cowardly with respect to their lives, but they were absolutely more cowardly with respect to their intellectual integrity. And FWIW, American soldiers who meet all of that are just as cowardly.

Most people making the "Suicide bombers are cowardly" argument, are doing so for the wrong reason. Doesn't make them wrong.

For that matter, many in Islamic countries do hate the West for its freedoms: they often do not accept the freedom to criticize Islam, and often go to great lengths to punish such blasphemers. As freedom of speech, including anti-religious speech, is considered an important freedom, that criticism is at least partially right.

The truth of the matter is something more like, "Many (not all) in Islamic countries hate Western freedoms ... but not enough to commit acts of terrorism unless and until the West forcefully intervenes in their countries."

AFAIK the 9/11 people didn't believe they would die in any real sense.

Or to put it another way, I think I understand why good people might pretend to be evil, and why evil people might claim to be good is obvious enough; but I'm not sure I really do understand why evil people would admit to being evil.

@Eliezer: what 'evil' person has ever admitted to being 'evil'? I'm not talking about the petty thief who is sorry for his actions, but the bin ladens or stalins of the world who are convinced that the end justify their means and they are really doing good for their people/country/future/god/whatever.

Rand's objectivism and capitalism are criticized by people who reflexively see 'selfish' and equate that with greed and all the problems with capitalism. But those critics are delusional or they just don't understand human nature and our built-in modules for self-interest. And what altruism we do have is reciprocal, that doesn't make it any less 'good', it just makes it a 'good' form of self-interested behavior that benefits both or many parties and allows for societies instead of small warring bands.

Socialism is bad because it doesn't work well--capitalism is bad because it works too well. Socialism goes against our natural instincts, capitalism in its unregulated form amplifies those natural instincts to unsustainable levels. And truly, all our economies in this world are mixed economies anyway, so that should tell you something about a 'one true way'.

Again referring to my previous post, I think most of the problems are not capitalistic ideals, but the money systems that warp those ideals. Money is important, because bartering doesn't scale and is inefficient, and lacking a post-scarcity reality where everything is abundant, money will not go away. But in its current form it is far from optimal for maximum friendliness for all.

If sufficiently intelligent and with a need to convince themselves that they are moral, it seems to me that cancer cells could come up with a similar list of virtues.

If sufficiently intelligent and with a need to convince themselves that they are moral, it seems to me that cancer cells could come up with a similar list of virtues.

There was, once upon a time, an editorial in the Wall Street Journal calling Ford a "traitor to his class" because he offered more than the prevailing wages of the time. Sounds made up to me. A lot of stupid people think he did it so his workers could afford his cars. That's asinine. The marginal amount of money they'd send back to him directly would be negligible. The real reason was that he had a high turnover rate and it was costing him too much to keep training new employees. His retained more people after he raised wages.

Not related too much to the topic, but this post made me realize that the Russian word val'uta (currency) is cognate with value. I'd heard the word for most of my life, but I never made the connection.

The tenets of the Way of capitalism are sensible and admirable (not, in my opinion, the most sensible and admirable by far, but even so), but for many human beings it's difficult to keep such a diverse moral philosophy in your head - the result being that for some, even some that rise to the top, everything collapses to "make money at all costs".

Would that other systems get the same favorable treatment that Elizar advocates for capitalism. How about looking at the virtues of Communisms from the inside, as Elizar would have it. Anybody feel motivated to do more than a superficial hack job? How about Socialism? Monarchy? Plutocracy?

Speaking as someone who has no problem with capitalism, I'd say that people's reaction to it have a lot more to do with the people who promote it. Sort of like most people who don't care much for Heinlein turn out to have an appreciation of his writing, but absolutely detest the fanboy adulators who surround his remains.

EY: Is this "capitalist moral system" merely rationalizing greed, regardless of how coherent it is?

Also, in markets where these values actually harm profit-maximization, would the "true capitalist" throw them aside?

So, I always found one thing strange about the comments in this article - that no-one even considered a 'Traditional Socialist Values' post.

So I, no fan of socialism, did.

It worries me that I am not at all sure how to write the analogue of this list from the perspective of a devout mormon without something along the lines of "premarital sex is bad because I despise all that is good and joyful in life, bwahaha"

I mean, I think it might have something to do with the solidity of families, but there's still some steps I'm not seeing (ie fully sex-positive families in scandinavia seem to do just fine)

I think that one of the most valuable things I got out of my legal education is that I learned conservative (fiscal and social) political and legal theories from people who believe it themselves, not from people who were treating it as a caricature or a strawman. (And liberal ones too, but that's not so uncommon an experience. I identify as a "liberaltarian" myself.)

I live in the nonprofitiverse, where "capitalist" is usually a slur. (With some notable exceptions.) It's pretty hard to get people to listen to you once you've said the word "capitalist"--but if you bring up some of these points without naming them many of even the least sympathetic to "capitalism" would agree. (Similarly, I've seen Tea Partier signs that could have come straight from liberal talking points.)

I find it a lot easier to read about economic systems I don't agree with than social systems I don't agree with--I may think someone proposing an economic policy I find wrongheaded is wrong, but not immoral. Whereas there are many social policies I find not just wrong but abhorrent, enough that I have a hard time taking their proponents seriously.

I am well aware that this is an old article now, but I was reading it and found that the positions mentioned in this article are close to my own. Not exact, but close. I personally cannot conceive of a more virtuous way to distribute the goods produced by society, than by the personal vote of each individual member deciding upon the value of each other in material goods, weighted in infinite recursion by society's determination of those people making the decision in the exact same way.

Nothing about this is greedy, or heartless. It merely relies on people making decisions on what they are closest to being experts on -themselves, and those closest to them. It leads to inequality of outcome, but that is hardly a problem when it causes the poor to be vastly wealthier than they have been at any other time in history. Poverty is the natural state of man, and capitalism is the best way to make something else.

That said, what we have is hardly capitalism in its pure form. Political meddling doesn't help. Redistribution of wealth gets votes, but doesn't make society wealthier. Overzealous regulation prevents innovation.

People act like it is a tragedy when a man is replaced by a machine. It is not, though I can understand why it seems that way to the person losing the job. The machine was chosen because it works better than the man, making all of society fractionally richer. If it stopped there, I could understand the issue -he still doesn't have a job. Luckily, it doesn't stop. A richer society can afford to higher more than one man extra, and will indeed need to to get the excess extra efficiency can allow. Men find it hard to reason about very indirect benefits, but that doesn't make them any less real.

Additionally, people have problem realizing that the economic system isn't all numbers, and prices, and jobs, but people. A man gives his daughter a car for her birthday -this is not an economic transaction; this is a man who wants his daughter to be happy, and have the freedom to drive;capitalism actually is deeply in tune with this. A century ago, it would have been ludicrous that an ordinary man buy his daughter a machine that goes more than sixty and takes her anywhere the roads could take her; this is what we call progress, not extra zeroes in the bank.

I find it funny that so many of the comments are about terrorists. I read the previous article too, and most of these comments would seem to apply to that, so I suppose they apply to this one too, seeing how there is an obvious connection, but it's still funny.

I think many do not truly understand what capitalism is. Every economic wrong doing is for some reason attributed to capitalism, but we are not fully a capitalist country. I believe the general term for what we are is a 'modified free enterprise system'. Captialism is something different, better, but I unfortunately do not have the free hours to propound on it, especially when it is unlikely to be read, but he is very right that proponents of the system consider it more moral than other systems, not just more profitable.

I think of capitalism more as the idea that, even when everybody is selfish, it still works out surprisingly well. You could come up with a set of values that would do the most good in a capitalist system composed mostly of selfish people, and call them capitalist values, but I don't think that's really the point.

I don't think there's some capitalist value that it's intrinsically moral to grab all the money you can get. There is instead a capitalist belief that if you do try to grab all the money you can get, you will have to help more people than you hurt to do so. Well, they'd probably try to deny the hurt part completely, because most people don't understand that policy debates should not appear one-sided, but you get the idea.

These base points of capitalism I agree with, but alas there are a thousand fallacies out there which corrupt some of them. Notably in historic time: every economic bubble bursting into crisis since ever. This is not fault of capitalism, this is a fault of human civilization being a rather poor medium to implement capitalism in.

So, given the global crisis and every crisis before it such as the Tulip bubble in the first half of the 1600's, is it a simple solution is to implement some additional rules in the vein of meta-consequentialism?

In countries that are lawful and just, it is the privilege and responsibility of a citizen to pay their low taxes. That said, a good billionaire wouldn't ask to pay a lower tax rate than his secretary.

Since when is this a traditional part of capitalism? Apart from the definitional problems with "a good billionaire", who is it who says that a billionaire who pays 40m in tax and wants to pay less is somehow immoral?