[chrisin2d]

I think you're on the right trail.

My take is that a highly productive globalized industrial society necessitates high abstraction of work and supply chains.

Buying a chair on an e-commerce site has many layers, each with its own sublayers (shipping <- fulfillment <- e-commerce site <- payments <- warehousing <- distribution <- manufacturing <- supply chain <- design <- product research <- market research — I'm skipping a bunch). Each layer and sublayer has its own bureaucracy to keep things running and to interface with other layers.

A pair of pants will be touched by fashion consumer researchers, fashion designers, textile designers, product managers, supply chain managers, marketing managers, analysts, social media managers, advertisers, merchandisers, software engineers, accountants, data scientists (clothing companies are turning to ML to assess fashion trends and demand), and many, many more. All to make it possible for you discover and buy a cheap pair of pants and have it delivered in 2 days.

Because of its efficiencies, the high abstraction economy outcompeted and replaced the old low abstraction economy. The driving force is the fact that it's easy for people to indirectly 'vote' for a high abstraction economy by overwhelmingly preferring to buy cheaper and more stuff; but it's very difficult for people to 'vote' for a low abstraction economy, even if people will occasionally buy something handmade.

I think that this force will endlessly drive the economy to become ever more abstract. Consumers want cheaper, better stuff. The economy will become more abstract, evolving ever narrower niche roles in order to serve consumer wants.

People will find themselves in those ever narrowing roles in order to afford the good life. And there is no low abstraction economy to flee to for the simple life because it has been outcompeted and replaced.

[nicoburns]

I think you've just illustrated the problem with laissez faire economics. It rewards only efficiency (and short term efficiency at that - resilience is often not accounted for), even if that's not what people might choose (they can choose otherwise, but not for long becauss those other modalities will be outcompeted out of existence).

We could have a way out of this if we restructured our economy so that decision making power didn't solely rest with owners of capital, and taxed companies ina more strongly progessive manner to prevent winner-takes-all situations. That would enable companies to make decisions that were not solely for financial reasons and allow for more diversity in business models and practices.

[teataster]

Efficiency is rewarded by consumer buying (voting with money) efficiently produced products.

It's not some abstract evil ideal that drives the market. It's people doing purchases.

Now, good markets need good (perfect to be precise) information. If people knew this is where we would end up (say most production moved to Asia), would they have made different choices (say to preserve manufacturing in US EU with better worker conditions)?

I would argue our economic system is just fine. But we fail in political, educational and ethical issues. Especially ethical, people know about horrible conditions in sweatshops, still there are massive queues to shop at low cost brands. I feel clothing as the most egregious, because there are decent alternative choices.

[nicoburns]

> Efficiency is rewarded by consumer buying (voting with money) efficiently produced products.

Right, but the fact that our economic outcomes are decided by consumers is an artifact of our economic system, not some necessary truth. There are a lot if upsides to such a system, but as discussed in this thread there are also downsides.

> I would argue our economic system is just fine. But we fail in political, educational and ethical issues

I disagree here. Our economic system makes sweatshop clothes cheaper (we could for example regulate or raise tariffs against them). That means that making thw ethical choice becomes a sacrifice of sorts, and not only that but it puts people who don't make that choice at a comparative advantage (they have more money left over), which effectively makes their influence over the rest of the economy greater.

We should be doing better in terms of political and ethical education, but we should also be ssetting up economic incentives to do the ethical thing not the opposite.

[oblio]

> But we fail in political, educational and ethical issues.

What if people just don't care?

[SuoDuanDao]

I'll go on the record predicting the opposite. Higher abstraction societies have higher co-ordination costs, something we're seeing now in ever growing administrative overhead. Much of what people are complaining about upthread is the higher percentage of resources going towards nonproductive, bureaucratic managerial tasks. We're probably going to get a reprieve in the short term as more of these are automated, but once the really profitable co-ordination jobs are replaced the overall administrative overhead will increase again. And it's nonlinear - co-ordination costs probably rise with the number of connections within a network, so every additional node adds more of these costs when joining a larger network than a smaller.

I actually expect we'll have two broad classes of society which value more or less abstraction. A few enclaves like Singapore surrounded by a lot of Amish country.

[ItsMonkk]

Everyone knows in a perfectly efficient market profits naturally go to 0. Recently I worked out that platforms - for example iOS and Android apps - where developers and users form a two-way market where the network effect dominates, naturally causes for the few platform owners to form a cartel with no need to compete. New platform owners can't enter into the market as they need both developers and users to take a chance, so the duopoly is stable. So you can't get to a perfectly efficient market in such an environment.

I hadn't realized until this thread that this is actually everywhere. Our supply chains are nothing more than nested Matryoshka dolls of tightly bound interfaces. The cartel formed by these platforms are the most profitable way to be in business. Everyone is seeking to become a platform that others expend energy building on top of.

Now that these interfaces are tightly bound, Metcalfe's law and it's associated n^2 communication costs mean that one participant can't make a change unless someone down the line changes. And they can't change unless someone else changes. It's the exact same problem as refactoring a big ball of mud.