So the entire freighter journey is shown in real time, to show how “crushing” (a word used in the article) capitalism is? Because before capitalism, there were no freight ships, or what?
Every week my office restocks on bananas from Latin america
Every week at least a few end up in the trash, because they turned black and no one wants them anymore
So some dude, thousands of kilometers away, grew his bananas, put them in a boat, for a weeks long trip to Europe, followed by hundreds of kilometers in a truck, to end up in my office trash
This is a simple example
It's not about what was possible before, of course we've been shiping stuff world wide for a long time, it's about the scale and banality of it and the scale and banality of waste that comes with it. Nothing is measured with the "absurdity" scale, everything is measured with the "money" scale. A lot of what we now consider normal is complete madness
So some dude, thousands of kilometers away, grew his bananas, put them in a boat, for a weeks long trip to Europe, followed by hundreds of kilometers in a truck, to end up in my office trash
Along with millions of other bananas that got eaten. You're arguing against economies of scale here, and you'll need to show your work rather than dismissing long-distance trade as "madness".
That's the thing. Under capitalism the only way to measure something is money. Millions of tons could be sold, profit was made, so it's OK to throw away a few tons.
Environment, living and working conditions, resources and materials being taken from non-renewables sources, all of those are unimportant under capitalism, all of those are unimportant with capitalism and are the reason why no one asks themselves whether it's really worth shipping fruits from the other side of the world. Sometimes even by plane.
People did ask themselves. They found, yes, it's worth. You might disagree, but I don't I think the number of rotten bananas a process produces offers any meaningful answer. At best it's a baseline and by itself about as useful as "x people die from y every year". What about it? Is that number supposed to be good or bad and what is the bigger context?
Doing stuff causes other stuff to happen. People die in car accidents, but a lot of death is prevented because we have cars, but then people also die because of pollution or get depressed because of noise pollution, and it keeps goin from there. It's hard. Let's be empathetic with each other, and good, and also think a lot about what is going on.
The problem isn’t capitalism; it’s the imperfection of humanity. No economic system in history has eliminated waste. The only industrialized alternative to capitalism was notoriously even more wasteful.
Price systems work by simplifying and transmitting information relevant to production and consumption decisions. If the price goes up, consumers who can go without the thing can stop buying it and producers who can make more of the thing can start making it, and they each have the incentive to do so.
When it comes to externalities with the environment, these can be incorporated into the price system. That’s how a carbon tax would work. It turns out that the intuitions of would-be central planners are often completely wrong.
The truth is, lots of people do ask themselves if it’s really worth it to ship bananas from Latin America to Europe. They work for the fruit company and their decision is based on the costs and benefits. If there are costs that they aren’t considering, then the solution is to incorporate those costs into the price system, not to have some banana commissar decree that oceanic banana shipping is banned because, in his enlightened gut feeling, it’s “absurd”.
Imperfection of humanity? A lack of resource extraction taxes doesn't have anything to do with humanity at large. Any hypothetical society could implement them today and the topic would be over. There is not much more you could do, frankly.
This may be a bit pedantic, but I think it's worth discussing.
> The problem isn’t capitalism; it’s the imperfection of humanity. No economic system in history has eliminated waste.
The fact that no economic system yet implemented at scale has eliminated waste does not necessarily imply that waste is unavoidable; we'd need to convincingly show that no such economic system could be possible. Similarly, I don't believe we can conclude that capitalism minimizes waste among all feasible, stable economic systems.
As far as balancing exploration and exploitation goes, it might be argued that we should focus on reaping the benefits of our current economic system and deprioritize the exploration new economic systems, but it's too much at this point (imo) to assert that exploration is futile.
My other thoughts:
• "Capitalism or central planning" is a false dichotomy; there are economic systems besides capitalism that have free markets.
• The goal of capital holders in a capitalist system is not efficiency (in the colloquial sense), but profit – planned obsolescence is perhaps the perfect example of this.
• I agree with you that central planners can be catastrophically wrong, and my current opinion is that incorporating externalities into the pricing system (through taxes) is a good idea. It can be difficult to correctly identify, distinguish, and price externalities; I wonder if a benefit of more local economic systems is that there are fewer externalities (by which I mean, actors experience more of the effects that they cause and impose fewer incidental effects on third parties), which would reduce the number of things we need to manually identify and correct.
> Price systems work by simplifying and transmitting information relevant to production and consumption decisions. If the price goes up, consumers who can go without the thing can stop buying it and producers who can make more of the thing can start making it, and they each have the incentive to do so.
This myth has been proven wtong again and again. It assumes that everything is available through a market; if my city doesn't have good cycling infrastructure, where do I put money so it improves ? Where do I find a more efficient justice system and how is its price ?
It assumes that all decisions are taken rationally based on a thorough analysis of the situation. The mere existence (and efficiency) of advertising, and the luxury sector, show that a not insignificant part of decisions are not taken based on self-interest.
It assumes that everyone has enough money to "vote with their wallet". I don't need to tell you how out of touch this assumption is when there is a whole class of people considered poor, aka not able to buy whatever they want/need.
> When it comes to externalities with the environment, these can be incorporated into the price system.
If you take into account how much a system like planet Earth provides and give it a realistic cost you realize it doesn't work. Take the ISS: it's cost around 100 billion dollars and provides the bare minimum for ~10 persons. That means that planet Earth costs at a minimum 10 billion dollars per capita, and that's far from covering it all.
The only thing you can do is have a central system that puts limits on capitalism, by introducing taxes and such. Which exactly means it's not able to handle everything.
> not to have some banana commissar decree that oceanic banana shipping is banned because, in his enlightened gut feeling, it’s “absurd”.
I hope the arguments people are giving are not making you believe that the only alternative is a central authority acting on feelings. That would be a complete misconstruction of the opposing POV.
> The only industrialized alternative to capitalism was notoriously even more wasteful
Or eating locally grown stuff that doesn't need to be shipped form the other side of the planet, but when you say that people think you're the mad man... I'm telling you, the whole system is mad, you're just too deep into it to realize, the dissonance would be too strong
What exactly is your basis for thinking it’s crazy to ship things from the other side of the planet? What cost benefit analysis have you done to come to this conclusion? Or are you just appealing to your own amateur intuitions?
If there’s an ecological cost that isn’t being accounted for, the solution is to adjust policies so the cost is reflected, e.g. via a carbon tax. And I’m sure if we had a carbon tax, we would eat more locally grown food because it would be more cost effective. On the other hand, different parts of the world vary widely in terms of what can be grown there and how efficiently it. It’s a complicated problem that can’t be solved top-down, and certainly can’t be solved by some armchair hippie going “the whole system is mad, man!”
Right. In a system where people feel forced to work crazy hours in the middle of the ocean; in a system where someone else pays the externalities of petroleum; in a system where the raw materials for a freighter can be dug up by people who may not need to understand why anyone would need bananas shipped to them; in a system rich people have shaped so that it feeds them whatever exotic fruits they desire... only in such a system can shipping bananas to be thrown out be considered "cheap because economies of scale".
Economies of scale means individual suffering turns into statistical noise.
I don't know if there's been a good example of an actually non-capitalist country yet. I'm not a historian, but all examples I can think of have a small class of people owning the means of production. They aren't always the bourgeoisie but sometimes a political elite or dictator's following.
What I can say is that on a more local scale, the non-capitalist systems I've had experience with have been much more pleasant than the ones where a small set of people held most of the power over production.
Also if you look at how you “spend” your own time you might find that a lot of it is not on purely capitalist hours, but instead time is spent on hobbies, sports, children, friends, family and other pursuits that would be regarded as non-capitalist.
Edit: I would be regarded as a capitalist within New Zealand (I am a successful founder, I don’t much believe in agricultural/industry subsidies), but I would be regarded as on-the-left in the US (I’m generally supportive of government health systems and social equality).
I actually see a food bank "gleaner" regularly at my Safeway. Bananas with any black spots at all are considered unsaleable, although they're perfectly edible.
So long before they turn all black, they're taken to the food bank and given away to whomever wants them at their central location. If a banana does make it all the way to black, it means someone bought it and then didn't eat it.
There is actually competition among the food banks for supermarkets' unwanted food. One will go to the supermarket manager and ask for their unwanted food and get told "Sorry, we're already giving it to Second Harvest."
It isn't only produce. The gleaner regularly fills up his car with breads, milk, and lots of other stuff.
It is kind of odd how we ship grains and soybeans farmed in the rain forest to a factory farm in the US and then end up with huge poo lagoons that in theory would have to be shipped back to the farms in the rain forest to act as fertilizer. Instead people just abandon the land and continue with their slash and burn agriculture on a different plot of land.
This may come as a surprise, but there's plenty of wastage in locally shipped produce too. It's not so much the distance as the act of picking things and putting them into boxes, and taking them out of boxes again that does it.
I don't know if you're sarcastic or not, because this is exactly what I mean by using a monetary scale. It's free to me but it still is an incredible waste of energy, time and ressources
I'm being serious, and I do this when possible. My non-gardening relatives will sometimes even drop off a pile of unusable produce for such purposes when visiting.
Ideally, it's better not to overproduce and overbuy. But I'm suggesting making the best of a situation where the bananas can either go to the landfill or still be of some use.
The economies of scale make this nearly no different than you wasting a locally grown banana. Very little energy was spent on that particular banana to get it do you.
A lot of people would care, that’s the issue. Even if you personally have achieved an enlightened state where you’re perfectly able to voluntarily forego trying to do and acquire things that are contributing to an unsustainable society, it doesn’t mean that you can extrapolate from that and construct a stable system where everyone else does the same.
Human beings are greedy and shortsighted, and they especially want to have more than the people they surround themselves with. Any sustainable solution will need to take this into account.
Observing the absurdity of something doesn't necessarily mean you have a more desirable alternative. I can observe that it's absurd that my apples were shipped halfway around the world without saying "so i don't want them".
Capitalism is absurd, what it makes humans do is absurd. It's also useful and has some worthwhile properties.
Trade exists apart from capitalism, and is found in any number of alternative economic systems. Capitalism is about who has ownership of productive assets. Conflating capitalism with trade makes it seem like no alternative economic systems are possible.
Before "capitalism" (globalization really I guess), you were eating apples from your neighbor's garden, wearing shoes made by your town's shoemaker, not from half around the world.
This is not correct, the ancient world and the ancient Mediterranean especially saw food get transported by sea. Rome.had to import much of it's food, for instance, as did Athens.
Well you're not wrong, but that was still the exception, and on a smaller scale. So maybe food wasn't the best example to get my point across. Like you said, they had to, it's not like some clever Roman said "hey you know what, I'll just buy cheap stuff from overseas to make more money and then fuck our farmers." Nobody sent locally harvested produce for processing to a country half around the world and then back. Or look at when ancient Rome and China did trade. That was for luxury goods, not for basic household items the average Joe would buy.
Not sure that’s the strongest take you could have made.
Some things cannot reasonably be produced domestically.
Some things are about attempting to shrink labour costs.
It’s cheaper for Britain to send its shellfish to China to be de-shelled by hand, then send it back than it is to pay some folks to do it in the UK (or mechanise the task).
This is an extreme example (and a real one) that highlights what the parent is talking about.
Even when accounting for the human, fuel, cooling and spoilage cost of shipping around the world it’s “cheaper”, but that doesn’t make sense to me because at the end of it there is much less fuel and much less fish than it would have otherwise been.
There’s also not a strong reason to buy shoes made in China except for economic reasons, and more recently supply chain ones.
We can weave fabrics and we have domestic cotton. However, the economics (pushed cheaper by dirt cheap freight) are emphasising a global supply chain where one isn’t needed in most cases.
I’m picking on China a bit but it applies to basically everything where the labour is cheaper and the supply chain bends itself in a more inefficient path (everything else being equal) to capitalise(heh) on the lower labour costs.
> It’s cheaper for Britain to send its shellfish to China to be de-shelled by hand, then send it back than it is to pay some folks to do it in the UK
This is a tiny fraction of a much bigger picture. The shellfish do not get their own private ship. It's cheap because the UK is already importing so much that when the ships return to China empty, they might as well pick up some shellfish on their way home. Then, the de-shelled shellfish is valuable enough to get a spot on the next full ship heading out again.
I think it's still as crazy sounding! We send shellfish around the globe and back to get them de-shelled. Not because they do it better, but cheaper. And for the company doing it it makes sense, since they benefit, and the now unemployed countrymen get compensated by the government, ie. taxes, ie. everyone.
And yes, of course there's always one more step that leads you to where you got in the end. Nobody established a new shipping route and built a new dedicated ship just to start de-shelling in China.
It's like when you look at some complex software that has a batshit crazy architecture, spaghetti code, 5 different code styles, hacks and is half procedural half OOP, and whatever else you consider a crime. But then you look at its history, how it's almost 30 years old, started procedural on a different OS, how its requirements vastly changed and extended over the decades in ways nobody could possibly anticipate, and suddenly, most of the crazy things don't seem so crazy anymore if you know the story behind the individual "crimes" committed. But thst still doesn't mean that looking at the whole picture can't reveal a batshit crazy codebase that you wouldn't touch with a 5ft pole if you can avoid it.
> The shellfish do not get their own private ship. It's cheap because the UK is already importing so much that when the ships return to China empty, they might as well pick up some shellfish on their way home
Is the implication then that the space would be completely vacant?
How can you be certain that there's never been a ship commissioned because the demand became too great and thus more ships needed?
Even if it wasn't just shellfish, there's a million different things that ship back and forth and it shouldn't be necessary, it's enabled by cheap freight and cheap labour: but those things are an equivalent burden to the planet and our sum-total of ecological resources. So it's very wasteful when you think in those terms and not in our faux-scarcity monetary terms.
> a global supply chain where one isn’t needed in most cases.
And you say this from your vast expertise in global economics?
Things evolved this way because a whole globe full of individual actors thought they made sense, based on prices. If they cease to make sense, those same actors will start doing something else because the prices they see will change.
It could take a while, but so would having another meeting of the Global Planning Committee.
You could do that in the modern day too, if the West decided to stop their exploitation of developing/colonial countries.
Instead, they’ve decided that minimum wages at home need to be X $£€ and X/100 everywhere else, so they can offshore everything. Nobody is forcing the West to make shoes in China!
Every week at least a few end up in the trash, because they turned black and no one wants them anymore
So some dude, thousands of kilometers away, grew his bananas, put them in a boat, for a weeks long trip to Europe, followed by hundreds of kilometers in a truck, to end up in my office trash
This is a simple example
It's not about what was possible before, of course we've been shiping stuff world wide for a long time, it's about the scale and banality of it and the scale and banality of waste that comes with it. Nothing is measured with the "absurdity" scale, everything is measured with the "money" scale. A lot of what we now consider normal is complete madness