[zozbot234]

AIUI David Graeber famously pointed out that people in small groups can form the equivalent of a "market" simply by exchanging favours ("I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine") in an informal gift economy, without any money-like token or external unit of account. That's quite in line with what I said.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

You understanding is mistaken. Graeber's "everyday communism" is not a market, and his whole larger point is that contorting everything to the lens of markets is simply ahistorical and unempirical.

I'd strongly suggest reading his books. They profoundly changed my understanding of how human institutions and society form.

[zozbot234]

Unless it's some sort of complete post-scarcity, it has to be understandable in market terms. What happens if people try to free-ride on the whole "communist" system? If they get excluded from its benefits, that's equivalent to enforcing some bundle of property rights.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

> Unless it's some sort of complete post-scarcity, it has to be understandable in market terms.

No, it does not, and that's Graeber's whole point.

"Markets" are not some sort of physical law of the universe.

A simple example of this is it's the norm in hunter gatherer societies to take care of people who never will make an equal contribution back in the transactional sense.

Because the social ties in those societies are not simply transactions.

If your model fails to accurately describe empirical reality, time to improve/expand the model.

[zozbot234]

These social ties are real (they are a kind of wealth, or social capital, for the persons involved) but they're also limited to very small social groups, the equivalent of a modern small village neighborhood or HOA. The point of the market is that it scales well beyond those.

[mcmcmc]

Translating every aspect of human existence into some kind of “capital” is deeply unhealthy.

[robot-wrangler]

> it has to be understandable in market terms

I like economics and math too, but the whole discussion of markets is a terrible starting place for deriving results in ethics/psychology. If you insist though, notice that unions will happen unless some other organization is working to prevent them. What do you suppose this means? People are aligned with each other exactly because they've noticed their coworkers are not corporations or governments.

Although the two are entangled, politics is a more relevant framing than economics here. If people weren't broadly aligned on basic stuff, then autocrats, theocrats, kleptocrats and so on would simply not be interested in dismantling democracies. They make that effort because they must.

[zozbot234]

> the whole discussion of markets is a terrible starting place for deriving results in ethics/psychology.

Historically, we did essentially the opposite. We figured out many aspects of human ethics and psychology first, and deduced from them how and why markets work as they do.

> ... If people weren't broadly aligned on basic stuff, then autocrats, theocrats, kleptocrats and so on would simply not be interested in dismantling democracies. They make that effort because they must.

This implies that people are only weakly aligned in the first place, otherwise no such attempt at dismantling could ever succeed. That's not a very interesting claim; it does not refute the usefulness of some external mechanism to more directly foster aligned action. Markets do this with a maximum of decentralized power and a minimum of institutional mechanism.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

> Historically

This is not the history, it is a mythology in opposition to the empirical evidence.

Which is why you should read Graeber.

[zozbot234]

It's history of ideas. What Graeber says is ultimately aligned to this, as I pointed out in a sibling thread.

[sdenton4]

You're not even wrong, as they say... I'm tempted to add 'seeing like a state' to your reading list.

"Understandable in market terms" doesn't mean the thing is actually understood, and in fact may be dangerously misunderstood.

[jpfromlondon]

Reddit is over there ->