By Jimmy Alfonso Licon
We are told ad nauseum that the capitalist system runs on greed. In reality, a successful economy depends mostly upon trust.
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By Jimmy Alfonso Licon
We are told ad nauseum that the capitalist system runs on greed. In reality, a successful economy depends mostly upon trust.
The article was typical mises.org word salad for my humble IQ level, but your summary/highlight I liked
humble obviously because Mises.org only hires geniuses
and by genius I mean hand jobs
Not my summary but I’m glad it helped.
One sentence, all we need
Kind of a weird opening, because humans dont naturally do this. See indigenous tribes, 1491, or Jared Diamond's account of Papua
If it's not "natural", it's at least rather widespread, suggesting it's fairly easy for us to develop this attitude or habit or whatever it is.
I'm not sure that's right... It was very, very hard for us to develop it. Selection, basically; we're only here, large-scale global soc, bc we did.
And the morals/enlightenment values/religious ideas that let us do this were revolutionary
The confusion is that my "it's" was present tense: i.e. modern humans seem to have a facility with this. Getting here from our common ancestor with chimps would not have been an easy road.
I don't even mean the common ancestor with chimps... just tribes (or at least off civilizational center) some 500-5,000 years ago, or uncontacted tribes today in various places #1525478
There are dense and diverse cities all over the world, even before most were in contact with each other.
Since that will account for more of humanity than small fringe tribes, why assume the latter better represent our natural state?
hm... because things like culture and trust, tit-for-tat, build on top of previous relationships no? So you only get to the civilizational (civis) ones from the earlier ones? All humans were like that, and (my conjecture) would be without a heavy dose of culture/norms/elevated morals always and repeatedly recreated
Maybe we’re splitting hairs, but it seems so ubiquitous as to allow us to say it’s fairly easy (maybe to the point of being natural) for humans to act this way in high population density settings.
IMO, open question as to whether the market itself can supply the requisite social norms to make a high trust society
I suspect the meaning of that question will get tricky as we dig into what it means for the market to supply something like that.
For example, markets have preconditions that must exist in the culture or they won’t persist anyway. So, do we include those cultural conditions in the question?
I suppose a sharper way to ask this is:
Can a low-trust society transition into a high trust society simply by deregulating markets to allow for open and free economic activity?
One of Doug Casey’s pet projects is pitching market reforms to 3rd world dictators.
I suppose a low trust market economy would have lots of personal protection goods and services, including self-custody solutions, with elaborate no-trust exchange systems.
Right, and the transition from low trust to high trust society doesn't have to be unsupported by security products and services. That's what makes this an interesting question.
(my position is you still probably need some minimal government provision of basic security and dispute resolution; I don't buy into the idea that markets can provide that entirely on a private basis)
Do you think the typical examples, like frontier settlers or pre-state Ireland, don’t translate to modern settings for some reason?
The real question is compared to what. There will be some degree of security and dispute resolution, so what you must mean is that people would prefer the cost of government services to the cost of private.
Did frontier settlers use market-based security and dispute resolution mechanisms? I'm not familiar with the history. I would've assumed that they still appointed leaders and used some sort of non-market-based enforcement of rules
In the sense that they didn't have access to state services and had to figure things out amongst themselves. I don't know much about the extent of any commercial services.