@paulfree14 Touché. So, shall we say "markets uncontrolled only by power"?

@icefox I think we need to get over the ideology of the market logic.
Market is, what is described by economists, who seem to just ignore studies of anthropology and want to claim having the authority of it's definition.

Is everything that creates value when an exchange between individuals happening called market.
No, general it's reserved for and only for trading.

Otherwise growing up childs would be also a market...that seem odd.

@paulfree14 I dunno, the Wikipedia definition seems fairly specific: "In mainstream economics, the concept of a market is any structure that allows buyers and sellers to exchange any type of goods, services and information."

If you really want to shoehorn parenthood into that definition I suppose you can but it's probably not a very useful abstraction.

@icefox
...right.
I think I got a bit lost in my own words. Behind the word market there is this meaning of, that's how we create value.
And if we wouldn't have this market we'd be sort of just using 'sticks and stones'

A market is a social contruct where people (voluntarly, or under pressure) behave under specific norms exchanging goods

It's a bit like an unquestionized standart, defined by ecomists selling theories under ignorance of the findings of anthropology

@paulfree14 that's silly. Exchanging goods can increase value by getting them to those who value them highly, but value is created by people making things.

More or less. I'm sleepy. And also an engineer, so I might be biased.

@icefox @paulfree14 As Paul said, there is always a regulation mechanism in place, explicit or implicit.

From the form of regulation comes the form of power and vice versa.

If we can't avoid regulation, then the question is whom is in charge? Capitalists say it should be them. But what is needed is for everyone to have a say in this.

So in the end, for me the division lies between democratic markets vs undemocratic markets (capitalism).

@alxcndr @paulfree14 democracy and capitalism are not mutually exclusive, the same way democracy and communism are not mutually exclusive. One is a method of making decisions and one is a method of mediating exchanges.

@icefox @paulfree14 I disagree.

It's not just mediating exchanges. It is deciding who is in charge of the investment, what to produce, why, and for whom. This has strong political implications and should, as everything else, be in the scope of democracy.

Unless your definition of democracy accepts for non-uniform distribution of power (someone's voice counts more than someone else), capitalism is mutually exclusive with democracy.

@paulfree14 @icefox

Of course this is a spectrum. The closest thing you may have to "democratic capitalism" (which is at best an euphemism, but really is just an oxymoron), is market driven economy with cooperatives as the only form of company.

The power is thus more diluted, but companies still compete against each other, making the bigger ones still decide how investment is done.

@icefox @paulfree14

In other words, until you have all the workers being able to decide democratically where and how to invest (independently of their affiliated company) you don't have economic democracy.

And since capitalism working this way is not capitalism, it is mutually exclusive with democracy.

@alxcndr @paulfree14 the *economic ideal* of capitalism results in exactly this. It's an optimization problem: "what do we produce to maximize economic output?" Capitalism, like evolution, is a fairly simple set of rules that tends to solve optimization problems.

There's other ways to solve optimization problems too... and many ways to not solve them, optimize for the wrong thing, or get stuck in local extremes. And that's even without humans involved!

@paulfree14 @alxcndr so the question to ask should not be "how do we kill capitalism" or "how do we make democracy universal", it's "what do we do to make the world a better place, regardless of labels or ideology". The proof is in the pudding. Right now the best pudding seems to be Nordic socialism imo, and migrating that model further left seems hopeful.

Communism has not lived up to the hype because it cannot solve the economic optimization problem.

@alxcndr @paulfree14 Democracy is not good at solving optimization problems. Modern democracy was not designed to find the *ideal* solutions to problems, it was designed to solve a very specific problem: that of rulers working against the interests of the ruled.

Going to have to think about this a bit more! The relationship between economic and government decision making styles is an interesting question.

@alxcndr @paulfree14 90% of humans are idiots. Unless we can fix that, pure democracy is going to kinda suck and be easily swayed by anyone who can, one way or another, broadcast convincing disinformation to lots of people at once.

That's one reason representative democracy exists, for better or worse: the idea that your representative puts in the time and effort to become expert in the fields you cannot.

@paulfree14 @alxcndr this is a bit of a tengent, just pointing out that the world is a non-uniform distribution, and sometimes non-uniform distributions are useful.

@tw price as a function of wait time sounds like an interesting graph...