The greatest thing about tight, upcoming elections is that governments actually start to do a tiny bit of what people want. Great result.
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See https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691138732/th...
Not to mention the market irrationally rewards short term good (or even bad) and long term bad behavior, but it does it consistently, so no long term good behavior can ever win out. See: oil and gas industry.
All solutions that try to handwave people out of the equation, which includes market based ones, are the wrong path imo. The author was heading in the right direction when writing about economic education and fighting misinformation, imo that's the correct path, we can't permanently fix stupid since our brains are all basically completely broken, but we can mitigate. Utopia may be unreachable but I think we can improve.
NFTs are an entertainment / art product. Them having non-zero value is the same as the original Mona Lisa selling for more than a perfect replica.
What about the stock market are you darkly hinting at?
> Not to mention the market irrationally rewards short term good (or even bad) and long term bad behavior, but it does it consistently, so no long term good behavior can ever win out. See: oil and gas industry.
I'm not sure what you are talking about. Could you be more explicit, please?
> All solutions that try to handwave people out of the equation, which includes market based ones, are the wrong path imo.
Sounds like a straw man? Who is waving people out of the equation and how?
Well, sort of, except that "added ownership value" is a scam - links to an image are encoded on-chain, not the image or even a hash of an image. People think they're buying art when instead they're buying a URL.
> What about the stock market are you darkly hinting at?
> I'm not sure what you are talking about. Could you be more explicit, please?
Sure thing. The current organization of capitalist society rewards actions that increase profit short-term, such as stock buybacks at the expense of layoffs, and not actions that increase profit long-term, such as sustaining a labor force that maintains and builds upon institutional knowledge. Institutions "get away with this" by leveraging the coercive nature of capitalist society (work, often in bad conditions, or die), but because the coercive short term actions are the ones that are rewarded, this will probably lead to total systemic collapse, like when the British pushed the American colonies too far and completely lost control and their entire colonial investment... and again in India, some Caribbean islands, etc. Not to mention all the slave revolts throughout history. Extractive, compulsory, coercive capitalism is only ever a short-term gains focused mechanism.
The greater example for our era though is climate change. There simply aren't "market forces" that can punish extractive behavior and reward sustainable behavior. Because it's cheaper to mine and burn coal in the short term than it is to do material science research and build good solar panels, the coal burning companies win out. Under capitalism, where political power correlates to capital, this means they can leverage the State to give them even greater incentives, and throttle the last remaining channel for long-term good-for-humanity projects that might not necessarily be profitable anytime soon: government sponsored research. See: exxon promoting climate misinformation despite being totally aware of climate change in the 70s: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...
Under capitalism, long term gain requires high short term capital investment, which of course comes with risk, and the risk is too great to invest in sustainable technologies when you can keep burning oil. The collapse will come with environmental collapse, or, even if we invent incredible carbon-sequestering technologies, when the oil and coal simply run out. That won't matter though, because the political power of coal-burners will have become so great that they can just leverage the State and its monopoly on violence to continue to serve their needs as they see fit.
So TLDR capitalism rewards things that are bad for the earth and the people trying to live on it.
> Sounds like a straw man? Who is waving people out of the equation and how?
George W. Bush https://www.bushcenter.org/catalyst/environment/stefanik-mar...