Comment by simianwords

Comment by simianwords 19 hours ago

I don't like many things about this post, its a bit snobbish and uses esoteric language in order to sound more intricate than it really is.

>Capitalism is not simply incapable of reflection. In fact, it's structured to ignore it. It has no native interest in what emerges from its aggregated behaviors unless those emergent properties threaten the throughput of capital itself. It isn't designed to ask, "What kind of society results from a thousand locally rational decisions?" It asks, "Is this change going to make more or less money?"

Capitalism and free market has lot of useful and emergent properties that occur not at the first order but second order.

> In the case of the global economic system, under capitalism, growth, accumulation and innovation can be considered emergent processes where not only does technological processes sustain growth, but growth becomes the source of further innovations in a recursive, self-expanding spiral. In this sense, the exponential trend of the growth curve reveals the presence of a long-term positive feedback among growth, accumulation, and innovation; and the emergence of new structures and institutions connected to the multi-scale process of growth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

In fact free market is an extremely good example of emergence or second order systems where each individual works selfishly but produces a second order effect of driving growth for everyone - something that is definitely preferable.

kelseyfrog 19 hours ago

Appreciate the engagement. But your reply mostly recenters a pro-capitalist narrative by redefining the products of "emergence" as inherently good. My argument isn't about stacking pros and cons and calculating the combined sum. It’s about a structural blind spot: capitalism systematically collapses higher-order questions about what kind of world were building into first-order value propositions like "growth," "utility," and "innovation."

That's the core problem. Capitalism resists second-order critique from within because it translates every possible value: justice, meaning, even critique itself, into terms it can price or optimize. Your response is a perfect example: you defend capitalism by listing its outputs, but that;s another first-order move. If you were engaging at the second-order level, you'd interrogate not what the system produces, but what it refuses to ask, and who gets to decide. That silence is precisely my point.

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simianwords 17 hours ago

> "emergence" as inherently good
I did not claim it as inherently good, only that it is preferable.
> capitalism systematically collapses higher-order questions about what kind of world were building into first-order value propositions like "growth," "utility," and "innovation."
There is nothing about capitalism that ignores second or third order effects of its policies. Let me make it clear what kind of capitalist system we have in place - private ownership and free market regulated by a government that works for and is elected by the people. In this system the free market works but only till it progresses certain things the people voted for like standard of living, freedom etc. If free market does instead has unintended consequences we have levers to guide it where we want like taxes and subsidies.
> Capitalism resists second-order critique from within because it translates every possible value: justice, meaning, even critique itself, into terms it can price or optimize
I think I see were you are getting at but I have to be honest - I think it is coming from a naive place (I'm open to be proven incorrect).
Imagine you had the power and the responsibility to shape lives by enacting policy decisions. You are presented with a fairly complex problem where you have a large number of people, each one with their own lives and interests and you have to guide them into doing something preferable. No matter where you come from, left or right in the political axis, you will end up using quantitative methods. I imagine your problem is with such optimisation. If so, what is your exact critique here? How would you rather handle such a situation? How would you manage a system of so many people and without quantitative method? Religion?
> If you were engaging at the second-order level, you'd interrogate not what the system produces, but what it refuses to ask, and who gets to decide. That silence is precisely my point.
Ok please elaborate (only if you have engaged with my question above).

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