the mellow tigger's musings

I still want to write up some definitions of capitalism and neoliberalism, mention alternatives, and generally just think about what we're doing to ourselves by choice. First, though, I feel it's necessary to draw attention specifically to the central lie of the free market economy: the invisible hand of the market will produce the best outcomes for the system.

It sounds like a brilliant idea inspired by the principles of evolution, namely the self-organization of parts into a complex whole without central coordination. It's true that competition can encourage creativity, but only insofar as all necessity does. That necessity can be imposed by the harsh physics of the universe or by the reasoned decision to choose certain limitations. The hypocrisy of unfettered competition's superiority is easily exposed. Consider this simple question:

If a sports game is so good in its current form, then would it be even better to remove the sports official, so each team and each player can freely choose at will their own rules?

Also interesting is a related question of why English has so many names for sports officials, if sports would in fact be better off without any of them? Why the emotional investment in rules and enforcement within sports but nowhere else?

Capitalism and neoliberalism simply do not care about the cost to the environment or to the human population, as long as wealth is extracted and collected first for a few key individuals. We see this effect in practice with predictable bank failures, pollution scandals, falling wage values, and the ongoing biosphere crisis. Now, we even have PFAS "forever chemicals" in toilet paper. Yes, capitalism has managed to poison toilet paper. Profit is the sole driving force of our current economic system, for as long as it can be maintained, even though it's obvious to everyone (since 1993, at least) that it can't be maintained forever.

Which world do we want to live in? World 1, in which corporations and people work to extract profit from everyone, everything, and everywhere at all times? World 2, in which corporations and people work to continue their existence within constraints of sustainability and ethics? It's simply a choice, and it always has been. Will we choose to add constraints to make the game more enjoyable? Which system of those two possibilities do we want to maximize for its efficiency?

Choose. May you live in the world that your efforts create. Whether my wish for you is a blessing or a curse probably depends on your choice.

Long ago (and long before my autism diagnosis), I mostly thought of humans as noisy and obnoxious animals. Sure, my bipedal appearance seemed to match theirs, so we were similar, but they vocalize so frequently and interfere so aggressively. Rather annoying creatures. Best just to avoid them.

I was in my late teens when I happened to be watching one particular scene in "The Breakfast Club". I never would have gone to a movie theater to see a social drama, so it must have been on HBO or Showtime on cable tv, playing in the background while I did high school homework or something. Which means I must have seen it in early 1986 or late 1985, after the original theater run. I was 17 or 18 years old at the time. The scene that made a life-changing impact was where the rich girl says something to the effect of:


That was it. That was the precise moment when I realized that humans are people like me, with experiences and concerns like mine. Many years later, I heard Jim Sinclair share a story at Autreat where he used puppets to mimic an autistic kid's historical social interactions back at him, and the child experienced a long pause of self-reflection as realization of sameness dawned. I know there's a word in sociology for that dazed pause when people in native cultures without mirrors see themselves reflected for the first time in a glass mirror, like Narcissus of old Greek stories. I had that too-still-to-breathe pause too, hearing that dialog in The Breakfast Club.

Amongst some autistics, apparently, that pause is not caused by understanding for the first time how others see us but how we see others... at long last. For the first time, listening to that movie scene, other people actually existed in the realm of my experience. From there, it seems that we develop a strong sense of morality and a loud insistence that the noisy humans collectively should behave better. If we learned, after all, then so can they. Some researchers seem to be studying this effect.


There's even a recurring internet meme that insists fictional Orel Puppington is autistic. He's that wonderfully literal and concerned-about-the-common-good boy from the excellent Moral Orel tv show that was somehow too bizarre even for Adult Swim. Welcome to my world.  Still no real talent for person-to-person stuff.  In college, I still lived very much a solipsistic life, but I remain very concerned about the health and fairness of systems that carry us all into the future.

Here's one of the great points (among many) from Class 2 on the Wealth & Poverty series. It was around 1980 when so many trends started going bad in the USA economy.  Both of these images are from Class 1 in the series, each showing real family income growth by quintile, before and after 1980.  During the Baby Boomer period, everyone benefited in the USA.  Since then... it's been bad, especially if you're already poor.



Much of the underlying reason for it can be found in one simple concept.  For a few decades prior to 1980, the management of large corporations was viewed as a public trust.


But that changed when greed-is-good libertarian neoliberalism took over the economy.  Afterwards, the duty was to private shareholders rather than public stakeholders.


Separate from the lecture, I notice that this point in time coincides with the rise in the USA of televangelism (The Moral Majority) and trickle down economics (Reaganomics).


"But wait," I hear you say.  "This all sounds awful, more like a Moody Monday post.  You tagged this one as Good News?"

In 2019, the Business Roundtable (BRT, with about 200 members including major CEOs) made a very important statement about "a modern standard for corporate responsibility".  Basically, the plutocratic leaders of those corporations are now considering a change of heart.  Sure, it's just lip service at this point. Undoubtedly, it's a response to many years of hard work in DEIJ by vast numbers of volunteers and employees, plus other threats to their primacy since 1980.  Even if it's real, even if its something more than mere lipstick on a pig, it will still take years and decades to undo the damage that has been inflicted already.

But even so, it's still a signal.  A small light in a great darkness.  It's one of the things I told you about, a reason that I haven't given up hope for change.