This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Not a market theorist but rent seeking is extracting value and not generating. I have never seen consumers being better off when there is lack of interoperability, DRM, vertical integration, walled gardens, monopolies, oligopolies, monopsonies, drm on printer ink and other anticompetitive practices.
So it is not the best use of the capital in the society.
No, I just meant why define capitalism in a way that only includes the good things it enables and not the bad.
I see a parallel fault line within socialism, with Syndicalism in conflict with Central Planning. For me, this goes back to the 1973 miners' strike in the UK. The mines were owned by the National Coal Board(NCB), a branch of the government. Much of the coal was sold to the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB), another branch of the government. The basic idea of the strike was to raise electricity prices (by government fiat) to get the money for higher coal prices to get the money to pay the miners higher wages. Or just subsidise the NCB out of general taxation. That was the Trades Union perspective, but the Socialist Planning perspective was that the British coal fields were pretty much worked out. Paying high wages for the horrible job of going under the North Sea to mine small amounts of coal from narrow, wet, fractured seams was a bad plan. Much better was to send the miners to work in factories above ground manufacturing things and stuff to trade for coal from places with more favourable geology.
Basically the National Union of Mine Workers was butting heads with the planners in the socialist part of the British economy and seeking rents based on their ability to crash the economy by coming out on strike.
In a capitalist economy, with fragmented private ownership of the means of production, and lacking national trades unions, this specific kind of rent seeking works badly. The employees at one company come out on strike. They win an excessive pay rise. Their employer starts losing money, and goes bankrupt. The workers lose their well paid jobs. Whoops! Both capitalism and socialism suffer from rent seeking and capitalism has some internal defences to it. Capitalists are entitled to say that rent seeking is not narrowly specific to capitalism; they don't have to own it.
The plot of Heinlein's 1940 The Roads must Roll
More options
Context Copy link
Are there actual examples of companies going under because of excessively high salaries? AFAIK unions where they damage companies mostly do it by protecting poor performers.
Maybe not a central example, but the union deleted the rock island railroad by striking even though the company was on the verge of bankruptcy
More options
Context Copy link
Salary load can be notable in some industries, but I think it only rarely takes down entire companies (more than capable of causing problems on a per-location basis of course) because it's not often actually the biggest cost on the balance sheet (just the most "controllable" which is why so many emphasize it a lot). It is pretty "sticky" though, so it can compound otherwise controllable problems when a major financial shock happens (this has happened to a few airlines, for example). That's not quite a single point of failure, though it might depend on how you parse the question.
The big thing to note is how the problem used to be worse when pensions were a thing. Many, many companies would go down because they didn't have enough in the bank earning investment return to cover pensions and didn't have enough from revenue to pay it either. Part of why so many companies dropped pensions in favor of the 401K as soon as they could. But even then, you'd still have legacy stuff - GM in 2009 comes to mind, Wikipedia says "For each active worker at GM [in 2006], there were 3.8 retirees or dependents in 2006". Yikes.
The other failure mode is start-ups who hire too much too fast, but that's not really what we're talking about.
More options
Context Copy link
British Leyland was a bit of each. Good wages, and sleeping on the job. Holding on to your job when you do not do it is also a form rent extraction, so it doesn't change the point that capitalism has some internal defences against rent seeking. (The system has defences, the individual companies just fail.)
"protecting poor performers" reminds me of the Brezhnev era joke We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us. I claim that the "slacking on the job" form of rent extraction is present under both capitalism and socialism, supporting my main claim that rent seeking is not specifically capitalist.
More options
Context Copy link
Studebaker.
Never had a strike, thought they had a great relationship with the workers, highest paid union workers in the industry.
Then times got tough in the early 60s as the Big Three started to squeeze out competitors, there was a Studebaker labor strike in ‘62 which blindsided the management who, again, had rolled over at every opportunity previously and seemed to be under the impression this merited some sort of loyalty. They continued to have labor conflicts throughout the 60s and the company was dead in ‘68.
There were other issues as well, few things are single-factor problems, but high labor costs were either the #1 problem or a major contributing factor.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link