An ERE hypocrisy?

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7Wannabe5
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Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 9:03 am

Re: An ERE hypocrisy?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@Jason:

True. Also an individual's level of testosterone is well correlated with likelihood to engage in acts of heroic altruism. IOW, one of nature's mechanisms for winnowing down the population of grown skilled hunters (inherently competitive/capitalist at the margin)relative to grown skilled tenders of the hearth (inherently co-operative/communist at the core.) I now consider the advent of modern feminism to be directly related to the invention of technology that allowed 12 year old Annie Oakley to function as the "grown skilled hunter" for her family of mother and younger siblings.

Farm_or
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Re: An ERE hypocrisy?

Post by Farm_or »

Anti consumerism for me is fundamentally protest of simple math. Spending all of the earning, but it doesn't stop there and goes deeply negative.

There are three stages of that phenomenon, something with worth, something without worth, and the very worst - something worse than worthless. That is debt.

The idea of profitting off of consumerism is short sighted. Look what happened to most people's profit in 2008? That was the result of hyper-consumerism boosted by political and governing influence.

It's more fitting to benefit from productivity. The capitalist model is to provide goods and services continuously improving. Innovative and productive application of novel ideas supply an increasing demand at constantly decreasing lower costs. That demand need not be driven by consumerism.

Does that make any sense? Most every bar cuts off drunks when they have had enough. Lest the drunk would become a problem worse than worthless, the bar would lose a customer and the decline would continue...

Jason

Re: An ERE hypocrisy?

Post by Jason »

Farm_or wrote:
Sat Mar 17, 2018 7:42 am

Does that make any sense?
I am far from an economist and am probably one of the least qualified to respond, but I see a false dichotomy between productivity and consumerism. The transition in the US from being a producer to a consumer society seems to me to miss the point that we moved from being a consumer AND producer economy to merely a consumer economy. There just seems to be an inextricable link between production and consumerism that you can't always separate the chicken and the egg. IMHO, Apple stock went up because they are crack dealers disguised as a technology company. Maybe the societal benefit or (societal drain) is not as extreme, but they, in my opinion, have created a dependent consumer and are now merely feeding addictions through the requirement of increased dopamine releases. I reduce partly in jest, but I do honestly believe there is some truth to it.

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