Philosophy & Economics

[Gaizokubanou]

Has anyone here been coerced and now feel positive about it? Or is coercion just something that can sometimes be done to other people for good reasons?

 

Coercing young children to pick up or drop certain behavioral traits are critical for their well being IMO.

 

 

Another popular option is to say a coercive offer is one you would prefer not to be presented with - having been given the offer, you are worse off. Unfortunately this is probably both over and underinclusive - it's overinclusive because there seem to be benign offers that people would prefer not to get, like when someone offers you a donut and now you have to either rudely refuse or eat something unhealthy you don't want, and it's underinclusive because an abusive slave owner who offers to beat a slave less if the slave will do something disagreeable but still better than being beaten is, on this model, not making a coercive offer.

 

I think that definition is quite good.  The two examples you stated, first one with donut, if the person offering seriously can't take polite decline then it is a coercion (eat this or I'll be pissed at you), albeit a mild one but still, and the latter seems like a clear coercion cause their built in status has clear and extreme strings attached to the offer.  By being a slave owner, one is very likely to be constantly in a coercive state against their slaves.

 

Edit: Will think on latter bit more with much more milder forms of slavery where slavery wasn't complete ownership as it was during colonialism, but rather another status closer to say, indentured servants.

 

Edit2: Removed a sentence to make the argument more coherent.

[itsamoose]

This is a pretty good article about a problem I've long suspected when it comes to labor rights around the world.  I can't quite tell if this article is just an ad for patagonia, but either way it illustrates the problem that virtually no single actor in the clothing industry has the ability to fix this problem on their own.

[Zeusthecat]

I've been thinking a lot about the concept of culture lately and I realized I don't really have a solid grasp on why it's so important. To be more specific, I guess I don't really get why it is important to preserve sets of beliefs and behavioral patterns purely because of "culture". Whether it is southern culture, hipster culture, Native American culture, or any other of the multitude of cultures out there, what inherent attribute do they have that makes them so important?

All cultures had to have started somewhere and it's weird to think how, over time, they eventually gained enough traction that they became a powerful enough force to actually dictate people's morals, behaviors and beliefs. In that sense, it kind of seems like a terrible thing because, for a lot of people, it can be used to justify terrible behavior and bigoted beliefs. And a lot of people accept it because as soon as the culture card is brought up, suddenly it becomes harder to argue against because culture is considered so important.

I don't mean to say the concept of culture is necessarily bad, I just honestly want to understand more about why it is important and why it is a thing that people hold on to so strongly.

[clyde]

One use of culture as a scale for perspective is that it provides us with an acceptance that there are different social contexts. Culture is inextricable from socialization. I'm having a hard time talking about the value of culture without just talking about the value of interacting within a group of people.

Personally, I have an attraction to cultures as systems of aesthtics, priorities, techniques, landscapes, art, and paradigms. The closest analogy I can think of is musical genres or game-worlds. Forgetting the value of socialization within groups, my appreciation of culture is similar to enjoying the similarities, differences, and hypothetical influences between musical genres and game-worlds.

[Mangela Lansbury]

Something that made me really appreciate culture as something with preserving was cultures that are totally divorced from anything modern. There are tribes in the Amazon who are completely divorced from any concept of what you or I may think of as the world. That's just fascinating to me -- that there are people who have no idea what modernity looks like. They didn't experience the industrial revolution. The internet is an alien concept to them. We live on the same world, but not in the same world. That's so worth preserving to me.

Another thing that made me appreciate the importance of differentiating cultures is Westernization. The West has had such a negative effect on so many places, and we should be trying to preserve the culture in those places. If you look at a country like Pakistan, it has completely distinct cultures in it -- there are phenomenal and important authors who write in Urdu that people who grow up speaking Pashtu don't have access to, and these discrete cultures live completely separate lives in Karachi. Both have their pros and cons. That's incredible to me and it's worth preserving.

And even beyond that, there are distinct cultures in America. Black and white culture, and they're discrete enough that people talk about African American Vernacular English as a separate language from English. AAVE has something as distinct as the habitual be, and white populations will not be able differentiate between their conception of the verb to be and other conception of the verb to be. That's crazy! It's completely worth preserving!

[Merus]

I don't know if that answers Zeus' question, though, Mangela.

 

For me, I think, culture imparts a sense of belonging and shared norms. A broad culture is generally fairly shallow - it doesn't give us any ideas of how it's acceptable to act, and in that kind of environment we tend to suppress the personality traits that make us unique. When I visited the UK, I was struck by how much more complex the public language was than in the US, which I visited earlier that year. The standard for crassness in each country is quite different, as well.

 

I know I bristle when aspects of American culture are taken to be universal - Hulu is a frequent reminder of this - but that culture can't be meaningfully critiqued by someone whom it's being foisted on. Like, Saturday Night Live and David Letterman are mostly not funny, but in American culture they are funny because of this long history of influencing American culture in subtle ways that you have to have been part of to appreciate. With a universal culture, the ability for any one person to influence it is vanishingly small, which means that most people can't feel any kind of ownership over their milieu. (This is complicated by capitalism working out how to control the milieu while making its consumers feel like they're in control, but the basic principle is the same - just imagine a culture too small to be significantly influenced by capitalism.)

 

I don't know if this makes a lot of sense outside of my head.

[Zeusthecat]

Merus, I think I follow what you're getting at and it makes sense. I hadn't considered that perspective.

I like Mangela's Amazon tribe example too. But let's say that there are some terrible aspects to that culture that makes life miserable for a subset of people within that culture. Would it really be worth preserving the entirety of that culture if that were the case? Let's say that instead of preserving their culture, we just preserved certain perspectives and behaviors within that culture. Does that then become a bad thing because we are maybe "westernizing" that culture and picking out just the parts we like? What is our moral obligation here?

This is honestly incredibly confusing to me. I kind of feel like our reverence for culture is misguided and that we should instead focus on preserving behaviors and perspectives that are unique to cultures that aren't our own. But this seems to be frowned upon because it isn't our place to try to influence cultures that aren't our own.

[itsamoose]

I don't necessarily agree it isn't our place to influence culture, mainly because even if we don't overtly try to influence a particular culture, we inevitably will. You bring up an interesting topic here, one I've thought about a bit in recent years, and I always try to look at culture through the lens of how it is used. Just going from recent examples whether it be the Washington Redskins team name, confederate flags in the southern US, child bride legalization in Iraq and others I often see people try to defend shitty behavior by citing it as their culture. On the other hand though, I've also seen things like headscarfs being outlawed under the guise of some moral imperative.

I've never been out of the US personally, so I'm not all that familiar with other cultures beyond what I've heard. Though from my experience I don't see westernization as necessarily bad. There are a number of western ideas I fundamentally see as better, as well as elements of other cultures that are better than ours. I would say that if there is an element of a culture you don't like, as in it genuinely harms people rather than just being different, it is perfectly acceptable to try to change that from the outside. To me it's more about the way you go about that, which I suppose is a much different question.

[clyde]

I don't think culture is more important than anyone's safety or ability to live as an equal. IMO, the ideal would be that everyone could chose what cultures they want to take part in and if there isn't one they like they can find some folks and make a new one.

[clyde]

Elizabeth Warren tries to explain to us the fundamental problem with the trade-agreement that president Obama and the Republican leadership are trying to pass through in secret. This could be a huge disaster to attempts to increase worker's rights and environmental standards worldwide.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/06/23/warren/CJluXWm4B5VDTdUDsCkwEL/story.html

[Merus]

It seems like a real eye-opener that not even the US is thrilled with the TPP. I mean, the reason I live in a country that's not America is so corporations are not able to ride roughshod over the laws of the land, which are entirely happy to completely fuck over corporations if they think that's going to lead to a better outcome for its citizens (see: plain packaging laws for cigarettes).

 

Also moving is expensive.

[elvaq]

When has a free trade deal been anything but a disaster for workers rights? Glad to see there is strong opposition for maybe the first time ever but my it's only a stumbling block as the reasons for opposition are technical rather than ethical.

[Merus]

I don't know if free trade actually has a lot to do with workers' rights. Certainly, it does take out some industries, but it also bolsters others and the idea is that you're hoping the deal will help the industry you're good at more than it hurts the industry you're bad at. But industries deteriorate all the time, free trade or no - it's pretty hard to do any kind of simple manufacturing in developed countries now that China and India have an economy at the point where their workers can do simple manufacturing. So you need strong worker protections anyway.

 

If you have strong worker protections, it seems like a free trade deal would be unlikely to strip them away, because it'd be a concession from the country that has them that drives the price of the good they're exporting even lower, which is not in the interest of the importers.

[brkl]

If you sign a trade deal that forbids worker rights, which they do, then of course those rights will be stripped away.

[Merus]

If you sign a trade deal that forbids worker rights, which they do, then of course those rights will be stripped away.

 

Yes, but now we're talking about a trade deal, not free trade agreements. One is a subset of the other. The TPP, for instance, contains both free trade agreements and a deal that limits workers' rights (along with a bunch of other terrible shit).

 

There's nothing inherent in a free trade deal that necessarily has to strip workers' rights, is my point. You could argue that trade negotiators are far too willing to throw the needs of individual citizens under the bus to help exporters, and I wouldn't object to that. It's just I feel that the ire should be in the right place.

 

Part of the problem here is that there's some really dumb tariffs, like the chicken tax America places on all foreign-made pickup trucks in retaliation for Germany placing a tariff on imported American chicken in the 1950s. Free trade deals are the only way these tariffs get cleared. While it's easy to paint doing this as hurting workers, in reality these tariffs probably should not exist and these workers are essentially in zombie jobs, making a product that shouldn't exist.

[clyde]

[Mangela Lansbury]

So... Greece. What's up with that?

[itsamoose]

I haven't been following Greece all that closely, but from what I understand they were in a massive period of growth that the 2008 crisis not only ended but reversed dramatically. Then it's been a slow and steady decline ever since, exacerbated by the loans taken out during that period of growth, difficulty collecting taxes and political divisions within the country. I read into this about a year ago, and at that time sections of the country appeared to be almost controlled by a series of gangs with various political ideologies (anarchists and others), although never having been there I can't confirm if this is true. I'm not all that well versed in economics but my understanding is that there are no more delaying tactics available, as well as no public support for them, and Greece must either be bailed out or default on their loans, possibly leaving the euro in the process.

[Reyturner]

[Cordeos]

So... Greece. What's up with that?

 

Its a mess. Greece shouldn't have been let into the EU, they might have fudged some numbers to be let in, but was let in because the EU was more interested in getting bigger than in actually growing sustainably. Its never been able to collect taxes due to a mix of ineptitude, corruption and lack of effort. Greece has a long history of political parties promising the moon and delivering nothing. A combination of tons of loans given by overeager banks and Greek governments too willing to take them put them in an impossible position after the 2008 crisis.

 

Now Germany wants Greece to cut its way to growth (something that really doesn't work.) Greece wants a bailout or at least some debt forgiveness. 

 

Feel free to correct any errors I have made, I am not an expert and have oversimplified a lot

[Gormongous]

So... Greece. What's up with that?

 

I have some strong opinions on Greece, but they mostly revolve around the corruptness of banking institutions. While international banks were working hard to help Greece cook its books to join the European Union, they were also buying up Greek debt on the cheap, which they sold for profit once EU membership made Greece part of the same risk pool as Germany and Sweden. When that private debt turned toxic during the recent economic troubles, the response was to turn it public with the first bailout, and thereafter the troika of the EC, IMF, and ECB have functionally treated Greece as a bankrupt corporation to be liquidated. Sure, they post well-intentioned projections of how their austerity programs will cause a long-term resurgence of the Greek economy, but it's hard to argue with the reality of their actions since 2010:

That's not a lazy and corrupt economy struggling to repay an oversized loan, that's five years of a country being strip-mined in the name of austerity.

 

The article from which I'm linking that picture is a good summary of what I feel. I'm strongly in support of the οχι movement in Greece, because this seems exactly like what happened during the housing bubble in the US. Banking institutions try to make money by disregarding moral hazard and making loans to people who wouldn't be able to pay them back. The banks are either ignorant because they don't know that those people aren't able to pay or they're immoral because they don't care. Either way, when the wheel makes its turn and those loans become clear for what they are, it's somehow entirely upon the lendee and not the lender that the debt can't be paid, with bailouts going to the banks that knowingly assumed the risk and not the people inadvertently harmed by those actions. Lives get ruined, banks roam free, and the world keeps turning. Sure, Greece shouldn't have borrowed that much, but governments make mistakes like that all the time. Germany, for all of its economic rectitude, had its debts cancelled after the Second World War, and national debt for the US is currently well over a hundred percent of our GDP. What's happening in Greece is political theatre made to appease European elites. The interests of the Greeks don't even enter into it, as the recent referendum shows.

 

Bankers shouldn't dictate terms to governments. That's a nightmare out of the nineteenth century or some cyberpunk novel. I don't know why anyone is okay with it, but most people with whom I talk have expressed the very simple view of "you should pay what you owe," even though more than a few of them have student loans in the tens of thousands that they're quite sanguine about never being able to repay in full.

[jennegatron]

So... Greece. What's up with that?

It's very pretty.

 

[Mangela Lansbury]

Germany, for all of its economic rectitude, had its debts cancelled after the Second World War, and national debt for the US is currently well over a hundred percent of our GDP. What's happening in Greece is political theatre made to appease European elites. The interests of the Greeks don't even enter into it, as the recent referendum shows.

This is the thing that's hardest for me to wrap my head around, even though I've read pretty extensively about the situation in the last few days.

Is there any good reason for Germany to be as hostile as they are to the same kind of debt restructuring/forgiveness that got them out of their own economic hell? Or is it just the same greed that -- as I understand it -- pushed them to make untenable loans to Greece to bolster their export driven economy?

[Cordeos]

This is the thing that's hardest for me to wrap my head around, even though I've read pretty extensively about the situation in the last few days.

Is there any good reason for Germany to be as hostile as they are to the same kind of debt restructuring/forgiveness that got them out of their own economic hell? Or is it just the same greed that -- as I understand it -- pushed them to make untenable loans to Greece to bolster their export driven economy?

 

There is a fear that if Greece is allowed to restructure then Spain, Italy and the other weaker economies in the EU will also ask for it. There are times where I think a global debt forgiveness would solve so much. (I stole the idea from Debt: The First 5000 Years)

[Gormongous]

There is a fear that if Greece is allowed to restructure then Spain, Italy and the other weaker economies in the EU will also ask for it. There are times where I think a global debt forgiveness would solve so much. (I stole the idea from Debt: The First 5000 Years)

 

Yeah, the logic of hardliners is now that Greece has to fail under austerity or be pushed out of the EU in order to keep the EU itself whole. I think it's beyond gross and shows a misapprehension of the EU's overarching purpose as a common market and currency union, but then I'm not making the hard decisions here.