Agreed, Deano, a genuinely fantastic talk. Quite a few ideas I hadn't given any thought and some that I'm a firm supporter of, such as the one at the end that today's 'dog eat dog' principle isn't by any means an essential requirement for productivity.

*philosophy (I hope that's ok with you mauz )
*humanitarian

Adding video to channels (Humanitarian, Philosophy) - requested by EDD.

i really enjoyed his documentary, "Status Anxiety" from 2004.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'success, careers, life, meritocracy, western society, envy, equality' to 'TED, success, careers, life, meritocracy, western, envy, equality, Alain de Botton' - edited by Trancecoach

"I'm a firm believer in justice. I just think that it's impossible."

I love it.

I love him, he's a great talker and thinker.

And his last answer to the question posed by the host really demonstrates the divide I see with Left Wing vs Right Wing voters.

He says that you have to allow for 'haphazardness' in people's fortunes. ie. While you can do all you can to be successful in your life, it does NOT guarantee your success. You can fall on hard times due to circumstances outside of your control. And, on the flipside, there are people who have put in almost no work and yet are stupendously rich/successful due to the cards handed to them, or just blind luck.

As such, you should govern with the mindset that the poor and impoverished are not necessarily like that through their own fault.

Right wingers are all about 'Anyone can be successful if they work hard enough'. Whereas left wingers are all about hard work, and definitely work hard and strive to succeed, but do not assume that someone who isn't 'successful' is that way through laziness only.

Fantastic talk. Thank you very much for this sift.

>> ^curiousity:
Fantastic talk. Thank you very much for this sift.


Ditto.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

Brilliant talk. A successful, *quality submission that must not fail to make the top 15.

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by dag.

Fascinating.

"Sex with mum was blinding."

So awesome.

Here's a better HQ version
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtSE4rglxbY

>> ^spoco2:

Right wingers are all about 'Anyone can be successful if they work hard enough'. Whereas left wingers are all about hard work, and definitely work hard and strive to succeed, but do not assume that someone who isn't 'successful' is that way through laziness only.

I agree with a lot of what he said, yet I'd apply it in a different way to your analysis.

Left-wingers want to grant healthcare, education, housing, food, etc, to everyone who can't afford it, so people can have the same opportunities. However, that's the whole illusion he's pointing out: So many things that are out of our control play a role in determining what opportunities are open to us or not. Granting everyone all this stuff is never going to grant people the same opportunities for success. It's a waste of a lot of people's time and money to pursue that illusion through government.

Left-wingers indirectly assign the responsability of helping people who are unsuccessful to people who pay taxes. When, really, people can be unsuccessful for any number of reasons, or for no reason at all, like the speaker said.

I personally think that the poor are not to be blamed for being poor, only I don't think anyone else should be blamed for that either. If the poor are to be offered opportunities to get out of their condition, then it shouldn't be at the expense of others. Capitalism and free markets are the best way to allow the most opportunities for the most people while spending the least (in terms of other people's time & money).

Capitalism isn't the best way for everything.

If you want iPods, and furnature, and cars, and things that aren't paramount to our survival, yes it works pretty well.

If you want health care, food, safety, education, transportation, and housing, it's a pretty shitty system.

And it is far from being the most efficient.

Capitalism is the absolute best at one thing: making rich people richer at the expense of everybody else.

"I personally think that the poor are not to be blamed for being poor, only I don't think anyone else should be blamed for that either. If the poor are to be offered opportunities to get out of their condition, then it shouldn't be at the expense of others. Capitalism and free markets are the best way to allow the most opportunities for the most people while spending the least (in terms of other people's time & money)."

Huh? No, really, here you're just saying 'I don't want to pay for other people... cause... well... I'm selfish.' And then you're saying 'This mythical all solving "Capitalism" beast will make poor people not poor'

HUH?

How in the HELL does capitalism EVER give poor people a chance? That's insane, you're just chanting a mantra of 'Capitalism' and 'Free Markets' with NO understanding at all of how you think that's going to solve any given problem... Just that it means the least amount of work for you in this model, and the least amount of care for others.

>> ^rougy:

Capitalism is the absolute best at one thing: making rich people richer at the expense of everybody else.

Hi rougy,

I suspect you're either mistakenly criticizing capitalism or basing that assumption ("rich get richer at the expense of others") on the very popular socialist misconception of surplus value. That theory has long been debunked in economics by understanding the subjectivity of value, even though many people still unknowingly refer to it.

Truly unregulated markets are the best representation of capitalism as a social order, as opposed to the more common case of markets which are distorted and stifled by excessive govt regulation. Healthcare, food, education, etc. are usually heavily regulated services, because govts in many countries take upon themselves the responsability of providing these services.

In a free market, rich people strictly in the private sector usually get richer by providing services to thousands or millions of other people, so they have to be very productive. So, "rich get richer by receiving money from many other people in exchange for their services" makes a bit more sense to me.

It's not a zero-sum game, people are not productive at the expense of others.

When you say, "at the expense of everybody else", I always imagine something like theft or fraud happening. Rich people can't steal or fool others into giving them money and get away with it, unless they work for or in collusion with govt. If that happens, it can hardly be attributed to capitalism.

And it is far from being the most efficient.

Well, I'd honestly like to know what social system is more efficient than free market capitalism in terms of productivity and resource allocation.
>> ^spoco2:

Huh? No, really, here you're just saying 'I don't want to pay for other people... cause... well... I'm selfish.'

Why am I being called selfish for not agreeing to force productive people to help the poor out of their condition? Are taxpayers responsible for the poverty they have to save poor people from? Why is a poor man's welfare more important than a taxpayer's? Didn't the guy on the video just say that failure can have any number of causes unrelated to merit?

You should be careful not to buy into fallacies that distort your perception of capitalism. the free market is not perfect and "all solving", and it's not supposed to be. What matters is that, compared to every other social system out there, it has the best incentives in place for productivity and problem solving. That includes solving the issue of less opportunity for the least fortunate, without even resorting to the use of force.

^gtjwkq

I find myself wondering why you keep saying "left-wingers" all the time. There are more than just two opposed schools of political thought.

I'm afraid as recent events have demonstrably proven we do need regulation of markets. There is no such thing as a perfect market but there are things such as greed, corruption and incompetence. Sometimes the profit incentive will activate all those qualities and more.

I'm still astounded that loss-making banks, in the very business of capital, are still awarding bonuses to executives who have failed miserably to make a penny. And after taking billions of tax-payers money to fucking recapitalise.

And that's money I would indeed be happy to help the unfortunates in society. The lost potential of humanity is a big price to pay. To not help because somehow one could say there are no guarantees of success is to avoid the moral argument. Do we choose to help each other or not? Or do we just see ourselves as the haves and have-nots?

So to Rougy's comment that "Capitalism is the absolute best at one thing: making rich people richer at the expense of everybody else."
Well you only have to open your paper to see the ugly truth. Take Tesco one of the world's biggest retailers. Their finance arm has a three year £225m debt guaranteed under favourable terms, something they negotiated on the heels of the main banking collapse - they certainly didn't need the deal. They're also heavily into tax avoidance like most banks and now the taxpayer guarantees their borrowings. What a marvellously efficient exchange of goods and services.

Over at Barclays high street staff have had their pensions cut while the company's investment bankers are in line for average pay of £200,000. Yep, no surplus value there.

>> ^Deano:
I find myself wondering why you keep saying "left-wingers" all the time.

You're right, I don't like the term either, very innacurate. I'm mostly referring to those who defend big government.

Deano, I think you're making a terrible yet very common mistake. The examples you mentioned are not strictly about capitalism, but about collusion between private companies and government, something free market capitalism frowns upon and does not allow.

Those loss-making banks you mentioned, in accordance with market rules, should have just gone bankrupt. Government stepped in and bailed them out, something they shouldn't have done. These outrageous bonuses would've never been granted if the banks weren't saved from their certain (and deserved) doom in the first place.

That money from the bailouts, that you wouldn't have felt bad handing out to the unfortunates, shouldn't have been created out of thin air or debt either.

When considering scandals surrounding big companies, you have to be careful not to overlook the government's participation in them.

I'm assuming then you want to see an economic model in place that currently only exists in textbooks. The problem is that there is no such thing as a perfect free market economy, not as long as you have humans involved.

"Collusion between private companies and government?" Come on. Government and business is in bed with each other and always has been. And it gets worse as the private sector takes over more and more public sector business and actually manages to do an appalling job. The examples I could give here are numerous.

The bank bailouts don't support free market principles but they were quite happy to take the money. The problem is the banking system didn't work in the first place. These were the capitalists who claimed they offered a stable and efficient financial market. But all they did was to conjure up increasingly complicated financial products, aka scams, in the name of profit and we saw precisely what happened.

I think it's pie in the sky to suggest that unfettered free market economics will solve even a small amount of our problems. In trying to impose that theory there would be a devil of a mess in trying to compensate for the differences in all pre-existing markets not to mention the fallout from removing all kinds of government regulations.

On the other hand I am *not* a fan of governmental waster and incompetence and I have seen these forces in action. I have to wonder if the UK government are actually capable of fighting a war. And the glib response to the equally facile U.S criticisms of the NHS avoid the many problems the service has. The question is how do you get better government and better politicians to provide services that need to be provided by the state? It's going to be a long work in progress.

^ The only thing that stops free market from existing are government regulations. Reduce them and you get closer to it. There are many examples of economies that are currently prospering a lot more than we used to because of the economic freedom they enjoy.

Just because government and businesses have long been involved with each other, doesn't mean it can't be stopped. If government had less stake in the economy, businesses would not bother leveraging it so much to their advantage.

For many centuries, the church and the state where in bed together in many countries and humanity suffered the consequences. The same kind of separation, but between the state and the economy, even if it goes against the interests of big players (big government and big businesses), is still a worthwhile goal. The many people who are suckered into supporting these big players, social liberals, also stand in the way.

The banking system doesn't work well because it's one of the most highly regulated and distorted markets in existence. Just the fact that we have central banks, for instance, is very anti-capitalistic and completely harmful and unnecessary. The "capitalists" you mentioned (whoever they are) are nothing but. Real capitalists would not support government meddling in the economy.

When you mention problems arising from sudden lack of regulations, that's like opposing abolishing slavery because black people would have problems adjusting. Even though that is true, it's hardly an argument to keep slavery going.

I believe any problems arising from sudden economic freedom are a lot easier to deal with then the problems you get otherwise. If it makes you feel better, make the transition gradual, or help people adjust, but economic freedom is the way to go.

I do hope there can be a better system than meritocracy and one built upon money and selfishness and punishment. There hasn't been one yet, but we can be hopeful there can be.

So gtjwkq, since "left-wingers" support "big government", we'll assume you define "right-wingers" as supporting "small government", and we'll further assume that you categorize yourself as a right-winger.

What are your stances on the Patriot Act, racial profiling, the war on terror, the war on drugs, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, and fossil fuel subsidies?

^ That's a lot of assumptions. I honestly don't know if you can assume that about left and right wingers, but we can do it for argument's sake.

I was admittedly being lazy, but whatever left wingers want, AFAIK imply an increase in govt spending. The same also applies to a lot of so called right wingers.

I'm mostly a libertarian, so no surprise here:
- Patriot Act: Wrong, intrusive, unnecessary.
- Racial profiling: Don't know what you mean here, pass.
- War in Iraq, Afghanistan: Humbler foreign policy wouldn't create terrorist problem that was the excuse for wars. Al Qaeda and Osama could have been pursued and brought to justice/killed without a war (letter of marque and reprisal seems like a good idea).
- Fossil fuel subsidies: Unfair, unnecessary, as subsidies usually are.

^gtjwkq

You have to be joking mate, the *lack* of regulation of the banking industry helped cause a complete collapse in credit. Sorry I just think your arguments don't stack up to the real world.

^ You're not making much sense to me either. The banking industry is one of the most highly regulated markets in existence. Regulate it an inch more and you might as well nationalize the whole thing.

If you want to find the biggest culprits behind our "collapse in credit" and the subprime mortgage crisis, look no further than the Fed, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

It's not reasonable to ignore how distorted the financial and banking markets are, and blame only the market itself, instead of the government created agencies which are causing massive distortions, for any problems that arise.

I've posted the full documentary on which this talk is based here: http://videosift.com/video/Status-Anxiety-Our-Success-Obsessed-Society

*related=http://videosift.com/video/Alain-de-Botton-on-Pessimism

Alain de Botton on Pessimism has been added as a related post - related requested by Trancecoach.