Capitalism

I have no good references for this, but I think of capitalism as specifying:

How Money Uses People to Make More Money.

This definition (for me) makes the business school / economics assumption that the purpose of a business is to turn some money into more money logical, by narrowing human motivation to just their cash equivalents. Pro-capitalism positions would tend to say that this misses the concomitant fact that to make money, you have to meet a human need, but I think the meeting of the needs of the human who notionally owns the money at the expense of clients and workers for the business, tends to discourage that. The humans who 'own' the money have to serve it relentlessly or it will migrate to or get captured by other humans who can tend it more effectively. I always think of the 'Ton' in Regency England, where living off your fortune meant marrying to maintain your fortune, which meant spending enough to keep up with rich class. Every decision was warped by this one fear - will our money run out on us, leaving us to reduce our lifestyle or heaven forfend, work!

Pro-capitalist positions will also point to the virtues obtained under capitalism - the material wealth, the vigorous uptake of innovation.  These, though, are neutrals.  Capitalism would not end slavery, workhouses, introduce schooling for all children, or preserve the environment.  The benefits to human life are side effects.  The good side effects are not combated, the negative side effects are. What is defined as negative sometimes has a corollary justification to money (climate change might, universal education might now, although not before 1900), but if that corollary were convincing, money would be invested spontaneously.  Capitalism is not the summum bonum.  It has to be a part, not the whole, of your ideas of good human outcomes.  This idea might explored in 'The Darwin Economy' which I should maybe read, although I think it is more about the fact that evolutionary stable strategies in nature and Nash equilibria in business-style games are described by a single theoretical structure.  The Darwin Economy probably points out that Nash equilbria (local minima in which neither player can move to a better strategy without losing out to the other) can occur which are not nearly Pareto optimal, and suggest that we need to selectively breed (or otherwise put evolutionary pressure on) corporations and markets to edge toward Pareto optimal benignity.

There is an interesting theorist of technology called W. Brian Arthur, whose book 'The Nature of Technology' captures a lot of the true things you can say.  It would have been a better book with more Heidegger (Equipment as a starting point for understanding Human Being can't not be informative about technology), but it's still excellent.  He has put out an article recently called 'the second economy' in Mckinsey's (registration-walled), but summarised and expanded upon at theatlantic.com.  Essentially, he's pointing out that equipment 'works'.  It doesn't just increase productivity, it produces. It finishes things. The Second Economy is the automatic economy. Arguably, we've always depended on this - farming depends on the productivity of fruiting trees and plants.  But trees and plants are not doing information work, and they aren't Turing-complete in being able to work indefinitely accomplishing who knows what (is that a fair use of Turing-complete in a sentence?  Possibly not).

 This would change my original definition to:

How Money gets things done to Make More Money.

There is much speculation about the singularity, about the second economy becoming independent of the humans who think they own it.  Charles Stross' Accelerando does a wonderful job of imagining it while keeping at least one tippy-toe on the ground.  It could happen.  Well before it does, he notes, Money will migrate toward it.  Google and Facebook and Intel and so on are that beginning.  Amazon has bought a warehouse-robot factory to turn all its warehouses over to robots (rather than abuse humans into robot-form).

(One difficulty with trying to recognize this is that it might mean people don't take money seriously any more, in which case you lose the good of capitalism (anti-nepotist, results oriented, energized, innovation-attracted) with the bad.  And people are no better off, because they've migrated to thinking that (detached cool/ethical validation/family affection/etc) is the only thing worth having, and they'll put that on a pedestal until it kills them too.)

* Is that Turing-complete?  Turing-complete means a language of instructions that can articulate write, read and delete, conditional execution and repetition (loops) - perform the functions of a Turing machine and be implemented by a Turing Machine.