Evolution, Capitalism and Competitive Markets (Socialism)

[cslr]

Nowadays, (extreme) right-wing politics are becoming increasingly popular and one reason for this is in our schools that, for example, teach evolution (the strongest will survive) in somewhat misleading ways (existence of weaker ones play significant role in optimal adaptation) leading to ideas that ultra-competitive markets are best solution to everything.


More in depth discussion why very strong competition is not always the best approach (in evolution or society) is in my blog.

http://technotes5.blogspot.fi/2017/0...that-only.html

I have background in mathematics and haven't studied socialism or communism. I would be interested to know (similar) mathematical theories people have developed related to socialism.

[willowtooth]

Adam smith needs revision



there are plenty of marxist mathematical works like Das capital https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/

but there's plenty of people who refute "social Darwinism" which is a gross misinterpretation of Darwin's works. The term itself was created Richard Hofstader as an insult toward Americans calling them anti-intellectuals. Social Darwinism was used to justify laissez faire capitalism, racism, slavery a long list of other crimes, rarely if ever citing Darwin as a source. It is more closely related to the Protestant or Calvinist theory of work ethic than any scientific or mathematical basis.

A glance at the occupational statistics of any country of mixed religious composition brings to light with remarkable frequency a situation which has several times provoked discussion in the Catholic press and literature, and in Catholic congresses in Germany, namely, the fact that business leaders and owners of capital, as well as the higher grades of skilled labor, and even more the higher technically and commercially trained personnel of modern enterprises, are overwhelmingly Protestant. This is true not only in cases where the difference in religion coincides with one of nationality, and thus of cultural development, as in Eastern Germany between Germans and Poles. The same thing is shown in the figures of religious affiliation almost wherever capitalism, at the time of its great expansion, has had a free hand to alter the social distribution of the population in accordance with its needs, and to determine its occupational structure. The more freedom it has had, the more clearly is the effect shown. It is true that the greater relative participation of Protestants in the ownership of capital, in management, and the upper ranks of labor in great modern industrial and commercial enterprises, may in part be explained in terms of historical circumstances, which extend far back into the past, and in which religious affiliation is not a cause of the economic conditions, but to a certain extent appears to be a result of them. Participation in the above economic functions usually involves some previous ownership of capital, and generally an expensive education; often both. These are today largely dependent on the possession of inherited wealth, or at least on a certain degree of material well being. A number of those sections of the old Empire which were most highly developed economically and most favored by natural resources and situation, in particular a majority of the wealthy towns went over to Protestantism in the sixteenth century The results of that circumstance favor the Protestants even today in their struggle for economic existence. There arises thus the historical question: why were the districts of highest economic development at the same time particularly favorable to a revolution in the Church? The answer is by no means so simple as one might think.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/a...testant-ethic/

[ckaihatsu]

Nowadays, (extreme) right-wing politics are becoming increasingly popular and one reason for this is in our schools that, for example, teach evolution (the strongest will survive) in somewhat misleading ways (existence of weaker ones play significant role in optimal adaptation) leading to ideas that ultra-competitive markets are best solution to everything.

Yes, this is a correct assessment -- here's the history of this strain of thinking:

The term social Darwinism is used to refer to various ways of thinking and theories that emerged in the second half of the 19th century and tried to apply the evolutionary concept of natural selection to human society. The term itself emerged in the 1880s, and it gained widespread currency when used after 1944 by opponents of these ways of thinking. The majority of those who have been categorised as social Darwinists did not identify themselves by such a label.[1]

Scholars debate the extent to which the various social Darwinist ideologies reflect Charles Darwin's own views on human social and economic issues. His writings have passages that can be interpreted as opposing aggressive individualism, while other passages appear to promote it.[2] Some scholars argue that Darwin's view gradually changed and came to incorporate views from other theorists such as Herbert Spencer.[3] Spencer published[4] his Lamarckian evolutionary ideas about society before Darwin first published his theory in 1859, and both Spencer and Darwin promoted their own conceptions of moral values. Spencer supported laissez-faire capitalism on the basis of his Lamarckian belief that struggle for survival spurred self-improvement which could be inherited.[5] An important proponent in Germany was Ernst Haeckel, who popularized Darwin's thought (and personal interpretation of it) and used it as well to contribute to a new creed, the Monist movement.

Creationists have often maintained that social Darwinism—leading to policies designed to reward the most competitive—is a logical consequence of "Darwinism" (the theory of natural selection in biology).[16] Biologists and historians have stated that this is a fallacy of appeal to nature and should not be taken to imply that this phenomenon ought to be used as a moral guide in human society.[citation needed] While there are historical links between the popularization of Darwin's theory and forms of social Darwinism, social Darwinism is not a necessary consequence of the principles of biological evolution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism

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More in depth discussion why very strong competition is not always the best approach (in evolution or society) is in my blog.

http://technotes5.blogspot.fi/2017/0...that-only.html

I assume you're referring to this section here:

Now, in practice global optimization can be very difficult problem requiring lots of resources and special arrangements (governments, laws etc) to be used to the search while local optimization methods like simple gradient ascent can find some kind of solution very quickly explaining its popularity. Its then up to policy makers how much resources they want to use to support weaker people that are (if they are perfectly rational) mathematically speaking looking for new even better solutions.

I have background in mathematics and haven't studied socialism or communism. I would be interested to know (similar) mathematical theories people have developed related to socialism.

Politically, the baseline you've chosen is the independent variable of 'popularity' -- I think you're using 'political popularity' as the basis for a standard that an optimization method could use, like simple gradient ascent. (If there is no *standard* -- like sheer biological survival and reproduction in the natural world -- then no process of optimization can take place because there is nothing for the system to compare individual cases to.)

Marxism *does* have an elemental analogue to the variable of 'biological survival', which could be roughly thought-of as 'social survival' through the return receipt of 'necessary labor value' from the total labor value inputted into the economy through work-effort inputs (commodified labor).


[23] A Business Perspective on the Declining Rate of Profit

If the wages that one receives for their work are empirically *insufficient* for survival in the modern world and for a mass reproduction of the labor force going-forward (new incoming generations of ready-to-work workers), then Marxist theory would say that there is *inadequate* socially-necessary labor value returning to the workers (relatively high unemployment, relatively low wages, and relatively low national-and-global GDP, as in current world conditions).

There's no good reliable social analogue for 'the natural world' as a basis for mass human-social optimization, though, since human society has long since become *social* / cultural, rather than strictly *biological*, as we would see through the process of natural selection in the natural world.


Worldview Diagram

Using the market mechanism for optimization is inaccurate and inappropriate because what the market measures is *exchange values*, which cannot be directly correlated to 'human health and contentment', for the purpose of a social optimization variable.

Neither can 'political popularity' be correctly used as an independent variable because a dependence on it could just lead into a social system of *patronage*, where human needs may be sufficiently met for those in the patronage system, but not for others, and not on the whole since other, *better* optimization standards may happen to be passed-over, like 'collective-worker-empowerment-for-collective-worker-health-and-contentment'.