WORKSHOP 8: QUESTIONS
What do you take into account in any given economic decision?
Spending pocket money, buying big ticket items, borrowing money, investing money, working for money, getting daily necessities, housing, feeding, clothing, leisure?
What is being ‘a good human being’ in terms of how you handle money? In terms of debt, saving, credit, obligation, transactions all these things.
What is the morally correct way to handle money matters? To give money? To get money? Like, is it moral to earn a salary when you know the boss is taking out loans to keep the company running?
Is it moral to pay your debts? Is it immoral not to pay them?
Are our economic relationships always a cold calculation of ends and means, or are they more than that? In economic relationships do we always only calculate to our own benefit? Are all economic decisions by people part of a rational profit-loss calculation?
In terms of our economy, are people fundamentally in relationship to each other, or fundamentally individuals or free agents?
How would you describe the intersection of individual, social relationships and economic relationships?
I went through all the transcripts and reflections and selected quotes and snippets of conversations that seemed to be relevant points. I appreciate all the hard thinking everyone has put into this, especially the effort put into making written statements.
WORKSHOP 1: MARKET SOCIETY
What is money for, what is community for?
-You're paying to be a part of becoming, does that mean it's not authentic?
-Does paying decrease the value?
-I don't think it does?
-If you're paying on a lower level [of Maslow's hierarchy of needs], it doesn't seem that way. But paying on a higher level, like relationships, it decreases the value of what it is. Pay for food, shelter, medical relationships, it's okay, but pay for something on a higher level, it's not as valuable as it should be.
-It isn't viewed as valuable.
-So money intrinsically cheapens something
-Cheapens things that are supposed to be on the higher end.
-But there's another thing, if you don't pay for it, it feels unlimited. The scarcity thing. If you don't pay for it ,it’s unlimited. It's voluntary. But if it's limited...
-It's more likely to be quality?
-The reality is that it's not unlimited. The reality is that it's limited. The quality of meetups is not as high, because they’re not charging money, it's a hobby, just on the side, so the quality is not that much.
-So becoming is professionally a community? We do quality community professionally?
-I don't know!!!
-Paying for the service, it's the opposite of what I’m saying, but paying for higher value decreases the value, but we're paying for it, and it's not decreasing it
-I mean, you could be charging by the hour, but this is a paid community, but it's survival money, venues, paying for expertise. It's like friends at the party, people put money in the pot to pay for things
-Thank you!
-But when he starts to make a profit...
-But he's not doing the content...
-But he's creating the place for the content to happen...
-But he's paying for the lower level so the higher level can happen.
-But within the party, however they act with each other, within that broader space that the shrewd business man set up, it's just like running a...
-Like running tumblr
-If the person paying for the service is happy, and getting what they need. And if they're getting the money value out of it.
-And I think what is interesting, the people are not paying for being happy. They’re paying for the service, but the happiness comes with the service.
-If they weren’t happy, they would not come back, and the service would be gone.
-So who decides what the money value is, it's the people paying.
-But if I’m paying for the friendship for 100, it's different. I'm buying the service, but I got the friendship.
-Maybe using the term friendship is the problem
-Or any -ship, relationship
-Because we just enjoy it!
Community is about
-having fun with, enjoying people
-liking the people you're with
-doing something you're interested in doing together
-values are similar
-feeling like you belong
-feeling like you can learn or grow from the experience together
-anything you do with the 'right' people is fun to do. You could just stand on the street corner and enjoy it.
What's the difference between random meetups and 'this'? (our group and the discussion we're having)
Community is not this: just touring, not taking things seriously, transience, no investment in the group, here to escape, no continuity, no interest in getting to know each other as people, seeing people as instrumental means and not just who they are, not getting into any thing beyond what we're doing
A community is this: it has more understanding amongst each other, share the same values
-It's monetization of relationships that destroyed community.
-We lost community so we rely on money
-We started using money, so we lost community
-Two factors in a vicious cycle?
-We substitute money for relationships
-On the one hand, this is a good thing, it allowed people to move people around. On the other hand it introduced shocks into the community, we could no longer rely on relationships being there. It's scary when the source of your attachment is no longer there. It's the flip side of diversity and people going out to explore
-Even for yourself, you're changing, the village is changing, people come and go
WORKSHOP 2: WHAT MAKES RELATIONSHIPS WORK?
What are the things that makes a relationship happen for you? What are the things that make you move towards a person?
-People who are 100% connected or interested with a person, able to just be with that person. Can interact fluidly, or you can hang out with having to say anything. Never a dull moment
-Where you can help each other change for the better.
-Help you see things from a different point of view
-A coincidence of teaching needs, a bartering of needs
-Coincidence, period. You know someone, they can give you some different thinking
-When you stop being able to share new things that's the end of the relationship. -It has to keep growing.
-You can feel it when there's a slowdown in what someone is giving
-You have to respect each others values even if you're different
-If you can fix the error, the relationships will be stronger, but if not it'll be broken -But for me the error is your expectation. But you can fix the way you're seeing this person.
-But what about when the expectations fall away, and then you find you don't like them?
-But i'm saying you were seeing some rosy aspect, and now you see the dark side. But maybe you have to just accept the dark side. Like seeing the person more fully.
-I think the mistake is a good chance to make you realize if the relationship is going to work or not. -If you're stuck in a bad relationships, you blame all the time, he's not changing, but you're not changing either. So the break can help you think it through, why can i not change? Or if you have too many disagreements that happen, you get to the limit, it's a good chance to break with that person forever.
-The basis of any good relationships for me, it is friendship. Doesn't matter if it s a family relationship, boss or employee, it doesn’t' matter. Its a friendship, like what everyone said, there's a sense that everyone knows where they’re going, and what is important to each other, and trying to respect and support that, and that you enjoy that about each other. And you have the reasonable expectations of one another. It's because you give each other the freedom to be who they are and who yourself is, that you can enjoy one another and the relationship.
WORKSHOP 3&4: BUSINESS OR FRIENDSHIP?
Trust
-Trust is the foundation for friendships
-Individuals are easier to trust than groups. automatically a lot, or more complex.
-The level of trust you have as an individual matters. A person's experiences affect them.
-Somebody who has had experience of abuse or trauma will have a much lower level of trust than others.
Sharing
What motivates me to share, we will have the same topic, memory or inside joke, and I feel like we belong to each other.
Gift Economy: you have received this talent from the universe, and so you have to keep it running, so you have to do your best to keep giving, also giving is better than receiving.
Money is not shareable.
There's two types of sharing, providing basic help, even to people you don't know, like holding a door for people, or giving up your seats on the MRT, basic courtesies. [The other kind is] sharing with friends, helping them, like giving them an umbrella or some food, something of more immediate value.
[Sharing] is more emotionally quantifiable.
Share ideas, like today we're sitting here to share ideas. I expect I can receive something knew when I share like this, and it makes me grow, so that's my definition of sharing.
When I share, it means I care.
I realize that I share based on what I think creates balance and reciprocity in the context of that relationship. So we share different things in different relationships, right? I share what I think the other person can give back or appreciate.
Friendship doesn't equal sharing, emotionally or in relationships. Like I can share things, but we're not necessarily friends, I can share a seat on the MRT, but it doesn't mean we have a bond.
Cooperation
I think the pre-existing condition for cooperation is that we're limited. We cannot do everything, we have our area of expertise and our limits. So we have to have this understanding so we can cooperate.
I like cooperation WHEN it makes me better, like they give me constructive ideas, make me progress in advance. I also don't like it because I have my thoughts and ideas, and I want to put them into practice, but they might not think it's not good enough, but can't tell you why. …If it fails, then I don't like taking the responsibility for that. If working on my own, that's fine, but with others, I have to take responsibility, and people say you're arrogant, see you didn't listen, and we have to suffer because of you.
The people who cooperate have to have the same intellectual level, and the mindset that we are working together towards something. If not, then the process becomes flawed, people lower the expectation and the minimum shared, let's just get it done, it's not very excited and creative or done in the best way.
The key to successful cooperation, is we need to have a mutual goal, and there's no free rider in this group. Everyone needs to recognize that we need to contribute some resources , some ideas, some energy. If the mutual goal disappears, the cooperation disappears.
-So you can't cooperate if we have different goals? Like if I want to make profit and you want to help people
-The aligned goal turns into the mutual goal
-So it's the bigger picture of making the event work.
-It's like the connected part of the Venn diagram
Community
Community is not cooperation, which does not have a long-term plan and is at best obligated and at worst coerced. Community is not the individual; it is the collective, seeking a greater goal for a greater group.
People have to trust each other to maintain the basic functions like interaction and collaboration in a community. With greater trust, people can take more risks and make something creative which might benefit more people. Apple Inc. has become so famous because we trust their brand. Governments exist because people believe that officers can make useful policies to make countries better. Human beings are special creatures who are willing to trust each other in a relatively high level. I believe that contributed significantly to our civilization.
A community has a sense of continuity, that this mutual benefit is ongoing, rather than a one-off event.
Is communalism the same as cooperation?
-Not the same
-Cooperation does involve a horizontal structure, and communalism can be horizontal or communal, but it's about holding together for survival and up the pyramid. It can be coerced or consensus, but there's the face-to-face, everyone plays their part. Countries are imaginary but cities are real communities,
-Communalism, you don't have to cooperate, you don't have to interact. We're told to work on page 8, I may choose not to. Working on page 8 together would be cooperation, but we're all sitting in the classroom together, that's the community
Capitalism can be a form of cooperation … The reason you see well-functioning businesses, like now, is because they function under cooperation.
-Capitalism is about common vision?
-It's about moving forward towards something.
-Communality is about a balanced ecosystem, we're playing in the ocean, we're getting fruit, whatever.
-One is goal and process oriented, one is just about being.
-Cooperation is about getting together to achieve their goal, communalism the goal is being together.
[In] communities, some people share things together, during this sharing process, people might start to have some mutual goal, they create some mutual goal together, therefore they cooperate together to make things better.
We separate to many communities for mutual goals, like in a different circle, same goal, same community. If they have the same goal, they want to reach the goal, ... if the goal disappear, the community won't grow.
I want to say some negative part, that, there's another more quick way to make the community more close, to assign an enemy. If we have a mutual enemy, or supposed enemy, it makes everyone in that group feel close, and that they have the same interest. And the same time, this society will be more close. -That's the story happens in America, china, Taiwan, everyone in the world, also our company
-The disaster also functions as a threat. -Scapegoating also works.
Community is just something that has to be continuous. If we don't feel like a community yet, it's because it has to be over time.
Transactions
-Exchange doesn't involve money
-Transaction involves money
-I don't think transactions imply profit
-But why would you transact if there's no profit?
-Maybe the profit doesn't happen for one or both sides
-It doesn't have to mean profit, it might mean revenue.
-Revenue is about the exchange, and profit is after the cost is subtracted.
-So...transaction is about revenue
-And people seek profit from the revenue
-Are transactions always fair?
-No, because if they were fair the revenue would equal to cost.
-Wait, what is fair?
-Fair doesn't mean equal!
-Transactions are not a priori fair. Some are fair, some are not fair
-A transaction is a business deal, money changes hands, it can be good or bad, but the transaction is what it is.
-The transaction means there's no care about the well-being of the other party. You could care, but there is no assumption of care.
-Your focus is on what you're gaining.
-You could make it about wider self-interested.
-But that's not included in the basic premise.
Exchange
-Similar value, equal value
-But not involve money?
-It could but doesn't have to.
-If it involves money, what would be the difference from a transaction?
-If I had 500, then you gave me 500? That makes no sense.
-You exchange US dollars for NT dollars.
-You can say it's a transaction as well, because you pay some fee for that, that's a transaction.
-I still think that exchange implies a form of equivalence.
-Something about equality that implies a sense of caring about well-being.
-I agree with that, because we exchange things at a flea market, it has a sense of caring about well being, I have what you need. It's not doing a transaction.
-Giving one thing in return for another, an occurrence in which people give people of similar value to each other.
-Transactions are not about equality, whereas exchange is
-If [a transaction is completely] fair, then revenue is equal to cost. … I think what she's saying is how much profit you gain from it, if it's reasonable, then the transaction is fair. But the more money that adds to the thing, the more unfair it gets. So if the coffee shop in dongchu is more expensive, then it's fair, because of the rent. But if the coffee shop on the outskirts of the town, if it has the 70NT coffee, then it's unfair.
What’s the difference between a debt and an obligation?
-An obligation is a service is provided to you, and you return the service or good deed.
-A debt is something has been done for you, but it's quantifiable, and fun and nasty tools can be added to it, like interest.
-An obligation is not quantifiable ,it's your responsibility to returns something,
-Debt is emotionally detached quantifiable…it's necessarily about the money.
-Why is this difference important?
-An obligation is a moral issue, like paying someone back, reciprocity, that's a good thing to do, right? But people think debt is a moral issue, it's self-evident, but the history of debt is brute history domination.
-Obligation is personal, and debt is personal
-Like 3rd world countries ran up debts when they had dictators but now that they're democracies they're still on the hook for the money.
Debt: we want sth and we ask, like we need money we borrow. then we have a debt.
Obligation: we didn’t ask, we don’t look for it, people just give us, so we have obligation but we are not in debt.
do we have debt to our society? to this sense, i think we have obligation but we don’t have debt.
in a relationship, only obligation exists because people give voluntarily.
debt is clear, there is a beginning (when people look for it) and there is an end( when people pay back), but obligation is not clear. you don’t know when sb gives and when sb takes, and you don’t know how much you give, and how much other recieve, whereas you don’t know how much you receive from how much others give. and also you can’t control if sb wants to offer their kindness and you can’t either generate how much they give.
What’s the difference between sharing and trading? Friendship and business? Communal and transactional relationships?
Could money substitute for communal relations? Does money displace communal relations? Does introducing money end communal relations?
-If you have a relationship, you don't pay money to get anything, and if you don't have a relationship, you can't pay any amount of money to get it. I think it's important to define these details, to get to what sharing is what trading is.
-For business opinion, I think if we know the relationship and if you know how the relationships work in the world, maybe you can make big money. You know who can share the thing with you and who won't. You can get the money value maximised, because you know who and what the, how many money can buy the maximum material. If you know the relationship, you know who will share with you, no need for money. If they don't want to share, then you need the money. You don't need to pay the money if you know who wants to share with you.
-I don't think money can substitute for communal relations. They're supposed to be together on a parallel. Money cannot buy you happiness or friendship. Everyone has their limitation, if you want to share, have friends, have communal relations, you must have more than you need so you can share with others. Those who don't share, they’re not selfish, they just don' have enough for themselves, so they don't share. Money would help this kind of situation. Money and communal things would have to be balanced.
[B]oth money and relationships are important, it gives you more choices so you can take care of yourself, because there's money you can choose your relationships, in a way that's positive, and you're not forced to stay in negative ones.
Money is useful, transactions are useful. They are just there, tools..., equally useful for good and for evil. These tools are quantifiable, and to quantify human bonds and relationships is to degrade them, hollow them out. Placing a market value onto something is not the end, but it leads to a slippery slope of self-interest, which shares the domain of human nature with altruism for the sake of letting the world continue. Placing a market value onto someone, well, then the slope is more of a cliff. You must be aware of your consequences.
WORKSHOP 5: WHAT DO WE OWE OUR PARENTS?
-Why can't we put a price on our relationships?
-Because money makes it so clear
-I accept the price but other person may not
-Too clear takes it from individual knowledge into mutual knowledge
-Is there love involved in this kind of transaction?
-That's a really good question
-Because when you're growing up, you receive ideas from your parents how much they love you, their compassion for you, but when they present this kind of bill, all of a sudden, the process these years you grow, these years they raise you it's a fake thing.
-You're saying it falsifies the relationship to bring money into it?
-Relationships are not quantifiable, and so brining money into it makes it hollow and turns people into instruments.
Do we owe our parents? Are we obligated to them?
-We do owe them, we are obligated to them, but they owe us too. They need us to have the experience of being a parent. My father has some unfulfilled dreams, so he put pressure on me to fulfil his dreams. I did it to make him proud, so he can boast in front of relatives and friends, and i did that
-So now you paid him back?
-No, now he owes me.
-So you both owe each other, it's a relationship!
-So people owe each other different things, it can't be calculated,
-Compared?
-There’s' no way to make it equal.
-One kilogram cotton equals one kilogram steel, but there's no measurements between what we owe our parents and what they owe us.
-Our obligation is to recognise what they've done for us. There's no imperative for reproduction for the survival of the species. But there is something to paying them back by showing what you've made of yourself.
-And that makes your parents life, we fulfil them, we make them cry, we make them happy.
How would you describe the relationship we have with all the other people on the planet, and/or all the people who came before us?
Do you feel we owe humanity or the people who came before us anything?
Would you think of our relations to all of humanity as a debt?
our relationships to the world we live in now is different because it should be a community-based relationship. The last two classes were about entirely different ways of seeing value, as people or as instruments. It can't be quantitative, we can never hope to pay back, but there is so much that came to be, all the influences what raised us, genetic influences .... And we have an obligation to leave the world less of a mess for future generations
-could you say that we could pay the obligation to the people in the past by paying it forward, so to speak? To make things better for the future people?
-I think our building for the futures paying our debt to the past.
-Obligation is what you do, it's part of the genuine social bonds. We need to appreciate what people have done for us.
-Just like right now, i think we owe our children a better life
-Absolutely
-Because we created a chaotic world for them to face in the future.
Do parents owe their children? Do parents have the responsibility, if they create a life, to make that life successful? If they fail to help them set up successfully for life do they owe the child a debt? If you create a life, do you incur a debt–do you owe the person for creating them?
-The more complex an animal you are, the more work you’re expected to put in to bring your offspring to successful adulthood. So you owe your children to make them successful according to definitions of success.
-If your dad can brag about you, he's discharged his obligation to the species.
-Parents are not responsible for the child becoming, but they're responsible for setting them up for success
-That's a fine line!
-It is. They can do the work to set them up and it still wouldn’t ensure they would be successful
-I agree.
-I think this gives parents too much pressure to raise a kid, to ask them to make sure their kids will be successful.
-What's the benchmark of a successful adult?
-Self-sufficiency
-Living in your own place, and taking care of your daily life.
-Yes that's the basic.
-Make enough money to feed, clothe and house yourself
-That's actually a pretty low standard then. That's not putting any pressure on parents. If your kid can feed itself, you’re doing okay!
-But that's like first-world expectations, before it was able to hunt, able to reproduce, keep the family going. It used to be just survival. But now it's like, you're living at the lowest possible expectations
-So we're all successful now! That's great!
-But that's not that easy, because look at all the 啃老族 in society.
-But are they actually unable to take care of themselves? Or just doing what's easier?
-If you think you owe someone, you need to pay it back in the future, which creates pressure between you and them, and this pressure will turn into a tension between you and your parents. You know, parents need children to learn how to be a better person by raising kids. We are all learning. It’s not that we are in mutual debt.
-you're reframing our today's discussion framework, you're saying it shouldn’t be about debt or not debt, it should be about mutual learning.
I see if it's a debt, or an obligation, owing is part of debt, it's not voluntary, it's a social bond that can't be quantified. I think that we do have our duties obligations to each other, we can obviously pay back, not pay back our debt, but try to fulfil our obligations to all the people that raised us, influenced us, our bodies, minds, spirits.
We can fulfil this obligation with the people who will come after, whether it's trying to raise our children well, or maximise their chances of being okay, not going into parenting lightly, and acknowledging the sacrifices our parents made, but also doing what we can to improve the quality of the world.
Ernest Thompson Seton’s dad turn his parental relation from obligation to a debt so make the relationship end when the debt is cleared.
WORKSHOP 6: CASH OR CREDIT
Cash
Does cash mean money here, because in the dictionary, money in any form, paper coins, or anything that can be used for trading.
For the purposes of today, cash is not credit.
It's the thing you hand over physically
It's the medium of exchange
So then cash is unstable. Because in this world the money rate, it changes.
Necessary?
Because you need that to make a transaction.
No transaction without it,
Nowadays!
cash makes it possible to steal.
You can't steal credit, but you can steal cash
Cash is for a lot of people, but credit is for a small group of people, but it's hard to coordinate for a large group of people.
Credit
Cash is fixed, you get a specific amount of money, and you use that for other transactions, and it's hard to make it bigger, but credit can be made bigger
Credit is stretchable! It could be as big as the seller is good at speaking.
Because it's abstract
Or because it's based on human relations
It's abstract because you cannot touch it, and so there's a huge range for expanding.
It's based on human relations because it depends on the people negotiating
So credit is possible to be manipulated
Yes! It is! And so is money but in different ways.
And it makes it harder to control. Because the people who control the knowledge to manipulate, they know how to make the people think what the credit is.
Credit now and credit then, different! Difference is interest
Back then it was a face to face community, it was face to face contact, based on intimate community relationship, now it's a faceless predatory enterprise.
And the difference is interest.
Community
But insofar as they are communities at all, they are necessarily founded on a ground of mutual aid.
Is it not community if they're not helping each other?
I've never thought about this before.
If people are not helping each other, what are they gathering for?
To me, I don't necessarily they really have to help each other. Not intentionally at least. Just sharing their presence in a group. People are doing their own thing. People in a community are doing their various skills, but because they're good at what they do, everyone can enjoy their presence.
So it is helpful
But not directly. It's not like, you need help, I’m going to help.
I think at the very beginning of forming a community, it's like about being like-minded, and hanging out together, and then they find out that people might need help, and they provide help. Community is not formed mainly to help each other.
But help happens from it
Yes, just naturally it happens.
I think that community always has some purpose, and then help is a side-effect.
They have the broader goal, and then goes to a lower level. Community has to start off as a purpose that's greater than any individual.
What is the difference between cash and credit?
Cash is cash, it 's a value instrument, and credit is more of a judgement on someone's character. It's a moral examination analysis of the person, now it's just, can you pay me back or not. Nowadays, being in debt is considered immoral. Credit is about judging a person's worthiness
Like the value of a person.
Not like what they're worth, or it can be, but can I do business with them, will they be able to pay me back. Before it was like, are you a good farmer/blacksmith, so I’ll extend credit because you're worthy.
You're not going to do business with a guy who owes a lot of debt.
Yeah
Because now, credit is kind of objectified, where as then it was more about word of mouth. But yes, it still has some kind of judgement of who you're facing, who you're doing business with.
According to ‘debt’, money is theivable, credit is not. Money is an object without a history and credit is by definition a relationship.
Mostly true, you can't pull a knife and say, give me all your credit. But in the virtual or impersonal credit era that we are now, credit can be easily manipulated
Credit is flexible and money isn't
Credit is expandable/contractible
Stretchable
We're hitting a big nail here. You're saying this is old-school negotiations, and nowadays, new school everything is written down and you cannot change it, but the people who wrote these things down, are the old school, they can change it at will actually, they control it at the top, but when you want to change it they say, but it's written down you have to pay it!
If there's enough resources, so the human will be willing to share.
That's what I was thinking, a background situation that's not about authority, but is about having enough.
And there's a problem of allocation. And the government is created for making the allocation fair.
I think I agree with his statement about people are driven by self interest. That is because we don't actually know what other people think totally. We only, the only think we can totally 100 percent trust is ourselves.. So I can understand why he said you lock your possessions in boxes between families. I think even between family members you can't totally trust each other, because you don't know them totally, or how they might react with something, you cannot predict. There's some unpredicatabilities even between family members.
Otherwise we wouldn't have soap operas
That's also what makes relationships interesting. If you know people totally it's not fun!
[laughter]
People are complicated. We don't know, even ourselves, how we will react in certain circumstances. Sometimes you do something and afterwards you just don't know why at that moment why you have that insane behaviour. So trust issue is the main issue. You don't know how to trust people because that kind of thing just happens.
And so that's why you can't predict other people, if you can't even predict yourself!
Cash and credit are similar to each other in terms of trust. The cash is a one-time transaction, and then it's done. But if there is trust there, then there' possibility for the second and fourth transaction afterwards. Credit is something you use in advance, or you save for the future. You do something good, and there might be some good things happen in the future for you. You help someone, and in the future someone might help you back
WORKSHOP 7: MONEY AND MORALS
What do you understand ‘moral’ to mean? What is ‘morality’?
-It's a generally accepted principle, a principle generally accepted by a group. individuals might disagree but it's acknowledged to be the standard.
-if you don't follow the morality, you'll be punished, not physically but psychologically, socially
-and if you don't follow the morality, not just you, but your family or those with relationships to you will be punished.
Do you believe a group has to agree on a standard of right and wrong?
-when a group agree one standard does it have, can they enforce it upon the other individuals in the group? or anyone can break the standard?
-I'm guessing, that's the reason why I want to say no. because if a group agree on the standard, when it's wrong how do you correct it?
-welcome to planet earth!!!!
What is the morality of profit and advantage in a transaction?
-Like asymmetrical information. Someone knows more than the other about the market in the transaction.
-In the economic world, the morality of profit of transaction is that you should make your best effort to maximise profit and advantage. so any action you take to make advantage in a transaction is allowed. in the economic world. not in the moral world, not in normal life
-[The real question is,] what's the immorality of it? because having the advantage means taking advantage of someone. your profit is someone else’s' loss, and where's the morality of that? it's completely immoral.
-We said that transactions are inherently unfair before.
-exchange implies equality, and transaction implies asymmetrical.
-if transactions are inherently unfair, why should people set a standard for a moral transaction?
-is there a standard?
-yes! "Don't Cheat! but what's cheating, and what's a normal unfair transaction?
-it's when the information is too asymmetrical? like dealing with a kid, or mentally challenged person.
What are the human motivations behind doing a transaction?
-if we know they're unbalanced, then what's the motivation?
-because we don't have that something, and we need it, so we will do a transaction and pay a little bit more to those people who will do it for us. Cooperation!
-we think of it as the 'cost of not having it yourself'. Like, what am I going to do about it?
-you have no choice.
Is there any morality in terms of a transaction? Can a transaction be moral?
-is there ever a moral transaction then?
-cuz in the world, human nature forever, we've always got a profit from our transactions.
-if you're selling food with any toxic materials, or selling poor quality building materials, then it's immoral.
-the transaction is immoral.
-because the buyer buys things from you, they want to buy something they can't make for themselves but can't, and you're supposed to provide the quality they want.
Is it moral/immoral/neutral to have an advantage in a transaction?
Is it immoral or amoral?
-for me it's neutral. Because motivation to doing a transaction is want to take an advantage. If you don't want to take a profit, you don't have a reason to exchange. So the key point is to what extent the advantage you get. It's a good advantage, a bad advantage, will you hurt people.
-speaking of hurting people, those builders might not think they're going to kill people, but they might do.
-they're just trying to save money, cost down.
-they should disclose the information
-but if they do that they're doing cheating wrong.
What is being a good human being in terms of how you handle money?
In terms of debt, saving, credit, obligation, transactions, cooperation, community, all these things
What is the morally correct way to handle money matters? To give money? To get money? For example, is it moral to earn a salary when you know the boss is taking out loans to keep the company running?
Is it moral to pay your debts? Is it immoral to not pay them?
-I have an idea about the first question: good human being in handling money. It's a behaviour where you’re managing your money by whatever activity, in a responsible way. Beneficial for you, beneficial for those around you, who you're trading with, and there's no huge loss in any part. In financial terms, in ecological terms, in social terms. It’s kind of utopian, a perfect balance that's not actually possible, but good to keep it in mind.
-it's hard for me to answer those questions, because in my world, no matter what kind of way you handle your money it's okay, you can send money, or lend money to others, or borrow money from banks or from your friends, or take your money to do business, whatever you want, but the key point is that you need, no matter what kind of decision you make, you need to show the…results
-I know a lot of banks do bad things to people, but I know I can earn a better salary from a bank, so it's hard to choose take money or not.
-You can take the salary without feeling guilty, because you're not the one doing this. So that's related to what we said before about the transparency.
-if you don't know, it's understandable, but if you know…
-but if you're not the one directly doing it, you're just doing what others asked you
-that's the soldier logic. Just following orders.
-if you know, then responsibility comes into play.
-maybe you know they're putting toxic ingredients in the food, but you just do the packaging
-and your entire family depends on your salary
-that's how they get you.
-that logic works with a lot of shitty jobs.
-there's a certain level of privilege involved in being able to speak out
-but you'll make others lose their jobs
-morality of greater good?
-this is like the train question where you can kill one person or five and which do you choose
