this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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me_irl
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Yup! This is why we need to take money out of the hands of the wealthy and give it to the people they exploited.
it's deeper than that.
money is the incentive to corruption. the actual cause of corruption is indifference to suffering of minorities and the disenfranchised.
the answer is easy. you don't have to donate. you don't have to protest. all you have to do is call out the smallest corrupt mistreatment of your fellow human beings.
see someone getting accosted by police because they are guilty of being black? start recording and ask the cops to identify themselves.
see someone being mistreated at a store because they are trans? call them out on it. get angry, tell make sure they are aware of how people that act like they do are treated.
also, don't stop going there. go there every day. make sure they aren't doing it again, and when they do, call them out on their bullshit again.
the only way to stop people from behaving badly is to teach them that it's unacceptable behavior.
a society that stands idly by while people in that society are attacked is doomed to suffer and die.
"I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I've come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It's the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy."
-- Gustave Gilbert (After interviewing Nazis post-WWII)
an empathetic society is a cooperative society, a socialist society.
capitalism is completely indifferent to the human factor, competition is about few winners and many losers. unemployment is desirable, poor people must be allowed to die.
people think economics is a science but it doesn't consider human nature, "everyone tries to maximize their personal profit" isn't an anthropological statement it's capitalism restated.
That's literally the whole field of behavioral economics.
Also, economists don't care about individual human behavior. That's not what economics is. Economics is the study of broad trends in large populations. And for the most part, modeling these trends as people trying to maximize their own utility function is a useful tool to explain things.
Also also, the point of science is to be measureable and falsifiable so that hypotheses can be tested and disproven, making the predictions of the field more accurate over time. Economists create falsifiable hypotheses. Often they are disproven. Economics gets better at modelling the real world over time. Economics is a science.
"All models are wrong; some are useful."
Behavioral economics isn't how we allocate our resources, it's a correction of classical economics to include the human factor. The assumption that everyone is a perfectly rational profit optimizer only reflects reality insofar as we've codified that behavior into our laws and regulations such that shareholders can sue companies for not acting in that assumed way.
The kind of economics people take as science don't describe human populations throughout history.