I heard many comments like this growing up and they were extremely unhelpful in my attempts to understand anti-capitalist thought. Like, of course capitalism knows life is social. What else is Facebook? Bars? Telephones?
We need better ways to express the underlying idea here.
We need better ways to express the underlying idea here.
My best unpackings are:
1. People care intrinsically about properties of their relationships with other people and many products are at least partly about this (eg. conspicuous consumption). This means externalities are more prevalent than you would expect.
1. People care intrinsically about properties of their relationships with other people and many products are at least partly about this (eg. conspicuous consumption). This means externalities are more prevalent than you would expect.
2. There are many important forms of cooperation that cannot be decomposed into items of one-to-one cooperation, and so can't be achieved purely with market mechanisms; you need social norms or orgs (sometimes gov, sometimes corporation works too) or some other weird thing
3. The fact that humans cooperate so much means that pretty much anything that benefits any single person is likely to have a bunch of positive spillovers in their communities
