Stage yellow case against capitalism

[Infinity16]

I honestly think that people at stage green could be making better arguments for why we should do away with capitalism. Most of the arguments can be resolved with unions, social spending, and regulation. The substack article below tackles something more fundamental.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-163414870

This link on Substack is about the limits to growth. Basically, some experts at MIT have calculated that capitalism is going to lead to a global cataclysm if the economy does not shift from growing forever into something more sustainable. The main benefit of capitalism is that competition makes the best businesses win out. But this also is the weakness of capitalism as it makes the system unsustainable. Businesses are incentivized to keep on growing and growing. Systems thinking demonstrates that nothing can grow forever.

I might also add that economic models typically assume that people are "rational actors". For anyone familiar with spiral dynamics, this is all stage orange. There is an underlying assumption that the best way to organize a society is via individualistic competition.

Here is another substack article by Devon Price, a stage green trans man who wrote a very good article on the limitations of stage orange:

https://drdevonprice.substack.com/p/can-you-be-transgender-autistic-and-pro-capitalism-eadff262db9d

[NewKidOnTheBlock]

It is the best system we got. By a long shot. And there's never going to be a better alternative. You can argue for a different forms of capitalism that would account for the existence of disabled people, unlucky people, people in poverty, LGBTQ etc. etc. or whatever wokie ideals you're subscribing to, wealth can be capped at some levels and then redistributed to the society. There's a lite form of such a system in Scandinavian countries. But to argue against the capitalism itself is just foolish

[Bjorn K Holmstrom]

Interesting thread. The limits to growth resonates, but the capitalism vs. anti-capitalism framing feels a bit binary for me.

What if GDP is actually the deeper problem? Not as a measurement error, but structurally: it's a single number trying to govern an insanely complex system. There's a cybernetics idea, Ashby's law of requisite variety, which I think is important, that says that your control mechanism needs to be at least as complex as what it's controlling. GDP has one dimension, while the economy has hundreds. The system is blind to care work, ecological health, community resilience, while an oil spill registers positively. Pricing care work crowds out the intrinsic motivation that made it care work in the first place (and caring for an elderly parent doesn’t ‘count’ unless you outsource it and send an invoice).

It's kind of inefficient too. A lot of energy goes into maintaining the system itself: billing, compliance, all that, a bunch of people are stuck there who could be doing something regenerative. That's not a capitalism problem per se: socialism or any other -ism that still uses price signals and GDP as its primary feedback loop will reproduce the same dynamics.

Instead of asking who owns the means of production, what would a higher-resolution observation architecture actually look like? What signals could see the things GDP can't, and feed back into decisions at the scale where those things actually exist: bioregional, local.

We have many pieces already: Doughnut Economics, community currencies, participatory budgeting, rights of nature. The gap is more about connecting it all together, making these experiments talk to each other and to existing institutions without just getting absorbed by the old system.

So, in short: What could focusing on meeting requisite variety give us?

Curious to hear what you think.

Edited yesterday at 09:04 AM by Bjorn K Holmstrom

[Leo Gura]

You have not invented any remotely viable alternative. All you are doing is complaining but not providing workable solutions.

You have to actually invent something better.

Edited yesterday at 09:27 AM by Leo Gura

[Bjorn K Holmstrom]

@Leo Gura I agree that critique without something buildable behind it doesn’t go very far.

I’m not claiming to have a finished alternative system. What I’m working on is closer to early-stage design work on coordination mechanisms that could be tested locally and iterated.

The core idea is that if the problem is misaligned feedback systems (like GDP), then the alternative isn’t a new ideology but new feedback loops that can actually be piloted.

For example, one concrete direction: introducing complementary local currencies tied to care work or ecological restoration, running in parallel with existing systems, then testing them at small scales (community / municipal level) and measuring whether they actually shift behavior and incentives in practice.

That’s the level I think this has to start at, something you can prototype, observe, and refine, not a top-down replacement of capitalism.

A broader framework I'm envisioning is attempting to connect multiple experiments like that into something more coherent over time.

So I’d frame it less as “here is the solution” and more as, here is a design space for building higher-resolution feedback systems, starting with small, testable pieces. If you think even that level isn’t viable, I’d be interested in where you see the constraint, because that’s exactly where the design work needs to focus.

[Infinity16]

17 hours ago, Bjorn K Holmstrom said:

@Leo Gura I agree that critique without something buildable behind it doesn’t go very far.

I’m not claiming to have a finished alternative system. What I’m working on is closer to early-stage design work on coordination mechanisms that could be tested locally and iterated.

The core idea is that if the problem is misaligned feedback systems (like GDP), then the alternative isn’t a new ideology but new feedback loops that can actually be piloted.

For example, one concrete direction: introducing complementary local currencies tied to care work or ecological restoration, running in parallel with existing systems, then testing them at small scales (community / municipal level) and measuring whether they actually shift behavior and incentives in practice.

That’s the level I think this has to start at, something you can prototype, observe, and refine, not a top-down replacement of capitalism.

A broader framework I'm envisioning is attempting to connect multiple experiments like that into something more coherent over time.

So I’d frame it less as “here is the solution” and more as, here is a design space for building higher-resolution feedback systems, starting with small, testable pieces. If you think even that level isn’t viable, I’d be interested in where you see the constraint, because that’s exactly where the design work needs to focus.

That might be a good place to start. Obviously, the surest way to help the environment is decarbonization which may involve regulation, carbon tax, or cap and trade.

In regards to resource overconsumption, I'm not sure what can be done other than trying to help our stage orange societies move up to green and realize that there's more to life than materialism. As for how to do that, the least we can do is to vote for candidates who will bring us closer (or at least not further) to that goal. Maybe it would also be worthwhile to volunteer for environmentalists groups and to make donations.

What I described above may not happen within a realistic timeframe, so it may be worthwhile also to learn how to survive a future with a damaged environment.

[Bjorn K Holmstrom]

On the topic of what's actually being built, there's a draft report just released from UN Special Rapporteur de Schutter on extreme poverty which is doing something similar at the policy level: instead of proposing a replacement system, it maps a "menu" of experiments (complementary currencies, participatory budgeting, rights of nature frameworks, universal basic services) and explicitly acknowledges that which ones apply depends on local context. It's anchored in human rights law rather than systems theory, but the underlying logic (test things locally, connect them over time, don't wait for a top-down solution), rhymes with what I'm describing. Draft is here if anyone wants to dig in: https://www.neep-poverty.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/SRPoverty_The-Roadmap-for-Eradicating-Poverty-Beyond-Growth_draft.pdf

[LastThursday]

From a systems point of view capitalism wasn't invented from scratch, but was an evolution of what went before. Inventing a new stable system from scratch, like Communism, is nearly impossible. Communism collapsed because it isn't workable in practice in the long run, even China has partially embraced capitalism. Capitalism will eat itself eventually, and it will evolve into something else, the best we can do is nudge it in the right direction.