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Name: jb
Joined: April 2, 2004

What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.

"Don't lean too heavily on the "us vs. them" narrative we humans are fatally drawn to; every human contains multitudes and is a potential hero and a potential villain. Including you and me." - languagehat

"The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche." - Jon Ronson, via Natalie Wynn

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historian turned research administrator.

staking out my initials everywhere I can on the internet.

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People need to know more historical demography.

also: Stats Canada tables are my friends.

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I often don't post the hard thoughts, because the internet struggles with nuance and Metafilter isn't an exception in this.

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My personal differentiation between market economies and capitalist economies (based on reading/research in historical economic development, but little to no economic theory). I would love to learn whether I'm crazy, or just re-creating economic systems 101:

"A market economy (or "market exchange economy") is one in which goods and services are exchanged in a market and most people trade for what they need (whether for cash or barter doesn't matter). They aren't subsistence producers (people growing all their own food, producing their own tools, clothes, etc., from natural resources). They are generally specialized producers - a farmer growing wheat trades some of his wheat to a shepherd for wool or to a carpenter for roof repairs - and they produce surpluses to be traded (even internationally). In a feudal system, this is complicated a bit by the ways in which surplus (of both goods and labour) were appropriated by the elites. But generally feudal systems and market economies worked together - they aren't distinct (and medieval peasants produced for markets as well as for their lords - very few were ever subsistence). Same with slave economies - they are a variation, but very few economies were ever 100% slaves.

The difference between a market economy and a capitalist economy (which is a subset of market economies, really) is about the relation of capital (aka the means of production) to labour. If you own your sandwich truck and you buy the ingredients and make the sandwiches and then sell them for a profit, you are a marketer, but not a capitalist, though you may live in a majority capitalist society - but what you're doing is the same as has happened for 1000s of years. Market economies are ancient and predate more capitalist economies by thousands of years. The Roman empire, for example, was run on the basis of markets, and a Roman-era sandwich seller had the same economic relationship to his work as the modern one.

Capitalism is when you have separation of capital (means of production) and labour. If somone else owns the sandwich truck, buys the ingredients, pays you just for your labour to make and sell the sandwiches, and then they keep any profit - they are a capitalist.

Frankly, even though I would not describe the medieval and earlier periods as "capitalist", we've always had some capitalism in our civilization. Once societies were large enough to build cities and temples, there have been labourers who traded only their labour and had no direct access to the means of production. Maybe even before cities: I can imagine that as early agricultural villages began to socially stratify, some people had land and other people did not - and those without may have had only their labour to trade, especially if there weren't natural resources (e.g. forests to hunt in) that they could exploit instead.

But we talk about the post-medieval period as being the period of transition to capitalism because that's the period in which labourers went from being a minority of most populations into being the majority. I know the European context best (which is, of course, the context that informed all of the theoretical thinking of Marx and other socialists) - over the 16th to 19th centuries, the majority of people in Europe stopped having direct access to the means of production (as tenant farmers and/or independent producers) and increasingly traded their labour as the means of their livelihoods.

And in our current economy, even relatively high income and high status people - e.g. professionals - trade their skills and labour for their livelihoods. But the highest income people still make that income through capital (largely with investments)." (context - a thread comment I spent too long on)

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further blathering on feudalism, capitalism and engrossment:

"here is the difference between a feudal and capitalist economy (with a narrow focus on the southern English countryside):

In a feudal economy, elites owned the most important means of production - land. But they didn't just extract cash from it: they extracted labour. They also didn't directly access the profit on that labour.

What this meant on the ground: landlords had an incentive to have a larger number of smaller tenants - because they could get more labour for their own (demesne) lands. As well, unless the rents were set like sharecropping, if the tenants could produce more from their land, they kept the difference (the profit). Their income would go up in a good year (and down in a bad).

In a capitalist system, the landowner either rents out the land to large farmers who then hire labourers to work that land or hires the labourers directly. In the first case, the landowner is a rentier, but the farmer is the capitalist - any extra profit produced above costs (including rent) accumulate to the farmer - as well as any risks (lower income in a bad year). The labourers' wages don't go up in a good year, though they might go down in a bad year (by not being hired). If the landowner hires the labour directly, same deal, they are now the capitalist and take the risks and the profits.

The big impact on people from capitalism is that there is no incentive for a landowner to have many small tenants - if they are getting their rent in cash, then a few, larger and more stable tenants are better than many smaller ones who may not be able to pay. With fewer tenants, more rural people were landless labourers, and had no option but to trade their labour - including to their former neighbours who were a bit luckier than them.

Thus, in the history of English agriculture - which, of course, informed Marx's thinking, even though he really misread the causes of the mid-17th century civil wars, we have the process of ENGROSSMENT which predated the famous enclosures. Engrossment was the process by which farm sizes increased, families with direct access to land decreased and those who relied on labour for their survival increased. Feudalism had, perhaps, delayed what may be an emergent property of markets, because it had this strong incentive for elites to keep up their ability to command larger groups of people. But once this was gone, engrossment proceeded. Later, enclosures of common lands followed - but recent research has suggested that the labouring classes had already lost their use-rights on commons before they were formally enclosed." (context)