mrosswind comments on "If you read theory, you'd understand that there's nothing wrong with supporting child labor"

[–] mrosswind@hexbear.net 3 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Industries grow and shrink as a result of changes in consumption. The change in outcome is a sum of all the changes in the conditions. All changes, whether we have the tools to measure and distinguish them or not.

You’re inventing a mechanism where a change being too small to be considered important means its effects are erased from reality. An organized boycott is still composed of many individual immeasurable purchase decisions. If the small actions had no way to exert their effects, they couldn’t make up for that with numbers. Capitalists would be able to will a boycott out of existence just by refusing to see it as a trend. You could will away a dune based on the impossibility of following a single grain of sand.

Again, industries are not boulders that sit static until given a big enough shove. They are dynamic processes that continually fluctuate as a result of all the transactions that did or did not happen at each stage of production and distribution. The friction of whether or not to make a change is already always being overcome by other market forces.

Industries are governed by thousands of people making endless small adjustments to the operation of the node they manage in response to the changes made by the managers of the nodes they interact with. At no point is the manager who decides by how many children the cacao company can expand its workforce going to hear about a movement becoming organized enough to be considered a boycott. They will make their decision as a result of the decisions of their nearest organizational neighbors. The layers and layers of decision makers aggregate and obfuscate the decisions made leading all the way back to the consumer(s). In the same way that it’s impossible to trace the impact of a single purchase forward from a store, it’s also impossible for the person hiring the children to trace back and selectively be influenced only by coordinated efforts, but not by silent individuals. If it is possible for a boycott to succeed, it is only because the individuals who participated each had a small impact.

You can say that it’s a negligible effect, you can say it’s unimportant when compared to the effect of [X], but your claim was “an individual choosing to stop consuming something has no material effect on child labor”. That is not true. It’s a tempting simplification that offers comforting reassurance morally. In many cases it’s close enough to true to accept as a premise. But if you take it to be literally true, then you’ve necessarily buried some magical thinking into your understanding of the world.

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[–] frisbird@lemmy.ml 3 points 4 months ago (1 child)

You are attempting to make a conceptual argument using a misunderstanding of systems.

The statement that private individual consumer choice does not have a material effect on child labor is demonstrable using math. It is you who are proposing magical thinking. You are also incorrect in your assessment of my analysis.

I am in no way assuming industries are static objects. I am starting from the assumption that they are complex systems with feedback mechanisms and buffers. Let's take a ridiculous example: the ocean. Sea levels are rising. A single person choosing to spit into the ocean daily has no material effect on sea level. I don't think this is a controversial statement. But neither does it assume that the ocean is a static boulder. The global water system is a complex dynamic system, and as such, it exhibits dynamic equilibrium. One person's daily spit will not rise above the level of random noise already in the system.

Similarly is large global economic systems. If you want to talk about the material effect of a single moral protestor choosing to change their private behavior, it materially affects the retailer, specifically in their gross sales. When gross sales are affected, the retailer makes choices about how much of that product to order on the next cycle. That's the effect. It hasn't reached child labor yet. But before we move forward, we have to ask the question of whether the retailed will actually change their wholesale purchasing behavior. And depending on where you live, like for example a major city, the number of people new people moving in and the number of existing people moving out, daily, is going to have a bigger effect on gross sales at that retailer than one moral protestor. Street construction is going to have a bigger impact. The weather is going to have a bigger impact. The retailer is a buffer. Depending on their size (let's assume a non-chain local large retailer), they are not going to notice your choice not to buy. Hell, my whole adult life I have never been able to sustain stable housing longer than 4 years. My constant moving has more of an effect on retailers than my moral choices.

But that's for a single retailer with a single location. When we move to the conglomerate level, individual choice matters even less. Like the water cycle constantly moving water in and out of various locales, this dwarfing the contribution of your spot, conglomerate retailers are constantly reallocating inventory based on demand. Now your individual choice needs not only to rise about the random noise of consumer behavior at a single location, it needs to rise above the random noise of consumer choices around the whole territory of the conglomerate. That noise includes the rise and fall of populations in entire states, it includes natural disasters, it includes national marketing and trends.

So until your individual choice has a material effect on the amount of chocolate candy that a retailer purchases at wholesale, your individual choice has demonstrably no affect on child labor.

And that's only the first and second buffers in the system! The food companies that make chocolate candies also make other products that involve cocoa, and they operate under different brands. If you managed to have an effect on the wholesale purchase numbers of a single purchaser from the food manufacturer, that wholesale change would need to rise above the random noise of the thousands of wholesale purchase numbers around the world. That buffer absorbs major regional changes very well, by reallocating inventory to growing markets and clawing it back from shrinking markets, without ever having to change how much cacao they purchase, therefore not having an affect on childa labor.

This is how highly complex systems maintain over long periods of time in highly variable environments. They build feedback mechanisms and layers of quantitative buffers so that small changes get aggregated into larger trends allowing larger trends to be anticipated and adapted to without threatening the system.

This is how systems work.

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[–] mrosswind@hexbear.net 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

When you talk about signal versus noise, you are referring to measurable material effects. Whether a material effect exists is not dependent on whether someone notices it. When a signal is lost in the noise, it's no longer measurable, but the material effect continues to propagate. If someone spits in the ocean daily, no weather station on Earth could detect the change, but if the person is getting their water from a source not usually in the water cycle, then yes, the average volume of the ocean would increase by an incredibly small amount.

There are market trends that are large enough to be observable despite the chaotic nature of the system. But our collective ability to observe and comprehend the effects depends on how well surveyed the global economy is, the resources put into analyzing the data, and the ideology used by the analysts. If the signal was truly destroyed when it was overtaken by noise, then when corporations see an unfavorable trend coming they could raise the minimum signal to noise ratio to protect themselves materially by firing the analysts, erasing the data, and enforcing a more favorable ideology. This is the magical thinking. Companies and governments attempt this all the time, but it doesn't change their economic situation.

You've thoroughly laid out how the noise amplifies through each layer of the system. The problem is that the system you've described is far too noisy to function if noise wipes out signal. At the opposite end of the chain from the consumer, it's all noise, there's no signal left. Even when something like closing the strait is clearly big enough that it should have some effect, the farm managers have no coherent way of determining what the effect actually is. They're hiring and firing children based on random number generators.

Given that the system operates at least somewhat rationally, that can't be the case. "Signal" and "noise" are subjective concepts. One person's noise is someone else's signal. At each layer, the managers watch the decisions made by their neighbors for signals, make their own decisions, and then pass those on to others as noise. Then they wait for signals to come back in the other direction.

If you fix your perspective to either the consumer or the farm manager, they have no way of ever perceiving each other through their personal noise. But if you look at the system as a whole, their actions do impact each other, and there is an intact chain of decision makers who will continue to communicate the effects of each one to the other. This is evidenced in the physical product repeatedly transported from one to the other. For each step of processing and transportation, there has to be a person maintaining the link between them, or else the product would not arrive.

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[–] frisbird@lemmy.ml 1 point 3 months ago (2 children)

We're talking past each other and it's exhausting. You are attempting to use systems language to describe how a single purchase has a material effect on child labor and ignoring ALL of systems theory about feedback, equilibrium, and buffers. I don't need to argue with you. Read a book on systems theory please. I am done trying to explain it to you.

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