"The US" is an ever-changing collection of millions of people. Each with their own individual capacities to do good and bad and everything in between.

When you create systems that are easy to abuse, some of the people in the system will abuse the system.

Ah yes let's be sure not to judge anyone for anything they do

People do not make choices in a vacuum.

But they still make their choices and should face the consequences of them.

What exactly do you propose?

Death penalty for engineers, and a slap on the wrist for CEOs.

You can still judge them evil even if the parent was accurate as to the motivations for their actions. Villains are more interesting when they're sympathetic.

You're in the planning meeting discussing this feature, you ask "Hey, are we allowed to do this? I thought stand downs were contractural." and your PM says yes, they got the okay from legal. Now what do you do?

> they got the okay from legal.

Now that I could definitely see happening. I would also want that in writing somewhere.

I guess discovery for the impending lawsuits should be very interesting

It’s easy, looking at the current state of affairs, to conclude that ethical behavior is incompatible with capitalist ambition. One might still choose to be ethical nonetheless, but with the understanding that you will be overtaken by those who have made a different choice.

Knowing little about the research, my prior would be that screen time is bad for kids and is also a proxy measure for the attentiveness of parents

I would tend to agree with that. I can even see in my own kids changes in behavior when external factors affect my own ability to be attentive to my kids.

Proudhon and Marx were two philosophers making observations about a rapidly-changing economy nearly two centuries ago. Society, politics, and economies have all drastically changed since then.

I don't think "Proudhon debunked this" is going to change anyone's mind. I don't find his arguments particularly compelling, even taking the historical context into account. I see him as trying to take a moral position and then trying to shoehorn it into an economic theory. The spirit of the underlying moral position is much more interesting than his pseudo-intellectual attempt at rigour.

What is property and Das Kapital are even more relevant now than when authored.

Why? because the plurality of people in the late 19th century when all these things were being written was still primarily smallish groups with limited capacity to generate impactful externalities. Read: Engels formation of the family, property etc..

While there was global capitalism, it had not entirely consumed the entire globe at that point

Ad of today there are no parts of the globe that are free from the reach of some property owner attempting to extract a resource from property that they do not control. There are no indigenous peoples that are free from the effects and impact of global climate change as a function of global capitalism

That’s just as fact

> energy comes from somewhere and you have to eat food which takes from the environment, that somebody else can’t eat or some other process can’t utilize, so by a function of your existence you cost energy to maintain

Your assertion that "energy comes from somewhere" seems to be borrowing a concept from thermodynamics and apply it, at the scale of the entire universe, to an opinion about the properties of economic/political system.

Our planet, as a system, is unequivocally energy-positive. We are inundated with energy from the sun. Does that mean capitalism is positive-sum on Earth?

Humans can’t convert sun energy into biological energy. We aren’t plants.

However we eat plants and we eat the things that eat plants. So do you consider plants and animals part of your environment or not?

Is the basic requirements for having an economy being a set of humans in a society that has language and culture and exchange?

There’s no free lunch

Human activity takes from the non-human environment.

Under an abstracted society which you could call capitalism if you like these resource extractions are done with no view to externalities and we know this because even in a basic undergraduate economics degree you will be told companies do not price externalities and there are no pricing mechanisms for externalities outside of Reactionary measures historically

Again I’ll reference here the entire history of ecology and cybernetics has tried to make this abundantly clear that these are all connected and the fact that you seem befuddled about these connections tells me everything I need to know about this conversation

In your opinion which society / nation / government in human history is closest to your ideal of how things should be?

Closest seems to be the mondragon cooperative

Calling people ignorant and naive while doing nothing to address the actual arguments isn't going to convince anyone.

In the passage you linked to, the author argues that property is impossible, which seems like a rather different argument than the one you are making.

in fact it’s the opposite

If you read Prudhon thoroughly you’ll understand that his critique is that the entire concept of capitalism is based on the concept of property (undisputed) and the concept of property is an entirely made up mythical thing (disputed)

Opposite of what?

And what does that have to do with non-zero-sum games?

Side-note: imagine how much work law enforcement has put into these kinds of cases over the years only for the perpetrators of fraud to be pardoned.

Can't imagine how many people who work in law enforcement are furious with the current administration.

Game theory applied to the world is a useful simplification; reality is messy. In reality:

* Actors have access to limited computation

* The "rules" of the universe are unknowable and changing

* Available sets of actions are unknowable

* Information is unknowable, continuous, incomplete, and changes based on the frame of reference

* Even the concept of an "Actor" is a leaky abstraction

There's a field of study called Agent-based Computational Economics which explores how systems of actors behaving according to sets of assumptions behave. In this field you can see a lot of behaviour that more closely resembles real world phenomena, but of course if those models are highly predictive they have a tendency to be kept secret and monetized.

So for practical purposes, "game theory is inevitable" is only a narrowly useful heuristic. It's certainly not a heuristic that supports technological determinism.

Monopolist economic surplus?

Ok but does this take into account which industries are monopolistic or oligarchic?

In an industry with real competition you have tight margins and can't afford to spend money lobbying.

In an industry with a monopoly, you have huge margins can reduce the economic surplus of everyone else down to close to zero (often deep into the negative if you count for externalities, looking at you oil and gas), so they are strongly incentivized to fix your market and you can't afford not to lobby...