[ExI] Social justice and transhumanist

[Anders Sandberg]

On 20/02/2012 02:31, Giovanni Santostasi wrote:
> Too many transhumanist embrace capitalistic ideals. I think we should 
> be associated with social justice and equity. I think these would 
> bring the singularity faster than unchecked capitalism and liberalism. 
> Here a nice article on how the Scandinavians overcame the 1 % : 

HAHAHAHA!!! Sorry, but as a Swede I find this article hilarious. So that 
is how the American left sees us :-)

The article forgets that many historians think Sweden was very close to 
going in the direction of fascism or communism in the early 20th century.

The problem in learning from Scandinavia is that these societies are 
small (Sweden's entire population could fit into New York City) and 
culturally homogeneous. It is not hard to be consensus oriented if 
everybody more or less believes the same thing and social distances are 
by necessity are small. Sure, some of these ideas are sensible, like 
unions that work with the employers because they realise they have 
mostly shared interests. But the Scandinavian model does not scale well 
to big and diverse societies, since the consensus-seeking is not 
possible or efficient enough.

It is notable that the current Swedish political export since the 90s is 
clever liberalisation: how to deregulate markets, school choice (even 
including for-profit schools), handling bank crises lightly and how to 
run welfare states on market principles.

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University