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.

[–] mrosswind@hexbear.net 1 points 1 hour ago (1 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.

[–] frisbird@lemmy.ml 1 points 13 minutes ago

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.