We need a new "Wealth of Nations" that incorporates modern physical concepts into the economic picture. "The Wealth of Planets" is the obvious extension, but it's not a concept that nationalist economics is really ready to embrace, as the natural conclusion is that nation-state borders are highly arbitrary in nature relative to things like primary photosynthetic production, the availability of food supplies and raw materials, etc.
This all becomes a lot clearer if you think about what a human colony on Mars would have to cope with. Assuming importing food from Earth is implausible, there's going to be an obvious limit to how many people each colony can support, determined largely by how much food each colony can produce (which in turn will depend on a robust air and water supply). 20th-century economic models imported from Earth won't make much sense in that situation, regardless of whether they're lefty or righty in nature.
Likely the next major stage in economic thinking will be the adoption of ecological economics, and in the quantitative sense, something like the extension of the thinking of Yale's G. Evelyn Hutchinson (1903-1991) on lake ecosystems to the entire human enterprise on planet Earth.
Unfortunately the social sciences and humanities (where economics seems to have found its academic berth, as well as in the business schools) are not going to be willing to adopt this perspective, as it means they'd have to learn biology, chemistry and physics. The alternative is to yank the economics departments out of their comfortable little holes and stick them in the natural sciences division...
The poor economists, just imagine them having to constrain their models in accordance with principles like the conservation of mass and energy...
>"Unless we have reached the end point of humankind’s moral development, it is pretty certain that the average educated human of the twenty-third century will look back at the average educated human of the twenty-first century and ask incredulously about a considerable number of our most cherished moral and political axiom"
While I generally sympathize with the article I think there's one issue where the ethics are going to be much more clearer than the economics being discussed. Animal rights. When this kind of thought experiment comes up that is the one thing I'm convinced people in a hundred years will consider us barbarians for, from experiments to factory farming. We hide it from ourselves already. Contentious current issues of inequality may be one thing but what we do to sentient life on the planet is what we're going to be judged for certainly. It's the one thing we never really go back on.
I think there are a few that we can easily see right now if we try to step outside ourselves. The typical western toilet is one filled with drinking water which we then pay money to try to process and recover the drinking water. All while other humans go without drinking water.
Eh? The humans who have potable water in their toilets are not stealing it from others. Drinking water (and the infrastructure that provides it) is not a zero sum game.
I expect future generations will criticize today's morality due to our failure to redistribute wealth and resources among all living and non-living phenomena (think mineral deposits and natural landscape features).
A disproportionate amount of resources and attention are given to humans who can live out tremendously meaningful existences without the material waste we see today. We'll see that human suffering is an essential part of our existence and not an aberration.
However, this worldview could only gain traction through political force, and the summoning of force would undermine the initial intention of the movement. Therefore what you see (partisan politics) is what you'll continue to get.
Awakening will continue to be available to all humans. I hope access to psychedelics will cement this, and that psychedelics will escape their association with a political "side". If we're fortunate, consciousness of a cosmic oneness and associated acts of "faith" will shift the battle lines in the political arena.
It seems like the question of “how could people have believed that” would be best answered by historians? And if this question is based on what you saw in a movie or novel, first you need to learn about how accurate it is. Did people really believe what you imagine they believed?
Bret Devereaux‘s writing particularly comes to mind. I liked his series about polytheism in ancient times:
Give equal reward to everyone regardless of their contribution or success, and people lose motivation for work. After a while the nation as a whole collapses. We have seen it in the communist era.
While I agree with the point, communist area just isn't good example of that. There were huge differences in wealth in communist society as well. It's probably because the pure communist society is impossible anyway - it's impossible to keep people away from maximizing their own well-being without violence.
And yet open source software exists. People create lots of valuable things just for fun.
"Communism" never called for equal pay for everybody. Communism is about common control over the means of production. There are lots of ways to distribute the proceeds.
One is to say, "Here's a basic level that everybody gets. Now we'll take whatever is leftover and pay for stuff according to market pricing."
There will still be farmers and garbage pickers and hotel maids. They just make the equivalent of $200,000 per year, which is what they deserve for doing unpleasant work. Tech CEOs, sports stars, and actors will continue to be incredibly desirable jobs -- they'll just get paid little to nothing.
Some will sit around all day, and I don't really care. It takes only one farmer to feed hundreds or even thousands of people. We'll pay that farmer a million dollars a year, and it'll be a bargain. He'll use it to buy art, or video games (same thing), or travel, or whatever the hell else he wants to do -- purchased from people who are getting paid in proportion to how hard something is, rather than because they were lucky enough to be desired.
> My point is that all production is social production. The productive assets of every age are the joint product of all preceding ages, and all those born into the present are legitimately joint heirs of those assets.
TLDR if you're trying to grapple through the 1,300 words leading up to the author's first point, this is it -- the wealth of a nation... that it exists, I suppose (ignoring that they occasionally have to get rebuilt from nothing).
The introductory essay has no examples, it is just a long quasi-theoretical discussion of things like causation and value. These concepts are completely intractable by real economic theory (because an economy is a complex dynamic system run by humans). So you need to look at the real world. What actually happens to the economy in nations where privately held wealth doesn't exist? What happens to the people? That is what you have to reckon with, morally. This ABC implies fairness stuff shows pretty well the amount of effort that was put into this.
Ah, the rehashed CEO vs. employee pay statistic. Yes, this may be true for CEOs at the largest of companies which have a lot of employees. But the vast majority of companies are not multinationals. But I agree that the vast majority of fortune 500 CEOs seem overpaid relative to what they do or skill. I'm sure it's possible to find someone who can do a equal or even better job for only $500k of compensation, not tens of millions like we sometimes see.
If "the vast majority" of fortune 500 CEOs are overpaid, why do boards continue to hire people that get paid so much? Why do shareholders put up with it? Couldn't they just say, "We will pay half what the current CEO makes, who wants the job?" and get an endless line of qualified applicants?
Or is it that when billions of dollars are on the line, quibbling over tens of millions is far too risky?
I don't know about anyone else here, but when I think about being CEO of my company, it does not look like an attractive job nor one I am qualified for. Now to do this for a giant org with tens of thousands of employees. I mean I could take the job to get a golden parachute as a "Fuck you, got mine" maneuver, but I would ruin the company and destroy many lives and careers in the process.
I find CEO pay to be up to the market, and I don't think the market is wrong.
Have a look at how the CEOs get their position in the first place; it's more of a network of people using their current positions to extract money while jerking each other off. It's not really a question of market effect or competence, it's more that if you try to find someone who asks for less and isn't in the network, the existing powers sink the stock price, buy shares and appoint a highly paid buddy to solve the problem they created in the first place.
If you want to see how large numbers of such executives can all be wrong, you need only glance over at the front page of HN as of late, at the daily layoffs mea culpa letters.
But the market can be wrong! In many situations. In fact, it's only "right" under the most ideal of circumstances, perfect information, perfect competition etc.
Then there's the question about what kind of right we're actually talking about here. To an ideal market, right is distributing resources to optimize profit. But if some people are less profitable than others, that clashes with other, arguably more natural, notions of "right".
I don't think the entire market is off by an order of magnitude for a huge group of people. There is a competitive market for competent CEOs and the pay reflects supply and demand.
Again, if you want to go throw your hat in the ring, be my guest. Clearly it's very easy to a lot of people here. Good luck
> compensation to the top 25 hedge fund managers equal the combined salaries of all kindergarten teachers in the country
Those are people who deserves (have the right) to be compensated better for their work. It's a failing of the market, the system, a moral and cultural failing that they are not.
I refuse to belive we can not tweak our economies to value peoples work more fairly.
The market when it comes to CEOs is people known to the board. There’s no open recruitment, no selection criteria, no blind resumes. It’s basically nepotism/cronyism.
While $10M is probably peanuts compared to the shareholder outcome from having a good CEO, I doubt the hiring process is actually able to distinguish between candidates well enough for that to make sense.
This all becomes a lot clearer if you think about what a human colony on Mars would have to cope with. Assuming importing food from Earth is implausible, there's going to be an obvious limit to how many people each colony can support, determined largely by how much food each colony can produce (which in turn will depend on a robust air and water supply). 20th-century economic models imported from Earth won't make much sense in that situation, regardless of whether they're lefty or righty in nature.
Likely the next major stage in economic thinking will be the adoption of ecological economics, and in the quantitative sense, something like the extension of the thinking of Yale's G. Evelyn Hutchinson (1903-1991) on lake ecosystems to the entire human enterprise on planet Earth.
Unfortunately the social sciences and humanities (where economics seems to have found its academic berth, as well as in the business schools) are not going to be willing to adopt this perspective, as it means they'd have to learn biology, chemistry and physics. The alternative is to yank the economics departments out of their comfortable little holes and stick them in the natural sciences division...
The poor economists, just imagine them having to constrain their models in accordance with principles like the conservation of mass and energy...