by
Bob Hughes
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Equality, not competition or hierarchy, is 'the mother of invention'. Progress slows or goes into reverse as soon as ideas are appropriated by hierarchical organizations. Inequality is sustained when a few people persuade the majority that there is no alternative. [...]
not sure if the Thatcher reference is intentional or not but it's great
[...] 'Technology' often implicitly refers to something you are expected to turn over to 'the guys who understand it'.
great quote. from Ted Nelson's self-published book Computer Lib, apparently a foundational text for the hacker movement (why haven't I heard of it????)
A key part of any Utopian project should be to discuss widely and think deeply about the human natures we want to have and the ones we do not want to have, and to devise the kinds of social arrangements that will support and reward those characteristics.
[...] Demand for large, luxury cars fell abruptly; labor historian Rob Rooke records that demand fell steadily from 150,000 sold in 1929 to only 10,000 a year by 1937. Perhaps this was because it no longer felt right to drive in luxury when people were starving, and perhaps, following rumored or actual attacks on wealthy limousine-owners, rich people suddenly felt 'that ostentatious displays of wealth could cost them their lives'.
BRING THIS BACK
change the attitude of one group to change the behaviour of another
[...] unequal societies have a short-term competitive edge over more egalitarian ones because those who take the decisions do not have to suffer their consequences. Rogers writes: 'unequal societies are better able to survive resource shortages by sequestering mortality in the lower classes'. In the longer term, however, these societies can only survive by proliferation--finding fresh populations to bear the burdens they create. [...]
citing Deborah Rogers (Stanford)
Positionality is a valuable concept for anyone who is interested in making society more fair, because it highlights the fact that the system is not composed entirely of people who believe in it and want it, but perhaps very largely of people who have been dragooned into it and would love to be free of it. This may even be true of some members of the rich elite. [...]
referring to positional luxury goods (Veblen goods?)
[...] the publication in 1973 of Fischer Black and Myron Scholes's algorithm for the pricing of options.
Before Black and Scholes's work, derivatives had been a small fraction of all investments, essentially the contracts known as 'futures,' [...] Black and Scholes's algorithm allowed almost everything else to be priced the same way, including personal debt. It was what made the 'hedge fund' possible, and a world economy in which financial assets completely eclipsed the real ones that they supposedly represented. [...]
something to remember
The power-shift towards finance became self-reinforcing. Financial institutions deployed their increased lobbying power successfully against the legal barriers between speculative and retail banking [...] This drew creative effort and investment into the monetary system itself, and away from the productive economy for which monetary systems in theory exist.
referring, obviously, to Glass-Steagall (introduced 1933; repealed 1999)
[...] The subtext is: there is no need to wonder about the future because brilliant minds are working on it, and it will be nice. Everything you could wish for is being taken care of.
imo this is the sort of attitude that dystopian/YA fiction comes up against
Conventional economics doesn't capture all of the economy's costs and, according to its critics, it isn't meant to. The Harvard economist Steven Marglin argued in his 2008 book The Dismal Science that mainstream economics has always been the servant of powerful interests, which naturally want reassurance that what they are doing is for the best, and don't wish to hear otherwise. Mainstream economics, he writes, 'has been shaped by an agenda focused on showing that markets are good for people rather than on discovering how markets actually work.' So economists still maintain that money (as defined by the banking and finance community) is the best measure of the human value of economic activities--even though we see more and more examples every day of environments and lives ruined by the pursuit of monetary profit.