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Today I have been ranting a lot about economics, unfortunately in a kind of disconnected way responding to individual points.
Basically, I believe that the best economic system goes as follows:
1) Everything, at least theoretically, goes into a big pot.
2) The first thing that comes out of this big pot is a very basic standard of living for everyone. This is a big area of debate in itself - what constitutes a 'basic standard of living', is it 'a hut and some corn' or 'a house of your own, a private hospital room when required, and a car'? But this should be basically 'the things which people need to have which they can't be trusted to buy for themselves' - food, medical care, shelter.
3) The second thing that comes out of the pot is a 'general allowance' which should be enough to give everyone a 'reasonable' standard of living. This is the bit where one person might spend on a widescreen TV and another might spend on Photoshop and another might spend on running a car - different people have very different priorities for 'basic standard of living' so you can't just impose one standard set of services on everyone.
4) After that, surplus resources get apportioned via some system which is very much like today's capitalist system, although possibly with some special bonuses for providing socially useful things that people don't generally see fit to directly demand (especially things which ensure everyone can recieve their Very Basic Standard Of Living), which would be the equivalent of today's public sector jobs.
The consequences of this is that nobody _has_ to work to live, which probably reduces overall productivity.
But additionally nobody has to do a job they don't like or aren't suited to in order to live, preventing them from being productive in their 'hobby' field which might actually turn out to be very useful and productive and end up being paid for by other people eventually, but they would never have been able to get the practice in to be good enough to get paid for it if they had been forced to mop floors at the local store in order to eat.
Some people just like to be useful; some people like to clean things. We would probably have to do without so many shop assistants, but that's okay because we know how to do automated checkouts now. We would probably have to community-organise or have larger incentives for some public services, like collecting the bins. Surely that is okay too - we should incentivise people who are doing low-status jobs by 'you want to have nice things' rather than 'you want to eat tomorrow'.
Obviously this is all hopelessly naive and not thought through, but I hope you get the jist.
The main objections / obstacles to this system appear to be:
1) Dislike of freeloaders. 'Why should I pay for lazy people', anger about 'benefit scroungers' etc. People don't like to work for people who are 'being lazy' and not 'pulling their weight' to take some of it even if they're only taking away just enough for them to live on. I'm not sure how to fix this - it seems like a moral failing to me (my slightly confused moral system tells me that one should be happy to give stuff away to those less fortunate, regardless of whether they 'deserve' it or not), and also it doesn't make sense from a practical perspective (practically, society is better off with the freeloaders kept happy and well-fed than having them be resentful), but it appears to be a deep instinctive / emotional response (and probably has good reasons that I'm not seeing because I don't share it) and hence I can't see how to cope with it.
2) Ability to use infinite upsides / desire to provide for one's children. Linked to the above is the problem that taking away 'surplus' from people who have 'earned' it has actual tangible effects on their life expectancy and the projected success of their children, and so is 'unfair'. Unfortunately, whilst it is true that some people gain wealth due to being hard-working or virtuous in some similar respect, most people gain wealth because of circumstances, upbringing, and general 'luck' factors - but disproportionate quantities of people view their wealth as 'earned' entirely by themselves in any case, because that is a beneficial rationalisation to an individual making it. It being therefore impossible to determine who has 'earned' their wealth and who hasn't, it is only fair to redistribute fairly evenly (based on marginal value) from everyone, even if this does cause injustice to those who really did work very hard for their wealth.
3) Removal of incentives. The more you tax people, and the less 'deserving' the recipients of the tax money, the more likely people are to go 'well, I won't bother working then'. I acknoweldge that this would be a problem in some cases, but think it is a worthwhile tradeoff for avoiding the suffering of those who can't find employment even with their best efforts, or who get stuck in unpleasant employment but can't leave for fear of losing basic necessities. On the other end of the scale, giving people a reasonable standard of living for free will cause some of them not to work at all - but mostly I contend that this probably means the job wasn't worth doing in the first place, and I'm not sure that many people would rever to a life of complete unproductivity, instead they would get bored and express productivity in new and unexpected ways.
I'm sure there are a lot more but this is probably the extent of the rambling I should do whilst I should be finishing lunch and getting back to working at my own money-earning job (my enthusiasm for working on other projects neatly demonstrating that actually some people work _more_ and _better_ when monetary incentive isn't the incentive on offer...).
Basically, I believe that the best economic system goes as follows:
1) Everything, at least theoretically, goes into a big pot.
2) The first thing that comes out of this big pot is a very basic standard of living for everyone. This is a big area of debate in itself - what constitutes a 'basic standard of living', is it 'a hut and some corn' or 'a house of your own, a private hospital room when required, and a car'? But this should be basically 'the things which people need to have which they can't be trusted to buy for themselves' - food, medical care, shelter.
3) The second thing that comes out of the pot is a 'general allowance' which should be enough to give everyone a 'reasonable' standard of living. This is the bit where one person might spend on a widescreen TV and another might spend on Photoshop and another might spend on running a car - different people have very different priorities for 'basic standard of living' so you can't just impose one standard set of services on everyone.
4) After that, surplus resources get apportioned via some system which is very much like today's capitalist system, although possibly with some special bonuses for providing socially useful things that people don't generally see fit to directly demand (especially things which ensure everyone can recieve their Very Basic Standard Of Living), which would be the equivalent of today's public sector jobs.
The consequences of this is that nobody _has_ to work to live, which probably reduces overall productivity.
But additionally nobody has to do a job they don't like or aren't suited to in order to live, preventing them from being productive in their 'hobby' field which might actually turn out to be very useful and productive and end up being paid for by other people eventually, but they would never have been able to get the practice in to be good enough to get paid for it if they had been forced to mop floors at the local store in order to eat.
Some people just like to be useful; some people like to clean things. We would probably have to do without so many shop assistants, but that's okay because we know how to do automated checkouts now. We would probably have to community-organise or have larger incentives for some public services, like collecting the bins. Surely that is okay too - we should incentivise people who are doing low-status jobs by 'you want to have nice things' rather than 'you want to eat tomorrow'.
Obviously this is all hopelessly naive and not thought through, but I hope you get the jist.
The main objections / obstacles to this system appear to be:
1) Dislike of freeloaders. 'Why should I pay for lazy people', anger about 'benefit scroungers' etc. People don't like to work for people who are 'being lazy' and not 'pulling their weight' to take some of it even if they're only taking away just enough for them to live on. I'm not sure how to fix this - it seems like a moral failing to me (my slightly confused moral system tells me that one should be happy to give stuff away to those less fortunate, regardless of whether they 'deserve' it or not), and also it doesn't make sense from a practical perspective (practically, society is better off with the freeloaders kept happy and well-fed than having them be resentful), but it appears to be a deep instinctive / emotional response (and probably has good reasons that I'm not seeing because I don't share it) and hence I can't see how to cope with it.
2) Ability to use infinite upsides / desire to provide for one's children. Linked to the above is the problem that taking away 'surplus' from people who have 'earned' it has actual tangible effects on their life expectancy and the projected success of their children, and so is 'unfair'. Unfortunately, whilst it is true that some people gain wealth due to being hard-working or virtuous in some similar respect, most people gain wealth because of circumstances, upbringing, and general 'luck' factors - but disproportionate quantities of people view their wealth as 'earned' entirely by themselves in any case, because that is a beneficial rationalisation to an individual making it. It being therefore impossible to determine who has 'earned' their wealth and who hasn't, it is only fair to redistribute fairly evenly (based on marginal value) from everyone, even if this does cause injustice to those who really did work very hard for their wealth.
3) Removal of incentives. The more you tax people, and the less 'deserving' the recipients of the tax money, the more likely people are to go 'well, I won't bother working then'. I acknoweldge that this would be a problem in some cases, but think it is a worthwhile tradeoff for avoiding the suffering of those who can't find employment even with their best efforts, or who get stuck in unpleasant employment but can't leave for fear of losing basic necessities. On the other end of the scale, giving people a reasonable standard of living for free will cause some of them not to work at all - but mostly I contend that this probably means the job wasn't worth doing in the first place, and I'm not sure that many people would rever to a life of complete unproductivity, instead they would get bored and express productivity in new and unexpected ways.
I'm sure there are a lot more but this is probably the extent of the rambling I should do whilst I should be finishing lunch and getting back to working at my own money-earning job (my enthusiasm for working on other projects neatly demonstrating that actually some people work _more_ and _better_ when monetary incentive isn't the incentive on offer...).
no subject
Date: 2011-03-29 04:49 pm (UTC)From: