But, "the economy" is generally just a descriptor for what people need/want, and what they're willing to do for it.
A phrase like "slaves of the economy", with the implication that someone should be entitled to escape that condition, is about as ridiculous as thinking you are a "slave to nutrients" or a "slave to oxygen" or any other physical constraint. You can't escape it; you have to eat--what are you willing to do to get food?
However, what I think you're probably more upset about, and what you probably should instead be phrasing it as, is economic manipulation. That is something that can legitimately be unjust. Power and information are some tools to manipulate or benefit from economic conditions to a greater extent than others, and therefore have more boats or leisure time or political positions (or food or N95 masks or jobs etc etc)
That's an easy one: no way in hell, it'd be SO much worse. Our society can only exist with extreme specialization.
Hell, if we take into account that the land available couldn't even remotely support the people living on it (~2km2 per person per year), so there'd be a famine under those conditions and you'll what's being suggested as "alternative" is effectively extreme suffering followed by death for 95%+ of the population, maybe 99%+.
Most people on this site are beneficiaries of this economy, fortunate to have many options and resources. Not everyone is so lucky.
I'd like to think it would be possible to build a specialized, prosperous economy without economic exploitation, but we certainly aren't there yet.
For example, a public park may be a great asset to the people that live around it. But it generates little to none in terms of GDP. Privatizing it and turning it into a parking lot has more economic activity, while making the lives of people meaningfully worse.
That we don't have good measurements to reconcile that contradiction is what turns us into "slaves of the economy"
> The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
We do have many measurements to reconcile that.
We know how much particulate air pollution from fossil fuel combustion increases health care expenditures. We know how not having save places to exercise outdoors affects general health and results in sedentary lifestyle diseases.
But most of our decisions, individually and as a society, are predicated on short term convenience and gratification, not long term health, so we ignore the measures we already have.
It's weird to me that we organise our lives based on one social science and ignore all the others.
40-50% of most countries production goes to government projects, so no we don't ignore everything else than capitalism. We are about 50-60% capitalist at most.
Note that government projects also need you to work, work is a part of every system, it isn't capitalism that forces you to work people are forced to work in socialist and communist states as well.
Sorry, I don't get how this relates to what I said. I mentioned that it's surprising that we use one model of the world to organise our society (i.e economics) and you countered that the government is part of the economy (which is trivially true, but doesn't really relate to my point). Can you help me understand what you mean here?
It’s not exactly about what people want, but rather what capital needs to grow and increase its value. Most people have no say in these decisions and are left with only two options: comply or starve.
Naturally, power is expressed through whatever arrangement is decided upon, and therefore "manipulation" is guaranteed to benefit those with the power to change the system. Since the number of people who benefit the most, and therefore have the most power, is very small then it stands to reason that your information imbalance arrises from the exclusivity of this arrangement.
For example: the owners of retailers, restaurants, and other such businesses decided that they will not accept prolonged lockdowns. Therefore, the entire system acquiesced to their demands. Consequently, one million people died in the United States alone.
So, we are "slaves to the economy" because all of the decisions are made for the benefit of the ~2% of people who own a business. Those who were allowed to isolate, such as tech workers and such, just let this happen without anything more than a "tsk tsk", and that was because ultimately those people wanted a coffee delivered to their front door and 10% gains on their portfolio (yes, I hate my co-workers). Self interested people enabled by a comfortable, morally bankrupt middle class that tosses the working poor to the wolves for a chance to sell their carcass - that is "the economy"
Now, "the economy" said recently that this middle class can go stick it where the sun doesn't shine, and forget about work from home. Guess this allegiance to "the economy" really did get us nowhere, huh?
No?
The “economy” allows you to trade something that YOU are capable of into an imaginary representation of currency which you can trade in return for things you need but are incapable of doing yourself.
And it does that so well and so effectively, that mankind has achieved a quality of life unseen in human history. Children don’t randomly starve to death during a winter, your mom doesn’t just randomly die from an infection any more and we have a pretty chilled live compared to our ancestors 10 thousand years ago I believe.
Yeah, I don’t know what the economy has given me in return either.
It'd be like saying we have cigarettes to deal with stress or mental health professions to deal with excessive expectations of society. They don't address the cause in the first place.
You used to start out at an entry level job, and work your way up to something better. You could see how to get to "better" from where you were, and what it would take. When you got to "better", you were glad for the improvement. Yeah, the guy owning the factory had it a lot better than you. But as long as he gave you a route to a better life, that was good enough for almost everybody.
What changed? In my view, three things.
First, the route to "better" is a lot narrower these days. People are a lot less convinced that they can get there from where they are.
Second, people don't expect to have to work their way up. They expect to have it all on day 1. They expect instant success. When they don't get it, they get discouraged.
Third, people are finding that the promise is empty. A better job gets you a nicer apartment that feels just as empty as the previous one did. You're just as lonely there. Your job feels just as much like a soul-crushing grind as it did, maybe more so. In some fundamental way, the stuff you can buy with money isn't enough. People don't know where to find it, but they kind of expect that their job will give them what's missing. And it doesn't.
But everything else in the economy (extreme taxation, medical care, housing) has become increasingly predatory over the decades.
> how to diagnose and treat diabetes
Take this as an example. The "economy", as a machine, has learned to subsidize corn syrup, infiltrate every food with forms of sugar including what children eat at school (fuck chocolate milk, PB&J sandwiches, canned fruit in sugar syrup, none are healthy), then profit off of them when they get diabetes later in life. Insurance-scam them by making them pay premiums per month but still not cover their medical costs in full, make them pay for any preventative care they want to have because a doctor didn't "prescribe" it and it wouldn't be profitable to prevent disease. Make healthy food expensive, so that you can get as many people to get diabetes as possible. Lobby against having kitchens in schools so that they are forced to serve even more unhealthy shit. This is what capitalism as a machine has learned.
Diabetes shouldn't even be such a pervasive thing. It's highly preventable. It is in fact of the most preventable of common diseases. The economy machine, however, has realized that diabetes is profitable for the people who own and control the machine (Wall Street, insurance companies, banks).
This is just one example, but the entire system has become predatory.
Can you provide an example of this?
2. The company is taxed when they pay me, I pay taxes on that money again, and then I pay taxes yet again when I buy stuff with it (most of that money is being used to pay someone else's taxes), and then in some cases yet again just for owning it. It's frankly bonkers. 80%+ of money I make for the machine goes to paying taxes of sorts. I see very little of it.
Yeah, the country needs money to support infrastructure, you say. Fine. For what the US provides its citizens, it really doesn't need that much. There are countries that tax at similar rates to the US. They have well-developed railway systems, almost free healthcare, free university, they control crime effectively, they're delivering actual value to the citizens. If you dig into it, the US is a massive money laundering scheme -- the economy has learned to tax the fuck out of citizens without actually returning that value to the citizens themselves.
"has become increasingly predatory over the decades."
Can you show this for taxation?
Also this isn't true "80%+ of money I make for the machine goes to paying taxes of sorts"
~40% of every dollar produced in the US gets collected to federal, state, or local taxes. It is entirely possible that this could be 80% for some people.
Tax as a percent of the economy has gone through the roof, both as a percent of GDP, and as inflation adjusted dollars.
If you compare to a benchmark like the 1940s, tax% of GDP has more than doubled, and GDP has increased ~4.5x. This means someone today pays about 10X the taxes (controlling for for inflation!). State and local taxes have grown even faster than federal taxes.
Is the typical taxpayer getting 10 time more back from the government? Do we have 10X the schooling? 10X the police and safety? 10X the roads?
How?
So the amount increased 10x , what does that have to do with getting 10x your money back?
Or are you saying that since it's 10x more there should be 10x greater quality?
Ok... the interstate system, the military, etc
I dont think the changes in military or interstate justify a 1,000% higher taxes on an ongoing basis.
with respect to 40+%, property tax would be an easy way to eat up an arbitrarily large portion of income. Similarly, fixed fees and fines can eat up a lot for low earners.
> I dont think the changes in military or interstate justify a 1,000% higher taxes on an ongoing basis.
It's not 1000% higher.
That's cherrypicking. Income tax as % of GDP basically has stayed the same at around 8% since after ww2. Most people wouldn't think of the entire time period past ww2 as "over the decades".
I think the more interesting part is that the expenses grow with GDP, more than the % itself changing.
For those of us that have been around for a while, it seems shocking that real, inflation controlled government taxes and spending per capitia is >2x that of the 80's, because experientially, many of the services seems no different, if not in decline.
I also think it is interesting to think about what government duties become more and less difficult to maintain with growth, and the implications for what types of objectives the government is well and poorly suited to achieve.
I think the Baumol effect is a helpful lens for exploring this, so I think you.
You will sacrifice more for this system you see little benefit from. You may be called to fight for it, and you may even die for it, and the people who benefit the most from all of this killing and waste will eventually lose their hold on power due to the putrid state of the system itself.
In the country with the highest GDP per capita it may appear to be prevalent more because people seem to make VOLUNTARY choices with respect to their diet and exercise regime that do not tend to go well with their health.
Capitalism is not equal to “the economy”. “Currency” on its own doesn’t increase the wealth of a society. It is correct that unconstrained capitalism is unstable. Most countries in the world understand that.
If you're not struggling, congratulations.
They have nothing you describe -- no agriculture, no antibiotics, no farming, no electricity. (The fridge, however, they got covered.) They are quite happy that way. Certainly happier than the people around me in NYC.
Perhaps quality of life is about more than just material goods.
With subsistence agriculture the US can support maybe 2-3% of it's current population. The EU is (far) worse on this front. And with the Eskimo's way of life it can support 0.01%. So what about that little problem? And this can't be fixed without changing that lifestyle ...
That this superior way of life is suffering and death for nearly everyone never seems to get discussed for some reason.
Edit: Since alecst has obviously already read Kabloona, I might as well give a few more that are on that "list": Winter Wheat by Mildred Walker, Goatwalking by Jim Corbett, and Hyssop by Kevin McIlvoy. Maybe you'd like one of them too.
Obviously when you zoom in it's not black and white at all, eg the US has incredible GDP but also lots of abject poverty. But even in some imaginary proto-USA where the inequality is 10x worse, if the economy shrinks, fixing that is going to be harder than when it expands.
I agree with your objection that it's ridiculous to do "everything" for the economy. But wanting the economy to be healthy should be a thing everybody can get behind, from far left to center to far right, even if they violently disagree about how to take it from there. So a paper called "the economist" worrying about the economy sounds pretty sane to me.
“But I can’t see what is what the economy has given us in return” is such an absurd statement that the only generous interpretation is that you really didn’t think through it before posting.
People rightly care a lot about the economy because they care a lot about the goods and services that they consume but don’t produce themselves. We don’t sacrifice everything to the economy, no country in the world does, but it holds extremely high priority.
Even driving my own vehicles around the world I spend less than $20k a year, so I don’t need to work much.
I just don’t participate in the things I don’t want to - no phone, no tv, no new clothes, used car.
I Enjoy time, not money & things.
Life is too short to _not_ do that, in my opinion.
20k is higher than 90% of the global population.
Of course if I were content with walks in the park, I’m sure $10k/year would be enough.
Most people thinking “the top one percent” are the problem don’t realise they are part of the one percent (and thus part of the problem)
https://bsky.app/profile/robertsaunders.bsky.social/post/3la...
He starts out by noting that the economy as an idea is very recent invention. And yet it tops the list of voters concerns.
"If you had told Mr Gladstone that "the economy has grown this year", he would not have understood what those words meant."
(William Gladstone was the British Prime Minister, on and off, between 1868 and 1894. He is considered to be one of the great British PMs.)
"Gladstone was the most financially literate statesman of the 19th Century. But the idea of something called "the economy", which could "grow" or "shrink", did not exist."
"It (THE economy) first appeared in a major manifesto in 1950 and didn't get its own section until 1955. That's also when terms like "economic growth" appeared in Parliament."
“What we now call "economics" was usually termed "political economy”. "Economy" was not a technocratic exercise, but a moral and political arena."
"… it subordinated a moral and political judgment (what is "good economy?") to a blunter question: how do we make "the" economy bigger? In reality, economic choices were still moral and political. But they were cast as technocratic questions about "competence" and know-how."
"(and) … it turned "the economy" into a "thing", to be weighed against other, different "things": such as "the environment" or "saving lives". And it encouraged a tendency to make "growth" the goal, without asking what was growing, why and to whose benefit."
I recommend reading the whole thread if you are interested to learn how we got here.
And looking forward?
"Recognising that our concepts are historically specific - that they have been different in the past and might be different in the future - helps us to imagine other ways of talking and thinking in the present. In an age of so many economic challenges, we surely need more of that."
Stuff. You like stuff, I like stuff. If you had more stuff of one kind you could do different stuff, good stuff, even. And the people out there doing good stuff could do even more if they had more stuff to do it with. Everywhere you look, people like stuff. People with more stuff are happier on average, every time it's measured. People with serious stuff deficits end up being the ones to start wars, even.
"The Economy" is just the stuff. There's no magic here. You're imagining a villain, but it's all just stuff.
(People do go hungry anyway. We often do kind of a bad job feeding everyone, considering the enormous technological and logistical resources available now, but that's a historical anomaly)
Yes, some people have more money than they know what to do with (and, I would argue, than is good for them or us), but I've seen no reasonable suggestions that as many of us can have what we want without a reasonably open market economy. I don't think we're at a local optimum in the fine details of the rules for that economy, but I don't think moving to a whole different part of the possibility space is likely to be better than where we are now.
Victorian Britain has the biggest navy in the world because it could afford the biggest. Tony Blair has the most political discretion of any modern PM largely because the economy was so strong during his tenure.
And our words are necessarily poor at defining an abstract conceptual system that defies our comprehension. The definition of emergent as apples to an economy is hard to grok. And hard to communicate, even when the two communicators have a common mental model (sometimes education, sometimes acquired via social media or propoganda).
You can see politicians on the receiving end of systemic forces - where it seems like the politician doesn't comprehend what is happening because their model is wrong. We then create stories about their incentives - layering unintended misdirection on top of our collective ignorance.
Reminds me of Heinlein's razor, lol: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
On the topic of communicating complex systems, Dynamic Land[1] is explicitly working on explaining systems through interactive visualizations (among other things), you might find it interesting! It's still in the research phase, but I love that it engages as many senses as possible to help build intuition.
That said, I would definitely love to visit the labs to have a play with some of the stuff they have been developing demonstrated in https://dynamicland.org/publications/ (Note: can't click/tap pretty tabs on right - the headings on the page are the links to click/tap)
We all live in a global trading economy. This has been the case for thousands of years. We don't have a global dictatorship. This is good.
Also, this is a thing:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-worldbank?tab=chart&c...
One of the reasons why is because you can clearly see that life today in most rich economies has plummeted in quality. Technology has spilled over from the US but if you take away those gains, there is very little underlying improvement. Skills are collapsing, governments/companies struggle to provide basic services, disability is skyrocketing, it is a complete mess (and this is often linked to "the economy", look at Canada, look at the UK, set on paths of permanent decline for short-term political gain).
Like if someone is commuting an hour working full time in a LCOL area and can't afford a house, that would be scored lower than if someone is working remotely for a huge salary from a various resorts around the world, which would be a higher score.
There is an issue with people being systemically negative but it is very obvious which countries are thriving at a high-level from aggregate behaviour.
The problem is that some societies (unsurprisingly the ones that have a problem in this area) do not want confront this. So you have countries where the economy is collapsing, it is obvious to everyone...and they are getting economic policies from corporate lobbyists...to fix "the economy". I think this is getting at the spirit of the OP's point, most people who talk about "the economy" just have a very short-term, very self-interested take.
How do you measure civic participation? Why would you even try? It is genuinely baffling to me that people view quantification as an end in itself when any understanding of human behaviour tells you that a huge proportion of the population just shut their brain off when a number appears (that is the point made in the original post, we have this problem with "the economy" that leads to people making such bad policy choices because of this mindset).
I am effectively being paid less and the expectation is that I somehow work more. In fact, and this is genuinely the part that gets me more than anything else, when I mentioned it to my extended family during a social function, the response was: "can't you work on a train?".
I don't get it man. Is it some sort of weird generational gap? What gives?
When economists refer to the economy doing well, they talk about a bunch of indices being in a range they consider good. These indices are constructed in a way that is supposed to make them correlated with desirable outcomes on a large scale, but what's considered desirable is ideological and the indices themselves are often useless.
When capitalists talk about the economy doing well, they mean that they're getting richer at a satisfactory rate. People are buying their products, and can afford to pay a lot for them. Their assets are appreciating.
You probably guessed that these aren't the same things, but they're being conflated.
There is some construction going on; seasonal adjustment is useful for the same reason you shouldn't assume the unemployment rate goes up every weekend.
Not to mention that considering full employment as the desirable state assumes a certain ideology (work is good, low unemployment pushes wages up which is good, etc.).
Things like CPI are important because they underpin things like wage increases in contracts as well as government pensions. It's probably one of the most analyzed numbers that is released.
And while there's always measurement error, getting things accurately—especially trends—determines planning for things like factory expansions, production runs, supply chain contracts months out. These will determine staffing and employment needs—the livelihoods of many, many people.
"The economy" means employed people who have to pay rent/mortgages, groceries, etc.
You know how some countries are, well, poorer than others? That's what economic measures are measuring, among other things.
In general a good economy has opportunities, and stability. A bad economy is filled with many pitfalls, perverse outcomes, and human suffering. What’s interesting is how the effects of a bad economy divide between people who are devastated and those who weather the storm and maybe even profit—smaller and smaller groups, which is an inversion of what we want from a good economy.
All common sense, no? I think you’d have a peculiar life if these things dont effect you.
The economy, namely free market capitalism, has become the new state religion in the west.
Of course, it is clear that politics has impact on investors but, other than being able to vote, there should be no other way to influence politics in a democracy.
Everything is the economy, its just how its set up, and how it can be taken advantage of, is the problem.
"The economy" is a sum of all human activity. Not the other way around. We don't work for "the economy". "The economy" is the result of what we do.
Trying to understand what we do, why we do it and how to make life better for everyone seems like a pretty good goal IMO.
Travel, entertainment, and healthcare for example.
Food, housing, etc
Reductions in extreme poverty, increases life expectancy, improved access to education and healthcare.
Now complete the ritual. Take their place and bring peace and prosperity to your new empire.
On the flip side I can wholeheartedly recommend the Margaritaville episode of South Park! Such a beautiful satire.
Now, complete the ritual. Take their place and bring health and care to your new empire.
More wealth for more people faster than anything else in human history? Add in all the things that come along with that like reduced infant mortality, improved longevity, less violence, etc.
Compare that to what anti-economy marxists deliver: a lot of ideology followed by death of millions.
Markets are really good at solving problems and organizing resources efficiently - they’re not perfect and exist within political natsec concerns, can have bad incentives that lead to tragedy of the commons types of outcomes, but those can and often are mitigated when it’s in the interest of the parties to do so.
Many of the people who call themselves that misunderstand it though and indeed are just opposed to having to produce anything.
Edit: In fact, it works so well, you can ask what it does for you.
You’re not bartering potatoes for a dowry. Seriously man get over yourself
I'm not sure if this on its own is enough to make up for the negatives, but it did personally restore some perspective that there is some real good to it alongside the bad. So I've personally shifted from more doomer sentiments on peak capitalism to feeling a little more hopeful. (That despite the dysfunctions of it there could still be a functional good foundation worth keeping and iterating on rather than the only solution being throwing the baby out with the bathwater.)
Capitalism is a concept, a tool to organize production in a society. It doesn't do anything by itself.
And the capitalist didn't do any of those things.
It was the social democracy that demanded and made capitalists around the world to share the benefits of the system to the rest of the society.
For example in the Victorian era Britain the working class people were dirt poor working 16h a way 7 days a week. The capitalists didn't give anything willingly the working people had to demand these things via unions, labor movements and social democracy.
Is it basically the idea that the good we've gotten out of it (like driving down extreme poverty) has required 'social democracy' as another concept or force, to bend capitalism towards something better? And that a more useful perspective is zooming out from just capitalism by itself to include that?
I do feel like I still have a pretty limited understanding of how all of this fits together, so I appreciate you trying to teach me something here.
Workers negotiating and fighting for better condition, and joining forces with other workers have nothing to do with social democracy, it's a normal market mechanism to regulate the supply and demand of workers.
Where social democracy enters is with the political activism and the relative legislation, limiting working hours and banning child labor.
If genocide is bad for the economy, then I'm against it."
[1]: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo181707...
There's a reason would-be socialist states have back-tracked from central control of economy and allowed competition (Lenin did this so quickly in spite of his zeal it would make your head spin). They kept the authoritarianism though. Once those tendrils get in, they're tough to get out. Only a few countries shed that in the 20th century, one of them being South Korea; places that embraced Liberalism, because they had the good fortune to have leaders with sense.
Liberty qua Liberalism is good, and the checks-and-balances are meant to evolve over time. The alternatives are abject failures, and you'll propose nothing that hasn't been one.
Regardless, I stand by my derogatory comments about social Darwinists.
> the austerity measures actually caused more pain for most people
You're thinking of the Great Depression, not the Great Recession. Have you looked up just how much the U.S. government spent in that time? The bailouts, etc? This was not austerity.
I am most definitely thinking of the Great Recession which I lived through. I encourage you to research the low growth era that followed and what economists think now. You won't have to go far back because five years ago when the pandemic started there was a lot of writing about the failings of that era. In fact, the consensus seems to be we over-corrected this time, but still better than what we did in 2008. But yes, we made the investors who created the mess whole while making the American citizens eat the costs. It's a bit baffling to have something so widely written about dismissed so confidently by someone who doesn't seem to understand what we are even discussing.