Can you made a whole society wealthier?

May 26, 2019 6:51 AM

This essay is my attempt to explore that question. I look at the ways people have been successful in the past, where their societies invested, who actually got to keep the wealth, and who is trying to copy each strategy today. I touch on Politics, Economics, History, Culture, and Technology — a few of my favourite things — and all play a part in building Wealth.

Conrad Bastable (previously) spends, erm, 17,000 words constructing an OSI model of sorts for economics.

Here's a TLDR version if that's too much for you.

Special guest appearances made by Token Meme and Artw.

posted by ragtag (11 comments total)

Probably not but the Czar could not afford a cell phone. Can tech bring housing, medical and food to a reasonable level?
posted by sammyo at 7:14 AM on May 26, 2019

control F: Norway - nothing
control F: Scandinavia - nothing
control F: Social democracy - nothing
control F: Keynes - nothing

I'm not going to bother reading this. We know how to do this. It has been done recently and it's not difficult. You tax the rich and let unions do their stuff. These days, even more than earlier, you have to add international solidarity and to isolate tax havens so they can't work. Start by voting. If you are European, vote today!
posted by mumimor at 7:25 AM on May 26, 2019 [40 favorites]

You made the correct choice mumimor. I read part of the article and it is as dumb as you can imagine.
posted by Balna Watya at 8:42 AM on May 26, 2019 [5 favorites]

No offence to the asshole who wrote this, but he sounds like an asshole.
posted by tummy_rub at 8:46 AM on May 26, 2019 [6 favorites]

This cites ArtW of this here MetaFilter as a violent revolutionary?
posted by AnhydrousLove at 9:41 AM on May 26, 2019 [6 favorites]

This was personally helpful to me in understanding the roots of our contemporary global economy and particular actor's roles in it (the US, China, and the EU primarily). I feel that at least on the level of a good primer for How We Got Where We Are, it was useful, if overlong and undersourced (I feel like I've got enough of a grounding in this realm to understand when the gloss is probably right and when it smells like it bears more scrutiny, but not enough of an expertise or time to point it all out).

But the central question posed by the essay isn't anywhere close to answered, let alone even explored. The concluding section which proposes to begin examining this question is both the shortest and most poorly thought-out. At the end of the day, the entire essay feels very much to be a paraphrase of the old "[Capitalism] is the worst system of [economics] tried, except for every other one". (In fact, it's worth noting that the tl;dr Recap also linked in this post omits this final section entirely).

So yeah, I might actually send people to the Recap as food for thought, but wouldn't necessarily recommend reading the whole thing or trying to get anything useful out of it than another perspective on the history of economies.
posted by Room 101 at 10:43 AM on May 26, 2019

That's a lot of words to conclude that the status quo is fine.

I’ve come to believe that Financialism, as it exists today in America — and to varying degrees in Japan, Great Britain, France, China, and Germany — is the best system tried-to-date at accelerating Wealth-building and compounding success.

At least, I think that's the conclusion. The entire thing feels to me like an extended justification for capitalism by somebody having second thoughts.
posted by truex at 10:47 AM on May 26, 2019 [8 favorites]

The essay points out that globalism, which he declared dead, was an optimistic way to improve the market by improving everyone's standard of living. He ended his essay on hints and links that Germany and Japan took different idealistic social or nationalist routes to counter a dominant British empire that controlled distribution, and this is a clue to his thinking. The demand-side advantages bestowed on those who controlled shipping led to the inevitable creation of industrialization, out of British mercantilism. In this light, he rightly identifies capitalism, communism, and fascism as being the same in terms of industrialization, merely a dispute over who decides what. The essay also raises the option that voting to tax wealth is the method for labor to win, on the same feudalistic "take and tax" terms we now face in the feudalistic software era. Although he didn't underline or detail this tax message (from the same bias that mainstream media doesn't emphasize it perhaps), the essay quoted Heinlein suggesting that this voting is a force and a form of violence, playing to crowd calling for pitchforks. This is where ArtW and Token Meme were quoted for context, as "edgy irony" calling for killing masters and plotting out the billionaire lairs for future payback. UBI is shoved down into feudalism, and perhaps stands out as a criticism, but the author seems to making the opposite point concerning political power, or at least an obvious point about the stages cycling through.
posted by Brian B. at 12:36 PM on May 26, 2019

I feel like we definitely know how to make everyone poor, and we ve been doing our level best without starting world war since the 1970's. How about we just run that in reverse and internalize carbon costs into our system of finance?

What s that you say? The rich are financially overleveraged through the oil trade, and that would bankrupt them? All the better, then.
posted by eustatic at 3:24 PM on May 26, 2019

Wow there's a lot of reading here, it will take me a couple of hours to read it !
He's bandying historical terms like Feudalism in a way that's unhelpful and hard to read.
Looks like the type of book that would cost me $30 down at the bookshop so I'm not complaining.
posted by Narrative_Historian at 12:55 AM on May 27, 2019

I'm suspicious of 30,000 feet overviews in general, after being burned by grand explanation more than once, but I think this is helpful in the sense of providing a brief overview of the history of economics. I'm not sure I'd build anything on its assertions very much, but I still found it useful in contextualising things I already knew (the Bretton Woods agreement being vitally important and its dismantling being a root cause of The Mess We're In) and provided a new perspective on things that I've been suspicious about but haven't been able to articulate (drawing a line between the tech industry and feudalism).
posted by Merus at 8:50 AM on May 27, 2019