Tootfinder

Random thought that goes interesting places:
There are a lot of cheap ways to spend money to drastically improve the quality of life for lots of people (UBI, mosquito nets, digging wells, etc.). Those people almost invariably become way more economically productive in aggregate when this happens, far above the costs involved, if you measure from the perspective of the affected group. So for billionaires looking for outsized returns on investments, why not simply spend on some of these programs, then invest in a broad index of socks that are going to go up as a result?
The answer could be "billionaires by their nature are too evil to think of this," which, could be true....
But I think there's a deeper answer, which is that there *is no* bundle of stocks that goes up as humans flourish. This is directly contrary to neoliberal economic doctrine/propaganda, but it also has an explanation that's obvious from the neoliberal doctrine itself: the stock market is a gambling arena for bets on corporate profits. Corporate profits are money taken in in excess of costs. But the value of a corporation is not produced abstractly by the mere existence of the organization; it's produced by the labor of humans working for the organization, with raw materials that the organization purchases. So to make a profit, an organization has to do some combination of paying its workers less than the value the create, and/or paying less for it's raw materials than they are really worth. The more it does these two things, the more profit it can generate.
Notice that these two profit-generating activities directly and indirectly immiserate humans, *and* that reducing human misery by means other than reducing these activities makes them harder. People who have other means of income won't sell their labor for less than it's worth, nor will they sell their resources below their fair value. Only desperate people will agree to terms that corporations require to be profitable.
This is not a "Marxist analysis" by the way; it's the direct application of the basic principles taught in any neoliberal introductory macroeconomics class.
In any case, once we understand that the stock market is "gambling on how much corporations can exploit their employees/suppliers/customers", it's clear why you can't make money from stock investments in companies that profit from flourishing humans: profit is by construction made of human misery.
It also explains a lot of other things, like why private US employers who pay huge amounts of payroll towards health insurance for their employees would be *against* public health insurance that would offload those costs onto all taxpayers: the amount they're able to lower wages as a result of desperation for access to health care is more than worth the direct costs.
This is the central reason why capitalism (defined as: a system where money equals power) is inimical to human happiness: it allows profits built on suffering to be converted into the power to maintain the system of suffering and even extend and intensify it, creating a feedback loop of extractive domination.
Now I'm sure some people might read this and think: what about the good companies? The ones that pay their workers and suppliers a fair wage, and sell their products at fair prices? Even putting aside the fact that such a thing seems less believable than a unicorn these days, such a company by definition does not make a profit. The fair wage for its workers is the value they add to the raw materials it buys, and the fair price for those is the selling price of the finished product minus the value the company adds. The balance sheet will read exactly zero at the end of the day if compensation is actually fair. You can still run a company like this in theory, and even grow it, but of course under capitalism it will just get bought out by an unethical company that is profitable. Could you in some kind of utopian dream world run a tightly regulated series of markets where you have most of what people think capitalism is, without the bad parts? Maybe, but it definitely wouldn't involve actual capitalism, and it wouldn't have a stock market.
#anarchy #capitalism #econimics

Just finished "A Psalm for the Wild-Built" by Becky Chambers. Overall it's good but I also have some Thoughts.
First, it was very pleasant to finally read some non-trite utopian solarpunk after having read stuff like Octavia Butler recently. Both hope and despair can be poisonous on their own IMO, so getting some balance in is nice. It's definitely a very valuable thing to be able to lay out an actually desirable and in many ways imaginable future given our grim present. Chambers is no LeGuin though. I'll probably be reading more of her work and maybe she fleshes out these ideas elsewhere, but at least in this book there is no focus on either how the transition to a better society could happen nor on how the better society holds up in the face of adverse events and inclinations. Compare LeGuin's "The Dispossessed" or N. K. Jemisin's short story "The Ones Who Stay and Fight" and it feels like there's something important missing from Chambers' portrait of a future society. Of course, maybe the point is to make a cozy book, in which case fine, there's certainly a place for such things, and I can look for deeper inspiration elsewhere.
The second big thought I had was that Chambers' worldview seems not well-informed by certain indigenous perspectives, and this creates some contradictions. For example, (minor spoilers) when Dex enters the wilderness there's a whole bit about understanding humankind's place in nature and how human settlements are what we're used to but they're only a brief interruption of the vast untouched wilderness. Along the same lines, much of the world is intentionally left untouched by humans as a way to keep it pristine and natural. Later however, a character makes the point that humans *are* animals. The indigenous perspective that I appreciate would agree with that, and would further question the value in distinguishing between human influence on ecosystems and influences that others have. More sharply, one might observe that there's a bigger difference between how different kinds of humans relate to and influence their environments than between how less-disruptive humans and various animals do the same: the strip-mine-operator vs. migrant tribesperson impact difference is probably much greater than the migrant tribesperson vs. beaver gap, for example. Rather than talking about limiting human disruption, then, as if all human-environment interactions are disruptive and must be minimized, we could/should be talking about how to create human societies that have beneficial relationships with their environments and acknowledging that we actually have many positive examples of that, both historical and contemporary. Chambers' utopia is a "humans dominate nature but restrain themselves so that their disruptions are minimal and thus nature can thrive" vision, but what I'd even more like to see would be a "humans study old ways and make new ones so that they can interact positively with ecosystems again" vision, including some of "here are the places that sometimes breaks down but also the patterns and institutions that ensure repair of those breakdowns and thus long-term sustainability."
Final big thought: Chambers' utopia is too homogenous for my tastes. Of course it's hard enough and valuable work dreaming up and sharing any utopia and Chambers' transcends triteness in a number of ways, so this criticism is a bit rude. But the single shared religion, lack of mention of conflicts around shared decisions, especially historical society-defining ones, and nagging questions like "what about the people indigenous to the now-uninhabited lands?" and "what about the indigenous peoples who weren't part of the factory-building societies?" leave me wishing for more nuance in this direction.
All in all: a good book, and I'm criticizing out of a place of appreciation, not scorn. I've got there sequel out from the library as well and will probably detour to a few other books but get to it pretty soon.
Sadly I don't remember who, but I got this one because of a recommendation on here, so thanks if you're someone who recommended it!
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon