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>Without growth, he says, economic life becomes a zero-sum game. “As Martin Wolf, the Financial Times commentator has noted, the option for everybody to become

>Without growth, he says, economic life becomes a zero-sum game. “As Martin Wolf, the Financial Times commentator has noted, the option for everybody to become better off—where one person’s gain needn’t require another’s loss—was critical for the development and spread of the consensual politics that underpin democratic rule.” In other words, the function of economic growth is to blunt the force of envy in a world with highly skewed distributions of income and wealth. The answer lies right here but the author fails to consider it. We could evolve our economic systems to redistribute obscene wealth and build a more egalitarian society. The ones who give in this scenario only lose on paper but they wouldn't notice any difference in their day to day. This is especially true once automation becomes the norm. The article is too simplistic and fails to consider a host of important variables which are only now coming into play.

lmm 11y ago
> The ones who give in this scenario only lose on paper but they wouldn't notice any difference in their day to day. Not losing anything noticeable doesn't stop the super-rich avoiding taxes today. Why would that be different in the future?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- rorykoehler 11y ago
  The system is designed by us. We can change it if there is the political will.
  - lmm 11y ago
    You seemed to be implying that there wouldn't be violent objections to such redistribution. There will be. And even assuming you succeed in that redistribution, the original point remains: in a zero-growth world, people who want to get ahead will try to do so by taking from others, ultimately through violence.
    - danharaj 11y ago
      There cannot possibly be social institutions devised to prevent violent people from disrupting everyone else's life, right?
      - lmm 11y ago
        Such institutions didn't stop Genghis Khan. In a time of growth people are willing to pay taxes to support social institutions, but will that still be true in a zero-growth world?
vinceguidry 11y ago
> We could evolve our economic systems to redistribute obscene wealth and build a more egalitarian society. There is not enough of what everyone wants. There's no way to get it. Let's take a trivial example. There are a number of companies out there making smartphones. What if everyone wanted iPhones? There may be enough iPhones out there to give one to everyone in, say, New York City. There is not enough, and there will never be enough iPhones to give to everyone in the entire world. If you're just talking about money, then that's even worse. If you redistributed all the wealth in the entire world among 7 billion people, every person in the whole world would get a check for the princely sum of $8.57. (Obtained by dividing the entire world's money supply, found on Google, by 7 billion, roughly how many people there are in the world right now) Meanwhile every single organization, every single company doing anything useful for the world has been completely decapitalized. There simply isn't enough wealth in the world. And making everyone equal is the best way I can think of to ensure that no one will ever have the ability to make more wealth. Like it or not, we're stuck with inequality for the foreseeable future. Either people are going to be unequal in purchasing power terms, or in the fact that production capacities for all possible luxuries people might want are not and will never be world-scale. You can't give everyone on the planet a NYC penthouse. And until you do, people will complain about inequality. We need another way of thinking about the problems of the world than that some people have lots and lots of things that other people don't.
- evanpw 11y ago
  > every person in the whole world would get a check for the princely sum of $8.57 This number is way off. That would mean there are only $60B in the entire world, whereas the Fed was until recently creating $85B per month to buy bonds. Total worldwide wealth is around $241 trillion, which is $34k / person (which I don't think necessarily contradicts your actual point).
  - vinceguidry 11y ago
    The number I found was $60T, I used the money supply as I don't think that the rest of the wealth will actually be worth anything once all the cash is distributed. You're right though, I missed a few zeros, my figure comes out to $8571.42. Either way, nobody's really better off. Sure, we'd all have enough to build a mud hut, but the damage done to the world order would far outweigh any improvements.
dandare 11y ago
> ...build a more egalitarian society Except nobody knows how and so far all attempts at this failed. I think we have better chances in hoping for fusion power than working model of communism.
- rorykoehler 11y ago
  No one ever flew to space until we did. I don't think previous failures are a good indicator of future success. Also fusion power would be a game changer, another variable in the equation so to speak.
- Retric 11y ago
  Germany is a more egalitarian society than the US so the failure idea is overblown. We can treat food, housing, and basic healthcare as public goods without going full communist. In fact due to the concentration of state power historical communist society's are less egalitarian than Germany is today. PS: We also know a lot of things that don't work. Price controls for example cause lot's of problems, so free markets are really useful. The problem is when power is concentrated into the hands of a few you end up with what is effectively a planned economy. ex: Intel's on CPU GPU is good for them, but not the wider economy.
- danharaj 11y ago
  There have been several examples of anarchocommunist societies that failed because of external forces, i.e. they were conquered, rather than internal forces. Catalonia in Spain and the Free Territory in Ukraine are the big ones. They lasted for a few years each. Catalonia failed because the Stalinists in Spain betrayed them and that allowed the fascists, backed by Nazi Germany of course to win the civil war. George Orwell fought with the anarchists in Spain. It's very enlightening to read about the social institutions they developed before they were defeated militarily. The Free Territory was a model of extreme democracy where power was decentralized to an extremely fine-grained level. It was defeated by the Bolsheviks after Trotsky invited anarchist leaders to a joint meeting and then summarily executed them. Implementing communism does not seem impossible due to internal factors. After a few decades of build-up, both Ukraine and Spain saw the birth of egalitarian communist societies that flourished in the brief time that they were allowed to exist. They were crushed by external authoritarian conquerors.

lmm 11y ago

> The ones who give in this scenario only lose on paper but they wouldn't notice any difference in their day to day. Not losing anything noticeable doesn't stop the super-rich avoiding taxes today. Why would that be different in the future?

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
rorykoehler 11y ago
The system is designed by us. We can change it if there is the political will.
- lmm 11y ago
  You seemed to be implying that there wouldn't be violent objections to such redistribution. There will be. And even assuming you succeed in that redistribution, the original point remains: in a zero-growth world, people who want to get ahead will try to do so by taking from others, ultimately through violence.
  - danharaj 11y ago
    There cannot possibly be social institutions devised to prevent violent people from disrupting everyone else's life, right?
    - lmm 11y ago
      Such institutions didn't stop Genghis Khan. In a time of growth people are willing to pay taxes to support social institutions, but will that still be true in a zero-growth world?

vinceguidry 11y ago

> We could evolve our economic systems to redistribute obscene wealth and build a more egalitarian society. There is not enough of what everyone wants. There's no way to get it. Let's take a trivial example. There are a number of companies out there making smartphones. What if everyone wanted iPhones? There may be enough iPhones out there to give one to everyone in, say, New York City. There is not enough, and there will never be enough iPhones to give to everyone in the entire world. If you're just talking about money, then that's even worse. If you redistributed all the wealth in the entire world among 7 billion people, every person in the whole world would get a check for the princely sum of $8.57. (Obtained by dividing the entire world's money supply, found on Google, by 7 billion, roughly how many people there are in the world right now) Meanwhile every single organization, every single company doing anything useful for the world has been completely decapitalized. There simply isn't enough wealth in the world. And making everyone equal is the best way I can think of to ensure that no one will ever have the ability to make more wealth. Like it or not, we're stuck with inequality for the foreseeable future. Either people are going to be unequal in purchasing power terms, or in the fact that production capacities for all possible luxuries people might want are not and will never be world-scale. You can't give everyone on the planet a NYC penthouse. And until you do, people will complain about inequality. We need another way of thinking about the problems of the world than that some people have lots and lots of things that other people don't.

evanpw 11y ago
> every person in the whole world would get a check for the princely sum of $8.57 This number is way off. That would mean there are only $60B in the entire world, whereas the Fed was until recently creating $85B per month to buy bonds. Total worldwide wealth is around $241 trillion, which is $34k / person (which I don't think necessarily contradicts your actual point).
- vinceguidry 11y ago
  The number I found was $60T, I used the money supply as I don't think that the rest of the wealth will actually be worth anything once all the cash is distributed. You're right though, I missed a few zeros, my figure comes out to $8571.42. Either way, nobody's really better off. Sure, we'd all have enough to build a mud hut, but the damage done to the world order would far outweigh any improvements.

dandare 11y ago

> ...build a more egalitarian society Except nobody knows how and so far all attempts at this failed. I think we have better chances in hoping for fusion power than working model of communism.

rorykoehler 11y ago
No one ever flew to space until we did. I don't think previous failures are a good indicator of future success. Also fusion power would be a game changer, another variable in the equation so to speak.
Retric 11y ago
Germany is a more egalitarian society than the US so the failure idea is overblown. We can treat food, housing, and basic healthcare as public goods without going full communist. In fact due to the concentration of state power historical communist society's are less egalitarian than Germany is today. PS: We also know a lot of things that don't work. Price controls for example cause lot's of problems, so free markets are really useful. The problem is when power is concentrated into the hands of a few you end up with what is effectively a planned economy. ex: Intel's on CPU GPU is good for them, but not the wider economy.
danharaj 11y ago
There have been several examples of anarchocommunist societies that failed because of external forces, i.e. they were conquered, rather than internal forces. Catalonia in Spain and the Free Territory in Ukraine are the big ones. They lasted for a few years each. Catalonia failed because the Stalinists in Spain betrayed them and that allowed the fascists, backed by Nazi Germany of course to win the civil war. George Orwell fought with the anarchists in Spain. It's very enlightening to read about the social institutions they developed before they were defeated militarily. The Free Territory was a model of extreme democracy where power was decentralized to an extremely fine-grained level. It was defeated by the Bolsheviks after Trotsky invited anarchist leaders to a joint meeting and then summarily executed them. Implementing communism does not seem impossible due to internal factors. After a few decades of build-up, both Ukraine and Spain saw the birth of egalitarian communist societies that flourished in the brief time that they were allowed to exist. They were crushed by external authoritarian conquerors.