First off, I wanted to thank you for such a well thought-out post. There's a lot of room for condescension in discussions about stuff as fuzzy as economics, esp

First off, I wanted to thank you for such a well thought-out post. There's a lot of room for condescension in discussions about stuff as fuzzy as economics, especially as it relates to overtly political debates, and it was refreshing to see someone acknowledge the weak points (or at least the most debatable issues) of their position. I'm curious about one assertion you made in particular: >it is not easy to quantify the result into a mathematical model of moral social utility. Come up with such an objective, measurable metric and economists will start using it. I agree that this is a hard problem, but I can't help thinking that we are already pretty close to at least being able to at least measure symptoms of an "immoral" economy -- like if we couldn't graph a function, but COULD graph its derivative. I'm thinking of metrics we already have: overall distribution of wealth (and its change over time), inter-generational economic mobility, rates of poverty/hunger/homelessness, access to essential services, educational outcomes based on family income, you get the idea. We know having money is a huge leg up, we know a child whose parents make $18,000 a year doesn't have the same chances (or even access to comparable education) as a child in an affluent family. I'm wandering off into other, more contentious debates, but my point is that there are plenty of metrics we already have that we can point to and say, "This is a bad sign. This is not a good number, and its badness is self-reinforcing and will only get worse." Just look at productivity: it's gone up consistently, year over year, for decades, and yet the real value of wages hasn't moved. SOMEONE is profiting off of that surplus value, but it certainly isn't the workers. At that point, the arguments begin about how to fix those metrics, and we're back to square one, but I'd argue that there is plenty of evidence for people who want to make the case that the current incentives in American capitalism are unfair, if not unjust.