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socioeconomically, children should theoretically incur debt during childhood (paid mainly to women as principal caretakers). as children grow up, they'd work to

socioeconomically, children should theoretically incur debt during childhood (paid mainly to women as principal caretakers). as children grow up, they'd work to pay back that debt. while this framing may seem distasteful, it does roughly model, from an economic perspective, the natural, informal system of value exchange between generations that's kept our species going for millenia. but more importantly, it illustrates a genuine hole in economics that naturally disadvantages women, because the value generated from the work of domestic caretakers isn't being accounted for in our overall understanding of economic productivity. if domestic work were paid, we'd certainly reconfigure our societies to take that into account, and having children in workplaces wouldn't be so disfavored. incidentally, denser mixed-use urban environments allows for kids (and pets!) to be close by, filtering in and out of the workplace as needed, but not necessarily underfoot all the time, which to me, is the best compromise.

InitialLastName 5y ago
The expansion of our society since industrialization has been characterized by the gradual, but systematic, replacement of implicit social capital with explicit economic capital. It's been great for a subset of people (the economic capitalists and those who, for one reason or another, are unable to build social capital) but it's hard to pretend there haven't been costs for everyone.
- clairity 5y ago
  yah, i like to think of it as the esteem economy, something that's even more intimately tied with human societies and our evolutionary survival. polico-economic systems are simply models on top of this underlying esteem economy, and over history, we've jumped from one polico-economic theory to the next, without earnestly acknowledging and perhaps even venerating this simple connection. how social networks could potentially better model the esteem economy is what most interests me about them, but so far, likes and follows don't seem to do a good enough job in general at revealing the truly estimable from the randomly popularized background meme.

InitialLastName 5y ago

The expansion of our society since industrialization has been characterized by the gradual, but systematic, replacement of implicit social capital with explicit economic capital. It's been great for a subset of people (the economic capitalists and those who, for one reason or another, are unable to build social capital) but it's hard to pretend there haven't been costs for everyone.

clairity 5y ago
yah, i like to think of it as the esteem economy, something that's even more intimately tied with human societies and our evolutionary survival. polico-economic systems are simply models on top of this underlying esteem economy, and over history, we've jumped from one polico-economic theory to the next, without earnestly acknowledging and perhaps even venerating this simple connection. how social networks could potentially better model the esteem economy is what most interests me about them, but so far, likes and follows don't seem to do a good enough job in general at revealing the truly estimable from the randomly popularized background meme.