4 ms·
There is a richness to life that has nothing whatsoever to do with money. To the technocratic mind that would confuse this fact, what is "useful" can only ever
by scroot 5y ago
There is a richness to life that has nothing whatsoever to do with money. To the technocratic mind that would confuse this fact, what is "useful" can only ever be presented in the terms of the economics profession.
Under such guidelines it is quite "useless" to, say, spend a decade studying Akkadian. But our understanding of the past would be so much poorer without people willing to engage with Assyriology. I'd like to see STEM-maximalists argue that one engineering field or another is somehow more difficult than ANE studies.
- eigenket 5y agoSimilarly a lot of stuff that falls under the STEM umbrella is completely useless. I have spent months and years of my life working on difficult math problems a bunch of which will probably never have any real-world application.
- taneq 5y agoWell yeah, it's nice to be independently wealthy and spend your life studying whatever takes your fancy, and if you can afford to do so then good on you.
- scroot 5y agoI think the point is that everyone should have such an opportunity without having to be independently wealthy in the first place.
- taneq 5y agoI think we agree on the fact that it's nice to have nice things, and it'd be nice of the government paid for more nice things?
- bngybmgrglflps 5y agoA government can only acquire revenue by siphoning productivity ("nice things"). The organization and its agents bear no consequence for mistakes in the allocation. It has no means to compare value or incentive to do so. The system evolves according to the "iron law of bureaucracy" as a perfect rent-seeking apparatus. It's nice to imagine everyone having enough, or maybe that everyone is "equal." But you can't save anyone from their choices. That's not nice. It's prison. If you know how to optimize human life for a given group of agreeable people, go for it. For the rest of us, no means no.