We raised $5,445 in one time donations, and $250 in recurring donations. Multiplying the recurring donations by 3 takes us over $6,000.
Starting this coming Monday, for 3 months, I will do my part, and, on average, write two significant blog posts a week, plus have an average of an article a weekday for you to read.
The donation page is still up, and if you wish to donate or subscribe you still can.
My most sincere thanks to all my donors. When I started I really had no idea if we’d raise more than few hundred dollars. I am humbled that so many people find my writing worth supporting.
Our fundraising has gone very well, with $250 in recurring donations, and $5,180 in one time donations. Multiplying the recurring donations by 3, we’re just $70 from the second tier, which is an average of an article a weekday, and an average of two significant articles a week.
Thank you very much, when I started this I had no idea how much I’d raise. I appreciate this immensely.
If you haven’t given, and like my writing, please consider DONATING or SUBSCRIBING.
Anyone who gives $500, can also talk to me about my writing an article on a subject of interest to them.
(The original article on the campaign is here.)
The fundraising drive will end tomorrow, I’m extending it just one day because we’re so close to the second tier.
The donation page will remain up after that.
The best book on both successes and failures of the Soviet Union is Mancur Olson’s “Power and Prosperity.” If you haven’t read it, you should. The second best is Randall Collins essay in Macrosociology.
The great problem with most critiques of the USSR is that they do not explain its successes. In the 20s and 30s it did far better in most respects than the West. In the 40s and 50s and even into the early 60s it was still doing very well, and put the first satellite in orbit, produced tanks that were as good as the West’s and produced the most successful assault rifle in history. As late as the early eighties, there were points where Russia’s best tanks were better than the West’s.
I am aware of no other nation larger than a city state which has industrialized other than through the use of mercantalist policies. During the Great Depression the USSR vastly outperformed the West.
So, why did it fail? There are two perspectives I believe have a lot of truth to them. Let’s start with Olson’s: the failure of the USSR was a feedback problem. At the beginning of the USSR local cliques and power groups had not formed. The central planners knew exactly how much was being produced, and exactly how much could be produced and were able to coerce people into producing what they knew was possible to make.
As time went on, this became increasingly impossible. Put simply, the locals controlled the information flow to the center, and lied about what they could produce and what they did produce. Workers worked less than they could have, local bosses appropriated production to themselves, and the secret police couldn’t keep up, or became corrupted themselves. Absent accurate information, the central planners lost control. Everyone slacked off, corruption soared, production dropped, and the products produced were crap, especially the consumer goods. (The USSR remained able to produce some of the best military equipment right to the end.) Food production tumbled.
The second perspective is the geopolitical one. The USSR had less population than the West or even America. It was faced with enemies on every side, while America was isolated by sea from any possible assault and Europe only had to worry about attack from one direction. It had a smaller economy than its enemies. To keep up with its enemies militarily, it had to spend a larger percentage of its economic production than the West did. With a central position and a smaller economy, why would you think it wouldn’t crumble under the strain? I will note that Collins made this argument BEFORE it crumbled. On every normal Great Power axis, the USSR was weaker than its enemies. Fiscal strain is normal in such a situation, and it is to be expected that the economically weaker power will eventually lose. From a pure power perspective, and ignoring nuclear weapons, the USSR should have launched an all out attack on Europe no later than the 70s.
This is basic guns and butter economics, understood by Adam Smith. The more you spend on your military and your security apparatus, the more your civilian economy suffers, especially as the most brilliant scientists and engineers are hived off from civilian production. The longer this goes on, the more you suffer. If you’re facing economies that are much larger than yours, you’re screwed. And the US economy was the largest in the world starting the late 19th century, let alone a recovered European one.
As the USSR failed under these twin problems, exacerbated by the bleeding ulcer of the Afghan war, they also suffered ideological decay: they stopped believing in their form of government, and became less and less willing to kill for it. When push came to shove, rather than use the Red Army to maintain control (which it was still capable of doing), they didn’t believe in the USSR and the Warsaw Pact enough to do so.
Now let us turn to capitalism. The advantage of capitalism v. central planning, is that information is sent through prices, supply and demand. This information feedback, however, is still gameable by power blocs. The exact strategies are different than in a command economy, but the end result is the same. The West and America are currently undergoing this exact problem. The entire financial crisis was about inaccurate feedback, and broken feedback loops: it was about the financial and housing industries deliberately damaging the feedback system. Then, when it finally went off a cliff, they destroyed the capitalistic feedback system, which when properly operating, makes companies go bankrupt, by obtaining bailouts due to owning western governments.
There are myriad other problems with feedback in the developed world right now, from massive subsidies of corn and oil, to oligopolistic practices rife through telecom and insurance, to the runaway printing of money by banks, to the concealment of losses by mark to fantasy on bank books, to the complete inability and unwillingness to price in the effects of pollution and climate change.
The great problem with humans is that we lack time perspective. In a hundred years, when historians and whoever deals with economic issues look back (hopefully not economists as we understand them), they aren’t going to be that impressed that Western Capitalism outlasted Soviet Communism by forty or fifty years. Instead they are going to look back and say that both were doomed, in large part, by inability to manage the exact same problem. In both cases the feedback systems which controlled economic production were so perverted by various internal power blocs that the societies were unable to reproduce the material circumstances necessary for their continuance.
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Fundraising has gone well, with $160 in monthly subscriptions, and $4,490. Tripling the subscriptions, the total is $4,970, meaning we’re $1,030 from the second tier – two significant articles a week, and an average of an article every weekday.
Everyone who has given: thank you. If you haven’t given, and like my writing, please consider DONATING or SUBSCRIBING.
Anyone who gives $500, can also talk to me about my writing an article on a subject of interest to them.
(The original article on the campaign is here.)
The campaign will end this coming Monday.
The most important fact about modern economies is rarely remarked on: they are job societies. The vast majority of the population works for someone else. For those without jobs, poverty, homelessness, and in some cases death, is a real prospect. Members of modern societies cannot support themselves if someone doesn’t hire them.
This is, in human history, unusual. For most of American history, most people lived on farms, in the country, and grew much of the food they ate, made their own clothes, raised their own homes. They often lived lives we would consider horribly deprived, but they were able to provide for many of their own needs. The craftsman and professional, while they worked for others, had clients, not bosses, and while they had employees many of those employees were training so they might go out on their own.
We take for granted that industrialization, and moving off the farm has improved human welfare, but that is not true in all places, nor in all times. Industrialization in the Britain is synonymous with land enclosure: pushing feudal tenants off land they had previously had the right to use. Supposedly land enclosure vastly improved agricultural output, but it has been shown that communal fields were almost as productive as enclosed ones. Enclosure was done not to grow more food, but to make more profit, and the people who were displaced flooded into England’s cities, where they were compelled by the real prospect of starvation and death, to work in the new factories, six and a half days a week, 12 hours or more (check the #s).
These factory workers lived worse than they had as tenant farmers and serfs. They worked more hours, had less food, died younger, and during their lives suffered more from disease because of the horrible sanitation of European cities at the time. Their lives were virtually unending misery. This is the reason for the idea of Jeffersonain farmer’s democracy: because Americans were aware of the misery of industrialization.
In Mexico, after NAFTA, small farmers lost their farms because they could not compete with subsidized American agriculture. They flooded into Mexican cities, or they headed north to America to work as illegal immigrants. Again, though in some cases they earned more money, the vast majority of them were worse off than when they lived on the farms, and Mexicans as a whole suffered because after American interests bought Mexico’s food industry, the price of food soared, and the quality of that food dropped.
After World War II Americans flooded from the farms into the new cities. For this generation, the GI generation, it was a straight upgrade: their lives were better. They worked less hours, they had more food, they had access to power and indoor plumbing, and good jobs with good pay.
Those Americans were treated very well, and if you weren’t black, the 1950s and 1960s are looked back on as the heyday of American prosperity. Good jobs were plentiful and easy to find and they came with healthcare and good pensions. Life was good.
Today, millenials and Gen-Xers don’t have such a good deal. Unemployment is high, if you lose your job you will have a hard time finding as good one, or a job at all, and good pensions and healthcare plans are more and more uncommon, and increasingly restricted to the executive class.
Why? Well, one reason is this, the family farms are gone. The first generation had to be treated well because they had options: they could go back to the family farm. So their jobs, and their lives as consumers had to be clearly superior to being on a farm.
I’ve spent a lot of time discussing how to make job economies work in the past, because we live in them, and even if we decide to transition away from jobs as our primary method of distribution, it will take time. But never forget: as long as you need a job to survive, you are at the mercy of those who provide jobs, and for most, the only way you are treated well is if you are not easily replaceable. That lack of replaceability is in most cases a social attribute, not a personal one. You are not replaceable if the job market for your set of skills is very tight. As programmers found out, even if you think ahead and master a skill set that is in short supply, that can and will change, because it is not in the interest of employers for you to be hard to replace.
There are a few people who are their own brands. There is only one Madonna, and you cannot easily replace her. There are a few people who are supremely fitted to the current world, for whom making money is easy. But most of us aren’t in one of those positions, and we need to stop thinking that we are. We aren’t special, we aren’t a unique snowflake, and we are replaceable. We will be prosperous together, or not at all.
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We are all born into the world destined to die. Our reality is one in which pain is far greater than pleasure: you can scream for days in pain, but not ecstasy: the heights of pain far surpass those of please, and have far more endurance.
If there is meaning in this world it is not obvious, and the multitude of religions and philosophies, with their myriad different answers to “why are we here?” that we just don’t know. The message of religion and philosophy is “find meaning”, not “there is meaning” because their very multiplicity states clearly “we don’t actually know.”
All around us there is degradation, cruelty, misery and hopelessness. People living lives they hate, working all week for a few hours, desperately waitng on the weekend when they can be themselves. TGIF, and the near-universal hatred of Monday speak to what work is like in our society. A few, vastly privileged in the way that matters most, love their work, but that’s not the world most of us live in.
Illness and suffering stalk us, everything we care about will eventually pass away, the victim of the world’s cruelest joke of all: time.
In this world, a world which exalts suffering, we seem to go out of our way to make the world worse for each other. We live in chains we ourselves have forged: societies which are far crueler than they need be. Societies where most of us spend our days doing work that doesn’t need to be done, that helps no one, and in many cases which harms other people. We are stuck in a cycle of abuse, where we hurt each other, and then go on to hurt others. We writhe in fear at the meaninglessness of life, and if we find our bit of meaning in religion, philosophy or our tribe, we are happy to hurt as many other people as necessary to cling to our single spark of light.
One response to this is to say, “and so it is” and to be brutal and heartless and care only for a few around us, if even them. Live life, take what you can, enjoy it while possible, and when you die, at least you lived. Life is nothing but endless cycles of eating and being eaten, so make sure you eat, till the inevitable day you die.
Another is to simply accept what is: it is ordained by nature or God, or Karma, and so be it.
Another is to seek transcendence through mysticism, a path those who have not followed should not readily write off. Perhaps there is something beyond, and perhaps it can be found through esoteric discipline. Billions and billions have thought so, many have enlightened, and they were no stupider than we are.
Another is to embrace kindness: to scream against Nature and God, to say “just because it is so does not mean I have to accept it.” If violence and rape and greed are part of human nature, endless selected for by mindless evolution, why then so are kindness and compassion, and we can choose the latter and strive to make our time in the world as good as it can be for as many of us as possible. We do not need to be complicit in cruelty and suffering, but can make a choice otherwise.
This can be taken further, “nature made us thus but we do not have to accept it.” There is nothing divine, or sacred about physical processes or evolution, and if there is a God who made this vale of suffering, to hell with it. As our mastery of science and reality continues, why accept suffering, why accept death, why accept loss? Oh, eventually the universe will end, but why not seek to change ourselves such that we rarely die, we are not cruel, and we suffer less? The cry of the naturalist that we should accept our nature is not convincing to me. Why? To accept is to be complicit in all the evils of our nature.
However it happened, we have the ability to choose. What we are, what our world is, does not ultimately define us. Our choices to be complicit in suffering and cruelty, or to work for kindness and compassion: those define us.
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Is a society prosperous when everyone has an abundance of good, the usual definition of prosperity? Are you prosperous if you have an abundance of goods, but no time to enjoy them? Are you prosperous if you have an abundance of goods, but you’re sick? Are you prosperous if you have an abundance of goods, but you live in an oppressive society? Are you prosperous if you have an abundance of goods but are desperately unhappy and feel you’ve wasted your life?
This falls flat: more goods don’t necessarily make us better off, nor more services. More foods that make us sick aren’t better. More health care doesn’t mean we’re healthier, it often means we’re sicker. More prisons mean our society is producing more criminals and more crime.
Just increasing economic activity doesn’t make people better off. It doesn’t increase prosperity.
Perhaps the best example is the change from hunting and gathering to agriculture. It would seem self-evident that learning how to grow more food would make us better off. In fact, however, moving from hunting and gathering to agriculture lead to worse lives for most people. People were shorter in most agricultural societies, which indicates worse nutrition. They suffered more from disease and had far more chronic health conditions. Most people also had less free time and didn’t live as long as the hunter-gatherers who preceeded them.
Nor was this a short term decline, it lasted for thousands of years. Height is a good measure of nutrition, and we are still not as tall as our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Pelvic depth, which measures how easily women give birth has never recovered. Median lifespan was not higher for around 6,000 years. And even after it recovered, it declined again large parts of the world. Members of the Hellenic world, from 300 BC to 120 AD, had longer lives than westerners before the 20th century.(1)
Our lives can get worse, and stay worse, for hundreds or thousands of years, despite having more goods.
If prosperity means having more stuff, but being sicker and dying sooner, do we want it?
A better definition of prosperity is about having, not more goods and sevices, but the right goods and services in the right quantity.
We should want goods and services that makes us healthier, happier, smarter, more able to do great works and to live well. Instead of more work, we should want right work, enough work to make the right stuff, but not so much work we have no time for our loved ones, friends and doing the activities we love, whatever those might be. And, as much as possible we should want health instead of medicine and low crime rather than prisons.
All other things being equal more productive capacity is better. The more stuff we can make, in theory, the better off we’ll be. But in practice, it doesn’t always work that way.
Part of the problem is due to hierarchies and inequality. Inequality is undeniably bad for us. The more unequal your society is, the lower the median lifespan. The more unequal the society, the sicker, in general. More heart attacks, much more stress. The more unequal, the more crime. These links are robust.
The links run two ways. On the one hand, humans find inequality stressful. The human body, if subject to long term stress, becomes unhealthy and far more likely to be sick. People who feel unequal act less capable than those who feel equal. This is true for the rich and powerful in unequal societies and the poor. Everyone suffers. Though the poor and weak do suffer more, even the rich and powerful would be healthier and live longer in equal societies, most likely simply due to the stress effect.(2)
The second part is distribution, or rather, the question of who gets to decide the distribution. The more unequal a society, the less stuff the poor and middle class have, comparatively. Some technologies tend to lead to more inequality, some tend to lead to more equality. In most hunter-gatherer societies there isn’t enough surplus to support a class of rich powerful people and their servitors, in particular their servitors who enforce the status quo through ideology or violence. With little surplus, there is equality. This doesn’t mean hunter-gatherers live badly, most of them seem to have spent a lot less time producing what they needed than we do, they certainly didn’t work 40 hour weeks, or 60 hour weeks, closer to 20. (3) The rest of the time they could dance, create art, make love, socialize, make music or whatever else they enjoyed.
Agriculture didn’t lead immediately to inequality, the original agricultural societies appear to have been quite equal, probably even more so than the late hunter-gatherer societies that preceded them. But increasing surpluses and the need for coordination which arose, especially in hydraulic civiliations (civilizations based around irrigation which is labor intensive and require specialists) led to the rise of inequality. The pharoahs created great monuments, but their subjects did not live nearly as well as hunter-gatherers.
The organization of violence, and the technology behind it is also a factor. It is not an accident that classical Greece had democracy in many cities, nor that it extended only to males who could fight and not women or non-fighting males. It is not an accident that Rome had citizenship classes based on what equipment soldiers could afford: the Equestrian class was named that because they could take a horse to war. It is not accident that the Swiss Cantons, where men fought in pike formation, were democratic for their time. Nor is it an accident that universal sufferage arose in the age of mass conscription.
When Rome moved away from citizen conscription to a professional army it soon lost its liberty. As we move away from mass armies it is notable that while we haven’t lost the vote, formally, the vote seems to matter less and less as politicians more and more do what they want no matter what the electorate might want.
Power matters for prosperity, the more evenly power is spread, the more likely a society is to be prosperous, for no small factions can engage in policies which are helpful to them, but broadly harmful to everyone else. Likewise widespread demand, absent supply bottlenecks, leads to widespread prosperity as well.
In the current era we have seen a massive increase in CEO and executive pay, this is due to the fact that they have taken power over the primary productive organizations in our society: corporations. The owners of most corporations, if they are not also the managers, are largely powerless against the management. It is not that management is more competent than it was 40 years ago, at least at their ostensible job of enriching shareholders, it is that they are more powerful than they were 40 years ago, compared to shareholders and compared to government.
Because increases in the amount we can create do not automatically translate into either creating what is good for us, or into relatively even distribution of what we create, increases in the amount we can create do not always lead to prosperity, and certainly they do not have to lead to widespread affluence. Productivity in America rose 80.4% from 1973 to 2011, but median real wages rose only 10.2% and median male wages rose 0.1%.(4) This was not the case from 1948 to 1973, when wages rose as fast as productivity.
Increases in productivity, in our ability to make more stuff, only lead to prosperity and affluence if we are both making the right stuff, and we are actually distributing that stuff widely. If a small group of individuals are able to skim off most of the surplus then prosperity does not result and if a society which is prosperous allows an oligarchy, nobility or aristocracy to form, even if such an aristocracy (like our own) pretends it does not exist, society will find its prosperity fading.
Creating goods that hurt people is not prosperity either. At the current time about 40% of all deaths are caused by pollution or malnutrition.(5) If someone you love has died, there is a good chance they died because we make stuff in ways that pollute the environment, or because the stuff we make, like much food, is very bad for us. Being fat is not healthy, and we have an epidemic of obesity. Even when we do not, immediately, die, we suffer from chronic diseases at a rate that would astonish our ancestors. As of they year 2000, for example, approximately 45% of the US population suffered from a chronic disease. 21% had multiple conditions.(6) Some of this is just due to living longer, but much of it is due to the food we eat, the stress our jobs inflict on us, and the pollution we spew into the air, land and water.
We should always remember this. Increases in productive capacity and technological advancement do not always lead to welfare and when they do, it do not have to do so immediately. The industrial revolution certainly did lead to increased human welfare, but if you were of the generations thrown off the land and made to work in the early factories, often 6 1/2 days a week, in horrible conditions, you would not have thought so. You were in virtually every way worse off than before being thrown off the land, and so were your children. A few industrialists and the people around them certainly did very well, but that is not prosperity, nor is it affluence.
Prosperity, in the end, is as much about power and politics as it is about technology and productive ability. The ability to make more does not ensure we are making the right things, or that the people who need them, get them. Productive capacity which is not shared is not prosperity.
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Ontario is considering tying minimum wage increases to the consumer price index.
This is an ok idea, but the CPI is systematically fiddled to decrease stated inflation, because a lot of costs are linked to it.
A better way is to link it to productivity increases.
But the best way is to link it to increases in the top 1%’s or the top .1%’s income.
(There are better ways in a different, fairer economy. The one I favor is to start it where the person who is at the bottom 10% is. From then on increase it by the average of non-fiddled inflation, average income, and the top 10%’s income.)
In the last two days, we’ve raised $2,000 in one time donations, and $105 in recurring donations (which count triple).
Thank you. I am humbled. Honestly, I wasn’t sure if we’d raise more than a few hundred dollars.
I’ve also put up a new piece on the four principles of prosperity, if you haven’t had a chance to read it yet.
All economic theories are statements about what sort of people we are, or rather, what sort of people we should be. Economics has homo economicus, economic man, the rational utility maximizer who always acts in his or her own interest. We know that humans aren’t rational and we know that we don’t always do what is best for us, or even know what it is, but economics stands, nonetheless.
Economic man is prescriptive: it is about how we believe we should act. In ordinary terms a rational utility maximizer is a greedy, selfish bastard: a functional sociopath. They are concerned with other people’s well-being precisely and only to the extent that that affects their own. That we strive to realize this philosophy in our society is obvious from a perfunctory look at how we run our primary economic institutions: corporations. Our society insists and has put into law that corporations be concerned only with profit and nothing else(x). Our culture celebrates greed, we declare that “greed is good”. We believe that if everyone acts selfishly, for themselves, in freely agreed upon contracts, no matter how unequal the power of the people entering into them “freely”, that maximum well-being will result.
It took a great deal of intellectual labor to make being a greedy selfish bastard intellectually respectable:
To a survival machine, another survival machine (which is not its own child or another close relative) is part of its environment, like a rock or a river or a lump of food. It is something that gets in the way, or something that can be exploited. It differs from a rock or a river in one important respect: it is inclined to hit back. — Richard Dawkins, “The Selfish Gene”, pg 66 (30th ann. edition)
If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
– Ayn Rand(x)Well first of all, tell me: Is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed? You think Russia doesn’t run on greed? You think China doesn’t run on greed? What is greed? Of course, none of us are greedy, it’s only the other fellow who’s greedy. The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. — Milton Friedman
And the theory has been put to the test. In Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union western economists and development experts instituted it as shock therapy and the Russian population collapsed, the life span of Russians dropped, and happiness cratered for over a decade.(x) One of the harshest totalitarian states in history, and people were happier in it than what our free market apostles wrought.
Since the 70s or 80s, in most developed countries we we have been slashing taxes, cutting social benefits, and extolling the benefits of free markets, by which we mean not free markets, but markets which the government does not work to keep either free or fair. The results are in: wages have stagnated, the rich have become the richest rich in world history, exceeding even those of the Gilded Age, and the developed world is in semi-permanent crisis, with Europe a shambles and America unable to produce good jobs and running record deficits. Food prices are soaring, energy prices are through the roof and the Middle East is in flames.
By their fruits you shall judge them and the idea that greedy people operating completely selfishly will lead to everyone being better off has produced its bitter harvest. This is not the first time it has done so. The famous economist of the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes acidly quipped that “Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all. “*
The idea is absurd, and it has proved so in practice. The market, even the free market, properly understood, is powerful and prosperity requires it. But allowing unalloyed greed to be the principle that rules us, by which we run our societies, has proved disastrous, not just to our prosperity but to our liberty and to our democracy.
If we want more prosperous societies, which is to say, societies where affluence is widespread, we need to align our private morals and our public ethics. We cannot expect to exalt selfishness and greed and to always put ourselves and the few people we love first, second and last, and expect that miraculously, our worst of motives will lead to the best of results for people we don’t care about. We cannot put functional sociopaths in charge of our economic and political organizations and expect them to produce results which are good for anybody but themselves and the few people they need to keep happy in order to make themselves richer. We can’t expect widespread affluence when we tell ourselves that people are bastards who do, and should, look out only for themselves.
A society which creates widespread affluence must be based on four principles, and must elevate and honor people who embody those four principles.
Fairness. Everyone must be treated equally within the requirements of their needs. This does not mean being treated the same, a child with learning disabilities should not be treated the same as one who is gifted, but both should go to the same school system, and be treated no differently regardless of who their parents are or how much money they have. The wealthy and powerful must use the same institutions as the middle class and the poor for no system will work if it is not in the interests of the rich, powerful and influential that it does so.
Kindness. Instead of asking “What’s in it for me?”, we must ask that oldest of moral questions: “How would I want to be treated if I were them?” Kindness is not weakness, it is a refusal to allow yourself to become an evil person in response to evil. Finland, which treats its prisoners with kindness that astounds Americans, has ex-convicts who re-offend at half the rate of American prisoners(x). As justice must always be tempered with mercy, and mercy always tempered with justice, so kindness must be tempered with fairness. Being kind does not mean being a mark, it means giving people a chance, and treating them first with compassion.
Generosity. Greatness is not measured by what you have taken, by what you have hoarded, or by who dies with the most. It is measured by who has given the most and by who has made the most peoples lives better. The resources we have created are meant to be used; the more we share them, the more we make others lives better and the more they, in turn, can make our lives better. Happier, healthier, more affluent people are better for the economy and more fun besides. Economic cripples, unable to participate fully in society are in no one’s interest. Generosity, combined with the compassion which asks “what do they need?” helps everyone.
Future Oriented. The past gave birth to the present, which midwifes the future. The winners of the past, those who built the past, have their rewards in their time, but cannot be allowed to postpone the future till they can control it. Every society changes, or it dies. Every economic model must be modified in time. The old cannot insist that the world they grew up in is the world their grown children will live in.
These four principles can be embodied both by individuals and societies They are the characteristics of a generous dynamic society, in which everyone contributes, everyone cares and is cared for and everyone works to build the future. And they are not schizophrenic attributes: people can act this way in their individual lives. It is not required that people be kind and loving and generous to their family and friends, but ruthless and greedy in their business or political life.
We’ve given greed and selfishness a fair shot. More than a fair shot. More than a fair shot. We’ve destroyed uncounted lives and driven our own economies to the brink of disaster and then beyond. It is time to stop expecting that acting horribly will lead to good. It hasn’t worked and it won’t work. Instead it is time to try acting generously, kindly, and fairly. It is time for make sure that everyone shares in the wealth our societies are capable of creating. We should do this not just because the vast majority of us will do better, but because it is the right thing to do. It would be one thing if being bastards really did lead to the greater good and was a regrettable evil, but it isn’t. So, having exhausted every other option, perhaps it is time to, with a weary sigh, return to being good, to do unto our neighbors as they would have us do unto them.
It is time to be better people and to reap the rewards of doing so. It is time to correct those who prefer to be greedy, selfish bastards. It is time to return to affluence for all, rather than riches for a few. And it is time to end the rein of the greedy, selfish bastards.
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