Last week I wrote a brief post about the process of having insights: How we don’t control what insights we get, or when–we can only do the preparatory work, and then sit back and wait.
The insight I was writing about was really “Oh, this isn’t up to me, it happens when it happens,” but there was also an insight related to markets, capitalism, and really, post-capitalism.
A lot of what I’ve spent the last 30 years thinking about could be considered to be collective action problems–who, as societies, we let make decisions about what we’ll do. Feudalism did that one way, capitalism does it another; there have been other systems, and even within capitalism there are sub-ideologies: neoliberalism is very different from New Deal capitalism with its emphasis on increasing wages, decreasing inequality, and keeping prices up.
But the real issue is about power. Money is a type of power, it gives whoever controls it (not has it, but controls it), the ability to tell other people what to do. When you buy something or hire someone, that’s power.
There are so many issues with using markets to determine who gets power that you could write multiple books about them, but let’s review the positive argument for markets.
If someone pays you for something, they want it or need it. It has utility to someone.
The more people pay you, therefore, the more utility you are providing. Coincidentally, the more they give you, the more utility you can provide, as more money gives you more power to control people and resources. It’s a nice, positive feedback loop.
But one simple problem with it is that money can be used for things other than what people paid you for. Say you’re Bill Gates and you masterminded an operating system and productivity suite people use. (You did this using ethically suspect tactics, but let’s assume you still did more good than harm.)
Now you have a ton of money, and you use it to change how the US organizes education.
That’s what Bill Gates did.
Then it turned out, and Gates himself admits it, that his plan didn’t make things better. Arguably, it made things worse.
So the simple insight was only this: Money is too general a power. We want people who do something good to be able to do more of it, but to assume that, because they did one thing that other people want, means they are qualified to decide how people do other things is unwarranted.
We wouldn’t take the best teacher in the world and say, “Okay, Thelma, now you design the next universal operating system!” We wouldn’t ask the best surgeon in the world to design environmental policy.
We generalize the ability to make money doing one thing to assume it means you’re good at doing everything.
Maybe money shouldn’t be the sole metric we use to decide who will lead. Maybe Gates shouldn’t have been making education policy. Maybe the Koch brothers shouldn’t have decided what half the Republican party policy program should be.
Not a very startling insight, I’m afraid.
But I’m less interested in fixing capitalism than I am in thinking about post-capitalism. So what’s interesting about this isn’t the insight that this is one of the many ways capitalism fails, which I already knew, BUT that a feature of post capitalism needs to be avoiding power creep; just because someone is good at one thing doesn’t mean you hand him control of unrelated things. At most, you then put the best surgeon on the world on a committee to improve surgery, then maybe they start influencing hospital management, then maybe drugs, etc., etc.
A small movement to a related sector, without great power, but with influence, makes sense. Handing them huge power is stupid. A successful businessman isn’t necessarily good at anything but the specific business they were in, and generally isn’t good at economic policy beyond saying what’s good for him, or maybe, what’s good for their industry if what’s good for the industry isn’t also bad for them. (What was good for computers and software in the 90s was not, in my opinion, what was good for Bill Gates, and he wasn’t trying to make the best industry, but the richest Microsoft and Bill Gates.
Communism, with its central planners, had this same problem. Central planners didn’t know much about almost any of the industries they were planning.
Which leads us to a final note: I’m tired of people acting as if communism, social democracy (socialism in modern discourse), and capitalism are the entire acceptable spectrum.
Capitalists want this to be the conversation because they can say, “Hahaha, the USSR failed and Stalin was evil so you have to stick with us, there is no other alternative.
But all three systems have failed, because all three failed to handle climate change. They knew about a catastrophe for over 40 years and did nothing. That’s failure.
So the question isn’t, “Where on the communism to capitalism spectrum should we land?” The question is: “How do we create a third pole? Something new and better which avoids the known problems of previous systems?
And, along with, “It’ll come when it comes, and I’m not in direct control,” is the bigger insight I had while shopping for trout.
Something different, truly different, is needed.
Or we’re all cooked.
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