I remember telling his Oxford students: "If you walk by a Rolls Royce, spit on it". But on a more mild note I think everyone should read the Pope's "Let Us Dream". It makes such an understated brilliant argument for living with nature and equity with each other. Also encourage people to have a go at The Landlord's Game that Lizzie Magie designed after reading Henry George's fulminations against landowners and the sale of land. The economically illiterate consumers bought Monopoly instead, a cynical inversion of the message that the Landlord's Game conveyed. Like the JSO protestors we have a steep wall of entitled ignorance to tear down.
Every billionaire is a failure of economics and society. This is not the inevitable result of a system we cannot escape. Like all human creations, the economy is designed, and it can be redesigned. The myth of permanence is designed by the powerful to protect their power, and propagated by a corporate media whose interests are aligned with them, not us. We must break the power of accumulated money, by destroying its ability to accumulate itself. Set government bond rates permanently at zero. Use the government capacity to create credit (cheaply) to fund the transformation we need, instead of privatising this capacity to the banks and allowing them to choose the allocation of capital. Finally, turn to Henry George to recover the social value of land. it can be done. We just need “economics” to design a better system instead of justifying the current one.
"Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars .."
That's not the reasoning tech billionaires have taken. They are not seeking to run, at least consciously, rather they have legitimized and absolved themselves of *destroying* all life on Earth.
How? AI
1) They see AI, a Silicon God, as inevitable.
2) That this Silicon God will consume all live as it evolves
3) The first to birth it, will have totalitarian control over the entire plant
4) That carbon life is a "bootloader" to this next stage of life.
5) Merging with it (all the Neuralink nonsense) is survival
6) That this evolution will be immortal, and infinitely more intelligent than us
Their ideas are absurd, but *believing* them or saying so, grants them moral absolution (we had to do it!) to butcher all life to win their AI arms race. Because, although the arguments are filled with insane assumptions, the military application of the tech does have real Orwellian abilities which are rapidly evolving into nightmare.
Kill-bots and pervasive surveillance that can sift the net for any hint of rebellion, a totalitarians dream
Even a botched run will place horrifying power into their hands. Billionaires like them and so many more that have nurtured extremism, concentrated power into their ranks and sought even to invoke civil war are a threat to mankind.
The rich are just as subject to folly as any human being. Their wealth allows them to inflict it on everyone.
Interesting to read this as the remains of a hurricane, which started in the Caribbean some 3 weeks ago, arrives in the UK bringing strong winds and rain. It takes a long time for that energy to dissipate, especially if it doesn't make landfall.
We live in a time when prophets abound, and everyone can hear them, but almost no one listens to them. Those who do listen, either refuse to believe or they end up half mad with the knowledge that it could be different, could be better, but *it won't ever be*.
It won't ever be different because the people with power and influence to change things only use it to enrich themselves and insulate themselves from the consequences of their own actions.
This is an excellent post by a concerned and thoughtful economist. As a sustainability sociologist of international development who is prioneering a decarbonization-based international monetary system (Verhagen 2012"The Tierra Solution: Resolving the Climate Crisis through Monetary Transformation" ) resulting in the global governance system of Tierranism, I want to add a concrete proposal that is based upon the justice-based-TTRIMS monetary sustainability framework with its six applications in the 2024 sequel to the 2012 book entitled "THE TIERRA TIPPING POINT: From crypto, shadow banking, bank money, CBDC to the Tierra digital currency of the UN Peoples' Bank's 21st century monetary architecture".
The billionaires would like us to think that they’ve given up and dream of going to Mars. But they’re not stupid and the possibility of sustaining life on Mars is too remote to take seriously. Space is simply good business. Instead, I think their view is that the earth’s current population size is unsustainable, and that the problems of global warming would be mitigated by a huge population reduction. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest they’re actively working towards this, but I do think they’re planning on surviving a mass die off and doing nothing to prevent it. Weakening governments, encouraging wars, discouraging vaccines, all these and more will bring it on sooner rather than later.
Always aspiring for more is a side of human nature that does not accord well with sustainable resource use.
However, recent results in a study at Bath University and published in Nature shows that this facet of human nature may not be as typical as previously assumed, potentially opening up a more sustainable and just future for humanity.
The study is behind a paywall but this article provides the bare bones of the findings
Western govs face a problem with manufacturing money to pay for climate adjustments. Since we have de-industrialised, we have no easy conduit to absorb that money & use it. It will end up in the hands of too big to fail companies & private equity. The very problem faced by Biden. We can’t conjure up an industrial base without a lot of top down planning & our govs are simply not equipped with the skills to manage industrial devt in this way. Of course what we need is slow, patient, bottom up linear growth helped by gov, but this is near impossible in the current funding landscape. Regional banks have gone, all the funding agencies are looking for stupid BIG DRAMATIC ideas instead of existing little factories repurposing to try new ideas and the VC funding environment only wants to pick assembled, whole, category killers, not invest in little, linear, but by bit small businesses. If the gov can do anything useful, it’s to tax & regulate. But we live in a post tax / post regs world where manufacturing money is the easier political sell than actually running things. And if money manufacturing is not possible, we move to austerity & cost cutting. Zero chance of solving the problems that way. So for all I agree that this is an emergency & we have to act, I don’t agree that spaffing more money into the financial system is the answer (more like the problem) & I don’t believe the West - definitely not GB - can do the gradual, resilient step by step industrialisation that’s needed. So my vote is regulate & tax. Which will probably tank Sterling.
I remember telling his Oxford students: "If you walk by a Rolls Royce, spit on it". But on a more mild note I think everyone should read the Pope's "Let Us Dream". It makes such an understated brilliant argument for living with nature and equity with each other. Also encourage people to have a go at The Landlord's Game that Lizzie Magie designed after reading Henry George's fulminations against landowners and the sale of land. The economically illiterate consumers bought Monopoly instead, a cynical inversion of the message that the Landlord's Game conveyed. Like the JSO protestors we have a steep wall of entitled ignorance to tear down.
Every billionaire is a failure of economics and society. This is not the inevitable result of a system we cannot escape. Like all human creations, the economy is designed, and it can be redesigned. The myth of permanence is designed by the powerful to protect their power, and propagated by a corporate media whose interests are aligned with them, not us. We must break the power of accumulated money, by destroying its ability to accumulate itself. Set government bond rates permanently at zero. Use the government capacity to create credit (cheaply) to fund the transformation we need, instead of privatising this capacity to the banks and allowing them to choose the allocation of capital. Finally, turn to Henry George to recover the social value of land. it can be done. We just need “economics” to design a better system instead of justifying the current one.
"Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars .."
That's not the reasoning tech billionaires have taken. They are not seeking to run, at least consciously, rather they have legitimized and absolved themselves of *destroying* all life on Earth.
How? AI
1) They see AI, a Silicon God, as inevitable.
2) That this Silicon God will consume all live as it evolves
3) The first to birth it, will have totalitarian control over the entire plant
4) That carbon life is a "bootloader" to this next stage of life.
5) Merging with it (all the Neuralink nonsense) is survival
6) That this evolution will be immortal, and infinitely more intelligent than us
Their ideas are absurd, but *believing* them or saying so, grants them moral absolution (we had to do it!) to butcher all life to win their AI arms race. Because, although the arguments are filled with insane assumptions, the military application of the tech does have real Orwellian abilities which are rapidly evolving into nightmare.
Kill-bots and pervasive surveillance that can sift the net for any hint of rebellion, a totalitarians dream
Even a botched run will place horrifying power into their hands. Billionaires like them and so many more that have nurtured extremism, concentrated power into their ranks and sought even to invoke civil war are a threat to mankind.
The rich are just as subject to folly as any human being. Their wealth allows them to inflict it on everyone.
Interesting to read this as the remains of a hurricane, which started in the Caribbean some 3 weeks ago, arrives in the UK bringing strong winds and rain. It takes a long time for that energy to dissipate, especially if it doesn't make landfall.
We live in a time when prophets abound, and everyone can hear them, but almost no one listens to them. Those who do listen, either refuse to believe or they end up half mad with the knowledge that it could be different, could be better, but *it won't ever be*.
It won't ever be different because the people with power and influence to change things only use it to enrich themselves and insulate themselves from the consequences of their own actions.
This is an excellent post by a concerned and thoughtful economist. As a sustainability sociologist of international development who is prioneering a decarbonization-based international monetary system (Verhagen 2012"The Tierra Solution: Resolving the Climate Crisis through Monetary Transformation" ) resulting in the global governance system of Tierranism, I want to add a concrete proposal that is based upon the justice-based-TTRIMS monetary sustainability framework with its six applications in the 2024 sequel to the 2012 book entitled "THE TIERRA TIPPING POINT: From crypto, shadow banking, bank money, CBDC to the Tierra digital currency of the UN Peoples' Bank's 21st century monetary architecture".
For those who cannot wait till October, they can reflect on https://transformmoney.org and https://transformingtheworldeconomy.org.
Neither of those links work for me.
The billionaires would like us to think that they’ve given up and dream of going to Mars. But they’re not stupid and the possibility of sustaining life on Mars is too remote to take seriously. Space is simply good business. Instead, I think their view is that the earth’s current population size is unsustainable, and that the problems of global warming would be mitigated by a huge population reduction. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest they’re actively working towards this, but I do think they’re planning on surviving a mass die off and doing nothing to prevent it. Weakening governments, encouraging wars, discouraging vaccines, all these and more will bring it on sooner rather than later.
Always aspiring for more is a side of human nature that does not accord well with sustainable resource use.
However, recent results in a study at Bath University and published in Nature shows that this facet of human nature may not be as typical as previously assumed, potentially opening up a more sustainable and just future for humanity.
The study is behind a paywall but this article provides the bare bones of the findings
https://www.nsls.org/blog/wealth-and-success-exploring-a-tricky-topic
Oh dear, it should have read Dennis Potter: I remember him telling his Oxford students . . .
Western govs face a problem with manufacturing money to pay for climate adjustments. Since we have de-industrialised, we have no easy conduit to absorb that money & use it. It will end up in the hands of too big to fail companies & private equity. The very problem faced by Biden. We can’t conjure up an industrial base without a lot of top down planning & our govs are simply not equipped with the skills to manage industrial devt in this way. Of course what we need is slow, patient, bottom up linear growth helped by gov, but this is near impossible in the current funding landscape. Regional banks have gone, all the funding agencies are looking for stupid BIG DRAMATIC ideas instead of existing little factories repurposing to try new ideas and the VC funding environment only wants to pick assembled, whole, category killers, not invest in little, linear, but by bit small businesses. If the gov can do anything useful, it’s to tax & regulate. But we live in a post tax / post regs world where manufacturing money is the easier political sell than actually running things. And if money manufacturing is not possible, we move to austerity & cost cutting. Zero chance of solving the problems that way. So for all I agree that this is an emergency & we have to act, I don’t agree that spaffing more money into the financial system is the answer (more like the problem) & I don’t believe the West - definitely not GB - can do the gradual, resilient step by step industrialisation that’s needed. So my vote is regulate & tax. Which will probably tank Sterling.