Rabbit Holes 🕳 #27
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Rabbit Holes 🕳 #27
From universal basic capital, to the age of "fewer", and the original affluent society
Rabbit Holes 🕳
Today’s article snippets are a bit longer than usual as each of these three ideas are sooo crazy interesting. Trust me! 😉
#1 📈 Universal Basic Capital
“Policies that aim for greater [economic] equality through only increasing the labor share of income are stuck in paradigm inertia rooted in the zero-sum class struggles of a more labor-intensive industrial era, which no longer characterizes the tech-driven economy. The new paradigm for the rapidly approaching future would seek a greater labor share of wealth through an ownership stake that captures more of the value created by intelligent machines, which are diminishing the prospect of gainful employment. Both must work in tandem to raise wealth from the bottom up.”
“One way to head down this path, as hedge-fund manager Ray Dalio and left-leaning Nobel economist Joe Stiglitz proposed […] during the COVID crisis, would be to require companies that receive government subsidies and tax credits to assign a fair percentage of equity shares to a national savings plan, a kind of sovereign wealth fund with accounts owned individually by all citizens. They call this ‘universal basic capital.’ In this way, taxpayers who labor for their livelihood and help underwrite successful companies building back America [or other countries 😉] would also benefit from a growing return on capital just like the rich.“
» NOEMA | When The Blue-Collar Backbone Meets Generative AI by Nathan Gardels
“Instead of only once again relying on redistributing income to close the gap after wealth has been created, the idea is that wealth should be shared upfront: ‘pre-distribution.’”
“There are many models out there along these lines. […] Australia has what it calls the superannuation fund, in essence a sovereign wealth fund financed by employees, employers and state contributions to its universal pension scheme. The wealth of that fund now stands at almost $2 trillion, a sum greater than Australia’s GDP. Singapore has a similar plan, called the Central Provident Fund, from which citizens can also draw for health and housing needs. It is so profitable from its global investments that it is even able to fund some government services and help keep taxes low.”
“At this point, an innovative approach to economic recovery could present an opportunity to reduce inequality. The idea is that if everyone in this pandemic is sharing the downside, all could share in the upside as well.”
Stiglitz: “So, to me, this idea of pre-distribution through universal basic capital is absolutely critical going forward. It would reduce the burden that would be put on taxation, on redistribution, while augmenting people’s assets. […] It would generate more buy-in to the economic system because people would feel like they have an ownership stake in that system. That, in turn, would create more stability.”
“The idea of pre-distribution is not just economics; it’s also psychological because […] it makes everybody a capitalist. It makes everybody an owner. And you feel differently if you’re an owner of the future, an owner of the productive capacity of the country. You are not just a bystander in the system, but a participant.”
» NOEMA | Share The Wealth As We Recover Health - Interview with Joseph Stiglitz and Ray Dalio
#2 🙅♂️ We Are Moving Into An Age of “Fewer”
“An underlying assumption many individuals, managers and businesses incorporate into our decisions and choices is the concept of maximizing. While much of growth and well-being may be driven by more, a case could be made that less is what many should aim for if we are to solve problems, be happier and grow.
We are moving into an age of ‘fewer’. Fewer things. Fewer ‘managers’. Fewer big companies. Fewer people. Which might give rise to greater rather than fewer opportunities.”
Fewer things.
“Brands overproduce more than $500B of goods annually. In many categories less than half the inventory is sold. […] Much of this unsold product ends up in landfills like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which covers 1.6 million square kilometers in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and California. […] Most of the fast retail clothing is worn fewer than 6 times and is tossed filling landfills.
What if one of the most powerful ways to address environmental challenges is to buy, consume and sell less?”
Fewer Managers.
“Listen carefully to many employees as to why they prefer working from home or away from the office and in addition to flexibility, freedom, and work-life balance it is that they are more productive away from micro-managing, controlling, monitoring, continuously checking in management.”
“The past 3 years of working from home and or hybrid work has revealed that many managers are in crisis because they were not really managers but monitors, not leaders but bosses, not problem solvers but project assigners, and the talent who they oversee have begun to wonder what actual value their managers create besides “managing”.”
“We have entered an age of “De-bossification”. In many industries particularly “White-collar” ones the era of “bosses” is in decline. There is a rise in the need for leaders, guides, coaches, mentors, role-models, creators, and builders. Less of a clamoring for bosses, managers, controllers, monitors, evaluators, and paper pushers.”
Fewer Big Companies.
“A recent Wall Street Journal article, relying on labor data and an analysis from Jeffries, an investment banking and capital markets firm, determined that small companies were responsible for all of the net job growth since the start of the pandemic and accounted for four out of five job openings. According to the government’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, companies with fewer than 250 employees hired 3.67 million more people than have been laid off or who quit since February 2020. Larger companies, on the other hand, have cut a net 800,000 jobs during this time.”
“Increasingly scale is a disadvantage because modern technology, cloud computing, and marketplaces from Upwork to Shopify allow small firms and individuals to tap into scaled resources just in time while being agile and keeping costs flexible.”
“In addition to enabling technology there is a new mindset favoring small: Over a third of Gen-Z have side-hustles and side-gigs as being a maker, owner, creator, influencer is far more compelling than being just a managed employee.”
Fewer People.
“It takes 2.1 children per woman to keep the population flat. That number in most advanced countries is less than 1.7 and declining. […] If we exclude population growth in Africa the population of the world has peaked and, in a few countries, we are starting the great shrinkage.”
“Every business should interrogate their strategy to ask two questions a) how will our plans be impacted in our key markets with declining populations and b) what is our plan for the continent of Africa which will contain more [than] 40 percent of the global population in 2100?”
» The Future Does Not Fit In The Containers Of The Past | Fewer. by Rishad Tobaccowala
#3 🫐 The Original Affluent Society
“In the seminar I teach about hunter-gatherers, I often ask my students whether they think life was better in the past or today. There are, of course, always a few people who insist they couldn’t live without a flushing toilet. But more and more I’m seeing students who opt for a life of prehistoric hunting and gathering. To them, the advantages of modern life – of safety and smartphones – do not outweigh its tangled web of chronic indignities: loneliness, poor mental health, bureaucracy, lack of connection with nature, and overwork. Learning about the lives of hunter-gatherers confirms a suspicion that our modern lives are fundamentally at odds with human nature, that we have lost some kind of primordial freedom. For a generation who came of age with Instagram and TikTok, this is a striking – albeit theoretical – rejection of modernity.”
The idea that life in the past was better is, of course, not new, extending at least as far back as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s noble savage. But the 20th-century version of the primitivist thesis can be traced back to ‘The Original Affluent Society’, an essay by the late anthropologist Marshall Sahlins. It is one of the most famous, and controversial, essays in all of anthropology, assigned in virtually every class in the discipline. It is the essay that redefined how we think about hunter-gatherers – and ourselves.”
“‘A fair case can be made that hunters often work much less than we do, and rather than a grind the food quest is intermittent, leisure is abundant, and there is more sleep in the daytime per capita than in any other condition of society. […] This was, when you come to think of it, the original affluent society.’”
“[…] Building on Sahlins, in Affluence without Abundance Suzman argues that the wants and needs of the Ju/’hoansi were few because the environment provides all that is needed. Indeed, hunter-gatherers commonly see the world as a giving environment. Accumulation makes little sense in such a world because there will always be more. It’s also a good reason to avoid agriculture. One Ju/’hoansi man asked: ‘Why should we plant, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?’”
“[…] Anthropologists have long emphasised the collective nature of foraging – of doing work – but we ought to consider as well how rest is a collective experience that has shaped our evolution. When ants do nothing, they really are just doing nothing. In contrast, leisure time in humans is not just an absence of work, but a form of socialising, organic if unpredictable, synchronised to the ebb and flow of the natural world. Rest is enjoyed in the company of others but is also the reward for work done in the service of others. […] Rest allows the very things that make us special as a species: the capacity to listen and think and daydream.”
“[…] Today, many of us are doing the wrong kind of work, one that rejects sociality, craft and meaning, turning people into machines. In contrast, the physical, mental and social are inextricably linked in hunter-gatherer work. Modern life has been stripped of these connections, and compartmentalised for the sake of efficiency and comfort. Lee wrote of the Ju/’hoansi: ‘everyone worked and everyone used both hands and mind.’ Shorn of its original social context and multiplicity, the human body in today’s world is adrift and sick.”
“Frictionless technology at our fingertips leads to the paradoxical situation of our smartphone screens becoming crowded with apps, our days increasingly divided into small things, and our attention shattered. Things that were meant to make our lives easier simply tempt us to put more things on our plates, increasing the amount that we work, and wreaking havoc on our wellbeing.”
» aeon | Lessons from the foragers by Vivek V Venkataraman
💈 Seen On LinkedIn
This fits well with the “Age of Fewer” idea from above:
That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading and please consider sharing this issue on social media or with your colleagues and friends to help me spread the word!
Thomas