It’s a struggle to get people to simultaneously keep in their minds the ideas of working for nothing and of paying for nothing, and why, when taken together, they don’t lead to the sort of disaster that they would if they were considered separately.
Because they still lead to disaster when taken together. If the idea is that people work for nothing and get goods for free, what’s anyone’s motivation to work?
To be fair, a lot of work is self-rewarding. To understand Steven Jobs, you cannot really just look at his bank account.
But a lot of other work isn’t. But I guess a good answer would be that people use money to buy status anyway, so any system that that just gives status to people doing the best work could roughly work and in small communities it indeed does.
On the other hand, money has clear advantages as a vehicle of conveying status, rather obvious ones. The real “trick” seems to be that money also buys productive resources, not just status. So a succesful businessman can cash out into a yacht or reinvest the profit. This seems to be the difference, it is possible to give status to someone just through popularity, or a king giving a medal and a knighting, but this cannot be converted into productive resources. Probably every transactional system needs a medium of exchange that buys both status and productive resources and if it does it will be effectively equivalent to money.
On the third hand, lacking status does not make people starve.
I guess I am back to the idea I talked about before. Within small communities, like an extended family, socialism. Give status to best workers but not through money, because you want to feed etc. everybody inside your microcommunity. And between these microcommunities capitalism.
To be fair, a lot of work is self-rewarding. To understand Steven Jobs, you cannot really just look at his bank account.
And yet he did in fact wind up with a rather large bank account. Are you seriously going to argue that if managing Apple wasn’t profitable he wouldn’t be doing something else?
For some values of “not profitable” yes. The point is that the “profits” must came in the form of success, achievement and status. Not necessarily money, although indeed money is the most common form of success, achievement and status in a commercial, peaceful period of history. Jobs may have been a stellar general during WW2, and in that case making headlines and history books would be the “profit”, not the generals salary.
You know what, I’m still trying to figure this one out, but when I do, I’ll share it with someone who’s open to the idea of an answer. I’ve seen you around. You’ve made up your mind already. I’m totally not getting sucked into that kind of conversation.
Because they still lead to disaster when taken together. If the idea is that people work for nothing and get goods for free, what’s anyone’s motivation to work?
To be fair, a lot of work is self-rewarding. To understand Steven Jobs, you cannot really just look at his bank account.
But a lot of other work isn’t. But I guess a good answer would be that people use money to buy status anyway, so any system that that just gives status to people doing the best work could roughly work and in small communities it indeed does.
On the other hand, money has clear advantages as a vehicle of conveying status, rather obvious ones. The real “trick” seems to be that money also buys productive resources, not just status. So a succesful businessman can cash out into a yacht or reinvest the profit. This seems to be the difference, it is possible to give status to someone just through popularity, or a king giving a medal and a knighting, but this cannot be converted into productive resources. Probably every transactional system needs a medium of exchange that buys both status and productive resources and if it does it will be effectively equivalent to money.
On the third hand, lacking status does not make people starve.
I guess I am back to the idea I talked about before. Within small communities, like an extended family, socialism. Give status to best workers but not through money, because you want to feed etc. everybody inside your microcommunity. And between these microcommunities capitalism.
And yet he did in fact wind up with a rather large bank account. Are you seriously going to argue that if managing Apple wasn’t profitable he wouldn’t be doing something else?
For some values of “not profitable” yes. The point is that the “profits” must came in the form of success, achievement and status. Not necessarily money, although indeed money is the most common form of success, achievement and status in a commercial, peaceful period of history. Jobs may have been a stellar general during WW2, and in that case making headlines and history books would be the “profit”, not the generals salary.
You know what, I’m still trying to figure this one out, but when I do, I’ll share it with someone who’s open to the idea of an answer. I’ve seen you around. You’ve made up your mind already. I’m totally not getting sucked into that kind of conversation.
Only in the same sense that your typical physicist can be said to have “made up his mind already” about the possibility of perpetual motion machines.