Nobody who believes societies are economies has the first clue why we get things like ‘cost of living’…
Nobody who believes societies are economies has the first clue why we get things like ‘cost of living’ crises.
The same problems recur in our supposed economies, with the same ideas useless to prevent them.
Can status explain it? You bet. /1
https://t.co/HQkG0Ma0LY https://t.co/eoUalPbQSn
Societies are not economies. Economies don’t exist. Think about just how ludicrous the idea is that societies run as a sort of objective economic machine, with tweaks to things like money supply and interest rates, and budgets. /2
As Gabriel Tarde saw, all economic relations are driven by the interplay of human desires. They’re as social as anything else.
And the root desire, socially, is status. People want status, which gives them an identity. /3
What we call an economy is really the dynamic, continuous interplay of rival groups, battling for status.
Economics interestingly almost recognises this, with its obsession with competition. /4
That battle of status groups is competition, absolutely. But economics sees that competition as more of that objective machine rubbish, a mechanism to keep prices low via the optimum allocation of resources etc.
That’s an hilarious, disastrous mistake. /5
Competition, really the imitative rivalry of status games, reaches no equilibrium. No matter how much status individuals and groups achieve, they always want more.
The billionaire is never satisfied to just sit back and enjoy their wealth. /6
They then want to ‘philanthropically’ run the world too. This process will never end, on its own. Status games will continue until the fundamental material conditions of life can no longer sustain them.
That’s what a cost of living crisis is. /7
That’s what wars are. We keep playing status games until a catastrophe stops us. Nothing else will. Often the catastrophe is caused by the status games themselves - wars.
A cost of living crisis is a mid-level catastrophe. /8
Not catastrophic enough to critically disrupt the status games. But a step along the road to that catastrophe.
Our current cost of living crisis is a combination of two things. One the disruption of the pandemic. /9
All pandemics are catastrophes. We’re pretending the one we’re in now isn’t, but it’s now just doing us more slowly.
And economic politics since the 1970s has also decoupled status from public life again. That’s what the idea of ‘the economy’ was created to do. /10
For those post-war years we had focused on collective, ‘public’ life, relatively free of status.
But once we’d fixed a lot of things, status was back. The economy was what did that substitution, to return us to the feudalism of status. /11
Just look at the ideas. ‘Free markets’ are really just a model of society where the existing status groups, like governments, are increasingly pushed out as ‘inefficient’ market players.
It’s an obvious con, to strip existing status hierarchies. And replace them. /12
With whoever can garner wealth and power, then set free from any pesky regulation and restriction.
It’s (not an analogy) the old nobles, finally free of the pesky King restricting their baronial ambitions. /13
That’s what today’s proliferation of billionaires is. The new nobles, set free of Kingly power to try to make themselves the new King. They battle among each other.
This is a pattern as old as history. It *is* history. /14
It’s why we had Popes, and Kings. To try to control these status games, by establishing relatively stable status hierarchies.
We don’t have that now. So it’s a shitshow of battling rivals. We peasants can only look on, our ‘cost of living’ the result. /15
The absolute obsession with ‘low taxes’ of modern economic politics, how do we not hear the cry of barons down the ages, decrying the King’s robbery of their wealth with new taxes?
These are not analogies. The same social patterns are still with us.
/end