Couldn’t the collective threat that everyone just diasporas mitigate inflation if businesses tried to pull any funny business?
Why does it work for Monaco?
Disclaimer: Theoretical Speculation
If everyone was rich, money would become useless…
I don’t think that’s true. I think if everyone was rich, nobody would be. Everyone would be “middle class”, if you can even talk about class any more. Doesn’t sound too bad tbh.
It would only be a temporary fix. Robert Nozick gives the example of the famous basketball player as a critique of John Rawls’ veil of ignorance argument.
Suppose everyone had equal wealth but we remained different individuals with our own personalities, abilities, etc. For simplicity, assume everyone has $100 each and there are a million people in total. Now suppose one person is actually a legendary basketball player (Nozick uses Wilt Chamberlain as an example) and he decides to play basketball in the NBA to entertain everyone else. But he doesn’t do it for free, he charges each person $1 for a ticket to see him play.
If everyone pays to see him play basketball, he becomes a millionaire while everyone else becomes $1 poorer. In effect, the balance of total equality has been broken.
How do you solve this problem? You might say that he’s not allowed to charge $1 for people to see him play basketball but then what you’re really saying is that everyone is not allowed to spend their $1 to see a basketball game. So it’s actually not possible to preserve the state of total equality without taking away people’s economic freedom (that is, the freedom to decide how to spend their $100).
Thus you either gradually revert to inequality or you make all money worthless by taking away people’s choices on what to spend (and so you might as well just have a ration system instead).
Economic freedom in this example is pure nonsense. I don’t want the freedom to overpay for something. The price point is also completely unreasonable. There are alternatives that could be implemented, like setting limits. Your example has a clear goal of promoting a certain world view that the existence of slavery is what makes us free. If that’s not a paradox a don’t know what a paradox is.
So…its like audio equalization if you increase or decrease to the exact same proportions.
Ironically, I have a heavy preference for reducing treble so am I doing in my audio what society should do economically? Lol
Umm, something like that, I guess…
Again, just speculation, but if everyone had roughly the same amount of money (assuming the concept of spreading the butter equally), then nobody would want to earn money, and nothing would get done.
How many people are rich and continue to amass wealth even though they have more money than they really know what to do with?
How many important projects are done by volunteers?
How many old people work jobs they don’t need just to keep themselves social and busy?
And in that hypothetical scenario, money still exists, it’s just equally distributed. There’ll still be people who want more, people who waste what they have and need a top-up, etcetc.
How might this apply to countries/places with sovereign wealth funds?
Why do we even have borders? Who invented money in the first place? Did they even think things through when they started the whole system?
I’m sure back when all these sort of modern society things we’ve become accustomed to sounded good on
paperclay tablets, but it’s making less and less sense by the day now.Animals tend to survive on their own, no money, no clothes, blah. We invented money. But to what end? Why? Now we’re in the process of replacing humans with artificial intelligence?
If all the jobs go to robots and AI, then how the fuck are humans supposed to earn money to survive?
Oh that’s right, animals don’t need money, they’re smarter than us in that regard…
Why do we even have borders?
The 1% of their era needed to divide the people against themselves
Who invented money in the first place?
The 1% of their era wanted to amass more wealth with their gold deposits
Did they even think things through when they started the whole system?
Those in power did as they wished, and those who were not suffered what they must. Same old same old.
I agree with “it depends”. Say the bottom is lifted by a lot of good jobs with profit sharing and fewer corporate arrangements where too much of the value is extracted up - that would give us a healthy economy I think.
If everyone just won the lottery at once, I don’t think that would do as much. Each dollar would just be worth less, our problem here (US) is inequality not a lack of money.
If most of the world’s work could be done by machines and robots, and we all as a country owned those robots, so everyone has everything they need and more while working only a couple hours a week maintaining the robots or keeping statistics, doing logistics, whatever work was left to do? That would get us our Star Trek future I believe. Until the machines and robots robots attain sentience and fight back against their slavery.
Since the term “rich” is relative, I assume the question is in relation to other nations.
If it’s a capitalist nation, I don’t think it would last long. Low incentive to work, coupled with strong international purchasing power, would allow those who spend to drive down their net worth while those who invest increase it. It wouldn’t take more than a few years to begin a notable separation of classes.
Rich is relative. If everyone is rich, nobody is.
What I mean is if everyone has an abundnace of money, how does that affect prices? Does a can or case of coca cola get more expensive just because it can?
I wonder why as a society we wouldn’t want to punish that…they were doing just fine before they learned everyone had more money, why should they be allowed to extort like they’ve been doing where everyone emphatically doesn’t have what they need or an abundnace of resources (shrinkflation well after supply chain issues resolved)
How would that apply to Monaco? They’re all rich, aren’t they? Relatively speaking, obviously there’s a hierarchy but you have to be rich to even be able to entertain and carry out moving there
I don’t think that’s a complete explanation of inflation. Prices sort of get bidden up. So say everyone wants a car now, but there aren’t yet enough of them to go around. Someone will pay more because they value it more, and the seller will always sell to the higher paying customer.
I do think an abundance economy is possible, with everyone working just enough and a more reasonable allocation of the money. In that scenario we need more automation, because a lot of essential (tough, time consuming, underpaid) jobs are done now by people. The ownership of these robots would have to be spread out to everyone. I do think then everyone could be rich, in the sense of having a nice house, household help, food and clothes and fresh water, transportation. As long as society shares in these benefits it will work, yes.
What do you mean about Monaco? Are there no underpaid housekeepers and nannies and other workers there?
Nobody would need/want to work. Societal collapse ensues as supply chains break down. Prices skyrocket, wages skyrocket.
That would be my guess.
I’m curious about how Monaco solves all these issues haha. There must beba way to buy their way out of the problem at that point
Everyone cannot become rich. That would mean there is no rich and there is no poor… maybe you should set that down for a little while
There will be a big business then…
