Got Money?

Recently, I retired from a job that had occupied my attention for a mere 45 years. It was the worst of jobs, it was the best of jobs, but thank God, it paid well. I was able to provide my family with material advantages intended to make up for the lack of a fully engaged spouse or parent.

Since I retired, I have made more money each year than I ever did working! It’s called investing. Now, of course, we happen to be living in a charmed era, investment-wise. You’d have to be a pretty poor money manager not to have made gains over the last 10 years. However, I now suffer from the conviction, possibly delusional, that I could have made money in less advantageous periods as well.

There’s precedent. In early 1970’s Boston, two friends of mine purchased a six family residential structure now valued at $6,000,000. Cost: $10,000. I myself had an opportunity to buy a popular neighborhood bar…for $10,000. Or I could have bought a working farm in Maritime Canada…again, $10,000.

It gets worse. In both ventures I would have had partners so I would not have needed the full 10k…but I did need a seemingly unattainable 1k just to be included in the conversation. No joy! In those days, George McGovern was running for President on a platform that included a $1,000 minimum annual income for all Americans. No need to ask what I was doing on election day!

Like Jacob in the Old Testament, I had to work - in his case for 14 years, in my case for 45 years - just to create the capital we lacked at the beginning of our careers. Did someone say ‘Wage Slaves’? Both Jacob and I (several orders of magnitude below) went on to live economically comfortable lives. But at what cost?

Arguably, I worked 45 years to get to where I could have been Day One if I’d had $10,000 in my sock drawer. (Burglars take note, I will be moving my money later today.)

In every economic epoch, the generation of wealth relies on the same three sources: Inspiration (innovation, imagination, ingenuity), Perspiration (labor), and Capital (money, land). Inspiration derives its economic value from its future utility, Perspiration from our present exertions, Capital from wealth created in the past, conserved, and now unlocked.

In every era, all three sources necessarily contribute to the generation of wealth, but in proportions that vary depending on the means of production characteristic of the epoch. Likewise, all three sources share in the fruits of economic activity but not necessarily in proportion to their actual contributions. The relationship between contributions made and rewards received is called Political Economy. The disparity between the two is called Alienation.  

Examples: Much of the wealth generated in the ante-bellum American South was attributable to Labor (slavery) but that wealth was routed primarily to the holders of Capital (plantation owners). The Industrial Revolution substituted the factory (wage slavery) for the plantation.

Marxists proposed to invert the distribution of rewards between capital and labor. Fatally, they failed to acknowledge the crucial role played by Inspiration and so failed to reward those contributors appropriately. Hyper-materialism turned out to be Marx’s Achilles Heal.

Happily, the Industrial Revolution is behind us… along with the Enlightenment philosophy that grounded it. We are now in the third stage of the Cyber Revolution:

(1)    Computerization (PC and the smart phone).

(2)    Socialization (internet, the web, and social media).

(3)    Artificial Intelligence (the democratization of information and agency).

The Cyber Age age puts a premium on Innovation and rewards it accordingly. Capital remains essential to meet infrastructure demands so stock market returns are healthy. The odd person out, as usual, is Labor. In a world where much of what we have traditionally thought of as work can be automated with gains in both quality and efficiency, grunt work has become the least important leg of the economic tripod. We’ve come a long way from Tara and the assembly line.

We are truly in the process of turning the economic paradigm on its head. For millennia Labor has been over-exploited and under-rewarded. Now that must change! As Labor becomes less essential, and solidarity more so, compensation must exceed contribution. 

At least since the Middle Ages, Labor has played a disproportionately important role in wealth creation – a role that has been systematically under-rewarded. In order to sustain productivity, it was necessary to embed non-economic, quasi-economic, and meta-economic memes into our culture; for example:

He (sic) who works, eats.

Work earns respect; idleness…contempt.

We have a moral obligation to contribute to the commonweal.

Work provides an opportunity for us to express our creativity.

Work ennobles the spirit.

The Intellectual History of the late 19^th century can be understood as a contest between Marx and his foil, Pope Leo XIII. Interestingly, both agreed on the primacy of human labor on the spectrum of social goods.

We can no longer afford such ideological illusions. Yes, ‘work’ will continue to be a necessary part of life for the foreseeable future…but not 100,000 hours of work in a lifetime. Technology allows us to leverage our efforts to generate much greater productivity in many fewer hours.  The character of work will need to change; emphasis must now be on the 3 C’s: Creativity, Craft, and Care. We’ll need to find new ways to distribute societal wealth, ways that are not hog-tied to Labor.  

At this early stage, it would be a mistake to hyperfocus on any single solution. We are in the ‘let a thousand flowers bloom’ stage; but several ideas have already surfaced:

A 30 hour work week (40 hours pay)

Sabbatical years (at full salary)

A minimum annual income, not tied to Labor, for all legal residents

These are worth exploring. But we should also be considering a more fundamental reorientation; for example:

(1)    A national bank created specifically to provide no interest, low verification, micro capital investments to budding entrepreneurs, perhaps piggy-backing on the current student loan infrastructure or using blockchain to create a secure, anonymized, decentralized application and distribution network.

If I can borrow public money to pay for college, why not for alternative skills training or to finance my own start-up? The main reason that people who don’t have money don’t have money is that they don’t have money. We can fix that!

(2)    A sovereign wealth fund that invests in bleeding edge technology and vests every legal resident with an equal share over time. This fund would supplement existing public and private retirement plans (e.g. social security, pensions) but without any tie to employment.

(3)    A pre-K through 12 educational system, finally liberated from the need to train children to be ‘productive’ members of the workforce, now dedicated to stimulating curiosity, promoting creativity, and empowering problem solving. I envision a blizzard of public and private school alternatives offering a variety of foci, loci, teaching styles, even languages of instruction. When it comes to curriculum, N=1.

(4)    A pervasive recognition that we prosper not at the expense of our neighbor (class war), but in solidarity (community).

The grandfather of Western Philosophy, Anaximander Hot Link  (6^th century BCE), taught that ‘actual entities’ come to be when 2 or more ‘potential entities’, freely and without expectation of reciprocation, grant each other ‘reck’ (chreon), i.e. ‘what’s due them’ or ‘what they need’, e.g. respect, the space to become all that they can be, agape (love), shalom(peace). They template one another and the potential becomes actual in the process. I am (self) only because ‘you’ (other) are! I am in the context of you, the ‘other’.

This concept resurfaces in the New Testament, primarily in the writings of Paul and John, as koinonia (communion). The 1^st Letter of John is particularly explicit: “But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have koinonia(communion, fellowship) with one another…” (1: 7)

Again ‘light’ suggests reflection: if we walk together in the same light, we reflect one another, we template. In this way the early Christian church recaptured the primacy of mutuality that inspired Western philosophy prior to the Platonic catastrophe. Fast forward another 1500+ years and we rediscover the ontology of mutuality in Hasidic Judaism and later still in the 20^th century existentialism of Martin Buber.

The emphasis on mutuality in the ontologies of Anaximander, Jesus, the Baal Shem Tov and Buber ran counter to the cultural norms of their day: slavery, imperialism, serfdom, laissez-faire capitalism, nationalism, and even fascism. Regardless, mutuality remained a moral imperative for those who recognized it.

But ‘the times that are a-changing’ (Dylan): figuratively speaking at least, we are at ‘the dawning of the Age of Aquarius’ (Hair). It is not for nothing that Pisces, the fish, is an important symbol in the New Testament. Fish represent wealth and the abundance of nature, but abundance that can often be unlocked only at the expense of backbreaking, alienated, labor.  

How naïve am I to suggest that we may finally be entering an era when ethics and economics harmonize! And yet… Mutuality, the key to the Good Life, indeed the key to life itself, promises to unlock prosperity for the entire planet, if only our ancient idolatries (race, class, caste, etc.) don’t get in the way.