WE’RE BAILING OUT THE BILLIONAIRES AGAIN
It’s getting to be rather a bad habit around here. And it all started with the Magna Carta. Bear with me. Many more qualified people have explained the ins and outs of the recent bank failures in our crazy financial system, here and here. I also have talked about the energy implications of money before.
I don’t want to talk about FDIC insurance. I want to talk about story.
MONEY IS A STORY
It’s a story we made up when we moved beyond a barter economy. It’s a brilliant story! I make cloth, and you grow apples. I want apples, but you don’t need cloth. So I give you a tiny piece of metal instead, trusting that eventually somebody is going to need cloth and will replenish my stores of metal. None of us need the metal for anything, but it stands in for everything we do need.
Evolve that miracle system long enough, and apparently, you get pure imaginary money where we don’t even need the little pieces of metal, and we just tell each other we have it. What a story!
ANOTHER STORY: MONEY IS POWER
Another metaphor for money is power, which according to a basic dictionary, is the ability to either get things done or to make other people get things done. For most of human history, the guarantee on both kinds of power was violence and coercion. Do what I tell you because I have a big sword. Do what I tell you because I have all the little pieces of metal you need to stay alive. Do what I tell you because your eternal soul is in jeopardy if you don’t.
Do what I tell you, or bad things happen.
After a hard, millennia-long fight to declare that human beings are inherently valuable and threats and coercion are not the best way of organizing ourselves, we’ve gotten to the point where now people collect both kinds of power by promising it’s going to benefit everyone. At least a little bit.
Nowadays, they even occasionally work to make that happen when we do give them power. So instead of the point of a sword, we have stump speeches and ads about how great your life will be if you do what they say. Instead of serfs and subjects, we have customers and voters.
To sum up: in thousands of years of evolution, we’ve gone from doing what I say because I will hurt you if I don’t, to doing what I say because you’ll get something out of it too. Progress, I guess!?!
WE’RE MISSING PART OF THE STORY
The story of money changed, and culturally we have not caught up.
For the majority of our history, often called pre-history, which is hilarious, it seems like no one human was able to accumulate a huge amount of money or power. There were rich and poor stone age folks, and we do have the archeological records to prove that, but in general, keeping everyone alive was a group project. Most of life was communal and real close to the edge of subsistence.
Then we got agriculture, started settling down, and started valuing land and resources. And ever since, power has started to accumulate into ever fewer hands.
TO THE KINGS
Let’s skip ahead a little to the Kings. I think it’s a mistake to try and homogenize the politics of the ancient world. I know that there were actually a lot of ways that we organized ourselves, and there were quite a few egalitarian, matriarchal, democratic, and pretty much every other way to politic in the world. The book, the Dawn of Everything (affiliate) brilliantly walks through the diversity of human politics. But the world powers that eventually dominated learned to concentrate political and economic power in one man/institution.
NO MORE KINGS
And then began the largely thankless work of clawing back and limiting the power of those men. It took us several millennia in fits and starts and backtracks and success. We had an explosion of democracy, briefly, in southern Europe. We had the meritocracy of the Chinese government system but under the emperor. We had the Magna Carta declaring the rights of men in England that the pope immediately declared completely invalid and King John basically ignored. And many, many more examples of greater and lesser success.
But we got better and better at it. Most countries came up with a system of government where political power is split between many different people who are supposed to keep an eye on one another.
ALL BAD ROADS LEAD TO HITLER
Alongside the official changes, we changed our story.
We instinctively believe that no one man should be able to make decisions for an entire population and that when that happens it is almost entirely bad. Just witness the change from the word king to fascist. Practically, there’s no difference between them, just the story we tell about their actions.
I don’t think we’ll ever be done with this fight. Especially these days, there are constantly men arguing that it would be better if we all just did what one guy said again. But there is also always an instinctive counter-reaction that that’s a really bad idea. We can play out that story really easily in our minds and end up at Hitler.
THE WORLD HAS CHANGED AND OUR STORIES HAVE NOT KEPT UP
Since the industrial revolution, economic power, and political power have been split, and the people who run the government are not the people with all the money. Yes, they’re usually rich. There is great overlap, and they help each other out a whole lot, but the king used to be the richest man in the country. That is no longer the case by a long shot.
So on the political side, we have several millennial-long fights to balance political power and make sure the people who are telling us what to do are at least pretending it’s for our own good and have a bunch of other people with the power to stop them watching them.
WE JUST DON’T HAVE THE SAME INSTINCTS WHEN ECONOMIC POWER CONCENTRATES
We have had private citizen billionaires for 200 years, and we’ve already suffered the devastation of extreme economic concentration once as a world in the 1920s and many times in much smaller amounts since. And we came up with some really cool ways to fight that concentration, mostly with regulation and unions. And some really not cool like early systems of communism that just ended up with a different hierarchy. And we promptly forget all of those lessons again and again, because it’s just not in the story yet.
Culturally, they’re mostly still good guys.
Yes, their reputation has tarnished a little, but mostly due to personal weirdness, not the number in their bank account. We think of how convenient their products are. What geniuses they are. How amazing they are compared to the great towering intellectuals of previous times. They have big conferences in Switzerland where they try to solve the world’s problems.
It’s just generally thought of as a good thing to have a ridiculous amount of money. At the very least, we believe it’s fair that the labor of an entire society is going to very few people.
WE NEED A NEW MAGNA CARTA
Hopefully, it will work better than the original one. We are at the very beginning of this fight for the story of economic power. Who has it; who should have it and how we limit it.
It’s probably going to take a few more wobbles before we grow the same instincts around economic power that we have around political power. We need an allergy to extreme riches the same way we are now allergic to kings. Because it really is no different.
It should be just as ludicrous to concentrate economic power the way it’s ludicrous to concentrate political power.
HOW DARE THE POOR?
Right now we have a lot of the opposite – the laziness of welfare recipients, the unfairness of redistribution of wealth, and the insane policy that as you go up in the income brackets, you go down in taxes. The whole global economy is invested in enriching a few people. That’s a story.
Another story could be that one man is completely incapable of creating that much value for the world by starting a company. That people with loads of success are should be responsible for funding loads of the structure that undergirds society that enabled their success. That helping struggling people actually enriches and uplifts everyone. That a strong social safety net actually leads to more wealth because more people can take more risks. That keeping everyone in the game is more important than ensuring one dude wins the game.
None of this is TRUE. None of this SHOULD HAPPEN. It’s all just a story too. Maybe none of these things will end up in our final story about money.
We left reality the second some dude in Turkey handed another dude a Lydian Stater, a misshapen lump of gold and silver in 600 BCE with a couple of animals stamped into the metal and exchanged it from actual flesh and blood real animals, and everyone went away happy from that transaction.
Since it’s all imagined anyway, why not imagine a story that goes a little better for a few more people?