This is a really fascinating, thought provoking post. I think the broad notion of thinking about the economy in this way helps explain a lot, and it got me thinking about FDR’s four freedoms speech (which to this day I think is the best distillation of liberalism and what it should be that I’ve ever heard). Two are positive goods—freedom of speech and freedom of worship are about choice of what is meaningful—but the other two, freedom from want and freedom from fear, are about avoiding suffering. Essentially the promise FDR was making to the US was not that we would have to pay nothing in suffering to maintain a decent standard of living—such a post scarcity world was unimaginable then on technical grounds, and is pretty damn hard to imagine today—but that the suffering price would be bounded to a level where one still had the ability to be happy, have a meaningful life and pursue the things that would secure that meaning. Honestly I think that’s the social contract we should still aspire to today, and framing it in terms of discomfort instead of money helps make that discussion much more meaningful.
Thank you for writing this post! I feel like I am going to be linking people to it over the next few months. BOTH the list of kinds of first world poverty AND the concept of suffering flow economics are things I have thought about and talked about but never quite been able to put down on paper.
"Reimagining economics as flows of suffering" does a bit to account for the presupposition of rationality, which has always been one of my personal gripes with the dismal science as a layperson. I imagine that if it were taught this way it could also alleviate some of the greed maximizing behavior and diminished altruism that have been found in studies of practitioners and students of the discipline, if the relationship turned out to be causal that is. It's definitely an interesting way to conceptualize it. Thank you!
This is a really fascinating, thought provoking post. I think the broad notion of thinking about the economy in this way helps explain a lot, and it got me thinking about FDR’s four freedoms speech (which to this day I think is the best distillation of liberalism and what it should be that I’ve ever heard). Two are positive goods—freedom of speech and freedom of worship are about choice of what is meaningful—but the other two, freedom from want and freedom from fear, are about avoiding suffering. Essentially the promise FDR was making to the US was not that we would have to pay nothing in suffering to maintain a decent standard of living—such a post scarcity world was unimaginable then on technical grounds, and is pretty damn hard to imagine today—but that the suffering price would be bounded to a level where one still had the ability to be happy, have a meaningful life and pursue the things that would secure that meaning. Honestly I think that’s the social contract we should still aspire to today, and framing it in terms of discomfort instead of money helps make that discussion much more meaningful.
Thank you for writing this post! I feel like I am going to be linking people to it over the next few months. BOTH the list of kinds of first world poverty AND the concept of suffering flow economics are things I have thought about and talked about but never quite been able to put down on paper.
"Reimagining economics as flows of suffering" does a bit to account for the presupposition of rationality, which has always been one of my personal gripes with the dismal science as a layperson. I imagine that if it were taught this way it could also alleviate some of the greed maximizing behavior and diminished altruism that have been found in studies of practitioners and students of the discipline, if the relationship turned out to be causal that is. It's definitely an interesting way to conceptualize it. Thank you!
> Having older children in a neighborhood mind younger children
I think there's a typo here but I'm not sure what it is
Where “mind” ~means “provide caregiving and supervision for”
Oh, yeah ok.