Zoom out “God is watching us”, sayeth the poet “from a distance”. From a distance- abstracted away from abstract concepts of law and justice which seem so important to the participants- focused on carnal concerns of power and desire- what does the economy look like?
A couple questions about the “suffering economy” model (which may just be due to my non-expertise):
1. Doesn’t using the suffering balance as a way to define capitalists vs workers not really work? Consider a highly paid professional (e.g. a doctor) who spends all their income on consumption (thereby not accumulating any capital). Their suffering balance is almost assuredly negative (as long as their work is not abnormally unpleasant to them), but it seems wholly wrong to consider them a capitalist in any sense. Am I missing something here?
2. The suffering metric (in either the subtraction or division forms) also doesn’t seem to account for people having substantially lessened suffering from their work. Consider a moderately successful musician whose passion is music (so producing music itself causes no suffering to them). There will still be some suffering from e.g having to run the business side of their music career, but they would overall show up on the suffering measures much the same as a mid-scale prototypical capitalist.
Neither of these break the usefulness of the construct of course, but they seem like important limitations to it. Is there work addressing these limitations?
A couple questions about the “suffering economy” model (which may just be due to my non-expertise):
1. Doesn’t using the suffering balance as a way to define capitalists vs workers not really work? Consider a highly paid professional (e.g. a doctor) who spends all their income on consumption (thereby not accumulating any capital). Their suffering balance is almost assuredly negative (as long as their work is not abnormally unpleasant to them), but it seems wholly wrong to consider them a capitalist in any sense. Am I missing something here?
2. The suffering metric (in either the subtraction or division forms) also doesn’t seem to account for people having substantially lessened suffering from their work. Consider a moderately successful musician whose passion is music (so producing music itself causes no suffering to them). There will still be some suffering from e.g having to run the business side of their music career, but they would overall show up on the suffering measures much the same as a mid-scale prototypical capitalist.
Neither of these break the usefulness of the construct of course, but they seem like important limitations to it. Is there work addressing these limitations?