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?
We're not trying to define a capitalist as someone with a negative suffering balance. The closest we come is defining an economic elite as someone with a strongly negative suffering balance and above average consumption, but that's a definition of an economic *elite* which in this framework is not precisely coterminous with being a capitalist.
I think there's an important truth in the musician suffering less than others for what they get. Obviously I don't think we should go around persecuting writers and artists (being a writer myself)- but the reality is that society gives a rare few individuals (academics, some doctors etc.) the opportunity to perform unalienated, enjoyable labor- and we need to acknowledge that. There is a real sense in which people like this are freeloading in a world where others have to clean toilets. This has led to proposals like balanced work complexes- which are bad for efficency reasons. Nonetheless, it's kind of *tragic* that established professors are getting paid 100k or more to do what they do, while my mum hurt her body pushing a trolley. This isn't a matter of blame, but it's an important fact of our society to be critical of.
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?
We're not trying to define a capitalist as someone with a negative suffering balance. The closest we come is defining an economic elite as someone with a strongly negative suffering balance and above average consumption, but that's a definition of an economic *elite* which in this framework is not precisely coterminous with being a capitalist.
I think there's an important truth in the musician suffering less than others for what they get. Obviously I don't think we should go around persecuting writers and artists (being a writer myself)- but the reality is that society gives a rare few individuals (academics, some doctors etc.) the opportunity to perform unalienated, enjoyable labor- and we need to acknowledge that. There is a real sense in which people like this are freeloading in a world where others have to clean toilets. This has led to proposals like balanced work complexes- which are bad for efficency reasons. Nonetheless, it's kind of *tragic* that established professors are getting paid 100k or more to do what they do, while my mum hurt her body pushing a trolley. This isn't a matter of blame, but it's an important fact of our society to be critical of.