Evonomics

Now on the HN front page: Great Problems: An Epidemic of Rent-Seeking https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13153047

> obtain enough passive income to be independently wealthy

"Passive income" does not make you "independently wealthy". You avoid "being forced to sell [your] time" because you extract wealth from those who do.

Rent seeking does not, by definition, involve "creating value":

In economics and in public-choice theory, rent-seeking involves seeking to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking results in reduced economic efficiency through poor allocation of resources, reduced actual wealth creation, lost government revenue, increased income inequality, and (potentially) national decline. - Wikipedia

From Taking Back Adam Smith and “Classic Liberalism”:

Many conservative economists claim to be staunch followers of Adam Smith. They shout slogans such as “Supply and Demand!” “Capitalism”! “ “Let the markets work!” However, for anyone who actually read Adam Smith, you would note that the “invisible hand” was not his only observation of the inner workings of capitalism. Adam Smith recognized that many in the economy were making gobs of money, but weren’t contributing anything. He was referring to what was eventually called “economic rent”.

Smith observed that all production required 3 things. Land, Capital, and Labor. A very simple example would be a brick factory. The building and oven needed to create the bricks…

David Graeber (from Bullshit Jobs fame) talked about this at some length [1]:

"Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s – never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true."

"But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones."

"These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”"

and goes on to come to the following conclusion:
"Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a…

The share of U.S. economic output that's paid out in wages in at the lowest point since the government started keeping track of it. In 1964 AT&T was worth $267 billion in today's dollars and employed 758,611 people. Google is worth $370 billion but has only about 55,000 employees -- less than a tenth the size of AT&T's workforce in its heyday.

We're going to get self-driving cars in our lifetimes and the number one job in most states is "truck driver". My job as a software developer is to eliminate jobs (or simply prevent new ones from being required). I'm personally responsible for the loss of more jobs that I have.

> As veterans came home from WW II and 'mustered out' we provided the GI bill to train them in skills other than soldering. This provided an economy that transitioned a standard army to one tenth its previous size.

Of course, they transitioned into a world where all the other major countries had their manufacturing industries destroyed by war. Again, extrapolating from the past has it's issues; you cannot simply say "training" was the only, or even the most significant, factor. If you had a functional body, you could get a good job.

> using tax payer money to provide the education and training to anyone who needs it to take a job that could use them.

I think right now we have an absolute glut of educated people; no time in history have you needed to be as educated as you are right now to get an entry level position. People are literally taking jobs…

> they have a fiduciary duty towards shareholders to reduce the cost (and if needed the quality) to the point of maximising profit.

This is the Friedman doctrine:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

It has been popular since the 1970s, but there is plenty of legal precedence that says otherwise:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakeholder_theory

Including recent SCOTUS rulings:

> While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives. Many examples come readily to mind. So long as its owners agree, a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy-conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires. A for-profit corporation that operates facilities in other countries may exceed the requirements of local law regarding working conditions and benefits. If for-profit corporations may pursue such worthy objectives, there is no apparent reason why they may not further religious objectives as well.

* https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-supreme-court/13-354.html

* https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/573/13-354/case.pdf

*…

> War Before Civilization: the Myth of the Peaceful Savage (Oxford University Press, 1996) is a book by Lawrence H. Keeley, a professor of archaeology at the University of Illinois at Chicago who specializes in prehistoric Europe. The book deals with warfare conducted throughout human history by societies with little technology. In the book, Keeley aims to stop the apparent trend in seeing civilization as bad, by setting out to prove that prehistoric societies were violent and frequently engaged in warfare.

...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization

> How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

> The puzzling question is then how a world dominated by ultra social human cooperation can also frequently succumb to large scale war and conflict?

> Turchin’s answer, and one of the big ideas in the book, is that war between social groups is the mechanism by which cooperative behaviour develops “within groups”. It is a fundamental evolutionary process happening between societies at a large scale. He elevates war as a selection mechanism for cooperation, and values it above many of the technological factors like domestication of plants and the advent of agriculture.

http://evonomics.com/how-10000-years-of-war-made-humans-the-greatest-cooperators/

Agreed. re: power. But perhaps I'm seeing that power relationship differently. I'm feeling very strong parallels with economist Eleanor Ostrom's view on governing natural commonses [1].

Basically, she spent 4 decades disproving the "tragedy of the commons" in a whole set of defined cases, showing that a group of people DON'T selfishly destroy a commons when looking after it. She codified the requirements for a group of people properly governing a shared place/resource. Two of the 8 key requirements were 1) Local autonomy; 2) Appropriate relations with other tiers of rule-making authority (polycentric governance).

aka, powers must not be pulled too far from the place in which they are executed. to the extent that we need to seek efficiencies, system should offer through support from above to operate more efficiently (e.g., offer services and "kits" to self-manage). DO NOT CENTRALIZE OR CONSOLIDATE POWER.

Of course, the above recommendations can be discarded, but then collective governance fails, and keeping commonses alive and vibrant requires more and more central support systems to prevent its failure. Her rules are who you'd follow if you wanted decentralized and resilient governance structures and patterns.

[1]: https://evonomics.com/tragedy-of-the-commons-elinor-ostrom/