By Gunnar Rundgren, originally published by Garden Earth March 29, 2024
"...The economic metaphor of the invisible hand suggests that the lower-level pursuit of self-interest robustly benefits the higher-level common good. ...Adam Smith...assumed that there would be some moral system in place to keep the self-interest of trade in check: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are...some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others...though he derives nothing from it..." It would be unfair to criticize Adam Smith for failing to understand that the self-interest would become so dominating...[it] has eroded...the same self-interest and its main expression, the market.
It seems apparent that the current norm of individualism & the worship of self-interest is bound to undermine human society. This norm is also reflected in the obsession with competitiveness..."
#Budget#UKPolitics This article by Gary Stevenson is so good, please read every word of it.
“Whatever Jeremy Hunt says, traders know the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. And they’re paid millions to bet on it.”
This is what the world is - it is run by a minute elite for a minute elite and the rest of us, the masses, the natural world, we just don’t count. It is a #TragedyOftheNonCommons (will reshare my own piece on this below 1/n)
#FollowTheMoney 🧵12/n Of course, things were never rosy for everyone. Nevertheless, key shared assumptions about the #commongood informed post war public spending and that is all eroding now.
“Continuing austerity does not just kill people’s services; it has long since warped most political debates about what we should expect from the state. In lots of places, squalor, mess and festering social problems are now seen as the norm. “ #TheCrumble
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 13/n and i have to mention UK universities too, since I am directly affected myself (see #AcademicVenting).
40% of UK universities are in debt, with major reduncancies right now (incl at Goldsmiths). All in arts, humanities and social sciences. All of this is crumbling, with too little money flowing into it. Another industry, another #CommonGood
being eroded. Check out this constantly updated tally. #TheCrumble
Good for Andrew Scott, halting his "Hamlet" soliloquy speech until a man in the audience put away his laptop, on which he was typing away while the play unfolded, totally oblivious to the fact that Scott had halted the performance as the oaf typed.
What are people thinking?
Obviously, that they are the only people in the world, and no one else matters.
Few commentators are better at explaining in easy to understand, concrete ways the intense damage lack of accountability of legislators in gerrymandered districts are doing to our democracy than David Pepper. He's a must-read source about what's taking place in Ohio.
Here he is with a graph explaining why those legislators in gerrymandered districts do not serve their people and the common good.
@danie10 thanks, yet again, quite right, there is literature (sorry, I am an academic) on why #Africans dislike paying #taxes, well, it is because they know their #elites all too well, say, they know they will not get much back in terms of #publicgoods, for the #commongood.
Ronald Aronson on the mass psychosis of millions of us — affecting all of us, because of the refusal of those millions to acknowledge shared reality and the common good:
"Millions of Americans have become ensconced — or ensconced themselves — in a self-validating right-wing bubble that seems impervious to contrary evidence, and there is no easy path back."
An excellent essay by Robert Reich about how Ayn Rand's attack on the idea of the common good has become, from Reagan to Trump, the foundation of "conservative" politics in the US, and how this philosophy undermines the very basis of American democracy with its notion of the common good.
You want ethical alternatives? Let’s build a campus where folks can work on them without worrying about how to exist day-to-day (or fund their early-stage development like VC does for surveillance capitalism).
The extent of what public funding is doing today is “Oh, looks like you’ve got some alternative functional, let’s pay you to add Feature X to it.”
I've always been uneasy with privatization of public goods. I started thinking more deeply about it, more practically, sweating without power for 7 days after Hurricane Isaac struck New Orleans as a minimal category 1 hurricane in 2012. It was obvious that our private electricity company was keeping their shareholders happy, but they didn't care about the stakeholders - repairing rotting utility poles is not the most investor-attracting goal for a Fortune 500 company. So I wrote this to out local paper:
Many thanks to @danmcquillan for writing the book, and especially for wrangling with his publisher to talk #Australia distributor to bring the price to something more reasonable.
30 years ago, the World Wide Web was released in the public domain. Thank you Tim Berners-Lee and #CERN for this incredible donation to the #CommonGood.