I want to see what some other commentators who are more knowledgeable about the field say. This is a pretty striking attack against a central theory in... Scientific American? Without citing a wealth of evidence with detailed citations? I find the logic of the argument appealing, finding no inborn bias towards gain nor loss outside of what could be derived by reason would be a very nice thing to say about the future of humanity.
I read D. Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow a number of years back and it did present some pretty clear looking graphs demonstrating loss aversion of 2:1 iirc. I've since lost my copy due to a friend's "borrowing". ;) Certain other elements of his book have come into question, including priming. I'm eagerly waiting to see how the cookie crumbles here.
The positive way to think about this is that it appears humanity's moral universe is expanding. I could name a long list of things that we do all day that we are going to be judged extremely harshly for, but it would derail the conversation.
Why do we bother celebrating any of them? Mortals are mortal, they deserve to be evaluated based on what they do. I'm not sure what purpose, other than propagandistic, is served by looking at them through rose tinted glasses.
In any case, it's not entirely clear that other than the (wonderful) Bill of Rights, the American Revolution was anything other than the elites over here wanting more control. 3/5 compromise, male property owning voters, indirect election of senators, it really sounds like the new aristocracy, with an Enlightenment tinged bent, was taking control. After all, the UK was being run mainly by Parliament, not by the King.
Only popular struggle has made the US more democratic, direct election of senators, freeing the slaves, universal suffrage, but we see even that is being rolled back in the modern era with voter suppression, dark money, and the dark legacy of US foreign policy.
I had just read this essay which advocated for the FANG + Microsoft to be nationalized and taken out of the profit system like the post office. It really resonated with me. If anything, the removal of profits would return the things we like about these companies and remove the things we despise while giving their customers more of a say in how they do buisness.
They still escaped it. Competition was the driving force for companies to become big and monopolistic. The "intended" effect of the market resulted in the opposite.
I'm not sure I believe that S&P 500 chart proves his point that we are living in historically similar times to the 1960s. S&P looks at the top of part of the distribution, not the whole distribution. If for some reason, there were more or fewer companies, it would mean something different. I will note that we did in fact break up Bell Telephone and standard oil. If we act quickly, maybe we'll never get to 1T.
Ah bloomberg news, understanding that a new economic slowdown is in the cards wants to reassure the public that the economists have learned something. What they've learned is that they are ever more desperate to attempt to coax additional growth out of a slowing machine that increasingly just fails and takes ordinary people with it. Without new markets, the economy will continue to slow and monopolization will continue to increase.
Carbon taxes have to be astronomical to actually affect market behavior. Better to take direct control and titrate down carbon fuels while ramping other methods.
The market can't do it except by perhaps a happy accident, an accident that would be resisted by the established players. Look for the big oil companies to buy up green startups and kneecap them to keep the oil money flowing. Consumables are much more profitable than capital purchases like solar panels, ask the printer makers about their ink.
How are those choices different from money? The money version is only more liberating if you're rich. First-come-first-serve does suck for newcomers, but do they have a right to displace someone that has lived there forever on a whim? It's not obvious at all. It would make sense to attempt to build enough to keep people moving though.
I am suggesting that. I think that perhaps we might want to check for certain types of criminal charges, but we are seeing in real time how that is abused. However, yes, the concept of nations, standing armies, and the whole lot is built on hierarchy, deprivation, and violence, and undemocratic process. We should be working towards a world in which borders are not necessary, or at least, expand that zone maximally up to the teeth of imperialist enemies that would try to take it from us.
Socialists are not coming for your toothbrush. We ask for a world in which people are free to live and work where they please. A world where people are not thrown in cages or separated from their families because they cross an invisible line. We don't need to walk into your personal space to have that, but if we did for some reason, hi, how are you doing? :)
Yes, but how much of the housing price is physical maintenance and how much is "location location location"? With the latter eliminated, I'm guessing the concordant increase in taxes will far from compensate for the fall in the price of a positional good. Also, even if the taxes were equal to the current price, but things got fixed faster than most landlords, that's still a win. Don't forget about how much harder it will be to evict someone and ruin their life when there isn't a profit motive involved. So many benefits.