65 Comments

Love it. This segment "It’s about leveraging power to accumulate productive assets that" I find is particularly underestimated in terms of there having been many if not actually better pots than e.g. Zuckerbergs, but the bully seed funders and Zucki ensured other pots were absorbed or never saw the light of day making it almost retrospectively appear as if the winning pot naturally succeeded.

Expand full comment

meaning we humanity actually dont get the best possible pots to eat from, in addition to the voucher machinations you unpack.

Expand full comment

Absolutely. It's also related to the dance metaphor at the end - if John monopolises the party to start a conga-line, it means many other possible dances were not danced... I probably shouldn't mix metaphors though ;)

Expand full comment

Also the sun image and comment made me laugh out loud 😂

Expand full comment

It's a legit image from NASA. No alterations made!

Expand full comment

Yes. Sounds like the story of Tesla versus GE

Expand full comment

Very nice article. Deep and helpful.

And…. In a way, doesn’t it all stem from the vision others can create in our brains? From stone soup to walking on Mars? It’s that certain people have the ability (definitely exploit) to create that vision in others’ minds. Without wisdom and responsibility guiding those visions (in both parties), we’re left with what you describe.

I’ll not debating any of what you wrote. Great examples and wonderfully helpful. Trying to digest for myself why this continues as means of controlling people’s behavior when they/we KNOW better.

Expand full comment

Brains (collective activity of neurons and whatnot) are incapable of subjective consciousness. No one honestly knows what a "mind" is in essence, but it is possible there is mental activity that originates from beyond spacetime. I mean... who knows,.... but it seems possible (if you grok enough fundamental physics — all is in the boundary conditions). This is not to belittle your point, which I whole heartedly agree with. But other people influence our mind a whole lot more than just our brain. Our brains are our own personal meat AI's — completely dumb af.

Expand full comment

Lots of excellent points in this essay. I just will comment on one:

"... a degree of personal bravery and brilliance, but it could also equally come from narcissism, trauma, family expectations, training, or just plain random happenstance."

Point to make is even the "personal bravery and brilliance" depends 90% on other people. Who were the bullies testing your bravery? (Or champions sheltering you who were truly the brave?) How did you become brilliant without an educator, who in the first instance is normally your mother.

Expand full comment

Absolutely

Expand full comment

This is great!! I love it! I study hunter gatherers and what we can relearn from them. You’re an inspiration. This should be taught in every classroom!

Expand full comment

Thanks so much Gloria - really appreciate the support. Are there particular hunter-gatherer groups that you look at specifically?

Expand full comment

The 'Great Man' theory is belied by the actual experience of human beings. As Brett relates, we all exist in a vast pool of collective consciousness and interrelated activities. In Buddhism, there is the idea of the 'Alayavijñana', which approximates this collective consciousness but goes farther to include all sentient beings and probably gods and demons as well. Here we see Newton and Leibnitz independently inventing the Calculus, as well as incalculable numbers of simultaneous inventions. As an aside, the Alaya Vijñana will soon defeat AI because computers lack the sentience to be included.

The proponents of Great Man capitalist theories also invent manifold myths to justify their predatory gains. Brett spoke of the hunter-gathering leader getting first pick of the hunt ("In a hunter-gatherer setting, the reciprocity principle might be ‘you contributed to the hunt, so you get a portion of the meat’. "} Anecdotal evidence from actual hunter-gatherers show that while the leader gets first pick, he does so with the tribe in mind, accepting a share proportional to what the entire group needs, not what they 'merit'. Archeological evidence from the Paleolithic is replete with honorrific burials of well-nourished, but crippled or deformed individuals. [Graeber and Wengrow THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING] So, actual people throughout history have never behaved like predatory capitalists of our modern era.

Expand full comment

Very well said. I do mention in the piece that tit-for-tat reciprocity is but one of three moral logics in our economy - the other key one in hunter-gatherer societies is what Graeber would call everyday communism, the sense of an eternal bond of solidarity between people, which manifests in the principle of 'if someone needs something more than I do, and I'm in a position to give it, I will'. In hunter-gatherer settings that principle blends into informal forms of reciprocity

Expand full comment

Well said

Expand full comment

Great read. Your message needs to be repeated so “followers” understand the “power” of the people and to not give up their power to one man (lead dog, stone souper). Throughout history, there has been a need to idolize - Jesus, Allah, Santa Claus, etc. People want the easy button rather than take responsibility for their own destiny and decisions.

Expand full comment

Very true.

I suppose, if I was trying to be empathetic towards that impulse to follow a leader, it might be said that humans find the open-ended nature of consciousness and choice overwhelming, and sometimes find it easier to just be told what to do in certain spheres (or at least they don't have the energy to try mount a counter to a particular leader figure, especially when that leader appears in a realm that the person is not a specialist in). Actually, there are systems like 'liquid democracy' that try to work with this - they allow a person to delegate their vote on particular things to someone who knows more about it

This sense of people being overwhelmed by open-ended choice is one thing that economists seem to ignore - they often try to make out that every human action is based on 'choice' and 'preferences', when actually so much of human life is based on habit, inertia, defaults, and lowest-common-denominator paths-of-least-resistance. I think some degree of this will always be present in any social group, but the ideal is to find a way to help people avoid the worst 'hero-worshipping' or bootlicking aspects of following leaders, and to get a good balance of power between people with different roles in society

Expand full comment

You are definitely one of those “helpers” and I am thankful for you. Unfortunately I am not feeling empathetic in trying to reconcile the most recent events. I am tired of being “angry” at the “one great man”. I am incredibly disappointed and “angry” at the “people” that worship, follow, and blindly support him. The balance you speak of, that I always believed in, has faltered again during my lifetime as it has done throughout history. All of society suffers during a period of “hero-worshipping” a detrimental man. Your article is the right message at the right time. Thank you Brett.

Expand full comment

I feel ya. When people are locked into that way of being it's pretty tough. I grew up in an authoritarian type 'follow the alpha male' society, so I know a lot about it. But glad the piece has been helpful (I also posted my first comment above as a Note, so maybe others will have suggestions too)

Expand full comment

Keep posting so you can help the rest of us cope in our new reality! Thank you Brett.

Expand full comment

Who "idolizes" Santa Claus? The whole premise seems to me to be slightly off because throughout history many religious people have taken responsibility for their own decisions. In some sense, they would say, those without religion are slaves to their own desires. In fact, to take up Illich's point, "autonomous" subjects are now subject to the power of capital and the state.

Expand full comment

I love this. I love this so much, that I had to not only click the ❤️but also come here to comment and share this with others! This is well-written, and it finally translates some of my feelings, emotions, and arguments into words that are easier to understand.

Expand full comment

Glad you find it helpful Wes!

Expand full comment

Seems to me it’s about finding the right balance, ie cap CEOs pay at 10x the lowest worker or some such. Progressive taxation is a nobrainer; this would also redistribute JK Rowling’s riches more sustainably.

The main thing greedy, selfish people fail to recognise is that, while selfishness is profitable on the individual level, cooperative/altruistic behaviour is profitable on the group level. Witness the self-implosion of any society with galloping inequality.

Expand full comment

I think there's a really interesting discussion to be had about what the 'fair' level of inequality in any particular enterprise should be. Capping the pay at a multiple of the lowest worker is one way to do it. Another way to do it is to have a kind of waterfall structure, where the initial instigator gets paid out a certain multiple of what they originally put in - compensating them for risk up to a set point - after which it tops out and cascades down to workers

Also, would be really interesting to have that discussion about other people in 'bottleneck' positions - e.g. JK Rowling, or big football stars

But yes, the 'contradictions of capitalism' (as Marx etc would say) emerge from the fact that what makes sense to the managers of a single company does not make sense at a systemic level

Expand full comment

Really well said.

Expand full comment

One can make theoretical arguments against the existence of billionaires like you do here, but the primary argument for capitalism is the immense wealth it has produced over centuries, with the vast majority of the world being lifted out of poverty.

Perhaps there are ideological reasons to claim billionaires have no right to exist, but if extremely wealthy people are the byproduct of a successful system, and absent that system both the billionaires, and the increased collective wealth wouldn’t exist, then we might begrudgingly accept their role. You might say, we could just have normal capitalism with a limit on wealth, or just an increased amount of tax in the highest brackets, but this is far easier said than done.

Many European countries have adopted the model of social democratic capitalism, and the result has been a few decades of economic stagnation. Yes, Europeans have had more vacation time, fewer working hours, and a stronger safety net, but this has clearly come at the cost of long term growth. UK GDP per capita was equal (or higher) than the US in 2007, now it’s almost half due to almost 2 decades of stagnation. The same could be said of every western country.

A large amount of that growth comes from high-paying tech sector jobs that simply migrated to the lower-tax more business friendly US. Stripe, Spotify, etc. could have kept their profits, and their high paying jobs in the EU, but instead they moved to the US where their salaries stretch farther, regulations are lighter, and their income tax is lower.

The discussions of capital-owning and labor-producing classes is hardly true in America too, when the majority of people own significant amounts of productive assets through shares in the market. There is no clear class distinction in a developed country like the US, and thus you cannot appropriate the wealth of one class, without enraging the labor-producing class who are presumably the beneficiaries of any socialist-esque (I say -esque because I don’t want to block the authors view into a single ideology) policy.

The logical conclusions of socialist analysis of capitalism has proven unpalatable. The states aspiring to communism had some truly terrible failures, and more subtle drawn out failures of lower economic growth. The more reserved democratic socialism has yet to prove itself in the presence of increased potential economic growth. The European stagnation is that story playing out real-time, and the longer their GDP stagnates, the less confident I think a dispassionate observer can be in that system.

Expand full comment

I'm not making an argument against billionaires. I'm making an argument for how they exist. They exist because, as you mention, they are nodes who have a choke-hold on ownership in an expansionary system, which of course then leads to the argument of 'well, as long as the system is expansionary then everyone gets better, even if it comes at the expense of creating a plutocracy'. There is nothing inherently invalid or logically incorrect in that, but you're going to hit a serious problem when you dare to admit that growth in our society does not lead to security - in fact we see increased precarity in society, and increased relative poverty - precisely because human economies are adaptive and 'rebase' (see here https://www.asomo.co/p/money-as-addiction) - aka. economic growth in not merely expansions of stuff, it is expansion of *needs*. At some point this hits against not only ecological limits, but also the limits of the human body and mind, with a pervasive sense of existential meaninglessness in the rat race

For the record, the analysis I present totally takes into account the fact that workers own shares - people are existentially ripped apart by the fact that their very own interests contradict each other - the saver is happy to see their stock account go up, without realising that at a systemic level, that can be achieved by cutting their own income. Their investor persona is at war with their worker persona, but of course they seldom can see these systemic connections. A major point of Thatcherite reforms in the UK was to get the working class to have a share in their own exploitation and therefore to dilute resistance

Expand full comment

I respect the writing, since you present a good analysis, interpretation, and add qualifier at the end. Although, there is a heavy undertone of implication at what you're getting at:

"...if money suddenly ceased to exist, you would certainly experience a period of dislocation and chaos ... [but] What would eventually happen, however, is that the large-scale economy would fragment into thousands of smaller networks with closer social ties."

I assume the purpose of this analysis of why billionaires exist, is to criticize the current system, and suggest or imply a better one. It seems to me, that you do have a preferred system, one without money, one of ecological sustainability, one without significant exploitation. Thus while technically you aren't making an argument against billionaires (without re-reading I imagine you never say "Billionaire's should not exist"), what you include in your article, how you include it, and what you don't include is intended the reader to reach a certain conclusion. I don't see that as dishonest, as I think it's a very high-level way to make an argument, but I wouldn't call it an unbiased analysis.

Rebasing from capitalism will not be like rebasing from a cigarette addiction. MRIs, personal computers, smart phones, the majority of modern medicine, and modern mass-agriculture would be fundamentally impossible if we were rebased to small networks of barter based systems. The internet, with the maintenance of a billion miles of wires, towers, satellites and a national power grid could not function with these networks either, which is somewhat ironic since we are communicating from across the world and presumably like to do so.

I do sympathize with your critique on the expansion of needs. Clearly under our current system the result has been an expansion of needs to goods and services that are not only unnecessary, but are often self-destructive. The implied solution of your pieces though isn't something I can get onboard with.

Give me advanced post-scarcity production, with white collar work done by AI and blue collar done by humanoid robots and I think many people, even many libertarians can get onboard. Give me a world where cars are banned (and thus most of the freedom of travel), money ceases to exist (and our productive capacity falls back to the Middle Ages) and you'll have a lot of powerful people who won't just oppose this world, but will find it repugnant.

Expand full comment

Well, I've never once in my writing called for a moneyless world - that's something that abstract purists do. What I do call for though, is an end to disingenuous ideology that presents inorganic views of the world (e.g. 'money is a tool we invented to do this useful thing' or 'billionaires are just hard-working people')

If you look closely, you'll see this is a common feature in both the billionaire piece and the Money as Addiction piece. In the first, I'm calling out the narratives around billionaires, and in the second I'm calling out solutionism and delusions of high score progress. The true thing I'm attacking here is *inauthenticity*, the state of false consciousness that we live in, which is really a kinda existentialist tradition. In fact, I would view getting a person to drop the inauthentic narrative as a form of success. While I do believe in society's ability to build better systems, my first goal would rather be something like 'if you're going to live in this situation, hold an authentic understanding of it, rather than living in delusion'. That is different to me saying 'I want you to live in some different state of false consciousness instead'.

In fact, a second big strand in my work is essentially Buddhist-ish - pointing out that we live in states of contradiction that can never be resolved, and that actually being authentic about that is better than denying this reality. I would never do something like present a vision of a utopian world of AI robot luxury, because that's a false vision of certainty that wouldn't do what you think it would do. And yes, I know very well that people are primed to reject the past as 'awful', so of course they will find many ideas that go against standard progress ideology as repugnant (perhaps a person 5000 years in the future would imagine your life to be repugnant too, so this past-bashing is essentially deeply un-empathetic behaviour, but one that is often promoted in our society)

I would never make assumptions about you, but I will say that - in general - if a person already has a kind of dualistic worldview, they'll tend to imagine that someone who challenges one side of it must be promoting it's imagined opposite. So, the mere fact that I talk about billionaires in a way that's authentic rather than inauthentic is imagined by dualistic types to be, for example, 'promoting communism'. It's like they're saying 'if you refuse to talk about something in its official formulation, you must be an enemy of this thing'. This is bs though, because the act of 'calling a spade a spade' is not the act of insulting a spade. What it does insult, though, are all those who call a spade a golden sword

To use a related example, I often call Bitcoin tokens 'countertradable collectibles', which goes against the official internal ideology of Bitcoin purists, so they then accuse me of 'promoting the US dollar' - that's a dualistic worldview in action, and it's really childish to me. So, when I call out the official ideologies of capitalism, and point out the real damages it does, and then get all these people talking to me about how awful communism is, it's brings to mind a vision like this: I point out a house that's beginning to burn, and people in that house then point to another house that's already burned down, and say 'but look at that!'

Expand full comment

I think it's fair to say the primary goal of what you're doing is to deconstruct the narratives around Billionaires and Money/Capitalism in these articles, but I'd turn the practice around and accuse you of being inauthentic if you think the specific critiques (and potential solutions) you offer are not implicitly making a value judgement. My attempt isn't to yell Dualism (you critique one thing therefore you support its opposite), but I don't think I'm misinterpreting the implied conclusions.

I'll take the example about money. Yes, you make a good analogy with addiction, explain hedonistic adaption (progress in Quality of Life can be temporary, then you're back to zero), deconstruct the "solutionist" perspective on money, but you do indeed offer alternatives at the end of your piece. It seems to me the implication of this structure of Critique --> Alternative is to promote the imagined alternate, even if you don't explicitly make an argument for that alternative. I don't think it would be deluded, or childish to observe your critique isn't just in pursuit of authentic narratives, but for the promotion (or the promotion of awareness) of specific alternatives.

Here's what I'm referencing specifically:

"If money suddenly ceased to exist, you would certainly experience a period of dislocation and chaos... [but] what would eventually happen, however, is that the large-scale economy would fragment into thousands of smaller networks with closer social ties."

The clear implication of this statement (at least as I see it), is that rebasement of our use of money would not result in lower quality of life, but would result in a new "zero-point". That's a fair claim to make. One I would disagree with and have justification for disagreeing, but that would be a somewhat separate thought from what the article is primarily addressing.

Although your perspective is definitely more complicated that just that: "I’m not a purist. I defend physical cash precisely because, in a state of addiction, we need a diverse range of suppliers of the thing we’re addicted to. The act of Uberising payments into digital oligopolies of banks and tech firms literally places control of our ultimate object of dependence - money - into a handful of corporations. That’s not progress. That’s enclosure." demonstrating you're not impractical enough to only argue only for the end-goal rebasement when there's more pressing and achievable near-term problems like the complete digitization (and therefore perhaps complete control) of the means of exchange.

For your primary goal you've got me though. I don't have much interesting critique to offer of your authentic analysis of billionaires and how they operate as I think it's a mostly fair analysis made in good faith. I would disagree with the conclusions such thinking would likely result in, absent a more practical look at things, but those conclusions are for every individual to make themselves. Perhaps it isn't of interest to you, or on-topic for your blog to have that 2nd order discussion (I am not particularly interested in getting into a back and forth as to the merits of the authentic view being presented as I think it's a fine starting point) and that's more than fine. My intention isn't to accuse you of a dualist view, but moreso to explore my understood implications of your critique.

To close I think we're in agreement that the popular narratives around capitalism serves primarily (although in my opinion not exclusively) to justify and protect the system, and that a true look at things gives us a better understanding. I haven't read any of your other essays besides what you wrote here and linked in the previous comment, so I think it's unfair for me to expect a more complete explanation as to what "growth in our society does not lead to security" means in practical terms (i.e. what would a rebased world look like?) when you very well could have explained it already elsewhere. I imagine I'd strongly disagree, but I also can't imagine an argument as strong as you could likely make, so perhaps that intuition is not as correct as I think.

Expand full comment

In addition to Brett Scott's work I thought you might find Jason Hickel's work of interest. Here is a starter:

https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-poverty

Life expectancy, infant mortality and height are also more complex indicators than often understood. Usually its down to general misunderstandings of methodology and what a term actually means.

Perhaps a little acknowledgement of how global stats on improvements in health and wealth are propped up by achievements in China might also be welcome.

Expand full comment

Thanks. I will check him out.

Expand full comment

Great read. Deep as always. Your writing threw me a life preserver, so I could continue to the end!

Thank you for your soup analogy, it adds some understanding of the interrelation of the parts, melding into the whole.

Expand full comment

Glad you like it John! Thanks for the support

Expand full comment

Really interesting! Reminded me of S. Marglin's What do bosses do?

On the hunter-gatherers, it still seems that there's an individualistic basis to their motivations. What if there's group reasoning/collective intentionality (Tomasello): what's good for *us*? And what if the ethos is based on the idea that everyone should have enough (not a return based on what they put in)?

Expand full comment

Glad you like it Khalid. I'll check that book out

On hunter gatherers, I do mention in the piece that reciprocity is but one of *three* moral logics in our economy - the other key one in hunter-gatherer societies is what David Graeber would call 'everyday communism', the sense of an eternal bond of solidarity between people, which manifests in the principle of 'if someone needs something more than I do, and I'm in a position to give it, I will'. In hunter-gatherer settings that principle blends into informal forms of reciprocity

Expand full comment

Sorry, didn't see the link Brett. But I see economists also thinking of reciprocity in terms of self-interest and your example seemed to echo that i.e. society or the social is not primary but a *result* of individual decisions.

Also, I think the idea that we come together to survive (even now) also seems to me to concede too much to the moderns (and is perhaps not unrelated to the first point: because life is nasty, brutish and short, fearful individuals enter a contract).

Expand full comment

Yeah I see what you mean - the classical liberal conception of the world as 'individuals who contract to each other', plus the methodological individualism in economics etc. I could see how someone could read that into the piece, albeit I do explicitly note that nobody survives alone, which goes against the background imaginary used by libertarians, which is that 'option to exit' (i.e. the idea that you actually literally can leave society, and so can therefore 'form society' too). I write about that in terms of 'Tarzan vs. Mowgli' in this older piece I did https://www.asomo.co/p/money-through-mowglis-eyes

Expand full comment

Thanks for that. I'll check it out now. The point I was (clumsily) making is that the very idea of survival/fear and conflict (Sahlins) seems to be rooted in western modernity. Abundance or the state are solutions (or perceived to be the solutions) but now people are hooked, have been hooked, to them. And yet, with material security existential insecurity only seems to have increased. Holbein's 'Dead Christ' is perhaps a haunting depiction of this?

Expand full comment

"who owns the pot, who calls the shots, who provides the ingredients, and who gets to consume the outcome?"

You were half way to pure fire with this rap, but really feel like the second half really dropped off 😆

Sharp and insightful piece as always Brett. Really appreciate your work.

Expand full comment

Another version of the parable of Indra’s Net.

Expand full comment

Great, thanks for the tip

Expand full comment

A little hard on old Elon, he's the only one I can recall touching on this subject . Refering to himself as a business magnet vs a business magnate. Otherwise great article.

Expand full comment

Well, I'm not really condemning or praising the particular individuals and their *self-image*. Rather, the focus is on how they're spoken about and presented to the public. I'm sure, in the background, they know very well that they don't literally build these things, much like I'm assuming that an ancient pharaoh understood that he didn't actually build the pyramid (unless he's become totally captured by the mythology that surrounds him)

Expand full comment

You gotta be kidding. All the oligarchs think that way, just read a few of their autobiographies. They do not all embarrass themselves by saying it out aloud.

Expand full comment

It's an interesting question the degree to which they become captured by the mythology that surrounds them (see my comment above), especially when they become surrounded by 'yes-men' who constantly validate them and praise them. I suppose they must end up with contradictory elements in their psyche - at some level, they must understand that they don't really build the thing, but if you're surrounded by a network of people who tell you something else constantly you may start to get delusions of grandeur. Weirdly, I saw this happen to a lot of crypto people during the crypto booms - they started out as ordinary people, college students, etc, but a bunch of them lost the plot and became outrageously detached from reality, because as their wealth grew they became surrounded by acolytes who wanted stuff from them, and so constantly agreed with them and reflected their image back at them

Expand full comment

That's a good example! The phenomena or desire to want to be right about things is strong in modern society to an extreme degree, where you end up "having to be right" so will believe it, despite the odds. Stronger under modern education systems (which I half despise, despite all the good they also do for skill development and keeping kids off the street). I count myself lucky to have chosen to try theoretical physics, which is 60% beyond my comprehension, so every day I feel more stupid than before, and never right about things. Or at least never confident. Is it more than correlation that I am dirt poor? ;-)

Expand full comment

When I think of the great man view of history, I think of Ayn Rand and especially the Fountainhead.

She was totally romantic about Great Men

Expand full comment

Yes certainly. In fact I talk about here in the last few paragraphs of the piece!

Expand full comment