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UBI, yes. Jobs Guarantee? Not necessarily the correct extension. It is an alternative, but as automation and AI are also things in our world, it may not be the best way to manage our economy.

For our society the consumption of energy (work), is the thing we must minimize. The work to produce the things necessary to the society, is unavoidable. Making sure every person in the society is working, is not logically connected to that and I believe that in terms of degrowth there is much to recommend the avoidance of unnecessary work and its related consumption.

My answer to some of this is that the society (the government) is the entity that pays us for our work. It pays the UBI, it can pay for the work as well, and all the employer need do is report the hours. Unemployment is not evil, it is an opportunity to learn something new, most of us can.

Payment for work is not a substitute for that UBI, it is a supplement. We will work because we want to work, not because we have to. Most people do want to be useful to their society, and the UBI alone is "enough" for living, but that's it. It gets supplemented for those who cannot work due to age or injury, but it provides no luxuries. We work for our luxuries, or for our own satisfaction in being valued by the society, and we are paid for that work by the society, not out of a profit margin of a business.

Your answers are correct as far as they go, according to my new definition of money, but you are trying to complete a design without having answered this question, "Why is growth a sacrament in our economic systems?"

I think you ought to be suspecting by now, that I have something else in mind :-)

I've connected work to money, and money, the way we create, define, and use it, to the problems of our society. The money we have, defined as it is, demands growth. The socioeconomic system based on it cannot survive degrowth, and MMT alone doesn't fix the problems. The money the government creates for us has to represent our work, and suffer entropy just as our work, or its production, does.

When money has to follow the laws of the universe the same way everything else does, ownership cannot make money, so ownership income has to be taxed out of existence. Then the second law puts the boot into Keynesian theory because money cannot be a store of value.

It turns out to be rather annoying to change things to match those laws, but it is necessary to do so if we want a sustainable society. In that redefinition we lose Wall Street and "investment income." We learn that profit belongs to the society using the money, not individuals (or corporations). It is no small task to accommodate the changes and explain each of them.

I'm trying to get my book into libraries now. I'm not a publisher, it's just me, but it's available if you're interested. Just wander into my post.

We can discuss things here if you wish too, you don't have to buy anything ;-)

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Nov 30, 2023·edited Nov 30, 2023Author

Thanks, Ian for this thoughtful response. I'll take a look at what you're writing.

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