I like this graphic from Wellbeing Economy Alliance Aotearoa NZ which concisely sets out the difference between the Economic Man of economic theory (who economists spend a lot of time try to figure out how to make us all into) & the more subtle, socially engaged people most of us actually are (who economics has considerable difficulty understanding & modelling)....
Its a simple lesson in why economics is less a science & more a set of (albeit) complex opinions!
I like this. @ChrisMayLA6. Thanks for sharing it.
But it also saddens me.
All of my adult life has been spent with various parts of the wellbeing campaigners.
Yet this period since ~1980 has been dominated by #economicMan's greed and callousness.
Now economic man is being displaced, but not by a #wellbeingEconomy. The new big force is the politics and economics of cruelty. EconomicMan is being replaced by — or maybe fronted by — #SadisticMan.
I think what you see depends on where you look. The media is of course dominated by Bad News - we are experiencing a particularly vicious interaction of at least 3 negativities: that good news (people living contentedly, in harmony) is not 'newsworthy'; that much of the media is owned or influenced by the wealthy and privileged, and is to varying degrees propaganda for their outlook; and thirdly that they have, for reasons of both profit and propaganda, distorted social media to promote the worst of us.
But is the impression of humanity we get from the media actually visible in our everyday interactions with our communities ? If my lawnmower breaks down, I go and borrow my neighbour's, and he happily gives it. He doesn't charge rent. Who would? - and if anybody did, they'd soon be bottom of their community's estimation. The fact is, we don't habitually reproduce capitalist social relations in our normal lives - even after consuming their propaganda for generations. Everywhere, we resist, as naturally as we breathe.
@GeofCox I want to like that optimism, but I find it hard to agree that it describes the big picture.
Sure, common decency and collaboration still exists. But even those small bits of neighbourliness are undermined by growing instability of tenure, which impedes community building.
Everywhere I look, I see huge loss in community ownership, community institutions, and community events. E.g. mutual finance is almost gone, community spaces and venues like pubs are shrinking fast.
The privatisation - enclosure - of our 'common treasury' is one of the fundamental processes of capitalism - but it meets resistance everywhere, and always has done. That's what the 'Levellers' were doing in the early 17th century, what the anti-slavery and anti-colonialism movements were doing in the 19th and 20th centuries, and what we're doing here on mastodon, or in the open source software movement, or in co-operative and social enterprise, or the voluntary and public sectors - and in all our informal community groups, neighbourhoods, friendships, families, etc... This is normal human life. Probably, we've always socialised, teamed up, co-operated, talked, laughed, danced, partied, loved together - the joint-stock company is, by comparison, no more than a dismal passing fad.
Great poetry, @GeofCox. But I am puzzled by how uninterested you appear in empirical evidence that the resistance is losing on so many fronts.
For example, Mastodon is a great innovation, but it remains a tiny minnow beside the capitalist giants of social media which replaced earlier user-nanaged technologies such as usenet, web forums, email lists and BBSs.
Its a bit like celebrating the tents in Gaza. Better than nothing, but still part of a massive defeat.
In some small way, the resistance has won by opting out of the mainstream, and as more and more rational people opt out the mainstream loses its credibility and becomes an echo chamber of the stupid....which in turn leads to more people opting out and the mainstream getting even sillier.
It's a long way from being great admittedly, but the fact that alternative communities exist outside of the commercial mainstream means that the mainstream hasn't won.
This is back to my original point: "I think what you see depends on where you look. The media is of course dominated by Bad News..."
Indeed, and this is what is so frustrating about the economics & ideology of the economic man - normal social behaviour is treated as if its abnormal & needs to be discouraged (by incentives?) so we can function how mark model require.... but puts the cart before the horse; economics as social study/analysis should respond to how society works, not remake society to fit its models - which is why mainstream economics, despite tis self-presentation is very much not a science!
![Cartoon with two illustrations:
on the left: Rational Economic Man [who is]
self-interested
isolated
rational
fixed preferences
dominant
on the right: Social Adaptabale Humans [who are]
pro-social
interdependent
heuristic
fluid values
dependent](https://cdn.masto.host/zirkus/media_attachments/files/115/976/914/987/621/270/original/f54a232122719459.jpeg)
