People underestimate an honest living in terms of mental health. If I were rich, I'd be happier they think and fall victim to every confidence game going. The Devil is the patron demon of confidence games as he teases wealth and luxury all the way into hell.
If a person does not have an honest chance of getting materially ahead generationally they are prey to mental illness because they either lack ‘fit’ to the social structure they inhabit, outsiders, or they lack ‘structure’ to behave in, anarchy, both aspects of meaning. The lack of either makes them alien to their society which the brain reads as overcrowding, a lack of fit, stress deprivation of meaning essentially, or isolation, a lack of structure, inducing separation anxiety, which can intensify to anxiety hysteria. The true equilibrium in an ergonomic economics is between these two poles of social existence and away from unbalanced states of being that induce a sort of mass psychogenic dementia involving mimicry, a mild echolalia dynamic, and mindless wheedling behavioral schemes.
The whole focus of Marshall’s economics in the 1890’s was an honest living, labor, capitalists, managers and all. We have since succumbed to the myth of money, to the despotism of price over value, in the following decades. In the name of capital formation, capitalists being now optional, we have exploited the humane mechanisms of Keynesian economics by focusing on productivity all the way to an international standard of dirigisme, state capitalism. The question, what constitutes social efficiency?, is an ergonomic question which we have erroneously but effectively decided to answer in terms of machine efficiency. We therefore operate in an increasing vacuum of meaning and society is increasingly the worse for it because that breeds greed. We have abandoned solving wicked problems of value and instead describe the world by simple mathematical processes of price. This has made us momentarily rich in terms of money, as a society, beyond any historical reference but we are, as a society, the unhappiest people who ever lived. I will take stable social structures and an ergonomic economy and rational values reflecting true costs and an honest living to any scheme of infinite wealth I have ever seen. We do not, however, live in such a world and we cannot build one like it with today's economics or today's technology.
Do Well and Be Well.
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