I actually don't understand why Brexit should necessary be bad for UK. Switzerland is doing very well outside of EU despite it's literally surrounded by EU members. Of course, there is a risk that UK won't do as good as Switzerland does but it's only risk, it's not established fact yet.
Regarding article itself ... well, it's The Guardian so it's very predictable what they will write about wealth.
Regarding author, it's the same, respected and famous scientist is longstanding Labour Party supporter. With all due respect to mister Hawking, I won't buy socialism in any possible form and any interpretation even from world famous scientist.
I would prefer to enjoy to read his great science books.
> I won't buy socialism in any possible form and any interpretation even from world famous scientist
This is a pretty ridiculous statement.
Do you believe in taxation? Do you believe there are some things that a collective organization of people can do better than an individual - be that organization a family, village, private company, or a federal government? OK, then you buy into and support the premise of socialism.
Socialism/capitalism isn't binary. Don't be arbitrarily afraid of either word or concept, but do be afraid of either extreme, as extremes are always untenable. Moving towards "socialism" by increasing taxation on the ultra-wealthy is a move to restore balance and guide us away from one extreme which has gained in popularity in the past 30 years.
I'm 23 and I live in the US. The fear surrounding terms like socialism/communism to this day, even with my generation, amazes me. My peers have learned to use these terms as an insult without knowing exactly why they are insulting - they just feel a vague sense that socialism is "un-American".
I get that we had to turn on the propaganda machine full blast during the cold war as the threat of nuclear extinction is no laughing matter. But with programs like social security, medicare, medicaid, etc. making up such a huge portion of our federal budget, maybe it's time to rethink our hatred and out-of-hand fear of simple terms that we use to talk about ownership and wealth redistribution.
> Moving towards "socialism" by increasing taxation on the ultra-wealthy
This is not a move toward socialism.
Socialism is defined by communal ownership of the means of production and exchange. Capitalism is defined by private ownership of the same. These terms are specific in meaning, as they are jargon in the field of economics.
I'm not particularly interested in engaging in a political or economic debate right now, so I'm not trying to pass judgment on what is good or bad, but if you're going to make a post about people mischaracterizing a concept while doing so yourself.
Ninja edit: That capitalism and socialism are often seen in combination with other particular social and economic arrangements does not in any way make these things a component of socialism or capitalism.
>Moving towards "socialism" by increasing taxation on the ultra-wealthy is a move to restore balance and guide us away from one extreme which has gained in popularity in the past 30 years.
What you just described is not socialism, or even approaching socialism. It could be best described as social-democracy, which is a completely unrelated concept. Socialism would be banning private enterprise in favor of direct state ownership of the economy.
That's why people have an aversion to the word, because it's an awful concept. Not because of some irrational fear.
I may be completely wrong on this one but isn't social-democracy a sort of compromise between socialism and capitalism? So I wouldn't call it entirely unrelated.
You're not wrong. Where proper socialism seeks to supplant capitalism (and property law) through the power of the state, social democracy instead seeks to exist within the basic capitalistic framework while attempting to curbe its perceived social injustices through state intervention into the market economy and provisioning of social welfare services.
In some respect it's a compromise; mostly in that many of Europe's social democrats emerged from discredited hard core socialist parties. American social democrats, on the other hand, emerged out of a split with liberalism and ironically kept the name.
The distinction is important though. Social democracy in practice translates to simple fiscal policy. Actual socialism would imply a complete overthrow of our judicial and legislative systems.
Whether it is a compromise does not alter the defining characteristics of capitalism and socialism, those being private ownership and communal ownership, respectively, of the means of production and exchange.
These terms are not used as in the vernacular but are precisely defined pieces of economic jargon.
Switzerland does have access to the EU single market and implements many features of EU law, such as free movement of people. The UK might end up with a similar arrangement eventually, but if we adopt most of the EU principles but without any political influence I fail to see what the point was. Even if we manage to find a satisfactory solution, we will have to go through a lot of pain to get there, and we were already doing very well as a member of the EU.
I understand this but there is a reason why Switzerland decided not to join EU in the first place. I don't know exact reason. I suggest they preferred to selectively accept some terms instead of taking all burden of membership in the EU.
I like open-economy and globalisation but I would prefer more decentralised system instead of concentrating all power in the single place and then impose regulations across the board. In short, I would not put all eggs to one basket.
Although, I understand that some people voted for Brexit just because of emotions.
I guess it comes down to whether being able to pick relationship terms à la carte outweighs the benefits of discounts via a bundle deal and having some influence via a seat at the table. There's a chance that, long term, this restructuring is worth the human-effort capital.
And the EU is not just a trade deal. It is a single market, like the US is a single market, with a great degree of regulatory uniformity. Which means accepting laws from a central source (in the US it is Washington, in the EU it is Brussels).
What you think would happen to Texas were to secede? With border controls? With its internal regulation for its market? Paying tariffs to access to the rest of the US? No free-movement of people? And all of this, and we have Florida, right next to Texas that just remains in the US; why invest in an independent Texas if you can invest in Florida?
(Of course the EU is not like the US. The EU is a very thin federal layer compared to the US federal government. e.g. EU states go to war on their own all the time.)
The UK might get a Switzerland like deal. But that is very close to being a full-fledged member. That is not a hard-Brexit.
Implying that ~ 55% of its exports go outside the EU, and since the EU is a customs union, external trade incurs tariffs by default and members are prohibited from negotiating their own trade deals to change that. The 55% number is despite those constraints; it's not unreasonable to think that the proportion would be quite a bit higher if EU trade had tariffs and trade with the rest of the world didn't [1]. The 55% number is also rising steadily as EU growth lags behind the rest of the world. I'd be surprised if Brexit ends without free UK/EU trade, but even if it did I don't think it'd be the disaster many are painting.
Short-term things will be rocky given the uncertainty and adjustment pains; long-term things will be fine; medium-term could go either way depending on how the various parties behave.
[1] That's simplifying a bit, since the EU does have free trade deals with some countries, although notably not with the US or China or India or much of the rest of the Commonwealth. Also, some of the UK's trade with the rest of the world is currently routed through the EU, though given how cheap freight is these days that shouldn't be too hard to change if necessary.
Geography still matters a lot. Japan [1] trades mostly with Asia, and the UK [2] with nearby countries (it trades more with Sweden than Canada; more with the Netherlands than China).
When it comes to trade deals, the UK does not have all that much leverage. And Brexit was (to some extent) a vote for protectionism (e.g. against TTIP).
I agree that much of the support for Brexit had protectionist roots, though I think that was far more about labour protectionism than goods. Very few people in the UK have even heard of TTIP; it doesn't get mainstream coverage here. That may change once the UK steps out of the EU's trade-protectionist umbrella, of course; those trying to spin the result as a ringing popular endorsement of Extreme Globalization Turbo Max Pro are definitely being disingenuous.
As a resident of 'Washington' I would prefer you qualify the capitol of the nation by either it's full name 'Washington District of Columbia' or the common short-hands there of 'Washington DC' or just 'DC'.
Please, stop confusing the state and the city liberated from all states in the nation.
"I actually don't understand why Brexit should necessary be bad for UK"
Leaving the EU could have some advantages, but those advantages need would only come from a very VERY long, slow drawn out plan (eg. coming up with new laws and trade deals ready for the switch over) over many MANY years. Leaving the EU isn't necessarily a terrible thing, but doing it in the way it was done, now, so fast, with so much misinformation? The only outcome could be negative.
Sure everyone wants to rewire the server farm, but you don't just go down and start ripping out cables because "Once it's done it will be better".
> Switzerland is doing very well outside of EU despite it's literally surrounded by EU members
It also has a lot of agreements with the EU that include accepting restrictions on what immigration limits they can impose. Those are exactly the sort of restrictions that the Brexit campaign were complaining about, so if the UK went for a deal like the one Switzerland has, it would make a lot of the brexiteers angry.
Even in the best foreseeable case (where very little changes), the UK will go from having a say in the way the EU develops and the rules it abides by to gain access to the EU market to not having a say, but having to follow those rules anyway.
The article asks "can possessions stand in the way of fulfillment?" Experience tells me the answer there is certainly yes, they can and often do. I think achieving a cultural shift away from the accumulation of possessions is achievable-- as cities get more dense, as travel becomes more regular, safe and affordable-- and in some sections of culture this is happening already.
The article also asks though if we can truly ever own things vs only custodian them. Here I don't see any shift happening. The principal of property ownership, where property extends to land and to ownership of business corporations, is what largely drives the Pareto distribution of income we experience. This, in turn, defines the disparity between the rich and the poor. So, I'm not sure a truly fundamental shift can or will happen here.
I'm curious to understand the forthcoming results and learnings from experiments in Universal Basic Income which are beginning to get under way. And I think that if robots and AI actually automate away most current human labor, we might be able to rebalance our economy in a manner beneficial to more people. Alternatively, if life extension becomes more and more practical, the fundaments of our economy may be ripe for change. So, over the course of decades or centuries, I can see the equilibria of our economic system and the distribution of incomes and therefore wealth accumulation changing dramatically. But I don't think it happens through any mere cultural shift in thinking nor via incremental policy changes. That may not be a bad thing, but everyone should know that the fundamental rules of the system are unlikely to change dramatically any time soon, without some major impetus to necessitate it.
>The article asks "can possessions stand in the way of fulfillment?" Experience tells me the answer there is certainly yes, they can and often do.
While this can be true, and I know a few people who seem oddly compelled to accumulate more at the detriment of the rest of their lives, I find that it is far more common that the lack of wealth stands in the way of fulfillment.
On a different point, I see the market as an efficient way to find the best custodians for things. Or, at least, that is the ideal. The real market is far more complicated, of course.
Inequality is inevitable, and probably desirable. I only have a problem with inequality when those that have more can exploit those that have less. Contrary to common wisdom which is that people must be compelled through desperation to work (an extension of outdated history), I think it is possible for those that have less to have less command of wealth yet still not be completely desperate. Desperation and exploitation are not core features of a free market, Capitalistic system. In fact, I think they are a drag on Capitalism and the free market.
>Desperation and exploitation are not core features of a free market, Capitalistic system. In fact, I think they are a drag on Capitalism and the free market.
without making a value judgment, i think this extremely disputable, historically speaking
You don't have to dig in history to dispute it, desperation and exploitation are current features of our Capitalist system.
BUT
I think that is more historical accident rather than a necessary consequence of the system. I think we have to work to pull Capitalism out of that swamp if it is to remain viable for the foreseeable future.
But it is so ingrained that these are part and parcel with the free market that suggesting ways to fix it is taken as an attack on Capitalism itself.
In my view, if we removed desperation from the system, one way or another, and allowed people to bargain for a gain rather than to stem losses, it would be jet fuel for the market, the economy and Capitalism as a whole.
As long as businesses are profit driven there will be exploitation of both people and the environment.
It takes a trememdous effort to navigate the consumables as to minimize harm to yourself (bad food, addictive & compulsive apps) or the environment (so much plastic!). My point is, removing desperation helps but you still have to navigate the business landmines.
He really lost me with the first two paragraphs... Oh, and the title. The Brexit? Really? He's using the Brexit to launch into a soliloquy on the meaning of life?
It's not clear to me that the Brexit had to do with wealth as much as it had to do with sovereignty. It's also not clear that the Brexit will have a negative long run impact on Britain's wealth.
I know this sounds crazy to all the super smart international people out there, but A) the EU's growth sucks and B) it's likely to get worse before it gets better - oh, and C) when it gets worse the Euro could very well go away, making the Brexit crowd look like geniuses.
Look, if you look for fulfillment in money or possessions you are going to be disappointed. This has been a tenet of Western philosophy for millennia. Using this philosophy as a platform to trash the Brexit is disingenuous and beneath somebody as uber super smart as Hawking.
Hawkings is pointing out how the EU allowed for collaboration and money to flow from multiple sources, while now Britain will lose access to many of those. He also draws attention to how a mindset of "Britains wealth is being taken by foreigners", even though it isn't, was a driving force for many to vote for Brexit. The need for sorveignty arose from people belief that the wealth of Britain, be it economic and cultural, was being taken by foreigners.
From this perspective, Hawkings makes a good point to consider for anyone who is trying to better understand Brexit and its repercussions.
Also not related to the article, but the EU has kept Europe out of war for the longest period of time and was one reason for the unification.
It seems to me that the Brexit is going to hurt mostly because the EU is going to want to make it hurt to discourage more members from leaving.
That said, GB was never on the Euro so their transition is a lot less traumatic than it would be for most EU members.
The Euro has always had some dubious aspects, like tying everybody to the same currency but letting them set their monetary policy on a per-country basis. Problems like the Greek crisis are almost inevitable in a setup like this.
You seem to be confusing the Eurozone with the EU. The latter has its problems but is a basically sound institution, whereas the former was and remains a terrible idea without a fiscal union.
So you are suggesting that Poland should give up its financial stability (like being pretty much only EU country which did not suffer recession during 2008 financial crisis) and join Eurozone just to help you avoid small inconvenience with reimbursing business trip in foreign currency?
The Eurozone is suffering. All economic areas have up and downs. Being in a shared monerary union, you sacrifize some advantages for others: we compromise - I know, strange word.
We are building a stable, long term monetary union. We are learning, we are improving and we will have a strong currency going forward.
Next time another economy area is in distress, as it will unavoidably happen, remember about our crisis, and how we together saw it through.
Nowadays it is fashionable to attack the Euro. When the crisis is mastered, all know-it-alls will praise it. We do not need to care for the ones or the others. We do our thing.
And yes, the most practical consequence for induvidual citizens is that I do not care about currencies, at all. Except when I travel to Poland.
That sounds rather over-optimistic. A currency union is inherently unstable if not matched to a fiscal union. If you're not going to move to a fiscal union (and after Greece, I'm pretty sure there is not the political will to do so), then the Euro union cannot be stable.
Can it survive even if it's unstable? Perhaps. Will it be worth it? That's not for me to say. But you cannot "master the crisis" with the Euro zone without a fiscal union.
Thanks to the magic of currency markets, I don't have to care about currencies either when I travel in Europe, even though I am American. Whenever I buy something, I use my credit card, and the charges are automatically converted to USD based on whatever the USD/EUR/GBP/etc rates are on that day.
The Eurozone can be a great idea, if some sort of fiscal union comes into being; otherwise the Euro will always be undervalued in the North and overvalued in the South, causing imbalances in investment and consumption.
I agree he maybe didn't connect them crisply, but I think the general idea is that even though staying in the EU has a higher net value for the British economy, that value is not being distributed to the working class who voted to leave. Instead it is collected at the top by a wealthy elite of land and business owners. It's a problem of team incentives (net UK economy) being misaligned with individual incentives (individual worker quality of life).
Very well written, I think this is a great argument once you're comfortable.
Once you have some stability you can take a breath and enjoy a good book and have time to think and appreciate the value of knowledge.
However, before that, and those who are disproportionately being kept out of comfort by the current system (working two jobs to make rent, choosing which bills to pay, etc) don't yet have that luxury to rethink wealth.
It seems his premise is "Rethink wealth so you feel better about giving your money to others" I find it well meaning but naive to human nature. It might as well have been called "Ignore human nature". Wealth stems from "taking" resources and wanting to survive. We are in a petri dish of limited resources, with more and more people consuming. Good luck with that math.
It's also human nature to share. cf Kropotkin and studies of altruism in human beings. Wealth, as a concept is very much up for grabs. Is it accumulation of resources, the increase of security of resources, the fulfilment of psychological desires, the control of psychological desires, the stable passing on of genes?
Ideas, which can improve the amount of resources (virtually without limits, by say exploiting the asteroid belt), are not limited. That is, ideas can hugely increase the size of your petri dish.
What I dont know is if human nature can be contained to avoid growing the population continously above the carrying capacity, as we have been doing for the last 200 thousand years (or was that updated to 2 million?)
As an aside, in order to distract myself from my own local decadence, particularly at night when its time to sleep, I have been entertaining myself with an investigation of literature and cultural artifacts pertaining to the lives and living of the 18th Century, or at least: any particular culture beyond the fringe of the last 100 years.
Its only a trivial pursuit, nothing in particularly serious, academic, or even principled. Rather just something to think about before embarking into the nightly darkened garden, of thought and mystery.
I can't help but think it is such a tragedy just how artificial it all is, and has been, for the last few centuries. We have created immense artifice; extreme transfer of responsibility and control at very mechanical, practical, energetic levels of human discourse. The cities we have created, the means we have endeavoured to make available to all, or none, or at least many, simply "to get there" in the human equation: it continues to impress a fiction upon the land. Utterly fictional.
Consider the average airline passenger. How they manage to navigate the labyrinthine means by which the space was navigated, to go from New York to Tokyo. (Or any other place, perhaps Ankara to Cairo, if you like. It doesn't really matter.)
How extreme we have become, we species. That we do not acknowledge our principle accomplishments, beyond all else the universe pitches against us, while follying and crippling ourselves with ghosts and fakery.
Kill the fakery. If it works, sell it. Sell the hell out of it. Humans perpetuate technology first, bullshit second. Never forget the complete nature of the theorem.
Can't imagine why you were downvoted for this. You're spot on to read very old books; my godfather - a historian - insisted on reading books only written by dead people. He may have been a salty old man for the time that I knew him, but he was never unhappy.
I have recently begun listening to a LOT of classical music. Every time I casually new-tab over to YouTube and load up a Tchaikovsky playlist, I think to myself: "Not even the richest kings of Renaissance Europe could instantly summon a complete orchestra and hear a composer's entire repertoire played perfectly every time - yet that can be my reality whenever I wish."
Really reminds me I have so much to be grateful for.
Herodotus's Histories is probably the best place to start. Maybe 50% of it is accurate, as it was common among historians of the day to create functional exchanges of historical figures to simulate the debate of ideas, such as the Persian Magi debating on the kind of government Persia ought to have, between aristocracy, democracy, and autocracy.
Also, and while it is very very modern, John Green's Crash Course World History (and US history) is a great place to start so you have context when you delve deeper.
There will always be people who take great pleasure and submit extraordinary effort to accumulate massive wealth. These efforts cannot be ignored in the prosperous society we have today. We take refrigeration and electricity and indoor plumbing - unheard of for the Founding Fathers - for granted, and perceive those without it as living in extreme poverty.
It is only when the pursuit of individual prosperity comes at the expense and suffering of others that limitations - regulations, taxes - are warranted.
It is a good thing we have a system that incentivizes the creation of wealth. But when the wealthy pull up the ladder, they sow the seeds of their own destruction and suffering for themselves and many others.
One need only look at the history of Venice to see how greed and selfishness can turn a once-vibrant and upwardly-mobile society into a permanent has-been.
Poverty is a relative term: somebody without a shirt is poor because nearly everybody has a shirt, not because shirts are absolutely necessary.
Edit: not sure why I am being downvoted. Take the poorest man on Earth today; he is richer than most men alive 20 thousand years ago. I would argue that he would conquer any ancient society.
I don't think you understand how poor the poorest man on Earth today is, nor how ineffective that wealth would be for gaining influence in other cultures.
Maybe I got carried away. Maybe not the poorest, but a very poor man today has resources at his disposal (via modern societies, no matter how poor) vastly greater than the resources a very rich man could get millenia ago. He can be cured of various deseases, can move around with incredible vehicles, can talk with people very far away from him, has incredible amount of knowledge at his disposal, and already knows things (“the Earth is round“) which are very valuable (as in “we invested huge amounts of resources to get to know this“). His power is enormous.
Human nature is such that we feel poor because we only have a bike, while our neighbor has a Porsche, without realizing that a bike is an incredible thing.
For a remote Afghan, or even a rural Cambodian, life is pretty much the same as it has been for thousands of years. The wealth and means exist to feed and clothe and shelter all humans on earth, but those who actually have means at their disposal choose instead to spend the money on wars and opulence.
Plenty of Middle-class Americans deny that the earth is round, even with all the knowledge of the world at their fingertips.
Potentially, yes, the world is miraculous compared to the past. But for those who are not born into some of that gradual wealth creation (as most Westerners were), they are still very poor and very exploited. Or they are too remote to bother with and so life is hardly any different compared with 100 or 500 years ago.
We are talking about different things: you talk about somebody alive today, but basically living in the past. His peers are those in times past, so he is as rich or poor as they were.
I talk about your average “very poor guy“ in a modern society: he is just poor compared to his peers, but rich compared to a lot of people.
But no matter who we are talking about: my point all along is that being poor or rich is a relative measure. To say that a person is poor, you need to state “compared to“. Usually we implicitely compare to the “average contemporary citizen“
That simple things that we take for granted in our day-to-day live are luxuries (or even impossibilities) in other contexts . Which I use to show that poverty is a relative them.
I think Hawking has said many important things about wealth and economy in the past. Many economists are very narrowly focused, not considering the bigger picture.
Society and the field of economics have always had to make major changes in response to significant technological change. The industrial revolution ripped apart the old order and fundamentally changed the way people thought about economics.
As Hawking has talked about, I think AI as well will make fundamental and lasting changes to the field of economics, and to how we organize our society.
E.g. I don't think libertarian ideology can survive an AI world. Free market economics makes most sense for the present world but socialist economics might actually make more sense in an AI world.
It depends on how things evolve. Either a rich elite will end up controlling all the means of production without needing workers, creating masses of unemployment, or we end up in a world where everybody is a capitalist. Nobody works, but everybody might own capital they invest in production.
The outcome will depend largely on the marginal cost of production. If 3D printers, robots, AI etc allow production to happen at small scale with similar marginal cost to that of large scale production the capitalism might get dramatically democratized. If not instead we risk a Blande Runner like Dystopia.
Will be very interesting to see if the UK economy can actually recover at all with all of the acquisitions. There's a fire sale of sorts at the moment on UK's most valuable companies. The promises of the current prime minister to prevent the few big employers in the UK from being purchased have pretty much evaporated...such is the way of the snake oil salesman. The free flow of super smart labor in the schengen zone was a net positive for most UK companies, and for the foreign labor that contributed to the UK economy. The trick, as Hawking says is to ensure the fruits of the globalized economy is shared by all. In the US we have a huge issue with churn. Industries like coal will never return, however people like Trump promise that they will. What we need is a cheaper university system that provides a means for the children of those former coal miners to move onto something else (or even the miners themselves). Right now, if you're an out of work person in an industry that is gone...there's no way to move on. You can take out massive loans, or join the military to get free education. Those are about the only two practical options for most people (I for one took the military option), and that's not good enough. The managed capitalism that we've developed works well, we just have to remember that the government's role is to manage the economy...not to run the economy. Government should foster an environment for everyone to succeed, not just those who have a more favorable starting place in life (like Trump). Right now people are upset, mad, and often without hope. While I (and just about any other person with critical thinking skills) can punch holes in just about every one of Trumps lightweight arguments, these holes are ignored by the masses because they want to believe that there is a magic cure to what ails them. Unfortunately, like the magic pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, Trump's magical cure doesn't exist...just as the pot of gold that sold brexit will never be found.
To say that Brexit is democracy in action, you're suggesting that that alone makes it a good thing. Democracy in action has gotten us many terrible things as well. Democracy, in this form, is mob rule. If the mob is well-informed, it can go well. When the mob is not, it can go very badly.
>"If the mob is well-informed, it can go well. When the mob is not, it can go very badly."
That only applies if you have some sort of arbiter to decide whether or not the "mob" is informed. And if you do that, you might as well have a dictatorship, as the arbiter can decide which side s/he thinks is well informed. Or rather, they could decide that groups X,Y and Z are not informed, therefore they aren't allowed to vote.
I know you may not be suggesting that explicitly, but that is the type of thing that I would argue follows from your line of thinking.
You mentioned that the decision made is a good one if the mob is well informed, and bad if they are not. Or, rather you said something along the lines that it is "Not True Democracy" if the majority are not well-informed.
Making a statement such as "this was not democracy because the voters were not informed" carries a lot of implications. If it wasn't democracy, then the result isn't valid. If the result isn't valid, then you have to concede that you want to disregard certain peoples' vote based on the fact that they were not well-informed.
You then have to deconstruct that as to what it means to be informed, and who get's to decide that. Ultimately, someone/something has to make the call about who gets to vote, or whether that vote counts.
As much as I dislike/disagree with Democracy, one person = one vote is a line that is clearly drawn in most circumstances. It removes ambiguity, arbitration and interpretation. As soon as you open up the can of worms regarding "voting based on how informed" one is, then you have a huge slew of problems that I believe will very quickly lead to the realization that either you accept tyranny by the few, or the informed; or that democracy is not a moral and fair system.
That doesn't follow at all, and it isn't the consequence of my line of thinking. The arbiter can be time itself. An entity which makes a bad decision can see its bad decision played out over time by various measures. A failing economy, an increase in crime rates, an increase in poverty rates, an increase in some categories of diseases or diseases becoming pandemic or endemic that should be containable and treatable. A good decision, with measurably positive indicators, can similarly be discerned.
Of course, the vast majority of nation-level decisions will result in more of a mixed bag of positive and negative indicators. Take, for instance, tax cuts. They aren't uniformly good or bad. To a certain level, they free up capital for people to spend (a form of democratic decision making, I don't believe markets are magical like some, but they are generally efficient and effective). Beyond that level, though, they remove capital for the government to spend on things the people (or someone depending on the type of government) has decided it needs to be spent on and drives up national debt, or curtails national spending which may have other negative consequences (reduced average level of education of the populace, reduced access to essentials like medical care, poor preparation for emergencies, etc.).
What I actually want is what we (in the US) ostensibly have. A democratic (the -ic is important) republic with a form of representative democracy. Our votes determine who represents us. Those individuals are tasked with making decisions based on various calculi (risk analysis, economic models, legal constraints and obligations, etc.). I do not want anyone to lose their vote, nor does my comment imply that. Universal suffrage is a good thing, giving everyone an opportunity, ignorant or informed, to have a voice. [EDIT: What I do not want is mob rule. There's a reason the legislature in the US was divided into the Senate and the House. The House offered a risk of mob rule, but the great opportunity for the people's voices to be heard. The Senate balanced this by giving unbalanced-by-population representation to each state. This acts as a measure of restraint against mob rule.]
[Sidenote: Can we abandon "s/he" and similar constructs? If the intention is to be more gender-equitable, switch to truly gender neutral terms like the singular-they, or one. S/he remains constrained to the binary system that, presently, is becoming outmoded. Not only that, but it's an awkward construct that is not easily voiced. An article posted here, I think, earlier in the week had attempted another sort of gender-balanced approach by alternating he and she in each paragraph while speaking about theoretical persons. The problem was this: the post was about a singular, theoretical person and it appeared as if the person was swapping genders each paragraph. What's more, the story didn't make sense because it was technically about two different people when it was intended to be about one.]
No. You and your sibling seem to be thinking along the same lines.
When the mob goes against your wishes you've been overruled. But when the mob (or any entity) makes a decision that results in harm to itself, that was a bad decision. Decision-by-mob is incredibly amenable to this consequence.
Mobs are too easily swayed by rhetoric, appeals to emotion (particularly fear and anger, see the practical lynch mob calling for Clinton's imprisonment at the RNC). We do not permit mob rule in the US for this reason. We created a democratic republic to provide the majority a voice, but to temper it in a way that it would (theoretically) be harder for it to trample on the minority.
EDIT:
Further. I didn't say that it going against my views made it good or bad. I just said when a mob makes a bad decision it tends to go very bad. We're human. We're irrational. It's very hard to set aside our egos. If we make a bad decision, we too often see it through to the bitter end rather than cut our losses. When that decision is made by 100 million people, what's the consequence when it turns out poorly? The vast majority of those people stick with the bad idea. They don't just stick with it, they fight for it. They won't say, "Oops, we goofed. This was a bad idea and we need to change course." They'll say, "Let's stick with it and see if it gets better next year." They may even outright deny the failure of the plan they've chosen.
By removing majority rule, but not to the extreme your sibling suggests I was arguing for with a dictatorship (similar issue, dictator makes a bad decision, we have to kill them to get rid of them). See my paragraph 3. It's not a solved problem. It's not the only solution. But it is a solution, and it works pretty well. We balance the mob against a strong minority voice.
I believe that it is not simply the decision of leaving the EU that is the big news. It is the ideas and discussions that caused that decision to be made by the majority of the UK population (this article focusing in on the economic inequality portion of the argument) that are the most interesting and cause the largest reaction.
I should also mention that it is big news in the US because we are seeing similar sentiments from a portion of our populace and the foreshadowing of our own elections is, well, interesting.
I think they're rather pointing out the fact that democracy is a-priori taken seriously (good, sensible, and moral as you put it) until it votes-in an action that some people don't like.
You never hear the same types of things being told of normal presidential and governmental elections as we did for the brexit outcome. I.e. "this side used fear mongering of X" and "side B used promises of Y to manipulate the public" and let's not forget "the conservative elder voting block was voting against the youth".
1. In a normal election, you can "vote the bums out" in the next election. This has much more serious and long-term consequences, more akin to a constitutional amendment, which in countries that have a constitution usually requires something like a 2/3rd majority.
2. In a normal election, the side that wins by making promises (false or otherwise) then has to actually deliver on those promises, and be judged on those promises, because it is voted into power. This is not the case here, and in fact the new PM wanted to remain.
3. The lies and false promises in this particular case were quite extreme. Although there probably were some, I can't think of single "leave" promise that was truthful.
4. Yes, you do hear this all the time, but the general idea is that since you can reconsider next time around, the lies should be left to stand and the people voted into power judged by their performance relative to their claims. Again, there is none of that here, as the people behind leave aren't even generally going to be in power, so no judging them against their claims, and this will be hard to undo.
> You never hear the same types of things being told of normal presidential and governmental elections as we did for the brexit outcome. I.e. "this side used fear mongering of X" and "side B used promises of Y to manipulate the public"
They are not doomed: the argument is that they would be better off in the EU. And that Britain would be worse off outside. Not that it would be a poor country; it would still be one of the richest countries on Earth. Just a bit poorer.
Today money matters in so much as getting things that need to be done to happen. Things like quality medical care, a place to live, and 'workers' to get those things done.
Money past that, money as a form of arbitrary luxury, is far too transitory. Once you reach that point you have very little marginal change in your situation, status signaling, or other measures; you have reached saturation on the 'good' money can do for you.
I think that most of the people who support Universal-BIG just want to get rid of the wasteful feedback loops in the low end of that equation. Everyone should have good food, good living areas, and good healthcare as a member of society. It establishes a more level playing field for all other activities and removes a lot of the wasteful expenditures of time and energy. It also cuts down on the 'alternative' means of achieving such basic support (ending up in jail or revolving hospitalization and being a drain on society).
Does this mean money should cease existing? No, but for a lot of things it would no longer be related.
Regarding article itself ... well, it's The Guardian so it's very predictable what they will write about wealth.
Regarding author, it's the same, respected and famous scientist is longstanding Labour Party supporter. With all due respect to mister Hawking, I won't buy socialism in any possible form and any interpretation even from world famous scientist.
I would prefer to enjoy to read his great science books.