Making money and creating value are two separate things. There are people who create value without receiving any money in return. And there are people who receive an obscene amount of money while creating very little value — and sometimes destroying more value than they create.
Understanding that the two are separate is the only way you can question the legitimacy of our richest people. I’ll give you a hint: the most impressive CEOs journals routinely praise as geniuses, are very, very unlikely to produce as much value as the money they actually receive.
If you want to even stand a chance at critically looking at our current economic system, you absolutely need to properly separate the notions of "making money" and "creating value".
Another way to put it would be that the wealthiest people tend to own the assets that are creating lots of value. But owning is not the same thing as creating.
> You're basically saying workers don't do anything useful.
Not quite: bullshit jobs are when the workers themselves say their own job isn't doing anything useful. And apparently they comprise a sizeable portion of all workforce.
Of course, jobs people say are useless, jobs the workers themselves say are useless, and actually useless jobs, are 3 different sets. But I think we can confidently say something is wrong when so many workers say their own job is useless, even if they aren't: working a job you think is useless just isn't healthy.
This is what is known as "cope", ie, they don't feel emotionally satisfied.
Americans in particular always have pretty narcissistic ideas about what their jobs should be. You can see this from all the examples of hippies trying to start communes, which then fail because everyone appoints themselves official poet instead of farmworker.
That will catch up to us. It already has, in many parts of the world, and it's not looking like it'll get better soon.
And let's not forget, it's not just people who have paid the price.
> The contemporary rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than the background extinction rate, the historically typical rate of extinction (in terms of the natural evolution of the planet); also, the current rate of extinction is 10 to 100 times higher than in any of the previous mass extinctions in the history of Earth.
All of which is to say nothing about the inequality in how that shareholder wealth is distributed, which is incredibly short-sighted for literally billions of reasons. 8 Americans own more wealth than 4 billion humans. It's perverse beyond comprehension.
You only see the curves go upward. But if you look very detailed, you see that a plateau is coming. A downward trend will follow.
When the going gets tough...
About the inequality : it is really bad, but hundreds years ago, the poor were starving because of lack of food, in stark contrast with landlords and knights and kings.
Today an equal amount of or more, people die from too much food than of too little.
My point is, you need to take a step back and look from a bit more distance to see the real trend. Things are bad now, because we are at a maximum.
> a plateau is coming. A downward trend will follow.
The plateau is not coming fast enough, not even close. Scientists are very clear on this point.
We used all that oil and gas to get more work done, but we're still working more hours per year than those feudal peasants.
> people die from too much food than of too little.
We still have thirteen million hungry children in America. 700 million hungry people worldwide.
It's all very solvable, we just don't. We could end world hunger by eating like, two or three rich [0]. Knights and Kings have nothing on our oligarchs.
These trends of irresponsible emissions and rising inequality won't fix themselves. Not in time. Not without radical action.
See, the harmful confusion right there.
Making money and creating value are two separate things. There are people who create value without receiving any money in return. And there are people who receive an obscene amount of money while creating very little value — and sometimes destroying more value than they create.
Understanding that the two are separate is the only way you can question the legitimacy of our richest people. I’ll give you a hint: the most impressive CEOs journals routinely praise as geniuses, are very, very unlikely to produce as much value as the money they actually receive.
If you want to even stand a chance at critically looking at our current economic system, you absolutely need to properly separate the notions of "making money" and "creating value".