On Apr 19, 2014, at 1:45 PM, raghu <[email protected]> wrote: > > My main assertion here is that wealth (beyond a relatively modest threshold) > is a purely positional good. If you accept that, it follows, pretty much by > definition, that accumulation of wealth is a negative-sum game.
======== I don’t accept your main assertion; wealth is not reducible to an individualist[ic] positional goods problem. The conceptualizing/theorizing of the 'accumulation of wealth’ becomes extremely difficult once we start trying to engage the arithmetic of aggregation and what shall be included; the problems have gotten even more difficult since ecological economics has matured as a sub discipline. I would submit they are computationally intractable. > > It is an ontological rather than an empirical assertion, and as such, I am > not sure what kind of evidence it is possible to provide for it. To put it > slightly differently, wealth is a claim on some scarce resource, which by > definition excludes others from using that resource. ======== I don’t accept that there can be a priori truths about the historical processes of contemporary capitalism. I also don’t accept that there can be a priori truths about the psychology of individuals. So a folk psychology of ‘sociopaths’ is a non-starter for me. So Larry Ellison is an asshole and Warren Buffett is everyone’s favorite billionaire grandpa; big deal. > > When you are very wealthy, you are making claims on resources that you cannot > possibly use yourself, which means you are making claims for the sole purpose > of denying other people the use of valuable resources. That seems to me the > very essence of sociopathy. ======== Well when one is very wealthy under capitalist rules of the game, one has immense claims on the labor time of other human beings and the control of that labor time is the result of a long history of the development and transformations of the capacities of exercising coercion. Coercion and authority are *the big* problems in contemporary societies; the politics of expertise in finance, petroleum engineering, automotive design, etc. since 2007-2008 has only exposed the tip of an iceberg. I think that is why the politics of labor time that others on the list have been talking about is of such immense importance; wealth for them is the transformation of the capacity to control one’s use of time so that the levels and contexts of coercion are significantly reduced. One need only think of the enslavement of the masses of labor in Saudi Arabia in order to build the world’s tallest building to get a sense of how useless a concept ‘sociopath’ is when trying to put a stop to such suffering and the immense waste of time that such a project entails. E. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
