[p2p-research] Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us by Ralph Nader

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Kevin Carson wrote:
> On 9/23/09, Paul D. Fernhout <pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:
>> That's the name of a new novel by Ralph Nader, not my position. :-)
> His latest book,
>> Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!, is a 700-page populist fantasy in which a
>> small group of billionaires and media moguls — led by Warren Buffett and
>> including Ted Turner, George Soros, Bill Cosby, Yoko Ono and Phil Donahue —
>> pool their massive resources to reform the U.S. With the help of a $15
>> billion war chest and a p.r. campaign starring a talking parrot, the group
>> successfully unionizes Walmart, ends corporate influence on Congress, makes
>> Warren Beatty the governor of California and legalizes industrial hemp. TIME
>> talked to Nader about the origins of his book, its celebrity characters and
>> the U.S.'s real-life political battles. "
> 
> In reality, I suspect any such reform carried out by the super-rich
> would be reminiscent of Tolstoy's "Parable."  In that story, a humane
> farmer built larger and more comfortable stalls for his cattle, piped
> in music, provided plenty of the best food, and built an enlarged yard
> for them to exercise in.  When someone asked why he didn't just tear
> the fence down and set them free, if he was so concerned for their
> welfare, he said  "But then I couldn't milk them."
> 
> I don't doubt that a reform carried out by the "progressive"
> super-rich would make the system more humane;  the last such reform
> the super-rich carried out in the New Deal certainly did so.  But the
> super-rich are probably also thinking, at least on some level, that
> treating us more humanely gets them more milk in the long run.

Good points.

Here is something related on developing a broader humorous perspective on 
the "super rich", as a section in the on-line book I wrote last year:
   "Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for 
prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease"
   http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
"""
* Making the whole world into Princeton University, or how Princeton locally 
stands in the way of Princeton globally :-)

So, the question becomes, how do we go about getting the whole world both 
accepted into Princeton and also with full tenured Professorships (researchy 
ones without teaching duties except as desired? :-) And maybe with robots to 
do anything people did not want to do? This is just intended as a humorous 
example, of course. I'm not suggesting Princeton would run the world of the 
future or that everyone would really have Princeton faculty ID cards and 
parking stickers. Still, that's a thought. :-) That motel for scholars, the 
Institute For Advanced Study, is already a bit like this (no required 
teaching duties), so it's an even better model. :-)
     http://www.ias.edu/about/mission-and-history/

But you might object, who will run the kitchens, repair the roofs, plant 
Prospect Garden, and so forth? Essentially, who will be the Morlocks to 
support and maybe eat the Eloi on staff? :-)
     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine

Well, that's where this analogy breaks down, although one could perhaps 
imagine robots as the Morlocks (maybe without the whole eating PU staff for 
fuel thing).
     http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/news/2001/10/47156
     "A prototype robot capable of hunting down over 100 slugs an hour and 
using their rotting bodies to generate electricity is being developed by 
engineers at the University of West England's Intelligent Autonomous Systems 
Laboratory."

Also, idleness is nice on occasion, but ultimately, to quote E. F. Schumacher:
     http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html
     "The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least 
threefold: to give [a person] a chance to utilise and develop [his or her] 
faculties; to enable [a person] to overcome [his or her] ego-centredness by 
joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and 
services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow 
from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it 
becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker 
would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with 
goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying 
degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. 
Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered 
a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, 
namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living 
process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the 
bliss of leisure."

Ah, maybe that explains why so many Princetonians are unhappy? :-( As well 
as their overworked servants? :-(

That wasn't really fair, as Princetonians are typically the working class of 
the wealthy (doctors, lawyers, CEOs, hedge fund managers, US presidents, and 
so on), not the "top out of sight" "super rich" :-) who indirectly employ 
Princetonians etc. to keep some notion of order in the world as they see it, 
or at least so suggests Paul Fussell in his book: (don't know whether to 
take it seriously :-)
     "Class: A Guide Through the American Status System"
     http://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/dp/0671792253
See also:
     "The middle of nowhere"
     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adirondack_Park
         (That's just coincidentally where my immediate family lives, as it 
is still a somewhat intact ecology, and my wife likes trees. :-)
and:
     Tour of the US Income Distribution, "The L-Curve"
     http://www.lcurve.org/
         (Note, really "super rich" people are maybe off even *that* curve, 
since even "Bill Gates" might be the working poor by their standards :-)

Contrary to popular opinion, Fussell suggests the super rich can't see any 
relevant difference between Princeton and a lowly state school, and so their 
kids might attend either or none at all. No matter who the kid marries, 
they'll be super rich. :-) That's the calculus of infinites for you. :-)
     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity
But for the rest of this essay I'll assume Princetonians run things. And 
they do even in Fussell's view, but more in a sort of administrative way. :-)

Also Fussel suggests a way out in the book -- to live as "Class X" which is 
perhaps what my immediate family is, not "super rich", or even plain "rich", 
but living in such a way as it does not matter (much. :-) Really, how many 
sunrises can you enjoy each day? How many beautiful dandelions can you look 
at at once? How many organic eggs you raise yourself can you really eat at 
one sitting? How big does your office really have to be to fit a treadmill 
and a computer with a few LCD screens? And so on. As long as you don't want 
to boss millions of people around, there is not much difference between 
"Class X" and being "Super Rich". And you might expect even bossing gets 
wearing and boring after a while.

Also, assuming for a moment that Fussell was right about there being "super 
rich" people, this essay would then be about convincing the super rich to 
let everyone else (including most Princetonians) become super rich instead 
of killing all poor people (say people with less than a few billion Euros in 
liquid assets) as a precaution with military robots, mutant sharks with 
laser beams, or related stuff (see especially Marshal Brain's "Manna" story).
     http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
One can only hope the super rich might see that in a calculus of infinites 
that allowing more super rich people might make the planet and solar system 
more interesting. Like the society of Star Trek's "Q Continuum".
     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(Star_Trek)

I'm not talking about actual help, naturally, (and which would take all the 
fun out of it), so much as just not standing in the way. :-) But let's just 
pretend I did not say all that, or that Fussell isn't serious about the 
"super rich". Also, I've taken some liberties with his analysis -- he's not 
as extreme in his definition of the "super rich" as I am. :-) Besides, 
accepting the existence of the "super rich" with Princetonians as the 
"working poor" would make analyzing PAW harder (but also, admittedly, 
funnier. :-)
[PAW = Princeton Alumni Weekly magazine http://paw.princeton.edu/ ]

So, for the rest of this essay, I'll assume the "scarcity" world (at least 
in the USA) currently works more like, say, G. William Domhoff suggests:
     http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/
     http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/who_has_the_power.html

     "Q: So, who does rule America?
      A: The owners and managers of large income-producing properties; i.e., 
corporations, banks, and agri-businesses. But they have plenty of help from 
the managers and experts they hire. ... I will try to demonstrate how rule 
by the wealthy few is possible despite free speech, regular elections, and 
organized opposition:
      * "The rich" coalesce into a social upper class that has developed 
institutions by which the children of its members are socialized into an 
upper-class worldview, and newly wealthy people are assimilated.
      * Members of this upper class control corporations, which have been 
the primary mechanisms for generating and holding wealth in the United 
States for upwards of 150 years now.
      * There exists a network of nonprofit organizations through which 
members of the upper class and hired corporate leaders not yet in the upper 
class shape policy debates in the United States.
      * Members of the upper class, with the help of their high-level 
employees in profit and nonprofit institutions, are able to dominate the 
federal government in Washington.
      * The rich, and corporate leaders, nonetheless claim to be relatively 
powerless.
       * Working people have less power than in many other democratic 
countries."

And what is the current result of that system of social organization? We 
create a self-fulfilling prophecy of scarcity in part through fearing it, 
and then acting on that fear. (And the only antidotes to fear are things 
like joy and humor. :-) Consider, say the US military and Iraq. The USA 
invades Iraq and produces terrorists that now justify having invaded as well 
as now devoting more money to the military. :-( Now people are saying the 
Iraq war, promised as a "cakewalk" will cost about three trillion US dollars 
before it is done. So, now we need to cut back on US social programs like 
R&D and nursing homes and also reduce aid to poorer countries (which might 
have truly helped prevent more problems). Thus we ensure more scarcity at 
home and abroad.

How much of the US monetarized economy goes into managing "scarcity" in 
terms of person-hours of work?
* A big chunk of the prison system,
* A big chunk of the legal system,
* A big chunk of the military and police,
* Cashiers,
* Most guards,
* Most of the management chain,
* Most of the banking system,
* Most sales people,
* Most of the insurance industry,
* Most of the Welfare and Medicaid government program staff (eligibility and 
oversight),
* Most lawyers and related proceedings,
* Much of the schooling and grading system, and
* Most of the government.

Add it all up, and maybe it is 90% of the person-hours consumed by the money 
economy by now? That's just a wild guess, of course. :-) I'm sure someone 
else better with numbers could refute or affirm that. But it is loosely 
based on a study mentioned in the essay linked below.

If you consider that a lot of service work is unnecessary if people had more 
free time (babysitting, restaurants, teaching, home construction, 
entertainment) then even less hours in the money economy are really needed 
in a society with a lot of leisure to raise children, cook meals, putter 
around the house, take on apprentices or educate neighbors on demand, and 
sing their own songs or make up their own stories.

And of course, child-rearing and day-to-day housekeeping and volunteering 
probably represents many more person-hours than the 10% or so of the total 
person-hours that the money economy uses for real production (actual work on 
factory goods, actual labor in agriculture, actual work making energy etc.). 
So clearly people will do important tasks for intrinsic benefits.

Things may have been different 100 years ago when most US Americans still 
lived on somewhat subsistence farms, and so most work was local and for 
one's own family and business. But somewhere during the past century, I'd 
speculate a shift happened where the amount of hours spent guarding exceeded 
the amount of effort spent producing. And then it probably just got worse 
from there, to the current situation where most work was related to 
guarding, even though work that is mostly guarding may also euphemistically 
be called "cashiering", "teaching", "managing", and so on. Pick almost any 
job and take most of the guarding out of it and it becomes more enjoyable.

It's important to look at the hours people work on various tasks, not the 
money value assigned to the tasks. If all those person hours are going into 
guarding functions, then of course there is little time left over for 
playful productive work.

And note, this estimate is without even giving a long hard look to 
rethinking how things could be done to be easier or more fun. Down the road, 
once tasks are redesigned to ignore the guarding aspects, they might be more 
efficiently done. For example, think of all the time people waste waiting in 
supermarket checkout lines or at toll booths. Or the time educators devote 
to attendance monitoring and grading.

The above is all an echo of this essay by Bob Black :
     "The Abolition of Work" (written as I graduated in 1985, but I only saw 
it a couple years ago through the internet)
     http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

     "Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any 
evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world 
designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working."
"""

See also:
"[p2p-research] Basic income from a millionaire's perspective?"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/003949.html

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/