Couldn’t the collective threat that everyone just diasporas mitigate inflation if businesses tried to pull any funny business?
Why does it work for Monaco?
Disclaimer: Theoretical Speculation
If everyone was rich, money would become useless…
I don’t think that’s true. I think if everyone was rich, nobody would be. Everyone would be “middle class”, if you can even talk about class any more. Doesn’t sound too bad tbh.
It would only be a temporary fix. Robert Nozick gives the example of the famous basketball player as a critique of John Rawls’ veil of ignorance argument.
Suppose everyone had equal wealth but we remained different individuals with our own personalities, abilities, etc. For simplicity, assume everyone has $100 each and there are a million people in total. Now suppose one person is actually a legendary basketball player (Nozick uses Wilt Chamberlain as an example) and he decides to play basketball in the NBA to entertain everyone else. But he doesn’t do it for free, he charges each person $1 for a ticket to see him play.
If everyone pays to see him play basketball, he becomes a millionaire while everyone else becomes $1 poorer. In effect, the balance of total equality has been broken.
How do you solve this problem? You might say that he’s not allowed to charge $1 for people to see him play basketball but then what you’re really saying is that everyone is not allowed to spend their $1 to see a basketball game. So it’s actually not possible to preserve the state of total equality without taking away people’s economic freedom (that is, the freedom to decide how to spend their $100).
Thus you either gradually revert to inequality or you make all money worthless by taking away people’s choices on what to spend (and so you might as well just have a ration system instead).
Economic freedom in this example is pure nonsense. I don’t want the freedom to overpay for something. The price point is also completely unreasonable. There are alternatives that could be implemented, like setting limits. Your example has a clear goal of promoting a certain world view that the existence of slavery is what makes us free. If that’s not a paradox a don’t know what a paradox is.
There would still be class, but it would be based on things like social status and education instead of financial status.
I feel that is implicit in OPs question - I mean if it’s not equally rich, how is it different from what reality is right now? Anyways maybe OP can clarify.
So…its like audio equalization if you increase or decrease to the exact same proportions.
Ironically, I have a heavy preference for reducing treble so am I doing in my audio what society should do economically? Lol
Umm, something like that, I guess…
Again, just speculation, but if everyone had roughly the same amount of money (assuming the concept of spreading the butter equally), then nobody would want to earn money, and nothing would get done.
How many people are rich and continue to amass wealth even though they have more money than they really know what to do with?
How many important projects are done by volunteers?
How many old people work jobs they don’t need just to keep themselves social and busy?
And in that hypothetical scenario, money still exists, it’s just equally distributed. There’ll still be people who want more, people who waste what they have and need a top-up, etcetc.
Since the term “rich” is relative, I assume the question is in relation to other nations.
If it’s a capitalist nation, I don’t think it would last long. Low incentive to work, coupled with strong international purchasing power, would allow those who spend to drive down their net worth while those who invest increase it. It wouldn’t take more than a few years to begin a notable separation of classes.
It really depends on the parameters of the thought experiment.
If everyone suddenly received a lot of money, there would be a wild period of adjustment before we figure out the pricing system again and life continues as normal. Even though there’s a lot more money, there is not magically more TVs to buy. Nor would we all start building tv factories - there’s not magically more copper or concrete to buy either.
If we all got more money and buried it in our yards and swore never to use it, then nothing has changed. For the sake of the thought experiment, someone would break the promise (I would - I want air conditioning), and then everyone else would break it too, and we end up in the previous situation.
If everyone were suddenly truly wealthy - as in stuff / things - some might think we would chill out and coast for a while. But having satisfied our big needs ( I am not being hunted by tigers) and our medium needs (Air conditioning, yay!), I imagine humanity would just keep working - there are always more problems to solve / there is always more work to do.
Rich is relative. If everyone is rich, nobody is.
What I mean is if everyone has an abundnace of money, how does that affect prices? Does a can or case of coca cola get more expensive just because it can?
I wonder why as a society we wouldn’t want to punish that…they were doing just fine before they learned everyone had more money, why should they be allowed to extort like they’ve been doing where everyone emphatically doesn’t have what they need or an abundnace of resources (shrinkflation well after supply chain issues resolved)
How would that apply to Monaco? They’re all rich, aren’t they? Relatively speaking, obviously there’s a hierarchy but you have to be rich to even be able to entertain and carry out moving there
Nobody would need/want to work. Societal collapse ensues as supply chains break down. Prices skyrocket, wages skyrocket.
That would be my guess.
I don’t think that’s a complete explanation of inflation. Prices sort of get bidden up. So say everyone wants a car now, but there aren’t yet enough of them to go around. Someone will pay more because they value it more, and the seller will always sell to the higher paying customer.
I do think an abundance economy is possible, with everyone working just enough and a more reasonable allocation of the money. In that scenario we need more automation, because a lot of essential (tough, time consuming, underpaid) jobs are done now by people. The ownership of these robots would have to be spread out to everyone. I do think then everyone could be rich, in the sense of having a nice house, household help, food and clothes and fresh water, transportation. As long as society shares in these benefits it will work, yes.
What do you mean about Monaco? Are there no underpaid housekeepers and nannies and other workers there?
I think the questions you’re asking require the oversimplification of the real world to the point where even if someone gave you an “answer” it would be close to meaningless. Specifically, not everyones looks at changing geographic locations through a lens of pure economics.
You’re all over the place, but I personally believe the biggest issue is people look at economic systems and ask things like “how can we maximize our production and consumption power?”
The “solution” is for everyone to come to an agreement on how much of something is “enough” and work forward from that baseline. This is incredibly difficult because people have different priorities, and getting people to agree on how much food, fuel, and infrastructure should be produced and consumed per capita would be a huge challenge. Capitalist economic systems allow people to more easily distance themselves from the moral problem of greed by saying things like “If I can make $5,000 that means I earned the right to consume $5,000 worth of goods.” But the real world “value” of making $5,000 from construction work on housing is vastly different than the value produced from selling a $5,000 NFT.
