We really need to care more about other people
I was talking with a member of my family recently. She told me how she found $4 in change in a parking meter that someone had presumably not realised hadn’t been accepted by the machine. Her reaction was “Yes!!!” or words to that effect. She had that feeling of a small, seemingly harmless victory and in the past I would have celebrated with her but now it brought me to a jarring realisation: we really don’t care about other people.
I don’t mean that we’re deliberately vindictive towards others as a rule. Of course we care!! I mean in that small way that we don’t even think about but that shows our true motivations.
That $4 belonged to someone else. That small victory was someone else’s small defeat. We wouldn’t have snatched it from their feet had they dropped it in front of us, but the disconnect of time and space meant we could not see that impact of their defeat, only our victory.
Every retail bargain we score is someone else’s loss (but of course they’re ripping us off, aren’t they? So we’ve evened the score!). Every cheap item we buy from another country (another bargain!) is someone else struggling to make a living. Adam Smith, a founding father of modern economics, believed that a society of individuals acting competitively and in their own self-interest would lead to greater benefits for society as a whole. I would argue that, from a systems perspective, it probably results in a generally stable economy over time, but one that inevitably leads to a permanent underclass of those who don’t have the skills, drive or resources to compete.
One view might be that that underclass provides a source of cheap labour desperate for work that keeps labour, and therefore product, costs down (yet another win for us!).
Numerous studies have shown that poverty is extremely hard to escape from (ref), trickle-down is a fallacy, and the rich really do get richer and make sure that the overall economic system continues to facilitate this. These system dynamics are desirable for most voters who either have or aspire to wealth, so the system is very stable and resistant to change.
What is the role of government here? What do we want it to be? To get out of the way of our quest for wealth? Or to correct for the worst imbalances that these system dynamics inevitably create? This is not a problem that can be solved with monetary policy levers, it’s a cultural and moral challenge to all of us as individuals.
What would you do for others that you would have them do for you?
