Questions for billionaires, musings for limitarians

 Some contributions to a Mastodon thread on wealth and the wealthy seemed to me to be worth further reflection.

I really would like media interviewers to ask questions like this. The thread has a few other suggestions too.

One of the replies was helpful, I thought.

billionaires don't 'hoard money' they will 'never use'. the notional billion dollars isn't the amount of cash they have in the bank, it's an estimate of the amount of capital — ownership of stock, real estate, and so forth — they control and extract interest from. the idea of capitalists as 'money hoarders' is a child's understanding of what wealth inequality is & hampers any attempt to address its structural cause, which is social mechanisms of power placing a small group in a position to exploit the labour of the majority, not that small group somehow by their own efforts bringing in more money than they spend  -https://octodon.social/@esvrld/111806450875791439

This chimes with what has been mentioned earlier in the posts here on limitarianism, that it traces back to power and structural factors and that their own efforts are no more valuable than anyone else's; they just occupy a more powerful position to be able to extract rents. A subsequent toot elucidates:

if you accept that money abstracts agency, it's much of a muchness.
They have the money because they can compel conduct and (effectively) vampire your agency; you must do as they demand to live. That's where the money arises, even if it's a consequence rather than a cause. -https://canada.masto.host/@graydon/111818441705185094

I think that the idea that 'money abstracts agency' is worth considering further in this respect. It helps us to understand that money is a social construct and is, in a sense, 'owned' by us all; that is, in the sense that we construct it together by honouring it in re-use, to settle debts and acquire things ourselves. By using money as part of our agency in the social world, we empower others also to use it. I guess it's a kind of network effect. But it's a network which is exploitable if you are in the right position in the network and have means to siphon off some of the flows; to capture the surplus above strict costs -including labour. This was, I think, what Marx was noting about capital exploiting labour.

As to the response to these insights.

#greed used to be considered a bad thing.
We need a stronger, more widespread understanding that it is a threat to justice and freedom.
We desperately need to push for a culture where the accumulation of wealth and power is seen as a danger. -https://functional.cafe/@xarvh/111810773059876175

There are definite resonances to Jesus' teaching there. For Jesus, it was a more personal warning about what wealth does to our 'souls' -though I don't this that this excludes a consideration of the social, it's just a recognition of the relatively constrained political space of 1st century peasantry. In a society where we do have a bit more political agency (though it is hard fought and under threat) we should ask about the social and political dangers and work together to head them off as far as possible.

Going back to that first response, above. It helps us to recall, too, that money stands for the use or potential use of resources in a society which recognises that currency. Every currency unit represents the power to command some resource. The resource might be labour, it might be food, it might be finished goods or it might be raw materials. Very often, it's a combination of several of those things in actuality.

It is our communal faith that when we tender currency units, they will be accepted in exchange for goods or services that gives money its fundamental value. Absent that collective belief and monetary wealth evaporates. What is left in that case would be the raw holding of stuff and the raw volunteering or coercion of labour. At base, that is what money is.

Let's note, then, that the wealthy are relying on our communal faith to be able to be wealthy. Without us they are nothing. It is our existence and willingness to live and work within the monetary system that enables them to have their wealth in as far as they hold their wealth in monetary units or derivatives of them. Money is social, it is 'ours', the wealth have merely found themselves in a position to siphon off so-called 'surplus value'. They do this by dint of having various kinds of power to lay claim to the surplus and then to accumulate it. And note also, most often the power to lay claim is also socially constructed. It is 'given' by the rest of us -or at crucial points it is coerced that is to say, our consent is gained by threats of force. Often these threats are enshrined in what we call a legal system as a last resort enforcement of 'rights' to property.

They can only be wealthy because 'we' allow them to be. Their wealth depends on our consent (freely given or otherwise). They are 'licensed' by us to be wealthy.

What I think we need to do is to examine this license for its moral claims and downsides and ethically critique it. This involves questions like: what are just rewards? Why should power entitle one to more resources? What is the purpose of a monetary system? Are there justifications for wealth inequality? What effects does the accumulation of power (in the form of wealth) have on wider society and what is the basis for a society to morally limit those effects?

A Natural History of Scripture -book review.

 Lately, I've found myself more and more talking with other people about the Bible in terms of a kind of evolutionary pressures understanding of composition and preservation. In doing this, I guess I take it as plausible that writings that helped people tend to get preserved and copied while those that didn't got 'lost'. This means that where people found something in a writing that resonated with their sense of God, they would go back to it, and commend it to others. Where they found things that expanded their understanding of God and God's ways, they would copy it and pass it on. Where they found that challenges were productive, they'd engage with them and teach others to do similarly. Sometimes, I guess writings would be commended, and passed on because they had gained an aura of authority or because authoritative figures commended them. 

For this reason, I think it is important to talk about not just storytellers, but also editors and especially hearers and then readers. There would've been a reciprocal relationship around texts between these various people. Storytellers would adapt their telling to audience reactions -what 'tells well' would become a normal telling. Audiences would by their responses, requests and questions influence what was told and became an informal 'canon'. Editors would collect stories and writings with such matters in mind. But also they would have an eye to social and political conditions. 'Inspiration' in this view doesn't just belong to a writer but to the dialogical processes of telling, hearing, retelling, refining, reflecting, commending> I like to think that at key points were people paying attention to the divine resonances so that stories were also sifted for their spiritual value. Somewhere in all of this would be considerations of teaching and learning: what stories and texts promoted good reflection and wise conversations? This doesn't preclude 'divine inspiration' but it does take the focus off original authors being uniquely inspired -a model which seems suspiciously like the Romantic movement's views around the time when doctrinal bases dealing with scripture were being discussed, debated and codified.

An evolutionary approach suggests to me a survival of the fittest, and in this case that would mean that texts that were fittest for connecting people with God and God's purposes, would be the most likely to survive. 

Anyway, I thought I recognised in the title and blurb for this book, an approach that may help me to think about this approach more. So, I read with a question about how far this book would help me to develop and challenge this kind of approach.

Adkins sees what we now call Genesis 12:1-4 as the originating, kernel, story. And he spends some time in giving a potted version of the bigger narratives of the Hebrew scriptures. The book spends quite a lot of space retelling in summary the narratives and history of the accumulation of scriptures with some comment, history and framing to give a sense of development. I was intrigued by the naming of the NT as the Christian Sequel and will consider using this naming from time to time, myself. The rehearsal of the writings that become the bible raises the issue of canon, and canonisation is one of the matters that is touched on, as well as the non-canonisation of other writings.

I'd consider putting this book into the hands of people who were curious about the sweep of biblical history and open to consider how what we now call 'scriptures' interrelate with history. I think that there are challenges her to those who have a 'take it as it comes' approach to the writings of the Bible, and the author doesn't offer much to help such readers to consider and understand the critical scholarship which implicitly questions the 'straight forward' /face-value reading which doesn't really entertain the possibility that the texts we now have might have a back-story and not be written in the kind of way that someone now writing a novel or a textbook might write a complete work. Admittedly, something of the overview of critical scholarship comes when the history reaches the 1800s.

One of the interesting things that this book does, is to not only consider the formation of Jewish and Christian canons, but to incorporate consideration of the Qur'an alongside consideration of the Jewish Mishnah and Talmud. I think that this is a necessary consideration if one is taking a 'natural history' approach. The other interesting approach here, for me, is not to consider the Christian canon closed until the reformation is well underway. And indeed he points out that until the council of Trent, the 27 books were not considered a closed canon. It is also important that it considers the matter of translations and textual history which in actuality are big parts of discussions today about bible and authority in some parts of the church.

So, I didn't get my desired exploration of the kinds of forces that would drive 'natural' (cultural) selection nor a theology of canon, reception and inspiration that would take account of it. There are hints, to be sure, but mostly this is a historical summary of 4,000 years of story and reflection. It's a fair introduction but the further reflection I was hoping for is not part of it.

I may have to do that myself ...

Links

A Natural History of Scripture Website
Keith H. Adkins’ Website 

#ANaturalHistoryOfScripture

I should give a declaration of interest here. I received a pdf of this book as part of an agreement to review it, even if only briefly. There was no implication or explicit agreement that I should make the review favourable or otherwise. So I have simply stated what interested me and given my reactions.

"I can't justify it" a case for Limitarianism

 It's funny sometimes how things that are related pop up together and yet there's no intrinsic necessary connection, or it's that, alerted, a mind notices what it might otherwise have shrugged off. Either way, Chris O'Shea is the head of British Gas (now Centrica) and was given a £4.5m pay deal this year.

“You can’t justify a salary of that size,” O’Shea told BBC Breakfast on Friday. “It’s a huge amount of money; I am incredibly fortunate. I don’t set my own pay; that’s set by our remuneration committee.” (report here)

At least he has the grace to say its 'fortunate' and not try to make out he's super gifted or somesuch. The last post I put up introduced limitarianism, and this report advances the argument a little. One of the things I mentioned was that a big part of such high pay is power. In this case O'Shea disavows that power but it is set by a committee. So the power thing needs some tweaking.

He went on to say,

All of us sitting here on this sofa will make substantially more than £30,000. It’s not for me to set my own pay. It’s not for you to set your own pay.

Typically, such remuneration committees will justify their decisions by talking about "attracting talent" or some kind of idea of "benchmarking" -that is setting pay or bonuses in line with others in the same sort of work. What this reveals, I think, is a kind of oligopolistic mindset. So it is still about power, it's just that the power is diffused but we should notice it is still exercised  on behalf of those who are well paid -normally by people who themselves are well-paid. There're elements of groupthink, arms-length self-justification and a kind of closing ranks, all cloaked in a pseudo-objectivity. Someone in the kind of position that O'Shea is in can be sure that such a committee is going to set pay awards high because they know that the people making it will tacitly benchmark first by their own remuneration (as a baseline) and will be quite untroubled about whether 'the going rate' is actually justified in terms other than a vague sense of 'the market' in CEOs. It's a bit of a vicious circle: they pay high because others pay high and because they can since they hold the purse strings. And if they didn't pay high, what would that say by implication about their own high pay? It's grounded in little more than the idea that the wealthy should be paid wealthily. The fact that a committee makes the disbursement decision does not overcome the mindset they begin with or the power that they have to operationalise it. These are often the same people who are content to pay ordinary workers less than minimum wage if they can get away with it. It's about mindset, notions of value, ideas of 'markets', class solidarity.

To be fair to O'Shea, he claims that he'd turned down previous years' bonuses: it was “the first bonus I’ve taken in my time at Centrica; for a number of years, I’ve given up bonuses because of hardships that customers were facing”. Well, good for him. But ... why accept now? -Apparently he's not forced to have it. Presumably he could insist that they pay him a lesser 'fairer' amount. He could take it and set up a democratic committee to disburse the rest to, say, alleviate poverty -and challenge fellow high earners to do the same with a limitarian narrative. He could challenge the committee to come up with a justification for paying so highly that is grounded in more objective standards related to work: hours, productivity, responsibility ... and ultimately social cohesion. They'd hate it of course, because it'd require them to consider their own wealth accumulation.

I note that much of this is covered briefly in the remarks at the end of the article by someone representing a thinktank called the High Pay Centre,

“... one would expect someone paid such a huge sum to show greater leadership and responsibility and actively challenge the pay-setting process rather than saying he doesn’t deserve it, before shrugging and accepting it anyway. ... how much an executive is paid is rarely aligned with how well their company has served its customers and wider society. Mandating workers on boards would be one step towards ending this culture of rewarding failure.”

It's not just 'rewarding failure' but also over-rewarding effort and ability that many people could actually do. These are not people with superhuman abilities or extraordinary work efforts. There are millions of people with similar abilities and even more millions whose work rates and efforts put these execs to shame but without the power to set their rates their efforts go relatively unrewarded. It is much about power and the class solidarity of the rich.