Sounds good in theory but the Internet and globalization show us that the rewards accrue to the most driven/funded competitor, with the reward essentially being a monopoly for the "market leader." So for a lot of businesses, that wouldn't work, especially when people choose to work long hours for high pay, which is common in finance.

> Sounds good in theory but the Internet and globalization show us that the rewards accrue to the most driven/funded competitor, with the reward essentially being a monopoly for the "market leader."

Ah, the lovely "dog eats dog" story… We're humans, though, we should do better than that.

Now in practice, the winner is the one who wield the bigger guns. Meaning, the US will put its army where the oil is, though not before having talked of weapons of mass destructions, a dictator, terrorists, or whatever.

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Globalization or not, machines are eating our work. A good thing if you ask me: we don't want more work, we want less. People who ask for work don't give a shit about spending all day doing a thankless job. What they really want is dignity (there is shame in unemployment) and money.

Now the lucky few that love their jobs… more power to them. The rest of us would rather work 3 days a week instead of 5 if it didn't mean losing so much of their income.

> for a lot of businesses, that wouldn't work, especially when people choose to work long hours for high pay, which is common in finance.

In finance, long hours are not exactly voluntary, they're expected. Moreover, you don't get the high pay right away, you have to "pay your dues" first —as if you owed you employer for the privilege of being hired.

Paying your dues is just the finance industry version of the "apprentice" phase in the traditional "novice, apprentice, journeyman, master" trade progression that has persisted in various forms for centuries now.

Apprenticeship is no reason to work insane hours, no matter the trade.

In French, "paying one's dues" spells "faire ses preuves", meaning, prove one's worth. That way no one is tricked into believing they owe anything to their employer. Sure, it's only an idiomatic phrasing, we don't think of the debt any more. Yet I'm sure it wasn't so at first, and I'm sure the idea lingers.

Like the Japanese saying "sumimasen" (forgive me, excuse me) to say "thank you" in some circumstances.

Let's stop holding society hostage to "the economy", a relatively recent way of doing things for humans.

"the economy" predates human history. The ones who fight the best for resources gets them. We have only recently become more civilized where we don't have to literally fight for resources. But as long as there is human desire for status over other humans, there will be haves and have nots.

You are being overly reductionist. You are conflating "the economy" with economics. "The economy", the noun is very recent. Treating economic activity as an abstract system without its sociopolitical context, tacitly assuming that its telos is to grow and grow, this is all very new. Aristotle spoke of economy. Pundits today talk about the Economy. Job creators. Growth. It is a cargo cult.

Cooperation shapes and drives biology just as much as competition does. Civilization did not give us prosocial tendencies. The founding myth of civil government is exactly that. A myth. It is historical revisionism. It is reductionist. It is a mutilated view of people. Hobbes was wrong.

> But as long as there is human desire for status over other humans, there will be haves and have nots.

Honestly i am so tired of conversations that appeal to human nature as some immutable, invariant, unassailable truth. This isn't an argument, this is an assertion. Speak for yourself. If you desire status over other people, admit it. I find your characterization of the billions rest of us crude.

gravity existed long before we 'discovered' it. Trade and "the economy" existed long before we 'discovered' it too.

The economy is just as much about Cooperation as Competition. That's why we call it Free Trade.

> If you desire status over other people, admit it.

No, it's an observation of human behavior. When I see a large scale change in human behavior, I will change my opinion. What purpose do you debate on an internet forum that doesn't boil down to 'status seeking'. Think of all the the things we do all day that are essentially motivated by 'status seeking'.

The economy is not a thing that exists without society. Using it to refer to a specific object is at best a metaphorical shorthand for real phenomena or a dangerous fetishism. "Economy" is an ancient concept, perhaps one of the oldest human concepts. "The economy" is new. The way we use words changes, the way we use words is related to the way we understand the world. I really don't care what specifically you think the term "the economy" refers to in this context: I'm talking about the word, not the referent. I made an observation about a shift in the way we understand economy. Here: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/02/28/283477546/the-i...

> No, it's an observation of human behavior. When I see a large scale change in human behavior, I will change my opinion. What purpose do you debate on an internet forum that doesn't boil down to 'status seeking'. Think of all the the things we do all day that are essentially motivated by 'status seeking'.

Um, do you honestly think i gain any status at all whatsoever with anyone because i argue on the Internet? Like, you have no idea what else could possibly be the result of conversation?

i don't think you have as deep an insight into human behavior as you think you do. You still haven't supported the assertion. Either your definition of status seeking renders the statement banal and vacuous, or incorrect. I'd like to hear what your definition is and your justification. What you see in human behavior isn't good enough: we see the same raw reality. We interpret it in different ways. Acting like your interpretation is just obvious doesn't cut it, especially when we're talking about the intentions of human beings. It is quite impossible to directly observe intention. It can only be interpreted from behavior.

> But as long as there is human desire for status over other humans, there will be haves and have nots.

Oh, don't worry. We can fix that.