The way "esteem" is distributed today is if you produce something I want I "esteem" you by buying it. If you don't produce anything I want I "disrespect" you by doing absolutely nothing to you. I don't give you anything, I don't take anything away from you. I simply smile, nod, and move on with my life.

Seems like you want to take freedom of association away from the rest of humanity and put it into your own hands. It's hard for me to imagine a mentality that is more self-centered and more selfish than that.

that's an odd and quite uncharitable interpretation. there's not even a remote connection to (restricting) freedom of association, much less with my own hands (how would that even work?).

the underlying point is that money isn't the be-all-and-end-all of what we value and what we exchange in our socioeconomic lives. money collapses a multidimensional social calculus into a single-dimensional metric, with all the undesirable consequences of that kind of collapse. hoarding wealth is selfish, but it's worse when it also hoards power and esteem along with it.

not many wealthy people deserve respect (or power) along with their riches. people who make stuff with their hands and brains, not passively through wealth (e.g., rents), deserve esteem. that's the point.

Would you change your opinion if you were presented with hard data proving that 80% of wealthy people earned that wealth by delivering goods and services to people who voluntarily paid for it, and only 20% of the wealthy inherited it and that inherited wealth does not last more than 3 generations?

> 80% of wealthy people earned that wealth

More likely they hired workers who created that wealth. And while in today's system we say that the person at the top "earned" that wealth, we could just as easily arrange firms differently so they are cooperatively owned. And in doing so they would not produce super wealthy people but instead a society with broader wealth distribution.

>More likely they hired workers who created that wealth.

More likely they hired workers and everyone created wealth together. A worker can't work until someone builds the assembly line, buys the materials, and sells the final product.

If it's so easy to do the whole process that anyone can do it, what's stopping you? Marxists claimed the capital class denied the funds to the working class to start their own companies. Well since the world went off the gold standard there is no lack of funding. It's the opposite now. Inflation is an attack on wealth. Wealthy people are ravenous to get their wealth out of currency and into "things" like property and businesses. Venture capitalists will fund the most ridiculous ideas in the desperate hope that one of them will "hit".

Nothing is stopping me and I am working on this.

The binary metric you're referring to is simply an answer to the question "are you interested in an exchange?". This question is fundamentally binary. "Consumerism" is just the interaction of private property and freedom of association - which of these would you get rid of to abolish it?

> "Consumerism" is just the interaction of private property and freedom of association

No, you have misunderstood. I am 100% for freedom of association and freedom of contract. "Consumerism" is not just exchange, it is something more specific. It is the idea that buying more is directly tied to happiness and well being. Look.

"Consumerism is the idea that increasing the consumption of goods and services purchased in the market is always a desirable goal and that a person's wellbeing and happiness depend fundamentally on obtaining consumer goods and material possessions. " https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/consumerism.asp

Could you elaborate on what you mean when you say ending consumerism is completely unrealistic?

just zoom out and really look at the scope of the issue: 7+ billion people in the world want stuff. there's a huge matching problem between the want and the stuff, and a huge geographic/wealth/information asymmetry as well. there's going to be a lot of friction and waste in that huge, inefficient matching process (e.g., 30-40% of US food goes into the trash, 30-40% of stuff is returned to retailers). to achieve your goal, you'd have to be able to control (aka coerce) a majority of those people to want only an arbitrarily narrow set of "acceptable" things. that's just not tenable, even in a small, remote country.

You and I view this very differently. First of all, getting people goods that they need is not consumerism. Consumerism is the idea that buying a new car or a Pepsi will make you feel better. Or that doing so will make you “cool”. So for example most car manufacturers come out with a new model every year and then push the idea that buying a new model is an indicator of success. But I claim we would be better off if cars were more similar year to year so that replacement parts were more common year to year. This would make repair easier and lower waste. The problem is not getting people cars (well, cars in particular are a contentious example…). The problem isn’t getting people goods they need. Is that the companies who make those goods use psychological tricks to convince us we need to upgrade even when our thing is working. And they design their products with the upgrade in mind and it all leads to more waste.

To be honest it’s difficult for me to describe what I mean when I say consumerism. But getting people goods they need is not in and of itself consumerism. Consumerism is like the military industrial complex. It creates problems to feed a bloated production machine that consumes more and more because it benefits those in charge of the whole thing. And so consumerism leads our culture to believe the person with the new watch is cool and we all believe we must work day in and day out to compete in an endless game of consumption.

That is very different than, say, manufacturing electrical transformers and cabling so a new town can have electricity. In the middle the line is not clear but we can focus at first on the extents.

> if cars were more similar year to year

They were like this in the Soviet Union, and it was laughable how much they ended up lagging behind after a few decades. I see the process you describe, despite it's perceived but necessary inefficiency, as resulting in a system that delivers the most progress and the most resiliency. There's a reason that self-driving cars are being invented in one place and not another. The driving force behind that reason is much more important to preserve than any incidental waste or excess along the way.

But in another way, this is exactly how open source works. They do not sell you a new release and push ads showing how stylish you will be if you dump version 13 and upgrade to version 14. They just push a point release as needed. Some software is updated daily and some is updated once every five years. There is no marketing team trying to drum up artificial demand for some python package.

> They were like this in the Soviet Union, and it was laughable how much they ended up lagging behind after a few decades.

The soviet system was an authoritarian one and I am proposing a free market solution. I am basically just saying people can save money if they band together and buy machines which provide for their basic needs. But also it would all be open source, and like software it would be updated as needed.

Actually the example with cars was just an attempt to explain consumerism. I might as well just paste this definition in to this comment like I just did elsewhere.

"Consumerism is the idea that increasing the consumption of goods and services purchased in the market is always a desirable goal and that a person's wellbeing and happiness depend fundamentally on obtaining consumer goods and material possessions."

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/consumerism.asp

i understand your position. i had that sort of idealism once upon a moon. but i now realize that the causation is backwards. people want, full stop[0]. that is natural and universal, and trying to take that away from people is tantamount to stripping humanity of its animus.

given this universal truth, the question isn't 'how do we limit our wants, and our desire to induce others' wants to fuel our own wants?', but rather 'how do we repurpose this innate desire for the greatest collective good?' capitalism tries to provide one answer: redirect greed into productive drive by rewarding economic novelty and efficiency. however, even that idealism has been subverted by the political economy and the complex interactions between government and business, to the detriment of social harmony.

[0]: note that what we all really want is to be at the top of the monkey pile, and everything you're talking about are various proxies for how to tell where we are in the pile. we're never going to overcome that with solutions like 'end consumerism'. you're literally working against human nature with that line of thinking.

For a long time I wanted to be at the top of the monkey pile.

A LOT of that came from received culture growing up in California as a boy in the 1990's. I no longer want to be at the top of a pile of monkeys. I want my daily labor to support others in my community (broadly) rather than working to enrich a few people who will own everything and control our economy.

I think if you grow up in a society that tells everyone "greed is good" then you're going to think being greedy is human nature, but actually anthropologists know that societies have again and again existed based on mutual support of one another. I am simply suggesting we drop this "greed is good" mantra and focus on helping one another. And I think it can be more economically efficient when you value each person's life more or less equally.

no offense to you personally, but that's a naive position. "greed is good" is a movie platitude, not the basis of our complex socioeconomic system, so it's practically useless to argue against it. more crucially, your solution says nothing about the universality of human desire, which is why it's simply a non-starter.

if you really want to improve social equity, distributing esteem more widely[0] will be more fruitful as a guiding light than trying to devise a more perfect, automation-based socialist/communist economic model. extreme automation will inevitably increase inequality as capital will find ways to corner ownership of the machines and hoard the productivity gains, no matter your good intent.

[0]: 'flatten the pile', if you will.

Isn't ending consumerism essential to avoid running out of resources.

If we could mandate that a product can only be sold if the entire lifecycle is sustainable then technically it could continue. This includes the company taking responsibility for disposal and recycling of anything they produce.

The current model of transferring materials from source, through consumers and then direct to landfill where they sit forever can only end one way.

probably not. it's hard to consume lots of stuff en masse by most of the population. in the developed world, we've already largely moved to service economies and have less than replacement population growth, and so in that sense we've "maxed out" on consuming stuff. that's not to say that we're doing a great job at being efficient and frugal in what we consume, but that running out of resources isn't that big of a problem (for the foreseeable future).

I’d say so yes.