Not nationalization, that never works. Distribute each company among the workers. Turn them all into co-ops.
(I've been thinking this a lot but have never seen it expressed so succinctly. Thanks for the new term.)
Got it in one. Would I like to travel First Class and stay in fancy hotels? Sure, but I’d much rather have a house that I can improve to meet my needs instead. Would I like a fancy luxury car with all the trimmings over my sixteen-year-old Honda? Absolutely, but the latter is paid off and gets us around just fine. Would I like that spiffy Hasselblad X2D and some lenses? You betcha, but I’d rather take a proper holiday for the first time in fifteen years instead of buying another thing.
The problem is that society at present isn’t organized to prioritize necessities like shelter and healthcare, favoring wealth extraction and exploitation instead. Workers don’t want megayachts and hypercars and butlers, we just want to live more than we work.
It can mean moving within a class.
Surely most people want to better their station. To argue against that is insane and counter to every observable fact about human nature.
It can, but it's not how it's used most of the time, so kind of a pedantic distinction.
And many do not even want to "move within a class" that much. They'd be satisfied to keep their job and retain the same constant purchasing power and ability to buy food, feed family, pay rent/morgage, year after year.
There's also cultural mobility which is different from economic mobility.
All are exemplified by reddit's Ohanian marrying one of the Williams sisters and thus having a either higher or lower social status, than either Ghislaine or Larry Summers, quite independently of how much cash they each have in the bank
I wonder if popalchemist would count the cultural station as something worth improving apart of the economic one
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
EDIT: I see mention of coops below.. 10x improvements on that y'all working on? Coops for all ages?
*because prolonged anger is unaffordable for us culturally poor folks :)
Circa 1970 Issac Asimov wrote an essay that started with a personal anecdote about how amazed he was that he could get a thyroidectomy for his Graves Disease for about what he made writing one essay -- regardless of how good or bad it really is today, you're not going to see people express that kind of wonder and gratitude about it today.
This discussion circles around it
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47074389
but I think the real working class stance is that you want protection from economic shocks more than "participation", "ownership", "a seat at the table", "upside", etc. This might be a selfish and even antisocial thing to ask for over 80 years near the start of the second millennium, but I think it would sell if it was on offer. It's not on offer very much because it's expensive.
One could make the case that what we really need is downward mobility. Like what would have happened if Epstein had been shot down the first time or if Larry Summers had "failed down" instead of "failing up?" My experience is that most legacy admissions are just fine but some of them can't test their way out of a paper bag and that's why we need a test requirement.