I found my first night bartending at a country club an interesting data point in the socioeconomics of a modern American plutocracy, whereby an economic class is more a matter of social identity and clique rather than raw output and skillset. This eliminates a “middle” and favors extremes. Furthermore, it creates an unsustainable economic foundation due to nepotism pairing personalities with positions rather than with skillset, and visa versa where applied skillset get misplaced to fulfill social expectations rather than to fulfill productivity demands.
One needs to look no further than Donald Trump’s fiasco of an Executive Branch to see the examples of this (and I'm not intending to pick on Donald Trump for the sake of picking on Donald Trump -- he really is a great example of my point). Here, highly demanding jobs requiring highly specific skillsets are filled by personalities that do not have those specific skillsets, while the skillsets that should fill those positions are wasted elsewhere, or they even introduce a cost due to misplaced potential. This is akin to opening the oven door to warm an apartment with open windows: it ends up more wasteful than to just close the windows without any oven at all. I think this plutocratic model has been usurping American democracy for the past decade to the point of supplanting American capitalism: skill and effort no longer harvest capital because most of the capital has been consolidated by increasingly powerful identities and cliques; hence, capital is aliquoted to “lucky” recipients; it is not earned.
Perhaps the only capital left is resistance. Acceptance of a plutocratic model is willful surrender of any remaining unclaimed capital. We’re seeing an example of this in response to Trump’s immigration policies. If illegal immigrants were suddenly deported, or if certain immigrants were prohibited from arriving, then the capital value (which is disproportionately held by the rich) collapses because the apparatus upholding a vertically dynamic class system always requires skill and effort as its lubricant — such as those employed at country clubs. Every giant is someone else's midget upon a creditor’s back — in other words, wealth is simply the ouroboros of a perceived giant. I love it when unsuspecting phenomena come down to thermodynamics.
Hence, I propose a new economic model whereby the model system is a living cell (our global economy) and every transaction can be modeled by the exchange of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) — every cell’s molecular currency unit. Biology has had billions of years to evolve a highly efficient economic system whereby phosphorus energy transfers are utilized to maximize work output within given cellular (global) stress, organelle (nationstate trade) demands, and even microcosm (individual) protein expenditures that reestablish energetic membrane potentials (entropy expenditure). In light of this, I think current economic models are obsolete because humans, being a tribal species, have rapidly evolved into a primordial global “Coherent" from which there is no precedent, nor time to genetically adapt to this alien identity. We are no longer organelle islands trading goods — we are a living cell made of nationstate organelles surviving among a hostile cesspool of evolutionary baggage, as well as the indefatigable vacuum of the toxic neon cosmos.
Our next economy needs to be one of mathematical algorithms utilizing a learned artificial intelligence modeled on biologic solutions to thermodynamic problems. Clearly, biology has these microeconomic solutions at its disposal given its resilience over millennia; we just need to implement them into our macroeconomic systems. Doing so is our best hope towards becoming a multicellular collective organism — that is, an organism as a singular species with one identity, one clique — one that survives and evolves on its own to become an organism beyond our current “cell,” the Earth.
I realize this sounds like science fiction, but our existence on Earth has an ever-accelerating expiration date that, if we are to extend it, will require appropriate application of human skill and effort. This can only happen with effective economics. Opposable thumbs may have granted us genetic liberty from our marooned island of Old World monkeys, but apposable minds will grant us economic liberty from our marooned island of Old World Earth.
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