Better world, economics and bitcoins
Neologism #13, 05.06.2022
Is the world really better than ever?
The argument that we should be feeling happier than we are because life on the planet as a whole is getting better, on average, also misunderstands a fundamental truth about how happiness works: our judgments of the world result from making specific comparisons that feel relevant to us, not on adopting what David Runciman refers to as “the view from outer space”. If people in your small American town are far less economically secure than they were in living memory, or if you’re a young British person facing the prospect that you might never own a home, it’s not particularly consoling to be told that more and more Chinese people are entering the middle classes. At book readings in the US midwest, Ridley recalls, audience members frequently questioned his optimism on the grounds that their own lives didn’t seem to be on an upward trajectory. “They’d say, ‘You keep saying the world’s getting better, but it doesn’t feel like that round here.’ And I would say, ‘Yes, but this isn’t the whole world! Are you not even a little bit cheered by the fact that really poor Africans are getting a bit less poor?’” There is a sense in which this is a fair point. But there’s another sense in which it’s a completely irrelevant one.
Certain texts are worth reading from a further perspective. They get much more interesting, and I mean especially the more political parts.
Is the world really better than ever? in The Guardian
The Real Price Of Bitcoin
Everything you use, all the food you eat, every form of transportation you use, every Google search or Instagram picture that you load, uses some form of energy and computing resources along the way. What that means is, everything is going to cost you more, simply because Bitcoin exists
Proof Of Work asks you the question: do you want to create and support more life, or create more heat? Heat is the lowest form of energy that you can’t re-use — basically, entropy, the antithesis of life. Energy in the universe is finite. Harvesting energy requires equipment. How we decide to use that energy is on us, but we have our incentives, and we follow them
This is a simplified one of the most critical analyzes of Bitcoin, but a good start.
The Real Price Of Bitcoin in Medium
Enlightened Economics: There Is an Alternative
One Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) economist, Steve Keen, suggests sending each American household $50,000 to pay down debts. The money would first pay debts, and those not indebted could keep the surplus. This would not only be cheaper than the $16-$29 trillion Wall Street bailout, it would bail out Main Street instead of the banks. It would also remove an enormous debt load that now suppresses demand, employment and production, perpetuating the Great Recession.
If you've always wanted to know what the controversial MMT theory actually is all about, then this post is for you
Enlightened Economics: There Is an Alternative in La Progressive
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