Covid warnings - of any kind - clearly don't work.

[subjacentish@zeroes.ca]

Covid warnings - of any kind - clearly don't work. You know why?

I think the thing people always forget about economics - any system of exchange - is that the cost of something is driven by scarcity.

John Ruskin hammered this really hard.

If everybody has apples - what are YOUR apples worth?

If everybody can just plow their own field and feed themselves, what is YOUR grain worth?

The key to gaining wealth in any system of exchange is to CREATE SCARCITY. Make sure your neighbor does NOT have enough grain. Hope the apple crop fails elsewhere.

It's not just "supply and demand" it's scarcity and asymmetry. Inherently.

This is the core driving factor w/ Covid, and it's why all the shouting about Long Covid and Being Immuno-Compromised will never change our situation. It only reinforces it.

We don't live in a world of Human Scarcity. We live in a world that everyone experiences as over-populated.

So when most "normal" people hear these warnings, they think "This will happen to someone else. Good. That will be more jobs, lower rent, higher pay, more opportunities, more goods for me. Suckers!"

You're not going to change this by underlining how BAD Covid is or how much it ruins lives. The "normal" economic person does not care.

They think it's going to happen to YOU. And they don't care about YOU.

[subjacentish@zeroes.ca]

Sit down and think quietly for five minutes about how much your salary would be worth if the entire human world had exactly as much money as you do.

What kind of labor could you buy if everybody else already has enough money? And who would you buy it from?

(I'm not saying the imbalance is GOOD. I'm saying this is inherent to most systems that monetize labor and goods. It's the asymmetry that forces people to sell their labor for money.)

[thrilway@kolektiva.social]

@subjacentish
Interesting way to put this. It made me realize there's another interpretation of the "barter myth" theory of money.

> In a barter economy¹ if you make cloaks and you need grain, you need to find a farmer that needs a cloak. Money was invented so that you don't need to hunt for such a match.

An alternative lesson of the myth is that in an "economy" based around actual needs, you actually have to provide something of actual value to actual people in order to meet your needs. And this lesson is anathema to capitalists.

¹which never really existed.

[77nn@goto.77nn.it]

@thrilway @subjacentish

I think that another way of reading the "barter economy" is the "knowledge economy". You don't need to find a farmer ho needs a cloack, but someone who knows a farmer who needs a cloack and at the same time knows that you need some grain. So the commerce is done by delegation of knowledge, and those who are most knowledgeable naturally accumulate goods and other knowledge to serve everyone. I think Amazon did this.