Humans are all rich fools.
Fooled by Randomness and Money
This was started as a rambling response to Tessa Schlesinger’s excellent post on the power of the Rich to exploit climate change risks.
We have a difficult time contemplating value in the modern world. Capitalism/mercantilism has given us the brain-numbing shortcut of “price as value”, but it doesn’t give the human brain a context for what “value” actually fits a price. Supposed competitive markets are supposed to moderate greed and corruption so that we will see the ‘best’ value for the price in some vague sense of demand vs supplies, but that doesn’t leave a place for quantifying the natural usefulness of either ourselves or the things we purchase.
The price of 1 kwh of electricity averages around 13 US cents. As we question all of the “services” that the propertied “rich” are providing for all humans to buy that electricity or other forms of energy (food, travel, subsistence, medical care) via money, let’s compare modern life to physical work in pre-industrial times, in order to understand what Nature itself needs from humans.
In our early evolution, humans received the bounty of food, shelter and reproduction from one place: our labors in the natural world. Hunter-gatherers, on average, labored somewhere between 3 and 6 hours per day.
