X ⊕ Y

This is the first in a series of preliminary posts that encode ‘big thinking’ ideas I want to draw on when I come to discuss individual ideas later.

So ‘Slavery’:

GNU foundation founder and general ‘Free as in Freedom’ guy Richard Stallman declared:

“If all you can do in your current occupation is make slaves of people then GO DO SOMETHING ELSE!”

in his 2008 lecture at Manchester University.  This got me thinking: ‘Why do comfortable middle class people with comfortable lives and very little correlation between getting new stuff and feeling happier, bother taking things from people who do actually want them?’ i.e Why do comfortable people drive hard bargains or get involved in selling customers things that the customers don’t want?

To frame this a bit more formally:  With the decreasing marginal utility of wealth, how does effecting a non-pareto trade benefit those who have more than enough?’

So breaking this down into premises [and out of economics jargon]:

A Pareto trade [technically 'pareto-efficient trade'] is one where an exchange benefits both parties, it is the trade of a surplus for a surplus. I have too much timber but need some cloth, you have too much cloth but need some timber -if we trade it will benefit us both. Things only get a little more complicated when you talk about how much timber for how much cloth, but the principle stays the same -it’s win win.

A Non-pareto trade is therefore one where someone loses out

[a much more formal definition]

The diminishing marginal utility of wealth is a desciption of how $1 extra is much less useful to a billionaire than it is to a Ugandan Farmer. Similarly 1 extra dollar is more useful to a millionaire than to a billionaire, but is still worth much more to the Ugandan Farmer.

[more]

So, you would imagine that: As the incentive to gain extra money decreases, so does the incentive to take other people’s money.

This is probably broadly true even  now: Someone who needs money to feed their family is far more likely to steal criminally than someone who has a stable source of income greater than her requirements. However, I notice a lot of comfortable middle class people get involved in marketing products they don’t really believe in. That is to say they think that either the customer or society or both will be worse off for responding to the marketing messages. In other words, they believe they are effecting non-pareto trades with their customers or encouraging them to become involved in them elsewhere.

Now, I see this all the time and it’s not just marketing, it’s people in investment banking, people in telesales, journalists as well as a whole range of less often criticized fields. My deep-set feeling is avoid it!  Particularly if your life is comfortable, you are much more likely to see a good return through making society better than by exploiting individuals. I hope to go into how later on, but at the very least helping yourself will not help you much.

While Slavery is a dramatic and politically loaded term for this [and is very much Stallman's rather than mine], it gets the message across. When you make non-pareto trades with people you essentially make use of them beyond what is good or rightful. You might think that more stuff is always good, but after you are comfortable you will find that the comfort does not increase and the cost to the other person does not make a meaningful contribution. It is fundamentally an issue of the exploitation of someone else for your needless gain, a mild form of slavery.

Taken all together this binds society up in knots of manipulation where everyone is serving some desires that exploit them and there is little coherence in motivation. So it is incumbent on us to avoid slavery. This means avoiding enslaving others, avoiding becoming a slave and avoiding helping people make slaves of others. Genuine freedom of choice for people is desirable to us all and if we ever deviate from fostering that, there should be clear and valid goals associated.

In later posts I hope to consider how corporations legal obligations to their shareholders and to ‘growth’ as well as competition more broadly incentivise people to make non-pareto trades. For now it is enough to say that no matter what grand organizing systems we live in, the baseline will be true: ‘Once you have enough to be comfortable, every trade you do should be a win win. If you win and the other person loses, you lose too.

B