I’m looking for your deepest abstracted definition of the history and political nuance, the philosophical, the ethics, the evolved and historical meaning, and the meaningful impact it has had in evolving political structures and systems.
This is not ELI5, or a dumb question like “What is the stock market,” /s… It is a question of dumb contexts like: what is it really under the surface, or what is it in your opinion, or what is it in principal, or what is it used for as a justification for other parts of society?
So what of the stock market during WW1/2, or its relevance to the USSR? What about enterprise outside of the Western world in South America, Africa, and Asia by comparison. I’m quite naive on this subject. I figured it all started with dutch merchant shipping, but upon looking up the wiki, the first mentioned source was 12th century France.
I’m not really seeing the difference in feudalism except a members only kind of participation with a crony pool of inbreds, not all that different than the billionaires of today.
What are the idealist or futurist potential alternatives between the present and a future where wealth is no longer the primary means of complex social hierarchical display? My premise is that basing hierarchical display on the fundamental means of human survival is barbaric primitivism. I believe we already have systems of merit, reputation, and accolades that serve as prototypes in academia, sports, and entertainment. Wealth extraction neglects the responsibility of the environment and long term planning. I’m curious how humanity evolves in a distant post scarcity future but without becoming authoritarian or utopian/dystopian, but instead realistic, if you have any thoughts.
For the historical questions, I don’t really have answers, especially where it involves departures from the Western world. I did, however, briefly touch up on Islamic banking, which I’ve always found intriguing as the Islamic faith does not permit charging interest on loans, viewing it as usurious. I’m informed that Christianity also had a similar prohibition on usury, but apparently it fell due to the need to fund the constant wars in Europe.
I think the important distinction insofar as stock markets is that the crony pool of inbreds have access, but so too does the commoner. Well, the middle-class commoner usually. And we’ve seen David-vs-Goliath cases where the commoners put up a decent fight against the inbreds’ institutions; the whole GameStonk fiasco comes to mind. An equivalent economic upset would have been wholly impossible at any point during any feudal period in history.
From conversations I’ve had previously, possible answers to that question are presented in the works of Paul Cockshott, author of Towards A New Socialism. I’ve not read it, but friends in Marxist-Leninist parties have mentioned it. The Wikipedia page, however, notes that it’s an economics book, which could be fairly technical and difficult to read. Sort of like how Das Kapital is more-or-less a textbook, in contrast with how Wage Labour And Capital was meant for mass consumption.
True. The cost to the environment is not “internalized”, to use the technical term. Hence, it doesn’t need to be paid for, and is thus “free real estate”. Solutions to internalize environmental harm include carbon taxes or cap-and-trade. But the latter is a lukewarm carbon tax because it only looks at the end-result emissions, rather than taxing at the oil well, so to speak.
Might I recommend The Three-Body Problem and the trilogy overall by Liu Cixin? This phenomenal hard scifi work describes a space-faring future where the human species faces a common, external threat. After all, much of today’s progress was yesterday’s scifi. So why not look to scifi to see what tomorrow’s solutions might be. It’s no worse than my crystal ball, which is foggy and in need of repair.