[ExI] A Nobel laureate and climate change

[Stefano Vaj]

On 17 September 2011 03:53, Tomasz Rola <rtomek at ceti.pl> wrote:

> Sounds like the rich have no children. And if they have, they don't really
> love them. Because, obviously, they only love money?
>

Contrary to common wisdom, I suspect that people do not really care about
money. This is a distorted mirage generated by the mercantilistic
one-dimensionalism of late western culture, which had no course anywhere
before the Europe of the XIX century.

What they invariably crave is power, status, and growth in those areas, and
"work" is simply the name in each given age of the activities they perform
to this end rather than for the pleasure of it. Even today, beyond a
relatively low threshold (50 million USD?) nothing you do can really change
much of the quantity or quality of your food or comfort or medical care or
sexual partners, but money continue to matter simply as a mean to keep the
scores in the competition *for the above*, the specific function of money
having become irrelevant. Conversely, a lot of people want to become a
president of the US or a catholic bishop even though an equivalent effort
could secure them a higher-revenue position.

This is why all the literature floating around about the "end of jobs"
sounds ridiculous to me. Peasants largely stopped tolling in the fields and
knights from riding their horses around the country to administer justice
with the advent of the industrial revolution, they did not stop to compete
at an individual and collective (read "class", "firm", "sector", "nation",
"ethnical group", "corporation", etc.) level for all that.

-- 
Stefano Vaj
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