Improving Our Standard of Living (Wattpad Edition)

Chapter 35: The System Isn't Broken-It's Flawed

In aggregate, humanity's standard of living has been improving for centuries; not only because of improvements in technology, but because political and economic systems are more democratic. Markets are freer, voting rights are stronger, and more wealth is produced per person than ever before.

History has shown that reforms are as evolutionary as they are revolutionary. Many societal innovations had to occur to get to where we are now, and more are needed to continue this evolution.

All innovations are based on the discoveries of the past. This is as true of politics and economics as it is with inventions and scientific discoveries. Rather than indicating that our current capitalist and democratic system is obsolete and in need of replacement, my data has shown that we should instead build upon the shoulders of giants. There's much that capitalism and democracy get right, and there are many ways we can improve these systems.

We are neither as democratic nor as capitalistic as we can be. (Capitalistic in the sense that anyone, even an impoverished person, can acquire means of production and other opportunities to pursue his or her dreams. And to do so in a way that's economically viable for the individual and for society.)

Nations have been democratizing and freeing their economies for centuries. Each milestone produced improvements to the human condition.

That's why I'm not for smashing the state. We have a system that has been improving and yielding results for generations. It still doesn't perform as optimally as we would like, but it's not broken.

Countries have tried smashing the machine that is democracy combined with free markets. The results were always disastrous. Fascism and communism in the 20th century. Hundreds of socialist and anarchist communities of every variety (democratic and non-democratic) such as the kibbutz in Israel, the New Harmony Society, the Ralahine Community, and countless others. Before 1800, there was tribalism, mercantilism, and theocracy. Those systems didn't work either.

Capitalism combined with democracy are the only systems that have succeeded in elevating the human condition by leaps and bounds. Yet we've had a mere taste of what these systems have to offer. We are far from the pinnacle of political and economic freedom.

I suspect that we will one day achieve a degree of abundance that will allow us to outgrow our primitive desire for profits. The pursuit of material things is born of scarcity, which is quite real.

Globally, per capita, we have merely $10,000 or so of goods and services at our disposal. That's not enough to reach the stars, to develop unlimited clean energy, to expand our intelligence by orders of magnitude, to cure disease and conquer death.

We are still primitive. Humanity needs something closer to $100,000 per capita to reach that emergent property—that threshold—that will allow us to shift our priority from creating wealth (tools) just to survive, to pursuing other endeavors like—as I mentioned—life extension, expansion of our intellect, colonization of the stars, and the creation of infinitely complex and diverse societies.

Don't mistake my praise of free markets for the desire of money. How boring. At a certain point, collecting money for money's sake is utterly pointless.

But humans do need a certain amount of wealth to do the kinds of amazing things I just mentioned.

Open markets are a means to an end. We must continue our evolution of capitalism precisely so that we might one day transcend it. We must create so much wealth that scarcity is no longer a threat to us. Checking our bank accounts and stock prices becomes irrelevant. Conspicuous consumption becomes unfashionable—primitive.

Once we've hit economic escape velocity, then the real work begins. I talk about that work in the final chapters.

In the meantime, we could do a lot of far-out things. We could get rid of money, private property, the stock exchange, free markets, free trade, economic growth, tree cutting, and so on. But I fear doing so would destroy all the things that our current political-economic system gets right.

Let's reform what already more or less works. Let's make our political and economic systems and institutions better, fairer, and more environmentally sustainable—not smash them to bits in a tantrum. Let's remove the splinters from the foot rather than the foot itself.

The machine isn't broken. We just need to improve the design—to maximize opportunities for everyone. That requires reform, not revolution.

Progress doesn't stop at one constitution or list of policies. It continues. That's why the Founding Fathers of the United States allowed for constitutional amendments. Many important laws were created long after their deaths such as the abolition of slavery, women's rights, the right of the propertyless to vote, lowering the voting age to 18, and the right of citizens to elect senators. Similar laws were passed elsewhere around the world, often before the United States.

We need to keep democratizing as we have been for centuries. That involves building upon the progress we've made, not undoing it.

In the sections ahead, I identify a major issue with our ever-evolving political-economic system. An issue that I didn't directly cover in previous chapters.

Policy-wise, the hurdle that humanity has been slowly overcoming for thousands of years is oligarchy. It has been the dominant political-economic system in almost every society since antiquity. The great struggle of civilizations for all this time—pertaining to policy—has been making societies less oligarchic and more democratic.

The sections ahead are devoted to defining oligarchy, explaining how it harms living standards, and how we can reduce it further than we have thus far.

We've come a long way in weakening oligarchy, but we still have a lot of work to do.