Wealth of Nature vs. Wealth of Nations–A choice of paradigms

A page excerpt from the book Economix that inspired this post

Even today there are people who still live in jungles, deserts, by mangroves and marshes, on high mountain plateaus and on frozen lands. While Providence does not put a price tag on the resources they need they may have to walk some distance to fetch water daily whereas we have the convenience of piped water that we pay for. For energy, they have to collect wood, while all we have to do is to turn on a switch. Aboriginal people have to be very careful with their food so they do not waste it since it takes quite a bit effort to collect, hunt or grow it before processing it to something edible; but for us in towns and cities food is all around even out of season or foreign foods. All we need is money to buy it and we usually buy more than we need. We can surmise that money plays an efficient role as a conveyor of convenience, that it is a fruit of progress in the evolution of human civilization. If this is indeed progress we should expect that the quality of civilized city life be much better than living as aboriginal people. We certainly may be better off than aborigines, but does that make us happier or more content then them?

Aboriginal folk and we national people live in two different paradigms. They live in a paradigm where money is not essential and we, where money is essential. The effect that money has on time in one paradigm and the lack of it in the other has created two modes of living. The former has created the rat-race for more and more wealth, and the other oblivious (but not carefree) living. Pondering these two paradigms makes me wonder if the development of money is actually progress or otherwise.

Two striking differences appear when aboriginal communites are compared with cities. The most obvious is their size. Aboriginal villages are naturally smaller than towns or cities. Their constraints in population is simply ecology. So much land can only provide so much resources for so many people. If their community grows beyond the capacity of their environment, then a natural split in the community occurs and groups diverge for the sake of equitable distribution of resources. Modern cities emerge by efficient provision of resources to its community by means of commerce. Thus the more efficient a city, the bigger its community. It is the advent of money that makes commerce efficient since people and businesses can get paid for their effort and that wealth allows citizens to procure whatever they need or want. Aboriginal societies have to directly collect the resources they need, so their wealth comes from cooperation of the entire population working as a team to collect all the necessary resources for everyone.

The second difference between these two types of community is the dearth or complete lack of stratification in the aboriginal communities compared to the communities in the cities. Stratification in a community are its hierarchies or classes. The rat-race of modern living driven by time-is-money creates classes and castes, rich and poor and the phenomenon of poverty. One could be forgiven to think the money being progress would create better and more equitable societies than living in the jungle. Unfortunately the gap between rich and poor has become burdensome in modern life.

Aboriginal societies are based on cooperative living. All able members of the society work together to gather resources. This kind of living for them is not a choice but an imperative. By working together and sharing their effort everybody benefits from efficient gathering of resources. Whether it is defending the community or collecting water, all chores are considered equally important therefore its members have no need to stand out higher than others since they depend on each other for shared resources. Even the leaders of these societies fulfill a role out of necessity instead of status and their lifestyle is more or less the same as the other members. Thus apart from age and gender there are generally no other significant stratification in aboriginal societies. Everybody is cared for by others, nobody needs to be richer or poorer than anyone and poverty is a consequence of natural disasters, not the lack of personal wealth.

Modern cities however are a wealth of class and diversity. Glorious opulence and abject poverty can exist side-by-side in a city. Poverty in cities have nothing to do with the lack of resources, instead it is the lack of wealth to purchase resources. By my observed evaluation class stratification in modern cities is caused by the distribution of money based on the worth of an individual's time. In most national economies every individual's time is valued differently without taking into account the value of the work that they do–can any economist out there explain this phenomenon? For instance nobody will deny the important work that janitors do. Their work is as crucial to the functioning of a city as that of the policemen, harbour masters or the mayor, yet janitors are among the least paid workers. In many cities they earn so little that they cannot afford the most basic standard of living. I believe the concept that time-is-money skews the quality of living in communities. It has created a pursuit for wealth that has turned money from a convenient form of barter to something very different–exploitation capitalism– or capitalism on steroids. In practice capitalism condones this disparity in wealth distribution, though in its ideal capitalism is often touted as the panacea for poverty and breaking class stratification.

Capitalism evaluates worth of time based mainly on intellectual, academic, social and even political acumen. Capitalism fervently the rights and freedom for any member of a community to accumulate as much wealth (through innovation, business or inheritance) as they can muster based on their effort and ingenuity. Unfortunately it also come to cater to exploitation as a means of generating wealth. With exploitation the gap between have and have-nots become wide enough for class consciousness to persist and develop. Thus the birth of disharmonious cities and nations where money is controlled by the elite and powerful; where time and effort is exploited from the middle and lower class.

Poverty and class stratification of society has been the stuff of communities for ages. The effort to create an utopian and equitable society is an age old striving. It has been and continues to be the cause for the rise and fall of Empires, Kingdoms and Nations. Exploitation capitalism is simply the modern purveyor of greed which used to infect the Kings and Dictators of yore and governments and mega-businesses of present. Yet the struggle continues for fairness and equitability. Whether this can be achieved through capitalism is still an experimental notion. If utopian communal living is to be accomplished through capitalism then someone has to find a way to exorcize greed from it. Otherwise if we wish to enjoy utopian life on Earth the answer may lie with the ways of the aboriginals instead of the academic and financial experts whom the world depend on for solutions, thus the choice of paradigms.

For an entertaining study of Economy, comic style like the pix above check out this book–it is a revealing history book about why we are paying for what we are paying