[[How has been]]

Wednesday, August 20, 2025

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uh oh. it is august and I haven't written anything.

To be honest I have limited writing output nowadays, even less for good writing. Work takes up a bit. Then writing e-letters. Now... What have we here. Let's look in our topics for writing but haven't written shall we?

And the prompt of the day is: Somewhere, maybe Gary's economics, says that they changed from we will give good jobs to we will give low prices and use this to privilege capital over labour.

I think the question underlying that is what is the role of the government?

And that is a very big question with many different answers from many different peoples so... let's bracket that for now.

Well it seems to me that the capital / labour divide is really one of the real-life issues that is fundamentally not reconcilable.

Okay, on the very basic level, i do think that good jobs in a society are better than low prices because good job privileges labour generally over capital while low prices privilege capital over labour.

I am not aiming to rewrite large parts of economics. I have, though, some comments.

It seems to me that the fundamental economic analysis that capital, land and labour and entrepreneurship are the 4 factors of production is sound.

Labour is essentially life of a person, multiplied by whatever skill factor and some other factors but at the root it is time bound and linear in proportion to time of a person's life. Labour is also not transferable.

Capital is unbound, has no limit and grows exponentially if deployed well. Capital is also like... deferred consumption or stored value. I would also like to add that capital's value technically has a decay factor to it in that one has to guard one's own capital and that incurs a cost. That being said, currently with most peoples living in relatively safe countries this "security" is being provided as a public good. But this security definitely benefits the haves much more than the have nots, even if the have nots would be unable to afford private security. Capital is also transferable across generations ? ?

Land is land... It seems to me that ownership over land is also quite a weird concept. The land has existed millennia prior and will exist, presumably millennia after you. What is "land" is essentially the right to use the land unmolested, which... in a capitalistic society is a function of capital + security. Add to that that land is scarce, presumably less fungible than capital (?) Technically it seems to me that the good way to do land is for the collective to lease it out for money (capital) for fixed periods. I think the Singapore leasehold model works reasonably well for physical land... for resources... ya probably something like a leasehold model could (?) work (?) idk how it works for non-renewables though but presumably water rights could work in somewhat the same way (e.g leasing a right to x amount of water from river y)

entrepreunership... okay, presumably is a subset of labour but well, perhaps not as time bound, slightly more able to scale than linear.

ehhhhhhh it's late. but i think to trace the comments on the 4 factors will probably lead somewhere.

[[I wrote this at]]*|11:59 PM|