No, I didn't, but I'm frankly growing tired of cookie-cutter article like this one that just enumerate problems that have existed since the literal dawn of civilization.
The entire "economy bad" brigade is, as parent comment puts it, "r/im14andthisisdeep". They see problems everyone else sees, but they don't have any actual insight, just empty rethoric.
But if you go looking for it, there is a wide array of work that has been done divising ideas for the systematic change we need to solve these problems. I have a whole bookshelf of authors proposing alternatives. Projects like The Next System project, and the Democracy Collaborate, have been working on divising ways to grow alternative systems with in the confines of the current one.
The challenge of course, remains funding. Because those with the wealth got that wealth through the current system and continue to benefit from the current system.
So actually making change is going to take either a mass popular uprising (electoral or otherwise) or enough people with enough wealth recognizing the problems and being willing to give up their wealth and power to solve them. Knowing that the solutions will forever disempower them and their peers.
Edit:
To provide some clarity of the sort of solutions on offer, I'll provide my favorite. Stop prioritizing capital, start prioritizing labor. Right now, Capital basically gets to call the shots - because we allow for any kind of contract in business formation and you can't start a business with out capital and we don't restrict what capital can demand. This allows capital to take advantage of that power imbalance at the time of business formation to demand control. If instead, we restricted what capital could demand to say - a reasonable interest on a loan - and legally structured businesses as institutions democratically run by those working in them, this would have the effect of empowering labor and disempowering capital.
People would still have the ability to make money from their money, but it would vastly reduce the current multiplier effects on the growth of wealth, and thus the tendency for wealth to concentrate. It would tend to spread wealth out to a much wider proportion of the population - because the people doing the work would get to vote for the leaders of their businesses, and those leaders then have a much, much strong incentive to take care of the people doing the work. Likewise, the people doing the work would have a much stronger incentive to take care of the communities in which they operate, because they are much more likely to live in those communities than distant investors. It has the effect of reconnecting businesses with their neighbors and communities in a much more real way, and empowering those involved in the business who are most aware of the effects it has to change those effects.
Would this system be perfect? Nope. It's really a pretty gentle refactor of the current sytem (though one with wide ranging effects). Would it be better? Yeah, I really believe it would.
There are many other effects this change would have - I've wanted to write a book on it for years, but haven't been able to find the time or bandwidth. Someday. If I ever get to take a long leave of absence or get to cash out, someday.
Another alternative you could consider, one I've played with as a thought experiment many times, what would happen if we simply banned people from making money directly from their money in all forms? It's a challenging thought experiment, because where do you draw the line? Money is just a representation of property, so how do you define money made from money versus, say, renting a machine you own? But it's a worthwhile thought experiment - could we devise a system where you could only make money by working, and not by simply owning property or holding wealth?
There are many more alternatives out there, from gentle refactors to whole rewrites. Some fleshed out, some just thought experiments. And everything in between. They should really - all of them - be a much bigger part of our public dialog than they are.
Further edit: Many threads are on-going but I've been at this all morning so I'm going to call it a day and go make lunch. I've appreciated the dialogs, and maybe I'll write that book some day. If I do find the time to write that book, I know exactly where to come to harden it against criticism. If I can convince a forum full of capital investors and would be capital investors that making capital investment illegal is a good idea, then I'll be able to convince anyone!
> legally structured businesses as institutions democratically run by those working in them
This already exists, they are called cooperatives, many of them actually work pretty great. Try to guess what happens when they grow and they need to hire employees...
> what would happen if we simply banned people from making money directly from their money in all forms?
No banks, no loans, no credit cards. No way to protect against inflation with financial instruments as basic as a target-date fund.
Oh, and 0% public debt, of course.
> Money is just a representation of property
It's not and you know it's not, you're just playing with words.
They continue to operate. Mondragon has 80,000 worker owners. And yes, it has a challenge in recent years where the worker owners have created a class of non-owner employee. But it got pretty big before that started happening, and there's no reason to believe it wouldn't continue to function just fine if that wasn't an option.
There are many other worker cooperatives functioning very well at scale with zero non-owner employees. My proposal is essentially that we make this the requirement. That any business formed must be formed as a democratically run worker cooperative. This is perfectly actionable. Governments define the legal structures under which businesses may form today, and continue to regulate those structures. Right now, those structure enable the investor ownership relationship, and most worker cooperatives have to use those structures and bend them to allow the worker ownership relationship. It's a relatively straight forward legal matter (with wide ranging consequences) to change that structure.
> No banks, no loans, no credit cards. No way to protect against inflation with financial instruments as basic as a target-date fund.
Like I said, this is a thought experiment. Not fleshed out. And it's not the same as the proposal I outlined above for a worker cooperative based democratic socialism. I don't think you actually read my post, I suspect you just skimmed it and then reacted to certain sentences.
Unless you mean it should be an entirely voluntary system? More likely you’re thinking like the Bolsheviks and you’ll cause 20 million people to stave with your ideas.
Remember Stalin was as evil as Hitler.
What I'm proposing is more akin to distributed democratic socialism. Our government is still democratically run. You still have independent banks (formed as credit unions) or crowdfunding to start businesses. The only difference is that once a business hires that first worker, then decisions start getting made democratically. And they continue from there. The state isn't running any of the businesses and there's no central planning arm.
To my knowledge, this has never been tried as a whole economic system. But worker cooperatives exist and are functioning just fine in the current system. Ever bought Equal Exchange chocolate? That's a worker cooperative. Heard of Mondragon? 80,000 member worker cooperative that's functioned successfully for decades across multiple verticals in Spain.
What I am proposing is that we do away with the traditional investor relationship and mandate that all businesses must be formed as democratic worker cooperatives funded either by regulated loans or some form of crowd funding.
A better solution would be to increase taxes on income from interest and capital, and use that funding for education and social services.
The usery laws are just about preventing banks from exercising undo power over those worker cooperatives at the formation stage.
I feel like innovative companies such as SpaceX or Moderna would never happen under that economic model for example.
I know any number of people who would eagerly start a high risk innovation play as a worker cooperative, because the money reward isn't what they care about. They care about making change in society or seeing a technical advancement become wide spread.
For most of them, they just need the chance - a floor under their feet so they can't fall too far if they fail and enough funding to get going. And, given how much crowdfunding has succeeded in todays world of concentrated wealth - I believe crowdfunding could provide that in this system where wealth is much, much more distributed.
The other piece of if is, with worker cooperatives every single employee of the company is fully bought into that innovation play. And stands to see the rewards created by it. Not just the investors and company founders. If anything, it increases the effectiveness of these companies, because everyone involved in them is incentivized to give it their all. Everyone involved stands to see the rewards of success.
I think you're reading into other's worldviews too much. Most people likely agree it's systemic. Many would not be convinced by the proposed solutions, because they do not think they would improve the situation. Moreover, large numbers of people do not think the situation can be improved, that this is just the natural state of the world (for which they have thousands of years of evidence to point to).
