At a certain point, profit can turn to status, like with the super wealthy. Elon Musk seems to be pushing for $1T, not because the extra money matters, but because he wants the status of being the first to get there.

But if you look at the quiet majority, many people will take more stressful roles because of the higher earning potential. So they're increasing their output specifically to get a better standard of living. Those types tend to be contractors, small business owners, and early stage startup employees.

If you look at the alternative, such as China or the USSR, those who rise to the top aren't those with the highest productivity, but those most able to play the political game. If you look at a small engineering company, it's generally those with the most technical capability who rise through the ranks, but once you get to larger companies, higher roles generally get taken over by business types, i.e. those best able to play the business side of the political game. It's the same process, just with different mechanisms for gaining power.

Any proper solution here needs to fix the problem of the wrong people getting to positions of power. The economic system isn't particularly relevant, other than setting the rules of the game. The best solution, IMO, is to make the rules of the game such that you get punished hard if you don't know what you're doing (i.e. you're a business type running an engineering firm firing top talent to cut quarterly costs), and you get rewarded if you do. If we actually put execs in jail for problems their businesses create, I think we'd quickly see companies like Boeing change their leadership to one that will prevent problems, such as someone w/ an engineering or safety background.

That's why I think government and the economy should be as separate as possible, and in fact in an adversarial relationship. Bureaucrats should be rewarded for catching crime in the private sector, and private companies should have real incentives to keep everything above board. That can't happen when politicians are literally funded by the companies they're supposed to be regulating.

Come on. Even animals are motivated by profit: getting more out of something than you put into it. Profit doesn’t have to mean “shareholder dividends.”

It’s so naive to claim that it’s only society’s setup and status pressures that make us care about getting better things for less effort. As if that hasn’t been the aim of every individual AND every society since the dawn of time.

The easiest way used to be to just plunder people. Take their shit. Now it’s your shit. Easier and faster than making the shit. Woohoo.

Then trade entered the chat, and it was the first time that people started to think there might actually be a better way: that both parties could walk away from an exchange better off, and that it might be in each of their interests to keep the other alive.

Could you provide a realistic alternative that we could transition into?

We need to shift power back to the local levels; only that way we can personally ensure our wellbeing.

I agree with the conclusion, but not how you got there.

My Senators and House rep live pretty close to me, like 15 minutes away driving, so I could go visit them if I wanted. They spend a lot of time in DC, but they come back several times throughout the year.

The issue, IMO, isn't where they sleep, but that they can't easily be removed from office. Our districts are gerrymandered to the point that the main party usually wins with 20%+ margin. Why care about constituents if reelection is all but guaranteed? They could live next door to me and that wouldn't change their mind. If I assassinate a rep, I'll go to jail and the replacement will likely be worse. They're more accountable to their party and donors than their constituents.

But yes, I very much do believe decisions should be made locally because party affiliation matters far less. My local legislature behaves very differently from the federal Congress, not because of where people live, but because they're much more easily replaced and they can't hide behind other reps from other states and argue that their decisions are careful chess moves to get what really matters passed.

This argument is very different from the argument I'm talking about. Lemmy isn't a government, nor does it attempt to fill that role (as much as my instance's "Agora" community wants to think it does), so whether Lemmy is successful doesn't give any insight into whether a more decentralized form of government could be successful.

communitarianism produced Lemmy

That's a pretty generous description.

A more accurate description, IMO, is that two people wanted a safe space for their extremist community (tankies), and they had a working version at the time that a lot of people were frustrated with Reddit. Those two are still running the project, and they moderate their instances very tightly. But many people outside that community came and decided to make something good out of it, which is why additional instances popped up run by people with different motivations from the original pair.

So I don't think communitarianism produced Lemmy, at least not initially, but it did help turn Lemmy into what it is today.

We win when Lemmy is the superior option for enough people that we actually start bleeding Reddit out.

I don't think that's necessarily true. I think we have already won in that people choose to stay here over returning to Reddit or whatever social media platform they came from. That said, active users on Lemmy seems to be steadily dropping, which is a bummer, but I'm still able to have decent discussions here, so it's working for me.