The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy

In The Wealth of Nations, Smith argues that the economic world is divided into laborers, landlords and merchants. Laborers earn their money from the sweat of their brows, landlords from rents, and merchants from profit.

Keynes turned conventional economics on its head by looking not at the behavior of individual firms, but at entrepreneurs’ feelings about risk and uncertainty, and how they would ride the flows of capital.

happens when happiness is not acquired by receiving money, but by giving it away.

animal.

One of his concerns can be parsed out as a conflict over resources: “If any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies.”

afflicted. In one longitudinal study, 12,000 incoming

Malthusians, modern and classical, the reason we’re headed to hell in a handbasket is that people are rapacious and untamable, creatures of passion and impulse. Those drives will lead us inexorably to consume endlessly, but we’ve seen that people aren’t always like that, while corporations are always like that—the profit motive makes them so—which

artificial people were more worrisome because they could never have enough.

Under this model, rights are what governments give, not what citizens take.