Sublime

But it can also go the other way. What economics has missed is that adding an incentive—a fine or a bonus—may be subtracting something else, the individual’s sense of responsibility, or obligation, or intrinsic pleasure.

Friedrich Hayek, who has become an iconic figure among today’s conservatives, was a strong proponent of the idea. In his three-volume work Law, Legislation and Liberty, published between 1973 and 1979, Hayek suggested that a guaranteed income would be a legitimate government policy designed to provide insurance against adversity, and that the need

One of Adam Smith’s most intelligent and penetrating readers was the German economist Karl Marx. Marx agreed entirely with Smith’s analysis: specialization had indeed transformed the world and possessed a revolutionary power to enrich individuals and nations. But where he differed from Smith was in his assessment of how desirable this development m

all of us are generalists inside. We were not born to do one thing only. It’s merely the economy that – for its own greedy ends – pushes us to sacrifice ourselves to one discipline alone, rendering us (in Marx’s words) ‘one-sided and dependent’ and ‘depressed spiritually and physically to the condition of a machine.’ It was in the Manuscripts of 18

If the government intervenes through regulation, taxation, or other barriers, the result is almost always an imbalance between supply and demand .

But from the 1970s onward, power shifted. Households now invested their savings through large and powerful intermediaries such as pension funds and mutual funds. The rules that had been set up to protect individual savers against the greed or incompetence of corporate executives were now leveraged by professional agents with billions of dollars of

This explains the idea of promoting a Greater Safety Net for networked individuals rather than for corporations—a hedge designed to cover us against all critical risks and empower us in our many interactions with other economic agents, all without the intermediation of the proxies (large corporations, the state) on which the Great Safety Net 1.0 ha