Assertion:
Yeah, greed
But people usually don’t want MORE
They’re usually happy with where they’re at.
What people REALLY hate is losing something. Losing ground, losing status, losing money, wealth, etc.
So what happens if someone’s amount of something stays the same, but everyone else’s increases. LOSE.
This is the concept of inflation.
If the house price of a property owner decreases, or doesn’t increase as much as everyone else, then they will be unhappy.
So far, so fairly unremarkable.
But there is something else in this:
The ratchet principle.
What’s that thing you just made up?
The ratchet principle:
Something increasing has a negligible consequence
Something decreasing has a high cost.
What do you think will happen?
I’ll tell you what - After a few decades a housing crisis results.
So, how do we climb down from this?
Well, this effect is already combated by what is known as progressive taxation. The more you earn, the more you pay, increasingly so.
Except there is a problem.
Power accretes
Erm, what?
The thing that progressive tax fights against, fights back. And due to ratcheting and power accretion guess who wins in the long term?
What do we do then? We’re screwed right?
Well, yes and no. If we’re screwed then we have been for probably over ten thousand years at least. Because these cycles of power accretion and collapse happen over and over again.
Collapse huh, no one said anything about that?
Ah yes. The reset phase of the cycle. I prefer the term avalanche. Tipping points are reached, the whole stack of cards comes tumbling down. Sometimes takes centuries. Sometimes less than a decade. An example is what happened to British elite power (and most visibly property) after World War One. No space to go in detail here, but next time you visit a National Trust property, take a note of the time it fell out of private hands. Also, people have done serious research on this.
Yes, but what do we do now?
Erm I dunno. Develop an ‘off-ramp’? (A concept from international diplomacy - supply a graceful descent/get-out clause from a terse situation)
The ideas are probably all out there already. Find them and talk about them x
One more thing - what does this have to do with politics?
Everything. Politics is about power. Wealth is about power.
It could be argued that all political effects are emergent from the basic principles discussed here.
But let’s leave that for another day 😊