That demonstrates the underlying problem. When you can quantify something, people can compete over it. To most people money is THE quantifiable thing about humans. We literally call a person’s money number their “net worth.” It’s not “oh that guy with all these relationships and virtues and vices has just seen his net assets exceed one billion.” It is “he is now worth one billion.”
So with it carrying such cultural weight and such quantifiability… I guess what I am trying to say is that sometimes the problem really as is simple as “number go up.” Unfortunately, simple problems can still have impossibly complex solutions. How do you change the nature of a person, and then do it en masse? How do you break one feedback loop and get into another? (the people in control would make society more decent if they themselves grew up in a more decent society)
That demonstrates the underlying problem. When you can quantify something, people can compete over it. To most people money is THE quantifiable thing about humans. We literally call a person’s money number their “net worth.” It’s not “oh that guy with all these relationships and virtues and vices has just seen his net assets exceed one billion.” It is “he is now worth one billion.”
So with it carrying such cultural weight and such quantifiability… I guess what I am trying to say is that sometimes the problem really as is simple as “number go up.” Unfortunately, simple problems can still have impossibly complex solutions. How do you change the nature of a person, and then do it en masse? How do you break one feedback loop and get into another? (the people in control would make society more decent if they themselves grew up in a more decent society)