> If your worth is not determined by your productivity, then what remains of you underneath it all? Everything else. You are worth so much more than your productivity. I'm glad I never got sucked into the protestant work ethic, since defining yourself based on your labour and the value you generate from that sounds woefully narrow-minded (this doesn't feel like quite the right word, but close enough). It's probably h…
"Your worth" is a bit of a vague and meaningless term (everyone is worth infinite in some sense). But if we want to talk about your general ability to secure more comfortable living conditions then your worth is very much linked to your productivity. The average living conditions are largely determined by how productive the average person is. There are some hard-to-escape balance equations at play there. Good vibes a…
Also coincidentally it’s highly correlated with who your parents happen to be. But its likely spurious…
The people who have lost the lottery by both by being not born into wealth and also being destined to suffer from physical or mental disabilities, well I guess tough luck..
> the people creating the enormous surplus are in practice worth quite a bit more
Wouldn’t phrase it exactly like that but yes you are right. However it’s very hard to figure out who those people are and to measure their contributions.
It so happens that being paid a lot for your labor doesn’t automatically means that you aren’t a net negative to the society . There are loads of people working in inherently parasitical or exploitative industries who make massive amounts of money but when you add it at all up they contribute significantly less than those people living from charity. Much of the economy is still effectively zero-sum.