Is the god of productivity dead?

Is the god of productivity dead?

Nietzsche said god is dead in 1882, but there was a new driver of morality:

New technology => Workers needed => Greater justice => More technology

Black and women’s suffrage, gay marriage, women in the work force — all good for increasing the productivity that brings more toys. Similarly environmental destruction and genocide are bad for enjoyment of ecology and culture. So Homo wealthians can seem moral even when they are not.

However for a particular Homo wealthians lacking morality, let’s call him Max, there is a catch to this productivity god. A society that can’t deliver new toys within one lifetime, might as well offer up their children to pedophile rings as far as Max is concerned.

Besides “the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice”, Theodore Parker writes in “Of Justice and the Conscience”:

Man naturally loves justice, for its own sake, as the natural object of his conscience.

For humanity the “for its own sake” part wasn’t tested so long as justice helped produced scientific progress with quick benefits. Homo wealthians, on a long term average, reliably promoted progressive civilization because they could see the results even in the short term.

Say for instance Max thinks more and more advanced AI will increase his lifespan. He then prefers data centers and training larger models to America’s foreign wars and incarcerating 2 million people. He supports peace and freedom purely for the savings.

But the meteoric rise of Homo wealthians’ life expectancy has slowed to a crawl in the last few decades. And how connected to less war and lower incarceration does Max feel now that wars and prisons are financed through debt instead of more obviously via taxes? And even if they are financed via taxes it won’t matter if Max has very low taxes anyway.

Of course less civil unrest is also a feature for Max, but that’s a much harder path to progress.

Gerontocracy compounds the problem — the share of wealth owned by Americans 55 and older is up 24% since 1926 to 73%. So not only does Max want to see progress before he dies but also young Homo wealthians are increasingly rare.

More bad news is that progress frequently required a society shaking event like a world war or pandemic to become widespread. Women’s suffrage had reached only eight states before WWI inspired national adoption.

How important is Homo wealthians support?

The idea for dividing a day in thirds, where 8 was paid labor, came from mill manager Robert Owens. Henry Ford was early in moving to a 5 day work week (though he was also antisemitic). Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a Homo wealthians from a young age.

Its not that nothing happens without their support but it does make things much easier:

At the height of the Civil Rights Movement J. Irwin Miller sat down with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Andrew Young to personally help plan and co-sponsor the 1963 March on Washington. Afterward, Miller used his clout as a Midwestern industrialist to lobby Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, as well as wavering Congressmen, to pass federal civil rights legislation. Meanwhile, in 1962, Currier organized $870,000 in foundation money to launch the Voter Education Project.

Miller’s lobbying helped secure the votes needed to pass the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Currier’s funding bankrolled the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) voter registration drives across the Deep South, directly paving the way for the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer.

Or more recently:

When Hanauer pitched the idea of a $15-an-hour minimum wage to a room of wealthy liberal donors in 2011, people in the audience literally laughed out loud at him. Determined to prove them wrong, Hanauer used his policy group, Civic Ventures, to fund the 2013 and 2014 ballot campaigns in SeaTac and Seattle that enacted the country’s first $15 minimum wages.

The jobs did not disappear. Instead, 100,000 low-wage workers got raises and spent that money in local businesses, causing Seattle’s economy to boom. By proving in the real world that higher wages didn’t kill jobs, Hanauer’s experiment shattered economic orthodoxy and set off a nationwide wave of $15 minimum wage laws in San Francisco and across the U.S.

Or:

MacKenzie Scott’s gifts provided Howard and Tuskegee Universities with the largest single donations in their histories and enabled LISC’s Black Economic Development Fund to create or preserve over 8,500 homes and invest $166 million into Black-owned banks and real estate developers. Dustin Moskovitz’s $207 million built the permanent national infrastructure — such as the Alliance for Safety and Justice and Fair and Just Prosecution — that passes state ballot initiatives reducing prison sentences and trains reform-minded prosecutors across the country.

But Hanauer’s $15 minimum wage is more inline with a productivity and self interest move than MacKenzie Scott which might be more pure “for its own sake”. MacKenzie says,

My approach to philanthropy will continue to be thoughtful. It will take time and effort and care. But I won’t wait. And I will keep at it until the safe is empty.

Nick says in 2014 of the Homo wealthians (he doesn’t use that term),

And what do I see in our future now?

I see pitchforks.

Now in a WSJ article Nick says pitchfork predictions of are coming true but

Neither socialism nor MAGA is the answer. But neither is a retread of the neoliberal orthodoxy responsible for the largest upward redistribution of wealth and income in American history.

Nick, like FDR, is trying to cut the minimal deal necessary to keep the system from collapsing.

Why Nick can’t convince Max

Offhand Nick’s argument to avoid pitchforks seems like it should be compelling for the wealthy looking to live in a stable America. But the wealthy are ignoring riots and fascism while the money is good.

U.S. dollar and Treasury markets are the bedrock of global finance. If the United States turned into an authoritarian police state, the rule of law protecting property rights and contract enforcement would evaporate. An authoritarian regime can freeze accounts, impose draconian capital controls, or outright nationalize domestic assets overnight (just as Putin’s regime did to fallen Russian oligarchs like Mikhail Khodorkovsky or, more recently, Vadim Moshkovich).

Being an exiled billionaire in Malta or Singapore makes you a rich tourist. You lose your social network, your cultural relevance, and your seat at the table of global power. They do not want to live in gilded cages at the edge of the world; they want to run the world’s most powerful country.

1933: Capitalism was clinically dead on the operating table, and the wealthy needed the federal government to bail out the banking system and restore basic order.

2026: Hanauer is trying to convince billionaires to surrender wealth while corporate profits, equity valuations, and billionaire net worths are near historic peaks. Telling people the system is broken when it is actively printing money for them is a nearly impossible sell.

So we are closer now to a vicious cycle:

New technology => Less workers needed => Fascism => Brink of disaster