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Ch2: How focusing on poverty (instead of inequality) allows for optimistic narrative about progress these past 2 centuries. Actually most happened in China, which obviously not capitalist. She presents much data on distribution of gains to show rising tides floats yachts more than boats. Piketty. Neoliberalism. How we forget to talk about class. Focusing on poverty only leaves the rich to do what they want.

Ch1: Poverty much more visible than extreme wealth. Media doesn’t report enough on the rich, many don’t notice inequality. 4 kinds of wealthy. Diff between rich and super-rich. 3 thresholds: the Rich Limit: how much it takes for people to think of you as rich; the Ethical Limit: the max amount you can hold without feeling icky (about 1M per person); the political limit: the cap the gov should incur (10M per person).

Intro: Exploring the ethics of extreme wealth. She puts her cards on the table right away, arguing for an “ethical limit” of 1m per person, to be dug into later. She bats away common criticisms: limitarianism is not about USSR communism. Nor the abolition of markets or private property. She takes apart the “envy objection” and points out the illogic of envy politics.

Cal Newport’s latest advice book tackles the question of productivity in knowledge work. Factory work can much more easily be measured and systematized. Newport points out that office workers, writers, artists, and scholars are often assigned tasks and must come up with their own individual system to be productive. These systems are opaque to managers, who end up relying on “visible activity” (which many busy office workers are familiar with) as the proxy for productivity. Add in always-on email and instant messaging apps, plus a global pandemic and people trying to work from busy homes, and you end up with a lot of burnout.

However…

See rest of review micro.chadkohalyk.com/2024/04/22/just-enough-capitalism.html

Very readable yet comprehensive history of Northern Island over the past 100 years.

Epilogue: Wrapup. "Feudal designs permit expressions of affective voice but not… effective voice." "Feudal defaults teach their users the embedded ideology of homesteading" (colonialism) "Through governable stacks, communities can identify and root out feudal patterns and remake them as commons." "The stack is social, technical, and environmental infrastructure. It is affective and effective." Not techno-solutionism.