Bewildering Respect

Starting rich is a safety net. Not all safety nets are viewed the same. 

A lot of Government safety nets come at the cost of respect. They are the opposite of a job interview. To get help, you must prove you need help. With a job, you know there are limited vacancies, so you are proud they chose you. To get help, you prove you cannot self-sustain. That is a belittling acknowledgment to make. 

When we look at other people’s problems, our advice is autobiographical. We look at their problem with our whole picture. With our capital, our knowledge, our skills, our experience, our way of seeing... but I am not you. You are not me. 

Watching a participation play where the actors take suggestions can leave the audience frustratedly correcting and recorrecting as no decision plays out as if they were acting. I even ended up as one of the characters, “let me have a turn”. Even then, you are just one of the participants and many decisions are team efforts. The decision you would make in that situation would not be the same, because you would not be you in that situation. 

I find seeing real poverty humbling because it strips away how much credit I give myself for my own personal merit. It strips away vast chunks of the justification for why I am as fortunate as I am. It leads to a re-evaluation of thorny ideas like white privilege, civilizing missions, and unintended consequences. 

It leads to bewildering respect for people in their worlds.

Extended Challenges

When a country isn’t wealthy enough (e.g. South Africa), or even if a country is wealthy enough (e.g. the United Kingdom), to have a solid safety net, we start pushing responsibility to owners and managers saying, “they need to look after the employees and create jobs.” In some ways, I think that is fair. Firms can use team language when convenient and treat people (employees and clients) as disposable tools at other times. The danger with that is the condescending idea that there is a class of people responsible for looking after people, and an underclass of dependents doing their bidding for a hand-to-mouth living. Both decision-making and responsibility can be shared in a way consistent with autonomy and consent. If we build proper resilience and endurance. If we aren’t solely reliant on salaries or welfare. What happens when companies go bust? What happens when countries can’t tax more or borrow more? As we have seen during the Covid crisis, a large number of the institutions we rely on are not designed for extended periods of challenge. To be creative, you need the capacity to survive the winter. Wealth creation is at its heart, risk management. 

Ice Age Earth

Last Resort

The idea of a “Lender of Last Resort” (LOLR) brings harsh focus to the importance of liquidity. Price isn’t value. If you have stuff no one wants, the price is zero. It doesn’t matter what it is. It doesn’t matter how much you think it is worth in normal times. If you don’t have the capacity to reach normal times. The price may even be negative. You may have to pay someone to take something with long term value from you, because you simply have no option. There is nothing as dangerous as having no options. The role of LOLR is played by Governments or Central Banks. Selectively and inconsistently. Lending to institutions they don’t want to fail when no one else will. The Bank of Mom and Dad plays this role for many surface level risk takers. For the majority of people, there is no last resort. There is no one to step in. They are their own last line of defence. Risk is deeply personal.

Different Lifeboats

I have been extraordinarily fortunate during the Covid Lockdown. I am very aware of the “same storm, different lifeboats” debate around the costs of shutting the hand-to-mouth economy down. I am a Soutie with one foot in the UK and one in SA, so am very aware of the different levels of government support available under Global Apartheid with single government monopolies, and barriers to entry and exit for luck-of-the-draw citizens. It is 6 years since I stepped away from the corporate world, feeling I had a big enough engine to finance my own (generous in relative terms) basic income. Most of my work since then has been unpaid. I started supplementing this by starting a small business 3.5 years ago, but have had no paying clients since March. My Buffer and Engine have kept me going.  My Engine will need repair, and I do feel an obligation to figure out a way to do some monetizable work. The Covid Crisis has been a strange exercise in alternative parallel realities. Different Governments. Different Engines. Different Buffers. Different Values. Yet, we somehow need to gradually improve our ability to cooperate constructively. Space for difference, but with a capacity to handle the noise. 

The Start of the Life-Boat (1906 Postcard)