Preface
A Likely Story is about the economics of wealth and capital accumulation and the impact of the latter on income distribution. Total wealth or the Added-Value produced by members of the Community (GDP) is referred to in the Story as the collective Community Dinner. Ultimately, what is produced together (final demand) is shared together. The absolute Purchasing Power (income) of each individual determines the size of each one’s share at the Dinner table. The focus of A Likely Story is the economic analysis of sharing the Community Dinner income distribution).
In a series of virtual sub-stories illustrating the process of creating wealth, the meanings of income and consumption, investment and saving, money and credit, labor and capital, private and public goods, the functions of corporations and government are all explained in terms of actor interactions. Economic actors as players assume distinct roles: income earners and consumers, savers and/or investors, money and credit generators and/or users, workers and/or rentiers, those appropriating personal things and those sharing things in common, governors or the governed. The economic dynamics of these interactions in pursuit of wealth and its distribution are the forces that shape ways of life.
In A Likely Story, simple examples are used to illustrate how, for instance, the Community, through barter exchange in an environment of undeveloped technological knowledge, manages, out of survival necessity, cooperatively to produce and share its Added-Value to meet its basic needs. Subsequently, in a different monetary, economic paradigm, with high-tech capabilities for generating Added-Value and prosperity, the Community develops and eagerly indulges more sophisticated needs. Greed and its constitutional setting, which grants exclusive legal rights to some more than others, concentrate credit and investment decisions in fewer and fewer hands, and socialize the risk factor. These are the ingredients that combined lead to antagonistic behaviours and the result that wealth becomes disproportionally shared. This later Community’s disparities of income among its various population groups are structural and characteristic of a particular type of capital accumulation.
Division of labour and technological progress have made both labour and capital, as factors of production, more efficient, and thus conducive to greater accumulation of wealth, to more material prosperity and to the increasing size of the Community Dinner. A Likely Story focuses on a particular form of a corporate capitalism economy, in which aspects of technological progress foster mass consumption in the pursuit of market control and in which capital is slowly substituted for labour in the process of the production of wealth to the point of rendering human labour redundant. A new subserving labour force of hominoids emerges, to tend to a Community of ‘retirees’, effortlessly relishing material paradise. Freed from labour effort, the Community, with an insatiable behaviour for more, adjusts to a consensual consumption pattern that producers are eager to sustain, consumers, happy to indulge and government, willing to assist. Spiralling unsustainable growth ensues that ultimately leads to the Community’s economic demise. Economic survival is shown to be possible only when humans return to meeting their own needs themselves.