TheValueOfBeingInvolved

Some facts:

• My sister regularly bakes sourdough.
• It takes her about an hour of labor to make each batch (not counting the inconvenience of having to stay at home all day to be there at the moments when the bread requires 5 minutes of attention)
• The ingredients for the sourdough cost about 2 or 3 dollars per batch.
• The most expensive artisan bread we could get at the store costs $8 per loaf.

Based on these facts, a naïve economic analysis would conclude that my sister values her time at about $6 an hour, which is less than half the local minimum wage.

Of course, this is nonsense. What is really going on is that being involved in the world has value to people, which offsets the cost of the labor one has to put in to be involved.

Definition of Involvement

Involvement in some aspect of the world means, for the purposes of this page, direct control over the aspects of that part of the world that one considers important, with a tight feedback loop.

This is, of course, a matter of degree. One can be "involved" in bread production without controlling each individual yeast cell. But the exact behavior of the yeast is an unimportant detail; only the overall behavior matters at a human scale, and conveniently, that is the level of abstraction at which one has control.

By contrast, the purely economic involvement entailed by buying bread at the store is a crude control mechanism.

Basis for a Critique of Neoliberal Capitalism

Neoliberal capitalism (henceforth, "capitalism") is ostensibly maintained because it's "good for the consumer", and generally critiqued because it makes life harder for producers. But as soon as you place a value on involvement, this analysis of capitalism becomes obviously absurd, because producers and consumers are, for the most part, the very same people, and the effect of capitalism is to alienate them from the work/product in both roles. Do we really want to spend the bulk of our waking hours on efforts that we feel no relation to and have no real control over, just so we can buy things we don't really like and then spend the rest of our time staring vacantly at YouTube? What kind of trade is that?

If the numbness engendered by capitalism really were comfortable, there would be a conceivable (though morally odious) argument for it. But what it actually leads to is anxiety, because all participants in the system have the sense that their current favorite pacifier could be taken away at any moment, without them having any say in the matter.

Control is an antidote to anxiety, because it creates acceptance. People often get nervous before boarding a plane, because they fear a crash—but they don't have the same anxiety about driving, even though you're much more likely to die in a car accident than a plane crash. If self-driving cars prove to have anywhere near the fatality rate of air travel, I predict that many people will avoid them—even if they are safer than human-driven cars.