Digifesto

Multiple sources have no referred me to Suresh Naidu’s article in the “After Piketty” anthology. It’s now high on my to-read list.

A key insight from the secondary reviews is the reminder that however capital is supplied (whether it be in liquidity, or capital “goods” like factory equipment, or land, or today in intellectual property), they are priced according to the expectation of future return on ownership. Given the diverse forms that capital can take, “expected return on future ownership” may very well be what distinguishes capital from consumer goods.

Capital accumulation is then, at its most basic, the process of strategic investment to maximize return across lots of asset classes.

Let’s assume for now the most cynical possible view of political economy, in which all political agendas are just rallying will in favor of this or that kind of capital, pushing for the revaluation of capital or policies that change its distribution. In many ways, this is consistent with Bourdieusian social theory.

Then look at the push for universal basic income (UBI). I’ve though UBI is a great idea in the past. It seems humane: everybody gets enough to live on, and people can at last be free with nothing to complain about. No problem, right?

There is the sticky concern that UBI does not address equity concerns. I’m not going to write about that now.

What I’m thinking about now, just putting myself in the shoes of an arch-capitalist for once, is that giving everybody a budget for consumer goods paid out of general taxes changes the way capital is valued. Specifically, capital that is directed towards to provision of consumer products becomes higher-value with UBI, since it guarantees a greater income stream.

This analysis is perhaps neither here nor there, so to speak. But it’s the kind of thinking I’d like to do more of. I’m coming to the conclusion that a useful analysis of political classes has to be done with a solid understanding of economic supply chains, the human parts of them especially. This is not a matter of simple polarities or binaries but rather the analysis has to take the supply topology into account.