- David Graeber: “What is destroyed when we think of ourselves as consumers is the possibility that we might be doing something productive outside of work.”
- Similar themes to Billionaire Wilderness— “The very rich… are uncomfortable with being rich. If they are assholes, they are uneasy assholes. They try to hide their spending from their nannies, cutting the tags off new clothes and peeling the labels off expensive bread. They don’t boast about their wealth, but about their thrift. They talk about looking for good deals and driving old cars.”
- “The rich feel morally compromised, so they try to be good.”
We shouldn’t ask our rich to be good, in other words, we should ask our economic system to be better.
- “Your class, in this approach, is determined by how much you have of three kinds of capital—economic capital, cultural capital, and social capital. Or, what you own, what you know, and who you know.”
- Etymology of scholastic: Greek for “to be at leisure to study”
- Greeks didn’t value work (which was for women and slaves), but did value study
- Leisure = opposite of busy, but not rest or play—rather, time spent on reflective thought and wonder
- (Only possible, though, bc work of women and slaves)
- At some point, goal was to be the Leisure Class → “Leisure is how a class that doesn’t have to work displays it’s status.” But now, we aim to reach a point where we can work for fulfillment— never money
- Work vs labor: blurred definitions, but one way to distinguish = work rewarded by money, labor by transformation
- Protestant work ethic: moralizing of work, privileging of property
- AC = how our comfort is destroying the world… the more comfortable we are, the more destruction we are likely to be causing
- Capitalism = using money to get money
- The ideology that asks us is to remove surplus wealth from circulation and lay it aside to produce more wealth— hoarding of money for the purpose of making money (ex. taking out a mortgage on your house and investing in a retirement account simultaneously)
- David Graeber, again: “We are all communists with our closest friends, and feudal lords when dealing with small children.” Many daily intx → everyday communism, such as how we exchange info in a conversation (in terms of moral accounting?)
- “My garden isn’t a collection. It’s a place where I practice care, and where I take time. Time being, in the end, all I ever wanted.”
- Interesting set of “rules” Bliss set for herself in writing this book— have to talk about money (and specific amounts), must begin in present tense, must include a conversation…