Беседы с дочерью об экономике

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but in the societies we live in, we tend to confuse goods with commodities
<…>
very often in today’s societies, just as all goods are thought of as commodities, so all values are measured—by economists, at any rate—as if they were exchange values. Anything without a price, anything that can’t be sold, tends to be considered worthless,

In a family, among friends, and in communities, people do things for one another. This too is a certain form of exchange, though not in the commercial sense,<…>
when I wash the dishes and in return you take the garbage out. It is a type of exchange more like an exchange of gifts at Christmas or solidarity among neighbors who help each other when need arises. These exchanges are personal and reflect long-standing, deep, familial, communal bonds and feelings.

Twilight on Aegina, Paris’s gags, and the dive you took for Captain Kostas—these things were never intended to go on sale. Commodities, on the other hand, are goods produced in order to be sold.

The sunset. Your annoyance at me. Paris’s jokes. The joy of diving into the sea just because Captain Kostas asked you to. This is the stuff of your summer’s joy. By definition, they are “goods”—the opposite of “bads,”

Geographical conditions predetermined that Africa, Australia, and the Americas would be colonized by Europeans. It had nothing to do with DNA, or intelligence.

the British, had been forced by climate and need to generate large surpluses and all that came with them, from seagoing vessels to biochemical weapons.

Of course, when they encountered tribes and communities that had not yet developed agricultural production, because of the millions of deadly microorganisms they now carried with them, a handshake was enough to wipe most of the tribespeople out.

Without a large surplus, there would be no capacity to create religious institutions with complicated hierarchies of clergy, since the “holy” men and women did not produce anything. At the same time, without organized religion the rulers’ authority over the generation and distribution of the surplus would be very unstable and prone to insurrections by the majority, whose share of the surplus was usually tiny.

So how did these rulers manage to maintain their power, distributing surplus as they pleased, <…>?
The answer is: by cultivating an ideology that caused the majority to believe deep in their hearts <…>. That they lived in the best of all possible worlds.

Historically, all the states resulting from agricultural societies distributed their surplus in an outrageously unequal manner,

the production of agricultural surplus gave birth to the following marvels that changed humanity forever: writing, debt, money, states, bureaucracy, armies, clergy, technology, and even the first form of biochemical war.

Obviously, we’ve had markets since we were living up in the trees,<…>The first time one of our ancestors offered to trade a banana for some other fruit, a market exchange of sorts was in the air. But this was not a true economy. For an economy to come into being, something else was needed: a capacity to go beyond just gathering bananas from trees or hunting animals—a capacity to produce food or instruments that would not have existed without human labor.

So let me begin with a common error that many make: they think that markets and the economy are one and the same thing. They are not. What exactly are markets? Markets are cart of exchange. At the supermarket we fill our cart with things in exchange for money <…>. Today, with the Internet in full swing, a market does not even have to be a physical place, like when you get me to buy you apps on iTunes or vinyl records from Amazon.

So the original question, “Why so much inequality between peoples?” blends into another, more sinister question: “Is it not simply that some groups of people are smarter and, as a result, more capable than others?” If this is not the case, why is it you’ve never seen in the streets of Sydney the kind of poverty you encountered on your visit to Thailand?

But did you ever wonder why it was the British who invaded Australia, seizing the Aboriginals’ land just like that, almost wiping them out in the process, and not the other way around? Why didn’t Aboriginal warriors land in Dover, quickly advancing to London, murdering any Englishmen who dared resist, including their queen? I bet not one teacher at your school dared to raise that question.

All babies are born naked, but soon after some are dressed in expensive clothes bought at the best boutiques, while the majority wear rags.

this book, courtesy of having been written as something of a stream of consciousness lasting a mere nine days,

readers may be surprised by the absence of any mention of “capital” or “capitalism” in the book. I chose to leave out such words <…>. So, instead of speaking about capitalism, I use the term “market society.” Instead of “capital,” you will find more normal words like “machinery” and “produced means of production.” Why use jargon if we can avoid it?