In order to play Devil's advocate here: If you're not capable of contributing to your society then what value do you truly have? Is it everyone else's responsibility to keep people alive for the sake of having more friends or family members around you than if they just died off? Although it's not even as simple as "pensioners are worth less because they earn less." Why do computer programmers who sell their souls to Apple or Google get to earn 6 figure salaries - why are they valued as highly as doctors? More valuable than teachers. More valuable than nurses. What the hell good is Facebook doing for humanity? That's more like a personal beef because I live in Silicon Valley and I do not work in tech. I teach special education. I'm far less valuable to my community than Twitter. Economic models are not based on the value of a human life to the benefit of their community. People are paid a lot because they will allow a company to earn even more. I'm paid comparatively less because I don't work at a for-profit organization and I don't contribute to this capitalistic culture of making and selling products or services. I just ensure that children will grow up to be empathetic. Something we obviously need more of.
I think the usual counterargument to this is that those who don't contribute to society have emotional and social value to those who do. Ie the reason we don't euthanize allentally handicapped people is because of the emotional trauma (and related loss of capital) that would cause is more costly than the expense of keeping a mentally handicapped and non-earning person alive. Not that this counters what you're saying in your comment--i don't think you value economic modelling highly--but it just goes to show how many hoops you have to jump through to make it look like human lives are valuable outside of their capital in economic modelling. I wish something like that were more immediately obvious.If you're not capable of contributing to your society then what value do you truly have?
Your explanation is way easy to understand. In fact, I'd never really considered how valuable it is to keep a person alive for the sake of the family's emotional health. I just have my own personal values about it which don't necessarily generalize to a community as a whole.
>If you're not capable of contributing to your society then what value do you truly have? Consuming. Same with the pensioners. They are not worthless to a capitalist society, they consume the goods which people and companies produce allowing them to have a job in the first place. And if I could play devil's advocate for a moment: Facebook can be used by grassroots organizations to affect change in their communities, it can contribute something to society. Professional athletes on the other hand... >I just ensure that children will grow up to be empathetic. I thought I heard a few years ago about some economic models that try to take these things into account, I can't remember where at the moment though. Does anyone know?
Consumers! of course, why didn't I think of that? I disagree that these social media sites like Twitter actually sparked revolutions. People will fight and revolt and protest with or without the internet. We've been doing it for literally forever. It's human nature to communicate when we have a problem. But, again, I have my own selfish point of view regarding internet technology and its value in society. Thanks for the enlightening POV . I'm not nearly as familiar with economic modeling as I believed I was. The perspective that there can be a value placed on empathy, for example, seems intuitive but I just sort of assumed it was ignored as a worthless personality trait for the sake of economic modeling.
I'm not saying social media can spark revolutions, but the have proved to be useful tools. Don't know if the rest of that was sarcastic or not :/