Economic Justification in a Culture of Scarcity

In this decade of financial crisis, we are increasingly forced to justify the living that we believe to earn. It started in 2008 with the bankers. The rich obviously have to justify why they make so much money. But don't think the poor remain exempt from the duty of economic justification. If they touch an allowance, everybody wonders if they ever contributed to society with decent work and how our social security model will survive with all these allowance right holders. Economic justification is not easy.

But even in the middle class, among those who believe to be hard workers, there is an increasing justification problem. Are we sure this hard work really contributes to the economic bottom line? Perhaps middle class people still earn too much for what they contribute. And the worst of all is, if they live too long, they ‘undo’ the positive contribution to society by requiring  too much pension and health care money in the second half of their life.  You may think I’m serious in this reasoning but I’m actually trying to prove the senselessness of this type of reasoning. Individual economic justification is not a good idea; it can’t be done well, and it is not fair.

Compare the optimistic 196x’s with the 201x years. Life seemed so easy 50 years ago. In those years, everybody expected to have a better life than his parents. Today we seem to live in fear that the economy turns its back at us. As indicated in my July-2017 blog, we have sunk deeper into the vicious circles of the Matthew Effect. It started in the 1980-ies when everybody started believing we needed more competition. As a result, we maintain a culture of scarcity, as if we were poor and as if everything has become scarce suddenly. The fear of scarcity has become self-fulfilling, the day the financial crisis erupted. We have become hyperactive and suffer from status anxiety. What we need is better and smarter collaboration.