The Capitalist Pig-Dog Blog: Starting Points

Posted on 2015-04-24 by Nick Thomas

My last post talked a bit about beliefs and sticking to them, but it shied away

from discussing them in any detail. Words like "leftwing", and the

Political Compass graph, might have given a few hints away. If I'm going to be

analysing and changing my behaviour according to these things, it's important to

get a decent grasp on what they _are_.

Firstly, I don't consider myself to be an ideologue. I've read Das Kapital and

The Wealth of Nations, but I'm not about to pick one up and start brandishing it

as the source of all answers to everything ever. Instead, I think of myself as a pragmatist - the economy (and human economic behaviour in general) is a means to

an end, and should be arranged however best meets those ends, regardless of

theoretical underpinnings.

What end(s) am I pursuing? I lack any great theoretical underpinnings for this

either, but it's very important to me, personally, that everyone has access to

a basic, comfortable standard of living. It is also very important to me that

the power people have over other people is minimised. These beliefs do have

a degree of tension, of course - to ensure everyone is comfortable, you must

necessarily impinge on the freedom of others, to an extent. I've mostly resolved

this internally by emphasising the collectivist strand over the individualist

one.

Is this all classic Third Wayism? Am I 20 years late to the party? Perhaps to an

extent, but watching New Labour in action (or looking back at its goals and

accomplishments) doesn't leave me with the feeling that the strategies pursued

actually worked - instead, I'm left with some degree of hostility to naive market

solutions.

I think this mostly comes down to private property. Some people believe that

property rights are sacrosanct, with their exercise being a vital part of being

free from others, but I lean more towards viewing them as a device for exercise

power over other people. Property rights are, of course, here to stay - and I

take advantage of them extensively - but this viewpoint informs how I'm inclined

to use property rights to solve problems. In particular, I'm liable to avoid

usages of property rights that permit a relatively few people to direct or control

the behaviour of many others, or their exploitation. Like the entire economic

spectrum.

I consider rentiers to be rather bad; to me, this form of participation in a

market necessarily maximises the amount of power over others that a group can

have, while leaving significant numbers unable to participate (as artificially

restricting supply to raise prices is the surest way of increasing profits).

Austrian-style economics see rent-seeking and demand an end to all regulations;

but in many cases, some regulation is actually quite handy. As an example,

removing all planning restrictions would reduce the costs of property

significantly, but it would also result in some very unpleasant - including

fatal - dwellings being constructed. Honest regulations aiming to meet the basic

human need of housing - why is that so difficult to achieve?

At some point I'll be examining what I do for housing myself, and what other

options there are. Perhaps I'll be able to come to some conclusions at that point.

For now, it's easy to point at problems, but much harder to think up solutions.

I've spent a little while trying to work out whether I should publish actual

numbers on here or not. We can be an odd bunch when it comes to how much we

earn, what we spend it on, etc. In the end, I figured, what's the harm?

I've been using Gnucash to track my finances since 2010, and while I could just

open up read-only access to that database, even I'm not that open. So instead, I

made some pretty pictures:

I am intending to dip into this historical data a fair bit in the future,

so this isn't the sum total of everything I'm releasing ever; there might even

be some tables in the future. The next post will look at my income in more

detail, before I go on to poke various aspects of expenditure (which is the

really interesting bit).

For now, I'll just note that my take-home pay (after taxes and pension

contribution) is ~£3300/month (this is better than the median) but my net worth

(excluding said pension, as it happens) is still relatively low, although it's

on a fairly rapid upward trajectory. All this gives me significant leeway to

change my behaviour that, I will try my best to remember, won't necessarily be

available to people earning the kind of sums I can remember from before I lucked

out (this job started in 2008; things were a lot hairier before then, hence the

current net worth game). The next post will look at my income & net worth in a

bit more detail; it's worth setting out how much I earn and why I earn it in the

way that I do (along with considering alternatives, feasible or no) before going

on to see how that money is spent, hoarded or invested in any detail.

Questions? Comments? Criticisms? Contact the author by email: gemini@ur.gs

The Capitalist Pig-Dog Blog: Starting Points

Beliefs and values

Income and expenditure