this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2025
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Hope I’m not thinking too abstractly here:
If you’re an individual with only their bare hands in a society that doesn’t need manual labor, not even necessarily a capitalist society, then that society would have to give you something (education) in order for you to give back to society. Once they do, you’d owe them. Maybe not dollars, maybe a moral obligation, but they’d only give you something expecting a return
“The rich get richer” through things like stock buybacks are their own issue. I just don’t get the implication this is a genuine multi-layer representation of an issue.
I disagree that all relationships between humans must be transactional, which is what you're implying here.
That’s the thing, I don’t mean between two humans. I mean between a human, and all the rest of society, which is why I phrased it that way.
Society gives a person an education, and expects that person to do something meaningful in return. It might not be the same two people in that transaction, which is similar to how we pay taxes for benefits we might not personally see.
Society invests in the education of its people, and the return is a general benefit to society from its people being more educated. It is not necessary for every single individual to give something tangible and obvious back in order for society to benefit from an educated populace. If you apply the criterion that every individual must give something back, it always turns into a requirement that they give back something tangible, usually money or labour, and the next step is to abolish education in philosophy, the arts, and possibly the more theoretical or exploratory parts of science. The result of this is an impoverished society, not an enriched one.
For it to be a good deal for society to pay for education there only needs to be on balance a benefit to society. That leaves room for the arts and all kinds of human curiosity and creativity that doesn't yield an immediate tangible benefit. We contribute together, not individually, and some contributions are very indirect. Still, societies benefit from the arts, philosophy, and people with curiosity. And this system can tolerate some people not contributing anything much at all. The investment is in quality of life for the society as a whole.