Capitalism does some things well. The speed of innovation, the breadth of creativity, the streamlined practices. But it comes at a cost, at least eventually.

I think it’s a self-cannibalising system, bad at preserving the conditions from which value is extracted. It optimises so well that things lose their souls. Btw part 1 is here.

Decisions can be rational for one company while becoming disastrous when every company makes them. Cut staff. Reduce quality. Remove anything that can’t be directly linked to revenue. Minimise tax. Each makes sense on its own spreadsheet. But together they produce exhausted workers, hollowed-out public services, brittle supply chains, and customers who can’t afford to be customers 

The Race to the Bottom

Competition ignites a race to the lowest price, sacrificing staff and quality or using tax wizardry. You’d think corpos could focus on offering the best service, but humans prefer simpler choices and lower prices, a preference reinforced, ironically so, by the precarious jobs created by the same optimisation.

When rent, food, energy, and childcare costs are rising, you’re not spending evenings considering the long-term social consequences of your summer holiday airline choice. You’re clicking “sort by lowest price” and hoping the wings are included.

Ryanair always looks cheap until you want luggage, leg mobility, or to sit next to your baby, partner, or grandma. I’m convinced there’s a way to go yet: a discount for passengers guiding the plane to its bay,  or popping on a high vis to drive fellow passengers to the terminal.

Continue reading “Billionaires Pt.2”

It feels like “tax the billionaires”, or the more poetic “eat the rich”, became more mainstream post-pandemic. And I think it’s because public services, and quality of life for regular folk, was noticeably worsening.

So, would mainstream anti-billionaire sentiment exist if economic stability and social mobility was easily accessible for all? E.g. was the sentiment alive between 2000-2007?

If no, and stay with me here, is it the billionaire that directly led to underfunded public services and lower quality of life? Probably not. Yet indirectly, via regulatory capture, probably yes. The more they accumulate, the more they influence to accumulate further. Eventually wealth becomes gravity.

And so to the notion of taxing billionaires, using Jeff Bezos as a convenient example. He’s worth ~$250bn. Enough to buy a kebab every second for nearly 8,000 years.

Tax, by the way, became an ugly word that made people run away to Dubai. Normally though, people agree to live in communal areas, and they contribute to keep that area pretty and the community’s needs served. Now scale that thought up to a national level. That’s what tax is supposed to do. It’d cost a libertarian a ton of time and money to train and equip themselves as a firefighter, or road repairer…compared to a community pooling together for a specialised, cost-efficient and resource-efficient team.
Caveat: This is for cities. I can’t speak for remote regions until I’ve completed my Walden life chapter.

Having said that, I can understand why people flinch at tax. For many young people, the social contract has been broken. They might think, “why is a third of my tax bill going to pensioners, some of whom are sitting on immense property wealth, while I have to pay exorbitant amounts to rent a windowless room with a DIY shower unit assembled near my bed? And my calathea is dying”. Tax has negative optics now because trust in public institutions is low.

Continue reading “Billionaires”

I used to think, “thank god physical disciplining in schools went away and the experience was safer for kids”.

Then I thought, well if some kids are getting abused at home, like they were previously, it just gives their trauma room to manifest in that safer school environment. Where the ugliest manifestations can hinder schooling more than physical disciplining would’ve.

Then I thought, but maybe if that safer school environment could now also treat kids as humans pending discovery of some form of intelligence I.e. who are the builders, movers, thinkers, performers, carers, strategists, artists?

I realised that the factory of schooling has remained the same, minus some cruelty.

And I wondered, “why did we stop halfway on the journey to giving kids dignity?”

Lisbon isn’t just about its beautiful tiles, food scene, and sunsets. There’s also the intangible things like family networks, old neighbours, cultural routines, saudade, and its hopes.

It becomes a form of exploitation when investors are allowed to bid for a culture nurtured over generations, prune the rough edges, and then sell access for maximum profit…rendering it beautiful, but hollow. Meanwhile, those who created much of its value are left with higher rents, weaker communities, and a growing sense that their own country no longer has room for them.

But at least it enriches a narrow class /s

To be crystal clear, I don’t think tourism itself is the danger. Tourism brings money, jobs, visibility, and cultural exchange. The danger is this modern extractive form of it. And it doesn’t take much imagination to consider the consequences. I’d only need to look at London (where I was born and raised) to notice how wealth preserved the surface while the life beneath it can feel precarious.

I write this seemingly naively, as if private equity and wealthy investors are merely oblivious to the effects of their quarterly goals. Unfortunately, and with great insomnia, I know it’s a business model: privatise the gains and socialise the losses (i.e. the intangible negative externalities). All enabled by regulatory capture, political incentives, and a dash of scorn that community isn’t as profitable as individual isolationism.

I can’t seem to pinpoint moral imagination anymore. It’s quiet. I struggle between accepting accumulation as an inevitable human impulse, and whether surrendering to that conclusion is a kind of defeat itself. Greed often feels more powerful than kindness, because it’s easier: easier to take than to care, easier to extract than to preserve, easier for a few determined people to damage what many gentler people are trying to protect.

I don’t think a country should measure success primarily by how much capital it attracts, or how much property appreciates. Surely a humanistic approach, which, correct me if I’m wrong, relates to what we are, would be: can its young people afford to live near their family? Can an elderly resident remain in the neighbourhood they know? Can workers in the tourism economy build stable lives from the wealth they help generate? Do local people feel included in the future of their own city?

The irony is that I came to Lisbon as part of the very class of people stoking change.

I was raised in London, though I never felt like I belonged, and I moved here with the kind of mobility many Portuguese people don’t have. I know that makes my concern complicated. I’m inside the problem, trying to live with some awareness of it. But I guess that’s also why I feel it quite sharply.

I’ve seen what happens when a city becomes increasingly organised around capital rather than belonging. I’ve seen parallel worlds emerge: one for those with money, mobility, and international networks, and another for the people who carry the place through ordinary life.

In Lisbon, I feel the parallel worlds too: the expat world of specialty coffee, brunch, English-speaking spaces, and aesthetic consumption; and the Portuguese world of families, workers, elderly neighbours, dry humour, and the slight twitch of memories from difficult political histories. These worlds occupy the same streets, but they don’t always meet.

I’m learning Portuguese. I read Camões and the country’s history. I feel at home amongst the soulfulness and sarcasm of the Portuguese. In many ways, I feel more kinship here than in the city that raised me. I try, imperfectly, not to treat Portugal as a lifestyle accessory. But I still feel the weight of sometimes being grouped with those who arrive without curiosity, humility, or any real desire to belong beyond consumption.

There is a strange loneliness in loving a place while knowing my presence may symbolise something painful to the people from here.

I don’t think growth is inherently wrong. But if Lisbon’s transformation turns the city’s own people into background characters in a prosperity story written for investors, tourists, remote workers, and elites…then that growth has cost too much. A humane society should not ask ordinary Portuguese people to sacrifice their homes, neighbourhoods, and sense of belonging so the country can appear successful from the outside.

Maybe I feel for the Portuguese, not because I imagine myself morally separate from the problem, but rather because I’ve already lost a version of home to the same problem.

London taught me what happens when ordinary people are priced out of the places that formed them. So when I see Lisbon beginning to split into parallel worlds, it’s difficult to pretend it’s harmless.

Though I moved to Lisbon with the mobility of a London expat, it wasn’t with a face people usually associate with that world.

Sometimes I feel suspended between the Lisbon of remote workers and the Lisbon of Uber drivers and service staff…the latter of which is deeply relied upon, but they’re rarely welcomed with the same ease as the former.

I’m close enough to see both, and oftentimes misread by both, but I don’t quite belong to either.

So…even within the outsider class, there are hierarchies.

AI won’t determine the future nearly as much as how the gains end up being distributed. I think what the AI faff has exposed is the gap between economic systems and human needs.

It’s a fair aspiration to remove work from human hands (ongoing for millennia), but it’s not fair to gate-keep the value that comes with it.

Bigger Q:
What happens when intelligence is a commodity in a system built on scarcity?
How will our identities, structures, and search for meaning change?