Piles (part 1)

When we hear about the amount of money that we as a nation have lent to banks or the value of the total national debt, we struggle to comprehend the sums of money involved. This tends to have the effect of trivialising the amounts of money involved, they simply become conceptually small again, because in order to be able to deal with them we tend to remove the zeros. On top of this, when amounts of money can be related to us personally, we tend to concentrate solely (and understandably) on the part of the transaction that concerns us, rather than using our part of the transaction to contextualize the whole transaction. If we take a long haul flight, we might pay £850 (assuming it's not peak season), and our ticket will be one of 150 on that flight (150 x 850 = £127500), and if we add in some business class (20 x 2500 = £50000) and some first class (10 x 6000 = £60000) then we can pretty much visualise what a quarter of a million pounds looks like: like 180 people eating unfinished baby food, watching three month old films and breathing each other's recycled farts (obviously, some of them get more space to do this in than others). Once you fill the sky with these things, it becomes a very valuable place, but the sums of money involved quickly become incomprehensible again. If you look up at the sky and think 'two hundred and fifty thousand pounds (£250,000)' every time you spot an aeroplane, you'd lose count very quickly. This dissociation is both a symptom and a necessity of the systems of large scale capital: being in possession of large amounts of money obtained from the payments of a large number of people is only morally acceptable if we are entirely detached from the mass of humanity that lies behind the money.
Of course an amount of upscaling is required for large-scale economies to work, but the dislocation between the source of income and its output that this creates allows for inefficient distribution of the wealth generated. Indeed, as the systems and networks that the global economy relies on improve, it increasingly appears that the only reason for the traditional large scale corporate structures is to justify the payments of those at the top. The skills involved in the provision of any upscaled service cannot reside with one excessively remunerated person, so why do they get paid for making largely ineffectual decisions about 'direction', 'strategy' and other nebulous concepts? The only reason I can think is that they have persuaded us of the importance of what they do. In the past it may have been the case that the benefits of scale only came from behemoth companies with legions of superremunerated executives at the top dealing with their corporate affairs, but with the infrastructure that exists now this should no longer be the case. Smaller companies should be able to pool their specialities to form lose partnerships of common interest that would have the advantages of scale that large corporations currently do. Such networks could be formed and funded on a project by project basis. Obviously there are issues of joint liability that would need to be clearly defined at the start to avoid the sort of blame-shifting that can happen in large companies when something goes wrong, but the infrastructure required exists. So why isn't this happening? The main issue is one of perception: ask any young silicon valley/roundabout entrepreneur what their goal is and it will invariably be founded on an idea that they may one day be as unimaginably wealthy as the pioneers of the commercial computer technology: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. Did you spot the odd one out? Mark Zuckerberg is not like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. The latter two men found themselves at the head of multinational companies due to an overriding passion for their subject and after years of work. Mark Zuckerberg had one idea and almost instantly saw its potential to make him a lot of money as event software. There is no sense in which facebook was ever intended to bring benefit to humanity; Zuckerberg never had any of the early revolutionary zeal of Jobs or Gates, he wanted to fastrack to the executive boardroom. Sure, he made the early years like being at college, but that's because he was at college and so was his market. Zuckerberg unfortunately embodies the dreams of the people who could so easily change the way our society functions: at the first opportunity, sell out.
With the strange abstraction that comes from very large sums of money comes the assumption that, as we cannot really comprehend such things, they must be unimaginably good. Whilst we all dream of winning the lottery we will never move away from this flaw in our culture; whilst we believe that the only way to be truly happy is to have considerably more than everyone else, we will have a society where there are a sizeable minority with much more than everyone else. The only way to comprehend the big numbers is to think of the individual stories that make them up. Think of each of the people on the aeroplane and how each of them got there: the pensioners who have waited all their lives to make that trip; the young couple looking for a new life who have bought a ticket on credit and hoping their future will pay down the debt; the businessman chasing the dream of glamorous business travel. The stories quickly pile up and become overwhelming in themselves and we realise that it is money itself that allows us the separation from those who contribute to our wealth. The idea of owning slaves is reprehensible to almost everyone, yet many people have no problem putting a price on the value of another person if that transaction is indirect. The fact of money allows us to make a commodity out of anything without any associated guilt; it allows us to launder association and context, so that commodity may be sought from the ills of the world without any associated moral taint. I am not saying that money is the cause of all of the world's ills, but that it is the means by which we most easily allow ourselves to ignore them.
We don't need to burn all money and return wholesale to a barter economy, but maybe we should think about the true cost and value of the goods and services we buy. If we think about it as buying a segment of someone's life then maybe we'd be more concerned. Then again maybe we just don't care, maybe we're too selfish care, maybe we'd rather just think about all those people's lives as so many numbers.