VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 3
A New Order for the Economy
The last chapter did education. This chapter is about the economy. The second chapter moved culture back to its proper place and patched the leg of character back onto the human heart. This chapter has to touch the thing your heart is most panicked about: the rice bowl, a way to live, that little money in your hand. Look at it from the root, and the names people have quarreled over for a hundred years, peeled open, are all the same one thing: settling people. To weigh an economic system, do not ask what name it flies, ask only whether it has settled people well. This chapter saves the slave, the laborer, the one who lives on capital, and also the hand clutching a mountain of gold, the one locked the tightest of all. It does not save them by bringing anyone down. It saves them by seeing clearly the lock on each person's head and undoing it, one lock at a time. That lock takes culture to warm the person, politics to cut off the power, law to set the rules straight, and productivity to make the pie big, four things undoing it at once. Once the pie is big, what labor earns goes to the individual, and the non-labor share returns to the public. This is the second stroke at the bottom of the pot: drawing out the firewood. What it saves is the floor under your staying alive. Fifteen sections, going down one at a time, and all you have to do is follow along.
Section One does not start from any flag. It starts from a quarrel that has gone on for more than a hundred years: is capitalism better or socialism, is communism right or wrong. This section wants you to stand a little higher and look down. Look first at slavery. Peel off the chains and the whip, and underneath it too pens a crowd of people in, gives them a mouthful of food, and keeps them alive. Its means are vile to the utmost, and it did not vanish, it only changed its skin. Look next at socialism. Distribution according to labor has lived from the lion pride, the ant hill, and humanity's earliest tribes all the way to today, and what it has over slavery is dignity. Confucius said, do not worry that there is too little, worry that it is shared unfairly, and Zhu Xi glossed that fair sharing as each getting his due. Look last at capital. Capital is not evil. It is a tool that gathers scattered money and scattered people together. One big factory carries a whole ring of restaurants, hospitals, banks, and construction crews along with it, and it settles the most people of all. But a tool has no eyes, and which way it goes depends on the hand holding it.
Section Two goes on to the fourth, communism, distribution according to need. Say communism, and how many hearts tighten. This section asks you to put it back into the home and look. When the food is served, it is not divided by who earns the most. The child is growing, so an extra bite goes to the child. The old one's teeth are bad, so the soft food is left for the old one. Distribution according to need catches exactly the people who fall through the holes in the first three nets: babies, the sick, the old, the disabled, the ones who have stumbled for a while. Mencius said, let the people support the living and bury the dead with no regret. With all four looked at, it nails one layer down: underneath, they are the same one thing, settling people, and in four words, to live and work in peace. From now on you hold in your hand a yardstick ten thousand times more useful than any system. Do not ask its name, ask only whether it has settled people well.
Section Three begins the saving, and the first to be saved is the slave, because they are at the very bottom. First it drags the slave out of that old picture of iron chains and whips. Locked, cannot get out, no choice, wrung and used, only enough to hang on: put those five together and you have a slave. Today's new skin comes in three layers: the lock of work-or-starve in the sweatshop, the laborer whose papers are held, and the most decent, hardest to recognize layer of all, the algorithm over the heads of the people running deliveries and driving for the ride apps, sharper than any overseer of the old days. Then it singles out debt. Debt picks out the proper person. Once the mortgage, the credit card, and the online loan are on him, he dares not fall ill, dares not quit, dares not rest, and by day he still has to put on a suit and act as if nothing is wrong. Do not blame the person carrying the debt. The one who wove that net is another pair of hands.
Section Four tells the thing most to be watched for: someone wants to use AI to make a batch of new slaves. Locking up a person used to mean keeping a foreman, and now one algorithm is worth ten thousand of the meanest foremen, and takes not a penny. Darker still, it does not take a whip to you. It flashes you rewards, gives you badges, ranks you on a leaderboard, and packages the wringing of you into a game you get hooked on. But the crime is not AI's. It is the hands holding it. How do you let the slave out? Not by smashing the lock, not by dragging anyone out, but by two of the plainest things. The first is to let him see that lock, so that he turns from blaming himself to seeing the lock clearly, and once the lock shows its shape it is half undone. The second is to give him a place to go. The first chapter said you were let out of the prison called work, the second chapter has the courtyard of the school to catch you, and on top of that there is, for the first time, enough. He will not starve, and so he dares to let go.
Section Five goes up a layer and saves the laborer. The one hauling cement, the one driving, the one farming, the one at the office desk, the one delivering parcels: everyone who exchanges his own effort for a share that keeps his family is a laborer. This section first clears the name of the word labor. The talk of today calls effort-work low-end, and parents teach their children, study hard so you do not end up doing hard labor like your father. Here it insists on saying the opposite: to live by your labor is the most honorable, the cleanest, the most dignified way of living in this world. Every cent in your pocket was earned under the sun, you fear no one's investigating, and you never tormented anyone. Then it breaks the panic open. AI truly has taken over a great deal of work, and here you will not be coaxed. But what you truly fear is that the work is gone and so you cannot live. The source is not AI. It is the old chain that welds staying alive dead fast to having a job. People made that chain, and people can undo it.
Section Six first sets up the plainest fairness: what labor earns goes to the one who labored. A worker creates ten thousand in a month for the factory and takes home three thousand, so where did the other seven thousand go? Capital gathers the money, builds the plant, carries the risk, and should get its share. The boss drawing off two thousand and leaving the worker eight thousand is fair. Drawing off nine thousand five hundred and throwing him five hundred is wringing. The ones destroying this fairness are not the great majority of proper bosses. They are the small clutch who lean on their leverage to wring people half to death. Then it tells the enormous thing: there is, for the first time, enough. Underneath humanity's thousands of years of suffering lies one word, shortage, and the old chain was rooted in shortage. Today grain rots in the silos, new clothes are burned as trash by the ton, things are made cheaper than cabbage. Shortage is gone, and the chain loosens. AI taking over your work turns from a disaster into a liberation. The laborer still labors, and can pick a thing he is glad to do.
Section Seven is a great turn in this chapter. In the two sections before, you went along sympathizing with the bottom and being wary of capital. This section swaps out that picture of the big-bellied capitalist with a cigar in his mouth. Let me ask you: on your card, is there a bit of money saved up by scrimping and pinching? If there is, you are a capitalist. Saving money for interest, buying insurance, paying into a pension, wanting to leave the children something, all of it is using capital. The one running the little convenience store downstairs, the one in your village who contracted the land, the one who took out half a lifetime's savings to open a small factory and settle a few dozen workers, all of them are capitalists, they are you and me and him. Then it lifts off you the shame that came of wanting to save. The squirrel hiding nuts in autumn, the ant storing grain, and the person saving money to protect his home are the same instinct, and it is also a householder's duty. That run of talk that slings mud at saving ends up helping the very hands that wring people.
Section Eight pierces a slogan shouted for a hundred years: bring down the capitalist. Since the capitalist is you and me and him, this arrow flies out and strikes you yourself, your neighbor, your fellow villager. It has truly been done in history. The few who clutched the mountain of gold had long since moved their wealth away, and the ones who fell were proper households guarding a bit of hard-earned store. This book does not walk this road, not half a step. It uses the pen, not the knife. If there are a few bad trees in the forest, you should not set the whole forest alight, you should pick them out one at a time. Then it counts that muddled account. The sweatshop, the net of debt, the people-locking AI all have capital in their hands behind them, and so the whole account was charged to capital. When a knife wounds a person, the one to curse is the hand holding the knife. Take that blame off, and the hand hiding behind the two words capital shows itself, alone: a very, very small clutch.
Section Nine takes you up close to that hand. You have most likely clenched your fist, waiting to see an anti-human monster. Let me stop you first. Come up close and look, and it is a person. In one day he can still eat only three meals, when he sleeps he can still take up only one bed, and that mountain of gold, he can carry none of it into the coffin either. Then why can he still not stop piling it higher? Unwilling to stop is greed. Unable to stop is being locked. Between them lies all the distance of heaven and earth. The lock on his head is called the investor. Let his heart soften, let him earn a little less, and that crowd behind him invites him down at once and swaps in a fiercer one. On the rider's head it is run or you have no food. On the debtor's head it is pay or you are dunned to death. On his head it is wring or you are wiped out. From the base of the tower to its tip, not one person is free.
Section Ten starts from a story. A very rich old woman fell gravely ill. It could have been treated, but she could not bear to spend the money, and guarding a house full of money, she died in pain. A few words rise in your heart: slave to money, miser, fool. But that money was what her long-dead husband had saved up over a whole lifetime and left to her. What she was guarding was not money. It was the last warmth of that person. This story teaches you one skill: in looking at a person, do not stand far off, come up close and look into what lies at the bottom of him. Then it answers the question that has hung all along: what is to be done with that hand? Do not bring him down. As for the practical stakes: bring one down and the lock is still there, and the one swapped in is fiercer; bring down a hundred, and the hundred and first sits down in the seat just the same. As for the root: he too is a locked person, a person to be saved. The ones who raise the two words justice and go beating people with them very often are themselves the next to do evil.
Section Eleven tells how that lock is undone. First it lays its cards on the table: the economy alone cannot undo it. It is like a rope twisted of three strands, one strand money, one strand power, one strand the rules, and loosen only one strand and the other two soon draw it tight again. And this sets up one of the most important great positions in this book: culture, the economy, politics, and law, four institutions completing one another and checking one another, and missing any one, that lock always has a strand that will not come loose. Then it tells the first of them, culture, going to warm that person. A person taught from childhood to be first, that the more money the more of a success, may have been missing the leg of character since childhood, and does not know what would be left of him if he let go. The law and power cannot reach into a person's heart. Only culture can. The strength from outside makes him not dare to wring. Culture makes him not want to wring.
Section Twelve goes on to the two outer strands. Why is that person clutching the mountain of gold so unafraid? Business feeds the official money, and the official uses his power to shield business: that is the collusion of officials and business. The common people go to sue, and sue to the very official who took his money, and the last road to reason it out is blocked dead. The strand of politics bends that hand of the official back to its proper position, managing business on behalf of the public, so that he does not dare to wring; the details are left for the fourth chapter. Then look at the rules. The sweatshop has its contracts, the net of debt has its black-and-white agreements, and wringing people with the algorithm is written in no ban anywhere, because that run of rules was laid down following the lock in the first place. The strand of law does two things: it bends the rules back to protecting people, and, paired with character education, it guides everyone toward keeping himself in check. Of the four strengths, not one goes to bring anyone down. But the innermost strand is still missing.
Section Thirteen starts from the two most sensitive words of all, communism. Here it will not quarrel with you, and will not have you pick a side. First it grants that the heart was good: every person having a way to live, every person having dignity, all under heaven shared, not one person let to fall through by this world. Confucius spoke of the Great Unity, of the old having their end well seen to, the strong having their use, the young having their growth, and the widowed, the orphaned, the lonely, and the disabled all being provided for. The heart of communism and this Great Unity dream are of one lineage, so on no account will this dream be cursed. What was wrong was the road. The old road, laid bare, is one word, grab, and underneath it is trodden a premise: things are not enough. Once you grab, you cannot tell good people from bad, and you grab your way onto the heads of proper people. And even if you level it out, in a blink it is uneven again. Ten people dividing a pie only enough for five go hungry however it is divided. The problem was never in how the pie is divided. It was that the pie was too small.
Section Fourteen is the passage in this chapter where the argument is set the highest. The new road, in one line: do not grab, make the pie big, big enough that no one can finish it. For thousands of years it could not be made big, and today, for the first time, the machines and AI have made it big. This road does not rest on people being made good. It rests on things being many enough. Whether that one clutching the mountain of gold is greedy or not no longer keeps anyone else from eating their fill. But there is still one pass: the big pie falls first into that hand. So one line is nailed down dead: the non-labor share returns to the public. The wages you earned by your effort, the interest that little store of savings breeds, are the labor share, and they go to the individual, not one cent touched. The great share that the machines and AI in a fully automatic factory generate of themselves stands on the skill humanity piled up over thousands of years, and should be the common holding of all under heaven. Returning to the public is not returning to the government or to any office. It is falling into the hands of every real person. Once things are enough, that force of having to earn without end goes slack, and the innermost strand of that lock rots away on its own.
Section Fifteen is the close, looking back over it once. The new skin of slavery was recognized, labor was set straight, capital went back to its place as a tool, the communist dream came true by productivity, and the four each returned to their places. This whole chapter never brought down a single person, never grabbed a cent of a proper person's money. It did only one thing: undo the lock. Then it nails down one line: looking this high and this deep is for coming back down to the ground. A few people clutching mountains of gold say humanity's way out is on Mars. Here that is pierced for you: to send people to a place with no air and no water is not saving people, it is murder. Humanity's heaven is this earth under your feet. Last it points out the root. Things being enough can cure having no choice but to grab. It cannot cure having enough and still wanting to take more, and that rests on character. Productivity gives the chance, and character keeps it. The door is not sealed. It is left drawn to, so this chapter can go on growing.
What this chapter sets up is the yardstick in your hand and the floor under your heart. The economy is one thing only: settle people well. Things are, for the first time, enough, and the old chain welding staying alive to work can be loosened, and you no longer have to do the work you hate through and through for a single mouthful. From saving the slave to undoing the lock, not one person was brought down. But behind that lock there is still a propping hand not yet undone in detail, the strand of power that is the collusion of officials and business. The next chapter, A New Order for Politics, takes you to see that hand clearly and undo it, and to bend the machine of government back into its proper position, hired by the people to protect the people.
Contents of This Chapter
One. The Four Systems, at Bottom, All Settle People (Part One)
Two. The Four Systems, at Bottom, All Settle People (Part Two)
Three. Saving the Slave: Slavery Changed Its Skin, and the Lock Called Debt
Four. Saving the Slave: AI Makes New Slaves, and Letting the Slave Out
Five. Saving the Laborer: To Live by Your Labor Is the Most Honorable Way of All, So Why the Fear
Six. Saving the Laborer: What Labor Earns Goes to the One Who Labored, and There Is Enough
Nine. That Hand Is Not a Monster, There Is a Lock on His Head Too
Ten. The Old Woman Who Died in Pain Guarding Her Money, and Not Bringing Him Down
Eleven. One Lock, Undone by Four Systems at Once, and Culture Goes First to Warm the Person
Twelve. Politics Cuts Off the Hand That Props It Up, and Law Sets the Rules Straight
Thirteen. The Communist Dream Was Good to Begin With, and the Old Road of Grabbing Was Wrong
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
One. The Four Systems, at Bottom, All Settle People (Part One)