I've spent 50 years studying profit as an accountant, economist, and political economist. And here's the truth: almost no one understands what profit really is, least of all mainstream economists. In this video, I explain why profit is not just income minus expenses, why external events matter more than you think, and why our government has no concept of capital worth preserving. This isn't just about accounting. It's about building a new system where people and planet come first.
This is the audio version:
This is the transcript:
I've been talking about profit now for 50 years.
I was 17 when I first prepared a profit and loss account for a business, and now, at 67, I've talked about it as an accountant, as an economist, as a political economist, and just as a member of society. And the one thing that I've learned over that quite long career is that most people have not a clue what profit is or how it is measured, or what the concept represents, and as a result, they, and most especially economists, talk complete nonsense about it.
So in this video, what I want to talk about is:
What is profit?
What does it represent?
How do we measure it?
And what happens if we can't agree on what those measures are?
And perhaps most importantly of all, why has the government got no equivalent measure to use in its own accounts, which means it's totally out of control when it comes to economic management? 📍
These are big issues, and we really do need to understand them. So buckle down. This is quite a long and potentially quite a complicated video, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise, but I think you'll find this interesting.
So let's start at the very beginning. What is profit? Most people think it's quite simply the income of any business activity during the course of a period, less its expenses, and that's it. And they could not be more wrong.
So let's say what profit really is. Profit is a measure of the change in the capital employed by a business over time, having taken into consideration any of that capital that has been withdrawn by the business owners or other people with a claim upon it during the course of a period.
I told you it was going to be complicated, and it certainly is, but critically profit does not equate to income minus expenses, because profit is also heavily influenced by not just the internal actions which those things represent, but also the external events that influence any type of organisation from an individual to a government during the course of a period.
So let's define some of those concepts a little more precisely because we need to if we're going to understand where this video is going.
Profit is the increase in capital value of a business or other undertaking over a period of time.
It follows, therefore, that a loss is the decrease in the capital value of a business or other undertaking, which could include a government, over a period of time.
And both of these figures are stated having ignored any money that has been taken out of the business; so money taken by the owner in a very small undertaking, or dividends paid to the investors in a company, or of course, the national income that is consumed by people during the course of a year if we're talking about a government; it is the figure for the change before those are taken into account.
So, in other words, what profit includes are two things. There's the income earned; that is the income, less the expenses, plus the other consequences of changes that reflect the value of the capital of an organisation, however large or small it may be, and both of those measures are between two specific dates - very often a year, but it could be a day, it could be a week, it could be a month, and it could be decades; you can choose.
Now, what that means is there are always two key income statements that have to be considered when we come to understand what the true net income or profit of an enterprise is during the course of a period, and again, I use that term enterprise very loosely to cover any type of undertaking.
One of them is the income that is generated by activity undertaken during the period, that is, the revenue generated less, the expenses incurred, and then there are the gains and losses that have arisen with regard to capital values.
Now, not all of those capital changes result from trading.
Many of them arise because of external events that affect outcomes, and I'm going to explore those in a little more depth in a minute, but the point is, at this moment, that profit is not just the income, less the expenses, profit, if it truly reflects the changing capital value of the enterprise over the period is going to include both these measures, one of which is, broadly speaking, under the control of the reporting entity, the enterprise, whatever you wish to call it, that is the company, individual or state, and the others which aren't. And that point is particularly important, we have an internal measure here, which has an impact upon profit, and an external measure; how the world beyond our boundaries affects our worth.
Now, let's just have a think about those externalities that affect profit.
Some of them are just things we have no control over. Things like the failure of a supplier, or a customer, or perhaps more importantly, of our IT. We have seen this in some recent events. But those, to some extent, are considered to be internal by accounting.
Other events are harder to recognise in that way. In particular, we have the consequence of regulatory change on the future capacity of a company, individual or state to make a profit from an activity.
For example, if we banned all carbon fuel extraction in the future, then instantly and overnight, every single oil and gas company in the world would move from having an enormous value to no value at all. Now, I'm not saying that's necessarily going to happen, but that is an external change which can massively change capital value.
So too, for example, can interest rates.
If an organisation has liabilities which are dependent upon the rate of interest which is going to be payable in the future, then if the interest rate expectations change, so will its capital value. So too, will the cost of financing its pensions change as a result, and the cost of financing pensions in the future, which have arisen as a consequence of work undertaken now, is a cost of the current period. So there are all these externalities which can change the value of a business over which it has almost no control.
But you wouldn't believe that from the way in which economists and others talk about profit. They talk about profit as if it's the result of the genius activity of entrepreneurs, but it isn't. A lot of it comes down to luck, good fortune, and being able to fiddle the calculations on what the future consequences of current actions might be.
And even then, when you've considered that these things arise, you have to decide what is the capital that you're trying to maintain. I talked about the 'changes in capital value', but there isn't one form of capital.
We could, for example, consider the physical capital of an organisation, and a whole basis of accounting, the historic cost convention, is entirely based upon the idea of maintaining the physical capacity of an organisation to carry on producing.
There are some concepts of accounting which look at replacement costs. They're relatively few now, but they do exist.
And more importantly, we now have a whole concept of capital in accounting, established by International Accounting Standards, which seeks to preserve the financial investment in a business. What it focuses upon is the market valuation of an organisation and the maintenance of that value.
But those aren't the only things we could look at.
We could look at the investment in human capital that an organisation has, and we could also look at environmental or sustainable capital, which is something that I've spent quite a lot of time writing about in recent years in my work as a professor of accounting.
All of these things can also get mixed together in one set of accounts, but the important point here is none of them are the same.
So, depending upon what form of capital we choose to prioritise in any form of accounting that we undertake, we can get very different accounting results, and that's before we take into account the impact of all the externalities of which we have no control when we're looking at any of these systems.
As a consequence, what is profit? You tell me to a certain degree.
But then there's another issue, and I have to mention this one because, again, it's really important.
The accounting concept of profit and the economists' concept a profit are virtually irreconcilable.
For accounting, we look backwards to see what has happened during the course of a period to understand the income generated. That is the first half of this equation in the movement of capital. So we look at income less expenses.
But economics doesn't do anything like that. Economics is a solely forward-looking measure of capital when it comes to determining value at the end of a period, which it then compares with the value of the enterprise at the end of the previous period to determine what profit might be.
So economics just looks at how much cash flow might be generated in the future as a consequence of actions that have already taken place and tries to determine what the current worth of those is, to do which it undertakes something called discounting. But discounting requires that the value of future transactions be literally reduced or discounted by a set interest rate over a period of time, so we can value them at present.
But what is that interest rate? Who knows?
The point is that, actually, both are fundamentally different measures. Accountants and economists might as well be talking different languages when it comes to profits. Accounting lacks consistency, but economics is based entirely upon assumptions about the future, and the result is two irreconcilable languages, which have enough common to confuse the world.
And then we move on to government accounting, and here things get even worse, because there is no capital maintenance concept of any sort whatsoever in any approved form of government accounting the world over at present. In other words. If we are saying income for a period is a change in the value of the capital of a country over a period of time, having taken into consideration what was consumed by the people in that country during the course of a period, there is no such measure of capital available to any country to work out whether that equation is a good result, or a bad result. And that's because there is quite literally no balance sheet required in any of the standard forms of accounting established for governments, the main one of which was established by the United Nations in 2008 and then adopted by the International Monetary Fund and the EU and is the one that we use in the UK still.
Therefore, no one knows what change in value is being reported by government accounting. In effect, the future is entirely ignored in that system of accounting. It's just all about cash. It doesn't even properly match income and expenses.
So the government isn't considering physical capital.
It isn't considering financial capital.
It isn't considering our environmental goals.
It doesn't have any priority with regard to human capital and its development or potential.
No. It's just talking about cash flow.
And as a consequence, it has almost useless information on which to manage our economy. You could not have come up with a worse system of government accounting if you tried, except they did, and that's what they came up with.
And so we are now talking about a system where, for businesses profits are inherently uncertain because of the methods of accounting that we use; future assumptions can shape profit expectations considerably and, therefore, allow for manipulation of the reporting of current results; discount rates or interest rates have a massive impact upon current values of many businesses, and there is no way to verify predictions made, and profit is, as a consequence, whatever you wish it to be unless we begin to think about something else.
Suppose we don't talk about profit maximisation, and suppose we adopt just one capital maintenance concept, and suppose that capital maintenance concept that we adopt is one that puts people and planet at the core of capital maintenance, because if you were a politician, isn't that what you would do? Wouldn't you put the maintenance and protection of the people within your country, and even the protection of that country itself, at the core of your political thinking?
Suppose we just talked about maintenance and not growth, and we tried to work out whether we were actually achieving that goal or not, and we were, to use an accounting phrase, 'prudent' with regard to our assumptions; in other words, we didn't overstate our expectations for the future, but were entirely reasonable, only making assumptions that we can prove to be fair.
If we did that, first of all, we'd stop talking about profit maximisation in a world where that is not understood and where it may not even be possible.
But we'd also be talking about how we consider the consequence of externalities and the impact they have on well-being in a totally different way from what we do now, and government would be forced to look at that.
We would embrace the uncertainty of the externalities and of our future as a consequence, and try to come up with sensible ways in which we can manage them, whereas at the present point of time, we actually quite literally try to discount them by pretending the future consequences of current actions reduce significantly over time, to the point where we can ignore them, which is why we've ended up with the climate crisis, for example.
And so if we were to put the protection of people and planet at the epicentre of our thinking and used it as the capital maintenance concept when measuring profit, then, and only then, would we have a goal which had a social purpose for both micro and macroeconomic accounting.
But as it stands, that isn't the case. As it stands at present, we have this supposed claim that we must maximise profit, which actually equates to wealth accumulation by proxy, and we've seen all the consequences of that with regard to inequality and everything else.
This concept, which is talked about by economists, is in fact so vague that it is socially useless and at the same time totally socially powerful.
And of course, it is that mythology which has served the interests of an elite. This idea supports unjustified enrichment, and yet simultaneously, it of course supports exploitation of people and planet, and there is no theory or measure that we have inside the current systems of operation of capital maintenance that lets us challenge that satisfactorily.
So this is not real economics as it stands.
We aren't defining issues properly.
We're talking about profit maximisation as if it is a concept when it is, at best, an ideology, and it is certainly not one that has ever been agreed upon by all the people who engage in the activity of measuring profit.
It ignores externalities.
It pretends value can be owned where much of it is beyond control, and it reduces life to a largely meaningless number as theory stands at present.
So profit as a human construct is a very poor one. It depends upon a chosen capital concept, and almost nobody seems to understand that fact, and many of those who do will choose one that represents their own goal and not the greater good.
The system's true aim, then, at present, would appear to be the justification for avarice, but we actually could create a capital maintenance concept with real meaning, putting people and planet at its centre, and then we could have a system of proper economic management, and that is my goal.
This has been a complicated video. I'm aware of that.
I said it at the outset, I'll say it again now because I'm not pretending otherwise. It took quite a lot of thinking to put it together.
So we've created a poll. There are multiple questions in this poll, and you are allowed to provide multiple answers because it's a complex issue and we're fundamentally asking four things.
Was this useful? Do you want me to explore the issues in more depth? Do you agree people and planet should be the priority of our capital maintenance concept? And if it was, could accounting save us?
Those are big questions. I'm really interested in your opinions.
Poll
What do you think (multiple answers permitted)?
- Do you agree people and planet should be at the centre of accounting? (31%, 178 Votes)
- Should I explore these issues in more depth? (26%, 146 Votes)
- Was this video useful? (25%, 141 Votes)
- Could accounting help save us if that was the case? (19%, 106 Votes)
Total Voters: 201
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I have run a roofing business for 22yrs and we employ 16 people.I now am winding down and work 3 days a week so I can spend more time in the gym, doing pilates and playing golf. I know what I pay my staff, what materials cost and what I charge my customers. I have a good handle on profit thats why we have remained in business so long. I employ an accountant so I abide my the rules and tax the right tax. She deals with it efficiently and relatively hassle free. It runs smoothly. The difficulty is getting in the work at the right price not theoretical mumbo jumbo. if I spent all my time thinking like this then nobody would do any real work.
I have run a roofing business for 22yrs and we employ 16 people.I now am winding down and work 3 days a week so I can spend more time in the gym, doing pilates and playing golf. I know what I pay my staff, what materials cost and what I charge my customers. I have a good handle on profit thats why we have remained in business so long. I employ an accountant so I abide my the rules and pay the right tax. She deals with it efficiently and relatively hassle free. It runs smoothly. The difficulty is getting in the work at the right price not theoretical mumbo jumbo. if I spent all my time thinking like this then nobody would do any real work.
Respect to you Peter ref your business. You are unfair on the mumbo-jumbo comment. Certainly in the case of govs’ there is a wholesale failure to measure (& thus account for) capital assets. If you saw my comment below – I know two other economists (both macro) and both agree with Richard on this. Relevant to you? A well functioning gov’ means that you are able to run a well functioning business. That you have done so despite the nonesense of the past 15 years is even more credit to you & zero to the political numpties pretending to run the country. Complex things countries – particularly with respect to assets, money flows etc. There are no simple explanations & any one giving one should be regarded with caution.
Thanks Mike
Very interesting, though I’m not sure I fully grasp it all. To me this sounds like an idea that might be very important to fill some of the gaps in Doughnut Economics, which I think does a good job of framing the big picture political ideas for a sustainable society, but I’ve not yet seen it work on the more precise accounting side of things. I’d be curious to know if you think these ideas could work together.
Donut nis interesting – but misses, in my opinion, a great deal of necessary macro and micro theoryu and explanation. I am not saying in any way it is wrong – I like it. But building complementary ideas is good.
Interesting and useful. Thank you… and I think further exploration would be a good idea.
I know you have come at the water industry from this angle already… but an explicit “accounting take” that looks at companies balance sheets (and government balance sheets) that put a value on clean water (in rivers/lakes/seas as well as taps) and why, despite their published accounts looking rosy that they are, in fact, not great…. or if they are, it is at the expense of government (ie. us) who ultimately carry the can for environmental degradation.
PS I found I could only vote for 1 out of 4 possibilities in the poll
I have corrected that, and thank you.
There has always been this thing about ‘ don’t sweat the small stuff’ – but really it is accounting that should be looking at the small stuff because the big stuff is made up of the small stuff so to speak. And that is how – by ignoring the small stuff – you end up with the world we have now where certain things that are losses are totally ignored much to our detriment.
These losses are discriminated against in order to focus on a very narrow band of what is called ‘profit’ (or success).
I ticked all the boxes in the vote.
My concern is accounting never looks at the big stuff.
As you said, it’s complicated.
I see it as all joined up myself – I always saw (resource) accounting as a sort of full, honest impact statement on economic activity that (1) accounted well for what was actually happening and (2) was reflected in any summary/accounts/ annual report.
These are not mutually exclusive.
You ask
‘what is profit? You tell me to a certain degree.’
From personal experience
Son v Dad
They buy for a £1 & sell for £2
Son sees their money doubled
claims 100% profit
(ROI: profit/cost)
invests £2 in wine, women & …
nurses hangover
Dad sees 50% profit
(margin: profit/revenue)
enjoys a Havana
plots his next cigar
text book says
BOTH RIGHT
burn text book ?
I think you completely miss the point of what I was saying.
The contribution of ‘Peter. the roofing business man’ appears twice
He posted it twice.
Very fine blog, gets to the heart of the matter.
I know three economists (you & two others). The two others both agree with this blog & have raised some of the issues with me:
“because there is no capital maintenance concept of any sort whatsoever in any approved form of government accounting the world over at present. In other words”
They used different words – but same point.
& agree ref flow-based accounting (“No. It’s just talking about cash flow”). They regard governments as bonkers in the way capital is treated. I mention this to show that you are by no means alone in your analysis. I could move into how renewables are developed and the erm “business models” used. Perhaps for another blog. Working with an economist (macro) gives one a wholly diff view of the world – we both gain from the experience.
Thanks Mike
I intend to elaborate this a bit: it is core to my political thinking.
The First Rule of Economics:
For every economist with a theory there exists another economist with the exact opposite theory.
The Second Rule of Economics:
They’re both wrong.
None of us have the whole truth but we might all get closer if we start listening to each other’s truths a bit more.
Sorry, but that’s nonsense.
Not all of economics is wrong.
Please do not post nonsense or I will have to block you. This is your second warning of late. I have not got time to waste on this. Yiubare wasting other reader’s time with this.
Superb essay, thank you.
The externalities that are considered as nothing by economists or accountants are what are finally catching up with us.
Hence the need for a new economics.
Environmental devastation is importantly but energy availability is even more important than that.
I urge you to get in touch with Tim Watkins. You may already have. I do t think he lives that far from you.
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/
My takeaway from this is don’t sweat your assets; companies that ignore their capital assets fail or struggle. Country’s that do the same have broken water systems, railways, dilapidated housing stock etc.
I wonder if we could learn from Sharia and Judaism and create an enforceable set of ethical accounting rules…limit rent seeking for a start
I very much agree with the need to take a longer term view. I’d be interested to know what you think of this – written in 2018 0 balanced scorecard for a country as a way of looking at outcomes in the round and concentrating on direction of travel rather than instant results
https://brianfishhope.com/vision/good-characteristics?start=4
I will try to read that.
I will be returning to this issue – and will seeking to explore how we can build sustainable measures of worthwhile capital.
Please do!
Imho, most if not all so-called ‘ethical finance’, ESG reporting, triple bottom lines and the like is so much smoke and mirrors; and fails to address real capital and value: human, natural, social…
I think the Well being Economy people do something on this, but it will definitely benefit from rigorous accounting methodologies.
Always boggling that erosion of capital is an allowance against taxable profit but preservation of capital (repair etc) is also a cost against taxable profit.
Obviously no such conflict if capital maintenance is the measurement.
Do we get there as a concept of Wealth Tax? Enterprise/Person nominally owns resources while they are able to add value sufficient to cover the tax requirements to preserve the environment and people associated with the resources.
I confess I really am not following any of that, and I know a great deal about tax. Might you try again?
When a business buys an asset the depreciation is allowed as cost to reduce corporation tax liability.
This is the same rule if the businesses appreciates the asset (your Capital Maintenance) through repair.
This makes no sense in accounting terms as I understand it
My query is around a Wealth Tax and having read your views I would appreciate any thoughts you had on
If an enterprise has ownership or control of a resource then there’s an immediate tax charge (on this wealth) that the enterprise has pay by earning through adding value (as profit is defined) above.
If the business fails to earn the tax charge (sufficient for all Capital Maintenance) the resource is surrendered.
If successful then any surplus is the enterprises all taxes paid until disposal of the resource.
I am not surprised you do not understand.
First, depreciation is not tax allowable (caotial allowances are).
And repairs are not about asset appreciation: if they are, they are not repairs.
I think you need to do more research.
And I am sorry, but your wealth makes no sense either, to me. You are again confusing too many issues.
Thank you.
I repair my van it’s a business expense. Before repair it’s scrap value after it’s ‘blue book’ value. Appreciation if I own it ?
But if I buy a new van it’s possible to run it it into the ground and the whole capital value goes to scrap in five years. Discourages Capital Maintenance (repair) simple as the system is coded for capital erosion.
Repair (if the balance sheet adjusts up) then it’s capital allowance in part adds to the wider economy. I’ve spent £1000 to add £3000 (figurative example). Lot of faffing about (system not coded for Capital Maintenance) that might be flagged as fraud.
Wealth tax situation scenario I summarised is a version of a linking Capital Maintenance to single tax system (Geoism).
But it’s still a repair – not there’s anything wrong with that
This is a total waste of time on a red herring
Great point about maintenance. I totally agree that we should try to consolidate rather than expand.
Neoclassical economics as a field is clearly intellectually and morally bankrupt and any replacement must offer a more human interpretation of “profit”, one that moves beyond numbers and instead considers people.
As a side point: neoclassical economics views maximum profit as occurring at the point where marginal cost equals marginal revenue but real businesses set the price empirically, by observing how profit varies with output rates[1], which means that economists will always over-estimate the potential level of profit. A corollary of this is that government economists will insist the public services are “inefficient” because they have to operate just as real businesses do, which is used to justify the “defund, degrade, privatise” paradigm observed by Chomsky.
[1] See the addendum of chapter 4 of Steve Keen’s excellent “Debunking Economics” for more on this.
I switched to video for this, hoping for some graphics, and reading a few comments found myself not alone in needing to watch again! Back here to vote as my old tablet is not showing me everything on YouTube – links to polls etc. Voted for more – we must get the ‘externalities’ internalised, that’s people and resources.
Thanks.
I accept this one could have been done in more depth.
I may well do it again, but in different ways.
Excellent post that deserves repeating; video should be compulsory viewing for HM Treasury staff. If I may add.
Part of the embracing of ‘the uncertainty of the externalities’ needs to involve rigorously applied environmental regulation (Today, it’s abysmal). Because our man-made (Built) environment displaces so much of the natural environment, which otherwise would have a fabric of pristine, complex, self-regulating ecosystems. Environmental regulation can be seen as crude but an essential substitute for the ecosystems displaced (Another reason for seeking to maximise ecological presence within our modern human settlements, eg. Green Infrastructure). What the vogue for focussing on Natural Capital seemed to miss was the essentiality of attendant environmental regulation.
The dire condition of our rivers is a consequence of drastically weak environmental regulation in the absence of essential, sophisticated hydrological catchment management, (any prospect for which has been kicked into the 2040s due to Brexit), which will not be adequately addressed by Water companies’ ‘profit’ orientated investment plans. Which instead should be centred on delivering ‘public goods’ (Hence, nationalisation rationale).
Getting to grips with and accounting for the ‘externalities’ is essential to refocus our nation on well-being and futurity (sustainability), ie. ‘putting people and planet’ front and centre; all part of the more sophisticated management we need.
From a retired environmental regulator & deliverer of ‘public goods’.
I am working on another academic paper on this issue now.
Very interesting and food for thought. I’ve always tried to think of profit in the sense of adding value to things by changing them in some way. Begs the question of what is meant by ‘value’. Difficult enough if you can measure everything in money terms, but even harder when you try to put a value on intangibles such as well-being. Unless value is added, business and society in general cannot succeed. How you measure this added value needs to change. I’m not too optimistic because I read into it about 40 years ago and not much has really changed since that time.
It has not changed becaiuse neoliberalism has made sure it has not – and that is what has to change. I have faced challenges before. They can be overcome.
The Parable of the Kingdom’s Keepers
There was once a prosperous kingdom ruled by a wise but cautious Council. Every year, the Council met to decide how much gold would be spent from the royal treasury. They relied on their trusted Steward, a generalist of great eloquence, to advise them. He understood diplomacy, political winds, and the mood of the people — but not the ledgers.
In the cellars below the palace, there lived the Accountant, a quiet but diligent keeper of the kingdom’s Books of Worth. These ancient ledgers recorded not just the coins in the treasury, but also the condition of the roads, the health of the forests, the learning of the children, and the dreams of future generations. He tracked the kingdom’s true wealth — the kind that grows, or crumbles, over time.
Each year, the Steward would descend briefly to the cellar and ask, “How much gold is left?”
The Accountant would try to speak of more: the bridges nearing collapse, the fields turning to dust, the knowledge lost from neglected schools.
But the Steward would wave his hand. “I only need the gold number. The Council meets at noon.”
So the Council would set its budget based on what coins lay visible in the treasury. Grand halls were built. Banquets held. The kingdom appeared well-managed. But slowly, unseen, the timbers of the realm weakened.
One year, a storm came. The old dam, unrepaired for lack of gold, burst. The farmlands flooded. Grain stores were lost. No money had been spent on drainage because it did not “fit the budget.” The Council was shocked. “Why were we not warned?”
The Accountant, emerging from the cellar with soaked ledgers, replied softly,
“I wrote it all down. But you never asked to read the whole book.”
Thanks
There is the (in)famous definition of an accountant as one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
I am happy and relieved to discover this is not true of all accountants.
When political expediency demands that money is not spent on repair and maintenance of vital infrastructure (roads, schools, hospitals etc) where are the accountants, with the honourable exception of RJM, who will tell the government they are idiots?
Sitting with their heads down hoping to keep their jobs, knowing AI would not say that.
Thank you. This really cheered me up. There are parts I will need to revisit in order to fully comprehend but that signifies the fact that it is truly covering the real complexities informing a fair and just governance. At first reading, one question that arose was what is work ? How would we define the concept of work in a collective society once the damaging myth of its singular definition as commodification for cash flow is jettisoned ? Any new definition would only result from a collective epiphany of the mutual recognition of our diverse planet and human worth. If that ever occurred perhaps the celebration of the concept of truly being of service would replace the present day celebration of work that successfully accumulates personal individual wealth off the backs of others and our planet.
Somehow your comment has got missed. Apologies. And I am not sure I was suggesting a collective society per se.
Thanks Richard.
Perhaps not directly but any economy rooted in fairness would act to help cohere our current social atomisation.
Agreed
Richard
I couldn’t vote because the poll had already been voted on though not by me or anyone using my Ipad. I’ve noticed before that sometimes when I want to “heart” a comment, the number goes down and not up, so I have to do it again to maintain the number. This is an observation, not a complaint, but I thought you might be interested, though probably nothing you can do about it. I usually read your blog the afternoon after you post the day before, so maybe that has something to do with it. KUTGW.
Someone must be using the same URL as you, I know not how. That is how that happens.