The Relationship Between Death and Life in the Social Sciences

The Relationship Between Death and Life in the Social Sciences

A young Spanish writer and philosopher named Roberto Calvo Macias once wrote to me, saying that it is difficult to create a cogent economic philosophy without taking into consideration the (tragic?) reality that humans are mortal. This is a fascinating realization. It's not that we avoid death when it comes to business affairs. What are life insurance policies, annuities, and estate laws, but how can one deal with the Great Harvester? However, this is undoubtedly just a cursory examination of the issue.
We learned during the industrial revolution that people were unnecessary. The production process was simplified into tiny functional units that could be learned by anyone in a matter of minutes. It only took the most fundamental abilities to get through this learning curve. So long as people continued to breed, there would always be an endless supply. People become completely interchangeable and replaceable (and, in the process, alienated). The industrial worker is portrayed in period motion pictures (Metropolis, Modern Times) as a nut in a machine, driven to the brink of insanity by the monotony of his task.

This perspective on human resources, however, is quickly disappearing in wealthy Western nations. The primary value added is information; training periods have increased, and expert knowledge has supplanted earlier knowledge. Education requires a substantial investment in human capital. They are no longer a cheap source of information.A revolution in economic relations resulted from this discovery. Strangely, the first totalitarian governments to emphasize the role of the human factor in the entire set of means of production were those that practiced inhumanity, such as fascism and communism. Almost all modern economic systems have expanded the definition of scarcity to include human resources.
Every resource is in short supply. The study of economy is trade-offs: sacrificing one resource to obtain more of another. The first thing that economics students come upon is the idea of "opportunity cost." Natural endowments were included in the category of scarce resources in the traditional method. People hardly thought of humans as just another natural resource. It is now. The population's size, life expectancy, standard of living, health, level of education, and income are all significant factors.
Economics is the area of psychology that studies patterns of behavior and thought processes related to material wealth, as well as the access to and possibilities for obtaining it, as well as the mechanisms and processes that underlie its acquisition. This particular branch of the human sciences developed a "mathematical" aspect because financial riches can be expressed statistically, which sets it apart from other parts of the field. Because of this, it is extremely unexpected that the topic of mortality—which is what makes human resources scarce—has received such little academic attention.
The legal community has a positive fixation on death. For this reason, economic activity is confined to distinct legal organizations. A company's founders are humans, but the business is eternal. Because they survive the individual and have an independent existence, final wishes, formal testaments, estates, and inheritances are powerful ideas. On the other hand, economic theories typically make the assumption that people are eternal and that the scope of their economic endeavors and the legal institutions that represent them is limitless. This is somewhat supported by the way people behave and by looking at the social structures they create. Even in their advanced years, people continue to participate in lengthy activities. Not one 80-year-old inventor who has outlived his usefulness in the world will forfeit his income due to impending death. This is valid even in the event that he is childless. Even if a businessman has enough money to last two lives, he will nevertheless continue to accumulate riches. No consumer will give up just because he has all he requires to live a healthy life. The reason the life expectancy horizon is unsuccessful is that we all reject the possibility of dying. We all possess an incredibly powerful denial system that causes us to deny the reality that we will eventually pass away and that many of the things we do, try to do, fight for, and pursue seem completely absurd when viewed from this perspective. Therefore, economy is long-term and unlimited in scale, mimicking and reflecting human protective systems.
As Mr. Calvo Macias observed, it is surprising to learn that an organization's dynamic nature increases with its temporal finiteness. Organizations that claim to believe in immortality or the afterlife are procedurally inflexible, ossified, and frozen. States are also characterized by this. These entities and their institutions were more morbidly paralyzed the longer their past and the longer their anticipated future (the Reich of a Thousand Years) were. When dynamism is combined with revolt, it is strongly linked to both the sense of finiteness and mortality. The rebel refuses to acknowledge his own impending death. He retaliates by becoming dynamic, that is, by creating something new. Along the lines of mortal terror, creation and death engage in combat.
As a result, we can identify two categories of participants in the economy: those who embrace death and those who do not. The primary motivators of the first type are dread and anxiety, whereas the second is typified by ingrained denial and false confidence.
When old age sets in, those who are conscious of their own mortality show a decline in their economic activities. The more recent their income, the more significance they tend to give it. They give future revenue a low priority and give it very little weight. As they get older, they have a tendency to think short-term, and as they get closer to the end of their life, they avoid all forms of economic activity, except trading, speculating, arbitrage, brokering, and financial asset investments. With time, they get less risk adverse.
Even in old age, those who reject the creeping end exhibit an emotional connection to riches and its accumulation. They do assign some weight to income, but they do so in proportion to its predicted maturity (the more futuristic the income, the less weight it carries). Discounting Dividends Stock valuation models factor in an infinite stream of future dividends, discount it, and then add the total to determine a stock's current price. The current price of stocks on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is 18 times the price to earnings, or p/e. Assuming a 35% average tax rate on capital gains and dividends, an individual will need to wait 28 years to recover their investment. The effective multiple is really 60 and above when risk-free income (the interest payments the individual could have earned had he invested the money in Treasury Bonds) is taken into account. Investors are prepared to wait at least sixty years to get their money back plus a respectable return. This is the ultimate denial of life's finiteness.
There is disagreement between these two types. They provide the foundation of market economies as we know them today as they go about their business. Gamers are buying stocks, investing in projects, trading risks, and speculating—all of which are predicated on a secret philosophy of life and death. When we do, we exchange something with each other: our own mortality.
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