Universal public services - the power of decommodifying survival

Summary

Economic anthropologist Jason Hickel argues that capitalism keeps essentials like housing and healthcare artificially scarce, so people must work more, and economies grow, “simply to access things that clearly are needed”. His answer is to decommodify “the means of everyday survival” and add a public job guarantee, which together would “de-link human well-being from growth”.

Rationale

Manufactured scarcity matters to us too, for a reason he doesn’t give: what’s built into how people survive shapes what they come to take for granted.