Stephen Yearwood
1 min readAug 3, 2024

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Thanks for an increasingly rare thing in Medium, a serious article on a serious topic. Needless to say, there is a vast amount of food for thought there. The biggest question, always, is how analysis can be translated into the governance of society. I hope you might find the following of some interest.

Warren J. Samuels ["Welfare Economics, Property, and Power" in Perspectives of Property (Gene Wunderlich and W. L. Gibson, eds.: 1972)] analyzed "social power" as the ability to effect choices. His approach does neatly amalgamate the resources various systems contribute to power (expressed in that way).

Samuels concentrated on the process of effecting choices itself. It has occurred to me that his analysis gives rise to an ethic for governing the governance of society that is wholly located within material existence: since human beings have no choice but to effect choices, that makes choosing integral to being human; we must respect one another's capacity to choose to recognize one another as fellow humans (at a minimum, refraining from killing, harming, coercing, stealing, or--notably--manipulating). To act otherwise is to make a materially unsustainable assertion regarding the other being(s) involved, whether their humanness itself or some supposed hierarchical status. The place of effecting choices in human existence creates a straightforward framework for determining the ethical structure and functioning of the political process (the process of effecting choices for the community as a whole) and the economy (the process of producing/acquiring goods/services--which is nothing but choices being effected).

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Stephen Yearwood
Stephen Yearwood

Written by Stephen Yearwood

M.A. in political economy (money/distributive justice) "Please don't confront me with my failures/ I'm aware of them" from "These Days," as sung by Gregg Allman

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