The problem is though modernity is expensive, increasingly so with the erosion of moral capital and with automation. How we reduce costs and deal with the real economy is a huge challenge

Correct. One of the reasons why modernity is so expensive is because of laws that mandate equality of hiring and universal suffrage. These laws have been tested repeatedly and found severely wanting. All they do is flood the market with women and push men out. That is a big part of the reason why the idea of the man as the sole breadwinner has all but disappeared.

The other major factor is of course the severe debasement of the currency, but that's another story.

Just take a look at the Roman law and later the Justinian code. In civil law there are 3 pilliars: identity, obligations (i.e. written and written contracts and the obligation therefrom) and succession (i.e. death and how to split the property)
I remember the obligations courses (they were split between written and unrwitten) at law school and found them facisnating.

For a real life appraisal of what happens when you tamper and screw with contracts
take a look at this twitter feed twitter.com/BaldingsWorld

Chicoms are a case study of why (a) communism is an absymal failure
(b) whho to utterly wreck socity with you screw and tamper with contracts both written and unwritten and the obligations therefrom

xavier

Its also not a good option

There is also distributism , basically shifting incentives to encourage working and middle class hiring of locals as the best option but no one has tried it as the elite hate that sort of thing.

That said any future economic case will require regulation. The kind of libertarian thinking that suggest we can trust any corporation or that we could live safely without things like the Pure Food and Drug act is dangerous nonsense

The natural logic of incentives in a profit driven system is to cheat so you need to deal with that via regulation

The problem is though modernity is expensive, increasingly so with the erosion of moral capital and with automation. How we reduce costs and deal with the real economy is a huge challenge

Its nice though to see folks like Vox actually putting their minds to the issue. Change starts with ideas and boy howdy have we been lacking ideas since as Keynes put it

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”