I'm sick of justifying ethical behavior in terms of profit. We use phrases like "adding alt-text brings more customers to your site" or "protected bike lanes increase revenue for local businesses."
You should add alt-text descriptions to images because it helps people.
We need to build bike lanes because it makes cities safer and more accessible.
Reduce carbon emissions because it's the right thing to do! Discussing these things in purely economic terms misses the point.
“Discussing these things in purely economic terms misses the point.”
… and it accepts the framing that economic value is the only or ultimate judgement of value. We’ll make better progress in society when we insist on our own values and framing.
@DavidM_yeg @docpop This. I just can't stand the fact that economic value has become the only value for so many people and governments.
My breaking point was Covid. Protecting lives was not good for the economy, so societies collectively decided to cancel the pandemic because it was not good for the economy.
It’s not new really: it’s a worldview that is at the heart of neoliberalism and fascism and authoritarianism. It says you don’t have value unless you create wealth for someone. At its core they all say you need to *earn* the right to exist, with all the awfulness that follows from that. It’s implied in the conservative led shift from ‘citizen’ to ‘taxpayer’.
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It’s why housing first and safe supply are so controversial, it’s how welfare became a bad word, it’s why disability and senior supports are so miserly, it’s why we only pay lip service to human rights when bombs land on the wrong people; because they need to *earn* the right to exist.
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We need to lead a society level sea change that rejects that framing - any framing that requires a person to earn their life - and replaces it with a framing that insists that every person is infinitely and uniquely valuable, that human rights are actually for all humans, that every single person has the right to a dignified existence independent of their utility.
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Doctor M. Popular
David Mitchell 
David 