I agree with your assessment of a lack of rigor in the Aeon article, I'll reserve judgment on the topic until I can peruse the book (which presumably takes the time to build a foundation for some of the claims made in the article).
That said, the central notion of Distributism is property ownership, and that it was one of the philosophy's of the founding fathers for the US that property ownership, and property ownership rights, were fundamental to preserving the independence of the individual. (here is an article attributed to Madison [http://www.vindicatingthefounders.com/library/madison-proper...] but this topic comes up often in the Federalist Papers)
The challenge of course is that most of this thinking was done in the 'goods' economy and not in the 'information' economy. Using distributism to illustrate a topic that is often robustly debated here, consider the computer programmer who writes a program on his computer. The fruit of his property (the program) is just as much his property in the founding father's view as is the corn from a farmer's field. And yet this "property of the mind" or intellectual property is often criticized as being a fiction created in order to support rent seeking practices. The for argument starts from the notion of property, the against argument starts from the notion that information has no intrinsic value.
Turning this around yet a third way, and why I believe that Dr. Livingston is incorrect in his conclusions, when you invalidate or work around legal restrictions on profiting from ones property (as AirBnB and Uber have done), you see a rapid uptick in GDP from works using their property for additional income.
While I find Livingston's observations compelling, my interpretation is more along with Piketty's in that the regulation of labor in favor of structures which are more rent seeking creates artificial barriers to entry. And work ethic or not, most people work, it seems, in order to trade their skills for a currency that lets them trade back for other needs where they lack the skill or the time to procure.
Either way, its a complex topic and if you're really interested in the topic spend some time on Google's newspaper archives (https://news.google.com/newspapers) and browse stories written during the great depression about how the world was doomed and people would never work again because of the permanent displacement of labor.
That said, the central notion of Distributism is property ownership, and that it was one of the philosophy's of the founding fathers for the US that property ownership, and property ownership rights, were fundamental to preserving the independence of the individual. (here is an article attributed to Madison [http://www.vindicatingthefounders.com/library/madison-proper...] but this topic comes up often in the Federalist Papers)
The challenge of course is that most of this thinking was done in the 'goods' economy and not in the 'information' economy. Using distributism to illustrate a topic that is often robustly debated here, consider the computer programmer who writes a program on his computer. The fruit of his property (the program) is just as much his property in the founding father's view as is the corn from a farmer's field. And yet this "property of the mind" or intellectual property is often criticized as being a fiction created in order to support rent seeking practices. The for argument starts from the notion of property, the against argument starts from the notion that information has no intrinsic value.
Turning this around yet a third way, and why I believe that Dr. Livingston is incorrect in his conclusions, when you invalidate or work around legal restrictions on profiting from ones property (as AirBnB and Uber have done), you see a rapid uptick in GDP from works using their property for additional income.
While I find Livingston's observations compelling, my interpretation is more along with Piketty's in that the regulation of labor in favor of structures which are more rent seeking creates artificial barriers to entry. And work ethic or not, most people work, it seems, in order to trade their skills for a currency that lets them trade back for other needs where they lack the skill or the time to procure.
Either way, its a complex topic and if you're really interested in the topic spend some time on Google's newspaper archives (https://news.google.com/newspapers) and browse stories written during the great depression about how the world was doomed and people would never work again because of the permanent displacement of labor.