It's an interesting angle, and the possibility exists you might be right, however, for the sake of discussion I'm going to push back a bit.
A thriving economy necessitates people produce more than what they need to live. This excess gets exchanged with peers in the economy and most everyone benefits. Rather than straight barter, we use currency as a mediator to allow people who couldn't barter directly to still exchange goods and services. Consider the case of the USSR. During one of their many social programs, they turned all the farmland in the USSR into communal farms and struggled. Eventually, they relaxed restrictions and allowed people to start farming private plots of land where they could keep everything they grew in addition to the communal farms and things went comparatively gang busters. People had more food and suddenly they had more food to exchange on the market than the communal farms produced.
We are inherently social creatures and if people are surrounded by people who don't work, it creates a social climate that praises non-work over work. I.E. the "extra status" from your contributions is a social construct. Status is a social construct and in this case assumes people value workers and will heap status upon them for their contributions. Take an elite athlete who won a championship and drop him in the middle of grandma's sewing club, he'll have 0 status compared to that group's rock star. Status will only be conferred by people who value it and that might not be the case for people who aren't working.
> 6. Because you don't even consider what you're doing work (you were just playing around with maths and theory, and suddenly new discoveries!)
There's a difference between "new discovery" and "valuable new discovery" and turning that into something useful and productive.
A thriving economy necessitates people produce more than what they need to live. This excess gets exchanged with peers in the economy and most everyone benefits. Rather than straight barter, we use currency as a mediator to allow people who couldn't barter directly to still exchange goods and services. Consider the case of the USSR. During one of their many social programs, they turned all the farmland in the USSR into communal farms and struggled. Eventually, they relaxed restrictions and allowed people to start farming private plots of land where they could keep everything they grew in addition to the communal farms and things went comparatively gang busters. People had more food and suddenly they had more food to exchange on the market than the communal farms produced.
We are inherently social creatures and if people are surrounded by people who don't work, it creates a social climate that praises non-work over work. I.E. the "extra status" from your contributions is a social construct. Status is a social construct and in this case assumes people value workers and will heap status upon them for their contributions. Take an elite athlete who won a championship and drop him in the middle of grandma's sewing club, he'll have 0 status compared to that group's rock star. Status will only be conferred by people who value it and that might not be the case for people who aren't working.
> 6. Because you don't even consider what you're doing work (you were just playing around with maths and theory, and suddenly new discoveries!)
There's a difference between "new discovery" and "valuable new discovery" and turning that into something useful and productive.