One of the biggest views I see in my parents and grandparents: work provides purpose and dignity, and without work, you have no purpose, and therefore, you are a failure. This is really hard to respond to, especially with people who have spent 50 years working with this mindset, because they feel "invalidated" or "worthless" if their life's worth isn't measured by their work output.
I don't think that's necessarily a "bad" world view to have, especially if it pushes you to provide some social good that you wouldn't if you thought it was OK to be lazy. But I think it's harmful to impose that view on others. If you have no choice but to work or be discarded, then, when the value you can provide via work is less than that required to maintain your life, you have no choice but to attempt to indenture yourself. And failing that, you're truly, completely fucked. The purpose of entitlements ought to be (though currently aren't) to provide reassurance against a requirement to sell yourself to survive. And I truly believe, if we don't correct this failing of entitlements, then we will see mass indentured servitude (though it won't be called that), in developed countries, in my lifetime, of citizens of said country. Currently, we already see mass indentured servitude, but we say it's not that big a deal because
[1] The indentured are immigrants
[2] The indentured are in un-developed countries
[3] The indentured are "ghetto", "whore", or "gangster", which is seen as pretty equivalent to [2]
Well if your grandparents hadn't worked their asses off, you would live in a very different world right now. It's easy to say now that you are in a comfortable place where you can afford everything for almost nothing, but it was a very different world back then. Let's not forget that. And even now, you can afford things because people in China and other countries are working their asses off to make cheap stuff for developed countries. You don't get a first world country economy without hard work somewhere by someone.
But there's little to no positive connection between who does the hard work and who gets rewarded for it.
Nobody in China nor other country is working their ass off to make cheap stuff for developed countries. They're working their asses off to feed themselves and their families. The effort: very high. The value: not so much for them.
I get what you're saying, but covering the effort in valor and moral superiority as opposed to the value realized from that effort just seems to be a way to separate the worker from the fruits of their labor.
I think pessimizer was saying that the relative return to the labour at the bottom end is low.
It is like (to be hyperbolic) living a life of luxury, but on giving the starving man who labours for you a bit of food, suggesting that that is ample reward for his efforts, because of how much value that bit of food has for him. Then, you can top that off by saying that it doesn't matter how much food he produces for you, it isn't of much value because you have so much already.
People reject the labour theory of value, probably correctly in fundamental terms, but the marginal and subjective theories of value both seem to promote (and justify) this kind of structural inequality.
An example from the relatively recent NPR Planet Money t-shirt project [0] suggests that for that product just under 12% of the cost (6% of the sale price) went to the people who made the yarn, cut the cloth, and sewed it all together.
> just under 12% of the cost (6% of the sale price) went to the people who made the yarn, cut the cloth, and sewed it all together.
And what about the people who took the completed T-shirts and moved them to where they were wanted? That somehow has no value? People who ordered the T-shirts didn't order T-shirts sitting piled up in a factory; they ordered them so they could wear them. That means making the product is only the first step: then you have to move the product to the end user (shipping and handling), but before you can do that you have to figure out where the end user is and make sure he has paid for the product (order fulfillment).
For those three activities (production, order fulfillment, and shipping/handling), I get, respectively, $2.00, $1.79, and $2.36 (note that I've included both stages of shipping in the shipping/handling cost)--i.e., all roughly equal. That seems fair to me. In fact, if we include "printing" in production (which seems reasonable--people ordered a T-shirt with a design printed on it, not a plain one), that cost goes up to $2.90, more than the total shipping/handling cost. (Note, btw, that graphic design was only $0.12 per shirt, basically negligible.)
The real message of the cost breakdown, to me, is how much overhead there is: $1.21 per shirt in Kickstarter fees, $1.04 per shirt in Amazon payment fees, $0.33 per shirt in tariff, and $2.67 per shirt in "jockey costs" (presumably meaning company overhead for Jockey itself). That adds up to $5.25 per shirt in overhead, or about 42% of the cost.
I didn't say that the other parts of the process had no value, I said that the relative return to people at the bottom of the labour chain is low. My claim is that they are getting paid proportionally less for the work that they do.
I don't really see why it is contentious - poor people have less bargaining power, because they have less to bargain with (e.g. poorer health, less education, less to fall back on), so will come off worse in trades, including trades for their labour. It makes economic sense, but that doesn't make it good. Also note that overall efficiency can become irrelevant if the returns on efficiency gains are unequally distributed.
Addressing those problems, which are structural not individual, will improve the lives of people who are under-compensated by the current system. Claiming those problems don't have any effect on outcomes requires explanation.
> the relative return to people at the bottom of the labour chain is low...they are getting paid proportionally less for the work that they do.
If this is true, then based on the cost breakdown (which is all the evidence we have in this case), it's also true for the people who do order fulfillment and shipping/handling. Are all of those people also "at the bottom of the labour chain"?
> poor people have less bargaining power, because they have less to bargain with (e.g. poorer health, less education, less to fall back on)
It's true that poor people have worse health, education, etc., but that's not why they have less bargaining power. They have less bargaining power because they cannot perform higher-value work. Improving their health, education, etc. helps because it makes them capable of doing higher-value work, not because it magically increases the value of the same work they were doing before. A T-shirt doesn't become more valuable because the person making it is healthier or has a better education; but if better health and education enables the person to operate a T-shirt making machine that makes 10 shirts per hour, instead of making 1 shirt per hour by hand, then that person is doing higher-value work and should be paid accordingly (and will be, in a competitive free market).
So if people want to have more bargaining power, they need to bring more value to the bargaining table. Helping people to do that is certainly worth doing. But it's no use pretending that just improving people's health, education, etc. is enough. It isn't.
I'm not suggesting that "just improving people's health, education, etc. is enough." I'm suggesting that people aren't being paid enough because, structurally, they are in a poor bargaining position, and thus can't command higher wages, and so have worse outcomes, which perpetuates their position (that being the structural part).
Lots of things go into it, and looking at individuals doesn't really address the wider problem. The only reason that people accept the low wages is because they have nothing else, and once things improve enough to drive wages up the industries that rely on low-wage labour move on.
Now, you can take that two ways, and I see both as true (whereas you might only see one). Firstly, the jobs have (eventually/sometimes) improved conditions, up to the point where people demand too much, and the manufacturers have to move on. Note that this wasn't a benevolent act on the part of the manufacturers - they came there because that was where they could get the best return on their investment. It isn't quick, and the manufacturers have absolutely no interest in making it quicker - uprooting an industry is expensive, so they are incentivised to stop people attaining economic independence.
The other way to look at it is that the only reason that the manufacturer could extract such a low price is because the people they came to employ were in such a desperate position that they had no other choice. The only argument is that it is still fair, because it was a mutual agreement, a point which I addressed in another sub-thread: it is not fair, because it relies on coercion. We go around the world, coercing people into doing work for us for as little pay as we can get away with.
I don't know if you listened to it, but the NPR t-shirt podcasts had some of this stuff in there - including a guy from the t-shirt industry saying precisely that they go to wherever the poverty is, because it's cheaper (which makes sense!)
The typical refrain is that, as I already mentioned, it makes things better. Yes, sure, it sometimes does, only much slower than it could do. There are also a host of other positive and negative effects that aren't covered by these ridiculous generalisations I'm making, that can make things either much better, or much worse, for the people involved.
My belief is that we should use our combined wealth to mitigate the risks of uncertain negative events, and that it doesn't cost very much to do so for people who are poor.
> I'm suggesting that people aren't being paid enough because, structurally, they are in a poor bargaining position
But how do you define "paid enough"? Enough for what? I'll agree that they aren't being paid enough to improve their situation materially, but that doesn't mean they aren't paid enough for the value they actually create, doing the work they're actually doing.
> The only reason that people accept the low wages is because they have nothing else
Yes, but again, that doesn't mean the low wages aren't an accurate reflection of the value those people are currently creating.
> once things improve enough to drive wages up the industries that rely on low-wage labour move on
Yes, by automating their processes so that a single worker is much more productive and therefore can command higher wages. Not by paying people higher wages for doing the same work they were doing before.
> uprooting an industry is expensive, so they are incentivised to stop people attaining economic independence
This is true, but note that it only actually works if the manufacturers have no competition. Which basically requires governments to be complicit in stopping their people from attaining economic independence.
If there is free competition, then there is economic value to be captured in helping people become more productive, because the limiting factor in how much wealth can be created is almost always human productivity. So the manufacturer that comes to a poor country and builds a factory where people make T-shirts by hand won't last very long in free competition with another manufacturer that comes to that country and builds a factory where people make T-shirts by machine...and then builds a factory where people make trousers by machine...and then builds a factory where people make bicycles by machine...and so on, and so on; and thereby makes much more profit than the manufacturer who couldn't be bothered to invest in increasing workers' productivity.
For "how do you define "paid enough"?", yes, I did mean they weren't paid enough for the value they create, because of the price distortions I talked about that occur during the bargaining (price setting) process.
For "Yes, by automating their processes so that a single worker is much more productive and therefore can command higher wages. Not by paying people higher wages for doing the same work they were doing before." - automation absolutely is the only route to long term prosperity: it is what has create civilisation as we know it.
However, like I said there are strong incentives to stop people becoming more productive, because it is to our benefit, even in a market, once we have invested in a certain kind of productivity (indeed this goes both ways, with workers wanting to protect outdated forms of labour well beyond time). A lot of money gets sunk into developing places, and that money needs a healthy return. So although in principle, yes, there is something to be gained by helping people become more productive, that is on the assumption that the cost of doing so is negligible, which it often isn't.
Indeed, paying those costs, the ones that help people become more productive, are exactly what should be happening, and what will be avoided by whoever it was who previously invested in those people, until the investor(s) have got their return (which is essentially an indefinite period), or until the return on a new investment will be greater than its cost (and given that we're talking about moving cities, or often countries, those costs can be large indeed).
Just to (try and) be clear, I fully agree that what is required is helping people to be more productive. I don't agree that "free" competition is the optimal way to accomplish that. (I quote free because making competition free requires significant effort and enforcement, which is often lacking in the kind of environments that we are talking about)
As a small provocative thought: companies are legal entities, so how about requiring companies to be licensed, prohibiting them being owned, and thus requiring all returns to be either reinvested in the company or distributed to the people who work there. Investment would be entirely through bond issue, which is perfectly sensible, can be adjusted for any desired level of risk, and has good market efficiency. Lots of our structures today aren't defined by natural law, they are just arbitrary, and perhaps they have negative effects?
I'm afraid I'm off to bed, so I won't respond, but I'd be interested to read your reply if you write it. Good night/morning/afternoon/evening.
> yes, I did mean they weren't paid enough for the value they create, because of the price distortions I talked about that occur during the bargaining (price setting) process
The problem with this hypothesis is that there's no way of proving it. And the claim becomes questionable anyway if the company's response when labor is no longer available at the low wage they were paying is to automate rather than to pay higher wages. If the work the people were doing before really was more valuable, it would have been easier to just pay the workers higher wages.
> A lot of money gets sunk into developing places, and that money needs a healthy return. So although in principle, yes, there is something to be gained by helping people become more productive, that is on the assumption that the cost of doing so is negligible, which it often isn't
It's not quite that simple. Yes, the cost of helping people become more productive is often not negligible, but neither are the benefits. Forgoing those benefits because of what's already been invested is just the sunk cost fallacy. A major reason businesses still get away with it is, as I said before, that governments prevent fair competition. Another reason is that corporate governance is screwed up, so that any investment with a payback time horizon longer than the next quarter's returns has to run the gauntlet before being considered.
> (I quote free because making competition free requires significant effort and enforcement, which is often lacking in the kind of environments that we are talking about)
But any method for helping people become more productive is going to require significant effort and enforcement. Otherwise it's just another system that people will game. Free competition is like democracy according to Churchill: the worst system except for all the others.
> companies are legal entities, so how about requiring companies to be licensed, prohibiting them being owned
I think that would just make the screwed-up-ness of corporate governance worse. A key reason it's screwed up now is that the people in control of large corporations are not "owners" in any meaningful sense; sure, they own large blocks of stock (mainly because of being granted big blocks of options for no good reason), but they don't have the sense of ownership of the business that, say, a startup founder or the proprietor of a mom-and-pop grocery store has. If the business does well, great--they get big bonuses and they can exercise their options and sell their stock for more. If the business does badly--meh; they have their golden parachutes.
So I think we need more ownership, not less, because ownership forces accountability, which is what's sadly lacking now. Unfortunately I don't have an easy answer for how to do that, because a big reason for the current lack of a sense of ownership of corporations is that much of the stock ownership now is with large mutual funds, not individuals. This has at least two negative effects. First, it shortens the effective time horizon--even if you are investing for retirement in 30 years, your mutual fund is looking for returns right now, otherwise it will move its money to a different stock. Second, it means that most shareholders are now corporations themselves, not individuals, so the original idea of corporations ultimately being responsible to the individual humans who were its shareholders is gone. And mutual funds aren't going anywhere because they serve a huge and important need--retirement investing.
One possible way to help is to use technology to reduce the need for large corporations, by making more and more things doable by smaller and smaller groups of people. Making more and more things available as services helps with that. (Pg talks about this in one of his essays, where he wonders how small you could make a company if you outsourced everything except product development.) The smaller the average corporation is, the harder it is, on average, to abuse corporate governance.
But any method for helping people become more productive is going to require significant effort and enforcement.
Possibly, but I'm not sure we should take that at face value. There's another Planet Money story[0] about the efficacy of just giving money to people. If you accept that reducing poverty lets people become more productive by applying more of their available effort towards actions that do more than just sustain life, I think this at least puts enough question to that assertion to make it something that needs qualification.
One possible way to help is to use technology to reduce the need for large corporations, by making more and more things doable by smaller and smaller groups of people.
How does that account for the increased efficiencies gained from being large, e.g. bulk logistics? Walmart, split into 5,000 smaller individual stores, would likely not be able to match the prices of Walmart the mega-corporation, even if only due to bulk shipping and purchasing efficiencies (and leverage) gained by the single larger version.
Great discussion though, +1's all the way up the stack for you and mrow84.
> There's another Planet Money story[0] about the efficacy of just giving money to people.
It does look like many of these people used the money to increase their productivity, yes (for example, by starting businesses). But from what I can see, GiveDirectly has only been in existence since 2010. I'll be interested to see what their numbers look like ten years from now, if they're still around. (My prediction, for what it's worth: (1) the fraction of people receiving their money who actually become more productive will go down (more people trying to game the system); (2) their overhead will go up (more money being spent on trying to prevent people from gaming the system).) It's definitely an experiment worth trying.
> How does that account for the increased efficiencies gained from being large, e.g. bulk logistics?
I said "more and more things", not "all things". Yes, there are probably some areas in which economies of scale are large enough that large corporations are more efficient on net than smaller ones. But I suspect there are fewer such areas than most people believe, and I think technology can make there be fewer still.
> People reject the labour theory of value, probably correctly in fundamental terms, but the marginal and subjective theories of value both seem to promote (and justify) this kind of structural inequality.
Economics is (at least most of it) a science. It doe not promote or justify anything; it tries to describe the real world, and tell you what consequences any input would have.
I agree with you, which is why I think that "People reject the labour theory of value, probably correctly in fundamental terms".
Your claim that economic theory "does not promote or justify anything" is clearly wrong, because theories are co-opted as policy, and then have enormous impacts on people's lives. Would you claim that the economic theory contained within communism did not promote or justify particular courses of action in the Soviet Union?
My point was that the marginal and subjective theories of value, taken narrowly, promote structural inequality, by claiming that when a price is accepted it is fair. I don't think that real economists are so dogmatic, but people who cling on to that idea doctrinally, forgetting the caveats that must be applied (i.e. lack of any kind of coercion, perfect information, etc.) can end up saying that equality of value is all that is necessary for fairness.
That's simply a rhetorical question, because it is obvious that poverty can only be reduced by providing more wealth to those in poverty.
Your rhetoric doesn't address the point though, which is simply that there are (quite dramatic) unequal returns to labour which in turn persist poverty.
Why do you think it is misguided? You "break the chains of economic mobility" by providing people with enough wealth and time to allow self-improvement; if you withhold that wealth and time by dictating terms from the powerful side of an economic relationship then that absolutely is significant.
You state "all this focus on economic inequality is misguided" very brazenly, but what evidence do you have that the two aren't linked? From my position they intuitively are linked, and pretty strongly - sure, intuitions can be wrong, but why are you so confident that we can ignore the effects of inequality on poverty?
At the most basic level, wage growth for those in poverty provides better housing, better nutrition, better healthcare, and better education, which all in turn lead to better economic prospects, because those things make you significantly more employable in all sorts of ways (you're more reliable, you're not weak, you're more healthy, and you're not stupid).
> those things make you significantly more employable
It's interesting that you use the word "employable" instead of the more general term "capable of creating wealth". Someone who thinks of themselves primarily as an employee is always going to be less wealthy than someone who thinks of themselves primarily as a wealth creator. That's because having employees is not necessary for wealth creation, but wealth creation is necessary for having employees. So if you're an employee, you're in a relationship that is always going to be fundamentally asymmetric.
So if you really want to focus on economic inequality, you need to focus on getting people to stop thinking "how employable am I?" and start thinking "how much wealth can I create?" Ultimately, the only way to get real economic equality is for everyone to be an entrepreneur. And even then you won't have complete economic equality because people differ in entrepreneurial skills. Which is why focusing on economic inequality is misguided; what we should be focusing on is wealth creation.
I did wonder about elaborating, because I agree with your point about employees necessarily making less, but I didn't think it really necessary.
Your final statement "focusing on economic inequality is misguided; what we should be focusing on is wealth creation" is disingenuous, unless you mean focusing on how to improve wealth creation for those people in poverty. Otherwise, it is just a false equivalence - you are suggesting that by focusing on wealth creation for ourselves, we improve their chances for wealth creation, for which there is no evidential route beyond trickle down economics. If you do mean promoting wealth creation for people in poverty, or indeed people who are 'merely' poor, then that is a form of alleviating inequality that I wholly support.
> unless you mean focusing on how to improve wealth creation for those people in poverty
To be precise, I meant focusing on making people in poverty better at wealth creation. If that's what you meant, then we're in agreement.
However, I'm not entirely sure that's what you meant, because you talk about wealth creation "for" people in poverty; you use that expression twice. That could mean what I meant, or it could mean "creating wealth and then giving it to people in poverty", which IMO does not help--unless it's just the first step, and the second step is "here are ways to use what you've just been given to get better at creating more wealth for yourself".
Sorry, I thought that my questioning whether you were "suggesting that by focusing on wealth creation for ourselves, we improve their chances for wealth creation" clarified it. I was talking about improving the property of "ability to create wealth" for people who are under-served by the current system.
This can include a range of things, like better access to healthcare and improved nutrition, as well as schemes to help people start businesses. Things are still pretty dire for an upsettingly large number of people in the world.
>How is a "dramatic reduction in poverty" not of much value?
Value relative to effort. Compare your level of effort to your level of PPP received in return. Would you consider 1.25 USD@2005 a day to be an achievement for them in comparison to you, or an abysmal failure of society to justly allocate its rewards to the people who put in the effort?
In other words: is a just reward for doing the work that supports the lifestyle of the developed world a 'reduction' in the worst sort of abject poverty?
Your arguments ignore the failure illustrated by history of the strategy of society proactively allocating anything. Decades and decades of programs that spent billions of dollars giving money and sustenance impoverished groups across the globe, yet what finally begins to pull China out of poverty? Capitalism.
Letting people trade freely within a legal framework that protects everyone's property rights without regard to political and financial power is just. Everything after that is gravy.
I'm not sure what you think Chinese people did before they moved to the cities. Farm labor is backbreaking work, and they did it from sunup to sundown. Working in a factory for ten or twelve hours a day is a step up.
I think you misunderstood the GP. In the cases you described, hard work is clearly valuable. The problem is that there's a lot of emphasis on hard work for its own sake, not hard work as a means to producing something valuable.
My grandparents did indeed work their asses off. And in china, people are now working their asses off.
But robots are only going to get better; this process has already started and is having a huge impact. Manufacturing is only going to get cheaper; this process has been going on for centuries and will not stop just because we want to have more jobs.
The total comfort available in the world today requires less total off-ass-working than it did in my grandparents' day, and it will take even less work in my grandchildren's day.
Let's begin a gradual transition instead of just assuming the status quo is a fixed constant.
Your history is just as flawed as your understanding of work, value and progress (in other words, you've been brainwashed). "Hard work" has always been a domain reserved exclusively for the slaves. The "virtue" of hard work is just a shallow manipulation tactic devised by those in power. None of this has changed today. What IS changing, however, is that as knowledge becomes more readily available, fewer and fewer people are willing to buy into this crap. And that's good. Now, you may begin to worry about who is going to do all the work that slaves are doing today so you may continue to live comfortably. The correct answer, of course, is: machines.
(And btw., no, we're not where we are because of your grandparents' hard work. If your grandparents had anything to do with humanity's progress, it was ONLY through insight, not through hard work.)
The "virtue" of hard work is just a shallow manipulation tactic devised by those in power.
How is this an argument against what ekianjo wrote? Yes, there has (almost?) always been a privileged upper class that had much more leisure than the masses. Still, the fact remains that living standards would have been lower had a majority of the population not worked their asses off.
Should the distribution of work be adjusted? Absolutely! In our current world, inequality is so high, and to a large extent unjustly high, that it's sickening. But there is still a whole lot of work that needs to be done to maintain our living standards.
- Should the distribution of work be adjusted? Absolutely!
In the modern world, I unequivocally agree with this statement.
But, I find this to be a fascinating question when applied to less recent periods throughout history. Would we be where we were today if the ancient Greeks didn't have a ruling class and a slave class? If the Europeans didn't have the same 1500 years later? It's largely been the working (I use this term quite loosely: consent is not implied) class that has enabled (a small number of) the leisure class to make the majority of societal and technological progress. How true is this today? I'm willing to bet those making technological and societal progress are now largely in the working class.
Sorry my comment is inconclusive; it's something I've been long meaning to investigate further.
What you consider in your comment echoes Bertrand Russell's famous essay In Praise of Idleness. Russell, however, goes farther and outright states that
I have asked similar questions myself in the past; I agree that it's a fascinating (and fascinatingly uncomfortable) topic. Like you, I don't have a conclusive answer.
Personal attacks like this are absolutely unwelcome on Hacker News. People who do it repeatedly—or even once, if they don't have a history as a valuable contributor—will be banned.
> Your history is just as flawed as your understanding of work, value and progress (in other words, you've been brainwashed). "Hard work" has always been a domain reserved exclusively for the slaves.
Haha, to wake up and see that is really entertaining. You're a guy who has made money in IT and you think everyone can live the same way as you. You don't realize you are living in a small bubble that does not apply to 99.9% of all other workers out there. You don't realize there is a whole working class below you who's working to make sure stuff gets cleaned, garbage gets collected, meals get cooked, tables are waited and so on ?
> The correct answer, of course, is: machines.
Amusing, again. There's just so much machines can do, and there are still many jobs where it's completely irrealistic to replace people by machines (mostly because the investment is not worth it). If you think otherwise, I'd recommend you go out and visit actual industries making stuff, not just IT related ones, and try to understand why most of them still employ people no matter how many machines they have.
We will see an increase in automation for jobs that we didn't expect to be so. The speed of this transformation depends on our creative and technical ability.
If you think that work defines you, read up about the Puritans in America. They had an extreme motto that 100% of your waking life must be allocated to work. You could say they are the only religious that had a fear that someone around them was having a good time.
> We will see an increase in automation for jobs that we didn't expect to be so.
We've seen increases in automation for hundreds of years, yet there was never a depletion of jobs for people. There's more jobs now that there has ever been before (not talking about short time scale here). Industry automation has led to the creation of the expansion of the Services industry. And there will still be tons of professions where you can't automate stuff - at best you can improve people's work using computing aids, make them work more efficiently, but at some point of the supply chain you still need human action. For the services industry, there's also the bias that most people want to deal with other people and not with computers, so automation will face cultural limits as well in some areas. I'm not worried.
Surely you can see the endgame here. Amazon employs 1/3 as many people per dollar of revenue as Walmart does. Imagine a world where Walmart automates itself to a level comparable to Amazon. Lo! Watch as 1,452,000 jobs melt away!
And that's just one company. Sure, it's the biggest one. Sure, they're probably jobs nobody would do given better alternatives. All the same, those are now 1,452,000 fewer people employed in a world replacing human capital with physical capital.
Effort is praised because it is positive for kids' development. It is a better place for them to root their self worth. You get kids who can handle failure and try, try again.
The problem I have with your viewpoint is that it's contrary to what we've seen empirically. Sub-cultures where people don't work, but have their basic needs met aren't exactly flourishing. Work doesn't just give people purpose and dignity, it creates essential social structure without which communities dissolve.
I think it's quite possible that we could organize communities around something other than work. Colleges, for example, are a pretty good example. But I think proponents of basic income ignore the vital necessity of having some alternative before pulling the rug out from under people.
I think it's because such subcultures are self-selecting - why would a Wall Street banker (of which most seem to be terribly motivated) become part of such a group?
There are a number of experiments (eg. across Africa) where a BI-like model made relatively desolate towns flourish.
Basic Income needn't provide luxuries- as long as it eliminates the threat of physical harm out of the job market (thus allowing everyone to walk away from any given job at a given rate), it works as designed IMHO.
To add drive to people who aren't self-motivated, there's still societal status and its symbols, some of which will naturally cost more than BI can afford - otherwise they won't be status symbols for long.
> There are a number of experiments (eg. across Africa) where a BI-like model made relatively desolate towns flourish.
Can you provide citations? I've suggested this kind of experiment as a proof-of-concept for BI, but I've never actually heard of it being done except for That One Neighborhood In Montreal or wherever it was.
What I mean to say is that if the need to produce material things vanishes, people don't replace that need by producing art and culture and placing increased emphasis on family, friends and community. By "flourishing," I don't refer to material production, but social prosperity.
Having seen both, a ghetto in a U.S. inner city is objectively much more materially prosperous, partly thanks to government support, than a village in Bangladesh, yet if you look at crime, social cohesion, family cohesion, etc, the latter is more socially prosperous.
What makes a third world village different from a first-world ghetto? It's not resources, the village has less of those. It's not education, the village has less of that. What I see is that the village has social structure. Work creates roles for people, it creates hierarchies of authority, and it binds families and the community together into a common purpose.
I don't work is the only way to create social roles, hierarchy of authority, and common purpose, but I think most proponents of basic income err critically in assuming that those things are unimportant. It's so ingrained in first world culture that all people need are resources and education that people assume that if you give those things to people you will get prosperity.
If you compare an inner city ghetto to a village in Bangladesh though, there are other key differences.
Number one, there's no war on drugs in a Bangladeshi village to disrupt family units and create black market violence. That factor alone causes a huge amount of misery in inner cities in the United States.
Then there's the fact that communities may not be as supportive and tightly knit. This makes things much harder on working parents and their children. People have this image of people in the ghetto sitting on their asses and not working but the truth is there are a lot of people working more than one jobs and being stuck in poverty. Objectively the standard of living for those people may be higher than the Bangladeshi village resident, but the cost is that those folks probably have a harder time raising a family.
Either way I totally agree that basic income cannot ignore the role of the community as well as cultural and social constructs. Not to mention the criminal justice system.
> Having seen both, a ghetto in a U.S. inner city is objectively much more materially prosperous, partly thanks to government support, than a village in Bangladesh, yet if you look at crime, social cohesion, family cohesion, etc, the latter is more socially prosperous.
There is social and family cohesion in the inner city, but it doesn't look like middle class cohesion. Keep in mind that racial and class de-facto segregation is really high in the inner city, police more heavily target your community and are more likely to arrest you, and economic opportunities are limited in a variety of fashions (esp. property and business ownership). Things like gangs and grey market economies are a result of those conditions and they do provide real value for people even if it is associated with cycles of violence and things that are generally bad.
> Work creates roles for people, it creates hierarchies of authority, and it binds families and the community together into a common purpose.
Work does not inherently create hierarchies of authority, there are many models of work and social structure that have different results when it comes to hierarchy. Work also doesn't necessarily create or enhance communities and can sometimes even be deleterious to them.
The picture you seem to be drawing of ghettos doesn't much resemble American ghettos as I know them.
American ghettos are not places where unemployed people have all their needs provided for them and live in carefree leisure. Ghettos are places where society's traditional support structures have failed and, in order to stay afloat, a significant portion of the populace has turned to jobs so heinous and net-negative to society that they would be repellent in any other context. They're some of the first victims of the "bad jobs" that Stross warned in the OP that people would be forced to take in the face of poor employment prospects. Ghettos are a prime example of the harm that comes from our dependence on conditional money to live.
As a counterexample, retirement communities are generally much nicer than ghettos — even though gainful employment in those communities is even lower than in ghettos. This is because the people in retirement communities aren't desperate. They don't have infinite money, but they generally don't need to worry too much about money. So what do these people do when they are relieved of the need to work for a living? Oh, they work on personal projects and put an increased emphasis on family, friends and community.
I do think you're bringing up an important point. Most people haven't considered the social implications well enough, and there is a somewhat unsupported assumption that it would go smoothly. But I don't think ghettos are all the relevant, because financial independence is very much not the big problem there. And I also think you're glossing over the point that the employment crisis Stross mentions in the OP will cause major societal changes whether or not we institute a basic income — I just think the changes will look a lot more like a ghetto and less like a retirement community if we don't have something like a basic income in place.
work provides purpose and dignity, and without work, you have no purpose, and therefore, you are a failure
Regardless of age, I guess most people feel this way (not just the previous generations - even the people in their 20's and 30's today). What is the alternative to this? If not work - what is important? what makes one person a success and another a failure, and what gives purpose and dignity to life, in your opinion?
In my experience, producing things you care about, and doing so in a way that allows you to express yourself, is what gives meaning and purpose to your life, and what allows you to define who you are. Often, it does not qualify as "work", in that you won't receive money for it.
Making Art would be the canonical example of this. But you actually find it in a many diverse things, from building a cool, unique app to solve a problem you care about, to building beautiful furniture for your house, to writing an essay explaining a view you care about, to elegantly solving a math problem that had been exciting your curiosity.
What does not provide meaning and purpose to your life, is work with no room for self-expression, self-direction and self-definition. Most jobs done "for the money" fall into this category.
If my wife didn't have to work for money, she would study archeology and "work" on processing the countless of archeological site that are laying around where she comes from.
That would be work. There are plenty of things that people would do - I know of people that would take care of children, some that would teach, some that would code, some that would cook, ...
However that's not work, "work" in our capitalistic societies has a specific economic meaning: a work is something that produce profit. So for example in education, you have that silly situation where there is a demand and offer, yet there is no teaching job because the optimal profitability has been reached at a level lower than optimal for people.
This man[1] didn't work much in his life, he mocked Alexander the Great[2] and it's pretty much famous for his views almost 2500 years after his death.
It's quite an accomplishment given the fact that he chose to live as poor man in a very rich society.
Aristotle also has stated that More than 3 hours work per day, equals slavery and I'm pretty sure Socrates would have argued that If you don't want to work you should not be working.
Of course all these guys lived in the 4th century B.C.. With today's technology, people should not be working for food and rest. Seriously, the fact that there are people in whatever continent homeless and starving is a shame for our evolved society.
[2] When Alexander the Great took over Athens. He wanted to visit the Wisest man in Athens and the tale (mythology I get) says that the oracle of Delphi (Pythia) had state a couple of years before that The wisest man in Athens is Diogenis of Sinore. Funny, given the fact that Plato was around at the time. So when Alexander went finally found Diogenis in his jar - a jar Diogenis used as a bed/home in the agora - said "Ask for anything and I shall grant it you!" and Diogenis supposedly responded with indifference "*Can you move on the left? You're hiding the sun." ... The answer of course has a deeper meaning, Alexander couldn't give him the sun... And the most famous student of Aristotle (Alexander) was quite impressed as he moved on the left.
Aristotle also has stated that More than 3 hours work per day, equals slavery
Yes, and he was perfectly happy to live comfortably by making use of the products of slaves' work.
and I'm pretty sure Socrates would have argued that If you don't want to work you should not be working.
I'm pretty sure he wouldn't, since he, like Aristotle, was perfectly happy to live comfortably by making use of the products of slaves' work, and as far as I know, he never asked the slaves how they felt about it.
If Zeus himself descends from Mount Olympus and says to you,
"I am going to reestablish slavery in society. I will select slaves by lottery, and when it's all over most of the population will be held in the bonds of slavery. No one will remember a time before slavery. It will be as though it has always existed. I will never let slavery be abolished again.
I give you, and you alone, the choice to be free or enslaved."
What does this have to do with anything? I could answer the question as you ask it (of course I would choose to be free), but I don't see how it's relevant to this discussion, because in the real world, slavery is not dictated by Zeus, it is enforced by some humans on other humans.
For much of history, civilizations and other groups of people took conquered peoples as slaves to support the conquerors' lifestyles. The slaves served as the cheap energy that today has been supplanted by fossil fuels.
Our Western lifestyle is predicated upon these fossil fuels in much the same way that prior societies' lifestyles were based upon slavery. Slavery has undesirable characteristics that we (being dependent on it no longer) are free to scorn the evils of.
Fossil fuels also have undesirable characteristics: they're polluting the atmosphere, polluting the water, and releasing boatloads of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Sea levels are rising, coral are dying, and storms are projected to continue increasing in magnitude. Perhaps you've heard the economics saying, "There's no such thing as a free lunch."
You and I are so utterly dependent on this source of energy that our brains can't fully comprehend the consequences of choosing the alternative. And there's absolutely nothing we can do to convince anyone else to stop using fossil fuels. If you're anything like me (and other normal humans), you ignore the costs associated with your actions and continue to use fossil fuels for transport, for food, and for electricity to power your electronic gadgets. To change your lifestyle would require severe unpleasantness.
> You and I are so utterly dependent on this source of energy that our brains can't fully comprehend the consequences of choosing the alternative.
Depends on the alternative. If the alternative is a much lower standard of living, you're right, there's no way you're going to convince a significant number of people to choose that alternative. (You and I are both providing evidence of that just by having this discussion in this forum.)
OTOH, if the alternative is using non-fossil-fuel sources of energy to maintain our standard of living, I'm all for that. I think the chief obstacle in the way of that is people's unwillingness to accept that any source of energy will have some undesirable characteristics. "There's no such thing as a free lunch" applies to any way of achieving a standard of living beyond bare subsistence.
So the goal can't be to find an energy source that has no undesirable characteristics; the best we can do is to find sources that have less net undesirability, so to speak, than fossil fuels--just as fossil fuels have less net undesirability (by a very large margin, IMO) than slavery. There are at least two such sources that I can think of that have the potential of supporting a first world standard of living: nuclear, and solar done right.
I totally agree with what you've said, although I personally think that in terms of long-term misery that fossil fuels have the potential to be just as damaging as slavery.
> I personally think that in terms of long-term misery that fossil fuels have the potential to be just as damaging as slavery.
To me that says that you are either drastically overestimating the potential misery due to fossil fuels or drastically underestimating the actual misery that was caused by slavery.
What sort of data would you like to see? I'm having a hard time even getting the potential harm from fossil fuels to within a few orders of magnitude of the actual harm caused by slavery.
Perhaps you could start by answering this question: do you think I am drastically underestimating the potential harm from fossil fuels, or drastically overestimating the actual harm that was done by slavery? That will help me to "calibrate" where you are coming from. (And if it's the first of the two, as I suspect, can you give some specifics about why?)
From what I can find out from online sources, Socrates was able to "retire" from working as a stonemason at a fairly young age, and to spend basically all his time talking about philosophy. So yes, he certainly was not destitute. I didn't mean to imply that he was, only that, as a member of the Athenian class of "free persons", his existence was supported largely by the labor of many slaves, and I am not aware that he ever questioned whether the slaves were OK with that.
This depends heavily on what you mean by work. If by work you mean a minimum wage job at a McDonalds or Walmart, that isn't exactly what I would call purpose and dignity. For a meaning of work that included intellectual/artistic exploration without a guarantee of economic return on investment, but excluded economically viable but degrading labor, I could agree.
That's one way to look at it. I'm not disagreeing with it, but another way to look at it would be - any work that puts food on the table is work with purpose and dignity. Yet another (self centric?) way to look at it would be - if the job that I am doing helps me grow intellectually, emotionally etc then it is good work (regardless of whether it is useful to others/society or not).
May be these questions would be more important in the future, where most of the boring/mundane jobs would be left to the robots. Then people can spend more time to work on things they like, and less time to work for money.
Fairly certain that most people would disagree with "any work that puts food on the table is work with purpose and dignity." Easy examples come to mind: prostitution, arms dealing, etc.
The thing about usefulness to society is that we just don't need everyone to be useful anymore. Society will continue on perfectly fine even if half of the population contributes nothing at all, because of technology.
The future is not so far away anymore, and societal change is very slow. These are the kind of questions we need to be thinking about now.
Which is completely opposite from Antic times, during which work was considered demeaning, because, hey we got slaves to do that stuff. Going out to the field and harvesting was looked upon same as now is rolling in shit. You could do it but highly degrading. Arts and philosophy were all the rage.
Family, traveling, learning things, playing sports, spending time with friends, love, and more generally having fun while we can.
"what makes one person a success and another a failure"
That's quite a binary view of the world! why do you want people to be either a success or a failure? even if that's you want, work is certainly not the only metric for that.
I think it is interesting that in French, this notion of a person being successful has no natural translation (although you can say it if you really want to) and it is something I never hear being mentioned.
Those are the classic middle class values. I guess as the west keeps getting richer the middle class will move more into upper class ethics. I m not upper class so I don't know how they occupy their minds, but in the 19th century they used to bother with traveling, archaeology, nature, science, philosophy, writing, and having affairs.
> what makes one person a success and another a failure, and what gives purpose and dignity to life, in your opinion?
These are the questions everyone has to answer for themselves ultimately. People like to go around praising everyone they believe to have succeeded and condemning everyone they believe to have failed, but you need to decide for yourself what the purpose of your life is. Otherwise you'll just end up chasing what everyone else believes.
"What is the alternative to this? If not work - what is important? what makes one person a success and another a failure, and what gives purpose and dignity to life, in your opinion?"
First, there is the definition of success. For any given species or individual of that species, simple survival is the first level of success. This includes basic shelter, food and water sources, and protection from dangers.
Beyond that, once our more immediate needs are met, I think the next level of success is breeding. At one point, during my "Descartesian reset", I determined that throughout most of history, the primary purpose people had was to reproduce as a way to ensure their own well being in old age, but also as a sort of abstract, indirect immortality through their offspring. There is a reasons there are many cultures who still largely center around first-born.
For many of the proletariat, the safety and security of offspring was ensured through numbers (high mortality rates in the past) and through work servitude that was seen not just as an exchange of labor and time for money, but as an exchange of labor and time as an investment in their offspring, with money only being a tool to that end.
I think that, with the advancement of the arts and technology though, this otherwise ancient traditional model has been largely upended. Kings built castles, and Pharaoh's built pyramids, and other builders build structures that would last well past their deaths as their version of immortality, but normal people always were mostly just reproducing their dna. I think this is also why there is still so much reverence for glory and honor, particularly in battle, in that, if dying in a sufficiently glorious way, you are more likely to be remembered longer.
Past that, at some point I sat down and made a list. Essentially it boiled down to things that have a lasting impact for the greatest number of people beyond my death. Things like art, architecture, scientific discovery, writing, actions taken, etc. I don't remember the entire list, but it was fairly expansive.
The thing to keep in mind about all of these is the indirectness of their totality, that it to say a piece of art in itself may not actually be that big of a deal in the long term, but lets say that piece of art inspired another persons mind to do something great that they might not have had the inspiration to do otherwise.
tldr; Essentially, I think it all boils down to humanity's ancient tradition of trying to cheat death, and the way we do that has been changing. To me, as an atheist, the afterlife isn't a place where I exist, per se, but is more like the butterfly effect of my consciousness upon the universe it experienced before it's having been extinguished.
Of course, I'm hoping I can get my hands on a telomere regeneration mod to buy enough time to transplant my consciousness into a hopefully by then sufficient computer and kick off the singularity, but I digress.
To answer your original question, it isn't the work in itself that gives purpose. It's that a purpose is found and then striven for through whichever means are available, which for most people is usually indentured wage slavery. Ergo, when an older generation sees not working as a lack of purpose, do not mistake it that they think the work gives purpose, but that the work supports an already existing purpose. (which for most of them was child-rearing)
Family? At least that's what all those disgruntled workers keep saying. :P
Life is meaningless. People just tend to disagree at what existential level it begins to become meaningless. But right now is not meaningless - we can choose to enjoy it. Whether that is by telling ourselves that we have a purpose and acting upon it, or by playing amateur tennis - what's the difference? In the grand scheme of things.
Doctors have a purpose, but only because people are sick. Homeless shelters have a purpose, but only because there are homeless people. Soldiers have a purpose, but only because there are wars to fight. Workers have a purpose, but only because there is work to be done.
Do people have a feeling of existential purpose only because there is some unfinished work that they can finish, some pain that they can alleviate, or something being a burden that they can take on their shoulders? If so, it's a good thing that Utopia can't become real. Because we wouldn't like it one bit.
Life is meaningless to you... That's a whole another can of worms but a very interesting one nevertheless.
While watching a documentary recently, I realized that my existential angst wasn't nearly as pronounced or debilitating when I was struggling to live day to day. Work sucked, really sucked, to the point that some days I'd almost wish I'd rather fallen gravely ill or died rather than go to work. But that was only some days. Harsh world, you do what you have to do mindset.
One of the hardest adjustments to not necessarily having to work has been having to figure out the "why" and other existential angst. Yes, religion is a quick fix, but given enough free time, even that luxury may go away as one gets disillusioned with all the BS that goes with organized religion.
The author of the article presents a very interesting conundrum indeed. As things get more efficient, there is more free time, more wealth to go around more "leisure" potential than ever before. But on a grander scale is that necessarily a good thing? Apparently some Chinese bureaucrat back in the old day actively decided against industrialization since people wouldn't have work to do. A modernist world clearly dehumanizes people, that's just an artifact of the system. Perhaps a world where labor is cheap and more and more people work helps maintain order and may somehow be more conducive to human happiness as opposed to lots of free time to realize that the system is crap and have war and chaos. (Yes, I know this is a bit hyperbolic).
Personally, I'm really happy to not have to work crazy hours to be able to eat. I appreciate it. But I do see a lot of friends trying to come to terms with finding meaning in their lives, and not always with great results (had the unfortunate task to having to prepare a funeral for one in January). A very thought provoking article and certainly an insightful comment (though I am bit of wary of outright declarations of life's meaning or lack thereof)
Actually, meant to imply that your claim is your opinion & the debate on that is another can of worms. I actually found your comment quite insightful. I was hoping to get your opinion or those of others here about whether a world with more free time is necessarily "better" than one where people toil (perhaps needlessly) but are "happier".
People imposing their views on others inherently implies they think they are better and smarter than the other, and in general I have found reason to distrust such people. Not saying you are such a person, but I assumed you might agree that your viewpoint of life is meaningless is absolute or the "truth" just as the inverse is not. Most smart people can/should determine that themselves. My comment was not meant to be an ad hominem attack, apologies if it came off that way.
Even the word life can be interpreted any number of ways. To address either your point or his would require a whole lot of keyboard pounding before any meaningful conversation could be made.
I don't know if it's on purpose or not, but when you mention your parents, are you referring to both ?
My parents both worked, but not the same amount and not at the same periods. The parents of my wife are splitted: one is still working (for pleasure, really) at 64+ and the other never took a long lasting full time job.
There might be a question of what we mean by "work", but traditionally the task of sustaining a home and growing kids is not categorized as "work". Defining the purpose of someone through the amount of work goes straight into this issue, and it's my main problem with the idea.
You need others to validate your beliefs, then impose your beliefs on others. So you can believe these made-up beliefs yourself. In rare cases you can believe yourself if no one agrees to you. How fragile we are as humans.
> One of the biggest views I see in my parents and grandparents: work provides purpose and dignity, and without work, you have no purpose, and therefore, you are a failure.
Well, it is certainly good to do something good for society. But it doesn't necessarily have to be paid. Plenty of volunteer work might give more purpose and dignity than some of the more meaningless and tedious jobs.
But it turns out that, according to Dutch law, it's sometimes possible to be banned from doing specific kinds of volunteer work if you're unemployed. If it's something that could be a paid position, you're not allowed to do it for free in you receive unemployment benefits. No, you're forced to sit at home and do nothing.
Is this statement meant to be as ironic as it is? You're telling us that we must unquestioningly accept that telling people to unquestioningly accept our opinions is bad.
> If you have no choice but to work or be discarded, then, when the value you can provide via work is less than that required to maintain your life, you have no choice but to attempt to indenture yourself. And failing that, you're truly, completely fucked.
Work or be discarded? Really? Most people have, you know, other people in their lives. Hell, 20% of the country at any given time is children, and they don't work at all. Somehow, miraculously, they aren't just discarded.
The same is true with old people (i.e. parents). This world you imagine is a complete fantasy, and has never, ever, anywhere been the case.
Are you aware of the history of the US after 1868? Ever wanted to understand why the first section of the fourteenth amendment says "Subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States?
Subject, in this case, means subordinate. The newly-minted dual citizens (of federal and state citizenship) of 1868 and beyond are no longer "the people" that the government serves. They are the subordinates (slaves) of an authority no longer accountable to "The People", as there are technically none left post-1868.
If you think I'm exaggerating, I invite you to read SCOTUSblog sometime, and you'll eventually find someone (often a SCOTUS justice) mentioning how the first ten amendments of the bill of rights have now been "filtered" through the fourteenth, to see what stands and what doesn't. The only one yet to be filtered through the fourteenth is the third amendment (quartering troops). Thanks to DC V. Heller, the only one to escape unscathed is the second.
here's[1] a list of interesting cases directly affected by the 14th amendment.
Sure, under tyranny, all sorts of evil shit are possible. The parent is explicitly non talking about slavery, or situations like indentured service where you start there. I thought that was obvious.
The parent was talking about situations where you work in a free-ish market for a period of time, then can't work (for whatever reason) and then posits that these people will be discarded—as if that's the only option, or even, the most reasonable or likely option. It isn't.
I can't think of a single culture that fits the OPs premise and description of what happens to people that can't work. Can you?
I think most people can immediately identify with the idea of "working" 40 hours while really only doing 15 hours of hard work and 25 hours of paper pushing and procrastinating. Maybe not in your current job but almost certainly in some job you once held.
I think this is a product of work culture. There are, at almost every halfway useful company, a number of truly busy people. These people have 40 hours of things to do every week, or at least need 40 hours to properly instruct their subordinates. However it is often the case that they only really need 15h of hard work from each subordinate. The issue is that it's not culturally acceptable to say to your boss "I just did all you need from me this week in a few hours, I'm going to the beach now". So such a worker faces the choice of either speaking up and asking for more work, or dragging out the minimal work they have to do until it takes an "acceptable" amount of time. Since time is our most valuable asset the culture of a company is considered fair when people are giving relatively equal time sacrifices to the task at hand.
I know I have been lucky enough to have a manager that was not offended if I finished all of my work early and left, but 99% of people never have that luxury. It's psychological, most people don't want others to get off easy.
I think this reasoning doesnt depict the real model.
If you are supposed to do 15 hours of real work, the ambiance of leaving when you are done with it is in the best case, going to let you do those 15 hours, but worst case you wont even fullfill that.
An example of that is finishing up something, and then a bug pops out after someone checks it out. If you are not in the office, your work is incomplete.
For the value vs work proposition, its entirely inapplicable for everyday operations. Who is measuring the value? and how do you get to influence those decisions?
If you get to work a project brought down from the product manager, you implement it completely, and the project turns up to be a total bust, or just useless, or not used, you provided 0 value. Does that mean you have to work extra to make up for that?
Or you work a couple of hours rogue-like and discover a dev-ops inefficiency and you can cut down server costs 10%, saving the company 100ks of money. Does that mean you don't have to show up for work anymore?
So value is not the word at play here, its maybe the efficacy of going through your work load. The more time you spend commited the more you will do, and that is pretty strict. The guy doing 15 is not going to get more than his own version doing 40, no matter what.
It's something of an efficiency fallacy that keeping all resources (people and/or machines, etc) 100% occupied is the best way to get highest system productivity. Unfortunately, the assumption is baked-in to a lot of our work culture.
Regarding people, good reading in this concept is Goldratt's, "The Goal"[1]. There are more technical approaches of the concept. But, the novel is great in terms of getting a visceral feel of why there are busy resources, but at the same time you need idle resources within the same pipeline for good system performance.
I don't think most people make the conscious choice to drag out their work, it just happens naturally as our work expands to fill the time we've committed to being in the office.
The book Peopleware condemns Parkinsons Law as unproven.
The problem with Parkinson's Law is that management also knows it, so they think they can constrict their deadlines a lot and the work will get done, and if its not, they can pressure you to work extra hours to do it.
I've heard about almost this exact situation. A brilliant developer I knew when I worked for a Smalltalk vendor (one who made a seminal contribution to his programming community that went on to influence almost every other programming community) was working as a contractor for a telecom. He found that he could get all of his assignments for the week done in 1 or 2 days. Basically, his manager told him to do more work each week, so that the suffering would be distributed evenly.
> I know I have been lucky enough to have a manager that was not offended if I finished all of my work early and left
A problem with most knowledge-domain jobs is that the work is never done.
There are always new tasks incoming and other tasks parked pending further information, so there's no opportunity for for employees to say 'I'm finished'.
In that scenario the only way the employee can escape is to say 'I have met my assigned hours'.
An unconditional basic income[1] would speed up a paradigm shift from the current "work or starve" society. Maybe our grandchildren will look back to this time and make funny jokes about digging and filling holes...
For example, salary may still be partially driven by necessary education / experience, but physical, tiresome or stressfull works would requireask for way higher salaries (because you get up at 4AM to collect garbage when you have no other choice, or when you think it really is worth it, and those jobs would still be necessary)
The same way, some companies will have huge problems filling the ranks (let's say: food industry, waiter, marts cashiers (or the people filling the mart at night), ...
But education industry (and universities) would have to change their methods, because nowadays peoples are willing to commit 100,000's of $ to get a well paying job, this incentive would be gone, the better paying one being the physical labor, with low education requirement.
I also wonder if people would go with their lives the same way they do now. I, for one, would get one of those hard, high-paying job straight out of high school for a few year, enough to buy a house and save a bit, then go to university (or self-studying with internet classes, choosing some classes in common with friends) and study whatever I found get my interest.
TL;DR: I'm all for Basic Income, mainly because I don't see any long-terme viable alterative, and also because the changes it would bring to society would be really interesting to study.
You mention garbage collection, this is actually an interesting job for those that do it in Reading, UK. Reading has had the benefit of 'negative unemployment', as in more jobs than people, so how do you recruit people to collect the garbage?
It actually works out well for some that do it, by starting at '4 a.m.' they finish early afternoon, around about lunch time and can be around when their kids get out of school. They also get paid rather well, as in £40K, which is well above minimum wage. They are also working, whereas chances are that 'Microsoft', 'Vodafone' or any of the other big-brand, knowledge economy employers of the area probably would not employ them. The garbage collector in Reading is quite likely to want to hold onto his/her job as it makes a lot of life possible, even if it does come with the 'stigma' of being in the 'recycling business' (okay, being a bin man!).
I must say that the situation in Reading is an anomaly, it may not even exist any more, but five years ago it was a cushy number, I had friends doing it.
Compare this situation to collecting the garbage in a rural no-jobs area. Here the job pays minimum wage and nobody sticks at it for very long. There is no benefit in doing it as the money is barely any more than income support and any overtime is swallowed up by tax. Consequently there is a high amount of churn as people give it a go to get off the employment register and prove to the government that they are willing to work, then, one way or another, they jack it in.
So how would that work out in a 'basic income' economy in some rural town where there are no jobs? I think it would still work out rather well, even if the pay was £10K after tax + Basic Income. It would make the difference between having a subsistence style existence and one where one could cook nice meals for the kids and buy them all the things they need. Even a holiday could be afforded, subject to budgeting ability.
>But education industry (and universities) would have to change their methods, because nowadays peoples are willing to commit 100,000's of $ to get a well paying job, this incentive would be gone, the better paying one being the physical labor, with low education requirement.
Why would the incentive disappear? A basic income means that people don't make zero when they don't work; filling jobs would still be based on supply/demand, hence, implicitly, ability.
People are willing to commit to unfulfilling, exhausting minimum wage jobs because the alternative is to not have a home/decent food/a little spending money. If those needs are already fulfilled, its going to take more to convince people to do something economically necessary but unfulfilling/difficult.
So, the supply drops (many people choose to simply sit out the whole job thing if its going to be unfulfilling). At least, this is the theory.
Have you seen the improvements to garbage collection? A giant mechanical arm grabs a specially designed trash bin and tips it into the open top. The garbage man doesn't even need to get close to the bin. Hell, he barely has to get out of the heated truck (in northern Canada). The abundance of cheap labour just delays the implementation of "leisure-efficient" technology.
The local trash company (Winder, Georgia) switched to these recently. As much as I like new tech, I wonder about the two guys who used to run off to each side of the road to grab cans. Did they find new jobs?
So much for minimum wage. Cost of automation was cheaper than hiring two guys to do the same. Ask 'em if they'd have taken a pay cut to not have their jobs cut.
On the plus side, Barrow County is getting a lot of new stuff. They might have gone off to Bogart to get a job at the new Caterpillar plant, or to the retail development on University Parkway.
It's still not great to be replaced by a robot, but it's not a hopeless situation here like it is in a lot of places.
I work construction, and even though my job is a long way from being lost due to automation (strong AI to work reliably with low oversight and human scale maneuverability), it's going to come in.
My skills are all over, but my job is external renovations. We've gone from wood siding, soffit, fascia and shingles to predominantly metals and plastics that are now getting increased longevity. If new houses were built with the best materials, it wouldn't need work done to it for 40+ years.
Stone coated galvalume (iirc aluminum coated galvanized steel) is a true 40 year shingle. Their operating lifespan is likely to extend past 60 years before it absolutely had to be replaced (ie leaks). If that was available for a siding material or for fascia cladding, it would be >100 year longevity. (Shingles on a vertical wall typically last up to 3-4 times their rated lifetime for a roofing application - so 120-160 years).
If a customer gets their whole house done, they'll never be a return customer with our current materials. The work I'm doing today will be redone by a robot, I guarantee it.
We need basic income because almost every job can eventually be automated out. What about the day we're using nanobots? A tree branch damaged your eavestrough? Just pick up a pail of nanobots at the store and pour it into the reservoir in your basement that your houses computer handles all repairs and renovations. Who am I kidding, they'll probably be made by a nanofabricator you have that makes all your material things.
For critical jobs that can't find workers, there can always be some draft like mechanism, wheres people share this work. Once in while(probably long while) doing some dirty job isn't that bad as a price for basic income.
But i agree with many people who replied to your thread - this would be a very small problem.
I have to admit this alone is enough to give me pause. The logic goes something like: "Our current social system has produced astonishing wealth. We can therefore take this to change our current social system and distribute the wealth more widely. Hooray, we fixed things!"
But this amounts to a rewriting of the social system. We have no guarantees that the next social system will produce the same amounts of wealth. This is a silent assumption that most advocates seem to make, and it is completely unjustified. Despite the vigorous handwaving, it doesn't take much Econ 101 to guess there's a darned good chance it will produce less. But, if it produces less, now we're distributing less wealth. Whatever social effects may occur when that happens, it's pretty unlikely that they're going to be happy puppies and rainbows.
If one could assume a steady-state and that the effects of the first year will be the only effects ever, it's all fun and games. But the second and third order effects seem unlikely to produce a happy society, or even necessarily one that is still generating wealth at anything like our current pace.
The most popular handwave seems to be "Well, we can just pay people more to do the things we need done... and look, now they're getting paid more to do these things, so it's a win! Hooray!" but, well, follow that through to its logical conclusion... a society that is paying more for its basic needs is a poorer society. Poorer in the same wealth that we're trying to redistribute. And given that the price has risen, it's also a society that is getting less of its critical needs.
Sure, the first year of basic income is fun and games. But what does the twentieth look like? Or the year that you have to claw it back because the society no longer has the wealth to provide it? What does it look like when 78% of the culture votes for a larger "basic income" every year? Basic income is probably incompatible with democracy in the long term; what are we going to do about that? Basic income, democracy, and unrestricted immigration from poorer places are definitely incompatible with each other, what are we going to do about that? (Given that we already see plenty of politicians with incentives to legalize immigrants so they can have their votes, this is a huge concern.) What does it look like when a natural disaster strikes New York and society is out billions or trillions of dollars? You have to think about more than the first year, and you have to think about what real people will do in reaction, and what real people will do in reaction to those reactions, and so on and so on. Yes, clearly, Star Trek people do great on something probably quite like Basic Income, but that doesn't prove much.
And I'm quite concerned that this is something that from a societal point of view is not something we'd ever be able to remove if it did become infeasible; I suspect that the populace would happily ride it into straight-up social collapse before giving it up. We may be disturbingly close to that scenario even before we try "basic income".
This logic goes flying out the window if we can make robots that "just work" and can provide for us... but we're not talking about waiting that long right now, are we? We may have no practical choice but to suck it up until then. (And ye gods is there probably a thin line between a robot economy smart enough to provide for us without us doing much, and a robot economy smart enough to simply dispense with us entirely.)
> "Our current social system has produced astonishing wealth. [...]"
In Europe the main problem in agriculture is overproduction so farmers sometimes get payed to leave some land uncultivated and hard limits are imposed on the production of milk and on the import of bovine meat. This is not a place where we'll starve because everybody will start painting and sculpting all of a sudden.
Of course we won't starve, but just having enough food to go around is a pretty low bar for a society in which people can live comfortably. The working classes in the developing world today generally don't starve, but no one would say they have particularly comfortable living conditions. What jerf is saying that, in the absence of full robot automation, a society in which we have guaranteed basic income will make us poorer. The question is "how much poorer"?
There are a large number of people in the 'working' class (at least in the US) who are struggling daily to make enough money to be able to feed a family. They aren't starving as yet, but it just takes a small unfortunate incident to push them over the edge into spiraling poverty.
BI requires lots of experimentation, cant go from 0 to BI nationwide in one day.
The "wealth creation" argument is flimsy, but recognizing that the consequences of BI are unknown is not.
Also, i found this phrase really upsetting: "A society that is paying more for its basic needs is a poorer society"
It would have been a perfectly applicable argument against abolishing slavery.
I can assure you that all low-end jobs like serving burguers, cleaning up toilets, and the sort are not doing by people choosing what they want to do from assorted options and incentives. They have no other choices, its doing that or starving.
If you are not cleaning toilets, then you have all the incentives to go against BI, becuase you are way more likely to have to do your own sandwiches, clean your own office, serve and cook your own food, etc.
I find it dignified that people can choose that they want to do, and very much like the slave owner sucked up his loss of stature, middle-class and upper-class should suck up to not having wage slaves cleaning up after them.
"It would have been a perfectly applicable argument against abolishing slavery."
It would have been wrong, though; slavery is an abuse of power to force people who could otherwise be very productive members of society to do relatively low-value tasks. I'm pretty sure most historians agree that slavery was either not a net economic win, or on its way to not being an economic win, by the time it was abolished.
You then sort of prove my point, by describing an economy in which apparently nobody runs any restaurants at all, and apparently you're going to do your own cooking, cleaning, etc. Yes, that's a gloriously hippie paradise... it's also a poorer economy. You've just celebrated that basic income will produce a poorer economy. And that's not my problem. That's your choice. We all have different values. The question is, where is the wealth for basic income going to come from if the economy just got poorer than it is today?
There's no free lunch. A great deal of the "wage slave" jobs are also where a lot of the basic value of the economy is coming from. Indeed, isn't this half the point of the people on this page, complaining that the "real" value creators aren't getting properly compensated for it? If we tear into those, where is the stuff going to come from that we're supposed to be giving out to people as part of their basic income? It does no good to hand people a "living wage" if there's no longer anything to purchase with it. I'm not sure basic income advocates have deeply internalized the idea that for any economic transaction, there has to be two sides, and there's no Infinite Magical Grocery Store that will always be there, regardless of what we do to the economy. Replacing all the scut work with musicians and painters is a very sweet sounding goal, but where does their poop go?
It would be supreme (and probably very, very deadly) irony if we institute a "basic income" because we're "so rich", only to destroy the very wealth we thought we had in the process. This may not be what happens, but I'd like to see a lot more careful analysis based on real psychology and a few very careful trial runs (yes, I know about the tiny ones that have been done) before I'd even remotely support it. The risks are gigantic, and there's probably easier and less risky ways to mitigate the problems than this.
I dont see the distinction you make between slavery and wage slavery. Why is it so clear to you that the first one was detrimental to the economy , and the second one isnt?
People flipping burguers could be doing something a lot more producting than flipping burguers as well.
Also in terms of poorer economy, I think we dont see eye to eye on the definition of it, because if you consider the loss of wage slavery work as a poorer economy, you should also see that for old fashioned slavery.
The colliseums closed after there were no slave-gladiators, so abolishing slaves did contribute to a poorer economy.
Continuing on that, this is why I found that phrase upsetting: "A great deal of the 'wage slave' jobs are also where a lot of the basic value of the economy is coming from"
If we admit to ourselves collectively that our economy functions thanks to people that have little or no options, there is a very small difference than running a place with slaves.
In the form of a question, if you had a cotton farm that could only work because you had slaves you could work to death, and slaves are taken away from you and you go broke, what is your feeling about that business?
And if you have a burguer joint and it only works because you have people that are very cheap to hire to cook the burguers and clean the place up, and once they want higher salaries you would go broke, what is your feeling about that business?
The objective of basic income is not to increase everyone's wealth, but to increase overall quality of life.
Restaurants wouldn't disappear, but it would be a bit more expensive. Also, I suppose restaurants which treat their personal badly would quickly disappear. (You can say that's wishful thinking, but the lever effect would be quite effective against those).
If you really love your job, and that's everything for you, ok, not much of a change, you may even get a bit less money. Chance is that you work with people who enjoy it too, and basic income wouldn't be much of a change for you.
But if you have a side project you want to launch, it could be what makes the difference, even if it wouldn't be possible in the current economy. Or you could take a few years off to raise your children (or help them go through a difficult period, I heard it can happen).
"Established" company have a lot to loose in that proposal, mainly those we depend on cheap labor. But it would also create a lot of opportunities on the market, so the economical aspect wouldn't be that bad.
What kind of opportunities? Let's say, if people have a bit more free time, child education through fab-lab would be pretty neat (complement or replacement of school, IDK). This is just one "on the spot" idea, it could be done today... if people took the time, or could take it.
I'm not saying the point is to make people more wealthy... I'm saying, the society must be wealthy enough to afford it. The food comes from somewhere. The clean water comes from somewhere. Wealth must exist to be redistributed.
Frankly, "look at all the wonderful things that people will do when they're freed from having to do the things they are doing today" is the scariest thing about it. I'm a programmer. A pretty decent one. The exact sort of surplus-generator that this scheme is predicated on. I go to work and I enjoy my job, but let's be honest, if I could choose how I spent my time, it is not what I would do. I would do something fun and personally interesting, like my outliner (read: "yet another f'ing text editor"), or one of my video game ideas.
This is MURDER to the basic income idea. It only works if enough of us choose to keep working away on things we don't really want to do, and there's a real tension between "a living wage"... that is, by definition enough to "live" on without a job... and something less than that, which is hardly basic income.
How many people are advocating for a basic income because they really think it's just, and how many people are just itching to use it as a way of not having to work anymore (but use the high-minded wealth redistribution as a cover for advocacy)? Even on HN, I rather suspect there's more of the former than we'd like, more people dreaming about how they could easily live frugally if they could not work at all... and we're the workaholics of the world if ever there were any, we crazy programmers. If this is put to a vote, how many millions of people would be just voting to never have to work again? We're not that rich that we can take that yet.
The exact reason why we can't all just do what we want, today, is that "what we want" doesn't add enough value to society on its own for us to be able to afford it. If we could live in a glorious wonderland where we just did what we wanted and we all came out collectively wealthy in the end, we wouldn't have to try to create some "basic income" idea, we could just do it right now... but we can't. Our desires don't overlap the needs of the world well enough. That's true even here in the programming world, and if anything in the entire spectrum of work would work like that, it's our world, with open source and feasible free collaboration between thousands on single products. I can't see how to make the numbers add up... and that is what we have to do if we're going to make this work, not rhapsodize about how wonderful it all could be in Utopia if only we got together and wished hard enough.
The whole reason for the recent resurgence in BI is the realization that automation is fast removing that bottom rung of scut jobs. Obviously, BI won't work if nothing replaces the unpleasant jobs that no one would be incentivized to do anymore.
>But this amounts to a rewriting of the social system.
Social systems have been rewritten for a very long time. Colonialism, manifest destiny and whatever else springs to mind.... all of these things rewrite social systems. The new script is the purview of powerful.
Basic income would be just a step up to the ultimate goal of Star Trek style economy. I guess that having basic income would help cut on those 'bullshit jobs' that don't actually benefit anyone and are just a net negative for the society.
I see you've never worked in a large organization... ;-)
Bullshit jobs are largely jobs that managers create and defend in order to expand their managerial fiefdoms. A manager's influence in an organization comes partially from how many people report to him or her. That's the incentive structure that creates many of the bullshit jobs.
There are also interpersonal issues in play. For instance, you or I might walk into a particular company and observe a dozen different processes that could be easily automated with off-the-shelf software but are currently being done by humans. We might say to the manager "Why don't you automate, you're wasting money?!". In some cases, the manager would reply that the people doing those jobs are valued employees, possibly even friends, and automating those processes would put them out of work and thus, the processes are not automated.
It is a fallacy to believe that businesses operate efficiently simply because there is a profit motive. Businesses are complex organizations made up of people, with all their failings and weaknesses (if you want to call them that). It is not necessary for a business to be perfectly efficient to survive, it is only necessary that its competitors be equally inefficient.
It is a fallacy to believe that businesses operate efficiently simply because there is a profit motive. Businesses are complex organizations made up of people, with all their failings and weaknesses (if you want to call them that). It is not necessary for a business to be perfectly efficient to survive, it is only necessary that its competitors be equally inefficient.
I like to point this out to anyone who says "well, a business wouldn't do it if it made them less efficient", eg the case of open floor plans for programmers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507280
Like it or not, money is the best way to determine whether such a job is "bullshit" or not. Limited resources are allocated, on the whole, where those controlling those financial resources see the best productivity as measured by profitability. You may not grasp why a job is worth paying for, but you're not the one putting the money up for it. If a manager grows his fiefdom but his managers don't see fitting payoff, he'll find himself no longer a manager and his fiefdom dismantled.
It's not perfect, but it's way better than any other system.
Even net negative jobs can bring enough money to someone to be worth keeping alive, so no, money payed for the job is not a measure if the job is bullshit or not, it's just a measure that someone finds it profitable.
>It is a fallacy to believe that businesses operate efficiently simply because there is a profit motive.
Operating more efficiently is exactly what is destroying jobs. Middle managers are an easy target but I fail to see how there are enough of them to move the needles.
Telemarketers. Door-to-door cable TV sales. Most of the paper-pushers in the USA's medical care system (assuming we go to single payer system as well). A large percentage of retail workers (in the USA we have way more retail space than is really necessary). Most of the mid-level managers in most of the large corporations. Any place that has strict union work-rules is usually overstaffed to my eye.
Much of the administration of social services (Social Security, Food Stamps, etc.) in the USA (to all be replaced by that basic living stipend).
It's worse than that -- I've heard stories from friends in government agencies of people who do net-negative work (i.e. they create work for others) and keep their jobs for political/societal/social reasons.
I recall the following: "The factory at the edge of town has two employees -- a Human, and a dog. The Human's job is to feed the dog. The dog's job is to keep the Human away from the machines."
From the article, those are jobs that "have no benefit for person working", and "have no benefit for the rest of the society". Why we do work them? Because they benefit the small group that is powerful enough to force society to do net negative thing.
Not the author, but there are undoubtedly plenty of stimulus jobs created by the government that could be cut.
Smart parking meters (that accept credit cards, and that let you reup time with your phone) for example, could dramatically adjust the number of positions available for meter maids / parking enforcement officers.
USPS is probably going to have to shift at some point to... something different.
The federal government spends $25 billion maintaining vacant properties, and owns more than 50,000 vacant homes. That probably doesn't equate to job elimination, but there's got to be some kind of opportunity there.
Toll booths for toll roads have got to be on the way out, right? I mean, not saying EZ Pass is the best, or most ubiquitous, but we've got speed cameras that map to DMV databases such that if I run a toll, I already get a bill in the mail -- add a new question at the DMV for 'email address' and stop sending paper bills and you've got a business model.
It would be interesting to see if having some level of universal basic income and universal healthcare would be far better than having many federal, state and local departments dealing with distribution of a wide array of various government services.
How would that work from a free market standpoint? What I mean is, when everyone has a baseline amount of money, the relative scarcity is diminished and the market prices will inflate as the value of money(real & perceived) decreases.
I cannot recall the historical character at the moment, but I recall reading of a benevolent king(central or south american?) who give all his subjects generous amounts of gold to the effect that it crashed their economy. Anyone?
As far as I know, everyone has a baseline amount of money in our society -- it's just that it comes from a lot of disparate sources. Some people get their baseline from a combination of housing vouchers, food stamps, medicaid, and other entitlements; others get their baseline from working 2 McJobs; others have good jobs that provide way beyond the baseline.
If the baseline is provided in a more straightforward way (and, presumably, taxes on above-baseline amounts are raised accordingly) there may be very little economic distortion from the present state.
Do it slowly. Yes inflation can happen due to increased demand , but raising the amount of money slowly enables increased supply, which will cause prices to go down.
It doesn't work in supply restricted things like real estate thought, so other solutions might be needed for that market.
>What I mean is, when everyone has a baseline amount of money, the relative scarcity is diminished and the market prices will inflate as the value of money(real & perceived) decreases.
"Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon"?
I guess so, I am not an economist. That seems to be the cycle repeated since the dawn of human interactions, however. With scarcity comes demand, market sets price... and the rest of the spiel. A game that has been gamed long before we came along, but yeah, that seems to be how it works historically.
Your previous post claims that guaranteed minimum income may cause inflation. I replied with a quote that inflation is always and everywhere caused by monetary changes.
My point thus being that a guaranteed minimum income would not cause inflation.
Prices change in response to market forces, yes.
But micro price changes are not inflation.
Inflation is a macro level phenomenon, caused "always and everywhere" by monetary changes (debasement etc).
Hardly. Communism is a system in which all property is publicly owned and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs. (It's more complicated than that, but y'know...)
A Basic Income policy is totally Socialism, which is a system in which the economy is cooperatively managed. (Again, more complicated really.)
But there's nothing wrong with Socialism. It's a bad word in America, for historical reasons, despite being fairly widely implemented within that country.
The concept of Socialism presupposes a powerful state.
Both communism and basic income include the notion of income distribution as an antidote to strong government controls.
I agree there's nothing inherently "bad" about these ideas, I just wish we wouldn't invent new terms for old ideas, just because the older terms have gotten a (perhaps undeservedly) bad reputation.
This is a stressful topic that gets overwhelming quickly. Things are shifting but it's a slow shift and one that is going to be extremely painful before it gets better. Some interesting work going on with worker coops, parecon, post-scarcity economics, etc... As one of the linked comments noted "Looks like we've built higher-phase communism accidentally. Ooops."
The Keynes article he briefly touches on is fantastic
"Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society. To judge from the behaviour and the achievements of the wealthy classes to-day in any quarter of the world, the outlook is very depressing! For these are, so to speak, our advance guard – those who are spying out the promised land for the rest of us and pitching their camp there. For they have most of them failed disastrously, so it seems to me – those who have an independent income but no associations or duties or ties – to solve the problem which has been set them.
I feel sure that with a little more experience we shall use the new-found bounty of nature quite differently from the way in which the rich use it to-day, and will map out for ourselves a plan of life quite otherwise than theirs.
For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter – to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us! "
While having a beer last week with some friends, the topic turned to the old question "What would you do if you suddenly had $20 million dollars handed to you?". This is an old question of course, on HN it would be called F U money, but it had been asked that day by a customer of my friend Kevin. Kevin makes jewelry tools. His immediate response was "I could buy more tools and machines!", which was my basic response also. I have a nice new CNC lathe on my list next, a mere $100,000.
I think it is funny, that given enough money not to work our (Kevin, me) first reaction is to think of the things we could buy that would let us do more work. For the most part I enjoy my work, and I would get more enjoyment with fancy new equipment. "who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread" does not seem true in this case.
YMMV of course. Given FU money, I would probably not work 40 hours a week, every week. It would be more like 10 hours one week and 80 another. When I am in the passion of a new idea, the time flies by and 80 hours feels like nothing. Anyone who has worked all night on a project and then seen the sun rise knows what I mean. I find those times some of the most enjoyable in my life.
I think humans like to do things. Make games, write software, build sandcastles, etc. Removing the need for work would not remove the work. The work would just be what we found to be entertaining to ourselves, instead of a job to eat.
That mirrors my response to the $20M question, too. Congratulations: you have a vocation, not a job.
(Me? I'd finish off my existing more-for-money-than-for-love contracts, because I owe my customers. (I get paid a huge deposit in advance.) Then I'd get a lot more picky about what projects I tackled going forward; more willing to tackle not-obviously-profitable ones and less willing to do uninteresting stuff that merely puts bread on the table. Oh, and I'd hire a full-time copy-editor/proofreader, and PA to handle my expenses and travel arrangements. Then I'd move out of my apartment for 3 months and get it thoroughly remodelled, from the plasterwork up, because it's overdue to be rewired, could use a modern heating system, and I might as well redecorate while I'm about it. But apart from that, not a huge amount would change ...)
> I think humans like to do things. Make games, write software, build sandcastles, etc. Removing the need for work would not remove the work. The work would just be what we found to be entertaining to ourselves, instead of a job to eat.
Isn't that a reason in and of itself to remove work? People working for satisfaction and pleasure instead of trying to make it day to day seems like a massive improvement on many societal ills we face.
> "I think humans like to do things. Make games, write software, build sandcastles, etc. Removing the need for work would not remove the work. The work would just be what we found to be entertaining to ourselves, instead of a job to eat."
This is part of the issue that arises. I've spoken with many people about the concept of a low-scarcity, low-growth, etc... leisure economy and the responses are surprising. "But then what will people do?" "What will motivate them to work?" "Why would anyone want that much free time?" Some people just don't have passions strong enough to drive their lives.
Keynes also addresses this in the above linked article, saying:
"Thus we have been expressly evolved by nature – with all our impulses and deepest instincts – for the purpose of solving the economic problem. If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose.
Will this be a benefit? If one believes at all in the real values of life, the prospect at least opens up the possibility of benefit. Yet I think with dread of the readjustment of the habits and instincts of the ordinary man, bred into him for countless generations, which he may be asked to discard within a few decades.
To use the language of to-day – must we not expect a general “nervous breakdown“? We already have a little experience of what I mean – a nervous breakdown of the sort which is already common enough in England and the United States amongst the wives of the well-to-do classes, unfortunate women, many of them, who have been deprived by their wealth of their traditional tasks and occupations – who cannot find it sufficiently amusing, when deprived of the spur of economic necessity, to cook and clean and mend, yet are quite unable to find anything more amusing. "
I haven't dug for any data but at first glance it seems that many of our societal "vices" could be responses to this lack of purpose. Some of the socialist humanists touch on this topic, what happens to a man without purpose? Drugs, pornography, violence, depression, striking out and grasping for any sort of stimulation while flailing in a search for meaning.
> many of our societal "vices" could be responses to this lack of purpose
I forget who said it, but one author noted that purpose is as spiritually important as air. Without it, we break down.
How much of the Western world is built on grasping for the Next Big Thing? The entire consumer culture is predicated on this! And this consumer mindset gets reflected in the workforce. But if you think about it, it quickly boils down to the same dull need: the need to dominate, consume, and self-aggrandize.
These motives are exceedingly poor, and we consistently select leaders who exhibit them, often with terrible consequences.
Some people just don't have passions strong enough to drive their lives.
As much as I hate to say this, I'm afraid that this is probably empirically true (although you have to be careful about the precise conclusions you draw from this).
Most Western countries today are in a state of mass long term unemployment - there are millions of people who have not had a job for a year or more.
What are these people doing today? Obviously they have only limited access to resources, but at least in European countries, they tend not to be starving. Are they leading fulfilling lives? Anecdotally, the answer appears to be no.
I do like the idea of giving everybody enough money for a decent life, no questions asked. It is a fundamentally good idea, and we can probably afford it. But to think that that will solve all our problems is just naive.
In fact, I think the combination of direct job creation for full employment (defined as zero involuntary unemployment) and a basic income is a valuable goal. The great thing is that both policies are probably beneficial just by themselves already, even though they should be combined.
I see life as a trifecta. The first point, is things we do as a hobby, the second, things we do for leisure, and the third, things we do to sustain ourselves.
If one task can fulfill all three points, you have it made.
The ultimate example of the "what would you do?" question is Bill Gates. If there is any one person on Earth who does not _need_ to work, it's him. And yet he's as busy as he's always been. He's not just funneling money to causes, he's intimately involved in the process.
There's nothing wrong with being industrious. Hard work, meaningful hard work, is rewarding in and of itself.
Not needing everyone to work doesn't necessarily mean we're post-scarcity, which means someone has to decide how to allocate scarce resources, in coordination with the people or companies that run and maintain the mostly-automated systems, and that's where the extreme pain shows up.
Our economies also have this tendency to siphon off surplus and spend it on expensive military projects such as wars. There is the general year in year out expenditure on new military toys, keeping the nuclear 'deterrent' up to date and keeping those boys polishing their boots. We don't get a proper tax breakdown on this expenditure so I would only be guessing as to how much is really spent.
On top of this regular expenditure are the billions that have been spent bombing Afghanistan and Iraq to pieces. We have been saddled with debt to pay for that and it won't be the politicians that will be personally paying that off.
Although a lot of people don't wish to see it that way, war is a racket. Nobody would bother unless there was money to be made. The waste goes far beyond the lives lost and the taxes diverted, there is also a real loss of valuable materials and energy resources. It is all an incredible waste yet we are always told that 'defence' is good for jobs.
Given the default option for siphoning off the 'fruits of capitalist surplus' is more and more bombs and weapons, that is kind of what we all work for in our variously inane jobs. Isn't this a fantastic situation?
Military expenditures are about %4.2 [1] of GDP, compared lets say the financial sector which has increased to %8.4 from it's under %3 level in the 1950s[2]. Or the healthcare sector, which consumes 17.4% of GDP in the USA[3]. Compared to the typical average of ~%11 for countries with socialized medicine.
Most of the US tax expenditure goes towards social security and medicare. But your talking about a governmental system that can print it's own currency and is the reserve currency of the world, so even that is a bit wonky to think about.
If the USA fixed it's regulatory health care mess, broke the artificial supply constraints on doctors, made medical devices not have %1000+ profit margins and socialized their healthcare, they would save more GDP than liquidating the US military. Shrinking the financial sector back to its 1950's % of GDP would also pay for the military. Our relatively small software industry is under %2 in 2007.[4]
> Workers in Germany average a little over 35 hours a week, compared to the 42 hours worked in the UK.
Flat out wrong as per the source cited. The difference is only 0.7 hours, both for full time employees and for all employees (the numbers above mix the two).
> German law guarantees 30 working days of vacation per year (and I am told medical leave for attending a spa resort on top of that).
Nope, it's 29 days on average, but only 20 mandated by law (for a 5 day working week). And medical leave is, of course, only available if you actually have medical problems (and paid for by your health insurance or retirement provider).
Thank you for clarifying. Too often North Americans state "it's like this in Europe", without researching what the actual facts are like. I have Uncles who are still quoting facts that are 30 years old and may never have been accurate to begin with ;)
On the internet/TV for example, you are failing to take into account the spread of tech and efficiency. We can have factories produce TVs automatically, and internet infrastructure doesn't require a huge number of people to keep it running--and most of them, I wager, would be happy to keep doing what they're doing, because it's fun.
As for fancy restaurants or organic groceries...that's just a function of cooking something well and having something to cook. If you're not working all the time, you are more likely to be able to help in your community garden.
I'm sorry, but your assertion isn't borne out by thought.
What? That's quite silly. [...] I'm sorry, but your assertion isn't borne out by thought.
This comment would have been better without its hostile preface and its hostile appendix. Please don't use such language on Hacker News.
All: Please re-read what you've posted and, if it contains phrases that contribute hostility to the discussion, edit them out.
This is really important, because (speaking metaphorically) our brains are all programmed to pick up on the agitation in such language. That leads to bad things, like the comment getting less reflective attention, and threads getting provoked into a downward spiral.
This is meant in all seriousness (and posted here instead of private mail because it is something that others could probably benefit from reading):
The preface is the gist of my post ("I disagree with your reasoning, and find it absurd."), and the appendix summarizes the conclusion ("The conclusion you've come to does not follow logically once you take into account other factors").
I agree (having written some bad posts in my time) that writing "You're a fucking idiot, how the hell did you come up with this?" is not good discourse.
At the same time, avoiding any flavor or diction in our writing here would make it tedious to read and worse still boring to write.
There's got to be some middle-ground; I assure you that it wasn't written to be hostile (consider the corrective reply and my acknowledgement elsewhere in this subthread).
EDIT: Also, where do you come down on the "meta discussion kills" theory of communities?
I am confident that the creative and intelligent users of Hacker News can figure out how to retain "flavor and diction" while making their writing more substantive and less rude.
Meta discussion is bad on HN. My current stream of meta comments is a special case, and temporary. Sometimes one prescribes medicine that is toxic because the disease is worse. Hacker News' disease is unsubstantive and hostile language in comments. We're pushing hard against this problem from several angles. Providing clear feedback to the community is one.
I don't want to jinx it by commenting on how well it's going so far, but I would definitely like to invite any of you who notice a change, for better or worse, to tell us about it at hn@ycombinator.com. We'll read it with interest.
Internet infrastructure actually does require a somewhat large number of people and it is quite fragile.
I never would have though a fiber cut (which seems to happen almost weekly) would have such a large impact, but it does. I figured BGP would reroute around that and to some extent it does, but there's still a lot of manual route handling.
I think you misinterpreted my comment as if it were about what "we" as a society could do, but I meant it as a comment about what any of us as an individual could do.
I like to make this point using housing data from the census bureau.
A typical 1930s person, or even early 1970s person, lived in a 1500 square foot or smaller house. Houses built in the last decade or so average 2200 square feet. Many people could work a lot less just by moving into a smaller place and having the subsequent reduction in rent/mortgage and utilities.
I lived roughly this lifestyle for 7 years and thoroughly enjoyed it. Internet is cheap, so I wouldn't suggest anyone give that up, but if you're not especially materially focused, I would highly recommend such a lifestyle. [0]
However, I want to point out that essentially all agriculture in 1930 was what is now labeled as organic. So if 1930 is your goalpost, I don't agree with having it on your list. [1]
[0] http://www.ic.org
[1] I'm unconvinced that organic ag has any health benefit, but a fair extraction price is generally not applied to what often amounts to mining topsoil
This isn't true. Since about 1960 productivity has gone up but (middle class) incomes have gone down. The fraction of a family's expenditures have become dominated by the basics, not by the amenities you cite.
Again, not if you're willing to live in a typical 1930 house (with one bathroom for the whole family, a small kitchen, no family room, one bedroom for the parents, one bedroom for ALL the kids, no air conditioning, no garage, no laundry room).
The average price of a house is so much more today in large part because people want a lot more square footage.
> Health insurance.
Today's standards for health coverage are much higher than they were in 1930. Life expectancy for American men was 58 years back then. Blue Cross didn't exist. Jimmy Carter was the first US President born in a hospital (in 1924).
If you're willing to lower your standards dramatically, and accept medical treatment that's as sucky as it was in 1930, it's a lot cheaper than what we would today consider to be acceptable.
> Second cars (because women now need to work).
They don't, though. If you're willing to live the low quality of life that was prevalent in 1930, you can do it with a single-earner household.
In fact, why does your household even need one car? In 1930, most American households got by with zero.
Maybe 1930 but certainly not 1970. Typical middle class families are worse off than 1970 as that video illustrates.
But even the reduction in work to live the 1930s lifestyle you describe is no where near commensurate with per capita GDP growth over the same period. I think that is the real thesis statement: Most people have captured only a small fraction of increases in productivity.
Isn't a lot of that productivity exactly because of all those technologies (and more)? Then how does it make sense to stop using all of those things in order to work less? The Internet helps a knowledge worker to be productive (also enables some procrastination, but oh well). Is canceling your Internet subscription and consulting your 20 volume, 10 year old encyclopedia a benefit? Same goes for cell phones and cars.
And when you have all those things, also using them at home makes sense.
Because maintaining and advancing those things takes work. If you work less, you won't be able to afford that Internet subscription and $1000 in hardware to access it, you won't afford the $3.30/gal gas for commuting, you won't afford the iPhone with data plan, etc. Your employer will have to extend deadlines and cancel projects because you (along with everyone else thinking less work is a great idea) just aren't producing 4x your new relaxed hours, and thus tech won't be advancing nearly as fast and may not even keep up with the stresses of growing population. Doctors cut back their hours, and people consequently die in the ER. Lacking the now-deceased cell tower maintenance guy, your cheap cell phone doesn't work any more, and the reduced-hours landline installer for your area is booked for the next 2 years. Wanting to find a clever solution, you realize you can't access Wikipedia for a simple but very relevant factoid, and have to go to a local garage sale to pick up a 20 volume 10 year old encyclopedia - and carry it back, because you can't afford to repair the car.
The Red Queen was right: sometimes you have to run (work) hard just to stay where you are; slow down, and you'll go backwards.
Well, yeah, exactly. I doesn't make sense to live technologically as if we're in the 30's, because modern technology is the reason for our productivity.
Great article. One of the things that many people have an aversion to when it comes to this kind of thing is the "socialist" aspect of it. We all agree that it's great, but is it for everybody? I totally see where libertarians come from. They want A LOT of freedom. But why can't we have it both ways? One of the reasons socialism is hard to maintain is because of how spread out things can be, I think we can all agree that with socialism you inevitably have to force people to do certain things so that society can work (for example, live in a certain place), and this is much easier to do in a small location, but what's stopping us from having two sets of laws governing two areas of land?
You can fit everyone in the US into an area the size of Jacksonville Fl., so why not just establish "tech-metros" which are open to anyone and provide basic necessities in a socialized fashion, and use automation and digitalization to provide goods and services, while designating certain swaths of land out side these places as under a different set of laws that are more libertarian in nature? I believe ~60% of people would flock to the "tech-metros" while the remaining portion would attempt life in a more privatized fashion out side of them. With a more centralized "sub-government" in charge of these small areas, and with it being easy to come and go as you please, it should be easier to take care of the masses that want to be taken care of and let the masses who don't want to be taken care of take care of themselves.
Now that's just a couple paragraphs on a very radical idea, so there are a lot of details being left out, but imho this idea provides the most happiness along with the least destruction.
> Why should we not divert some of our growth into growing our leisure time, rather than growing our physical wealth?
Because not everyone was created equal. Some professions are completely worthless (e.g. ad creators) and add nothing net to the society. Others, e.g. doctors, are so valuable, and so few people can do them, that they simply can't afford to work less (educating more doctors so that they can work fewer hours is not an answer - I'm not a doctor, but I imagine it takes a relatively fixed amount of hours of training to actually "become a doctor" (after finishing your education), so if doctors worked less, they would be worse doctors). The social contract then dictates that everyone must work, since doctors have to work.
Strangely I was just discussing this in another thread, but there's a shortage of doctors because the doctors have a union that ensures that is the case, as that is a benefit to their members. Any attempt to relieve this pressure, such as allowing qualified nurses to undertake more work, is strongly resisted by the doctors themselves. And they will fight automation too, for the very same reasons, and with many of the same soundbites.
As Bob Black pointed out in The Abolition of Work, if a job is worth doing, someone would do it, whether or not they got paid to do it. Charlie Stross made that point in his essay - he'd continue to be a writer even if he didn't need to write for a living.
The same is true of doctors. And farmers. And firemen.
I contend a core persistent failing of FOSS is proof that premise is not true. There is somewhere around 5% of any project which must be done, but which nobody wants to do because it's hard/dirty work which produces little (but not zero or negative) benefit, is not interesting, few if any will appreciate (or even notice) it, but without which there will be a persistent stumbling block.
Sure, writers & doctors & farmers & firemen might do their stereotypical work for free because that's just what they do. But what about street cleaners & trash haulers? janitors for public housing? high-risk divers for floating oil rigs? Are you going to regularly clean, for free, elevators that low-end public-housing occupants piss in daily? pick up trash on the street, dumped there faster than you can clean up by bored teens who know they'll never have to do anything because their GBI cards will always get them food & pay the rent, and who are amused by your frustration at their persistent destructiveness?
There's quite a bit of a difference between being a writer, and being a surgeon/emergency doctor/fireman. Writer's don't work 12 hour shifts, don't do physically hard work, and aren't killed by their jobs.
The number of teaching spots for doctors is not necessarily well exposed to the market (various regulations). It's unlikely that all the interested and capable people are able to become doctors.
It's also possible to imagine a social contract that gives working people more, I'm not sure we have to stick with the one you see.
Namely, that the amount of work that can be done has an upper bound.
In fact, the amount of work that can be be done is infinite and with higher productivity other things are done (= can be done economically) than before, for example:
Cleaning the streets, painting your house white, keeping your nearby river clean, build tanks & guns, maintaining bureaucracy, helping people you don't know (welfare state).
These things are all non-essential (yeah yeah I know but still ...), yet are only done now because only recently we achieved the productivity / wealth of being able to do it.
If we stop doing these things we will feel wealthier because individually, we'll have more resources to fulfill our needs. We would maybe still help our neighbours or paint our house white or buy guns but we would (or not) do it because we decided it ourselves.
I suppose in the future there will be other things we'll do that now seem insane: maybe even the poorest might have a swimming pool, or we commute a few thousand kilometers to work, or we each carry a wearable computer around without needing it for work (can you imagine???).
But there will be work, it is as certain as death and taxes.
The complementary fallacy also in the article: the amount of work required has a lower bound of zero.
Survival isn't free. We consume (destroy) just to maintain a lowest-common-denominator status quo. The Red Queen was right: we need to run (work) hard just to keep up with staying where we are (98 degrees F). To keep two people at that state of basic survival while one does nothing to produce whatever's needed to maintain their fair share, the other has to work twice as hard - and without some suitable incentive, the one working will lose interest in doing so.
Yes, we're in a wealthy society. We're at this level because everyone, on the whole, works hard and pitches in. If a growing subset decide to just bask in the luxury, it's all going to come crashing down. As tax season approaches, I'm reminded of how much is taken from me - making it hard to do what I consider essential for my family, and making me reconsider my role in society; take enough from me, and I can go "off grid" pretty fast. Remember the goose who laid golden eggs.
The author points out that it's possible in some sense to have a world with less work, OK material standards, more leisure and less unhappiness. People would still work, social/technological advancement would still occur, but people would be more content and maybe many would move to jobs that would make more of their talents.
This, however, is looking only at big numbers on a macro level. It ignores all the things which have prevented this outcome from actually happening. These include (1) incentives (2) ideology.
1. If employer A allows less than 40 hour work weeks, or more vacation, he can be beaten out in the market by employer B which mandates longer hours and produces more per time period. Employees might prefer A over B, but they have so little bargaining power that this will not stop B. If the same requirements are imposed on all employers, then the country will be out-competed by others.
2. Conservatives criticize any such proposal with an argument like this: "You should be free to use your property as you wish, including by having people work as long as you can get them to agree to. And everything is already owned, so the only way to provide more for one person is to take away from another, and it's wrong to take money or other values from people who have earned them, to give to others who have not earned them."
Regardless of the merits of the argument, it is effective with the public, and politicians use it effectively to protect the owners. This can never change unless someone can present a contrary view that can be stated in equally pithy sound-bites and which is equally convincing for large numbers of voters (in democratic countries, basically W. Europe and parts of S. America) or unless a large enough segment commit to a revolution (in the rest of the countries which are not democratic).
I left a job where I was basically paid to be the other guy with a heartbeat who knows Smalltalk. I did nothing but browse all day, and it was soul crushing. (Also responsible for a significant chunk of my HN karma.)
If you're feeling unbiased enough to try and ignore what certain words mean to use today, you may want to ready Oscar Wilde's take on these things from a 19th century point of view.
If the words "Socialist" or "Marxist" mean something much more livid to you than " Romanticism" or "Postmodernism," you are not allowed to read the linked article^
funny i was talking about something similar with a friend last night. think about this:
in a lot of professions it's common to study about up to 10 years before you start working. that's after 12-13 years of school(unless you're a professional athlete)
you study for a quarter century. think about it. a quarter of a century. that's the height of your youth. then you're allowed to work for 40 years so you can "enjoy" your retirement(provided you still get any retirement at that time).
that's by the way the time when you have pain all over your body, wake up at 4 am and go to bed at 9.
Studying for a quarter of a century during the height of your youth a reward on its own, and it's unfortunate that for so many it's just a path to employment. I wouldn't change that even in the imaginary utopia I can dream about.
What's BS is having to pay for that is the less fortunate countries, and a pressure to churn people through it as fast as possible.
I do it as a hobby. Every once and a while I find a completely new rabbit hole to dive into and I find it exhilarating. I wish I could spend all of my time learning and making new things, ranging from computer systems/programs to rebuilding old motorcycles/cars or learning how to draw.
I did find my physics degree a little tiring by the 4th year, but that was mostly because I had discovered computer science.
in a lot of professions it's common to study about up to 10 years before you start working. that's after 12-13 years of school(unless you're a professional athlete
Give three examples. Just graduated doctors get paid while they're doing further study and specialisation, ditto for lawyers and doctoral students mostly get paid, albeit very badly.
My wife spent 8 unpaid years in education (4 years first degree, 2 year LLB, 1 year mandatory post-grad, 1 year devilling to be an Advocate) - with a 2 year trainee period before the devilling.
So there was a four year unnecessary mistake degree/degree as consumption not investment, right? One can get an Ll.B. in three years in the UK. Does mandatory postgrad actually mean mandatory or is it just a way of throwing out all other applicants?
Yes, but I'm not in England, and first degrees are 4 years here (for an Hons).
Getting a first degree and then an LLB is the more traditional route to qualifying as a solicitor and indeed the government department where she trained had it as a requirement - they only looked at trainees that had two first degrees.
Mind you, in reality the first degree was a mistake at the time but when she did learn how the legal system actually works (not written down anywhere, of course) having two degrees was regarded as a very good thing and more "respectable" than doing it as a first degree (can't think of a better term). It used to be pretty common - and was frankly a class thing.
Are you in Scotland? Solicitors haven't been unambiguously upper class until fairly recently, being a barrister has always been respectable but as far as the upper reaches of society were concerned a solicitor was a kind of clerk.
The two first degrees requirement is nauseatingly classist, almost as disgusting a waste of life as the US system of legal or medical education.
Mr. Myne has invented an extraordinary machine. This one machine can, using polluted air and brackish water as material inputs, produce a nutritious food substitute and potable water for one person for one entire day with less than $1.30 of grid power. The 2000 kcal daily diet uses about 8000 kcal of electricity and 10 L of dirty water. With this machine, a person can avoid starvation and dehydration for less than $500 per year.
But Mr. Myne owns the machines. He will lease them out for the low, low price of $8 per day. That's cheap for 100% of your daily nutrition! You still have to pay for the electricity and water yourself, which is about $1.50 a day.
There's the hypothetical. Now here's the experiment. What happens if people decide to stop paying Mr. Myne to use his machines?
What happens if people decide to stop paying Mr. Myne to use his machines?
Someone else invents it? The fallacy is the same one that most people in favor of "intellectual property" operate under: that Mr Myne is somehow so special that he's the only person who could have ever invented the machine. As history has repeatedly shown, even the very special are hardly ever truly unique. Most inventions and discoveries occurred at roughly the same time by different people around the world.
Why would someone else invent it? If people decide to stop paying for the machines, or at least stop paying enough for him to suitably benefit from making/obtaining & maintaining the machines, why would anyone else fill in the gap if they're not going to benefit either?
Such technologies are common: per-unit and per-use cost may be low, but price of reaching that cost level may be extremely high. Integrated circuits are individually very cheap (!), but the machines making them cost $billions - they're not something you are, on your own, going to construct just so you can have an iPhone. iPhones exist because Apple put enormous money into making their components in such volume as to reach commodity cost.
Mr. Myne's machines may cost just a couple dollars a day to rent & run, but may have cost a billion dollars to produce to achieve that cheap cost - heck yeah he wants 4x retail price thereon because he needs to earn back that billion dollars and make enough additional profit to make the whole enormous activity worth his while.
A thing is worth exactly and only what another is willing to pay for it. If people will pay $8/day for Mr. Myne's machines, that's what it's worth.
I feel the original thought experiment was not well phrased, and it felt a bit polemic, if not polarizing. I agree, the market will pay what it can bear, and if Mr. Myne doesn't react to that, the market will stop paying.
But unless Mr. Myne is the only one with the capital to create the machines, I can't see how someone else wouldn't come along and make the machines for what the market will bear. As the saying goes, "demand creates its own supply."
It's an allegory. Mr. Myne's machine represents the increased efficiency of future industrial capital. The magical machine is all the advancements of agriculture wrapped up in one black box, and completely automated to remove wages from the equation.
In the future, when robots can make everything you would ever need more efficiently than you can do it yourself, what can you possibly do to pay the owners of the robots for the things the robots make?
There aren't many options. You can own your own robots. You can do something the robot owners want that can't be done by robots. You can abolish individual robot ownership. Whatever you do, you have to think about what happens when producers and consumers are separated by an economic wall, when there's nothing that you can do that a robot cannot do better. Where you have nothing to bring to the market that anyone else wants to buy. It's not just people deciding not to pay. At some point they won't even be able to pay.
This is why patents ought to be property in the same sense that land or leases are property, and the govt. ought to be able to use eminent domain on them. Pay Mr. Myne a lot for his contribution to society, but then make sure that even the least-well-off can take advantage of this newfound material wealth without exploitation.
While there is no single right answer here, I think maybe you have stumbled across one of the many possible wrong answers.
If you haven't already figured it out, Mr. Myne represents the owner-investor class, his machine represents future industrial capital, and your solution was to use the government to seize control of the capital.
...discouraging anyone else from getting into the "Myne machine" industry. Why bother if others are just going to out-vote him, put a gun to one's head, and seize control?
(People have some sort of natural right to ideas that they never share, beyond that it's all protection granted by society. I guess it's a minor distinction.)
Patents are time-limited, government granted monopolies. Why confuse things with complicated and (often intentionally) misleading metaphors about property?
A free-market society would never average a 15 hour work week unless there's no incentive to pay for the work anymore. This could happen if we find a limitless energy source and real artificial intelligence. As long as someone is willing to pay for hours of work, people will be willing to work more than 15 hours a week to get ahead.
No, seriously, if I can work 15 hours a week and live comfortably, why is there an automatic assumption that I'd need to work more just because other people are prepared to do that? What does 'get ahead' even mean, in that context?
There's so many social and cultural assumptions bound up in your statement that it's nearly meaningless for anyone who isn't you.
People don't just want to do well, they want to do better than those around them. it's natural to many people (maybe not to you, but to many). I read this quote from a wall street executive in an article recently posted on HN: " “It's not just enough to fly in first class; I have to know my friends are flying in coach."
So unless nobody is selling first class tickets, people will work harder to afford them. And in order for the market to work, the seller of tickets will raise the price of first class until only ~10% of flying passengers can afford it.
I don't think your Wall Street exec is expressing a common viewpoint. In fact, I think he's probably a sociopath, and if we can architecture a society which is actively hostile to those kind of attitudes I think it could only be a good thing.
This looks like a lot of words to disguise the fact it's neo-luddism.
With technological progress worker roles are eliminated, but the idea is that the market has demand for new currently non-existent things and as the progress enables those things to come into existence creating new jobs as it goes.
The much larger problem is people are genuinely getting conditioned to receiving a lot for nothing, and this has distorted the market in terms of what activities are most highly rewarded. For example, easy credit means selling to people that don't have the money (or the means) is actually very lucrative, so you get a lot of otherwise smart people engaged in activities to extract money from those with easy credit as opposed to applying their talents to contributing more positively to the system as a whole.
> With technological progress worker roles are eliminated, but the idea is that the market has demand for new currently non-existent things and as the progress enables those things to come into existence creating new jobs as it goes.
The author is arguing that this isn't always the case. You can't take it as an axiom that the market will always have need for employing everyone.
For example, as automation becomes more sophisticated, the intelligence needed to use or modulate that automation may increase. As that base requirement rises, more people may become structurally unemployable. In the limit, if there is little that humans can do better than computers, there is little need to employ many humans.
Why do people have to be employed at all? If computers/robots become as good (I don't see this in close future), people will just use them to produce what they need and they will not need money.
2) That there is a vast untapped well of jobs that will be created as Point 1 progresses.
3) That the number of jobs in Point 2 is greater the number of jobs in Point 1.
Disagreeing with Points 2 or 3 doesn't make someone a neo-Luddite. Those claims are more about the economy than about technology. I haven't seen any reason to accept them as true. Obviously some new jobs will open up, but the idea that there is a sufficient pool of jobs that are worth a comfortable wage isn't in evidence as far as I can tell.
I see the Neo-luddism argument thrown out a lot when discussions pop up around basic income.
It's bullshit. Basic Income does not in any way support or suggest opposition to technology. In general, technology has made life better for everyone. It's not an issue that basic income is trying to solve.
The problem is that technology within a capitalist system allows automation to concentrate wealth. It's very easy for the owner of the machines to become increasingly wealthy, and very hard for anyone else to get a foot in the door.
The answer to this problem is not to get rid of the machines. This is not neo-luddism. The answer is to change social policy to spread the benefit of the automation to a wider group. That's what basic income tries to solve.
I think this would be better stated without hostile statements like "It's bullshit." That puts the very people you're trying to convince into a defensive mindset.
You're absolutely correct. The expletives come from constantly have to reject this attack, and personal frustration.
It also comes because many of the people who use the "neo-luddism" grouping are not trying to saliently argue about basic income, or any real policy change (income related or otherwise) but are just looking for an easy way to dismiss the speaker.
I don't think that's necessarily a "bad" world view to have, especially if it pushes you to provide some social good that you wouldn't if you thought it was OK to be lazy. But I think it's harmful to impose that view on others. If you have no choice but to work or be discarded, then, when the value you can provide via work is less than that required to maintain your life, you have no choice but to attempt to indenture yourself. And failing that, you're truly, completely fucked. The purpose of entitlements ought to be (though currently aren't) to provide reassurance against a requirement to sell yourself to survive. And I truly believe, if we don't correct this failing of entitlements, then we will see mass indentured servitude (though it won't be called that), in developed countries, in my lifetime, of citizens of said country. Currently, we already see mass indentured servitude, but we say it's not that big a deal because
[1] The indentured are immigrants
[2] The indentured are in un-developed countries
[3] The indentured are "ghetto", "whore", or "gangster", which is seen as pretty equivalent to [2]