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 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]