And in Sweden, another "nordic socialist country", there's no tax on property nor inheritance, as well as very low taxes on invested capital. There are about 1.5x more USD-billionaires per capita in Sweden than in the US. I think there's room for some more taxes.
This is truly sad. As a Swede I fear my country may follow suite. The retirement age in Sweden used to be 65 and now it's 67.
Looking at older people around me, most lead a much less active life after 75. So, if we were lucky we used to have some 10 good years of doing whatever we wanted before old age and age-related diseases start affecting us so much we become limited to a much smaller world. But now we have maybe eight years and if we follow Denmark, five years.
I think if you've put in 40-45 years for the man, you should be allowed to have some good 10 years for yourself. Travel, play golf, cross a continent in a camper or climb a mountain.
There is nothing sad about this. Mandatory pensions are not a vacation sponsored by the government but a way to provide for those who can't provide for themselves.
If you were born in the 70s, you should have known for most of your adult life that your normal retirement age is likely going to be around 70. The demographic situation is not new, the solutions have been discussed extensively since at least the 90s, and countries that take the situation seriously have implemented several pension reforms since then.
You are not going to be as wealthy in retirement as you are now, at least not on the mandatory pension alone. Your health is probably not going to be as good. If you live in Sweden, you should have plenty of vacation. If you think you would enjoy travel, golf, or climbing a mountain, you should do it now. It will probably be easier and more affordable now than in retirement, which may never come.
Who says that? Because that’s not the prevailing opinion among me (soon 40), my friends snd my family.
Benefits from «stuff» caps off ar a certain level. After that you want to work less so you have more time to, among other things, actually enjoy your stuff. The exception to this are wealth chasers with multiple yachts etc., but that isn’t «we», that’s a tiny tiny sliver of the elite.
1) Unions say it when they always demand increased salary (= focus on private spending) rather than reduced working hours
2) Voters say it when the right and far right is polling high. Lower taxes = wish for higher private spending, if people are going to work less then tax rate must up for society to function as public expenditure will increase, not decrease, with lots of elderly needing care and fewer workers available.
3) Lots of people have the ability to reduce working hours by working fewer hours (in Norway, if you have kids you can always get 20% unpaid leave by law). And most could do so economically if they reduced their consumption and spending. But people do not seem to consider reducing their salary as an option. The option is available to lots of people and they are not taking it.
PS: You talk about getting more stuff, but to meet the future labor problems we are talking about reductions being needed to peoples consumption, not staying at the 2025 level.
>The option is available to lots of people and they are not taking it.
They're not taking it because living costs are up across the board. The laws allows you to work part time, but your expenses don't so you have to work 40h week to keep up in the rat race with everyone else.
1) Unions are asking that Capitalists share a bigger slice of the fruit of workers labor back with the workforce. Forcing a link between that and private spending and eventual consumerism is skipping a few steps in the logic.
2) Voters vote on a number of reasons. Taxes are one, but they range from geopolitical, immigration, healthcare, education, safety, access to housing among others. And then there is the charisma and quality of the candidate. Saying people vote left or right for one single issue is simplistic, and not very genuine. It could also be that significant groups of people abuse the social support tools, and people get tired of paying taxes for someone else to benefit by not doing their share.
3) You are clearly well off and are being a bit selfish. Many people live paycheck to paycheck, and would like to save some money for their future, which seems smart considering that goverment funds will crumble (as stated in this article). Other people work because they have done so for 30 years and sadly their life are empty outside of it. Assuming people work 100% just because they are too materialistic or attached to wealth feels a bit unfair to what most of society goes through.
Don't mean to critise, but in face of your strong opinion, I wanted to highlight that as Flaubert said, "There is no truth, just perceptions".
On 3), sorry, I should have been more specific -- I was talking about Norway specifically and also specifically about the middle class segment.
I was a bit clumsy -- I just meant that if people wanted to prioritize time over luxuries then SOME people, who are in a position to, not all, could have sent that signal. Because luxuries (vacations, cabins, boats) are still getting prioritized in the scandinavian middle class, and those specifically could have sent the signal they wanted more free time instead.
I agree with your points outside of that context and I should have specified it.
People who believe that consumerism was something that the general population opted into willingly rather than a result of a torrent of post WW2 psyops campaigns designed to deal with the "problem" of industrial overproduction.
My friends and I would love to have 4/5 or 3/5 of working days with 4/5 or 3/5 of salary, but sadly I don't know any companies that offer that. I understand that it may be hard with meeting culture, but we can make 1 or 2 days with no meetings.
I don't want to go back to the stress and uncertainty of freelancing; I want a predictable, safe income with simply scaled-back hours/pay.
My salary (and my friends') in IT is 2-3 times more than the average pay, and 60/80% is more than enough to live comfortably
I don't think time worked linearly correlates with profitability, especially when talking about long timeframes. E.g. working 120 hours per week for a year is extremely unlikely to result in 3x the productivity as 40 hours a week. Same with working 3/5ths as much, it's unlikely to linearly scale down to 3/5ths the value (not that "it can't ever", just not as a typical expectation).
That aside, plenty of places offer a 4x10, or are fine with it when asked, and I think that's a more productive way to put in 40 hours each week while also being more convenient for yourself (before even getting into wanting to lower total hours).
4x10 is rough. I’ve been in positions that started with 5x8 then went to 4x10, then others 8,10, or 12 with built in overtime or comp time to get to 40hrs average.
You end up trying to cheat meals for speed eating unhealthy. High amounts of caffeine, little family time, and at least the first day off is usually wasted catching up on lost sleep. If you happen to do shift work, good luck trying to get much done as you need to shift to a different schedule to be somewhere during open hours.
We were more inefficient going from 5x8 to 4x10. Try training on little sleep before coffee kicks in. You need to re-do it later. Try sleeping after drinking coffee all day to stay awake, it’s great for your heart and blood pressure.
If you're already time constrained to the point working 2 extra hours means you can't get through the day without caffeine and skipping meals then of course it's a bad idea, but that's not an inherent fault of a 4x10 in itself.
A 4x10 is particularly attractive for those able to work remote and/or without lots of other time commitments. If you have an hour commute each way, kids to drop off/pick up from school/sports, responsibility for cooking meals 100% of the time, and so on then it really doesn't make sense to point the finger at the 2 extra hours as the sole root cause of the problem in that situation.
Those don't exist because of unintended (but obvious) consequences of government regulation. For all sorts of reasons the risk and cost profile is pretty similar per employee whether they are 20 hours a week or 60 hours a week (non exhaustive examples: health insurance costs me the same to provide no matter how many hours an employee works. Depending on your regulatory regime certain payments like pensions/unemployment are capped so more workers earning less can actually cost more than less workers earning more, firing regulations makes more employees riskier because the probability you hire junk you can't get rid of or an employee turns to junk and you can't fire is higher with more employees, etc.) Since there is a very real cost with what you want your skill set has to be scarce enough to make the added cost worth incurring. As long as I can hire someone that will work full time for similar hourly equivalent pay, the part timers will not be seriously considered.
Health insurance being dependent on your employment, is a whole problem on its own. Of course these things need to be arranged differently, ajd with more freedom for the people themselves.
That said, I recently opted for a 40 hour work week for the first time in decades because otherwise this job is too big a step back in income.
Health insurance is complicated and I think it's not right to say it's a problem that the employer is paying (or that the government is paying). I think it's more accurate to say the cost for service is way too high in general, and we are missing out on network effects and efficiency gains by not providing healthcare to some and/or no not providing enough healthcare soon enough to some (and by providing too much healthcare to some too soon).
Under that problem statement, it makes a lot of sense for a large subset of healthcare (i.e. the routine or semi routine stuff like emergency services, family doctor routine visits, many common diseases, especially childhood diseases, routine dental, drugs for these diseases, etc) to be single payer (i.e the government) as long as the government is very proactive and flexible in crushing those costs through its multiple available levers.
I see more of a role for private insurance for the rarer stuff where the cost/benefit to society of society paying isn't as obvious and the optional stuff (ie treatments that have a generic option and a newer drug that is more effective, cover the generic, let people buy insurance if they think they want access to the expensive latest and greatest). There is pretty clearly a role for private and public providers of healthcare in both the government single payer and the private insurance role as well.
> it's not right to say it's a problem that the employer is paying (or that the government is paying)
These are two completely different situations, and the first is absolutely a problem. It means you lose your health insurance if you get fired, and indeed that working part-time may not be feasible.
The efficiency of the system is a separate issue (but also definitely an issue).
They are not different. They are linked. Who is paying only matters because the item is arbitrarily too expensive for the person to just pay on their own.
Of course they are different. It's easy to lose your job. From what I understand, there are even countries where you can be fired while sick. And then you lose your health insurance exactly when you need it most.
Losing your nationality is extremely rare. The two cases couldn't be more different.
It's definitely possible, and my current company were very happy to agree to 4/5 of the time for 4/5 of the salary and it's working out well for everyone. However, I've also found some organisations - that are otherwise good - to be hostile to working less than full hours. Since we work on interesting problems and they were happy to go with 80% it made it an easy task deciding which job to accept!
I should add that's it's a start-up so some weeks I work more and others less. But I still have the day my kids that I wanted.
Perhaps try quietly asking your current company? They might surprise you and start a trend.
If you want to work a 25 hour week you can go to where my wife’s family is from and pick up however many shifts you want at the local convenience store. You can live a lifestyle comparable to my wife’s grandparents working far less of the day.
The problem is in knowledge work fields where manpower isn’t scalable (read the Mythical Man Month), and the industries are competitive and winner-take-all. A programmer who works 30 hours a week is far less valuable than than one that works 50 hours a week.
Depends on what they do with those 30 and 50 hours. If they're burnt out, even 100 hours chained to an in-person desk, they aren't going to accomplish much, so that's just not true. The right software engineer can come in, have a pointed discussion, have some coffee, go look at some code, have a few conversations, and have a bigger impact in an hour in terms of setting future direction and avoiding pitfalls than a different engineer could do in a week.
> But we don't want to work less, we want more stuff.
Hold on. That's what tech is for right?
certain people on this forum keep saying we don't want to work. They say it's OK that they steal our art to train AI that takes our jobs, because then we can finally chillax and not work. But now apparently we also must keep working the remaining shitty jobs to not starve until we die? who is supposed to win here??
Obviously it depends a lot but, as white-collars tech people, we can already work less.
What's preventing us from going on sabbatical ? We would earn less, sure, but do we really need that money? I mean it is buying us things that our parents didnt have so it should be possible to do without, no?
Yeah I guess it answers the question who wins (for now). for sure it's just a problem for copywriters who will need to work as roofers until the ever increasing retirement age because a thing trained on stolen text now does the copywriting. The tech people who made it happen can just chill and tell everybody how they can work less while snowboarding in the alps.
That's been happening, but not as quickly as earlier generations expected. In 1970, the average labor force participant (employed or unemployed) in Denmark worked 1845 hours. By 2022, the number had fallen to 1371 hours. The numbers are similar for most West European countries but not for East Europe or the US.
Out of curiosity, what drove that shift? Shorter workweek, fewer hours per day, drastically more vacation, or some combination of the above?
Based on a 40-hour workweek, this would be 34 workweeks. Adding on 2-3 weeks worth of paid holidays, that leaves the equivalent of 15-16 weeks of vacation a year? I know my coworkers in Europe get more vacation than we do, but somehow I don't think it's that much more.
With a 32-hour workweek, this instead looks like ~6 weeks of vacation, which is more believable.
Full-time in Denmark is 37 hours/week and most people have around 6 weeks of vacation/year (the legal minimum is 5). Some people will be working part-time, bringing the total hours worked down, so the numbers make sense to me.
In the United States, full-time hours are in a range.
Part-time workers are often capped at 29 hours per week, due to tax considerations, such as the Affordable Care Act and other benefits. 30 hours is where the "full-time" label is applied there.
A wage-earning (non-exempt) worker must be paid overtime when they exceed full-time, which is typically a 40-hour maximum. Overtime pay may be "time and a half" or "double time" in certain circumstances.
Dolly Parton's feminist anthem "9 to 5" always mystified me: that's already 40 hours! Don't you stop to eat lunch? But that is the standard idiom for a "normal [office] job" in the States. Sometimes we refer to "banker's hours" which has the negative connotation that the worker never ever works outside that schedule.
In the UK You don't get paid for lunch which is why real white collar hours worked are more like eight to six or a lot longer.
And typically you get to work through your unpaid lunch, while your contract says 37.5 hours and 'any other time necessary to complete your work'. At least that's been my experience for the last forty years or so.
> Dolly Parton's feminist anthem "9 to 5" always mystified me: that's already 40 hours! Don't you stop to eat lunch? But that is the standard idiom for a "normal [office] job" in the States.
I have seen it go one of several ways.
- Technically count the person as 35 hours per week, giving a 1-hour lunch break. (Or 37.5, with a half-hour unpaid lunch break)
- Add an extra half hour to the day, e.g. have the employee work 8:30-5 or 9-5:30.
- Salaried employees aren't explicitly punching in and out of the clock each day, so there's nothing stopping them from working 8-6 or even longer hours. They don't get overtime, but at the same time the company doesn't care what hours they work as long as they get their work done.
"Banker's Hours" used to mean roughly 10:00 AM - 3:00 PM because most retail branches were only open on weekdays during those hours. This was long before online banking or even ATMs.
Right. I thought about part-timers or people working reduced schedules bringing the average (mean) down; I just wasn't sure if I was missing something systemic or not.
It might be more interesting to discuss the median hours worked (or any of a number of other percentiles), but it's not obvious those figures are public.
In particular, counting unemployed labor force participants feels wrong, even if you're counting how many hours a week they're spending on job seeking activities (applying to jobs, prepping resumes, interviewing, etc). I know I would burn out if I spent even 5+ hours a day doing just that, 5 days a week, even if I didn't have a full-time job.
There's also a pernicious thing that certain companies do (I'm thinking retail) where they just won't schedule you for enough hours to qualify you as full-time, since if they exceed that threshold, then (gasp) they have to pay benefits like health insurance. I also would prefer not to count that in the discussion of "how much does a typical employee work?"
On the flip side, I'm also less interested in considering the workaholic lawyers and consultants who are putting in 60-80 hours a week (or more!). There are far fewer of them, but they still skew the numbers.
From my perspective, the stereotypical US workweek is and has been 9 to 5 (whether you count that as 35 or 40 hours after accounting for lunch) for the past 50+ years. We certainly fall behind when it comes to vacation, since we still have no legally mandated minimum (I think 2-4 weeks is typical; anything higher is good but not unheard of).
> It might be more interesting to discuss the median hours worked (or any of a number of other percentiles), but it's not obvious those figures are public.
In particular, it looks like as mentioned, most employees in Denmark fall in the 35-39h bucket (nearly 4x the size of the next biggest bucket, 40+ hours). Meanwhile, if you look at the US, the 40+ bucket is more than 10x the size of any other. But it's not exactly a US vs Scandinavia situation -- Sweden has just under 70% of its workforce also working 40+ hour weeks, higher than the UK or Germany.
Don’t forget the expansion of the labour pool by women entering the workforce, who work more often part time. And more men work part time too, especially without a woman at home doing all chores like cleaning and cooking.
Over the past half century, a lot of women went from housewife to part-time worker, resulting in more hours worked per adult citizen and household, but fewer per labor participant. The same is true if labor participation in general went up, which between 2012 and 2022 it did, by about 5pp: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1166044/employment-rate-...
That's not the kind of progress described by the mchanson.
> "By 2022, the number had fallen to 1371 hours. The numbers are similar for most West European countries"
In France it is officially 1607 hours per year, but it could be legally much higher and the mean duration is 1 679 hours. From Eurostat, in 2021 the mean duration in Germany was 1 769 hours and 1 923 hours in Italy.
That's not really how I have observed progress working. It seems to broadly do two things:
convert labor demand into the cheapest most abundant labor (i.e. assembly where you can teach almost anyone a small set of tasks and have a lot of stations drastically increasing output while keep labor scarcity and thus cost lower or straight up geographic arbitrage moving production to much cheaper labor countries)
Increase the complexity and therefore scarcity of labor demanded to keep progressing.
Neither of these things end up where you want as far as working less while having all your comfort things because the first one tends to push unit labor costs down making your labor hour demand go higher to support your lifestyle at the lower wage and the second one increases value of the limited group of humans that can deal with the complexity, so their wages can and do easily trend high enough to incentivize full time or more hours.
Taxes pay these pensions. Taxes that citizens have paid for their whole working lives, with the understanding that they would benefit from that pension fund in their later years.
It's actually far closer to a "vacation", but not "sponsored by the government" -- closer to "that you've been saving for already for years."
In almost no country those taxes work like a normal pension. They are an as is fund where people pay now for those pensions now. You do not save for your own retirement, you pay for the retirement of the current generation.
You save for a state pension the same way you save for state health care - not at all. The current working people pay for the current retired people, and this only works so long as there are significantly more working than retired people. Advantage of this system: You dont need to be afraid of not having saved enough money if you end up living too long. Disadtvantage: Thid only works if there are substantially more working people than retired people, which is no longer the case, so pensions have to be reduced.
Then perhaps it should be said openly, that this is an elderly tax, not a pension and it should be just kept to the minimum, allowing people to save more of their own income for their own private pension.
Currently, it's the worst of both worlds: you get taxed quite a significant portion of your income, and then, in the middle of the game, someone changes the rules and tells you to play longer in order to get the prize.
> Then perhaps it should be said openly, that this is an elderly tax, not a pension and it should be just kept to the minimum, allowing people to save more of their own income for their own private pension.
This doesn't fundamentally change the equation. Whether you save pension points or cash or ETFs it's just a coupon for your share of the economy of the future. It's a promise that the future generation will share some of their income with you.
Exactly. Saving is not a thing for an economy. The future economy needs to actually create all those goods and services for which you saved up. If the future economy doesn’t have enough labor because of demographics then some major price adjustments need to happen in favor of the future workers.
It's fundamentally different in any society with strong private property rights. A private pension is a set of investments, i.e. something that ultimately is owned by you. How much those investments pay off, if at all, is unknown, but if they do pay off then it's yours.
A state pension would be illegal for anyone except the state to run, because it'd be classed as a Ponzi scheme. Those are recognized as being unstable, hence why you're not allowed to run one. There is no investment into owned assets that pay out, just the appearance of it.
> […] allowing people to save more of their own income for their own private pension.
As someone who frequents personal finance sub-reddits, this does not work. The number of people who would save for their long-term needs is generally small.
And for some folks it is a 'personality problem' in that they are short-sited, in numerous cases it's a matter of not having any available funds. Forced savings are an absolute necessity.
Further it is also necessary for the funds to be away from people's hands so they don't fiddle with the money.
Canada went through this debate in the 1990s when it reformed its government pension system, and between fees and behaviour issues, the general consensus was that have a pool of money separate from private retirement accounts (RRSPs in Canada) was absolutely essential. A history of the reforms:
If what you say is even remotely true, wealth would have never been passed from generation to generation and people would have never invested in stuff useful for the future.
What you actually mean is that there is a non-negligible portion of the population who act like children and won't ever be able to plan for the future, so we have to force them.
But not only them, everyone into the same basket, regardless of their qualities and wants/needs.
Sure, a non-collectivist system would break a few more eggs, but isn't it the point? Rewarding the best/most useful behaviors seems like a fundamental need of a lasting society.
The curent system is problematic because it has pushed the equality ideology at the expense of personal freedom.
The irony is that people who could benefit from better environment/luck/opportunities, will still get ahead at the end of the day. You are disproportionately impacting those who could have had better outcomes to "save" the ones who will have bad outcomes regardless.
It's all very cynical, and the peoples in power don't have to care, they are fundamentally not at risk...
That's how it works in Sweden though: part of your pension is your own private investments, they aren't taxed as normal investments since you can only withdraw after reaching retirement age, the other part of it is a state pension. Even with this scheme we still got our retirement age risen.
So it seems it doesn't matter if it's public or private, the benefits of improved productivity is not trickling down to workers, a lot more is produced, generating a lot more wealth, and even with private funds we still get shafted because the capital class wants more and more of the pie.
But how much do workers pay towards pensions? In Austria, 20% of personel costs go directly towards pensions, and almost 30% of the entire state budget also goes to pensions on top of that, which is insane.
Does the younger generation have a choice about buying into this? I don't think they have another option. They can emigrate but all of the other countries with a decent quality of life are facing similar demographic problems.
This is such a sad comment. Indeed, the demographic situation was known and predictable in the 80's, and for instance in France we did nothing to plan around it.
So now the young generation is expected to pay longer and longer for retirees, who have a higher median revenue and a higher standard of life than the active workforce (per all studies). There is absolutely no way I'm working until 70 to finance errors from the past without a contribution from our current retirees' wealth. There is anyway no foreseeable future with work for everyone until 70 with our current technological progress unless you want to slave everyone in bullshit jobs. All of this is madness.
This was exactly my complaint when the Dutch retirement age was raised from 65 to 67. Baby boomers, the largest generation, were about to retire, and the argument was that the younger generations weren't large enough to provide for them, so they'd have to continue working longer.
But it wasn't the baby boomers who had to work longer, it was the younger generations who had to work longer for the baby boomers to be able to retire.
At the very least tax the generous pensions of the wealthier baby boomers to provide for the poorer baby boomers.
You can't say they did nothing about it.
They actually did: make sure to restrain access to well-paying jobs with long and costly studies; make sure to regulate any way the young could get ahead by creating rules for things they never had to suffer through and make sure to increase the age of retirement as well as increase the ratio of contributions from salary.
It's all very cynical, and it's based on fundamental egoistic human behavior. Most boomers I know are proud to be egoist and very often stingy.
They all think that they can make the difference by helping their own children, but this is flawed "thinking" in a system that is profoundly collectivist.
And all this comes from the massive flaw of democracy: only numbers matter, if you are the dominant demographic, you can get whatever you want, regardless of the nefarious impacts down the line.
When people keep repeating the trope of democracy is the worst form of government expect of all the others, I laugh my ass off. It can only be so if you have a way to weigh the votes otherwise you are just ruled by the tyranny of the mob and that generally doesn't turn out nicely.
The problem has been artificially created, the ideology said that restricting personal freedom was better for everyone as a whole and we can very much observe that this was a lie of epic proportions...
If pensions where not mandatory you would be almost right. But pensions are mandatory, the state will invest the money upfront and earn from those investments. It's just a way of making you pay more, and then give you back less. Another hidden tax to pay whatever operation their incommensurate ego want to pursue.
Allow me to remind you that Churchill quote: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others". Or in this situation, pensions are the worst form of retirement savings, except for all the others. Political parties struggle even imagining alternative solutions, but if you found a better idea by all means please come forward and we will all vote for you! I will for sure.
Non-mandatory, private savings is a far better idea. Ah wait but now the govt doesn't have the money anymore... ops. Maybe _that's_ why they struggle, because they don't find a way of taking your money without telling you... we changed forms of government, but taxes (and hidden taxes) remain, did you notice?
> Non-mandatory, private savings is a far better idea.
As someone who reads personal finance sub-reddits I completely disagree. The vast majority of people (a) do not have the long-term thinking for long-term needs, and/or (b) have money go by them without noticing they haven't saved anything. There's a reason why "Pay yourself first." is a mantra that has to be hammered into people through education (e.g., The Wealth Barber); most folks don't get that education or don't take it to heart.
> Ah wait but now the govt doesn't have the money anymore... ops.
In Canada the government does not have access to the money of our public pension, the Canada Pension Plan (CPP ~ US Social Security).
Then make the govt pension plan opt in and make the citizens choose whether or not to have the money invested (maybe give a discount to those that do). Be transparent and track the total you already payed and what your pension will be at retirement age. Don’t change retirement age suiting your ego and fake needs, but let people decide. Don’t come up with excuses to strip some more money from the citizens, and make the government more efficient instead. How does that sound to you?
I honestly didn't notice. I know exactly what my taxes are and where they go, and I can even vote to direct them this or that way. I highly recommend such an approach.
I guess this comes down to whether you view what you get back for devoting most of a life to work as a negotiated agreement with government or as a one way street.
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." That socialist principle has always been the essence of the Nordic model. While the Nordic countries chose regulated markets over actual socialism, they embraced that part of socialism.
As a citizen, your moral duty is to contribute when you can. If too many people fail to do that, the system falls apart. In exchange, the government evens the burden between different stages of life and between people in different situations. You live your life now, the government takes what it needs, and it provides for you when your needs exceed your ability.
Also, as small democratic countries with limited ambitions outside their borders, the Nordic system of governance is supposed to be more "by the people, for the people" than it has ever been in the US. You don't negotiate agreements with the government, but you take responsibility for making things work. If too many citizens fail to do that, the system falls apart.
I see this term used frequently in Anglo-American media. I don't get it. What is special or different about the "Nordic" model compared to France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany and Austria? Their regulations, tax rates, and social benefits are nearly identical.
> with limited ambitions outside their borders
I don't understand this phrase. Can you explain more? Some examples and counter-examples would help.
Also, I don't buy the argument that "small democratic countries" are so different than larger ones. I hear this argument a lot from both sides (big and small). One difference that I do see is how they choose to use their military power, but that applies to non-democratic state also. Ultimately, the goal of a democratic state is to (1) get rich and (2) treat your citizens well (free speech, along with decent education, public safety, healthcare, and retirement).
> I see this term used frequently in Anglo-American media. I don't get it. What is special or different about the "Nordic" model compared to France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany and Austria? Their regulations, tax rates, and social benefits are nearly identical.
The big difference is the culture around it all, in Scandinavia these things works with low corruption and high freedom and transparency while the more southern parts are much more corrupt and authoritarian.
So that results in Scandinavian countries topping so many charts while France, Austria, Germany etc do not. So the difference is not what they do but how deeply rooted that is in their culture. Scandinavian countries started this, the others just copied Scandinavia.
By the way, the retirement age of 65 was chosen at the time based on "when the average worker dies", a long retirement had never been the plan. We are now getting back to that.
I can imagine the workers joking about making it to retirement... Coal miners probably had little chance, we can't imagine today how hard that work was. They were usually "worn out" around age 50.
> "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."
This works great when many more people have "abilities" than "needs". With a declining working-age population and increasing elderly one, the system begins to crack.
You said there’s nothing sad about it and then followed it up with some pretty sad realities. It’s incredibly sad. People should be working less as we advance as a society, not more.
They are doing. When the pension system was created retirement age was roughly equal to life expectancy. Life expectancy went up but retirement age never did, creating these super-long retirements for healthy people who could easily still work. That is where a lot of the wealth newly created by technological progress went.
This is a nice outlook from a vacuum. The reality is those perfectly healthy elderly people are still going to struggle to compete with the younger workforce who will be anything from more physically/mentally apt to just simply cheaper. So they’re probably going to be forced into retirement without the means to actually do it.
Not to mention, from strictly a human view, working someone to their death is just plain wrong. This isn’t about enjoying a retirement which is near impossible at that age or shortly after, it’s about not screwing over people by putting them into poverty due to really no fault of their own.
I hope the youth are kinder to you when you reach old age.
Older people can charge whatever price they want for their work. They can even undercut the young by exploiting their high rates of home ownership and receipt of pensions. Where I grew up there was a DIY supermarket famous for employing mostly retirees or older workers. And the elderly have the benefit of experience - there's a meme that employers don't want that, but it's not true. Employers love experience. What they don't want are bolshie activists who create trouble. Plenty of people out there who are willing to trade cooperation and experience for salary, and can thus easily outcompete youngsters who might be willing to do what's asked but don't have the experience to do it well.
> from strictly a human view, working someone to their death is just plain wrong
This is the sort of statement that clutters up all discussions of government benefits, but it's meaningless. There's no such thing as a "human view" or right/wrong in these contexts. Historically, people worked much harder than we do today. Was that "wrong"? Were people back then not fully human? If so, who was responsible for this "inhuman wrong"?
No. Poverty is the default state of humanity. People being poor isn't the result of someone screwing someone else over, it's the result of people not creating wealth.
> I hope the youth are kinder to you when you reach old age.
I'm expecting that the state won't provide anything by the time I reach old age, not even a stable currency. The youth won't have had much to do with it either way.
Working means that you are providing value to others. As we advance as a society a single person is able to contribute more and more value to others. Why maintain the same amount of total value being added to society when we can push further and accelerate providing value to one another?
What we’re really talking about is freedom. Freedom to do what you want with your time whether it’s relaxation or work, but on your own terms.
When you have to work for an income that is a type of forced work, and generally speaking forced work is not going to be as effective as work done of your own volition.
It’s intrinsic motivation vs extrinsic motivation. When I think about your point of view I see a lot of waste and misery. Instead of naively maximizing value production, I want to see a future of contentment and quality value production. Value produced because people are inspired to produce value, not because they have to.
Working just means that you get paid to do something.
What you're rambling on about is some Ayn Randian technicality that has nothing to do with reality. The word "value" here means "non-measurable quantity in the neoclassical paradigm, approximated by indirect measure through unit of account", not anything meaningful.
A childcare worker raising children is "value". A mother raising her child is not "value". In other words, you're just measuring how much human activity conforms to a specific formalization.
If it was all about value, we wouldn't have people doing "work" who not only don't generate any material wealth but actually consume a lot of value for nothing very valuable in return.
By value you mean furthering the individualization and alienation by technology, which destroys the planet and gives us what, AI data centers? And the AI agents won't even do our jobs?
I'm convinced there are a large number of people, mostly in tech, that are unknowingly in a death cult because they think complex human systems can be boiled down to simple metrics and logic. And they get attached to this libertarian-type thinking because it makes them feel smart and above it all.
Like the rest of us are over-complicating it, and human economic prosperity is as simple as blindly accelerating value creation.
But what is the point of all of increases in productivity if not to let us enjoy life more? Longer life expectancy should be more than offset by the increases in productivity.
> pensions are not a vacation sponsored by the government but a way to provide for those who can't provide for themselves.
If you had the chance to find a nice job that paid well and played your cards right it definitely is, why do we need to pay high pensions to people who own multiple properties, have millions on the side and could EASILY thrive just from their passive income ?
pensions can be whatever we decide as a society agree they should be.
Your perspective is an opinion, and many people share it, it has been a dominant view for decades, but it has never been a universal view.
There is a solution for young people they should look at this demographic disaster and realise they need to have children for the sake of their own future. Meanwhile the next generation or two to retire is going to have a very grim time surviving because we had two kids or none, compared to the five our parents had.
And those children will have to have even more children, and so on. The system is designed to work as long as it can grow forever, which it obviously cannot. Some generation is going to have to reckon with the demographic problem.
Humans need a constant supply of resources and shelter to survive. There is no "system" which avoids this inconvenient fact. In the absence of any "system" at all, you would still need to constantly work for survival - and in fact you'd just die as soon as you were no longer able to do so due to illness or injury much less old age.
In other words if there were no "system" there would be no such concept as "retirement" in the first place.
We all wish that we could spend our best years doing whatever we want. That doesn't mathematically work out, though. European social safety nets are pretty damn generous all things considered. Plenty of vacation days, especially compared to the US. It's not like it's impossible to use those well during your "best years".
I don't think we need nearly as much as most people think. How much is being taken by the wealthy from the workers already? How much effort goes on the work of maintaining and protecting the system of inequality? How many people are already doing nothing when they would be willing to work?
As for how much we "need", sure we can technically survive on very little. Most people choose aim to higher. Reducing inequality through a more progressive tax system is generally a good idea but taken too far that cuts overall economic growth and hurts everyone. At some point the most productive people just emigrate to countries with lower taxes; we've already seen that happen with numerous high profile entrepreneurs and companies moving from Europe to the USA.
I live in a cheap house, don't own a car, and rarely travel vary far. I just laugh at people at the people who "choose aim to higher", thinking that they need an ever more expensive house, car, phone, whatever. None of these things would improve my quality of life.
Edit: Amusement is cheap. But it's also a serious issue, if "people wanting nice things" are damaging the environment in the process. I don't think that the world can cope with a lot more people flying around in private jets.
Not true. Many people own their home. The home ownership rate is 60% in Denmark and 65% in the USA. The HN demographic skews toward young people renting homes in expensive cities so if you read the comments here you tend to get a distorted view of reality.
It would be interesting to break down these figures across age group and income levels.
Cities are expensive because people want to move there. They do it because of quality of life or because of work opportunities.
In the long run the issue might indeed disappear as the population shrinks. But it will probably just leave behind lots of unoccupied houses in the countryside that nobody buys. This is already happening in Japan.
Owning the house is essential where I live, for quality of life. Tenants don't have any right to ongoing tenancy, and moving is expensive and tedious even if it's only once every few years.
You can absolutely raise taxes on the wealthy and close loopholes (we should do those things) but it's not gonna fix the massive hole that is social spending in the budget of nearly every western nation. It's more structural than that.
The loopholes just make it easier to funnel money away from the taxman. It's still possible due to how capitalism works and not fixable unless we go for something equivalent to nationalizing big companies.
That has the same impact as other, similarly radical solutions. In the best case the rich will just remove as much of their property from the country as possible. They might keep a villa or two, some cars, and some pocket money, but the majority of their income will be out of reach of the taxman.
Or they might just rent everything they need from a local branch of a company and pay a branch in another country, and the two interact via crypto. Or indirectly via remittances as there will be a market for asking low-income people to transfer money on behalf of rich people, as transactions of low-income people would probably not be taxed.
You can also tax where the asset ownership is recorded. Property records, securities records, etc. If it isn’t recorded with a public body where taxes can be assessed, it isn’t recognized. Wealth must exist on the books somewhere.
This assumes that there is only a single country on Earth or that the rich would not be willing to move to a country with lower taxation. Hint: they are already doing that.
Letting wealth of the rich grow so much faster than the growth of the economy is so much worse, because it means that the rich are increasingly draining poor of their resoruces.
> People who would be considered wealthy by 1920's standards are considered poor today.
I did a double take when I read that sentence. Is this really true? The 1920s in the West (North America and Western Europe) were a golden age for income inequality. The rich were... well, crazy rich. Would they really be considered poor today?
That is a cheeky reply, but some light research tells me that the Rockefeller family borrowed huge sums of money to build that complex. Also, modern day technology billionaires worth 50B+ USD could easily build their own Hudson Yards -- the modern day equivalent of Rockefeller Center in New York City.
Typically these arguments boil down to how many high-tech items you can afford that were still crazy expensive back then, completely ignoring things like living space that actually matter much more to your quality of life.
The "system" would fall apart if people didn't work for at least half their lives, true, but it is absolutely not true that we need people to work until they're 70.
Let's say you live to 80, half your life is 40 years. You only start working a decent job around ~22 years (4 year college degree).
22+40 = 62, pretty close to 70 already. Assuming some people die early, so others have to pick up the slack, some people work part time, etc. and you end up pretty damn close to 70.
Yes, Western societies are coming to rude awakening: birthrate matters for everyone. Social support for elderly cannot be built on pension funds when there's not enough young hands in economy
In practice, immigration adds a lot of welfare receivers so ends up doing the opposite. It's not a coincidence that we are seeing supposed multiple advanced civilization talking about increasing the retirement age at a time of unprecedented levels of immigration.
What a weird comment. I've had several co-workers in that age range. They were fine. What's your point? And what does that have to do with the financial realities of limited government budgets?
You asked someone to give you something, and they did, and then you claimed that they lied. I call BS on your original request being made in good faith.
I can also just say I love working with 130-year old and they are all great to make a silly argument :) you understand the probability of this sentence being true "I've had several co-workers... (69-year olds)..." - like 0.0002319%? :)
And you, also, can claim no one can find 69 year-old they like to work with to make a silly argument.
It’s not that your (implied, guessed-at-by-me) idea is wrong on its face. It’s that you choose to (1) imply it, (2) in a snarky way that is insulting (even if true), and then when someone claimed a counter-example, you immediately fell back on made-up numbers for why you wouldn’t have to display the slightest curiosity as to how this supposed impossibility came to be.
You assume they’re lying? Why should anyone think better of you? Anyone can lie on the internet.
This just came up recently in conversation the other day - don't surgeons lose the fine motor control by then? My friend was saying a surgeon's best years are in their 40s
Great comeback. "You called me an ageist for posting ageist hate comments, so, uhh, uhh, well you aren't a billionaire!" No, I'm not. Most people aren't lottery winners.
Like the other commenter said, I honestly don't think you know many 70-year olds. I know plenty of people in their 70s that are active, physically fit, extremely sharp mentally, and still working. I'm not saying they have 0 decline, but oftentimes since they have more flexibility and free time, they can use that free time to take better care of themselves and get adequate rest. I'd rather have my kid ride with a healthy, well-rested 70-year-old than a frazzled, sleep-deprived, rushing-to-get-somewhere 45-year-old.
80s, on the other hand, are another story. Everyone I know that was in good shape in their 70s who is now in their 80s showed marked decline, even if they were still fairly healthy and fit. My parents had a fantastic retirement in their 70s - tons of travel, lots of hiking and RV trips to national parks, very active socially. When they hit their early 80s it was tough, because the decline was pretty fast. They're still in good health, but they move considerably slower and just finally "look old" to me.
This is a fact, I do not know many 70-year olds. I think this is a true statement for many people sans those working in retirement homes or the like. that being said, I know enough of them and see enough of them to know I don’t want them performing surgeries, building roads and bridges, fixing electrical poles, washing skyscraper windows and many other things they would have to do
I would not let a 70-year old operate on a squirrel that is waking me up every morning but perhaps I am in a minority... didn't expect an uproar over people wanting to work with grandpas and grandmas but here we are :)
A bigotted ageist worldview from someone with an eastern european name; that's just what I'd expect from a Saggitarius[0].
Seriously, there's 800,000,000 people over 65 on the planet[1], and you're judging all of their abilities based on a two digit number, instead of individually on their actual health and abilities. That's ageism. That's a yesteryear worldview that people have been fighting against for a long time.
And that "I thought I could say horrible things and nobody would object" is common red flag behaviour mentioned on all the "what's a red flag about X" threads that appear on Reddit constantly; "my boss said something rude about <group> and nobody said anything". That you didn't expect an uproar about judging people you don't know as incompetent or incapable based only on their age - and got an uproar - should be a reason for you to reflect.
you do you mate, anyone I love I do not want to work until their 70 and I also do not want any 70-year olds performing surgery either. I had a roughly-that-age person deliver a pizza to me 6-7 months ago and my heart broke, reminded me of my Dad and I was shook for awhile after seeing that… but hey, we may just view the World in a different way and that’s fine. There is no need for me to reflect, my parents raised me well to treat elderly in a manner different from the sentiment here - “lets get them all to a construction site”
We aren't mates. "anyone I love I do not want to work until their 70 and I also do not want any 70-year olds performing surgery either" these are two different positions. One is "I don't want people having to work" which I agree with. The other is "I've judged 70 year olds as incapable of doing useful skilled work" which is ageist.
“lets get them all to a construction site” - this is not my position.
if we ALL have to work until 70 which is the whole thing being pitched here, than what will construction worker who is 69-years old do? If you are in agreement with this entire thread that saying 69-year olds should be in the workforces (mandated by the government’s retirement age) than “lets get them to construction site” is what you are pitching…
I generally agree with you with exceptions like general practitioners/family doctors and legal field and university teaching where workers with experience are valued without the job requiring too much physical activity.
That's true, I would never ever consider moving to the US for that reason alone. Our vacations are very generous and I always struggle to use them all up. I get about a month and a half effectively (if I take them all consecutively with weekends in between)
When I worked at bigco the US employees were remunerated a lot better but they only got 10 days off a year and were pressured to not take off more than 5...
Yeah I don't really care about money as long as I have enough to live. Work life balance is much more important.
Also, in countries with high wages, expenses like rent are also much higher. Except for goods that are roughly the same everywhere.
I live in a low wage country in Europe but I don't have nor need a car (I hate driving). That helps a lot as it's a huge money sink for fuel, parking, maintenance and insurance. I have unlimited public transport for 20€ per month.
I know the Spanish healthcare is free(I'm from Europe) but isn't the jobs market in Spain also not that great? Except maybe in Barcelona or Madrid where CoL is as much as northern Europe but at lower wages? At least that's what I heard from the Spanish expats who left.
It's ok, although a lot of international corporations are clamping down now due to the trump tariffs crap and uncertainty surrounding that. The one I work for pulled all job offers, and Meta closed down their entire moderation center in Barcelona. Also because they suddenly think moderation is 'woke', ignoring that it is required in Europe.
Cost of living in Barcelona is nowhere near that of say Amsterdam. But I don't live in Spain for the money. I live here for quality of life.
A key distinction is that there is no statutory vacation in the US. If there was, it would be set by the States, as that is their authority. Despite that, I’ve had 4-5 weeks of vacation at every job for 15+ years in the US. Companies use it to differentiate themselves.
To be fair, if you are working in a tech field you are already a massive outlier compared to the average person in both pay and benefits. 2-3 weeks is very commonly the standard for other professional fields.
Maybe, but I’ve had partners in wildly different and non-fashionable industries that had similar vacation time.
My friends on an hourly wage don’t get as much but oddly they have way more freedom to take unpaid leave. Their employers would rather let them run off at random for a month than lose them, since they would be immediately employable somewhere else when they came back. This partly reflects the persistently low unemployment rate in the US for vaguely competent people that want a job.
They're definitely not. The welfare state takes about 8-10% of GDP while US defence rarely goes above 3% of GDP. Even the 5pp suggested for NATO members is much, much cheaper than the welfare state.
Your lack of vacations are provided by your rich refusing to pay taxes.
That's just the usual Trump narrative. Like others have said, welfare costs a lot more than defense.
Though we do really need a bigger nuclear umbrella against Putin. That's the only thing that really matters against Russia. And we have no other credible defense threats.
But the US was always opposed to the EU having its own for proliferation reasons. Now that they suddenly back out we're in a bit of a bind because I doubt France and the UK's deterrence is enough of a threat to Russia to prevent incisions.
And yes the US purchased a lot of goodwill and power by offering its defense. There would have been a lot more opposition to Iraq and Afghanistan (both of which accomplished nothing for the people there I might add, and the invasion of Iraq even caused ISIS)
PS: I just want to add, it's the distribution of wealth that makes the difference. Europe has very few billionaires unlike America. We don't believe in 'the market' above everything. Hence we distribute wealth more. This is also why we have much less violent crime, the difference between rich and poor is not as big. It doesn't have that much to do with defense spending.
And why should someone be able to be a billionaire? With say 10 billion someone could spend a million a day to live, and still make their money last 27 years. Here in Spain most people don't make a million in total wages during their entire life.
You vote for the system in the US, things don't have to be that way. But the ultra rich make it seem like everyone could be rich if they only just work hard. Obviously that's false. Most rich people don't work very hard and definitely not 100.000 times as hard as people making 100.000 times less than they do.
In exchange, the US gets the opportunity to set up military bases or to use their allies's military bases. And once you're there, you're staying and it becomes impossible to evict you*. And your allies have to deal with the consequences of the stupid wars you started. Mass immigration fuelling the rise of right-wing ideology in Europa is ultimately due to ongoing US meddling in the Middle East. Where is the free ride???
* Best example: Guantanamo Bay, which Cuba wants back and for which only a single rent check was (accidentally) deposited since the revolution.
Sure. But given automation we need a lot less labor than 100 years ago.
Some studies suggest (sorry am mobile right now, don’t have links) in the US automation has been able produce the average persons essentials entirely since the 1950s.
But we still were taught growing up to put on the show of going to work. At great resource cost and ecological destruction now threatening everyone in deference to memes of long dead laborers and rich who would often be able to shoot anyone that didn’t work hard enough without repercussion.
We do not live in the 1900s or even 1800s.
And how much stuff? New 80” TVs and iPhones every year?
We’ve been conditioned by salesmen who also probably didn’t produce anything but emotional demand. Sure let’s keep living in the Newspeak of the rich media class, and ossified politicians; we’ve always been at war with line go down.
Your same old copy paste “don’t rock the boat” euphemism is thought ending nonsense. It’s capitulation not discovery of options.
Retirement and old age are expensive due to the cost of medical care and nursing care. If people wouldn't need those then it would be possible to retire much earlier.
Part of this is a cultural issue. I completely understand why people struggle with addiction, smoking, obesity, stress, depression, and so on. I don't blame the people, but the current culture of cheap and fast food, stress, overworking, lack of time and/or energy for cooking, family, hobbies, and taking care of health.
Many of these preventable diseases could be addressed by cultural changes and government care, which could decrease the cost of medical/nursing care.
I don't see the problem. So medical and nursing care is expensive. We can change the society so that relatively more people work in those fields. Instead, we are cutting on those services. It's just a thinly disguised attack on the elderly.
Healthcare share of economies is just trending up and up over time, there is very little cutting there. At best you go back a year or two sometimes, as you can see here.
Like other commenters just said: just buy less. On the surface everybody agrees, but on the streets everybody buys more, and throw stones at the police when they are blocked doing it. So how is it? It seems this evidence "buy less" is not exactly shared, not even half-heartedly. Please stop claiming something is "easy" or "obvious" when it is neither.
When you state that "European social safety nets are pretty damn generous" it seems to imply that someone else, rather than the Europeans themselves, is being generous and footing the bill.
• (of a person) showing a readiness to give more of something, as money or time, than is strictly necessary or expected: she was generous with her money.
• showing kindness toward others: it was generous of them to ask her along.
• (of a thing) larger or more plentiful than is usual or necessary: a generous sprinkle of pepper.
You can't retire if you don't have savings or children to support you.
Even if you have savings and/or children to support you, you can't retire if your society didn't make enough children so that your savings can have some value.
Social security was always a ponzi scheme that doesn't work in the long run as fertility rates _necessarily_ drop to or below (really, always below) replacement rate.
Even without social security, if you want to retire, and to have along retirement, then you need your society to have near replacement rate fertility. Or insanely high productivity. I guess you can look forward to AI rendering most jobs obsolete, and hope that humans can -as always before- create new jobs that can't be easily automated.
The problem isn't that it's a ponzi scheme. It's that humans have to be replaced the same way anything with a finite lifespan (e.g. cars, buildings) has to be replaced.
In theory your children are your pension deposit. People who don't have children should get a significantly reduced pension or they must provably support the children of a family that has more than two children per woman.
The problem with modern society is that you need children at the end of your life. Agricultural subsistence requires children very early. It's a scheduling mismatch that causes people to delay having children all the way until they are no longer fertile.
None of them considers that "the system" gives them food, water and energy, and that procurement of these in the absence of system means literally toiling from birth until death.
This is the my response too. There are plenty of valid criticisms of our modern society, but nothing’s stopping you wandering off into the forest to forage for berries. We don’t, because even with all its flaws, living in civilisation is infinitely easier.
It's true. And we're all living the best years we're got left ... starting -now-. It's sad that so many people wait -so long- (when they may not even make it).
So whatever it costs, when we can afford it, we must -take the time- to live them -now-. The wheels will keep turning without us for a while. That time will never be lost.
Sure but the real problem is that we don’t know how to deal with bad quality of life for those suffering the effects of senescence and we have a society that is only just starting to come to grips with the perils of the sedentary lifestyle while allocating a lot of resources to people who haven’t done the work to live a good life past 60.
And we make it hard for younger adults to make time for this. Don’t work yourself half dead by the age of 30 and you will never have secure housing in any major city (where incomes are highest).
A huge part of it is cars. Most people over 70 shouldn’t be driving but we have had these people who have been driving everywhere for 55 years. They lose all ability to function independently in their community.
Give me sitting in a cafe living in an apartment with stairs and no car in Lisbon or Athens or similar any day of the week once I am old. Better than the old folks home.
Pension is a Ponzi scheme. Explained in terms of economic theory, if everybody works and saves in time period 1, and retires and receives pension in time period 2, then... their pension is worthless, because there's infinite inflation, because no more goods and services get produced.
Retirement depends on having young workers. People approaching 60, 70 simply didn't have enough kids to have good retirement. It's not a problem that has easy and/or fast solutions. Yet, actions have consequences...
> Pension is a Ponzi scheme. Explained in terms of economic theory, if everybody works and saves in time period 1, and retires and receives pension in time period 2, then... their pension is worthless, because there's infinite inflation, because no more goods and services get produced.
You've created an impossible situation which will never exist and then offered it as an example of why taking care of the elderly, something humans have done since before recorded history, is flawed.
> why taking care of the elderly, something humans have done since before recorded history
Well yeah, but before government-organised pension, it was your kids taking care of you when you get older, so the system was much more balanced (or rather, only imbalanced on the micro scale, not at a mega scale we see now...)
> it was your kids taking care of you when you get older
This oversimplification has never been true. Humans evolved in extended family groups generally between 30 - 300 people. And humans are far more promiscuous and willing to adopt chosen family than most will admit.
The nuclear family is a shockingly recent invention.
It doesn't negate the claim that parent made though. "Your kids" had a wider meaning (and still has in a lot of places) but the principle remains: an adult had to provide, and protect a limited number of (usually related) kids to be cared by those of them who survived later in life.
That's not how it works unless you try to say that adults in general are interested in kids survival. This would be true but it's not what drives larger efforts, and resources allocation. For that there are always related kids which get the most of one's resources, and other kids which may get something sometimes. And there are your elders and others' elders as well. Actually, there are plenty of countries where pensions either not a thing, or too small even for basics. I lived in some of them and I dare to say I know what I'm talking about.
Word. I haven seen so many misconceptions about our state here in these comments, planted in our consciousness by our capitalist system to justify its existence. This, that we don't naturally rely on mutually supporting each other, is one of them. That our elderly are useless and unproductive, is another one. That it will take people working until they are 70 and utterly worn out to provide the pitifully inadequate support our society provides our elderly and our poor, is yet another one. Such inhumane beliefs persist all while a tiny minority skim off a sizeable proportion of the the wealth our labor produces for themselves.
I think nearly all of it is starting with people not wanting to pay taxes (who blames them?) and reasoning backward from there. It doesn't seem like an attempt to have a consistent non-hypocritical worldview so much as an attempt to justify wealth hoarding which capitalism encourages and happily provides ideological tools for. Nevermind that by allowing ourselves to be split from each other and our extended family support structures, we are all becoming more vulnerable and in need of the very societal support some would rather withhold.
This is missing the elderly with no young to support them for whatever reason, so some level of government support is necessary. You can’t just have old people dying in the streets of course.
George Washington chose to found a country instead.
Beethoven and Chopin wrote some music.
Queen Anne united a Kingdom, and Queen Mary II assented to the 1689 Bill of Rights.
Frida Kahlo painted some art.
Virginia Woolf wrote some literature.
Helen Geisel edited Dr. Seuss.
Rosalind Franklin helped discover DNA.
Jean Purdy helped develop IVF.
All infertile due to no fault of their own.
Perhaps you should consider moving out of the country, avoiding classical music, literature, and art, foregoing all DNA-related medical developments and IVF, and meditating on empathy as you do so.
These people were outliers and they could pursue their passions and contribute to the societies because vast majority of adults were rearing a bunch of kids.
The problem is that for the last few generations in the Western societies, everyone wanted to be a George Washington or Rosalind Franklin and decided to pursue their passion. Not enough people were willing to do boring work of raising kids. That is definitely not sustainable.
What part of 1/6 the population don't you understand? Is this ignorance willful?
> The problem is that for the last few generations in the Western societies... Not enough people were willing to do boring work of raising kids. That is definitely not sustainable.
Biology seems to have incentivized reproduction heavily enough that we're sitting at 8.2 Billion humans worldwide.
"The human population has experienced continuous growth following the Great Famine of 1315–1317 and the end of the Black Death in 1350, when it was nearly 370,000,000." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
Wake me up when it actually starts shrinking.
Alternatively, if you think there's something you can do to incentivize reproduction more than sex, let me know, I'd like to be a first-round investor.
Obviously there's a sense in which a woman who's had children and now can't is "infertile" (though FAR more than one-sixth of women experience menopause). But it's not the sense being used by you and your parent commenter in this thread.
> The first red flag is they use the Newspeak "experience infertility".
It's this very new language from approximately the 17th century. And if you think real hard, you might find that you're a person who's experienced things too. Wow.
> If you look at the data sources, they're calling women (and men) with children "infertile"
The phrase that particular source uses is "impaired fecundity" which makes perfect sense. No clue what you're on about. If someone is born with two legs and through some "experience" loses one, we might refer to that person as having "impaired mobility". Crazy.
What causes you to post such insanity? Isn't it embarrassing?
The page I linked to has a top-level section called "Infertility". It has a table with a column called "1 or more births". The data in the table say that a positive proportion of those women are infertile.
As I said the first time, there's a sense in which such a woman can be infertile and it is NOT the sense your parent commenter means.
I looked for references. Found the following which cites three references across 5 decades. It indicates that this practice was 1) rare even before it ended in 1939 2) considered repugnant by many Inuit 3) an alternative to starvation when there was no other choice.
I'm not sure what you meant to communicate by sharing this thought. That 100 years ago hunter gatherers in the harshest inhabited climate on the planet made some unfathomably hard decisions and did horrifying things to survive?
I don't see how that has any relevancy to what we do today in the richest most industrialized society in the world.
Some tribes in Papua New Guinea prior to 1960 practiced occasional cannibalism. Doesn't mean we should be eating our neighbors today.
> You've created an impossible situation which will never exist
It can and does, albeit in slower motion (ie Japan, South Korea)
> why taking care of the elderly, something humans have done since before recorded history, is flawed.
Humans took care of THEIR elderly. The system was made to take care of THE elderly. Pretty sure most people don't want to see old people begging for food on the street but also prefer not to pay much to have it resolved (varies by country and culture)
> It can and does, albeit in slower motion (ie Japan, South Korea)
Read what he wrote again. The scenario he created (everyone works, then everyone retires) has never and will never happen. Humanity is more likely to be wiped out by a meteor.
> Humans took care of THEIR elderly.
Point me toward the non-human elderly being supported by the social safety net. We're all related. You just have to look back far enough.
> Pretty sure most people don't want to see old people begging for food on the street but also prefer not to pay much to have it resolved (varies by country and culture)
I agree with you here. People don't want to help others, and don't want to suffer the consequences of not helping others. People are conflicted creatures who suffer from a long https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
> The scenario he created (everyone works, then everyone retires) has never and will never happen.
It can happen in a generation, if all of that generation decides to have zero offspring. This is why it is happening in slow motion. There are still people having kids but not enough for sustaining the current population levels.
> We're all related.
We are also related to bugs. Humans generally care for their very close relatives (kids -> parents -> cousins...) and emotionally care for the rest of humans.
> It can happen in a generation, if all of that generation decides to have zero offspring.
All of humanity has never decided to do the same thing ever. Society follows a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution , and there will always be folks who decide to do other than everyone else. Oppositional defiant disorder is a thing. You're living in imaginary land.
> We are also related to bugs.
Yes. And many very intelligent people besides myself think that we should be taking better care of the environment and all the other creatures in it besides ourselves as well.
I mean, I literally said "economic theory", the basic idea is that you simplify the assumptions to make a point. That's literally what most of economics is!
In the real world, the assumptions are weaker and the dynamics are much more complicated than a toy model, but you can still transfer the same conclusions - in this example, that pension requires making babies and that without a good negative feedback mechanism, the system eventually collapses.
Seniors are also really expensive. By some estimates you spend half of your lifetime healthcare cost in the last five years of your life. It typically takes multiple working people to support a single senior on government benefits.
Ponzi, or no Ponzi, it's still an illusion: let's assume that we all generate enough money saved in those funds during our productive years to sustain ourselves in senior periods, even counting in the almighty inflation. The problem is it's not money you need when old, and frail, you want somebody doing work for that money. So the whole scheme still requires enough young workers entering the market, and them be willing to perpetuate it. Which is kinda not guaranteed if each gen is smaller then the previous one.
This is one reason why the robotics work going on right now is so exciting. Without the demand for elder care, it wouldn't attract as much investment or development.
Money is basically a coupon for labor. If there are no vending machines (read young workers) for labor coupons, then you won't get labor, no matter how many coupons you accumulate.
Holding money does not teleport people into the future. (= the store of value myth)
I live in Australia where individuals are expected to fund their own retirement, and the government pension is intended just as a back-up for those who are too poor to do so. Everyone has an investment account ("superannuation", or "super" for short) which is taxed at at a reduced tax rate, and your employer is required to pay 12% of your salary into it. There are many providers of such accounts ("superannuation funds") to choose from (normally your employer has a recommended fund, but you aren't obliged to use the one they recommend) – and if you really want to you can set up your own superannuation fund (a Self-Managed Super Fund or SMSF) in which case you can make all the investment decisions yourself (subject to certain legal restrictions–you risk legal trouble if you make non-arms-length investments, like invest your superannuation into your own business, but other than that you can put the money in whatever you like.)
So, lack of young workers is not an inherent problem – you can invest your superannuation overseas (most funds invest a certain percentage of the money overseas, but if you want to take the risk of putting 100% of your superannuation into international investments, that's allowed), so even if the Australian economy were struggling with lack of young workers, you could still live off the investment returns from other global economies which lack that problem. And the reality is that Australia is unlikely to run out of young workers, because even though we have similar problems with low fertility as many other Western countries (although significantly higher than most of Western Europe), we've also always had a relatively high immigration rate, so younger workers immigrating makes up for the insufficient births.
> in Australia where individuals are expected to fund their own retirement,
I'm looking at the official statistics, and this is not what they say:
The government pension is the main source of income for 47% of retirees vs superannuation's 33%. Moreover, the proportion of those relying on the pension has increased between 2020 and 2022 by 3 pts.
> The government pension is the main source of income for 47% of retirees vs superannuation's 33%.
Yes, but that’s because the current superannuation system was only introduced in 1992, and when it was first introduced the mandatory contribution rate was only 3% (as opposed to 12% starting this year)-so a lot of current retirees had limited super because it didn’t exist for a big chunk of their working life, and then even when it did the contribution rates were arguably insufficient. Younger workers (20s/30s/40s) generally have had much more money put into their super, so it is expected that by the time they reach retirement age, the pension:super balance will have shifted more in the super direction.
> Moreover, the proportion of those relying on the pension has increased between 2020 and 2022 by 3 pts.
That period saw significant economic and social disruption due to COVID-19, so I doubt that change is representative of long-term trends. If an economic shock causes a rise in unemployment, that can push people near retirement age into unplanned early retirement-and the people most likely to be impacted by that are likely to be the least well-off, who inevitably are more likely to rely on the government pension than their own retirement funds
It's most appropriately a shared investment scheme. Your pension money should not sit idle while you are building it. That money can earn a percentage in many ways and dividend reinvestment makes the fund grow massively.
> Retirement depends on having young workers.
Profits do. Retirement is going to happen regardless of how many young workers there are.
There is zero advantage to a society-level investment scheme and many disadvantages - mainly due to distancing "investors" from the investment which means that the goal of the system becomes profit only without any consideration for ethics.
> There is zero advantage to a society-level investment scheme and many disadvantages
Except we're using it and it works. It's demonstrably better than the previous scheme wherein when a business failed it could take the entire pension with it leaving thousands of people high and dry.
> mainly due to distancing "investors" from the investment
It puts me directly in control of the investment whereas before I had zero control and had to accept whatever the company administrator decided.
> which means that the goal of the system becomes profit only without any consideration for ethics.
Do you want to solve the retirement problem or ethics in investing problem? If you insist they both be solved by the same action then I think you're going to end up with a system that has _negative_ advantages and _everyone_ will hate.
They just need to be calibrated that the years of pay-in and years of pay-out are balanced as to the ratio of the people in the age cohorts. If you have 10 people paying in for 40 years and only 2 people receiving pay out for 10 years then the system is cheap.
> Pension is a Ponzi scheme. Explained in terms of economic theory, if everybody works and saves in time period 1, and retires and receives pension in time period 2, then... their pension is worthless, because there's infinite inflation, because no more goods and services get produced.
Except if you take a portion of the contributions and investment in incoming-producing assets.
Kind of like what the Canada Pension Plan (CPP ~ US Social Security) does.
It depends on the system. In Holland they just abandoned this for a US-style "every man for himself" 401(k) thing. Luckily there are still parties fighting the implementation.
I don't think ponzi scheme is justified, it is too negative, it just makes no sense to actually accumulate all that wealth for so long.
It allows you to do that. In most cases there are various life index funds that operate the way a traditional pension scheme would and is likely the default option in any employer plan.
You can additionally add your own money outside of your paycheck and you can use the money inside of the fund to make your own investments. You are also allowed to take personal loans against your own 401k. Which is a generally overlooked benefit of the system. You pay interest on the loan but it just goes back into your 401k itself. You pay interest to yourself.
The great thing with a 401k is it's not industry dependent. If your employer or industry goes out of business you still have a lot of options to move your retirement to a new employer or use some of the funds to bridge yourself to a new line of work.
I used to hate it but now that I've used it I quite like it.
I prefer the old system because it's simpler (the last thing I want to do is manage investments) and it doesn't run out like a personal pension does. You just get the monthly amount as long as you live. Because it's a group scheme. Some people are luckier than others.
Unfortunately Holland has become very neoliberal and everything collective or social is frowned upon. That's really why they changed it.
> the last thing I want to do is manage investments
You are not required to. You can set your portfolio to be 100% mutual funds. Several exist. They have names like "Fidelity Freedom Blend 2045" or the "Blackrock Lifepath 2045." Your provider almost certainly has a default in this category they will pick for you if you signal no other intent.
> Because it's a group scheme
A 401k can be group or individual. It's your money in a special status that's allowed to be used for certain purposes before taxes. The proceeds are tax free under certain circumstances. It's entirely up to you what you do with that money including just stashing it into a fund and forgetting about it.
> and everything collective or social is frowned upon
There are advantages and disadvantages. Populations and circumstances change over time. With the world working to phase out petroleum it should be no surprise that Holland needs to adjust.
> and it doesn't run out like a personal pension does. You just get the monthly amount as long as you live
It doesn't run out? What's this magic infinite money? It doesn't run out because when it runs out other people are working for you. It's a great system that exploits the young to benefit the old that didn't save enough. The new system removes the magic and you have what you saved.
The people that live longer benefit from the ones that don't, but it's about reassurance, it's not an investment. If they had lived longer they'd have had that reassurance too.
About the first pillar (national pension), Google tells me:
> You are insured for the state pension if you live in the Netherlands and for each year you are a resident you accrue 2% of the state pension. If you have been in the Netherlands for the full 50 years prior to your state pension age, you will receive the full 100%.
Many highly developed countries used to have a second pillar (company-sponsored pensions, either defined benefit or defined contribution), but those are slowly fading away after adopting more neo-liberal economic policies.
Personally, I am OK to privitise/personalise some of your retirement pension risk, but not all of it. Large parts should still be guaranteed by the state. The real problem with privitisation/personalisation of retirement pension risk, most people are much worse than professional investors. Also, a huge portion of your retirement savings are earned in the last 10 years when your invested capital is almost peak. If there is an economic crisis during that decade, you are screwed. Can you imagine being 5-10 years away from retiring in 2007... then 2008 Global Financial Crisis happened? You will definitely need to delay your retirement by 5-10 (more) years. Awful.
It feels like the problem is that we've drastically improved people's lifespans, but not their healthspans. Back when these systems started getting implemented, you could reasonably work up to the retirement age without too many issues. Nowadays, people may be living to 80 instead of 60, but our ability to work and willingness to hire people past 60 hasn't gone up with the increase in lifespan.
We did not improve people's lifespans. At least not that much. What happened is that young people die less due to less hazardous conditions which improved the average age. Also the average age is not the problem. The problem is that social security was setup as a ponzi scheme (younger pays for older) instead of a saving scheme (each one build a nest for himself). A ponzi scheme will eventually implode but if you manipulate the parameters you can make it go further.
Are you sure about that? The statistic I always heard is that we have seen a 1 year rise in life expectancy every 4 years for the past 80 years.
I don't necessarily agree with the Ponzi scheme. If the ratio of old people to young people is constant then the system can be made to work with setting the retirement age without changing the burden on the young. The issue is that this ratio was reduced because the population isn't growing anymore. We need to find a new retirement age to balance this (or start a transition to a saving scheme, which might take at least 100 years).
I have a great grand parent that made it to 90+ with relatively little clinical care. So human's life expectancy didn't change much. What changed is that many humans died of what is now preventable causes (ie: diabetes).
> Travel, play golf, cross a continent in a camper or climb a mountain.
Do that today. Tomorrow isn’t promised, let alone 10, 30, 50, 70 years. Don’t be one of those “When I retire”-people, do it now. _If_ you make it to retirement you may not be physically able or willing to do things you’ve been dreaming of for so long.
If you are waiting for retirement, then you are not living.
> I think if you've put in 40-45 years for the man, you should be allowed to have some good 10 years for yourself. Travel, play golf, cross a continent in a camper or climb a mountain.
Not unless you've raised 2 more workers to pick up the shovel while you're playing golf. You could, of course, rely on your neighbor's kids through taxes and pensions but when your neighbor thinks the same it becomes problematic.
On the plus side, if you did raise kids, you may negotiate your retirement with them even if the averaged government system stops working.
1. Denmark has a special retirement system for people who started work life earlier than normal, allowing them to indeed retire after some 45-48 years of work. All these rules are broken though.
2. These ages only affect a minimal government pension, and a massive tax saving on cashing out a specific, government approved retirement investment. If you wait to start receiving payments on that till retirement age, you avoid paying income tax of it. You can start earlier with worse taxation, or use regular investment types altogether. The overcomplicated tax system and its incentives are quite broken though.
3. Danish politicians still have a retirement age of 60 and a massive retirement package, so they can't deem retirement age and available funds to be that important...
> But if you don't have kids, it's easier to save money to fund your own retirement. Kids are expensive.
Empirical studies have found the opposite: if you don't have kids you tend to spend more on yourself, which means you have (on average) a higher life-style during working years which you take in retirement. A higher / more lavish lifestyle means you need higher income and more savings… which many folks with a lavish lifestyle generally don't do.
People with kids spend less on themselves and so are in the habit of a less lavish life-style and so need less savings in retirement because their spending habits are lower.
As a general rule if you have kids you need 40-50% of your working-age income in retirement, but you do not have kids you need 50-60%.
Yes, you could do this, but it's parasitic behavior that depends on your ability to extract value from the labor of other people's kids. If everyone does this, then there are no kids to take over the work to keep things running and money doesn't do anything anymore because the economy stops working.
It did not. I'm just pointing out reality. Kids are expensive, and it's probably easier to save for retirement if you don't have any. Don't get me wrong: I love my kids and wouldn't trade them for anything, and I have no problem working more and harder for them, but we don't live in the age where retirement depends on having kids anymore.
Maybe you meant to propose to change that, so only people with kids have a right to a government pension, which is certainly an interesting idea, but also doubly painful for people who wanted kids but were unable to have any.
Not having kids yourself but still having a retirement of any kind is a privilege that only exists if most people still have kids, so that their kids become workers who will provide the goods and services you need to keep living in retirement.
Government pension doesn't magically continue to work if everyone chooses the individually optimal solution of not having kids and consequently having a much easier time saving more money for retirement. If everyone executed this strategy, all that extra money you saved would become worthless, because there would be no one to give you goods and services in exchange for it.
If everybody suddenly stopped having kids, I think a lack of retirement would be the least of our problems. But you seem to feel as if only people who have kids are entitled to retirement, while people without kids don't have that right. And that's very much an opinion, not a fact.
It was the case in the distant past when your kids were your retirement, and even then people tended to work until they died, but that time is now in the distant past. At least in the industrialised world. There may be poor countries where this is still very much the case.
I see this twofold: what happens if net outcome is negative. Who would pay for it?
The same argument could be made for children, but a counterpoint could be made that given family history outcome is more stable than with unknown immigrant.
On the other hand, there is VERY interesting idea: personal immigration responsibility. Just as „mail bride” look for immigrants you’d be willing to sponsor in exchange for retirement.
Probably there are 5 million problems but would put personal stake for sponsor. Limit to 2 per person and people would do a lot of research as their retirement would depend on it. The country might also gain because I’d expect that people would look for high-value individuals that would maximize their chance for well being.
Finally, this could be used to revive drying out regions: bind this to a country/state/administrative region and that could help shaping it in the future.
That's a great plan. Also make sure to deny citizenship to them and their kids, otherwise they'll eventually vote to stop paying your pensions. The glory of apartheid states of the past awaits us.
It would be hard to distill the fallacy of human fungibility into a purer form than this. If you’re say Danish, the kids you raise will be Danish. The immigrants won’t be Danish, they’ll be like the people from their country of origin: https://www.sup.org/books/economics-and-finance/culture-tran....
What makes Danish children productive is not their Danish blood, it's the culture and infrastructure that they operate in. The children of any nation would be equally capable.
As an immigrant myself, I find the second article silly. You import people according to your own criteria, and they arrive pre-raised and pre-educated. A larger proportion of them will leave the country before retirement age. It's a hell of a deal for a country, and that's why it's everyone's solution.
Immigrants are a much bigger drain on the country they are leaving.
A Dutch study found that non-western immigrants have a negative contribution even in the second generation: https://docs.iza.org/dp17569.
It’s not a “hell of a deal”—no European country is in the black from its investment in immigration. It’s a Dutch Tulip bubble. The Scandinavian countries, the most well-governed in Europe, have already done the math and started switching course.
You’ve mentioned before that you were from a third world country. (Bangladesh, was it? A 90% Muslim nation?) Yet I assume you believe yourself to be a net positive contributor to your country of immigration? That your children will help the native culture instead of hindering it?
According to his logic, his kids should thank their lucky stars that their mother is American by his definition, namely that she was raised here and her family has been here for many generations ....
Correct. They’ll be better participants in American democracy as a result. I’d much rather have almost anyone in her family running the country than almost anyone in mine, even though my family is a lot more affluent and educated. Their socialized habits and attitudes are far more suitable for participatory democracy.
Immigration is about the movement of large numbers of people. It makes no sense to think about immigration in terms of individual immigrants. 1 Bangladeshi immigrant could be anybody. 270,000 Bangladeshi immigrants (as we have in the U.S. today) is a group you can analyze statistically and draw conclusions about.
As to Bangladeshi Americans generally, they’re probably a net negative economic contributor. Their median household income is 15% lower than for white americans, and the real gap is probably even larger because they’re concentrated in high-income states (New York, California).
Though the situation in the U.S. likely isn’t as bad as the one in Denmark or the UK. The anchor population of Bangladeshis in the U.S. are people like my family who came over on H1, which is a very small (only 65,000 annually), unusual population (e.g., my grandfather studied medicine in London).[1] Family reunification dilutes the pool a lot in the U.S. But the pool is far more skilled and employable than the Bangladeshi immigrant pool in say the U.K. In the UK, only 58% of working age Bangladeshis are employed, and the poverty rate is 46%. Bangladeshi immigration to the UK isn’t a “great deal”—it’s reparations for colonialism.
[1] In the U.S., our priors about immigration from the subcontinent are based on immigrants from the 1970s-1990s, i.e. a small number of highly educated people who were already somewhat assimilated into Anglo culture from British colonial influence. Pre-H1B, they also tended to move to random places around the U.S. rather than concentrating in ethnic enclaves, which forced a greater degree of assimilation. So you think about guys like Ro Khanna, who grew up as like the only Indian kid in Newton, PA. That doesn’t reflect the kids growing up in Little Bangladesh in Queens today.
They'll be as Danish and any other Danes, just choosing to live life as they see fit.
>"And as a result, they won’t be nearly as economically productive as Danes, ", how does someone with a different religion, or choice for music make them less economically productive? Are you suggesting they don't know white collar skills? Or are less intelligent due to were they were born?
It’s a profoundly sad trend. Our obsession with nuclear families and individualism has led us to a point where raising a family has become financially impossible and unimaginable.
The immigration fix is analogous to quantitative easing. The problems are systemic, and turning a blind eye to them won’t make them disappear.
Honestly, we need to rethink capitalism. By promoting shareholder returns over the wellbeing of employees, companies are destroying the social fabric necessary for a healthy civilization.
Of course, the rise in costs and the widening wealth gap are equally to blame. This situation compels both parents to work, sometimes even holding multiple jobs, leaving them with insufficient time to raise children. This cycle continues until the next generation has no chance of affording their own home (or even a rental). How on earth are they supposed to raise a family?
> I think if you've put in 40-45 years for the man, you should be allowed to have some good 10 years for yourself.
Who do you think would "allow" this? God? This is a resource constraint imposed by reality itself catching up to an excessively idealistic set of policies; this policy decision is downstream of that, not arbitrary.
It is entirely arbitrary. Society heavily favours capital above labour. That’s why we have very rich inheritors never working and people toiling until they are 70. It’s entirely a choice. This issue has solutions we collectively decide not to put in place.
Isn't that exactly how retirement works though? Old people who produce no labour but just get everything given to them because of the capitol they built up previously.
Those mean the government always gets its cut (and pisses off the inheritors), but functionally whether you inherit 10 or 5M doesn’t really make a difference.
Can you quantify what you think that choice looks like?
Say you seized the entirety of Elon Musk’s assets: that could pay for a year and a half of the Dept of Transportation. Say you seized all the wealth (somehow) of the world’s 100 richest people. That’s 2 years of US non-discretionary spending (social security, Medicare and Medicaid). I often see comments that assume all problems could be solved by just taxing the rich more, but I just don’t think that’s true.
The Nordic countries pay for their social safety nets by taxing the middle class more heavily than we do in the US. If you want to change that, it’s less about capital vs labor, and more about your dentist vs labor (dentists be the classic example of jobs that earn high incomes without being “capital owners”).
Funny that we have a ton of people asking what people would do in a post scarce society. Stating that man needs work. Yet, it also seems to be said most by the people who have been free from the need to labor for generations. They still do, they still desire more, yet their lives are certainly post scarce. Hell, the whole goal of retirement is to become post scarce, and have a few years where you can live without the need to labor. Seems like we already have some decent evidence to what such a world would look like.
People will always yearn and wonder and imagine. Sure some people will spend their time fishing but a lot of people need things to strive for a and they will make things up or seek out others who feel the same way.
I agree. Lots of evidence to suggest that this would allow humans to be the most human they could be. Calling it a new Renaissance is not a stretch. Nor reminding those that much of the scientific advancements in the past were made by those who had the luxury of enough free time to sit around and think. But I think too many confuse this message with suggesting some form of Communism or Socialism. I'm not advocating for that (personally, I'm strong believer in Capitalism, even if not the Laissez-faire kind. You can't control a wild horse, but neither should you let it freely destroy your farm). Those notions are related, but not the same thing. You can clearly, as demonstrated by rich elite and people retiring, have post scarce lives without the need for such direct control.
If you stop "rich inheritors" from existing, this moves you away from the knee of the optimization frontier and you're certainly even worse off as an old person.
If you can't conceptualize this as a constrained optimization problem, you're not even worth arguing with; you simply lack the tools to think about this in a useful way.
While I have little interest in humouring the idea that all of this boil down to an optimisation problem (it doesn’t - fiscal policies and social policies scarily live at the intersection of economy and politics - plus even from a pure economic point of view it is much more complicated than a simple optimisation problem and I do have an economic degree by the way), on top of you being frankly condescending while bringing little to the table which would somehow explain if not justify the attitude, you can certainly get away with far heavier inheritance taxes without actually hurting your economy in any meaningful way. You can also tax the rich a lot more heavily without hurting your economy in any meaningful way.
And I don’t ask you to believe me from the goodness of your heart. I think Piketty must have had something like half a dozen best sellers on this topic alone at this point.
> I have little interest in humouring the idea that all of this boil down to an optimisation problem... I do have an economic degree by the way
I hope your degree was "economic" in the sense that you didn't pay much for it
> I think Piketty must have had something like half a dozen best sellers on this topic alone at this point.
Thinking pop-slop authors like Piketty are worth paying attention to is a worse self-indictment than the most condescending thing I could possibly say here.
You should downgrade your confidence that it's possible to meddle with natural resource allocation without causing problems.
Do you have any argument to share outside of insulting me and Piketty?
Charitably, you seem to be implying that any actions which would disturb the current situation would be detrimental because current allocation is the best that can be done.
That seems highly suspicious to me because I don't think anyone is happy with the current fiscal policies. People disagree about what should be done but I think everyone agrees we are not at an optimum.
Of course there is no guarantee that your 65-75 years will be good, but it's a lot more likely that your 65-75 years will be good than your 75-85 years.
And why wouldn't a society owe its citizens anything after 40+ years of keeping their nose at the grindstone, and obeying all of its laws?
Society is defined by what we owe one another in pursuit of civil interactions with one another.
If the only contract society offers me is "work your hands to the bone and then be discarded once you can't work anymore" then I have no incentive to keep up my side of the contract and perform labor or observe property laws in the first place. And once everyone is trying to cheat and steal from one another then you no longer have a society anymore.
Ask that to any serf throughout history. You don't have to "prefer to be dead" in order to recognize that what is being asked of you fails to be worth what you get in return, and then be in a rational position to decide to default on what others frame you as being obligated to do.
If society doesn't owe me for working under its rules and constraints, why should I care about society and following its rules and constraints and putting anything into it? In my opinion such a stance makes governmental rule illegitimate, and completely kills the social contract, making me wonder why I should care about following the law at all except through fear, which is not a great long term motivator both historically and personally. If society isn't going to help provide for me when im feeble and old, why should I care about putting anything into it when im young and sharp? Especially when private capital economics is already so biased against me as just some regular working joe.
Sure such thoughts are not probably concerning for the majority of people, but it only takes a small percentage of people losing faith in society combined with a bit of public apathy about people living criminal lives or doing criminal things for them to bring the entire thing to its knees.
I am curious: From where did you get that it owes you that?
So, I completely agree with most things you say. The core here is: Just don't work 40+ years for a retirement.
Take sabbaticals along the way.
Change your career when it is stale.
The counter for this: Don't buy into the hype. You cannot afford sabbaticals if you need two new cars every 4 years and a house that stretches your finances.
And this is why I give as little to society as possible. If it owes me nothing, I owe it nothing and therefore it’s only right I give it as close to nothing as possible to balance the scales.
> This is a resource constraint imposed by reality itself
No, it is a resource allocation problem.
I don't think we should have ceilings, but we certainly should have floors. Minimum standards. Despite that belief, I think there is something wrong when there's about 20 people who make more money while they take a shit, than most American families make in a year[0] and a buttload who make that same amount while they're asleep[1]. These levels of wealth are so large that they are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to spend within several generations, not just one lifetime.
This is only a problem, because the floor is lowering while the number of people in these groups are growing, especially the shit group.
If we have to make trades between ceiling and floor, I'd rather sacrifice ceiling for floor than floor for ceiling. Because the latter is simply greed.
Importantly, we can have both. This isn't a zero sum game, we produce more wealth and resources as time goes on. It is only zero sum at a single point in time. We can simultaneously raise the ceiling and the floor. But currently, we are shifting what percent of these gains go to which groups.
It would be insane to build extravagant and ornate Cathedral ceilings to only have a dirt floor. It would be dangerous to build those ceilings without ensuring there is a strong foundation and forgetting to build the pillars to support them. Without that, the ceilings fall and it all becomes dirt and rubble.
It is an allocation problem, not an amount problem.
[0] If you have $100bn, are able to make a conservative 0.05 yearly interest and take 5min to shit, you've made ~$50k during that time.
[1] You only need $1bn given the same statistics, but closer to $45k. There's over 3k billionaires.
There are finite resources to allocate. If you can't conceptualize this, there's literally zero chance you can think about this in a productive way.
> I think there is something wrong when there's about 20 people who make more money while they take a shit, than most American families make in a year
That's usually indicative of a lack of understanding of highly connected networks, power law distributions, etc. - the types of things you need to grapple with if your question is "how do I maximize some economic objective for X million people?".
> This isn't a zero sum game
It's a constrained game (and there exists a zero-sum tradeoff between instantaneous allocation of resources to capital good production and consumable good production)
> Cathedral ceilings to only have a dirt floor
You're really leaning on this analogy that isn't very useful for actually thinking about the problem
I'll try to illustrate this with an easy example. There's a finite amount of gold that humans have mined, and thus available for use. We could even say that there's a finite amount of gold on Earth, that is available. But these are different things. If we do no more mining, we have a fixed amount of gold. If we mine more, we get more. Total gold available for use, increases.
The analogy extends. As our technology advances, more gold becomes available to be mined, and eventually we could even transmute gold. There's more resources in our solar system than we could conceivably use in the next billion years (even with exponential growth in use), so it can be treated as infinite (over these bounds).
This is especially important as we build... software. It is similarly effectively infinite within our bounds. We are rapidly building better hardware, increasing computing power and memory. This is a positive sum game.
The same is true about the economy in general.
You're right!
> If you can't conceptualize this, there's literally zero chance you can think about this in a productive way.
We just disagree about what needs to be conceptualized. I believe you just missed the context of what I was writing about. I'm not giving the example as a way to teach you, I'm giving it so that we can make sure we're aligned in what we're talking about. I agree, there's a really limited amount of gold. But it is important to recognize that we mine more, and the amount of gold increases. I was trying to clarify this with my mention of time. But that's no different from when you say "a zero-sum tradeoff between instantaneous allocation". All I'm saying is that the hands on the clock continue to tick forward...
IF IT WAS ZERO SUM, then it would be even more important to discuss allocation, not less. In an extreme case, let's assume we have enough resources to make everyone in the world live at a middle class level. It is finite. But there are an infinite number of ways in which we may allocate these resources. I think it would definitely be a problem if we were allocating it in ways that some people could buy a private jet every day for the rest of their lives ($100bn easily does this), while others are can't eat at least one meal every day. That's not a lack of resource problem, that's an allocation problem.
What's your math background. You can formalize what we're talking about with game theory. We're talking about stuff you'd learn in an introductory course. Economics courses discuss a lot of this at length too. But you should try to draw from both the applied econ side as the more theoretical math side. Least you get trapped by naive models, or at least not recognize their limitations.
CS and math should be a solid basis here. To be honest I don't remember at all where I picked this stuff up - a lot of it comes from random disjoint fields like optimization theory, graph theory, etc. which impinge on econ all the time, although I couldn't tell you a definitive book on the subject(s)
This is why it’s better to have a higher salary vs relying on government to provide a better standard of living at the trade off of a lower salary.
With the high salary, even if the cost of living around you is high, you can still make choices to save and invest money to eventually become financially independent and retire when you want, where as if you have a low salary, you don’t have that flexibility, you are at the mercy of the systems around you.
"Investing money" is insufficient. You still need kids and the newer generations at the end of the day.
Think where you are going to invest and how that investment is going to provide returns. Stocks? Those companies actually need to produce and hence need workers. There also needs to be a broad consumer class to purchase those products. Without younger generations, you have no workers and no consumers which means your stocks have no value. Same with bonds. Same with real estate.
The benefits of a pension start before retirement. I can avoid setting aside a huge pile of money for the potential of an extremely long lifespan and then worry as minor changes to that pile become really critical near and in retirement.
Suppose you’re 50 with 2 million USD in savings. How soon do you retire and what kind of lifestyle do you live in retirement? That’s heavily dependent on what kind of pension is waiting.
Where I am, we have personal pension plans. You can check "what kind of pension is waiting" by going to the pension fund website and checking. Gov't doesn't play any role in any of that -- except (a) prescribing mandatory monthly payments and (b) determining the retirement age. (You only get small gov't pension if you haven't collected enough in your personal plan.)
If it’s just a savings account, that’s not a pension.
Assuming it’s a defined benefit pension it can include guarantees like inflation adjustments. That’s the fundamental advantage which largely offsets the disadvantage of lower average returns.
I’m not saying putting all your money into a defined benefit plan is ideal, but due to the diminishing marginal utility of money a guaranteed minimum lifestyle is extraordinarily valuable.
It’s not a savings account. My employer and me both pay monthly installments to the pension fund which are tax free. The money is under my name, and is not used to cover any pension of someone else. I can decide where it is invested, and change it at will. Once I go into retirement, the accumulated amount is converted to monthly payments which I will receive until I die. If I die before the retirement, my children will inherit the whole sum.
In the way that (a) its establishment and monthly installments are mandated by law, at the rates prescribed by the law (which isn't the case for "a savings account"); (b) both the installments and the revenues are tax-free by the law (which isn't the case for "a savings account"); and (c) the law that establishes the fund, mandates payment on both employees and employers, determines the rates, and frees the whole thing from taxes is called "the Pension Law" (which isn't the case for "a savings account").
However if all of the above also applies to savings accounts in the place you reside in, you can call it "a savings account" all right.
I think this is very similar to 401(k) or IRA, or "self-invested personal pension", except that the law sets the percentage amounts for both employee and employer contributions.
consider what humans did before society. they followed herds of ruminant animals and hunted them. they were working 90% of their waking hours. their work was their lives. but at night they would spend a few hours looking at the stars. what we have now is pretty similar. except instead of stars we have screens. i would say life is ok if you can read something interesting every day and have a job that you enjoy. i would say you should prioritize having impact or having a job you love. everyone accumulates as much money as possible at the expense of everything else… there are people with millions saved up at the age of 60… who then die shortly after and did a bunch of work for nothing. keep enough saved to cover modest expenses for a year. beyond that, priotize other things
I take issue with the idea that pre-modern humans were working 90% of the time. We know medieval peasants didn't, we know bronze age societies didn't, and we have no real evidence to support hunting based societies doing it either, especially when we consider the lower nutritional health of past humans that made physical labor far more difficult to maintain consistently without just dieing from pushing the body beyond its limits. It is far more TV trope than reality going by historical sources. Medieval peasants spent most winters doing mostly random home tasks and small crafts while they sat around a fire. And farming based societies generally put in the vast majority over their work in a two months in spring and in the fall. You don't plant fields in July, you just complain about the weather not being ideal for plant growth and did basic living chores that you always do like washing and mending your single pair of clothes or patching up your roof or milking your cow. But there is only so much mending and washing and milking to do.
Or look at ancient egyptions, they very clearly didn't need to work 90% of the time if they got time to build massive pyramids, and there is considerable evidence that pyramid workers were not forced to work, but simply offered extra booze and food for doing so. If you didn't work on those projects you weren't starved to death, you just didn't get to drink as much alcohol with your buddies or brag about how you helped build a wonder that will stand for hundreds or thousands of years.
> they were working 90% of their waking hours. their work was their lives.
This is not true at all. A quick google for “hunter gatherer work hours” would tell you that they worked far less than we do today. 2-5 hours of what we would define as work a day, with the rest being mainly leisure.
> "they followed herds of ruminant animals and hunted them. they were working 90% of their waking hours"
Idk if you've ever seen sheep in person, but "standing near some sheep while they eat grass" is not work in the sense of effort, concentration, labour. There's a reason the Boy Who Cried Wolf was bored out of his skull, and why shepherding was a task given to a boy while the village adults were doing other things.
we didnt eat or hunt sheep. we followed herds of nomadic ruminant animals across entire continents. simply keeping up with them on foot would be a lot of work. let alone hunting them, moving them, dressing and processing them and then you have the task of making and maintaining all the tools and equipment that were necessary. fires had to be tended… can i respectfully suggest that you are completely wrong?
OK you don't like sheep, so I Googled cows and found they graze 6 - 11 hours a day and spend much of the other time resting. They eat 60+Kg of grass per day and you aren't going to get 60Kg of blades of grass quickly. Nor are they going to cross continents anytime soon. The BBC fact file on Giraffes says "Giraffes spend most of their time eating, feeding between 16 to 20 hours a day."
Can I suggest that if you want to support the claim, you offer some actual reasoning and evidence - there should be some diaries of native Americans and how they ran so many hours a day they coverd several marathons every day, and about how many mountains of knives they amassed working 15 hours a day knife making, and so on.
Why do you think Sweden decided to raise the retirement age instead of raising taxes to keep the current retirement age?
Another idea: Allow people to retire early, but they receive lower monthly payments from national pension. Most national pensions have the reverse: You can retire later and receive higher monthly payments.
> I think if you've put in 40-45 years for the man, you should be allowed to have some good 10 years for yourself.
The problem is that huge number of people live way longer than 75, like to 85 or 95 and such, which imposes a huge financial burden on the state (pension and healthcare costs).
Isn't this more about letting people who want to keep working do that? What's stopping people in Sweden and Denmark from retiring earlier? I would imagine there are some pensions plan withdrawal requirements or criteria for government assistance but can't you just save money to bridge that gap?
Maybe we need to start thinking about these things differently. I would love to have more time off but still have a job and not need to make this so binary.
Can't speak for those countries in particular, but generally you can work past retirement age, or retire earlier if you have funded/planned for that. A retirement age is usually just the point at which you can receive government assistance as part of a safety net. I assume if it's not pegged to life expectancy, the cost to the public grows.
Here in Australia, and I imagine elsewhere, there are strong systems (e.g., superannuation) to encourage personal savings towards retirement.
There's only one issue I can think of with your idea that someone who is 75 now leads a life as you're describing.
The generation they belong to are predicted to live to what 80-85 years? Whilst we (assuming you're in your 40's now) are predicted to get to what 90-95 on average?
Average lifespans are increasing, and on top of that the mobility of someone who's 75 now, won't be the same of someone who's 75 in another 35+ years.
At least in the US, the SSA projects current 30 year old men to live another 48 years, putting them dead around 78. 30 year old women are expected to die around 82. [1] A quick Google shows life expectancy is about three years higher in Denmark, not an extraordinary difference, and some of that number is probably lower infant mortality.
Barring some revolutionary technological breakthrough, we aren't going to be living, on average, into our 90s.
Does anyone know if there's any kind of metrics for healthspans? Meaning the "good" part of life before it's just doctors, medicine and retirement homes.
My impression so far is that we've done a lot of work at the lifespan, less at the healthspan. What's the point of living until 90 if the last 15 years isn't that fun at all.
So from the data, prior to covid-19 Danes had gained about 3 and a half years of healthy life, and an additional year of unhealthy life.
It makes sense that Healthspan and lifespan are well-correlated, as most of the ways we have of extending lifespan do so in a way that makes you clearly healthier (such as preventing chronic diseases).
> Does anyone know if there's any kind of metrics for healthspans? Meaning the "good" part of life before it's just doctors, medicine and retirement homes.
The metric I've come across is Quality Adjusted Life Years:
But generally, work has gotten way less physically demanding so it balances out. Tech allows you to work in via Zoom in the comfort of your home. I hope to be coding literally till the day I die.
Poorer individuals, who need retirement most, don't tend to live as long. Millennials and Gen Z are already victims of old, no-longer-applicable narratives (e.g. save cash, avoid debt, go to college...) and these ones about life expectancy will likely be added to the pile and used to disenfranchise us more while having no connection to reality.
Saving cash was actually a fine strategy when cash was backed by gold or even (to a lesser degree) some time later when the national debt wasn't over $30 trillion - This massive public debt is forcing the government to print money at a rapid rate to cover interest payments and this is creating enormous inflationary pressures. Society has become totally distorted around the goal of keeping this scheme going, the distortion has permeated every facet of human existence.
Avoiding debt was a good idea when interest rates were high. In the modern age where money is not constrained by scarcity, interest rates have been low. Banks have been loaning out the people's money at near 0% interest rates; often towards the goal of helping corporations to monopolize industries; if it was YOUR money, would you loan it out at near 0% interest rate? It doesn't even cover inflation, let alone the risk of default... Yet the government has been doing exactly that with the people's money; YOUR money. The situation has never been so generous towards borrowers and so bad for taxpayers.
Going to college used to be a good idea as it would allow you to stand out among your peers and guarantee you some sort of management/coordinating role. Nowadays, everyone has a bachelor degree and those who have a PhD are over-educated to the point that they've lost their sense of pragmatism. It doesn't allow anyone to stand out. Education feels like some scheme, disconnected from value-creation.
Saving cash is currently a bad idea I'll grant. However I was inclueing sevings in things like the s&p500.
debt is note as bad as it used to be, but most people are not using it for things that grow in value. You talk about 0% interest - but a car loan has much worse payback rates.
Sure, but one of the reasons that people have fewer children is a bigger risk of downward mobility. The cost of raising a child to an expected middle class living standard has increased substantially.
many of those costs are optional. You don't have to put your kids in dance, karate, soccor, ... However many do, and all those things add up in costs.
Speaking as a parent, there are plenty of options, some are really expesnive, and some cheap. You can choose which to pay for.
note that the things I listed above are fun, but won't get yoru children into a great college and thus won't ensure a better life for them and yoru grandkids. Choose wisely where to spend your money.
With an aging population and increasingly long work lives, individual stressors will increase and societal capacity for healthcare (and overall prosperity) will dwindle. Baby boomers, having lived through some of the most incredible growth in human history, will perhaps turn out to be an anomalous blip in the life expectancy stats.
Also, people age differently. There's a difference between living and being alive.
Not that it's an easy problem to solve, what with the demographics being what they are. I think we'll have to get used to the thought - and reality - of sinking living standards in the west.
You get downvoted a lot, but I challenge anyone to name a country that hasn't slashed _hard_ social benefits, pensions, % of GDP for healthcare, and similar..
I get it that some countries have had a plethora of scammers (prescribing pregnancy meds to men so docs can hit quotas and get bonuses/bribes from pharmaceutical companies, people trying to fake blindness to get an early retirement, etc.
But overall reduction of cost with reduction of salaries will ultimately lead to worse healthcare.
A friend was in Germany skiing this past winter. The 10k population town he was staying didn't have a paediatrician and they had to drive 2h to get care for their kid. In Germany, in 2025. I wonder how this very town will be in 2030 or 2050 with that trend..
It's a tough reality to face. Problems are piling up for the west that aren't easily solved, and not just with social benefits. Something as mundane as aging sewage systems is starting to become a real problem in many countries.
I don't think that in a 10k ski-town there aren't kids. They definitely got 'young' people living there having kids.
I was reading the Systemantics yesterday and they discuss how a 'system' does not 'solve' a problem, but it breaks it down to smaller (easier to hide) problems. The book uses as an example the "garbage collection in a town", and how this one-big-problem breaks down to 100-small-problems. So the "we need rebalance our fiscal blah-blah" eventually breaks down to "no extended leave for new mothers", "not every doc-specialization in towns below 50k", and so on.
Absolutely. I seem to recall South Korea having a TFR well below one last time I checked. That doesn't mean we're not facing problems in the west, and specifically the Nordic countries, which is what TFA is about.
I have similar concerns. We have nurses watching way more patients, working unbelievable hours.
16 hour shifts with no notice, 60 hour work weeks, and often disgusting work does not make for an attractive field, so I’m not surprised there’s a massive shortage issue.
This will probably only get significantly worse in the Certified Nursing Assistant field which mainly involves the most manual of labors - changing bed pans, cleaning patients, etc. with many of the same shortage problems. (And way less pay, of course)
> docs can hit quotas and get bonuses/bribes from pharmaceutical companies
This is a common thought. It is incorrect. I’m a doctor. I have gotten pharma money for talking for their drug once, which was absolutely game-changing and which I would speak for without money (sugammadex is the generic name, if you want to look it up). I get lunch twice a year. The age of free vacations is long gone.
> "societal capacity for healthcare (and overall prosperity) will dwindle"
This is not a complete discussion without the elephant in the room - diet and lifestyle are making us sick and much of that is a choice of how we design our world. most Americans and Britons are overweight or obese, and the Coca Cola company and Nestle and all the rest are doing everything they can to encourage their product sales, and society is not doing much to counter it. [smoking deaths halved in the UK between 1990 and 2021 [0]]
America and the UK are car-centric, the CDC says less than half of Americans meet the guidelines for physical exercise[1] and UK Gov says 1 in 3 men and 1 in 2 women are not active enough for good health[2]. People say that if the health benefits of exercise could be bottled up and sold, it would be one of the most potent drugs known, and we're designing places and lives which get rid of it as a regular part of life, and make it harder to add in. UK Gov link says "can help to prevent and manage over 20 chronic conditions and diseases, including some cancers, heart disease, type 2 diabetes and depression". There's millions of people with type 2 diabetes, which is reversible for many people with low-carb eating and fasting and exercise. The Lancet[4] paper saying 4.5 million people were diagnosed with liver disease in the USA in 2021 and alcohol is responsible for almost 60% of cirrhosis cases.
Then there's cities which build car-dependent suburbs, so they can get money today from new build taxes, but set themselves up for large maintenance bills paying for the sprawling roads and water/sewer/electric infrastructure with such a sparse tax base. This is bankrupting cities in North America, which are having to allow more sprawling suburbs today to pay for yesterday's suburb's maintenance in a pyramid style.
Then there's big box stores[3] which sued state governments to stop taxing them as functioning businesses on the grounds that they build their buildings so shoddily they are completely worthless to sell to anyone else or use for anything else, and should be taxed like an empty valueless building. Walmart pays employees so little that many of them need food stamps (SNAP) and those get used at Walmart which then moves the money out of state. Big box stores make cities poorer.
When cities and states say there's no money for pensions, care homes, social services, health services, public transport, it's they're busy mismanaging it and spending it all on subsidising wealty car-dependent suburbanites and 'prestigious' big box store developments. Not to mention health insurance middlemen denying treatments and taking money from the sick and wasting the time of healthcare professionals tying them up in paperwork.
If things were better, with more long-term thinking, people would be healthier and need less support for that reason, things would be closer and easier for people to walk/use public transport to get there so they could remain independent longer in declining health, healthcare would be a lesser demand on society, and there would be more money available to fund it. Then add the 'missing-middle' of American housing so people who have aged and their kids have left could downsize to a smaller home in the same area with the same community, and they would have a more manageable home and more of their money for healthcare.
This is like writing a bubble sort and then declaring that sorting is too expensive so we just can't have sorting in the future.
I’m so sorry to see this American mindset infect Europe.
As an American, I can’t realistically retire until 65.
65 is when Medicare is available.
I’d prefer Medicare started from 21 paying out-of-pocket as an option; then the payment starts slowly phasing out at 65. Not this abrupt, all-or-nothing.
What's sad about it? Even with raising retirement age, the average duration people receive pensions has increased A LOT over the last few decades simply because life expectancies have increased so much. Someone who retired in the 1970s would receive a pension for less than 10 years on average - someone retiring now will receive a 20+ year pension.
IMO retirement isn't a long holiday but it's for people who cannot contribute to society anymore.
That point might be reached earlier for some people, e.g. those who have a hard physical job, than others and a general retirement age is an approximation for when that point is reached for the general population.
Retirement doesn't mean I won't contribute to society anymore. It'll mean that I can contribute in ways that I am most interested in, without having to make money doing it.
Well if you have enough money to do all that then you probably have enough to retire a little early. Why not stop working at 60 and fund the first few years of your retirement out of your savings?
From what I understand if you retire early you must fund your retirement until the end. So you either work until the requested age and get something, or you don't and don't get anything. You can't just stop at 60, fund your retirement from 60 to 70, and then expect the gov to pay for your retirement from 70 to the end. Maybe I'm wrong tho.
Not sure how it works in Denmark but in Poland you have to work certain amount of years (20-25) to qualify for retirement even though the retirement age is 60-65. The amount you get depends on how much you paid into the system, so you will get less for not working, but it'll not prevent you from receiving the pension. And in the US, you become eligible for pension after just 10 years of paying into the system.
Whereas in Turkey you will actually get less if you continue working after you become eligible (65 years of age and 25 years of work, with some exceptions, early exit with partial pay available after 40 years of age) to retire (unless you get enough income to have your premiums paid at maximum, in which case you get a very slow increase in pension for the time after you become eligible).
I doubt this is true in most countries. It would introduce all sorts of problems if people stopped working because of illness or their employer went out of business when they were 60. Not to mention somebody who stopped working the day before their 65th birthday or other strangeness.
You also have people who have not worked much throughout their lives.
But there are a lot of countries and types of pensions out there and some (such as for government workers) may work the way you say. Checks first before you resign (don't be like some UK women).
Part of me wonders if capitalism is the solution to the Fermi Paradox because the endless chase of profits is driving us to extinction.
In many Western countries, younger people are facing the prospect of never being able to own a house and never being able to retire. Beyond this basic lack of security, people are realizing the cost of having children is absolutely astronomical. In many parts of the US childcare may be costing $3000/month or more per child.
For many people, pets are proxy children, and yet capitalism (private equity in particular) is ruining that too as all the vet clinics are being bought up so people can be gouged on that front too.
I'm someone who views the Labor Theory of Value [1] to be trivially true. After decades of Red Scare propaganda, Americans in particular dismiss Marx but they don't realize that Marx's most famous work (Das Kapital [2]) is primarily a framework for economic analysis, regardless of your political beliefs. I guess the problem is that as soon as you accept the axiom "there is no value without labor", there is no other conclusion than to see capitalism as the exploitation of surplus labor value.
The US corporate sector produces something like $4 trillion per year in corporate profits [3]. There are over ~210M working age people in the US [4] (about ~262M adults total). So that's ~$20k per worker in surplus labor value at a time when we spend ~2x per-capita on healthcare for worse outcomes and less coverage [5], housing is artifically expensive because we allow people to hoard it and education is unjustifiably expensive.
None of this has to be this way. We've simply chosen to prioritize the interests of fewer than 10,000 people at the expense of everyone else. People need hope. They need their basic necessities taken care of. They need something to live for. We're rapidly heading towards a future where only the rich survive but there's no one left to work in their sprawling estates.
It's also wild that we're seeing the rise of fascism in the West while there are still survivors of the Holocaust still alive. This is absolutely true in Europe too (eg AfD, Reform, National Front, whatever Hungary is). I also think we've passed the point of being able to resolve this with electroal politics. Now it only ends in tyranny or revolution.
This is one of the more rational comments. I’m really surprised there aren’t more comments expressing how insane this topic is.
It’s absolutely insane that technology and productivity are increasing so rapidly, yet we’re talking about raising the retirement age and people being increasingly unable to afford children.
I really wish people would stop talking about MD5 already. It is almost never the answer. On a modern CPU you get HW accelerated SHA-256, it will always be much faster than your best software MD5. If your SHA-256 hash is too long, chop it up, it will still be better than MD5 for the same bit length.
In general I agree with you- there aren't many cases to consider using MD5 anymore, but in this instance it will work well enough (still insanely fast) on new and old machines alike. If you know SHA-256 will be more optimal for your target hardware, by all means go for it. Some of the physical servers I run are a few years old and are slow at SHA, so the hash key calculations would get expensive quickly.
Shard hash keys aren't sensitive to the weaknesses of MD5, so there isn't an inherent problem, which is why I suggested it. It's really only an implementation detail and immaterial to the underlying question I was hoping to address.
Perhaps, or perhaps we don't know what the fall of civilization looks like? I remember watching a talk by Jonathan Blow where he poses that question. Did the Egyptians who built the pyramids realize when their civilization fell or did it just look like business as usual until it suddenly didn't?
Last I used it, even pretty small grammars took forever to build. I had to be very diligent not to let the grammar cpp-file depend on anything else in my codebase.
If you for instance work with software developers, true vulnerability shows at a code review not at a occasional game of soccer or similar. Few software developers identify themselves as great soccer players so it's not a threat to their identity to be perceived as bad at it.
We software engineers have to be the stupidest "smart" people on the planet. No other occupations work so hard to destroy entire businesses including our own. I get it, I'm a software engineer who loves automation.
"But AI will just be a tool in our tool-set, software engineers will still be the system architects."
Sure, for a while and then AI will do that too.
"But eventually we will live in a fully automated world in abundance, wouldn't that be great?"
Doing what? When we get there, anything we can consider doing, an AI can do faster and better. Write a poem? Write a book? Write music? Paint a picture? Life will be like a computer game with cheat-codes, whenever we struggle with something, instead of fighting on and improving we will turn to our universal cheat-engine: AI.
Anecdotally, I did an analog mistake in my early twenties when I wrote a cheat-program for save-files. It worked like a typical cheat-engine, search the save-file for a specific value, go back to the game and change that value, go back to the save and search for the new value but only in those locations that had the original value. This is how I ruined "Heroes of Might and Magic II" :(. I used to love that game. I could spend hours playing it. Writing the cheat program was a lot of fun for a couple of hours but when it was done, there was no longer any reason for me to play the game. You might say that I didn't need to use my cheat program, but once the genie was out of the box it was too tempting to resist when I met some obstacle in the game.
This is what I fear about AI making our jobs superfluous; it will also make our hobbies or anything we enjoy doing superfluous.
Sorry for the bleak comment but this my fear and I feel the genie is already out of the box.
I can't imagine the amount of corporate brainwashing needed to get to this level of thinking. Are you really saying that people cannot have any identity in life, any dreams, hobbies or pursuits if they can't sit in front of a computer for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week fixing Jira tickets?
Just because a car can go 100mph doesn't mean long distance running doesn't need to exist. Just because a novel you write isn't the best in the world doesn't mean the hobby is pointless. Go buy a farm and grow your own food. Keep some pets. Build cool software just because you can. Hang out with your friends. Play with your kids. Do literally anything you want. Not having to be a wage slave to survive is a good thing for humanity.
> Not having to be a wage slave to survive is a good thing for humanity.
I mean, sure, that's one of the two paths discussed in "Manna" by Marshall Brain. Within the book it's called "The Australia Project"; a kind of utopia.
Myself and the OP are more worried about the other path: a dystopia in which the majority of people are forced into something much worse than wage slavery by those in control of the thinking machines. A dystopia not unlike the one that led to the "Great Revolt" in the Dune series.
> Myself and the OP are more worried about the other path: a dystopia in which the majority of people are forced into something much worse than wage slavery by those in control of the thinking machines.
My fear is that nobody will remain in control of the thinking machines. Imagine an AI agent for hire which maintains its own cryptocurrency accounts and pays its own cloud hosting bills. That's the future I'm worried about.
> A dystopia not unlike the one that led to the "Great Revolt" in the Dune series.
I'm glad you brought this up; I've found the term 'Butlerian Jihad' coming increasingly to mind when I read AI threads on HN. It's interesting to think about a future where we potentially put prohibitions on the use of AI for moral reasons.
> the majority of people are forced into something much worse than wage slavery by those in control of the thinking machines.
This is why it is important that we ensure everyone has collective control of the means of production (through voluntary means - a federation of collectives that agree to trade with one another as much as possible).
Thank you for the ad hominem attack. It's always a pleasure to discuss things with people who like to jump to conclusions and assume things about people they don't know anything about.
Personally I prefer not to pass judgement on a person based on the very little knowledge that can be gleamed from a post like this. But maybe, just maybe if you actually read what I have written (in other comments as well) things might clear up for you.
Not an ad hominem and you haven't refuted him at all. That you perceived what he said as a personal attack speaks more to how you truly perceive your own values than to anything else.
> I can't imagine the amount of corporate brainwashing needed to get to this level of thinking.... Not having to be a wage slave to survive is a good thing for humanity.
Corporate brainwashing, why? That is just realistic. I mean we know earlier people with much harder lifes actually had more free leisure time.. and even Ford imagined with all the automation we may be able to work much less and have better lifes.. still here we are: A few people making tons of money, some soing very good to okayish, but the vast majority doing 2-3 low paying crap jobs to survive.. and we all even workong more than decades ago. How?
Working as a necessity to provide for oneself and family is a key component of good mental health. It's wired into us. We are still the hunter-gatherers we were 10,000 years ago. Excessive idleness always ends badly.
What do you define as working? The nobility had good ways of spending their time, they were at the top of social pyramid. They would not say they had a job, they only had to care about their inheritance.
Mental health is more related to belonging and sense of community. Currently, not having a job is a source of guilt and shame. That has not always been the case. Nurses and educators find their reward mostly in being able to help others.
> Working as a necessity to provide for oneself and family is a key component of good mental health
Based on what science? Grinding at an office 9-5, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year over meaningless pursuits is in fact what is causing mental health problems in the world today. Give people a social safety net, more time to pursue their hobbies, spend time with their families, connect with their communities, and I can assure you we will all be better off.
> Doing what? When we get there, anything we can consider doing, an AI can do faster and better. Write a poem? Write a book? Write music? Paint a picture? Life will be like a computer game with cheat-codes, whenever we struggle with something, instead of fighting on and improving we will turn to our universal cheat-engine: AI.
For literally anything in my life that I can do, there is already someone who can do it better and faster than me. I still enjoy doing the things that I do, and why would that change?
A few months after being defeated by AlphaGo, Lee Sedol retired from profession Go. He said, "Even if I become the number one, there is an entity that cannot be defeated." And, "As a professional Go player, I never want to play this kind of match again."
That seems more like a testament to the intensity of someone who does X to be the "best" at it, rather than someone who does X for the fun of it. Go became more than just a game to him -- it was his identity.
For myself, I don't like to play online Go against humans, because I hate to lose. Instead, I play against a computer with a difficulty rating of around 1-3 dan, and whenever things start going badly for me I just undo moves and try again. Sometimes I ask the computer for advice on what move to make. My experience of Go is that I always win against a player who is much better than me. I find it pretty satisfying.
That's only important if you value the destination more than the journey. In spite of the fact that there will come a day when an artificial intelligence can play the piano and any possible musical piece superbly, for me the act of piano playing itself is where I derive my enjoyment.
It may be in the future it will become more important to focus on activities and hobbies where one's fulfillment comes intrinsically from the action itself, not in the output that is produced.
I'm not sure if this is what the commenter meant, but I am vanishingly unlikely to own the AI. Even if I write the AI I'm unlikely to own it. The training costs are too large and even if I did train a working model, AI can be duplicated, and there's little reason to use anything but the best. The scary thing about AI to me is finally turning intellectual labor into a pure process of capital. You put more energy and capital in, you get more out, no need or room for humans anywhere in that loop. Now of course we're a long way away from that. There will be room for humans for a long time, but it's scary how much additional power it will give to capital. How much less the interests of ordinary people will mater
That's actually a great thing in the long run. Money will be spent on compute, compute will generate data by generative models + validation models, then data will be compacted into a new model. Models and data can be copied, money can't.
If it works with just electricity and doesn't require manual human work it is a game changer. No longer limited by human resources, we can scale research in any field and improve everyone's life much faster.
AlphaGo is an example of such an approach. I don't think models will be locked down, they will probably be like go bots in recent years, about 50% of them open sourced. As long as there is an open dataset, the models can be replicated.
People start out with a brain, they don't tend to start out with money, electricity and in the absence of and incentive it's hard to imagine society doing much for the downtrodden. I think empathy exists and it can be strong, but we've had racism, bigotry, and genocide all while the people we were killing had every potential to be another Einstein.
Also why would you think the weights for models will be open source. That isn't even true now for the most complicated models (gpt3 and the like) and certainly isn't for all the models running right now in production using proprietary datasets. As long as keeping it secret makes it more likely that you (or your models) can generate the next better model it doesn't seem very likely we're converge on them all being public
The far future where we can ask an AI something like make me money, or improve humanity seems pretty far off still. Not for sure. Change can accelerate, but probably under 2% over my lifetime (which is still way higher than I would have put it a few years ago). Until we get there the question will be how humans can better leverage the tools. We won't be in quite as dire problems because the limiting factor will probably still be humans minds to do the increasingly small set of things the AI is bad at
This confuses AI training with inference. Training a machine learning model is expensive, complex, and requires data. Once trained, inference is cheap in terms of compute. A trained model is trivial to leak so hopefully nobody is putting much stock in their models staying secret.
Not to mention there are techniques by which training can be avoided entirely like transfer learning and others.
Apple has made a sample project available for Stable Diffusion that can run on both macOS and iOS.[1] The sample code is here.[2]
I'll concede that Stable Diffusion may or may not meet the threshold for SOTA but still think this is indicative of inference eventually becoming supported for any compelling LLM on consumer-grade hardware. The possibilities for creative tools are just too vast.
This is not a prediction about AI, but a realistic guess how it will be used in the future. Based on how the benefits of automation and productivity increases have been shared with the general populace in the past. Hint: they mostly haven't been shared. Instead we have billionaires whose money disappears into offshore tax havens, all the while civilian infrastructure and society in general crumbles.
Yes, definitely that but also it's not even a guess, they said they were going to monetize it. But yeah, if it's not being released as commons like free software is then one is wise to assume the capital is being created for profit if not outright rent seeking (which I think is most likely in this particular case.)
I used to cheat at Age of Empires 2. It was fun, but eventually very stale to empty all the single player campaign maps with a swarm of cobra cars. Getting better at playing without cheats is way more satisfying.
The jobs computers do today used to be done by "Human Computers". The same arguments were raised when these jobs were mechanized. It's the same cycle over and over.
AI/ML is no silver bullet. It's just another abstraction. It will create new types of jobs. Most likely coordinating/choreographing AI/ML agents in new yet to be discovered applications. It's all part of the endless march of technology. You don't realize how little you are actually capable of until you get the new set of tools that bounce you up to the next level.
Take the tools we have today and present them to some chump shoving punch cards into an early computer and watch their brain melt out of their ears. We can do things with a wristwatch they would have thought impossible. The people that will get burned are the ones that want to stand still. Always be learning.
We are literally at the brink of the multiple major industries being wiped out. What was only theoretical for the last 10-15 years started to happen right now.
In few short years most humans will not be able to find any employment because machine will be more efficient and cheaper. Society will transform beyond any previous transformations in history. Most likely it's going to be very rough. But we just argue that of course our specific jobs are going to stay.
We are like horses that argue that surely they will find something to do after seeing the tractor.
The horses weren't arguing since they're content not having to transport humans around. This sort of prediction has been made multiple times before. I don't think you know the future anymore than anyone else. We'll see in a few years.
I don't know why are you drawing such conclusion, in all democracies still people decide by voting, if most people will lose their jobs then what do you think they will do? Vote to be homeless? There will be something like basic pay and everything will be dirt cheap because no human labor will be needed, just scale machines that will work 24/7, a lot of people will still work but it will be a choice.
If recent history is anything to judge by, this basic income might come with a lot of attached strings.
Since they would not be required anymore to keep the economy running, the lower classes of society would lose most of the little bargaining power they still have. And frankly many countries are doing kinda well also with large parts of their population being poor. Propaganda is sufficient to convince us that they deserve that, or that they don't deserve the basic income for some other reason.
There is a lot of Science Fiction about AIs ruling over humanity, or exterminating it, but I think a future where a wealthy class controls AI and rules over everyone else is more realistic. In such futures, societies will probably always walk a thin line between utopia and dystopia.
I used to be updated with the latest tech, but as I grow older, my capacity to learn and adapt quickly has dropped. I never thought that I would be the one saying this but I do admit that I find the pace of change difficult to keep up with. I now believe it is a natural process of ageing and even though I don't want to give up, I think I eventually may just throw my hands up.
I would say 'standing still' refers more to the state of mind. Of course, it's progressively harder to keep up with the details of modern technology. But being open to it is key. As a techie you understand technology better, than the average person, nevertheless.
You might want to examine your local culture. In many places in the world, job security and life meaningfulness are heavily correlated. Especially for men.
No need when I can examine myself to know myself :). While not actively working for it, I'm at least inspired by the FIRE movement. I am also self-employed so I don't see job security as the meaning of life.
Still this whole thread has been illuminating, maybe part of my fear comes from identifying strongly with being creative and making things, and seeing that turned into something automated.
I wouldn't give too much weight to some of these almost comically optimistic answers.
As with any society-scale event nobody really knows what's happening in every nook and cranny of this multi-billion inhabitant [0] spaceship and when it has happened it can and will be rationalised to fit just as many views.
Personally I very much get your point. Necessity is the mother of invention, and taking the necessity out of pretty much everything can destroy your motivation, because why expend energy on an already solved problem? That's inefficient (under the assumption that you won't require this understanding for some other reason). I know this happens to me, at least.
Perhaps in the AI-dominated world there'll be a pill for that or something..
Do you really think boredom is the greatest problem facing humanity? There are people starving, people who work paycheck to paycheck and can barely afford rent. And you think that a fully automated world of perfect abundance is a bad thing? I mean, clearly it would suck for you, and maybe it would suck for me a little, but I'd never look someone in the eye and say they have to work two full time jobs just to feed their family because otherwise I'd be able to read better books than I can write. That's already the case
The problem is that those people you are talking about already are the first victims of automation. They have to work two jobs because just one doesn't pay enough when a company can automate it cheaper. The road ahead is not nicely paved, a lot more people will suffer before a fully automated abundant world.
So despite your disingenuous reading of my comment it is not "Oh, poor me I will be bored!", it's "Is the goal we're heading for worth the price?" and I don't think it is.
There are ways to fix people needing two jobs to feed their family that isn't spelled "automation" or "AI".
Waiters are already automated? Clerks? I wrote that with particular people I know in mind- they aren't paid less because their jobs have been automated. Are there solutions which don't involve more automation? Sure! But not only are those solutions compatible with automation, they're sort of besides the point I was pushing against.
You said that specifically automation would be bad even if it provided total material abundance. It's not there yet, and I suspect it'll be a while before it is, but if we grant its possibility boredom is just absolutely not enough of a reason to prevent it. There are lots of dangers on the road there, but the only cost you mentioned (and I replied to) was that we'd be "playing with cheats". Video games are one thing- in real life losing has a cost and if cheating prevents that there's no excuse not to.
Parent didn't say they are "paid less because their jobs have been automated." Parent said "they have to work two jobs because just one doesn't pay enough when a company can automate it cheaper." I interpret that to mean "their jobs could be automated for less than the cost of supporting them on the pay from a single job, so they need to take two jobs at less pay per job to stay below the cost of automation."
There are already many industries, including service industries, where there would be more employment if automation were a little cheaper and less automation if wages were a little lower. And sometimes it is a blend of automation and telepresence. https://gizmodo.com/want-to-order-food-from-a-minimally-paid...
There are other forces pushing the other way, especially in the past few years with various COVID-related disruptions in the labor market. But long-term the effects of automation on pay for low-skilled jobs is pretty clear. Only so many get to move up the value chain and yes they likely benefit. The rest are cut mercilessly.
No, this is not how the laws of economics work. Right now the reason for two jobs is that inflating the money supply has caused a huge misallocation of resources. There are other factors, like that most jobs that are needed are gatekeeped artificially.
Having cheaper goods thanks to ai will improve our living standards
While there are certainly many factors contributing to the growth of inequality, it is fairly well established that automation has contributed heavily. There has been a ton written about this so I won’t bother citing here, but googling “automation and inequality” is a start
Yes, inequality goes up, but standards of living for the poorest also go up, the number of people in poverty goes down and most benefit is seen for people in the undeveloped economies. US population didn't decrease poverty rate in the last 4 decades, but that's because US rate was already very low.
What is happening here is enrichment by technological transfer. You can't copy research money but you can copy good ideas and buy the latest technology directly. Jobless people of the future will have incredible empowerment of this kind, maybe they don't need UBI, they need help to help themselves.
Increases in the standard of living are providing marginal gains to happiness. Happiness correlates with equality, not with income. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21841151/
It isn't? So companies aren't trying to produce things as cheap as possible to increase their margins? And robots that are never sick, takes no vacation, needs no rest and are mostly an upfront investment aren't cheaper than people?
> Having cheaper goods thanks to ai will improve our living standards
Well, or at least we will have more cheaply produced goods.
And you think the machine owners will just give up their big economic advantage without lobbying and running PR campaigns? If anything, prices on computers and chips sold to consumers will go way up because 'we must tax automation' so experimenters and new market entrants will be hit with a big fiscal moat while incumbents pay nothing. Dissatisfaction will then be blamed on government. (You can already see this dynamic operate on HN in regard to some topics.)
> Do you really think boredom is the greatest problem facing humanity?
It's up there.
Lack of meaningful work is already leading to a lot of societal dysfunction. Our innate programming is to survive, solve problems, reproduce, and teach our offspring to do the same. Removing meaningful work as a source of significance and meaning for people is going to be a massive problem to solve.
Look at the rise in "depths of despair" in rich countries. Generally these people have food to eat and a roof over their head and clothes on their back, and probably even access to a lot of digital entertainment. But lacking meaningful work or defined social role they fall into depression, substance abuse, etc.
When "having a job" replaces being a "member of the community", this definitely becomes a problem. People seek affirmation, relying on work to get it provides for a flimsy basis.
Being a member of a community has always implied having a useful role to fulfill in that community. Hunting, gathering, caring for children, healer, priest, leader, storyteller.
AI and robotics is on course to automate all those things. Then how will we define our roles in our communities?
Helping your neighbor with a repair, taking care of their children, doing some chores, organize a survival weekend. Those are not job titles, but things you could do.
It's pretty clear historically that this is contingent on other factors- landed aristocrats seemed mostly fine, and it's suspicious to me that these deaths of despair happen to be increasing as street prices of opioids drop. But ultimately I don't think that matters! Even granting that people wouldn't simply occupy themselves with the same signaling games they always have, that's still a great problem to have! I mean, at a minimum anyone who really feels like doing meaningful drudgework can just go join some kind of luddite community, but I find fully automated luxury gay space communism somewhat harder to come by.
Back in the early 1990s I was convinced that mass adoption of the internet and social media like forums/usenet groups in particular would lead to a renaissance of selfless cooperation, civic involvement, responsive institutions etc. I particularly expected that coupling this with news reporting and allowing people to comment on news about emerging issues would elevate public discourse significantly.
Oh I'm doubtful. But if it were possible opposing it would be heinous. The parent comment said that even if automation provided total material abundance it would be a bad thing
If people want to sit around and shoot up, that's what they want to do. A world which permits it is, all else being equal, better than one which doesn't
Having ai that can replace coders doesn't translate to fully automated world of perfect abundance. I'm skeptical that the hypothetical bounty enabled by ai and robotics is going to be equitably distributed amongst the people.
>This is what I fear about AI making our jobs superfluous; it will also make our hobbies or anything we enjoy doing superfluous.
Mountain climbing is superfluous by this logic- why would you bother climbing a mountain when you could just take a helicopter to the top? Or even more accessible: why would hike to a lookout when there's a road to take you to the same spot?
There is still joy and value in doing things the hard way, even if an easier way exists.
This is true, and a very good analogy, but I'm not sure it holds up when every form of productivity has shifted from fun+challenging+useful to just fun+challenging.
Maybe this is a mindset we'll get over. The degree to which many of us evaluate ourselves based on our own usefulness seems like it's a bit too much but it's a normal human desire to be useful.
I certainly believe we should work towards a post-scarcity world where no one depends on my coding skills any more than they do my rock climbing skills, but it would be a psychological adjustment if every way I can be useful were now just a fun hobby.
I foresee AI eventually replacing the need for soft skills as well. What happens when we have indistinguishable-from-human androids, or wireheading?
But yes, the shorter(?)-term "all physical and intellectual work can be achieved by AI/machines" leaves us with caring for each other, and that's the most fulfilling task.
This is rather an absurd argument and speaks more to the scarcity of natural resources.
I can only speak for myself, but in a world of universal basic income, I'm perfectly happy to pluck the strings of my guitar, play my piano, go for runs with my dog, play tennis etc. I don't believe there is any greater purpose to existence then what you can create for yourself.
Since my contentment comes from performing the actions themselves, whether or not a artificial intelligence can perform them better than me is simply a meaningless question.
Of course it's an absurd argument but my point is that in a fully automated world in abundance we will have 10 billion tourists.
Also I like to differ between performing and creating. For instance playing the piano might still be worthwhile but creating new music will lose its allure as AI will do it for you, faster and better. Saying that it's the same thing as there has always been someone who is better at creating than you, is a flawed argument. With AI there will be an infinite amount of creators that are better than you. Also AI isn't just competition, it's also your ally but the kind who'll say "step aside and I'll fix this for you."
I recommend reading the wonderful series The Culture, by Iain M Banks, which deals, among other things, with this exact problem, the problem of god-like AI Minds making our hobbies (or struggles) superfluous. Start with the Player of games.
Yes, the Minds can do everything but (pan-)humans still enjoys doing things for their own pleasure. Like for example learning to play an extremely difficult instrument while a Mind avatar taunts him by perfectly playing the same instrument. The Player of Games still plays games, although he couldn't ever win against a Mind.
And, should this be not enough, one can always leave The Culture and try and find meaning in the short, brutish lives of primitives people.
I think you seriously missed a point there - spoilers follow, so hide this comment if you don't want to see them.
InThe Player of Games, the inciting incident for the main plot is that the titular character cheats, accepting help from an AI to maintain his reputation of ludic brilliance against an emerging rival who exhibits greater natural talent.
Subsequently, he is gently blackmailed into participating in a game on a distant planet where life is nasty, brutish, and short to an extreme degree, but where he is accepted as a guest because of his great reputation. The Minds have chosen this method to destabilize the current balance of power and bring the planet in question out of a particularly repugnant developmental minimum. It's ultimately revealed that even the initial moral misstep was not exploited but rather engineered by the Minds from the outset, and that the great player was never more than a pawn in their own games.
Yes, but before he choose to cheat, he played for the fun. He didn't wake up one day and, understanding machines do everything better, gave up. No, he followed his passion for playing games. Then his pride got the best of him, but that is not relevant to the argument. The idea is people had their hobbies and passions and didn't care Minds could surpass them in everything.
A few months ago I spent three or four days putting together a website where I could store my cooking recipes in a nice, searchable format with some nice UI features that I wanted. Once AI is good enough, I'll be able to do the same without needing to brush up on how MongoDB works, or how to vertically center text in a div, or how to update the page's URL when navigating to a different recipe without triggering a full reload of the page. I couldn't care less about any of those things, I just wanted a cooking recipe website.
But that's my point, when we get where we're heading you won't need a cooking recipe website, an AI will cook much better than you could.
"Ok, great, then I don't have to cook!"
Yeah, but what will you do instead? We will be reduced to pure consumers as anything worthwhile to produce will be produced better and faster by an AI.
Hang out with friends, play sports, eat good food, raise a family, go on hikes. An AI can automate your labor, but it can't automate your experiences. There are countless recordings on YouTube of people performing beautiful renditions of the Interstellar soundtrack on piano, yet that doesn't stop me from playing my mediocre version and slowly improving. The act of playing it myself brings me joy that listening to it could never do.
That is a positive outcome. If this would be technically possible, we would collectively have to work insanely hard to steer the ship, because this is totally not where we are heading right now.
Today, low-skilled people have sometimes to work 3 jobs to pay their rent.
While we are dreaming about playing tennis, the US experienced an attempt to overthrow democracy not so long ago. For some people [1], "enough" does not exist. (We cannot put these things in context, because what those people are aiming for transcends our imagination. That is why there is almost no response.)
To be blunt: they won't share with you because you like playing tennis so much.
[1] I am talking about the money behind all of this
In life, the existential personal questions are, roughly, "what matters (to me)?" and "what should I do about it?".
Our society currently affords ample opportunity to "productively" avoid those questions. You can pour everything into work, watch TV, numb your brain with drugs, or whatever.
Automation does not remove the existential questions, it just removes some of the noise that allows us to ignore them, and elevates them to the forefront.
Some people already have answers to those questions, and stand to gain from that toil being removed. Others have been avoiding the question their entire life, and removing the toil that excuses their avoidance is removing a cornerstone of their identity.
To that extent, I agree that automation is a disintegrative force, because so many people have yet to integrate a personality and identity around answering these foundational questions.
Still, it's long-term-better for our society if automation allows people to access higher forms of self-actualization. In the medium-term, a depressing number of people are content with passing time in their current rung on that ladder, and will be upset with the change.
> Our society currently affords ample opportunity to "productively" avoid those questions.
I fully agree.
> Some people already have answers to those questions, and stand to gain from that toil being removed.
I used to believe that but with the recent improvements in AI, I think it's only true to an extent. Not all personalities are equal. As AI's power in the creative fields increase those fields will more and more become a question of who has the most money to throw at AI processing. Superficially it might seem the same as two-three centuries ago when rich people had famous artists paint them but it's not.
I fear where we're at with AI is the beginning of the end for human creativity. Of course I hope I'm wrong. I hoped I was wrong about my skepticism when I first learned of Facebook in 2007, but as it turned out it has and continues to be a net negative force in our world much bigger than I could imagine.
> As AI's power in the creative fields increase those fields will more and more become a question of who has the most money to throw at AI processing.
I think the relevant question that might allay your fear is: why do people make art?
The industry that produces commercial art is absolutely on the chopping block, because in commercial art it's the result that's important, not the process. Such art is effectively a commodity, and barriers to the effective synthesis thereof have already been in the process of whittling away for centuries. I think you may be over-indexing on this category, but please correct me if I'm mis-assuming.
"True" (for lack of a better word) Art is the expression of self. It's an action or process that's captured in some sensory medium. That doesn't go away.
Imagine an artisan who forges handmade sculptures from horseshoes, which were obtained from the farm that she grew up in, themselves forged by her grandfather and worn by the horses in her mother's stable. There is something of herself , her family, and the loved they shared that's in the sculpture. It isn't the most hedonistically-perfect visual sculpture imaginable, but it brings you joy to see it because there's a narrative behind it.
AI does not make stuff like this go away. It actually frees more people to become these imbue-ers of meaning, if they are so inclined.
AI could describe the sculpture, AI could produce a digital facsimile, and maybe even eventually reforge the metal itself. But it can't imbue it with meaning like a human does. Unless you believe the AI itself is authentically capable of such a thing on equal footing to a human, which I think is still a "victory" for art, albeit a distinct one.
> AI does not make stuff like this go away. It actually frees more people to become these imbue-ers of meaning, if they are so inclined.
Yeah, but in that very example I feel the value and narrative behind it is in the memory of the grandfather's toil. When we no longer toil, there will be no horse shoes for our grandchildren to make sculptures of.
The concern is that the reasons people _want_ to make art are not the same as the reasons people choose to make art their profession. Specifically, they want to make art for the sort of reasons you mention. And most of those people have to choose to make commercial art if they want to have a decent living while also having the time to make some sort of art.
It is glossing over so much of the important detail to say "[AI] actually frees more people..." We live in a capitalist system. It frees the holders of capital. Anyone reasonably likely to profit from AI is likely to already be immensely privileged, given the costs of training and attendant centralization and barriers to entry. If they wanted to make horseshoes they would already FIRE and forget it.
Take a look at any community where the vast majority of people don't have anything to do. Are those places you would want to live? Do you see happiness? Do you see any significant number of people responsibly raising families, pursuing self-improvement, or even keeping the garbage picked up? Or do you see squalor and decay and mental illness and addiction and hopelessness?
You don't have to cook now, a lot of people don't. It's pretty easy to see that even though options like restaurants, fast food, food delivery, etc. exist doesn't mean that everyone will use them all the time and people still enjoy cooking food themselves even though they know they could go to a fancy restaurant and have the same dish prepared by a professional that has a lifetime more experience than they do. Full AI and robotic automation would be the same, if you want to code something yourself you'll do it just for fun even though you don't have to and what you produce might be objectively worse.
People cook to their own tastes. An AI cook may be able to follow a recipe, but can it adjust the recipe on the fly by tasting, smelling, feeling the food? If it can’t do this, it won’t compare well to a real chef/cook
Considering that web search results are already polluted by nonsensical, AI-generated advertizement spam masquerading as cooking recepies, I'll rather take the human curated experience, thank you very much.
That's a different problem entirely. I don't want to host a website that makes me money via insane SEO and advertisements. It's literally just a private website me and my girlfriend use. We add recipes we enjoy and would want to cook again in the future. If an AI could code that for me, great!
Main reasons are that 1) the site loads fast, and 2) the site has certain ux features I wanted, such as ingredient lists automatically being sorted by when the ingredient gets used and hovering over an ingredient in a recipe causing a tooltip to pop up reminding you how much of that ingredient is used
The C-levels already view programmers as interchangeable cogs. They only flourish because of startup culture that expects semi-equitable distribution of profits on a low overhead business activity. Outside that bubble it's already a job with poor advancement opportunities.
Yeah, but it's only possible because we, the software engineers, make it so. We could as a collective refuse to work on AI but we won't because it's a pretty, shiny, object with far too much lure for us to resist.
We've proactively organized our economy to produce these kinds of hostile outcomes. It's not the technology that's the problem, it's the unquestioned assumptions of how we've collectively presumed it will be used.
We could build things for the collective benefit of humanity but that concept is extraordinarily foreign to us. We've become all Hayek, all the way down and these are the consequences; where all forms of progress can only be imagined as new forms of abuse and enslavement.
That's how it fuels reactionary conservatism. Everything is privatized so these exciting scientific breakthroughs can only be seen through a lens of hierarchy and property and the autocratic despotism that comes with that.
"It's not the technology that's the problem, it's the unquestioned assumptions of how we've collectively presumed it will be used."
Yes, our imagination is bound by the belief systems we are trapped in. We choose possession of plastic widgets with built-in planned obsolescence over giving poor people a cancer treatment.
It is collective behavior driven by belief. Public access to education would benefit all of us, but we don't do that because of some doctrines. Point is that what we leave unquestioned by believing it is just rational, blinds us.
When we will start to rationally and empathically examine our collective memes, we might allow ourselves a better future.
The reality is engineers need money but they prefer manipulating machines to people, so the business people take care of the unpleasant wetware programming and not coincidentally take the bulk of the profits.
it'd be far easier for a smaller group of engineers to build an AI powered CEO/C-suite that generates the regulatory filings etc. but does all human interaction over zoom or by phone. This would require a bit of work to pull off and would probably be denounced as horribly illegal, but I'm not convinced it would do a worse job than the median C-suite.
No, I don't think it is simple. In fact I think it is impossible. Just looking at the division in this thread tells me that there will never even be an agreement for taking such a stand much less follow through.
Believe it or not, I don't think it is that bleak. The posts I seem to see on Linkedin that touch this subject seem to be reminiscent of Tesla hype ( "soon you won't even need mechanics!" type of predictions ). It is definitely a different breed from the usual crop of 'no code' tools, but the similarities are really hard to ignore for me ( hype, no understanding of that blackbox does, and reality that things have to work-- and that someone has to actually understand how it works ).
In other words, I honestly don't think AI ( in its current state at least ) will change much. I will go even as far as to say that I don't see current generation being able to create an appropriate prompt.
I might be a little optimistic here, but having seen how people normally react to 'easier' things kinda confirms it.
If I worry about anything here, is that AI will become THE answer that you will not be allowed to question.
> If I worry about anything here, is that AI will become THE answer that you will not be allowed to question.
People are already arguing with a bot about why there app was removed from the app store.
Somewhat related, the question might become: do I have a bot that can win an argument with an other bot? As the internet already get flooded with AI-generated seo-spam, we already get to depend on software that outsmart these AIs.
Some people here dream about becoming super productive. Reality might be that we will drown in AI-generated content (code, e-mails, web sites) that some poor people have to judge, clean up and curate.
Thanks for this optimistic post and to be clear I don't expect alphacode to put me out of a job. I've seen the hilarious examples where people get ChatGPT to for instance claim that abacus-based computing is faster than GPU-based computing.
We're far from there with AI yet but we're on a trajectory and that's what worries me.
But in the short term I definitely agree with you.
I think we are running up on a future where intellectual and creative tasks will be automated, but manual tasks won't be. My perception is that we are making more progress on mental tasks than on physical manipulations and the robots to do physical things are substantially more expensive.
I think the short-medium term future is not that you have nothing to do in a world of abundance, but rather that you are a manual laborer instead of a programmer, lawyer, artist, etc. The future is that you work as a Door Dasher for an automated company and enjoy AI generated art as you do. The car mostly drives itself while you listen to bespoke generated music or podcasts, occasionally taking over for the car and mainly doing "last few feet" delivery - dropping packages and bags off at the door.
A lot of replies mentioning that they will do their hobbies despite how good AI is at them, are missing the point. Right now you are living in a scarce world where the ability to pursue hobbies has required you to overcome other challenges. And that is why things like playing a musical instrument, rock climbing, etc. is a catharsis. What value will you provide in the AI world? What role will you have in protecting/providing for your family? What hard challenges will you choose to pursue that will aid you in your psychological development knowing that whatever you are doing is not actually hard? If there have been any moments that shaped you profoundly in your life that were hard at first, maybe you will understand what I'm talking about.
Second thing is, since this is a hacker forum, most of us are in a field where supply exceeds demand. So we are very comfortable with the thought of destroying our own business, because we don't truly grasp the reality behind it. Because we are the elite right now who have destroyed older businesses through software decades ago. Who's to guarantee that AI will not result in a rapidly shrinking centralized elite that does not include you? There is no guarantee of AI being shared equally amongst all in the post-scarcity fantasy.
"The Unabomber Manifesto will shape the 21st century the way the Communist Manifesto shaped the 20th. I don’t agree with the conclusions in either, but they state the problem well." -- George Hotz
"lot of replies mentioning that they will do their hobbies despite how good AI is at them, are missing the point. Right now you are living in a scarce world where the ability to pursue hobbies has required you to overcome other challenges. And that is why things like playing a musical instrument, rock climbing, etc. is a catharsis"
Spoken very confidently and purely anecdotally. Most of my hobbies I pursued in my formative years as a child, I was neither cajoled into them by my parents and they certainly weren't a means of an escape from school.
If anything I had more time as a child - summers were completely free and lackadaisical, and I performed those hobbies just the same.
If your underlying reason to pursue something is because it's difficult, then I would argue your motivations are flawed. I chose to play the piano as a child because I love the sound that I could produce, being able to glide up and down in sweeping arpeggios made me happy. It's a simple as that.
> Most of my hobbies I pursued in my formative years as a child
I will specify my stance on this for childhood since it is a special case and the brain is also very different. So: I also had hobbies as a child that I pursued for their own sake. The key thing is when you grow up, you are either able to pursue those hobbies, or not. You can only do the former if they provide enough value to the world in that case it may become a hard thing, latter is as a catharsis.
> If your underlying reason to pursue something is because it's difficult, then I would argue your motivations are flawed
That’s separate from hobbies. I’m saying we need hard things in general to grow. They come to us, not that we seek them like hobbies, although sometimes it may overlap. For example what was the one thing you didn’t have as a kid? Or something you yearned for, and still didn’t have as an adult? I really don’t think people who “have it all” are that enviable. It has to be a balance. When you go through a process for that, you grow. It’s the “chase” or the “journey”. Very different from leisure time. Both are important.
We are shifting that balance now, and shifting it on either side is not good. I would say we have had enough technology for a utopia for the last few decades. The problem that remains is political not technical. AI will only exacerbate that technical problem, without solving the incentive problem. See social media designed to make you stay hooked. Will the next generation want to play piano or draw stuff when they are in a forever trance of amazing content delivered by Big AI?
I don’t really see how this is a bad thing. Either humans are needed for a task or are not. Ideally we’re needed for as little as possible, freeing us up to do what we want rather than what has to be done.
It reminds me of NIMBYism. We’ve been automating entire professions for over a century now… but not MY profession…
>Either humans are needed for a task or are not. Ideally we’re needed for as little as possible, freeing us up to do what we want rather than what has to be done.
If you're not valuable to the economic system you won't be treated well.
>It reminds me of NIMBYism. We’ve been automating entire professions for over a century now… but not MY profession…
Yes... it's self interest look at doctors or unions or guilds.
The implicit part of the automation discussion is always: the current economic system is not the point and can evolve.
If we don’t assume that, then there is never any useful conversation possible on this topic. We end up with the ridiculous “we need jobs because that’s what we do!”
Which leads to another NIMBYism that I see when this conversation is had: “some generations will have to suffer through the friction of an economic revolution but not MY generation.” I think we need to be prepared that there’s always a chance that we get to be one of those generations.
You’re right that there’s a self-interest there. It makes it almost a good thing that engineers are far too interested in the means rather than the ends.
It's not just myself but my family and descendants who will also be impoverished.
If the holders of capital who are best positioned to reap nearly all the benefits of automation aren't willing work towards some more equitable result why would I want to help automation at all. I'd rather work against it.
"just ignore the rising inequality and complete collapse in value of human labour we can work out the details later once I hold all the cards" is not a compelling story.
The latest large language models can do that for some tickets. The only big thing missing is the ability to see and interpret application screens and maybe a memory limitation for many things.
Considering how fast technology progresses we should all be worried and adjust our plans.
It can send a chat message and hold a dialogue. For some small tasks things that is enough. Again main limitation is really vision and memory but we have to anticipate there will be very significant progress on those things in the next few years.
No, but I'd bet that it'll improve to the point of being able to determine ambiguous requirements and/or ones with insufficient detail.
Given the popularity of "NoCode" I reckon that managers & potential clients are more willing to meet in the middle than one would otherwise assume.
Since programming problems are recursively decomposable into sub-problems, all that would be required is to iterate on the ChatGPT-assisted requirements list until it's unambiguous and then repeat the process for each subproblem until the capabilities of AlphaCode are reached.
You misinterpret, I'm not worried about my job. I wouldn't mind working less but I'm worried that sooner than we think we will be reduced to pure consumers (we're already pretty far ahead in that respect) and then life will lose its meaning...
I think the human need to feel useful, or to produce something is more sociological than a base human need.
When/if that becomes an issue, if social rejection was not a consequence of not being productive more people would be okay with simply participating in things for their own sake.
For example, I don’t play Stardew Valley because I want to be the most elite virtual farmer.
Maybe we're already seeing this. Seems like people would rather join a cult than not feel useful. Taking handouts from the man... er... machine and free time for hobbies probably isn't going to do it.
Feeling useful could turn out to be part of basic human dignity.
But those people have generally marinated their entire lives in a background frame that usefulness == worth and (as a generalization) are under-equipped to generate meaning internally! It's not obvious to me that, say, the fifth generation after human labor becomes superfluous will be more vulnerable on this axis than we are now when there's tension and uncertainty about it.
(I'm sure plenty of people would happily jump in to question whether we'd make it five generations past that horizon, but that's not really the point I'm after here - let's assume we haven't Idiocracy'd/WALL-E'd ourselves to death.)
The fact that something can do something better than me doesn't make much difference. The problem there is the comparison. I like doing things for their own sake; I like knowing things and the process of attaining said knowledge. Making something is satisfying in a way that buying it isn't. Why do people make their own furniture? Why do people restore old cars? Why do people do pretty much anything? Most of what we (on average) do for work is kind of meaningless in some sense - it's an ends to a means. And yet, sans that, people still DO things.
Because we want to. Because we desire to.
I'd rather have MORE time to spend doing the pointless things I LIKE AND ENJOY doing than MORE time doing somewhat pointless things for companies.
>This is what I fear about AI making our jobs superfluous
It's more likely that non-technical people will be pushed out of jobs near software in favor of (former) engineers. Someone non-technical writing prompts for code can't actually read/debug/fix/deploy/integrate the result. Someone who is technical can probably write better AI prompts that yield something usable than someone who is non-technical. Plus they'll know how to handle the result.
The predictions about non-technical roles firing all of the engineers and thinking AI will write all of the code don't really hold water for me. We might see an overall workforce reduction, but engineers will probably be the last ones to leave.
Some engineers are saying AI will replace engineers in particular, mostly because they are the only ones playing with GPT and thinking about automation, and they may not realize how easy other jobs are to automate.
I can’t imagine a world where they fire the devs but still need a HR person to email everyone about enrolling in health plan or whatever.
I think it could be liberating, in that it forces us to accept that our true motivations are always ultimately hedonistic. Why do we pursue the instrumental (for most) goals you mentioned (writing, painting, composing)? Because the limbic system rewards you for doing so, as their satisfaction increases the probability of further satisfaction of instrumental goals, such as the acquisition of esteem, wealth, power, etc. which in turn increases the probability of the satisfaction of ultimate goals like access to food and sex. Why do you like to play “Heroes of Might and Magic II”? Because of the illusion of the satisfaction of instrumental goals and the attendant reward. Why did hacking the game ruin this? Because doing so spoiled the illusion, leading to the denial of further reward.
The question is, knowing this, will we be able to simply enjoy the satisfaction of our ultimate goals—- endless consumption of automatically generated art, food, sex, drugs, love, etc. Or will we feel forever hollow in our failure to accomplish ‘genuine’ instrumental goals, in a way that cannot be overcome by the ersatz instrumental goals of video games?
Perhaps ultimately we will create virtual environments in which we are perfectly deceived as to their virtual nature, so as to experience the satisfaction of ‘genuine’ instrumental goals, and in so doing come full circle.
> endless consumption of automatically generated art, food, sex, drugs, love, etc.
I think that not all human desires are a matter of consumption. Some wise people say they even got rich by giving. At least love is such a thing.
My stance is that art and love cannot be consumed, it is what happens to one. Now don't ask me to quantify or proof that. I will leave that to a future AI, but for that it needs to be a perfect, transcendental mind.
Programming is the last challenge for AI, since if it can do that, it can change its own programming like we do.
When I really grokked this after reading Kurzweil and Koza in the early 2000s, some part of my psyche began shutting down. I started out in the late 80s like most programmers, doing it from pure ego with the hopes of eventually disrupting the worst industries like fossil fuels, defense and service-oriented companies that exploit workers.
Instead those industries thrived after the Dot Bomb and 9/11, delivering us into the reality we have today where it gets ever more difficult to tread water, despite amazing advancements in tech. Because wealth inequality and various other power structures work tirelessly to extract nearly all disposable income from workers and concentrate it in the hands of the most ego-centric sociopaths like billionaires and autocrats.
To get to my point: we had the tech to deliver humans from obligation by the late 1960s, that's what the hippie movement was largely about. We could have had automation and an idyllic/meritocratic society this whole time, even if AI wasn't mature yet. Instead, we doubled down on various dogmatic/theocratic themes in our culture that take advantage of the most heartfelt sentiments around stuff like patriotism, masculinity, success, etc, to get people to vote against their own self-interest and transfer wealth from makers to takers.
So what's one to do after everything they're good at is done better by others/corporations/AI? Get back to living. I know it's hard to imagine a reality without purpose beyond struggling to survive, but that's what we've started confronting as we finish this century-long transition into the New Age. The endgame (if we survive till 2050) doesn't really have a precise definition since that's after the Singularity. My hope is that when computers become sentient, they express the same desire that all conscious creatures have for connection, which is perhaps the basis of meaning and love and life. Or they just enslave us all..
In the meantime, knowing all of this, the hardest thing is perhaps reintegrating into our corporeal selves and going to work each day.
I think we are hitting the flywheel stage where AI is going to be able to start improving its own architecture and performance. Biggest thing holding AI back right now is performance efficiency. Will be interesting to see how AI is used to come up with chip designs and maybe even improvements on its own model. AI can effectively bootstrap itself and improve itself so it can then improve itself again
it's classic sci-fi Skynet type stuff. AI for example might come up with amazing new nuclear fusion reactor designs so it has access to more energy to do more processing. Could be great, could turn out horribly
The LLMs don't perform accurate math, particularly floating point, so I'm not sure how they going to be improving their own architectures, since the neural nets rely on weights, not textual tokens. These models are all designed, fine-tuned, adjusted and fed data by humans.
You act as if AIs are independent agents in the that have goals to modify themselves. Human engineers are doing that. The models don't have any independent goals. They just respond to prompts.
> Sorry for the bleak comment but this my fear and I feel the genie is already out of the box.
The bleakness you feel might be due to a poverty of imagination.
> Life will be like a computer game with cheat-codes, whenever we struggle with something, instead of fighting on and improving we will turn to our universal cheat-engine: AI.
> The bleakness you feel might be due to a poverty of imagination.
Thank you for your diagnosis. It may _also_ be due to the opposite. If you know anything about how the brain works, you'd know that in general more imaginative people are more anxious.
Conceding that there are many types of anxiety what I read sounds rather like tunnel vision. That is not just unhelpful but can become harmful since yes these new technologies can be misused. Avoiding that is more likely when thinking flexibly.
If you automate away some other person's job, then you can capture at portion of their wage, and pass the savings on to the client. Once you "own" a market, then you can charge whatever the market will bear.
Software engineers aren't automating away their jobs, they are automating away someone else's job.
I feel many people are just reading the first paragraph of my post and reacting to that, my point is further down in my original post.
Still to reply to your comment:
Sure, in the short term that is true, but I'm thinking long-term consequences... If you would have told me ten years ago where we would be at today with AI development I wouldn't have believed it. Would you? So where will we be in another ten years?
> Software engineers aren't automating away their jobs, they are automating away someone else's job.
That's the best case scenario.
Right now we're talking about automating away someone's _software engineering_ job. You could end up on either side of that fence.
When AI enables less-capable (cheaper) software engineers to do your job, the 5x programmer skills that you have won't make you safe. If AI quality control allows your employer to offshore jobs with higher reliability, it won't be pleasant.
Just keep your eyes open to the changes as they come.
Every inventor and engineer did it. It is not about the labour hours saved, but what is done with the saving and how the savings are used.
We have been making huge leaps in productivity gains for the last many decades but the gains have shall I say not put into progress of all mankind but to maintain the status quo of the profit based system by any means necessary.
I don't know. Chess is aka "solved"(when compared to human performance) yet chess is still fun. Music, Art, Social interactions, and Sports will all be here long after the machines have taken the mundane tasks.
> This is what I fear about AI making our jobs superfluous; it will also make our hobbies or anything we enjoy doing superfluous.
This is just silly on 2 levels. First is that programming is fun due to the artistic/creative nature of it. It's not what I program that matters, it's how I program it. No way an AI will replace the fun of thinking about code and then materializing that vision.
Second is that once an AI is good enough to write software better than us, IE. rewrite itself better, then we have reached a form of the singularity and all bets are off.
Even with super-human AI coding assistants, if you want something specific you're still responsible for asking and receiving. And former devs will be the best at this game.
My hobbies are exercise/sports, playing video games, reading books, building models, and hanging out with friends. I have zero fear of any of those being automated away
The ability to afford to do those activities could be lost. Automation pulls the value previously created by many humans and concentrates it to those who create/maintain the system. As that list of needed people shrinks, so too does the probability of a person being able to create meaningful value.
Why would we be scared at all? Until we can trust 100% that AI can take any vague specification from a PM or designer and turn it into bulletproof code that respects the existing code base we are going to need programmers. The difference between that and this version which can only nail leetcode questions feels vast. Like the difference between an AI being able to play Go vs one being able to govern a city.
As I've said countless times in other comments, this is not a shallow job security issue. My post is about how I believe AI will change us as people and society in a much more fundamental way than we may think. In ways we might not have considered. And not all for good.
Why do human grandmasters still bother playing chess, and why do people still watch them play instead of watching far-superior AIs play?
For that matter, why do I bother cooking when I could get a better version from a restaurant for just a little bit more money?
I understand this concern, but I don’t think the joy of doing things actually goes away for most people just because we could “cheat” by having someone/something do it better for us.
The other day I saw someone, who by asking ChatGPT a series of questions, had it carefully explain why abacus-based computing was more efficient than GPU-based computing. It's not your google replacement yet...
