> I was talking to a friend of mine and I asked this. She said “of course everyone should be working, I mean, I’d like to be able to buy more stuff”
This sounds like the type of thing you hear from a person sipping a rare single-origin pour-over after their pilates class in Palo Alto.
In the real world, the average person would probably tell you something like "of course everyone should be working, I mean, I need to pay my rent, electricity bill, buy food, etc.".
Most people in this world work because they need to earn money to pay for basic necessities of life, not because they want to buy more stuff.
> Here is a very simple statement which may sound a bit mean: it is entirely feasible that giving a job to a “stupid” person, regardless of how much we try and train them, might cost the economy more than we benefit, in aggregate.
The economy is not society, though, and having a bunch of unhappy people who are poor and have nothing to do is probably not good for a country's well-being.
Until there's an alternative system that allows people to have their basic needs met without working, unemployment is a problem, and even if you had that system, we have no idea whether or not the masses will be content enough to stay sane and peaceful.
I interpreted that to mean "other people should be working because it will enable me personally to buy more stuff (that they produce)", not "each person should be working because working will allow that person to buy themselves more stuff".
> Until there's an alternative system that allows people to have their basic needs met without working, unemployment is a problem, and even if you had that system, we have no idea whether or not the masses will be content enough to stay sane and peaceful.
I read the author's post as a paean to letting people who can't contribute above the ever raising bar just exist securely as they please, rather than make whole countries suffer in the attempt to employ them.
The big question though is: can you have a society in which one group works and another doesn't? Ostensibly, the working group would be the ones who create and/or own all the value that supports the ones who don't.
At least in the US, given how many people complain about the "welfare state", it seems like there's bound to be resentment on both sides.
And that still leaves the question of whether people will feel good enough about the situation to accept it. I could imagine a world in which some segment of the population has sufficient UBI to live a decent life and you'd still lots of people who felt something was missing. Especially in a world dominated by social media, I just don't see large numbers of people on UBI sitting around and writing novels, painting beautiful pictures, making music, etc. I see a lot of people who are restless and unfulfilled.
> if you had that system, we have no idea whether or not the masses will be content enough to stay sane and peaceful.
Belgium, the Netherlands and a lot of European countries, have a "leefloon" or "bijstand". It is a monthly payment from the government if you have no other sources of income or wealth. The name means it is "pay to stay alive". It's not a lot (1518.29 dollars today for a single person), but allows for the necessities.
Quick AI research: the number of people receiving minimum income benefits in European countries represents under 5% of the population. So I don't think that tells you what happens to society when this becomes a primary source of income for a significant minority if not the majority of people.
Economics itself is the enemy. It is the source of that statement. It's so ubiquitous that we cannot even conceive of a life without it. The friend wanted scarce things, so naturally she wanted everyone in society working to produce those things for her.
Economics arise out of scarcity. There is not enough for everyone, therefore we must economize, we must decide who gets the limited amount of goods and resources.
We assume everyone should be working because if they aren't they are getting resources without contributing back their own resources, such as their limited time, body and cognition. That's an inherent unfairness, and is the "they're getting a free pass" sentiment that's all too common. I'm working, why aren't they?
To fix this, we must somehow achieve the fabled post scarcity society. Automate everything so thoroughly the price of everything becomes literally zero. This destroys the economy. It doesn't matter anymore whether people are working. There is no further need to economize if everything is abundant.
"I mean, I’d like to be able to buy more stuff" must still be satisfied, except she doesn't even need to buy it any longer, it just sort of materializes like it grows on trees. That is the dream.
Necessary technological upheaval aside, the one major roadblock to achieving the dream is artificial scarcity. We've got corporations conjuring up scarcity where there is none. The internet is the closest to artificial scarcity we've ever been, and it is so subversive it destroys their business models. The entire intellectual property industry must be wiped out if the dream is to be achieved.
We're getting close to post-scarcity on calories at this point. You can feed someone three meals of rice and beans for under an hour of minimum wage labour in most of the developed world, which is pretty neat even if the extra money is going to housing and non-food essentials.
> Economics itself is the enemy. Economics arise out of scarcity.
Scarcity is a timeless fact of life in a finite world, it's not some abstract invention by "economics".
The problem isn't that more people want more things than they can have. The hardest possible life is that of a single human alone on a planet abundant in all natural resources. People and our inventions and our work and our ambitions to improve things for the next generation are the very things that reduce scarcity for other people we share this planet with.
Well, my ancestors would already say that our scarcity is effectively zero.
Yet we still have political arguments about healthcare and I get irritated when my AI service says I'm out of quota. It's amazing what we've adapted to.
> To fix this, we must somehow achieve the fabled post scarcity society. Automate everything so thoroughly the price of everything becomes literally zero. This destroys the economy. It doesn't matter anymore whether people are working. There is no further need to economize if everything is abundant.
sure but the people opposing automation are the people on the left - the socialists and neo-luddities. the ones that are for automation are the billionaires - this makes your class warfare rhetoric more complicated..
Every socialist wants post scarcity deep down. In fact, it's what Marx promised them since the beginning.
Socialism is an ideological and practical dead end. They must be resisted at all costs. It's still an economic model. They won't destroy the economy, they will centralize it in the hands of the state.
Don't seize the means of production, distribute them. Give everyone an AI and a replicator.
Personal manufacturing capabilities. We must attack things like the very concept of trillion dollar semiconductor fabs. Everybody should be able to make their own things. Just like we can magically conjure up free software on a laptop at home.
> neo-luddities
Don't know enough about this to write coherently about the subject.
> the ones that are for automation are the billionaires
Contemptible, but I believe we have better chances of success if we try to collapse capitalism from within.
> must attack things like the very concept of trillion dollar semiconductor fabs
Computers used to be the size of these fabs. Now we have them in our pockets. Not because we need to attack or rebel or something. It's because a lot of people worked very hard over many decades to make it possible. And it wasn't out of the goodness of their hearts -- it's because they had bills to pay and mouths to feed.
No matter how smart you are, it is not possible to create a GPU in one's basement. And no matter how holy you think you are, you need incentives to invest the time and effort to make this happen.
I appreciate this reflection. I'm not sure if we assume we need everyone participating in the labor market, that we need their active contribution. I think it might be more about "well, if they're not, they're lazy and we're supporting them, they're getting a free ride."
So I think often there is this kinda contempt at someone not having a job.
But what I've often said, and may rephrase after I say it, is that people don't need a job, they need money and something to do.
And while it may not be those exact two things, perhaps it's different ones or more, I think a job is a compressed object that we assume needs to exist. And when we decompress it, we can see what people might actually need from it and provide those things in different ways.
So I'm excited to see you questioning the "job" object and curious to see how we might pull it apart and how that might actually solve some of the underlying problems that we can't seem to address.
> utilizing a resource to it’s fullest at all times is not a given
Typos like this (it's instead of possessive its) used to be bother me but now it's a hint that it might be human-authored, which is quaint, so it's stopped bothering me as much.
That won't be a good heuristic much longer. A few weeks back I saw Gemini write "Redundant Abstraciton Overhead" (-citon instead of -ction). It was the first time I saw a model make a "typo", so I made a note of it.
I don't think this is necessarily the assumption. The US labor force is less than 170 million [1], so less than half of society is in the labor force, and that includes unemployed. The total labor force participation rate (so we exclude institutionalized peoples, children, etc) is about 60%.
And while there's plenty of push about lowering unemployment and so on, I don't think the concept of getting more people into the labor force, or back into it, is pushed by any group at all. On the contrary the push for immigration is largely shrugging our shoulders at the fact half of society isn't in the labor force.
Of course if somebody isn't in the labor force they still need to find some means to provide for themselves, but I think that's quite different than the assumption everybody should be working.
We don't assume everyone should be working. Some categories everyone accepts shouldn't be working: children, students, retirees, new parents, the sick, and the disabled.
There's a widespread assumption that you should eventually save enough money to retire, which divides life into phases: working and retired. That's one reason behind feeling like you should accumulate more money: not so you can buy more stuff, but because you're not done building your retirement fund yet.
> A politician should not need to hunt for job creating policies, and yet they do because admittedly the alternative is poverty.
This is assuming that the purpose of "job creating" policies is to create jobs, as opposed to more abstract economic stimulus while trying to win the votes of people who happened to get a new job around that time. It helps if the unemployment rate goes down, because that generates positive reporting, but it's not required. People find new jobs all the time, after all, even when unemployment is rising on net. Without the economic stimulus, most of them would still have a job, though maybe a slightly different one.
I've never heard a really good refutation of Bertrand Russell's "In Praise of Idleness" (1935) where he asks this same question. It just seems to be cultural baggage. In his day, it was exemplified by the attitude of "why do the poor need leisure time", "idle hands are the devil's playthings", etc, and today is exemplified in some of these comments — "I don't want to give my tax money to X" where subsidizing X doesn't hurt that person, may in fact make them and most other people better off, but is still morally/culturally repugnant.
In some ways a lot of 'work' may already be seen as an indirect form of UBI. Like if an American employee is making $60/yr sending a few emails per day, probably 50 years ago they'd have to do a very different type of job to make the same kinda money. So maybe economic growth over the decades is being absorbed into 'more chill' jobs
> Labor is a resource, like water, and yet we do not drain the oceans with the same fervour as we employ people, trying to find a job for every drop.
This analogy doesn't make any sense! It is fake-poetic nonsense.
> When we have implicit assumptions such as these, it drives our decision-making
The implicit assumption that Labor is like an ocean?
> That if we want more stuff, and better lives, everyone should be working harder?
Every product we see around us, every service provided, is provided by paid or unpaid work. I would rather question that "more stuff equals better lives", but work equals stuff.
> Here is a very simple statement which may sound a bit mean: it is entirely feasible that giving a job to a “stupid” person, regardless of how much we try and train them, might cost the economy more than we benefit, in aggregate. Disagree all you want on the definition of “stupid”, but you cannot deny that such a bar exists,
There is virtually endless work to do. Even a a very stupid (not malicious) person can pick up trash from the street, dog walk doggies, dog sit Alzheimer patients, clean windows, etc. There are sheltered workshops to extract/provide (viewpoints differ) work out of literally intellectually disabled people, even if minimum wage has to be lowered to a single dollar per hour.
It is a valid perspective from the worker to find "stupid" work not prestigious/fulfilling/boring, but it will create economic value.
Because empirically people are happier when they work. When you decompose work into it's constituent parts - there are a bunch of incredible psychological things (meaning, responsibility, societal integration) and not so incredible things (toil, labor, chronic stress). When we are not working we do things that mimic work, we just don't call it so.
Because we got used to the idea that who is not working, is consuming resources made by those working and putting in effort. Then those putting in effort say "if I could get resources without putting in effort, why should I put the effort?".
> ere is a very simple statement which may sound a bit mean: it is entirely feasible that giving a job to a “stupid” person, regardless of how much we try and train them, might cost the economy more than we benefit, in aggregate.
Well, if they don't put in effort, however small, and get resources, others will try to be stupid too. Or, they would not get enough resources, starve and those with empathy will be very vocal and use shame.
> The dream society would be where we all just work less hours. Everyone can get a job but doesn't have to burn every workable hour of their life.
That's not the world our Overlords want for us. They want us to literally work ourselves to death making them richer than Gods as cheaply as possible, and then fall over into a convenient nearby pit and bury ourselves for their convenience.
I think the simplest answer that probably accounts for most of it is just that employees all have overhead, 20 people working full time is more efficient than 40 people working half time. Less HR work, less moving context between people, less office space, less laptops, etc.
So I can see how naturally the system has prioritised this way of working, but despite the efficiency I think we need to do something to normalise 20-30 hours as full time. Give people less iphones and more hours in their life.
40 is probably the most optimal way to extract the most value out of the most people. If only some worked less, there would probably be bigger HR overhead, like you say, plus those individuals would be less communicable. In reality, those companies who extract the most value from their workers are able to outcompete others, so the system stays. If company would pay less to workers (for less time used, half of "normal" employment), they would try to compensate with getting another job just to support themselves, because most workers are typically always on edge of supporting themselves (they move that edge whenever they get more money). If companies paid for less hours, their products would cost too much and couldn't compete with other companies.
I feel like we should be doing something like requiring paying overtime for over 30 hours a week. The complication here is countries are competing with each other as well as internally. That said, most jobs are local, so cheap construction workers or child care workers overseas don't compete with local ones.
This combined with doing something about housing prices seems like it could work.
It’s not even a hypothetical. That’s what was happening (at least towards the end) during socialism in Eastern Europe. Since everybody had to have a job, the over-employment produced a lot of slackers.
I'm happy to give some lazy dude smoking weed all day my tax money.
1. Working gives me satisfaction and money.
2. A lot more people are doing worse things with my tax money.
3. I don't envy that lifestyle in the slightest... if somebody chooses it: ok. Most of the times i pity the fool who thinks such an existence is fulfilling. The ones I know who had the lifestyle in the past were deeply unsatisfied iirc.
> I don’t want to give my hard earned tax money to some lazy dude not working and smoking weed all day.
Since this sounds very American, I'll assume you're American.
In which case the good news is you don't have to worry about that. More of your hard-earned tax money will go to bombing poor people overseas than will ever go to supporting the weed habit of the lazy poor in your own country.
Great little read, and echoes a thought I had about how work ought to look in the future. There is evidently a ‘floor’ of intelligence now, and a plethora of people who are anxious about what happens to their jobs if the technology supersedes their capacity. Not to say that anyone below the floor is ‘stupid’ but it would be naive to say that people are applying a 100% of their intelligence all the time when they work. That’s likely true of some people, but definitely not the majority.
So if most people work only to ensure their survivability and having their needs met, is that a high quality resource compared to what the intelligence on tap can accomplish now? Wouldn’t splitting up the workforce into people who care and are driven to solve a problem be more effective in harnessing this tech? I don’t have the answers to those but it’s an idea I find myself coming back to often.
Another hot take only slightly tangential to this is that I think most people are better off honing their craft in the arts and humanities, domains where the multimodality of expression can serve to make the models even smarter and better reflections of ourselves; but that’s its own rabbit hole lol
Here's a metric for all people that think redistribution will help: if you redistribute the consumption, you will all consume like the average person in India. And I don't think that's what you want.
As for paying people to stay out of the market: there are examples of this already, for instance it might be more beneficial for countries to pay coal miners not to work and spend money on shifting to clean energy sources. But since miners want to keep their jobs, it becomes a political issue and money gets spent trying to save this dying industry. Instead the money should just be given to the working people to not work as a win-win for everyone.
As for everyone needs to work because "I want to get more stuff", well I guess we'll need a leap in human thinking. We once evolved from hunter gatherers into growing our own food, so it might not be hopeless. I think this is an important topic for the future of the world.
Worth reading rather than reacting to the title. The author is basically arguing that "some people are too stupid to be worth the effort to employee them", not the more familiar way this phrase is used.
I wish a different adjective was used other than 'stupid', because it can distract from the point of the article (I wanted to come up with an acronym - best attempt: Someone Too Unsuitably Positioned In D workforce, and finally asked chat gpt: Someone Tragically Unqualified, Poorly Integrated & Deployed).
Anyhow, I don't take it as an insult to anyone, but simply people's circumstances (limited opportunities, lack of education..) can make it difficult for them to positively contribute to the system.
its not so obvious that the stupid person won't provide positive returns at the margins.
i'm sure there are a few people like that and they should be in disability or other government programs. but vast majority do provide value and should be working.
The problem is not really if someone is working or not, but that someone is able to demand that someone else works to provide for them.
If you don’t want to work, but you are somehow able to get by without having your existence assured by redistributing the property of someone else, more power to you.
How is this not the exact same stance that the far right has on immigrants and criminals?
Exclusion is a greedy short-term strategy. Are you also against public schools? I mean surely, the conclusion of your reasoning is that a lot of those students aren't going to participate in the labor market. Why bother?
UBI is the inevitable future. We are now living in a time period in history when we wait for government bureaucrats to finally realise that UBI is a right and not a privilege.
At this moment more than half of employment can be classified as “bullshit jobs” - inconsequential that would make no difference if they disappeared one day, created to satisfy the requirements of the capitalist economy.
We have been productive to feed and shelter everyone for free for a while now, at least 20 years if not more, but the scarcity narrative gets reignited and pushed by politicians who want to distract and blame immigrants or lack of resources for their own incompetence.
Indeed. As I see it (and I have lived in socialist and capitalist countries as well as developing countries) there are really only two problems. 1. People in power don't want the system to change because it's a threat to their position. 2. People with low education and no means to support their own kids keep having large families.
We can solve #1 by just vetoing the current government and replacing it. But #2 is difficult to solve because we should not be comfortable imposing reproductive control on humans from the government. So popular education may be a good thing to focus on: lower birth rate, lower problems, higher productivity.
This ideas was last examined in Germany around 1930. They landed on a term for these "stupid" people, namely "useless eaters". Then they committed genocide.
This sounds like the type of thing you hear from a person sipping a rare single-origin pour-over after their pilates class in Palo Alto.
In the real world, the average person would probably tell you something like "of course everyone should be working, I mean, I need to pay my rent, electricity bill, buy food, etc.".
Most people in this world work because they need to earn money to pay for basic necessities of life, not because they want to buy more stuff.
> Here is a very simple statement which may sound a bit mean: it is entirely feasible that giving a job to a “stupid” person, regardless of how much we try and train them, might cost the economy more than we benefit, in aggregate.
The economy is not society, though, and having a bunch of unhappy people who are poor and have nothing to do is probably not good for a country's well-being.
Until there's an alternative system that allows people to have their basic needs met without working, unemployment is a problem, and even if you had that system, we have no idea whether or not the masses will be content enough to stay sane and peaceful.
I read the author's post as a paean to letting people who can't contribute above the ever raising bar just exist securely as they please, rather than make whole countries suffer in the attempt to employ them.
You didn't get the same thing? Let me reread it
Imagine there’s a ratio of that category of people that’s a more optimal ratio than zero.
At least in the US, given how many people complain about the "welfare state", it seems like there's bound to be resentment on both sides.
And that still leaves the question of whether people will feel good enough about the situation to accept it. I could imagine a world in which some segment of the population has sufficient UBI to live a decent life and you'd still lots of people who felt something was missing. Especially in a world dominated by social media, I just don't see large numbers of people on UBI sitting around and writing novels, painting beautiful pictures, making music, etc. I see a lot of people who are restless and unfulfilled.
Belgium, the Netherlands and a lot of European countries, have a "leefloon" or "bijstand". It is a monthly payment from the government if you have no other sources of income or wealth. The name means it is "pay to stay alive". It's not a lot (1518.29 dollars today for a single person), but allows for the necessities.
So what happens is not _really_ unknown.
> In Belgium, roughly 4.35 million adults (aged 18 and older) are not working out of an adult population of about 9.5 million, around 45%.
Of those, roughly 3.95 million or 40% receive government income above the leefloon.
Economics itself is the enemy. It is the source of that statement. It's so ubiquitous that we cannot even conceive of a life without it. The friend wanted scarce things, so naturally she wanted everyone in society working to produce those things for her.
Economics arise out of scarcity. There is not enough for everyone, therefore we must economize, we must decide who gets the limited amount of goods and resources.
We assume everyone should be working because if they aren't they are getting resources without contributing back their own resources, such as their limited time, body and cognition. That's an inherent unfairness, and is the "they're getting a free pass" sentiment that's all too common. I'm working, why aren't they?
To fix this, we must somehow achieve the fabled post scarcity society. Automate everything so thoroughly the price of everything becomes literally zero. This destroys the economy. It doesn't matter anymore whether people are working. There is no further need to economize if everything is abundant.
"I mean, I’d like to be able to buy more stuff" must still be satisfied, except she doesn't even need to buy it any longer, it just sort of materializes like it grows on trees. That is the dream.
Necessary technological upheaval aside, the one major roadblock to achieving the dream is artificial scarcity. We've got corporations conjuring up scarcity where there is none. The internet is the closest to artificial scarcity we've ever been, and it is so subversive it destroys their business models. The entire intellectual property industry must be wiped out if the dream is to be achieved.
Scarcity is a timeless fact of life in a finite world, it's not some abstract invention by "economics".
The problem isn't that more people want more things than they can have. The hardest possible life is that of a single human alone on a planet abundant in all natural resources. People and our inventions and our work and our ambitions to improve things for the next generation are the very things that reduce scarcity for other people we share this planet with.
I agree, and I think the rest of your post contains the key idea:
> reduce scarcity
Scarcity will never be zero, and it doesn't need to be. It just needs to be infinitesimal, close enough to zero for economics to become irrelevant.
Yet we still have political arguments about healthcare and I get irritated when my AI service says I'm out of quota. It's amazing what we've adapted to.
sure but the people opposing automation are the people on the left - the socialists and neo-luddities. the ones that are for automation are the billionaires - this makes your class warfare rhetoric more complicated..
Every socialist wants post scarcity deep down. In fact, it's what Marx promised them since the beginning.
Socialism is an ideological and practical dead end. They must be resisted at all costs. It's still an economic model. They won't destroy the economy, they will centralize it in the hands of the state.
Don't seize the means of production, distribute them. Give everyone an AI and a replicator.
Personal manufacturing capabilities. We must attack things like the very concept of trillion dollar semiconductor fabs. Everybody should be able to make their own things. Just like we can magically conjure up free software on a laptop at home.
> neo-luddities
Don't know enough about this to write coherently about the subject.
> the ones that are for automation are the billionaires
Contemptible, but I believe we have better chances of success if we try to collapse capitalism from within.
Computers used to be the size of these fabs. Now we have them in our pockets. Not because we need to attack or rebel or something. It's because a lot of people worked very hard over many decades to make it possible. And it wasn't out of the goodness of their hearts -- it's because they had bills to pay and mouths to feed.
No matter how smart you are, it is not possible to create a GPU in one's basement. And no matter how holy you think you are, you need incentives to invest the time and effort to make this happen.
Is this really such a law of the universe or just insufficient technology?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30043719
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46178789
So I think often there is this kinda contempt at someone not having a job.
But what I've often said, and may rephrase after I say it, is that people don't need a job, they need money and something to do.
And while it may not be those exact two things, perhaps it's different ones or more, I think a job is a compressed object that we assume needs to exist. And when we decompress it, we can see what people might actually need from it and provide those things in different ways.
So I'm excited to see you questioning the "job" object and curious to see how we might pull it apart and how that might actually solve some of the underlying problems that we can't seem to address.
Typos like this (it's instead of possessive its) used to be bother me but now it's a hint that it might be human-authored, which is quaint, so it's stopped bothering me as much.
And while there's plenty of push about lowering unemployment and so on, I don't think the concept of getting more people into the labor force, or back into it, is pushed by any group at all. On the contrary the push for immigration is largely shrugging our shoulders at the fact half of society isn't in the labor force.
Of course if somebody isn't in the labor force they still need to find some means to provide for themselves, but I think that's quite different than the assumption everybody should be working.
[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CLF16OV
There's a widespread assumption that you should eventually save enough money to retire, which divides life into phases: working and retired. That's one reason behind feeling like you should accumulate more money: not so you can buy more stuff, but because you're not done building your retirement fund yet.
- Arthur C. Clarke
This is assuming that the purpose of "job creating" policies is to create jobs, as opposed to more abstract economic stimulus while trying to win the votes of people who happened to get a new job around that time. It helps if the unemployment rate goes down, because that generates positive reporting, but it's not required. People find new jobs all the time, after all, even when unemployment is rising on net. Without the economic stimulus, most of them would still have a job, though maybe a slightly different one.
> Labor is a resource, like water, and yet we do not drain the oceans with the same fervour as we employ people, trying to find a job for every drop.
This analogy doesn't make any sense! It is fake-poetic nonsense.
> When we have implicit assumptions such as these, it drives our decision-making
The implicit assumption that Labor is like an ocean?
> That if we want more stuff, and better lives, everyone should be working harder?
Every product we see around us, every service provided, is provided by paid or unpaid work. I would rather question that "more stuff equals better lives", but work equals stuff.
> Here is a very simple statement which may sound a bit mean: it is entirely feasible that giving a job to a “stupid” person, regardless of how much we try and train them, might cost the economy more than we benefit, in aggregate. Disagree all you want on the definition of “stupid”, but you cannot deny that such a bar exists,
There is virtually endless work to do. Even a a very stupid (not malicious) person can pick up trash from the street, dog walk doggies, dog sit Alzheimer patients, clean windows, etc. There are sheltered workshops to extract/provide (viewpoints differ) work out of literally intellectually disabled people, even if minimum wage has to be lowered to a single dollar per hour.
It is a valid perspective from the worker to find "stupid" work not prestigious/fulfilling/boring, but it will create economic value.
> ere is a very simple statement which may sound a bit mean: it is entirely feasible that giving a job to a “stupid” person, regardless of how much we try and train them, might cost the economy more than we benefit, in aggregate.
Well, if they don't put in effort, however small, and get resources, others will try to be stupid too. Or, they would not get enough resources, starve and those with empathy will be very vocal and use shame.
That's not the world our Overlords want for us. They want us to literally work ourselves to death making them richer than Gods as cheaply as possible, and then fall over into a convenient nearby pit and bury ourselves for their convenience.
If more people were employed during less time, we would also need more administration.
Not to mention that there are at least two sectors where there can never be enough employees: medicine and education.
So I can see how naturally the system has prioritised this way of working, but despite the efficiency I think we need to do something to normalise 20-30 hours as full time. Give people less iphones and more hours in their life.
This combined with doing something about housing prices seems like it could work.
Same thing was also happening in Gulags.
But to me it’s about you trying to contribute.
I don’t want to give my hard earned tax money to some lazy dude not working and smoking weed all day.
But if said guy worked as many hours as I did, just not profitably but through a sponsored job, I’d be fine with sponsoring him with my money.
Because he’s still contributing. He is still adding value, even if not as much as somebody else could.
1. Working gives me satisfaction and money.
2. A lot more people are doing worse things with my tax money.
3. I don't envy that lifestyle in the slightest... if somebody chooses it: ok. Most of the times i pity the fool who thinks such an existence is fulfilling. The ones I know who had the lifestyle in the past were deeply unsatisfied iirc.
Since this sounds very American, I'll assume you're American.
In which case the good news is you don't have to worry about that. More of your hard-earned tax money will go to bombing poor people overseas than will ever go to supporting the weed habit of the lazy poor in your own country.
So if most people work only to ensure their survivability and having their needs met, is that a high quality resource compared to what the intelligence on tap can accomplish now? Wouldn’t splitting up the workforce into people who care and are driven to solve a problem be more effective in harnessing this tech? I don’t have the answers to those but it’s an idea I find myself coming back to often.
Another hot take only slightly tangential to this is that I think most people are better off honing their craft in the arts and humanities, domains where the multimodality of expression can serve to make the models even smarter and better reflections of ourselves; but that’s its own rabbit hole lol
As for everyone needs to work because "I want to get more stuff", well I guess we'll need a leap in human thinking. We once evolved from hunter gatherers into growing our own food, so it might not be hopeless. I think this is an important topic for the future of the world.
i'm sure there are a few people like that and they should be in disability or other government programs. but vast majority do provide value and should be working.
If you don’t want to work, but you are somehow able to get by without having your existence assured by redistributing the property of someone else, more power to you.
I disagree with almost all is written here, and not because I'm a socialist but because art and poetry and philosophy exist ...
Can you expand your point? I don't see how their existence leads to disagreeing with the author, and in fact I see the opposite.
Exclusion is a greedy short-term strategy. Are you also against public schools? I mean surely, the conclusion of your reasoning is that a lot of those students aren't going to participate in the labor market. Why bother?
We can solve #1 by just vetoing the current government and replacing it. But #2 is difficult to solve because we should not be comfortable imposing reproductive control on humans from the government. So popular education may be a good thing to focus on: lower birth rate, lower problems, higher productivity.