The Abolition of Work (2002)(theanarchistlibrary.org) |
The Abolition of Work (2002)(theanarchistlibrary.org) |
Work and play are both voluntary to different degrees. You can survive without working, although your existence will likely be miserable. You can also survive without playing, but again, your existence will also likely be miserable. Play is something we prefer to do voluntarily, but if you don't force yourself to play every once in awhile, your life will probably be unhealthy. In that sense, it is not voluntary.
Even if I didn't work, I still have to do things that I don't want to do in order to keep my life at the level that I want. I need to clean where I live, keep myself clean, keep my body healthy by eating healthy food and exercising. Work is just an extension of that. It's a choice that I make in order to sustain or progress my life at the level that I desire.
Calling work non-voluntary reveals more about the author than it does about the system they describe: that they feel that they have no choice. They have a choice, but the choice is unpleasant. That is not the same as no choice. Declaring that you have no choice is a result of the inability to confront the weakness to acknowledge the unpleasant decision.
For a large number of people not working is likely to directly lead to literally death. For most people it is not a choice at all.
The fact that starvation is possible in a rich country is by design. It is not a necessary fact of the economy.
You can sit there and twiddle your thumbs until entropy does its thing, or you can choose to work against it.
You can hunt, gather, and farm. Or you can do something in exchange for credits to get food from other people who do.
Work is voluntary for the rich. Poor people will do the things that rich people don't want to do in order to keep their lives at the level they want.
> Poor people will do the things that rich people don't want to do in order to keep their lives at the level they want.
Yes, that's a fact of life. The things that people don't want to do are still things that (mostly) need to be done.
The author is using the term non-voluntary in a different sense. If all your material needs are met, e.g. housing, food and hygiene — then working to acquire capital is voluntary. The pre-requisites mentioned are the foundation of an abundant society. Obviously someone in India is going to have a far greater need to acquire capital to sustain themselves' than your average metropolitan Australian; such is the wealth disparity that currently exists globally.
Don't get me wrong — I believe work is an important component of our lives'. Indeed it can give us meaning and joy amongst other things (perhaps routine as a fundamental). But what I think this author is trying to illustrate is that our current society as a structure leaves zero room for the disciplines that are either a) unexplored, or b) are creative in nature. If it's the latter then it is a mere pittance of what a full-time employee earns. That is the trade-off.
Given the current state of technology, it seems quite likely that all the actual plans for abolishing work will devolve into a small group of low status, probably socially voiceless, people being picked out and made to do all the work.
We have had the ability to automate most work for two decades. Food, clothes, furniture, electronic devices, all of these could be produced with close to zero human labor. Why don't we?
After exploring a market (agriculture) in order to launch my own automation company, I have come to the conclusion that it is not the tech that we lack, it is the will. A culture change is needed in order to make people realize that a work-less society is:
- possible
- desirable
- is not going to make them poorer
subbing out death for aging, which is far and away the leading cause of death, I think this is a good metaphor. The first step is to persuade people that work, like aging, is bad [0], and that abolishing work is a comparatively neglected social cause relative to the harms caused.
We might have to live with work for a long time now, because scarcity abounds; but there's no point pretending that's good, or lionizing work for its own sake. It sucks to work at "a job that slowly kills you" [1], just like it sucks that we get old and die.
[0] https://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html (discussed previously here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24770566)
[1] Radiohead, No Surprises: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5CVsCnxyXg
Not everyone believes that these choices exist. The author offered the POV--although unstated--that the compulsions sufficient enough exist to either fully obfuscate or remove this choice, and you responded with the fact that this choice exists--not why or how this choice exists, just simply the assertion that it does.
That entirely depends on your socio-economic class. I know a lot of rich kids that do no work but live very easy, pleasant lives.
> They have a choice, but the choice is unpleasant. That is not the same as no choice.
A mugger tells me to hand over my watch or get shot. Choice or not choice?
Choice, of course.
Miserable, but—be relieved!—short. Because you will die without food, and shelter, and the other things which you can't magically summon from nothingness: in the current society, you need to work to get them, or had to work in the past to amass appropriate wealth, or someone else has to do this for you. Few are lucky to be gifted it from their birth. As are those who can get those necessities incidentally from play, without deliberate planning in fear of not succeeding.
That's basically what this philosophical essay has to tell about the (non) “choice” that you are given: you work, or else you suffer. You do have this choice though, for sure. The play is when you don't have to choose.
Assuming I don’t want to starve to death, what are my other options?
I could beg, although that’s still work in the sense that I’d be trading my time for money. I could go around to places that offer free meals to homeless people, but that seems unreliable. And I could steal money or food. That’s about all I can think of.
I suppose that’s technically a “choice”, but only by the most ruthlessly literal definition.
Welfare in most developed countries is enough not to starve and not to become fully homeless. But in many countries, it does not go one inch beyond this. Subsisting on welfare is indeed a very uncomfortable life. But it is not literal starvation to death.
Well that's the rub, you don't want to work, you want to eat. The food has to come from somewhere. Even if you were a forager, other animals want to eat the same food.
> I suppose that’s technically a “choice”, but only by the most ruthlessly literal definition.
"Technically correct, the best kind of correct." More seriously we are talking about survival and food. Its hard to imagine a more ruthless domain of inquiry.
How all these things you mentioned are different from having a job: You do not have regular meetings with managers who evaluate your perceived performance against your competitors. No daily standups. Crossfit or not -- your choice. Paleo or not -- your choice. You can take a day off whenever you want to. You don't have to exercise in open space.
Ultimately and quickly it comes down to philosophy and your view of the truth of the world.
Autonomous adults generally aren’t compelled into recreation by an authority.
Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren’t free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or-else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.
And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace.
However, this essay has always seemed to be heavy on idealism and light on practical or concrete solutions to very obvious problems.
Even if we assume that all work could be gamified, it's not clear that everyone will want to play such games. I love games, and have spent way too much of my life playing them, but I've gone months and years without playing any games at all, and don't see how being forced to play a game would be any better than being forced to work.
Also, its difficult to imagine how the most undesirable of jobs could be gamified. Who's going to want to play the garbageman game? Or the fix the sewage system game?
The products and services of our modern world also requires sustained, multi-year efforts by trained specialists. Something like the mass production of medicine isn't something you can just play with once in a while and still get it made in high enough quantities with serious quality control.
Some believe that robots will eventually do all these things for us. Maybe. That remains to be seen.
Whether the economic whip is really necessary to get people to do the jobs that need to be done today is an open question, but simply telling people to play instead of work doesn't seem to be a very practical solution for many jobs.
This is utter nonsense. Many people enjoy their work immensely. To take a HN hero I'll bet Steve Jobs enjoyed changing the world via his work and through that loved his work. I'll be Steven Spielberg loves (loved?) his work.
Further, short of AGI, there will always be work. Let's imagine no one had to work anymore. What would we all do? We certainly wouldn't make TV shows and movies because those require work to make but we just said we live in a world without work. We could all have twitch channels talking to our fans but their'd be no games to play on them because making a game is seriously hard work. Maybe some hobbiest would make some 1 person indie game and not call it work but there are few TV shows, movies, and games that don't require a small army of people, most of which have to do "work".
Not sure how we're going to take the work out of nursing, cooking, cleaning (clothing, buildings, kitchens, hospitals, parks, streets) etc...
Replicators, if they ever exist, won't remove the need for work. Even in Star Trek (post scarcity) what do think the 1000+ crew members each ship do? They do work.
For an anarchist, he's fond of sic'ing the cops on people. His most infamous stunt was trying to burn down the apartment of some political enemies of his in the 80s, with them in it. Yeah, quite a guy.
He's a clever writer, if not too deep. His writings are a mishmash of anarchist, primitivist, situationist and whatnot. A lot of his humor is taken from Groucho Marx. Good stuff but still better the first time.
1. https://repeaterbooks.com/abandon-hope-summer-is-coming-kpun...
Take one example, real estate. The article states everyone working in real estate is useless.
Ok, let’s imagine we have zero real estate industry. How do we determine who gets to live where? There are 8 billion people in the world, that is a huge organizational problem. We are going to manage that just by doing what we want?
The real problem is that play creates nothing. Play is just play. 'Creative output' is still 'work', just with a hint (maybe 1%) of creative input.
Those with the most ostensibly aspirational jobs are grinding!
Does anyone think Lady Gaga (or Bach), any tech development, any real research, making Star Wars, putting on a Broadway Musical isn't 'work'?
These things require immense work, stress toil in all sorts of ways by all sorts of people - most of whom had to 'work/grind' for 20 years in school in order to develop the applied intelligence, skills, knowledge, fortitude, maturity to be able to even work in aspirational/creative work. And then they still depend on the rest of us to make their food, cars, homes, and 'stuff'.
Even our current , relatively modern systems and knowledge requires work to simply maintain, let alone improve.
They are not magically self-sustaining, even if they are somewhat more intelligent and powerful.
If we 'do what we want' we will be materially poorer than aboriginals, poorer than neolithic peoples ... frankly we'll starve to death as even they had to grind it out just to make do.
There is no way out. Life requires a modicum of effort, point blank. Maybe ... maybe ... we can offers some the ability to 'opt mostly out' but even then I feel we'll be doing people a disservice, for how could a unsocialized man-child, still yet illiterate and completely untutored at age 18 from not having made the effort, even realize what he'll have missed out on?
We can make a better world but 'some effort' will be a perennial requirement. This seems to be a metaphysical constraint.
Pointless work, such as work on a small part of a large software system which is obviously doomed or moving in the wrong direction, can be incredibly demoralizing. On the other hand, there are still some lessons to be learned. To be honest, I'd rather _never_ have those experiences. But they do teach me things.
There's a mind experiment I like to play sometimes (and an interview question I like to ask candidates): What if you never needed to worry about money; your bank account always had what you needed. What would you do?
This question can unfortunately illustrate how your mind is wired/trained. In my case, I devolve into logistics puzzles of how to ensure the right sized private jet is within close reach and able to take me to the travel destination of my current whim. (And further, how to optimize the resource/jet allocation to keep the planes full of friends, family, or other passengers when they are being relocated.) Point is, I suspect we always like to do some kind of work. In my case, I like to find solutions which balance concerns and provide situation-optimal results.
Ultimately it is likely that individual human life is pointless. Certainly from a macro time or macro universe perspective it is. So we gaze at our own navels in our own entertaining ways.
Instead of focusing in a negative "Abolish work"; lets do it from a positive standpoint: Shelter for everyone, Healthy eating made free, Education accessible to all... If we take away the main reasons the average person has to work for as an obligation, we can leverage a society detached from obligatory labor.
I've always thought about it from the workplace analogy. When we hire people, we make sure they are better prepared than our market competition. We provide them with a desk, computers, printers, access to food and beverage, access to tuition related to the job they will be making, and many stuff the employee doesn't have to pay for. How and why could we think society-wide should be different? Governments should start thinking of their citizens as employees.
> When we hire people, we make sure they are better prepared than our market competition. We provide them with a desk, computers, printers, access to food and beverage, access to tuition related to the job they will be making, and many stuff the employee doesn't have to pay for. How and why could we think society-wide should be different? Governments should start thinking of their citizens as employees.
Access to those things are provided conditionally upon their satisfactory performance. What conditions are you proposing that governments require to be met?
> Access to those things are provided conditionally upon their satisfactory performance. What conditions are you proposing that governments require to be met?
As soon as we hire people we provide them with all these basic perks, they are not conditional, because we believe if we are sending soldiers to fight we better provide them with the best chances of succeeding. Its the same idea society-wide. If you mean you fire the employees that don't perform you'd be right, but governments could create brackets. The point is, in this day and age there's no reason why we couldn't provide every citizen of a developed society all these basic things. You could argue shelter is the most expensive but there are examples like Singapore solving the issue society-wide.
The issue isn’t one of work but one of many of the jobs we currently have.
I'd like to see some stats on this.
[1] https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/10/06/3-how-americans-v...
Survival.org
I do think that taking a hard look at the nuclear family is a good idea- I think you can make a good case that biologically a newborn baby is supposed to be cared for by more than one person, more like 5 or 6. We are terribly cruel to young mothers, making them wake up once every hour all night long and then asking them to go back to their day jobs in addition after only a few days. Having the experience of raising a few myself has so far taught me that parents especially of babies need to be surrounded by support, and that young children should be surrounded by other young children. That points to community child raising. But someone still has to change diapers.
"Both Plato and Xenophon attribute to Socrates and obviously share with him an awareness of the destructive effects of work on the worker as a citizen and a human being."
This is pretty rich since all three of these ancient Greeks were only able to live their nice lives of contemplation and philosophy because of slave labor.
That said, imagine all the money and value documents in the world. Do these not entitle their holders to some share of our future labor and finite resources?
Its funny to argue against an end to work in favor of a system where everything is already sold 10 times over. Your kids will have to work to pay all this debt for a thousand generations.
It seems (also historically) we can run an outlandish system just fine. We will make it look as if it works even if it cant.
A big question to me is how much of an investment we are willing to make in a future we never get to see? How could we ever agree about that?
With the evolution of society, the nature of the jobs we do has changed a lot. In part that's ok: "modern living standards" involve more services and products than what we used to have in the past, and many are actually positive for our lives. This "inflation" in beneficial goods and services requires new jobs, specialization, etc. That's perfectly fine. There's a lot of work we actually need and makes our lives better.
But we also have many more useless services and products born from the very own mechanics of the economic system we live in, which continually pushes for increased efficiency and economic movement. If coronavirus hits and economic activity is slowed down, it doesn't matter that our basic needs are covered and food is available, the system won't tolerate this nicely. Why do we accept this? People suffering not due to a lack of basic goods, but rather due to the poor behavior of our economic system? So naive, thinking we were working to be able to cover our needs! A lot of the work we do is not to improve the world we live in, but to sustain the very own needs of our current iteration of capitalism. This is the kind of work that needs to be abolished.
Then we can start to think about what to do with the remaining work. And that can also be done much better, but that's for another chapter of the story.
The problem is Capitalism and the related mindless obsession with GDP. Degrowth economics in the form of an ecologically-sane post capitalism, is the only way humans can thrive again, and probably the only way we can survive as a species. This would not mean no work, it would mean our economics were in line with our needs as a species and planet.
He's a thinker. He's too pretty to work.
I'd be willing to bet he's over-educated, has spent large periods of his life on welfare, wears a cravat to the supermarket, and was always told how clever he is.
But he never really got anywhere. Now his bank account is dry, it's 3 days until his next benefits payment, and the 'idiot' who left school at 16 to get his heavy machinery licence as a teenager makes more in an honest work year than this guy has ever had the privilege of declaring in his life.
His counsellor (or mum) is on his back to get a real job, and this is his response.
Ironically, it's never the bricklayer's labourer arguing for the abolition of work. It's types like the author, whose hands have never borne a callous.
Ending toil is, in principle, impossible with our current level of societal wealth. We will need major, non-trivial technological innovation in order to truly escape our toil (through capitalism, of course :). Teams of innovators will need to build out AI & robotic infrastructure (among other things) in order to make this happen.
I hope that humans will look back on us thousands (if not hundreds) of years into the future and look in horror at how hard we had to toil for our basic necessities.
The leftist desire to redistribute wealth (which I think is strongly misplaced and immoral) will become irrelevant once we achieve a certain level of abundance that is unlike anything we are accustomed to today. It will be like wanting to redistribute oxygen or dirt -- two resources so abundant they are essentially free.
Being embedded in a flimsy sack of meat controlled largely by deterministic chemicals makes a mockery of freedom. And yet here we are, embodied. Makes a mockery of fairness too.
That paragraph is taking a stand against large organised bodies, without taking a sufficiently nuanced opinion on what 'freedom' means. If we take part in a larger body than ourselves, we lose a bit of ourselves (quite a lot, really) to the larger body. That is forced upon us by the inescapable fact that individual humans are delicate and feeble, so there need to be a lot of us to get things done. It is impossible to gain freedom from that.
We don't get sewerage systems, international trade or defence forces by people acting individually. The only point of contention is whether joining specific groups is mandatory or not (eg, opting out of the control of a state bureaucrat is largely impossible). Even the most hardened individualist has to admit a company gets a lot more done than an individual.
I think a big part of the argument is that "getting a lot done" may not be as valuable as we have been led to believe, and the things that we give up may be more valuable than we have been led to believe.
If we assume that a human often does what is in the best interest of that human, it is not at all surprising that we may have been misled by our fellow humans about where value lies.
Your sudden shift to such a low-level critique makes it impossible to, say, distinguish a c-corp from a coop (or even c-corps of different sizes, for that matter). Both are merely "impossible to gain freedom from" in your sense.
It's like a submitter defending a spaghetti patchset by talking about the complexity of modern chipsets.
I wonder if that's a typo, but there's no determinism all the way up from position of an electron in the core, and thru protein binding, which is also non-deterministic. That's why they run that COVID Folding@Home stuff - to assess how well vaccine particles can bind to a virus thru variations - lone "hit" or "non-hit" don't matter much.
That non-determinism alone is a great source of suffering, even before we get to "embodiment" and "need to feed that embodiment". ;-)
I don't think he gets what freedom really is. He's confusing it with volition. Very different things.
'Work' is an essential ingredient in the continued creation (and improvement) of the machine form which we develop our standard of living.
While we can strive for 'free as in liberty' - nothing material in this universe is 'free as in beer' - we still must make do with 'work' - which means an intelligent and conscientious choice to do it.
We actually are 'free as in liberty' to chose to live in material poverty, or to make the effort to improve our condition.
Let us radically simplify:
1) Your household will become 'messy' as you live in it. 2) Nobody is going to 'clean it' but you. 3) 'Cleaning' is 'work'.
So you can chose to A) live in an ever dirtier and dysfunctional household or B) clean it (i.e. work) and enjoy the fruits of your labour.
In other words, there is basically no 'magical cleaning robot, that doesn't require fuel or maintenance'.
One point that I do agree with is that play is better than work as it's currently conceived for our long-term wellbeing. We should strive to make work more play-like by focusing on creativity, autonomy, and linking both to accountability for results and automating drudgery as much as we can. That's how many parts of the tech industry function and it can be carried over into other sectors of the economy too. There's no need to "abolish" work in order to do this.
I'm sorry, but that's exactly the kind of "work" which needs sharing and gamification. Look up "plogging" for example. Also, in 3rd-world, signs like "Whoever litters here, thou shalt become an impotent or infertile" (and all the varieties) are quite popular. In more developed countries, gamification is "put each kind of garbage in its own can" (in half of that world, those cans are still emptied to the same trash truck).
> Or the fix the sewage system game?
"Install a smarthome leak protection system. While doing so, learn how to plug that leak in the first place, dammit!"
I don't think the recycling schemes (illusory and otherwise) were introduced on the assumption that the public would get so addicted to rubbish separation that we'd eventually be able to eliminate the need for any paid garbage collectors though. Or indeed that many people don't view rubbish separation as 'work' imposed on them, to the extent many local authorities collecting household waste have to threaten fines or at least noncollection of waste to enforce compliance.
As for less developed countries, they usually have an abundance of flytipped waste because they don't pay [enough] garbage collectors and whilst there's the occasional eyecatching 'clean up this beauty spot' activity nobody wants to play the garbageman game all year round...
According to CNBC, 85% of US workers were happy with their jobs:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/01/85percent-of-us-workers-are-...
And according to the Washington Post, 13% of people (surveyed from 140 countries) were "engaged" in their jobs:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2013/10...
“Hero”?
No.
A notable and inspirational figure with many positive and admirable attributes? Yes.
But a hero? No. Where is the heroism in being the CEO of Apple?
Work, while has its difficult moments, and parts that can be very tedious, is one of the greatest things we can do.
No beer ever tasted better than one after a solid day’s work, and being part of the advancement of civilisation, even in some small way is pretty much the pinnacle of human achievement.
If you hate working, I’d say change your attitude or change your job.
- Businesses being incentivized to pay as little as possible
- Workers not being treated with dignity, not allowed enough time to recover from being ill or take vacation to mentally recharge
- Workers being pressured to maximize for output rather than their own experience at work
Of course work can be great for some people, but it’s intentional blindness to look around and tell the worlds workers most of us are in a position where work is fulfilling rather than a demanding stressor that asks more of us while corporate entities attempt to cut pay and benefits. You can call it overemphasis on short term thinking or a systematic failure of capitalism. But work is demanding and often even unforgiving to most workers.
Star Trek is hardly a documentary. The characters work because that's what the writers want, to tell their stories. By contrast, in Iain M. Banks's post-scarcity Culture novels, work is not really a thing. Instead people have hobbies and interests, some people accomplish things by getting really into hobbies like spaceship building (but it would have been automated if they didn't), and a very few people choose to play important societal roles.
> Many people enjoy their work immensely.
You didn't counter the statement. Even if work is the source of most misery, that says nothing about people who enjoy their work.
Abolishing work means abolishing the false choice between a job and homelessness. People can still be paid to do things. Unpleasant work might need to pay better rather than depend on a desperate underclass. People will probably still clean toilets if you pay them enough, or maybe they will simply out of a sense of responsibility. What if we had the resources to provide for everyone's basic needs while paying people enough to keep things running, even when they have an actual choice? What if we have the resources, already?
You ask about artistic megaprojects. Well, what about them? Maybe billion-dollar movies don't get made. I think we'll do fine without them. Maybe AAA games aren't ground out by a machine of worker exploitation. They aren't worth it, anyway. No game could be. But I think it's crazy to think that you won't have people who want to organize into groups and create things. If everyone in the tech industry is given their basic needs for free, do you think everybody will go home? Or will some of them still do it for some extra money and because they find it rewarding? People who like their jobs like them for reasons beyond The need for money.
Today, the way we get farming, cooking, cleaning, manufacturing, etc., is primarily by exploitation. I think that our society should refuse to accept that that is inevitable. The idea that things only get done if you force people to do them lies at the corrupted heart of our economic system. We should reject it and build a just world, or we should die trying.
Food? Not at all, tons and tons are thrown out daily. Housing? Well there's enough of that for everyone we just don't know how, and don't want to, distribute it. Clothing? Even though people burn through clothing almost as quickly as food, it is produced in surplus so much that we invented fashion.
What necessity exactly is scarce in 2020? Classical economics has no explanation for this modern surplus of production.
Scarcity in the economic sense just means there are material limits to the things people want. It's not a synonym for "rarity."
> Food? Not at all, tons and tons are thrown out daily.
The places that are throwing out food also have charities and food banks so that few people actually starve to death. People who starve to death are in parts of the world with poorly functioning distribution systems. The people in those parts of the world who have food don't throw it out, they lock it up so they can give it to their friends.
> Housing? Well there's enough of that for everyone we just don't know how, and don't want to, distribute it.
This is a good point and there are homeless people in cities with vacant housing.
> Clothing? Even though people burn through clothing almost as quickly as food, it is produced in surplus so much that we invented fashion.
Crucially, there are very few naked people but the things people want to wear are still of limited supply.
> Classical economics has no explanation for this modern surplus of production.
Its literally called "capitalism"; People with means of production make profit by producing commodities and this incentivizes other people to invest their surplus in additional capital and compete to produce more commodities. This expansion of production drives the marginal rate of profit down which causes people to invest in producing other things; the capital and products are thereby multiplied over and over and the result is a system that makes these basic things extremely plentiful and low cost.
> What necessity exactly is scarce in 2020?
Human labor, time, space, raw materials, and products that are the output of specific processes that cannot be commodified in this way (art, haute couture, and antiques are examples)
The opposite state of this is poverty, a condition in which humanity has lived for 99% of its existence. In the modern day, technology and evolution in economic-political systems have enabled us to produce wealth at a large scale, enough to support hundreds of millions of people living with more material comforts than any medieval king. It took a hell of a lot of work to get here.
To argue that "Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world", then, is to put the cart before the horse. Work is precisely the attempt to alleviate ourselves of poverty. Work, coordinated well and magnified in its output by technology, which itself progressed due to a combination of work and the play of creative-minded individuals, creates the wealth we enjoy today.
I think this essay provides too many fancy words and not enough details about how to achieve this utopian vision of a world of all play and no work, in which economically productive activities are perfectly aligned with our human pursuits so as to produce wealth, leisure, and comfort for all.
For example, this following passage, in which he proposes the abolition of the auto industry:
Next we can take a meat-cleaver to production work itself. No more war production, nuclear power, junk food, feminine hygiene deodorant — and above all, no more auto industry to speak of. An occasional Stanley Steamer or Model-T might be all right, but the auto-eroticism on which such pestholes as Detroit and Los Angeles depend on is out of the question. Already, without even trying, we’ve virtually solved the energy crisis, the environmental crisis and assorted other insoluble social problems.
I am all for being an optimist, and all for evolving culturally so that we can work more happily and efficiently, and all for employing technology to achieve these things, but this essay isn't it. It would make sense if we lived in the Culture of Iain M. Banks, cared for by hyper-intelligent AI, but that's so far away in the future as to be barely worth considering right now.
As of today, work and a culture of work has produced our rich society. It's also produced its share of problems — rich diseases, soulless office cubicles, environmental degradation — but abolishing work culture is not the answer. The problems you mention of distribution and recycling of surplus is going to be solved with — dare I say it? — more work.
So, I'm not sure that those who produce (or distribute) it will agree at once "let's give right away half of produced for free". But if you pressure them much, they might "agree" to cut the production in half. But you may imagine where that could lead.
Finally, you may expect the government to buy half of it right away to give away for free. Well, good luck with running with that line for president, probably won't work even in Sub-Saharan Africa. And likely the food will still be trash when reaching the target audience, due to government efficiency.
1) Most people would not be content with just the basics. We like shiny new stuff like iPhones or fancy clothes or nice food
2) Even if there was no scarcity of anything, our distribution systems (Globally) are pretty poor. I doubt we could flip a switch and begin distributing resources to everywhere in the world that needs them.
Or would you, say, give your life to protect that tech from embargo/destruction?
The anti-capitalist project - based off my brief and limited political philosophy reading - seems to be an infinite one: not only is there much to build but more imperatively, there is an entire world to destroy.
In most situations the same information can (or at least could) be gathered in different ways also, leaving out real estate industry from the loop.
Also just to clarify what I mean: real estate owners =/= real estate industry. They are just part of a bigger picture.
That's not even 100th of what they do.
One of the most important services they provide is that they are the ones who make sure the deal comes together, which means coaxing the buyers and sellers in to agreeing, without which the deals would just fall apart.
They show houses for people, which means sitting and wasting time some stranger's home, then showing the people who come there around while telling them about the house and answering their questions. This takes hours and hours of their time.
They drive buyers around neighborhoods and go with them to see houses.
They arrange and attend engineers' inspections of the house.
In the midst of this pandemic these alone are life-threatening tasks. But even when there's no epidemic, real estate agents have to go to strangers' homes and be there alone, and for women (who make up the majority of real estate agents) this is not always safe.
Then they guide and give advice to buyers and sellers. I guess you could call this "giving information for a fee", but it's not the kind of information that you're going to get from a database. It includes negotiation advice, advice on what kind of offers are or are not likely to be accepted and why, what problems there are with the house and what needs to be done to fix it, etc. Depending on the agent, that information could be the fruit of decades of experience in the business that the clients are getting.
They'll also get their clients in touch with reliable professionals who can do the work that their clients require (like fixing some part of the house), etc.
They often read over contracts that their clients sign, explain them to them, and advise them regarding them (you'd think it's the lawyers job to do this, but lawyers often don't).
They often advertise for their sellers... for free. That means the real estate agents pay advertising fees out of their own pockets, and they don't get that money back until and unless the house sells.
They also have to put up with asshole buyers and sellers, and clients who lie to them.
They take calls at night and on weekends from clients that have absolutely no respect for their time.
...and best of all, they often do all the above (which takes a lot of time and effort) completely for free, as many clients will take all these services, advice, and help and then change their mind and not want to buy or sell after all, or change their mind and go with another agent... after using dozens of hours of the real estate agent's time, for which the real estate agents don't get paid a penny (as they only get paid if the house is sold).
Someone very close to me is a real estate agent, and I just constantly feel so bad for them because they're constantly getting screwed by their clients and slaving away for absolutely no money.. occasionally they get lucky and actually eventually get paid.. usually after many months of effort, but so much time is wasted for absolutely nothing.
And then on top of all that, so many people hate and look down on real estate agents, so they have to put up with that too.
Not that it's all bad. Some clients are decent, and even nice people.
But I'd still never, ever want to be a real estate agent and put up with all that shit. Just not even remotely worth it.
If we were to distribute products and services such that this person could do something on the 'create side' - we'd all be poorer for it because their value is likely in 'coffee making'.
Anarchism is nonsense.
> There is no way out. Life requires a modicum of effort, point blank.
If I understand the author, you’re conflating effort with your own definition of work. People do, regularly, pour 10,000 hours into their hobby like music or sports or art or writing. Yes, there’s some market for all of those things, but most people are introduced to those outside the context of that market. [Some] People are driven. We crave mastery. Directed effort can be incredibly rewarding for the mind and body, ever the more so when you truly get to focus it at your wim (play) instead of according to someone else’s wants (I.e. the market; work).
What even is wealth if such abundance exists? I think you may misunderstand the left’s goal of redistribution. It isn’t about divvying scarcity equally, it’s about sharing and enabling the bounty you seem to be describing.
> It will be like wanting to redistribute oxygen or dirt -- two resources so abundant they are essentially free.
But not all oxygen or dirt is equal. Some people experience a greater abundance of safe, clean air and rich, profitable soil. They tend to be the same people who experience a greater abundance generally.
This is hopeless naive. There are more houses than there are homeless people, and yet the prices of houses continues to rise. Dirt and oxygen are not hoarded because they are impossible to hoard, anything that can be hoarded will be hoarded.
Or, the value of the money continues to decline.
If you measure house prices in bitcoin over the past 10 years, then house prices have been in decline relative to bitcoin. This trend is likely to continue for some time.
Under disinflationary money, houses will become a consumable rather than an attempt to store wealth. The cost of housing will decrease over time (although wages will also decrease over time). Having a home sat there not collecting rent will cause you to lose money.
The desire to redistribute wealth will hit a hurdle when the wealth owners can store it in their heads and have it be completely unseizable, plausibly deniable and undetectable anyway.
The problem is these people don’t need a house, they need a full time caregiver to manage their addictions and mental illnesses. The government and people are somewhat happy to give welfare payments but not cover the expense of giving the level of care these people need.
While not a leftist per se, I've always found this concept of redistribution immorality to be a little strange. Much wealth is already regularly redistributed from value creator to rent-seeker. Laws can be optimized to serve the needs of corporations. Much of wealth creation also depends on the previous work of others in the same environment, whether it's infrastructure or even the work that goes in having a decent place to live where people can afford to be a healthy consuming market. Would your typical software engineer have been as successful in Sierra Leone?
The flipside of that concept is to have privatized profits but collectivized negative externalities. That's not to mention entire industries consisting in intelligent and skilled workers spending their lives redistributing wealth from a wealthy person to another (traders, corporate lawyers, etc.)
That's why injecting the concept of morality feels misplaced: if the there already is redistribution, then workers taking a share through governmental action is just an actor exercising whatever power they had, where they previously did not and other actors did.
My perspective is that people who allocate capital see this effort as workers becoming rent-seekers. So there are capitalists, and a capitalist rent-seekers; and there are workers, and worker rent-seekers.
> if the there already is redistribution,
So if people are opposed to the rent-seeking, they might fell that the correct decision is to avoid increasing the amount of rent-seeking.
> The flipside of that concept is to have privatized profits but collectivized negative externalities.
This exists and is terrible.
> That's not to mention entire industries consisting in intelligent and skilled workers spending their lives redistributing wealth from a wealthy person to another (traders, corporate lawyers, etc.)
So some of this is actual productive work that allocates capital or resolves disputes, and its not always easy to draw the line between parasitic activity and productive activity in these domains. Even if the line can be drawn in theory its not clear how to regulate it. And the regulatory effort is itself vulnerable to parasitism, rent-seeking, and capture by the object of regulation.
I do, and I'm not in a particularly big state (small New England one.) Yet I pass empty miles and miles of forest, often without a single building in site. Even in normal streets I can go fifteen minutes down my road by car, and the houses thin out to nothing.
Unless you restrict the world to maybe what, the 100 most dense megacities, there's insane amounts of empty land out there. We are not that dense. The owning and restricting of land through law in many ways seems to be more a part of capitalistic society than a requirement; people have to own land to make money or not make money.
Housing may only be one part of the picture, but housing-first policies have proven to be the most cost-effective way of solving homelessness: https://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2016/sep/14/less... and https://www.vox.com/2014/5/30/5764096/homeless-shelter-housi...
im sure for some people thats the reason, but it is clearly not all
The costs are multiple. We organise society around the productivist maximisation of output, requiring us all to work at a dizzying pace despite the dramatic increase of productivity per hour of labour over time. We compensate for the modest time we have to ourselves, 'leisure', through a lifestyle of extreme consumption. One of the underlying reasons that we want to consume more, is as a marker that we are the kinds of people capable of high consumption. Having a nice house, clothes and car, going on nice holidays, validates our social status and esteem, or worse, feeds our pride and envy. We organise the whole of human life and society around production to satisfy our ape-brain psychology, to feed our bottomless status-seeking. It's a huge collective action problem, and we would all be better off if we jointly committed to working less, and shifted away from private consumption to public goods that can be shared in common.
There are also important questions about where spiralling levels of consumption run-up against natural resource and ecological limits, and the fact current rates of western consumption depend on cheap labour in the global south that won't last indefinitely - and in the case of China relies on a historically unprecedented reallocation of national income away from its citizens, and towards gargantuan capital investment at home and abroad.
The problem is that we are not inherently given the opportunity to make that decision for other people. It's one thing to speak theoretically about this process of exogenous desires forming anew with every novel discovery. It's quite another thing to tell people "no more inventions or creative labor, society is wealthy enough."
> The costs are multiple. We organise society around the productivist maximisation of output, requiring us all to work at a dizzying pace despite the dramatic increase of productivity per hour of labour over time. We compensate for the modest time we have to ourselves, 'leisure', through a lifestyle of extreme consumption. One of the underlying reasons that we want to consume more, is as a marker that we are the kinds of people capable of high consumption. Having a nice house, clothes and car, going on nice holidays, validates our social status and esteem, or worse, feeds our pride and envy. We organise the whole of human life and society around production to satisfy our ape-brain psychology, to feed our bottomless status-seeking. It's a huge collective action problem, and we would all be better off if we jointly committed to working less, and shifted away from private consumption to public goods that can be shared in common.
I agree with (almost) all of this and if you are serious about the above, I humbly suggest investigating the connection between time preference and interest rates.
> There are also important questions about where spiralling levels of consumption run-up against natural resource and ecological limits, and the fact current rates of western consumption depend on cheap labour in the global south that won't last indefinitely - and in the case of China relies on a historically unprecedented reallocation of national income away from its citizens, and towards gargantuan capital investment at home and abroad.
I agree that this is problematic at best and likely to be catastrophic.
I am not a proponent of eliminating growth, let alone creativity and inventions. Those are great things, within limits. I simply think we ought to move away from the opposite extreme of maximalist production and consumption. I agree that how to do that is enormously difficult.
Haha, well it was quite recently when the mom of a friend of mine (over 18) with a sibling (under 18) made them go do some recreational activity, despite neither of them really wanting to do so. Legally I suppose nobody was obligated to do anything here, but practically speaking I'm not sure how "optional" this was; they basically did as their mom said despite not otherwise wanting to. It's not like families ties instantly break at 18 years old.
Children and young adults who still live with or depend on their parents/guardians are usually under their authority to some extent, even for completely arbitrary things like “go play”.
As we get older and more capable those things usually relax but there’s definitely a transition.
An adult who has full autonomy would probably weigh a decision like you described and decide whether to voluntarily go play with their younger sibling even if it wasn’t play for them. Some will do it, others won’t.
I’ll put it another way. I’m getting older(ish, I’m 38), I don’t have all the energy in the world, but I have a puppy. She loves to play and she benefits from it. Sometimes I just don’t feel up to it. I could always decide not to, my only strict obligations are don’t abuse or neglect her. But I usually play even if I don’t want to, by choice, because I want my puppy to be happy and healthy too. That’s a kind of decision making that most young children don’t engage, and gradually becomes more common in early adulthood and becomes more solid as we get more of our own autonomy.
It’s totally voluntary. It’s just not always play for me. And with that said, my puppy wants a play :)
I agree you shouldn't literally die if you choose not to work in a first world country, but you should only receive the bare minimum to keep you alive (e.g. a tent, basic medical treatment and a steady diet of government cheese).
The problem is that the massive tech surplus is captured and not allocated to make life less hellish.
I disagree, it is economic reasoning.
> The problem is that the massive tech surplus is captured and not allocated to make life less hellish.
What massive tech surplus is there that could move food across the ocean for free?
The original poster made reference a reference to medieval beliefs in earthly paradise with the idea of food falling from the heavens. In reality, we already sorta live in the land of Cockaigne given the dizzying variety and quantity of food we are able to produce, as well as the amount of energy. We have the technology, and we have the ability. Granted, it would be nice to have much cheaper energy sources but these no longer seem to be a distant dream.
So all I am saying is that the idea that we don't have to work as much is not that unrealistic. Already much of work is relatively meaningless, or merely redistributive. The portion of the economy that actually produces things is small. Most people shift wealth around in the tertiary sector.
So yes, there indeed are enormous challenges when it comes to distribution. But these are mostly the result of political choices and not physical barriers to which the original poster was hinting at sarcastically. If you take electric vehicles, no progress is made for decades then suddenly when people focus their efforts on it the landscape changes completely. Coca Cola can manage an extremely proficient distribution system, so who is to say governments can't? With increasing automation they will have to start redistribution anyway or indeed lose elections.
This reminds me a bit of members of the House of Commons wondering if the poor would become too lazy if we decrease the working day from 16 hours to a mere eight.
>Finally, you may expect the government to buy half of it right away to give away for free
Governments all over the world already prop up agriculture with price controls. India is currently wracked by the largest protests in history because that system was put on pause. So it's not like people aren't receptive to governmental intervention in critical sectors. The notion of government efficiency is amusing in the first place when we consider the half of food that is wasted by market action
> of food we are able to produce, as well as the amount of energy. We have the technology, and we have the ability.
And you miss my point too. I keep reading "we", "we", "we" in replies here, but who's that "we"? I for one this year was able to produce following food: a few stems of mint, and 5 centimeter diameter watermelon on my balcony.
So let me tell you - "they" are able to produce food. "They" have technology and ability. And that's exactly what people keep saying here: They should collect our garbage. They should turn cities into more suitable for automated vehicles. They should automate agriculture. For I don't see a great desire among participants here to grow their own potato crop (automated or not).
But what if they decided that we want too much from them? What if they decided it would be "easier" or maybe even "better" to just kill us?
> This reminds me a bit of members of the House of Commons wondering if the poor would become too lazy if we decrease the working day from 16 hours to a mere eight.
And they did become too lazy, ain't it? At least they don't die like flies (smells bad) and don't run revolts that often.
If this is how low your understanding of economics are then i understand why you are a libertarian
That it isn't widely accepted as a form of payment yet is nothing to worry about. It will come. It is inevitable.
Deflation is good because things get cheaper over time. The solution to debt is to stop getting into it.
Houses have already ceased to be a source of wealth. All house prices are declining in value w.r.t bitcoin. You can't stop this. Complaining won't get you anywhere. You can choose to ignore or accept this reality.
Storing wealth in your head means you can memorize a passphrase or BIP-39 seed phrase and recover access to your bitcoin anywhere on any machine, without having physical backups of your private keys which might get stolen.
How much do you understand about economics? Have you read any of the Austrians or are you just a fiat economist who ignores them?
Out of these two phenomena, which do you think is the most problematic when it comes to making a less hellish society? Usually capital allocators have captured massive surpluses without giving equivalent productivity in return, and the work of allocating capital is romanticized by those same allocators to be far more productive than it probably is in reality. In reality, the concept of privatized profits and collectivized externalities is so central as to erase most other concerns. Not to mention that the work that actually generates capital or labor itself will logically be far more important in aggregate to work that merely allocates capital they did not generate, even if of course that work can have positive consequences.
>So some of this is actual productive work that allocates capital or resolves disputes, and its not always easy to draw the line between parasitic activity and productive activity in these domains
If these professions were to strike, would the public even notice unless told to? Some specific capital owners would not get wealth redistributed to them from other unluckier owners with less redistribution specialists, but the welfare of the rest of the population would not be impacted since the actual wealth produced would still be there.
Still, someone has to provide them. What are they getting in return? Don't say "food, shelter, and education" because in your scenario, they already get those. What are we doing to incentivize these people to provide food, shelter, and education for everyone else?
> I think that is the point being made when people talk about abolishing work and offering all the basics for free. I believe its a correct premise aswell. We are not talking about luxury.
I'm not talking about luxury either. I'm asking where the food, shelter, and education for everyone is supposed to come from.
> As soon as we hire people we provide them with all these basic perks, they are not conditional, because we believe if we are sending soldiers to fight we better provide them with the best chances of succeeding.
They are conditional upon satisfactory performance of the duties they were hired to perform.
> Its the same idea society-wide. If you mean you fire the employees that don't perform you'd be right, but governments could create brackets.
You want governments to provide better food and shelter for certain people? Who gets the best food? The people in charge, or what?
> The point is, in this day and age there's no reason why we couldn't provide every citizen of a developed society all these basic things.
For a few months, maybe. Who is supposed to work to replenish the food once it is eaten?
> You could argue shelter is the most expensive but there are examples like Singapore solving the issue society-wide.
Actually I think shelter is the easiest, food and energy are the ones that are going to be consumed until they are gone and would need to be rationed/allocated.
I'm not sure I could differentiate on the basis of some objective criteria. Capital rent-seekers seem to attempt to build a moat around their capital so that other capitalists can't compete with them and drive the rate of return down. Worker rent-seekers seem to take advantage of vulnerabilities in the social fabric in order to parasitize the system. They both take advantage of the regulatory system in order to enable this activity. The capitalist rent-seekers each individually have a larger effect, but there are many more worker-level rent-seekers.
> Usually capital allocators have captured massive surpluses without giving equivalent productivity in return, and the work of allocating capital is romanticized by those same allocators to be far more productive than it probably is in reality.
I'm not buying that. Allocating capital is productive activity, its what enables the workers to work more productively. The capitalist risks his capital by making allocation decisions, the profit he earns is his wage. You want me to give the worker credit for being productive when he is so productive because the capitalist created the conditions for that productivity by hiring him and giving him access to tools. Some other capitalist would have made different, possibly inferior, allocation decisions and the worker wouldn't have been as productive. People also romanticize labor, and labor is a necessary disutility.
> Not to mention that the work that actually generates capital or labor itself will logically be far more important in aggregate to work that merely allocates capital they did not generate, even if of course that work can have positive consequences.
Correctly allocating capital does make more capital. Allocating capital is labor. Investment decisions generate more capital.
> If these professions were to strike, would the public even notice unless told to?
Yes, they would. People who want to sue other people would have difficulty finding a lawyer. People with pending disputes wouldn't reach timely resolution and would have to find other dispute resolution methods. People who want to invest their surplus would find it harder to invest, and would have to find another way to allocate their surplus, since the investment market was on strike. People who wanted to find other people to invest in capital for their business would be unable to, and innovation would decrease.
> Some specific capital owners would not get wealth redistributed to them from other unluckier owners with less redistribution specialists, but the welfare of the rest of the population would not be impacted since the actual wealth produced would still be there.
Wealth is continually increasing. You're suggesting that we could stop generating more wealth with no ill effect.
What are you doing to be provided of a body and the planet?
> I'm not talking about luxury either. I'm asking where the food, shelter, and education for everyone is supposed to come from.
We've come to a technological point in civilization where people shouldn't have to do labor for these basic things. It's part of advancing civilization. We can allow people to dedicate their time to whatever other endevours we could think of instead of demanding repititive intense labor work just for the sake of keeping them busy.
> They are conditional upon satisfactory performance of the duties they were hired to perform.
Conditional to me means if you give me A I'll return B. When I hire someone I don't wait for A (performance) to be given, I provide B (Desk, computer, Office, Electricity...) forfront. The analogy of sending soldiers to war also resonate. We don't send naked bodies to war and is not like they had to work for all the gear either. Where did all these expensive gear came from? which soldier worked so hard to get it? Its not like you know they will win the war beforehand either.
> You want governments to provide better food and shelter for certain people? Who gets the best food? The people in charge, or what?
The best food (luxury), is for those who break through and are able to contribute further to society. You can think of the Silicon Valley crowd as an example.
Overall, if you go back in history, the majority of the people we praise these days, created their master pieces as a result of working in their leisure time. Eistein didn't create all his work because he was in a sweatshop having to punch numbers in a sheet.
Something in common most of these individuals had, was being part of the noble class or having access to that financial network. So, they had all the basics pretty much taken care for. I'm pretty sure if da Vinci had to punch hours in a sweatshop he wouldn't have been able to create half of his work.
If you look throughout the history of civilization, you'd come to the conclusion that keeping people poor is just another way of ostracise a social class for the benefit of the elite few.
I'm not sure what you're asking. The body is a natural outcome of my parents' reproductive activity. The planet was here before me and will be here after me. Food, shelter, and education are made by humans. There is not enough forage to support 8 billion humans.
> We've come to a technological point in civilization where people shouldn't have to do labor for these basic things.
It's not a matter of "should." They do have to labor to produce these things. These things are a product of labor and they do not exist without labor. Your preferences are irrelevant to the material necessity of labor.
> It's part of advancing civilization. We can allow people to dedicate their time to whatever other endevours we could think of instead of demanding repititive intense labor work just for the sake of keeping them busy.
Grading papers is repetitive intense labor work. Picking weeds and harvesting crops is repetitive intense labor work. Framing, roofing, and flooring are repetitive intense labor work. These activities are where food, shelter, and education come from in our advanced civilization. People who forage, live in tents and caves, and learn by imitating their elders have been driven into the margins and assimilated by force of superior productivity and now there are too many people and not enough space for us to return to the older mode of living. As unfortunate as this is, it is a fact of life and our dislike of the past 10,000 years of history is not enough (on its own) to turn back the clock.
> Conditional to me means if you give me A I'll return B. When I hire someone I don't wait for A (performance) to be given, I provide B (Desk, computer, Office, Electricity...) forfront.
This is because a capitalist risks his investment in return for the opportunity to make a profit, and the laborer exchanges his time for a certain paycheck in order to lessen his exposure to risk. If the worker does not perform as he is expected (or even if he does and the capitalist has not correctly predicted the future) access to those things is removed.
> The analogy of sending soldiers to war also resonate. We don't send naked bodies to war and is not like they had to work for all the gear either. Where did all these expensive gear came from? which soldier worked so hard to get it? Its not like you know they will win the war beforehand either.
They don't get to keep the gear either, they return it when their term of enlistment is up.
> The best food (luxury), is for those who break through and are able to contribute further to society. You can think of the Silicon Valley crowd as an example.
So you're proposing to reward people based on their productivity? Who is to be trusted to decide what constitutes productivity? What test do you propose to use to decide whose productivity is superior?
> Overall, if you go back in history, the majority of the people we praise these days, created their master pieces as a result of working in their leisure time. Eistein didn't create all his work because he was in a sweatshop having to punch numbers in a sheet.
He had a job in the patent office that allowed him a lot of quiet time to think.
> Something in common most of these individuals had, was being part of the noble class or having access to that financial network.
It sounds like you're saying we already do this thing you're suggesting we do.
> If you look throughout the history of civilization, you'd come to the conclusion that keeping people poor is just another way of ostracise a social class for the benefit of the elite few.
I'd suggest that one of the most effective ways to keep people poor is providing a basic subsistence level income so they do not have the incentive to work and become dependent on your generosity.
The question is - providing for whom?
If you are the first country in the world that declares "basic healthy food, shelter and education is free for everyone who is present here, no strings attached", you incentivize other countries to send their needy your way instead of doing the same.
And that means a lot of people to provide for. Maybe Americans feel reasonably isolated by their oceans, but the distance between Germany and Subsaharan Africa is shorter than between New York and San Francisco.
Right, because even that requires someone do work to support people on welfare.
>> Subsisting on welfare is indeed a very uncomfortable life. But it is not literal starvation to death.
It would lead to quick death if we all tried to live that way at once.
I suppose you could add “move to a country with a better social safety net” to the list. But it doesn’t change the overall point, which is that every alternative to work requires you to turn your life upside down.
Oh, yes, absolutely. But this is moving the goalpost. The question was not whether one could stop working without having to make changes to their lifestyle. The question was whether one could stop working without literally starving to death. In most developed countries, the answer is yes. No one really starves to death due to poverty in developed nations anymore.
I am not too familiar with the situation with the poverty in the US. Do people there still die from poverty-induced starvation in the 21st century?
Getting thrown in jail will get you fed without working. But most people would consider that an absurd tradeoff. So we pretend it’s not an option, moving the goalposts in order to have a more interesting discussion about how to stop working without upending your life or withdrawing from society.
The point of welfare is to make not working so unpleasant that a minimum wage job is less work to hold down.
This is true across the whole developed world, the majority of which I have lived in.
I think the question needs to be a little more nuanced than that. Here are a few resources to get you started:
https://hungerandhealth.feedingamerica.org/understand-food-i...
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/27/912486921/food-insecurity-in-...
https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/food-insecu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_in_the_United_States
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/11/23/hungry-at...
https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/54-million-people-america...
> more than a third of the country still lives in an area where able-bodied adults are exempt food stamp work requirements.
How many countries allow people to move there for the purpose of collecting public assistance?
Who can be trusted to decide what those limits are for other people?
> I agree that how to do that is enormously difficult.
There is a perspective that interest rates are connected to time preference and higher interest rates incentivize a longer time preference, which would make people more inclined to plan for the future and consume less.
I agree that it is enormously difficult and not likely to be solved by merely changing the rate of return on invested capital.
The productivist society in which we now live is not natural or the aggregate consequence of so many individuals choosing their preferred levels of production, consumption and leisure. It is a result of a system of competition that compels firms to plough productivity gains into capital reinvestment, and individuals to work beyond their happiness to succeed in the job market and afford themselves the markers of social validation. Any society has to collectively decide what it's priorities are, and how to balance production and consumption, this one included. However it is won, it should be won through democracy.
Interesting point about using interest rates to slow the economy.
> However it is won, it should be won through democracy.
The incentive structure that shapes these choices is one we allegedly arrived at through democracy.
> It is a result of a system of competition that compels firms to plough productivity gains into capital reinvestment, and individuals to work beyond their happiness to succeed in the job market and afford themselves the markers of social validation.
The labor multiplying effects of capital are the main reason we enjoy this high standard of living. Pathological pursuit of markers of social validation are the outcome of social behaviors that evolved in a society of small groups and small amounts of handmade goods being acted out in a high population, high wealth society.
> Any society has to collectively decide what it's priorities are, and how to balance production and consumption, this one included.
Collective decision-making is not possible in groups that exceed Dunbar's number. The myth of collective decision making in a large society is a social fiction that power elites use to cover their manipulation of the political process.
> Interesting point about using interest rates to slow the economy.
Thank you for considering my opinions. This is a great discussion and I'm touched by your insight into the problems of the modern world.
Only if nobody wanted anything else but food. Which is nonsense. People want lots of things besides food. And clothing, and shelter. And sanitation, and medical care, and...
What you are calling "rich" countries are countries in which people have way, way more options--where their lives are a lot more than just bare subsistence. And history shows that the vast majority of people want all those options; they don't want to live a bare subsistence life. (If you do, how are you even posting here? The Internet is not possible in a bare subsistence world.) And providing all the things needed for all those options requires lots of work.
Society is designed in a way where non-working people are shamed and considered parasites and anomalies. If we want to transition to a non-working society, this has to change, or the fear of losing one job's to a machine will stall automation.
We have subway drivers despite the tech to automate this job has existed since the 1960s.
I don't see where anyone is making an argument based on any such notion.
I think the reason most people are suspicious of those who don't work for a living is fairness: we all benefit from the many goods and services that our society produces, so we all should contribute our fair share to producing them.
I agree that the market for jobs in our society is very inefficient, which means that many people are unemployed not because they are unable or unwilling to do productive work but because of our inefficient process for matching people to jobs that will actually be meaningful for them. However, no one has any more efficient process for doing that; there are processes that lead to less unemployment in the sense of fewer people not having a "job" on paper, but those processes (as shown by the Soviet Union and China) don't care about the actual job satisfaction of individual people, so they don't solve the problem we are discussing here.
I also agree that industrialization created many "jobs" that actually aren't meaningful at all; the only reason people were used to do them is that nobody (yet) knew how to build machines that would do them. I agree that those jobs should be automated. What should happen as a result of such automation is that the necessities of life--food, clothing, shelter, basic transportation--should get cheaper over time. The main reason this hasn't actually happened in developed countries (or hasn't happened as much as it should--there are areas in which it has) is governments artificially keeping prices high to serve special interests (for example, the US government paying farmers not to grow crops). That is a political problem, not a technical problem.
Even if all the drudge work is automated, however, people will still need to design the machines, make sure they are doing what they're supposed to do, take care of any malfunctions, and update the designs as conditions change. Plus, there are many services that only humans can provide. So I don't think we are anywhere close to having a shortage of work that people will pay other people to do.
In an ideal world, we would have artisans that could craft high quality bespoke items for a fair price, and a small selection of popular items that suit most people.
Modern agriculture depends on the technology that is created by the other 40-70% of the population that works. Additionally you have to compensate the people in agriculture with something for their labor.
> The fact that starvation is possible in a rich country is by design. It is not a necessary fact of the economy.
It's also a consequence of human rights. We have decided that forcing people to work in the field so that other people can enjoy the benefit of their labor without due consideration is wrong.
Iceland is 81.8% and South Africa is 41.7%, according to the table on the page.
Who provides the water? who provides the rest of the inputs for bread?
There are a lot of things that need to be done to provide a basic standard of living, even if 1% of the society are slaves who labor in the fields for the benefit of the other 99%.
Is it? What statistics do you have to support that? And do those statistics track poor nutrition due to poverty as a component, or do they just ignore that?
A mugging is coercive precisely because the alternative choice (getting shot) is not meaningful.
"free choice" != "choice"
"choice" != "voluntary"
I mentioned semantics for a reason.
> A mugging is coercive precisely because the alternative choice (getting shot) is not meaningful.
Its not really desirable but neither is it wholly without meaning. Some things are worth dying for. For some people increasing the cost of robbery to murder for their assailant is one of those things.
I would argue you can already live a comfortable life with a minimum of work (say 20h per week part time at big city minimum wage, $13/hr). For example, in Chicago you could rent a room with heating and AC, cook your own basic but flavorful meals, have healthcare through Medicaid and basic transportation on the bus/trains, thrift store clothing and a cheap cell phone with data plan for internet.
So we concede. smnrchrds wins the point. It's not a point we cared about, though, and we're going to move on to talk about a question we find more interesting: Can a person live a decent life without working?
Here is how I read this:
"Can I live a decent life?" - > Can other people make sure I have what I need when and where I need it?
"...without working?" -> ...without me doing anything for them in return?
Sounds awesome. For me.
This isn’t rocket science.
My point is that we are far past the point where mere survival requires the whole population to work fulltime.
Collective choices are made with the assumption that everyone should work but we have the means to create an entirely different society.
Its more than comfort, agricultural productivity relies on modern technology. Storage and transport of food relies on modern technology. Modern technology is a society-wide endeavor where many people contribute in tiny ways that all add up to something that can't be replaced by any of them.
> My point is that we are far past the point where mere survival requires the whole population to work fulltime.
Indeed, labor employment to population ratios range between ~40% and ~80% nowadays.
> Collective choices are made with the assumption that everyone should work but we have the means to create an entirely different society.
I think the issue is different than you are characterizing it. Why would a few people work to support everyone else without getting anything in return?
This implies that an employee of a firm like Renaissance Technologies should have the same social status as an unemployed welfare recipient; I do not believe this is the case in our society.
No, rather it implies the opposite because the employee is working whereas the unemployed person is not.
It often coincides with a loss of ownership. If you can't make your own value, and you're letting something else make it for you, you might save yourself labor, but you're giving up your ability to create that value. Yes, the system as a whole will produce more, which is good, but the loss of leverage is an important factor to consider.
There's also a wasting and dependency effect that occurs when too much of a system is automated. If people aren't needing to work on or maintain a system, they don't need to know how it works to use it, pretty much by definition. It's doing the work for them. That creates a dangerous situation where essential systems aren't really understood, and fewer and fewer people end up knowing how to fix things because there isn't the same need to distribute the knowledge of upkeep/understand the work it's doing personally by doing it yourself.
Automation is extremely beneficial, and I'm often frustrated by what seem to be clear cases of not taking advantage of it, but I think what you're saying here over simplifies things.
I think the solution is for more people to learn how to set up their own automation and to automate things without making them too centralized.
> I think the solution is for more people to learn how to set up their own automation and to automate things without making them too centralized.
That's my sad conclusion as well. We could get to an automated society with far less pain and much faster if it was decided collectively though.
Look at car automation: if a city wanted to make automated cars a reality in their streets, there are tons of accommodations they could do: from radio beacons to official maps, standards on how to signal construction work, purposefully designed roads...
Instead, we are trying to design automated cars with the assumption that zero efforts will be made to promote them. Worse: we assume they are going to be so criticized that they have to perform better by a magnitude on day 1. That's making us waste 40 years.
Sorry, but that sounds hilarious. If "a city wanted", it's still people who would need to ensure "to signal construction work". And people don't care. And for other stuff, people would need to pay for it with their taxes. I'm sorry, but as an outsider, I would say the roads (usual roads!) in the US are in "perfect" condition only in California. In other states, it's the usual asphalt-with-cracks, which will turn into a hole when a heavy truck rides it thru the rainy/snow season.
Heck, majority of the world has problems with trash on the streets, and cities can't neither teach their people to not litter, nor clean up timely after them.
I disagree. I think we have decided collectively to progress towards automation as fast as possible without unduly impacting people's quality of life.
> Look at car automation: if a city wanted to make automated cars a reality in their streets, there are tons of accommodations they could do: from radio beacons to official maps, standards on how to signal construction work, purposefully designed roads...
I believe there already are official maps and standardized signs in the developed world. I agree that incremental improvement is possible and desirable, I also think people are working on these things already. It is possible that signs could be redesigned to make them easier for machines to read but I'm not sure that's much of a bottleneck.
> Instead, we are trying to design automated cars with the assumption that zero efforts will be made to promote them.
I see lots of effort to promote them, they just aren't technologically ready to perform at scale yet.
As seen in some test suites and CI/CD pipelines...
For a large subsets of those categories, they already are. That's why, if you mostly buy food that's handled by automation (combines etc.) you can sustain yourself on a $50/month food budget. Similarly for furniture, check out IKEA factory videos to see the degree of automation employed in making cheap furniture. Electronics are mostly also produced by machines, humans do the last stage assembly only (and it's mostly because labor in Asia is just cheaper than sophisticated robots required to perform assembly).
Clothes are more difficult from a robotics standpoint (mostly because, unlike wood, cloth is not rigid/does not retain shape, which makes it insanely tricky to manipulate), so we're not there yet. But, on the other hand, making of the cloth itself, which previously required an insane amount of labor, has been fully automated for a long time.
Basically, once you own a place to live in, you can easily sustain yourself with a very part-time minimum wage job. Make the job pay more and you'd need to work maybe a month in year. Most people don't do that because they want the comforts and pleasures brought by market enough to work extra hours for them (usually up to a full-time job).
Most people won't do the $50/month food unless forced. The Soylent-junkies maybe, so if you're some robotic Western software dev whose sole purpose in life is placed in its optimization to be "productive" in a corporatist society.
Food is a central cultural part of billions of people's lives, provides joy and is a critical component in socializing. Food is more than just plain sustenance unless forced by natural or artificial circumstances.
Because we actually can’t do those things?
If I understand it properly the author suggests we should find the time to play with these things. Who knows what might happen? It will no doubt be interesting.
Our indevidual performance is certainly mind blowing in a play settings. I see "players" do what seems impossible to me every day.
Now consider this, can joy not be had in cooking? I can certainly tell you that I find cooking good food to be a very fulfilling task. Unlike engineering projects I can go from start to finish in under an hour. And it fulfills an immediate and visceral need.
I think that the argument for play is a good one. In engineering I encounter many people who engineer, not for the joy of it (which is spread very thin in many jobs anyway), but for the money. Now imagine if there was no quantitative social status (money) associated with engineering. You would see engineers self select purely on a basis of authentic interest rather than financial status seeking. Would that not bring more promising talent to the table?
Let me now attack the idea of automation from another angle; to claim that we should be able to automate all product is as outrageous as claiming that Atlas holds the earth up. How could we automate everything? Who makes the machine, and perhaps more importantly, who fixes them when they break. You cannot possibly convince me that you could make a machine to fix machines. Again, such a device would be in the realm of science fiction. In reality, even in the relatively controlled environments of factories things inevitably break in unpredictable ways, and there you are, back to needing humans to clean up the mess.
Now, automation does have a place; doing repetitive tasks. But I’d rather order a meal from an expert chef than a robot.
Probably because they wonder how those people are figuring out how to eat without contributing to the economy.
But I see an inconsistency in their feeling of injustice, because some people have to work a lot to get comparatively very little benefits from our largely automated economy. Anyone who works should feel like they live a luxurious life. Instead we see a lot of addiction and despair, despite lifestyles that consume huge amounts of energy.
Be careful what you wish for.
Automatic driving is a very easy task in roads and cities that are designed for it. Instrument all bus lines with ground wires, put a radio beacon on each crossing and sign, a front radar/lidar to detect obstacles and 90s tech is enough to automate a whole city. If it was desired, we would already be there.
Now, like you point out, there are many tasks that bring joy and people would do voluntarily. Said otherwise, there is a non-null amount of volunteer productive work.
Ergo, the goal of automating a society is not to automate 100% of the work, but to automate (100-V)% where V is the amount of voluntary work available.
"But I’d rather order a meal from an expert chef than a robot."
It would be interesting to make a Turing test for cooking. I am sure that there are many robot-made meals that are undistinguishable from chef's preparation.
As for a turing test, we’re talking about a professional chef here. Someone you can take an enormous variety of ingredients to in various forms of freshness or preservation, who can produce something that tastes really good. Theres often a large amount of creativity, improvisation as well as fine motor skills and expert timing involved in the process. It would be a monumental, hugely expensive task to create a machine that could even produce something edible given the same constraints. This just seems so far fetched to me.
Isn't that the economic reality rather than "the goal"? And doesn't this also put an shade on your original argument that it is "the will. A culture change is needed"?
I haven't worked for 20 years but I work in certain automation, and from what I've deduced it is rather that the V in (100-V)% is quite high, and then there's W = a x V (a is an positive constant) that specify required labour, specialization & investment for automation; which is almost always lower in supply than "voluntary work available".
Everyone agrees these products are inferior in quality to the comparable manually produced offerings.
> Automatic driving is a very easy task in roads and cities that are designed for it. Instrument all bus lines with ground wires, put a radio beacon on each crossing and sign, a front radar/lidar to detect obstacles and 90s tech is enough to automate a whole city. If it was desired, we would already be there.
It's not that easy to redesign an entire city to accommodate a second transportation network. A lot of buildings would have to be modified. Its probably better to approach this task incrementally using the existing road system.
> It would be interesting to make a Turing test for cooking. I am sure that there are many robot-made meals that are undistinguishable from chef's preparation.
I'd like to see a cooking Turing test as well because I disagree with you and this is in fact testable, one of us is mistaken.
Automation benefits cities as well, you know. For instance computers probably drastically reduces the number of manual processing of paperwork. That's tax money you can use for something else.
Thats your opinion, but it's not something that can be assumed to be true. Its equally likely that you just don't have the education and experience to perceive their contributions as valuable. Lots of people say the same thing about professions they don't respect such as artists, educators, police officers, mental health professionals, dog walkers etcetera. It says more about the person holding the opinion than the profession itself.
This is a common dodge used by professions that don't want to admit how much of what they do is not making any net contribution to society.
It is true that hedge funds contribute to making stock and bond trading markets more efficient, and that is a genuine net contribution.
It is also true, however, that in the course of doing this, hedge funds siphon lots of money from other people's pockets into theirs in zero-sum trades. Not to mention that many very smart people who could be making much greater genuine net contributions in other fields are attracted to hedge funds because of the money-making potential.
The question for society as a whole, as with any profession whose genuine contributions have not so nice side effects (which is just about any profession), is whether the genuine contributions are worth the not so nice side effects. One way society as a whole expresses its judgments about such questions is social approval or disapproval of particular professions based on people's estimate of the tradeoffs.
People's estimate of the value of a particular profession is dependent on their understanding of the profession and how it provides services to other people/professions. However familiarity/understanding is not a prerequisite to expression of social sanction.
> It is also true, however, that in the course of doing this, hedge funds siphon lots of money from other people's pockets into theirs in zero-sum trades.
There's an agent-principal problem here where a trader managing other people's money necessarily understands more about the field than the person whose money they are responsible for.
> Not to mention that many very smart people who could be making much greater genuine net contributions in other fields are attracted to hedge funds because of the money-making potential.
This is probably a sign that entry into this field is artificially limited. When the market rewards people for activity, it is supposed to indicate that activity is in demand. It may be the case that there are structural limitations that prevent the entry of new firms who would then drive profits to the marginal level.
We have decided to move all our factories to China instead of automating them. We still have subway drivers despite having the tech to automate subway since the 1960s.
I'm not convinced. For example, robots are absolutely terrible at handling cloth tasks (for example, folding laundry). I suspect that handling food, which has complex and unique (depending on ripeness etc.) physical responses to manipulation isn't much easier. Just try to give some in theory simple slicing tasks (such as - slicing an onion or a chicken fillet) to a 7 year old and see how well he does. The robot is no better.