> Cards on the table: I think the vast majory of people would do less, and perhaps very little socially productive work without the current financial incentives.
I don't disagree, but aren't you implicitly admitting here that the vast majority of people don't want to spend their lives doing work? We get a few laps around the sun, once, before we return to oblivion. It seems a tragedy to me to force almost everyone into spending that brief spark of life on the drudgery of increasing shareholder value.
If you agree, would you then also say that it would be in humanity's interest to work toward a situation where people can lead happy, fulfilling lives? I'm not saying I have any answers, but I am saying that implicit in your own assumption is a problem that needs solving.
I agree with everything you said except the shareholder value part.
people dont want to spend their lives doing work, but they do want to spend their lives consuming. If you eliminate the shareholders and shares, it still take the same amount of work to produce what we consume, so this wont help reduce work.
In the 1930s, Keynes imagined that humans would live lives of leisure as productivity doubled every 20 years. However, the human hunger for material comforts is bottomless.
The only offramp from work is reducing consumption or 2) freezing consumption (assuming productivity increases)
> it still take the same amount of work to produce what we consume
Does it? Seems like if we don't have excess value going to shareholders, less work could be done to provide the current level of value for things people are consuming.
Value isnt the same thing as labor/work. This would change where the value goes, not the amount of work done.
A restaurant needs X hours of labor to make Y hamburgers. This is true if all the money goes to workers, or just a fraction of it.
You could pay a worker more, but that doesn't increase the supply of hamburgers.
Inversely, any value tied up in the share price is not being spent on hamburgers.
The best you can hope to do is shift some consumption from investors to workers, but consumption differences are as great as wealth/value differentials. e.g. Musk & Bezos might have 1 million times as much value to their name, but they don't consume 1 million times as many hamburgers. The vast majority of excess value held by investors is not directed towards consumption.
> The vast majority of excess value held by investors is not directed towards consumption.
So why does it need to be created in the first place then? That takes work that apparently does not need to happen for any other reason than economic, not because it is valuable in and of itself.
>That takes work that apparently does not need to happen for any other reason than economic, not because it is valuable in and of itself.
Value =/= Work.
no extra work is happening at the burger shop. you still need X hours to make Y hamburgers. If anyone works less, fewer people eat.
The extra value is extracted from the buyers (many of whom are workers elsewhere).
>So why does it need to be created in the first place then?
In theory, the utility of investor profit serves as a market signal for what goods are desired, when things should be produced, and what should no longer be produced. Markets determine this through trial and error with thousands of participants simultaneously acting.
In theory, people have proposed doing away with the profit signal, but the only alternative is trial and error from a political process.
for the last 150 years, it has been understood that neither process is perfectly efficient. For most goods, it is conventionally understood that inefficiency of the profit signal is less than the inefficiency of political process.
By way of analogy, Walmart has a 2% profit margin which is a cost consumers bear for Walmart curating the selection of goods they want in the quantities they want. In terms of efficiency, I think it is unlikely a panel of government politicians (with their own motives and biases) could run a store and decide on the types and quantity of goods that people will want in a more efficient way.
>> The extra value is extracted from the buyers (many of whom are workers elsewhere).
>Who could, in turn, work less if burger prices didn't reflect the need to pay investors more than they invested.
This then invokes the problem that if everyone works less, less is produced. Even if you raise salaries, the options are the same. A) Same hours, same amount of goods to buy, or B) fewer hours, fewer goods to buy.
This is why I am saying "value" is entirely besides the point. What matters is production and consumption. you could cut salaries by 99%, and if production is the same, prices go down 99%. You can double salaries, and if production is the same, prices double.
The amount of "value" an investor has locked up doesnt change this. all that matters is the consumption of investors. If Investors are buying and eating all the hamburgers for themselves, yeah, that impacts workers. If they stick it a locked box of reinvested stocks, it has exactly zero impact.
>You can always measure by actual consumption.
Yes, this has been proposed in the last 150 years of economic literature. The challenge is who measures it, and who controls it. Remember, we already no that the market isnt perfect. The question is if it is better than a realistic alternative. Do you think a panel of elected republicans and democrats, with all their campaign promises, lobbyists, and personal product desires would do a better job of keeping the super market stocked?
>Note Walmart is subsidized by government programs that pay their employees because the wages Walmart pays are considered too low for survival.
Lets be honest about what is happening here. Voters feel bad and want people to have more money than Walmart needs to pay them to secure their work.
Calling this a subsidy is rhetoric. Walmart doesn't need the programs. Walmart will have enough workers either way, or even raise the wage to secure workers if they need to.
People dont want to work but they want the benefits of other peoples labor. Simultaneously they try to fight the automation that would lead to a world were humans dont need to work for things to exist
Alright, I'll concede the numbers, let's say some fraction of people are employed not because they see value in their work but because they're economically incentivised (in other words, to make ends meet). I'm saying that given the choice, those who are forced into spending their time in a way that is detrimental to themselves in any other term but economic would not do so, and furthermore, that humanity owes it to itself to remedy that situation in order to maximise for fulfilled lives. That is if you agree that societal progress means making people's lives better, and that spending one's time meaningfully is a good measure of better.
What I'm not saying is all work is horseshit and let's all party.
>I'm saying that given the choice, those who are forced into spending their time in a way that is detrimental to themselves in any other term but economic would not do so
You cant have the fruits of labor without the labor.
People make this calculus every single day, and nearly unanimously decide that it would be more detrimental to go without the fruits of labor (especially those that must be incentivized).
It is obviously worth exploring how to make work less miserable, or better fit the interests of a worker, but that is a genuinely difficult matching an allocation problem.
A "do what you want" policy would not result in the tasks people want done getting done.
The closest equivalent to a system without transactional incentives is individual subsistence farming where one has to work for oneself so they don't die.
You want fresh produce in your supermarket, but you don't want to be the person who drives around to various farmers to get their produce, the person who stocks the shelves, the person who plants and harvests the produce, etc.
(Well, I guess if you're american you don't have fresh produce in your supermarket, but the point stands.)
I see, but I’m not sure if these wouldn’t get done in a “do what you want” policy. There’s even a chance that they get done better than how they are done today. People would put in resources to improve (automate, simplify, etc.) the tasks they don’t enjoy doing.
It's not Star Trek, even in very automated industries someone has to do the things.
If you don't get in the tractor and plough the field you don't get the wheat.
Economic value is no less real. If anything, it's much more real at the low end in fast food, the supermarket, labouring jobs etc than it is in Uber for dogs.
Sure, someone needs to do something, but due to automation we need less labor for the same value, even if it isn’t fully automated luxury space communism (yet?).
That excess time could be spent on leisure, instead the insatiable hunger for more is driving us to drudgery.
how much productive work would you undo for more leisure time? Go back to the productivity of 2000? 1980? further?
On one hand, I think this is an interesting question to put the value of work into context.
On the other, I think most of society would fight tooth and nail against it.
That said, I do know people who do live pretty simply, no electricity, healthcare, or fancy food.
It kind of reminds me of an old miner that would periodically ride into town on a donkey when I was growing up in the 90's. He was about 150 years out of place.
> On the other, I think most of society would fight tooth and nail against it.
...why?
We'd still have modern computers and stuff. Dropping productivity wouldn't revert technology itself. So if you ask people "Do you want the same amount of housing and clothes and cars and services you could get back in 1994, but while working 4 days a week instead of 5?" what's the horrifying factor that makes them say no?
I don't disagree, but aren't you implicitly admitting here that the vast majority of people don't want to spend their lives doing work? We get a few laps around the sun, once, before we return to oblivion. It seems a tragedy to me to force almost everyone into spending that brief spark of life on the drudgery of increasing shareholder value.
If you agree, would you then also say that it would be in humanity's interest to work toward a situation where people can lead happy, fulfilling lives? I'm not saying I have any answers, but I am saying that implicit in your own assumption is a problem that needs solving.