"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."
-- Buckminster Fuller, 1930
Let's say we all agree that the global amount of resources are enough to support all of us without work, just for simplification.
Then what about distribution of these resources? I feel many people work to fight over that distribution, not just to produce. E.g., there might be no $1000/h lawyer who would think that they produce even $100/h worth of resources. But they might still work 80h/week (or make the impression) to get a bigger share of the pie that is already there.
> Then what about distribution of these resources?
The point is that this is an entirely separate question.
On a global scale, it's hard to find a worse distribution scheme than the currently used scheme, so any arbitrary distribution is better than the current one (in which the powerful take increasingly more).
The quote mentions that people either work to make a living or to make a reason for living. My argument is that there is another reason which is quite common: to get a bigger piece of the pie. If you put in more hours on friday night because you want a raise then the reason is not that you want to pay your bills (you already do that), and it's not because you couldn't do anything else on friday night that would be reasonable in your eyes. It's because you want a bigger share for yourself.
So I'm not discussing about how to share the resources, but I want to say that's a reason for people to work. The question was more "Isn't that also a reason to work?" Sorry for not being clear enough.
No one seems to be suggesting taking work away from people that want it, rather, it's to alleviate people from working who don't want it.
If you want to work 80 hour weeks to drive a car that can go faster than you'll ever legally be able to push it and live in a house so large you only use a quarter of the living space regularly. Go for it.
As for me, I'd rather have my basics met, so I could spend more time doing things to help build my community or just go camping and enjoy nature on a whim. The worst part is that I've found the more money I make, the better people treat me. So I don't have the option of working part-time just to make ends meet. That would quickly land me in a position with people who look at me like I'm worthless and treat me as expendable, which would make working even more unbearable.
I think a lot of the slightly crazier competitive types would be completely happy competing in virtual market games that have no real physical effects.
I'm totally fine with slightly insane people gambling and trying to out-deal each other, providing they're not doing any physical damage.
The problem we have now isn't so much that competitive people exist, but they're not just allowed to do physical damage, they're encouraged to do it to gain "rewards" in the form of tribal status markers.
As games go, that's not a winnable strategy, because sooner or later you run out of usable game space.
Saying a lot of "you" makes the impression that you(!) think I think that way. I haven't posted my own opinion though. I just added another reason people(!) have for working.
About the other argument you are right. Other people's respect is also an important reason to work.
Am I supposed to apologize that I want everyone to have an income that would allow them to live and be healthy? Yeah it does sound nice that I could work for just the extras and then spend the rest of my life enjoying them. I don't feel the slightest bit sorry that I'm appreciative that we live in a world where technology could take care of most our basic needs and every day the need for human input is shrinking.
90% of the world still live on less than $10 a day. If you incorporate inflation into the 1981 $1 a day world bank poverty threshhold it would be about $2.50 a day now. At that $2.50 there are something like 300 million more people living below that absolute poverty line than there were when it was created.
Unfortunately those Hans Rosling presentations really only deal with mortality at birth, which has consistently improved but probably only down to improvements in neonatal technology.
It's really about time people came to realise the World Bank/IMF neoliberal "free trade" globalisation experiment really only works to enrich western asset holders at the expense of the rest of the world through debt bondage.
I don't think that having jobs is the problem. A lot of people can benefit from having jobs. Ideally a workplace should provide a way to develop people, a stable income and clear goals. It is also less risky for the employer (doesn't have to search for someone when a task needs to be done) and the employees (stable income). I personally like to work in an environment where I can decide what has to be done, how to do it, but many people wouldn't want to take this responsibility or would have a far less incentive to work if they don't have to earn a living. In an utopia perhaps we could abolish jobs, if everybody knew what they wanted to do and what they were good at.
The issue is that from birth most of us are conditioned, through education and culture to not take this responsibility. Most of those who beat the trap have their passion squeezed from them through poverty or dreary corporate jobs that consume them.
You wouldn't believe how many people ask me what people would do if they didn't have to work due to guaranteed basic income or some such. Why do I even have to answer that question. People can do whatever they want. It's not my or the systems job to to tell people what to do. If a person is lazy and the only way they can get motivated is by the threat of starving then that's their problem however I would still much prefer to live in a world were people have the option to be lazy and not faced a threat to their basic survival than what we have now where people are highly driven, working multiple jobs, but socio-economic circumstances mean they are trapped in a poverty cycle they can't escape from.
I agree with your premise regarding the workplace providing a way to develop people and to give people a chance to organize around clear goals however I also think this should be decoupled from income stability. Any income earned in the workplace would be a bonus on top of the bare minimum needed to survive which should be provided. How can we say we are civilized when we let people starve, be homeless and deny them access to medical help when they need it because they aren't wealthy enough. The world as it is now is so absurd. Someday (soon I hope) we will look back on this period in human history with bemusement.
Great point. I think with robotics and other automations we will get minimum wages and work / art or other efforts will give bonus. Kaliyug in vedas mentioned a 10000 years period where everything will great with everyone happily living with others with out wars and fights. I strongly believe if all countries work together we can make it happen. I think corporates in current methodology done their job and move on two new model which will be that profits be used for bonus and for basic wages for all method.
I think part of the progression will be to get rid of the concept of countries as we know them today. Fixed geo-economic and geo-social boundaries are counter-productive to progress at this point in history but it will be very difficult to dismantle the structures we have in place. Thankfully we can already see the green shoots of this the EU and to a lesser extent North America but I suspect turmoil lay ahead as Nation Union superpowers' needs and wants create geo-political frictions and possibly war.
> Ideally a workplace should provide a way to develop people, a stable income and clear goals.
This can only happen when you have a working, stable government that is investing in its citizenry, infrastructure, education, etc. What worries me tremendously these days, at least from my US perspective, is that the very definition of "stable income" is constantly changing as income inequality expands and we put in place policies which really only benefit the wealthiest corporations and individuals.
>Ideally a workplace should provide a way to develop people, a stable income and clear goals.
Why? Employers hire people because they, the employers, have goals (possibly very unclear), and their goals require more work than they can do alone as one person, and so they hire people to whom to delegate the work (this can happen recursively). Employers really aren't concerned with personal development or the employee's income as a matter of necessity, only if they happen to be unusually humane and personable, or the labor market happens to be unusually tight.
Indeed. Things used to be more delightful, because we could, we had the time. Elaborate festivals and parties are a great example. It is a great loss.
There was a human touch to so many of things that surrounded us. People wore beautiful clothes, tended to their houses, put effort in the elaborate rituals of the domestic and public sphere.
I always have to think of that walking around older southern cities in the US. From dainty modest shotguns to gingerbread victorian family homes, to stately mansions, each of them were carefully crafted, using materials pleasant to the touch and sight, with ornamentation that arose naturally, and even though sometimes elaborate, never garrish, always human. And this extended from the large architectural features - the columns and turrets - all the way down to the doorknobs and furniture. I imagine this architecture as an physical manifestation of daily life.
(I could pick any time & place to illustrate this, just nothing after WW1 in the West, when the machine aesthetic took over).
Well-tended gardens, week long festivals and carnivals, washing and mending your Sunday clothes on a lazy Saturday evening, shopping for fresh ingredients and preparing multi-course meals for the family ... These things take time. It requires human effort, something a machine can never replicate, time that somehow we don't have any more, even though productivity is so much more higher than it used to be. Perhaps we are wasting that time doing the ritual of work.
Past technological breakthroughs: The combine harvester. The cotton gin. The water-powered loom. Factory robots. Clothes-washing technology in general.
Self-driving cars, travel websites, self-checkout lines, Amazon's automated shipping centers, the first fast-food restaurant that lets you order with a touchscreen instead of having your order taken incorrectly by a minimum-wage drone, possibly Watson as a replacement for low-level customer service/tech support
We tried this idea, in America, at the Jamestown Colony. They initially established it in a "socialist" vein wherein everyone received an equal share of the proceeds (food, etc) regardless of their contributions to the colony. The colony barely survived because people lacked the incentive to work and produce because there was no advantage to them working more than their peers. Why should I work to produce an excess when Billy Bob sits on the dock all day and receives the same share I do. When they lifted the socialist mandate on redistribution, production at the colony skyrocketed because people were rewarded for their effort.
Everyone has to put a roof over their head and food in their belly. If we create a culture that tells people they don't have to work to receive those benefits, it will disicentivize people to actually work (why should they if their excess production goes to subsidizing non-producers who stare at the sky all day?) and engage in production activities. Supporting a society necessitates producers create more than what they need, but if you create a system that takes what it deems the excess from the producers without compensation or reward and doles it out, the producers will stop producing and we'll back at Jamestown all over again.
There was nothing "socialist" about Jamestown. Many of the initial settlers were aristocrats who had no experience of work, and no interest in it.
Unsurprisingly this didn't end well.
>If we create a culture that tells people they don't have to work to receive those benefits, it will disicentivize people to actually work.
We already have a culture like this. Those who believe they own an entirely imaginary thing called "money" believe they're entitled to live off the efforts who don't.
It would take an outbreak of unreasonable optimism to claim this is the most efficient and productive of all possible systems - especially considering it's notorious for its many completely predictable failure modes.
Those who believe they own an entirely imaginary thing called "money"
The fact that someone can write this is laughable to anyone that was ever poor in their life.
Money is not at all imaginary. It's quite real. The lack of money can ruin your day, your year, your life.
As for what money is - it is a productivity storage mechanism. Once you've been productive it allows you to store that productivity in a fungible form. It allows you to exchange that stored productivity for the productivity of others, give it away to someone else or basically do anything you want with it.
> Once you've been productive it allows you to store that productivity in a fungible form.
What is a trust fund then? Were the folks on the receiving end of trust funds productive? How about high frequency trading? Is the money made from computers intercepting and manipulating trade prices the result of someone's productivity?
Money has been divorced from productivity for quite some time.
Where did the funds in the trust come from? Was that being productive? Just because the person receiving the funds is not being productive doesn't mean the person who provided the funds in the first place wasn't productive.
As for high frequency trading, you may disagree with the means of production but that doesn't suddenly mean it isn't productive. Becoming efficient doesn't reduce productivity.
which hits the key point in Fuller's argument. In modern times thanks to scientific breakthroughs and the like, some people can be 100,000 times more productive than others with 1 invention.
What's profitable is decided by what people want, and we are no one to impose our priorities onto the world.
Cancer isn't getting cured because it is not spreading virally. The day the threat level is same as Polio, Small Pox or such disease, the solution will be inevitable.
The fact that anyone was ever poor should be an affront to anyone who believes that money is real. People of your ilk are fond of resorting to the old canard "everyone needs a roof over their head and food in their belly". Well, there quite simply is an astounding surplus of such. Those who really believe that the lottery system we currently use of assigning who gets what is truly effective and just will have to answer for that someday.
Money is only powerful because a quorum of people have mutually agreed to believe that it is. One of the things I enjoy pointing out is that the stock market is a wonderful example of the power of belief. When enough people believe it's going to crash, guess what happens?
What I feel many people miss is that goods and money are not synonyms. If there was a huge influx of money into the world, that helps exactly nobody because the amount of food, shelter and other goods has not increased.
I find that people "get" this a lot easier when you start talking about coupons and IOU instead of gold and dollars. Nobody believes that the guy who is moving coupons back and forth between various piles with specific timing has truly earned the load of goods he gains. Instead, they rightly feel like he is cheating the system and taking without giving back.
But in the real world, tons of people do tricks with money and get filthy rich from it, and that's just them "working smart". Meanwhile, somebody had to grow that potato, the actual tangible good, that he ate for dinner. What did he give back in return?
> Nobody believes that the guy who is moving coupons back and forth between various piles with specific timing has truly earned the load of goods he gains. Instead, they rightly feel like he is cheating the system and taking without giving back.
If you're talking about grocery store coupons, then that guy has absolutely earned the gains. Coupons are a form of price discrimination, i.e sell at a higher margin to people with a lot of money and less time but not lose the guy who has less money but more time on his hands. The stores do not sell below cost except for a few loss leaders, so the potato grower is still making a sale that might not have happened without the guy going coupon hunting.
It seems like they're talking about arbitrage, in which case there's essentially no risk involved, as the whole game is exploiting momentary differences in bid/ask price at different exchanges.
Sure, and that reminds me of another great example for money's imaginary quality: The total amount of money in existence is many magnitudes more than it would theoretically take to end global poverty. However, no one dares attempt this, because it would knock the struts out that prop up the whole system (namely, debt).
> The total amount of money in existence is many magnitudes more than it would theoretically take to end global poverty.
No quantity of money can end poverty, and no reasonable theory suggests that any amount of money can.
Systems of distributing goods and services (whether or not money is used as a proxy in those systems) might, but the quantity of money existing is pretty much irrelevant to that.
> However, no one dares attempt this, because it would knock the struts out that prop up the whole system (namely, debt).
Money is debt. Even commodity money -- as long as it is being traded not to be used for its intrinsic properties but for future exchange -- is essentially being used to separate the two sides of a barter transaction so that you don't need to exchange things of direct use such that the money then becomes, in effect, a marker of debt from the whole of the money-using society to the money holder.
So, yes, "debt" is the foundation on which the whole system of money is built because debt is what money is (modern fiat currency represents the abandonment of even the pretense that there is something else to it, as that pretense has always been costly to the function of money.) But if you think you can rearrange money to achieve some goal without maintaining its nature as debt, you don't understand money at all.
> the quantity of money existing is pretty much irrelevant to that.
I mean, that's what I'm saying, but as it is now, if I had a billion dollars, I could build a few wells in Africa, yanno?
> Money is debt...
Clearly, but in addition to that, my point is that the system of money needs people to be in debt. There's no "neutral state" as it were, and indeed, many of the efforts of the IMF and World Bank are calculated to get poor countries further in debt.
The grandparent noted that while we can increase the amount of currency in people's pockets, that doesn't fundamentally change the number of goods and services available to the total population. If you define poverty as lack of money, then yes, we can fiat more than enough money into existence. However, if you define poverty as lack of access to goods and services, increasing the amount of money available won't work. Look at Germany in the wake of World War I. Money was flowing everywhere, but the amount of good and services available was minuscule in comparison causing rampant inflation to the point where it was more cost effective to burn the paper currency for heat rather than spend it.
Let's break things down nice and simple. As you said, everyone needs a roof over their head and food in their belly. Well, there's plenty of that to go round. We don't need to fiat more money or otherwise increase the money supply, because as you astutely observed, that would potentially lead to a post-war Germany-type situation. If, however, the world's poorest were gifted adequate funds from the world's richest, they would be able to afford the biological necessities.
The fact that anyone was ever poor should be an affront to anyone who believes that money is real.
Using "real" in this context is confusing; yes, money is a social construction - a real one. You can also have fictional social constructs (SF works often describe some).
Are you using "real" to mean "natural" (as in "natural rights")?
Money is a medium to exchange effort/productivity and hence wealth. It is important because no one gives away their work for free. That is not because we are good/bad, that is because that is how we are by evolution. Our ancestors never climbed a tree unless there was a fruit to pluck or ran unless there was a deer to hunt. And given the effort involved in this, it made zero sense to share things for free.
We only have an organized form of that currently. Where you could do a lot of it and store it, and spend it later. Or opt to not earn it at all. Whatever the choice you must learn to live with it.
Ludicrous. You can expend effort all your born days and not see a dime. People give things away all the time. And climb trees, even! Do you really live in a world so bereft of imagination?
> There was nothing "socialist" about Jamestown. Many of the initial settlers were aristocrats who had no experience of work, and no interest in it.
The parent's quote specifically proposed the notion of people not working. This doesn't disprove the argument or address the point about the structure of Jamestown's initial income distribution mechanism.
> We already have a culture like this. Those who believe they own an entirely imaginary thing called "money" believe they're entitled to live off the efforts who don't.
How are you defining work? Money is a proxy for value produced at some point in time and you can either save it or immediately spend it. If someone acquired a reserve of value, how are they living off the efforts of other people? They still must buy goods and services like everyone else.
The claim that Jamestown was "saved by capitalism" is the typical libertarian/conservative story touted out in discussions about socialism and capitalism.
The situation was a lot more nuanced than that. The setup of Jamestown as between the Crown and the investors, not the colonists, who were essentially indentured servants for 7 years. Also, the climate was not right for the types of crops the colonists were trying to grow, and as someone else mentioned, the settlers were not accustomed to the environment.
"How are you defining work? Money is a proxy for value produced at some point in time and you can either save it or immediately spend it. If someone acquired a reserve of value, how are they living off the efforts of other people? They still must buy goods and services like everyone else."
That's an incredibly naive response. I would venture the author of that comment is referring to CEO and bankers on Wall Street. For the amount these people are paid, it's hard to see how much value they are producing. There is definitely an entitlement mindset.
That's an incredibly frustrating response because it doesn't actually address anything substantive but simply attempts to cast dispersion on the arguments. I'll reiterate the request I made to a commentator below in the thread. Are there counter examples of a society working without incentive that allows people to work or not work and if so, why aren't they with us today / if they are, why aren't they more influential? I'm open to being proven incorrect in the course of a substantive discussion, however, I'm disinclined to change my views in the face of simple dispersion.
You're missing the point that incentives matter, pretty much every economist from the most socialist to the most libertarian agrees on that point. When you incentivize one activity, you're removing incentives somewhere else. I.E. if I cut the cost of junk food 1000% percent, I'm encouraging you to eat bad food because you can get more of it for less compared to healthy food. Comparably, if I incentivize not working that will reduce or remove the incentives to work.
> That's an incredibly naive response.
And that's a terrible response with no further substantiation of the position. What is the "not naive" view of money? Why is it a superior position to hold? Give me a reason to prefer. Simply telling me I'm being naive without substantiation or alternative is borderline ad hominem.
> For the amount these people are paid, it's hard to see how much value they are producing. There is definitely an entitlement mindset.
How are you defining value? In the case of your example, they're leading in and participating in multi-billion dollar companies and markets that people are giving money to in exchange for services indicating they provide some value to the end user. We can debate the merits of that value or the manner it's provided, but the fact that people are giving the companies money would indicate they're providing a good or service the people value.
First off, I mostly agree with your sentiments. This comment is not in opposition but made to extend the discussion even beyond just money.
In order for a universal basic income system to work, we'll probably need to ditch democracy or put into writing some difficult to change protections. Seeing that the Constitution is being treated as either a) a living breathing document whose meaning changes with time or b) just a piece of inconvenient paper, I don't see a feasible way of making a universal basic income system work (edit: along side a democracy).
What's basic and what are people minimally entitled to? I believe everyone should be provided a place to sleep. But I think that should consist of a cot in a cement dorm like room with shared bathrooms. Other's will want, or with time demand or think that they should be provided a house, with cable TV, a cell phone, etc... With democracy in place it only will take until 51% of people don't want to work until the system completely breaks and falls into havoc (at which point a tyrannic dictator often takes over).
"Democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51% of the people may take away the rights of the other 49%."
which will lead to:
"Democracy with a universal basic income will lead to 51% of the people voting to take away the wealth and productivity of the other 49%."
Why doesn't that happen now, then? The current majority could, right now, decide to massively increase the taxes on, say, the 40% richest and redistribute that money to the rest of the 60%.
In fact, the current majority can, right now, decide to implement UBI, and then do all those things you describe.
Essentially, it's a slippery slope argument, with no great explanation of why UBI would change the conditions to start the "slip" that hasn't occurred until now.
One might argue that a majority can not decide anything since it's not an agent, nor is the relative amount of people who share a specific opinion somehow relevant in most of contemporary politics.
Also taxation is not a one way route as it might backfire through tax avoidance or just collective time re-allocation.
I'd bet there is no single agent on any developed country either powerful enough or knowledgeable enough to implement the UBI as it will most likely require massive legal and political changes.
So I guess it's pretty obvious why no one implemented the UBI yet.
Edit: never mind. I guess I miss understood you. Sorry.^^
Because coming to a consensus of what amount or what should be provided and how to provide is very difficult. Also there are numerous people who still believe in a work ethnic that things are earned not given. The shrinking middle class hasn't thrown in the towel yet.
Fully removing incentives doesn't work, but I would claim you do need to make sure people avoid the poverty trap (and that's only part of it).
To respond to your other question, the classic example would be mortgage backed securities that were part of the housing crisis. They provided -some- value, but overall, they were nothing more than scheme to make money off people's payments and nonpayments of mortgages.
Also, CEO's, on average, make 300% of the average worker's salary. I'm not sure the average CEO is 300% more productive than an field worker or an engineer. They do have a hand in leading the organization, but honestly, most of that work is done by the people below them in the org chart.
> The situation was a lot more nuanced than that. The setup of Jamestown as between the Crown and the investors, not the colonists, who were essentially indentured servants for 7 years. Also, the climate was not right for the types of crops the colonists were trying to grow, and as someone else mentioned, the settlers were not accustomed to the environment.
I don't know anything about Jamestown, but... this kind of feels like you're giving more detail, but it's detail that doesn't really contradict the original narrative?
At any rate, I took the original narrative to be: originally the workers received the same amount of stuff regardless of how much they worked, and that went badly. Then the workers started to receive more for working harder, that went better. And your version seems to be consistent with that, even if there were other factors making things difficult for the colony. Like they're two different stories, set in the same universe but focused on different things. One is a history and one is a snapshot, and the snapshot adds more detail but doesn't mean the history is wrong.
That's the impression I'm getting of the two narratives here. I remain ignorant of the actual facts.
While I personally cannot attest to the validity of these sources, it paints a more realistic picture of what happened. The colony's failure was not due to socialism, but to poor planning and expectations.
What I notice about those sources is that the original story in this thread
> They initially established it in a "socialist" vein wherein everyone received an equal share of the proceeds (food, etc) regardless of their contributions to the colony. ... [Later] they lifted the socialist mandate on redistribution
seems to not be retold in them. (I only skimmed, so perhaps I missed something?)
So, I guess: if that story is true, then those sources still don't contradict it. They add relevant detail, but if the story did happen as told, then it's still evidence that the "socialist" model worked less well than the "capitalist" model. It's somewhat surprising that those sources don't mention the two models tried. (In this case, I expect the "capitalist" model corresponds to 1619 onwards, "individual land ownership was also instituted". The first source doesn't cover this time period at all.)
And if that story is false, then the correct reply seems to be "um, that's not what happened" rather than "here's more detail".
It's well known that, once you acquire enough money, you can live off the proceeds of that money. If you inherited a million dollars and put it in bog-standard funds, you'd get ~$75,000 a year for doing absolutely nothing. How that factors into your theory, I'd love to know.
In (at least) two ways. One, you'd be lending wealth to other people so that they can create more wealth. Without your investment, less wealth would be created. Two, your parents acquired money by producing wealth, and one of the things that they chose to spend that money on was their progeny.
(NB. This does not claim that the allocation of money for value produced is perfectly fair, or just, or economically optimal, or whatever.)
Not the OP but your assumption is that 1. That "investment" mechanism will hold up forever and 2. That you don't put that money in the system at the wrong time assuming it is a random walk.
You're being rather argumentative, don't you think? Did you have something worth elaborating with the bit about the random walk? I would still be curious to know.
Has socialism worked anywhere? I think it would take a rewriting of people's expectations to have any chances. When you have many in society having the belief they are entitled to nearly anything, when they are told so over and over its their right, how can they ever function in a truly socialist system
The reason such a system fails is that you cannot exclude those who won't participate but instead just want to take
Virtually all advanced economies rely on socialist principles of redistribution of wealth through the fiscal system and state programmes within the context of a market economy.
Beyond that we're now seeing a growing dialogue pushing towards basic income, a full minimum living that is guaranteed and unconditional. This too can be considered socialist, and this too is compatible with a market economy where above and beyond the basic income (of e.g. $20k per year per person or whatever it is), people can pursue jobs to make $60k or $200k just like they do today, pursue education, charity or the thing they like to do, just as they do today, without the incentives of crime and fraud that exists for millions of Americans today who can't afford rent or insurance.
Neither systems are without flaws or caveats, but they show that socialist principles have their place in society. Of course that's different from other socialist principles which have failed, and a country without any form of market economy at all on a substantial scale (e.g. 10-20 million people and beyond) succeeding is unknown to me. Doesn't mean some of the principles of socialism aren't valuable. It'd be like saying a diet of just bread and water sucks, and extrapolating from that that any other diet that includes the components of bread and water(e.g. bread, water, veggies, fruit, fish), must therefore suck, too.
>why should they if their excess production goes to subsidizing non-producers who stare at the sky all day?
There's a lot of room for manouver between 'everyone gets exactly the same amount no matter their contribution' and 'everyone must be productive (net-positive on the society) to sustain themselves'.
So, reasons you might contribute when even the sky-gazers can survive at a decent level:
1. Because the extra pay lets you do more fun things
2. Because you enjoy the work
3. Because the extra status you get from your work contributions is rewarding
4. Because you like the people you work with
5. Because you're one of the one in ten thousand people who can leverage the technological progress to make significant contributions, and feel something of a noblesse oblige
6. Because you don't even consider what you're doing work (you were just playing around with maths and theory, and suddenly new discoveries!)
It's an interesting angle, and the possibility exists you might be right, however, for the sake of discussion I'm going to push back a bit.
A thriving economy necessitates people produce more than what they need to live. This excess gets exchanged with peers in the economy and most everyone benefits. Rather than straight barter, we use currency as a mediator to allow people who couldn't barter directly to still exchange goods and services. Consider the case of the USSR. During one of their many social programs, they turned all the farmland in the USSR into communal farms and struggled. Eventually, they relaxed restrictions and allowed people to start farming private plots of land where they could keep everything they grew in addition to the communal farms and things went comparatively gang busters. People had more food and suddenly they had more food to exchange on the market than the communal farms produced.
We are inherently social creatures and if people are surrounded by people who don't work, it creates a social climate that praises non-work over work. I.E. the "extra status" from your contributions is a social construct. Status is a social construct and in this case assumes people value workers and will heap status upon them for their contributions. Take an elite athlete who won a championship and drop him in the middle of grandma's sewing club, he'll have 0 status compared to that group's rock star. Status will only be conferred by people who value it and that might not be the case for people who aren't working.
> 6. Because you don't even consider what you're doing work (you were just playing around with maths and theory, and suddenly new discoveries!)
There's a difference between "new discovery" and "valuable new discovery" and turning that into something useful and productive.
As I understand it, various nordic countries are quite nice in that people are well-compensated for what those in North America would consider low-paying jobs. This would give people a lot more freedom to do what they like or do what they're able to do (if they have limited skill learning potential) without worrying about their future.
I support the idea of a basic income, but only if it is a replacement for the system of piecemeal welfare programs and tax-breaks that we currently have. The entire system could get so much simpler than it currently is.
You get your basic income check for X dollars a month. If you work a job, run a business, whatever, in addition to that, you get taxed Y% on your earnings, excluding the basic income amount. No deductions, no write-offs, no tax-shelters. If you wanted to have a progressive sliding scale tax rate, fine, although that makes it more complicated than a flat tax.
HR Block and Intuit would scream, but if you could do your taxes with just your W-2 and a four-function calculator, how many billions of dollars could we avoid wasting and invest in a more productive sector of the economy?
You are going to have issue with telling the basic incomers in more expensive places (like cities) that they have to move or else you are going to have to adjust basic income by cost of living.
The former is politically very dangerous (more so than BI already is) while the later is going to quickly add complication to the issue that you are trying to simplify.
I'd suggest replacing an income tax with a sales tax though. One 'punishes' earning, the other 'punishes' spending. Additionally you simplify enforcement by narrowing the collection points considerably. Talk about simple, you don't ever files taxes as an individual.
That mixed with basic income is a good plan from my non-economist POV.
I've sure someone far smarter that I can explain why I'm amazingly naïve.
Economically, you want to keep money flowing through the system as fast as possible. One dollar spent three times in a year contributes more to the economy than two dollars spent once. (I could imagine it even contributing more three dollars spent once due to participating in more transactions, but I don't know how you'd model that.)
If you tax spending, you incentivize hoarding cash, which decreases the "monetary velocity".
The psychology is different when income is taxed. People can choose to defer spending, but the only way to reduce income tax is to make less money- sure, some oddballs may do so out of spite, but most people prefer to maximize their income.
Furthermore, when combined with basic income, income tax does a better job of reducing the magnitude of inequality. While on its own that's a social argument, it becomes an economic argument very quickly: since it "takes money to make money", extreme inequality levels actually disincentivize productivity from the have-nots, since the expected return on effort becomes negligible.
If your entire economy is propped up by increasing levels of spending, isn't that a serious problem that could explode?
Even if you tax sales and incentivize saving, people will still spend money. They obviously need to purchase basic goods, and people will still want luxuries.
So, will people save more? Probably.
Will they stop spending and throw the economy into a downward death spiral? Highly doubtful.
As a followup, it has the added benefit of still getting tax money from the black market. If you are a drug dealer, you don't pay income tax, right? But you still buy goods and probably quite a few luxury goods. It also would capture tax money from the very wealthy if you drop all tax exemptions so they couldn't pay someone to find a loophole. It's not like they sit on their large sums of money and never purchase things.
If an economy is propped up by personal debt, things can (and have) exploded, yes.
But when not fueled by personal debt, you generally want faster spending, so that potential productive capacity gets used instead of left sitting for lack of demand.
Taxes: You definitely want to reduce loopholes as much as possible, and a sufficiently generous basic income would reduce the need for a lot of tax breaks, yes.
It is observed, however, that the very wealthy spend proportionally less on goods and services; most of their income gets reinvested. Good for them, but it leads to a positive feedback loop.
> I've sure someone far smarter that I can explain why I'm amazingly naïve.
I actually like your plan a lot, but it's worth knowing the weak points of any plan.
> Additionally you simplify enforcement by narrowing the collection points considerably.
That's one weak point. As long as there's big money involved, there will be incentives to minimize, cajole, hide, smuggle, etc. For example, the tax burden for cigarettes is already rather high, so there's a market for legal (Native American smoke shops), quasi-legal (online ordering), and illegal (selling loose cigarettes on the street) cigarette sales to get the "tax free" discount.
Extrapolate that to taxes on all goods and you see burgeoning black and grey markets and the organized crime that goes along with them.
...and there will be incentives for fraud with the basic income reporting as well.
There may be less regulation and enforcement overall, but it won't disappear by any means, especially given enough time for fraudsters to become more sophisticated.
As I said in another reply, there is already tax-evasion at the business level. Only having to enforce tax collection at the business level allows more focus on ensuring compliance. I would think the penalties would be much higher as well.
As far as basic income fraud, I think it should a basic income for EVERYONE, no matter the income level. If you are a real person with identity documents and of a certain age, you get a check. Will people try to defraud that, of course. They already defraud all the existing government programs. But as with dropping income tax, with basic income you drop all other government merit based assistance programs and focus only on a basic income program. Your fraud detection is now focused on a single program.
I even like the FairTax idea of an across the board tax 'prebate' for poverty level spending. Then every eligible citizen gets a basic income AND doesn't pay taxes on spending below the poverty line.
The question would be, would the taxes collected on above-poverty spending fully fund the program AND federal/state/local government spending? That's where I'm totally clueless. I tend to think that it would work out if it was a complete changeover. All government assistance programs would need to be merged into a single program and the federal/state tax systems would need to be scrapped en masse and replaced with a flat federal sales tax.
Will it ever happen? Hell no. Even if it is economically viable, there are way too many special interests that would lobby against anything like it happening.
That's already an issue though. With just a sales tax then you cut individual tax evasion out of the mix and allow the tax authorities to focus on tax evasion at the business level. Ignoring any arguments about the tax revenue difference between income + sales vs. sales only, I would think you could ensure much higher compliance if you only had to enforce at the business level with the added benefit of less bureaucracy.
Of course some people need more than just basic income to survive - if your medical expenses are 10x basic income, and you cut out all other welfare, how are those people meant to compensate?
There are some kinds of welfare that you can replace with basic income, but not all of them.
I should have distinguished, but I wasn't including healthcare. More along the lines of TANF, food stamps, fuel assistance, unemployment, all the other drips and drabs of money that can be applied for if you know about it and can work the bureaucracy.
US healthcare is fucked nine ways from sunday; maybe someday we'll adopt something on the Canadian pattern (I've had emergency surgery done in Quebec on vacation, anesthesia, overnight stay, 70-mile ambulance ride, the works - and the total was 1/10th of what it would cost in the US.)
Social Security is another sacred cow that you probably couldn't touch, at least until it goes tits up because all the boomers start drawing and there aren't enough of us left to pay in.
It is better to offer free health care that is paid via taxes/lower BI because it is cheaper to a society at large if people get regular checkups and fix problems earlier instead of waiting until the problem can no longer be ignored.
Irrelevant example. Jamestown is ancient history, per-industrialization and also by definition of the former, pre-post-industrialisation. Jamestown knew nothing of assembly lines, tractors, robotic fabrication, office jobs, and knowledge work. They never managed to actualize their population's hierarchy of needs enough to reach those levels.
We're far, far beyond needing to strike the earth to get fed each day. The real "producers" are mostly machines which extract value from the earth and process it for end-use. As far as the people who own the machines, they are a mere fraction of the human race... seems a bit silly to accommodate them excessively at the expense of everyone else's well being.
"The colony barely survived because people lacked the incentive to work"
To be clear, the people in the colony barely survived because people lacked the sense of self preservation required to work. You're positing that this occurred because they had to share their output; the tellings I've heard were that the aristocrats wouldn't work until another governer (John Smith) came in and made them work on fear of death.
The idea that anything about this situation was socialist is not well founded. The idea that the terrible outcome is proof positive of anything in particular is not well substantiated. I prefer it as a story of exactly how far the entitlement of the rich goes: those used to controlling the means of production would rather die than give up their positions of privilege. But it's not proof of my ideological position, and it's not proof of yours. It's just anecdata. The rest is just conjecture, not backed up empirically.
It's funny the people championing 'incentives for work', thereby turning 'redistribution of wealth' into some kind of mortal sin, simultaneously brand inheritance (redistribution of wealth by bloodright/nepotism) as a 'death tax' and act as if it's the worst thing ever.
I'd be a lot more inclined to be a bigger proponent for incentive based economies if we all started on a level playing field with equal opportunity. The reality is far from it, and we get phenomena like the working poor, millions of people with jobs, sometimes multiple, who can barely scrape by, in the same economy where others are born literally a millionaire without any basis in merit.
Obviously there has to be a balance in incentives, but I'm inclined to say the US has lost some sense of that balance.
> It's funny the people championing 'incentives for work', thereby turning 'redistribution of wealth' into some kind of mortal sin, simultaneously brand inheritance (redistribution of wealth by bloodright/nepotism) as a 'death tax' and act as if it's the worst thing ever.
I think you're conflating two ideas. Redistribution of wealth, in my understanding, means taking from Peter to pay Paul regardless of what Paul did. Inheritance on the other hand is Peter accumulated value (money) but decided to save it or invest it rather than outright spend it and gifted it forward.
The difference between the two is the level of coercion. In the former, the government is deciding who gets what from whom and how much in a roundabout way. In the latter, the individual who accumulated the value is deciding whom gets what and how much.
> in the same economy where others are born literally a millionaire without any basis in merit.
If the millionaires wish to remain millionaires, the money cannot be idle. It has to be invested in value producing activities that generate a return. If they just spend it, they won't be millionaires for long (see NFL stars going broke right after they get out of the league for an example).
> The difference between the two is the level of coercion.
I'm not debating the role of the state here, I'm showing that two people are born, one with $10m and one with $0, and that it's ridiculous to argue from such a state of reality that one ought to have a fully incentive based economy when one never has to work a day in their life (except walk to a bank, say '30% in the S&P 500 please, 30% in gold please, 30% in US treasuries please and 10% in a money market account please', and collect his check for the rest of his life), and the other can work 2 jobs like many millions of Americans do and barely scrape by. You'd agree that this is a flawed system, no?
That's a flawed system, and the solution is simple, the government employs coercion. I can't be against that as long as the coercion is on moral grounds, just like coercion is employed in many other situations (e.g. taxation, or prohibition of buying a slave for 10 years even if that person is willing) You mention coercion as if it's inherently a bad thing. Inheritance tax can level the playing field a little bit, where say instead of one kid, through no merit of his own, inherits $10m by bloodright and the other $0, one can inherit $1m (a gigantic advantage) and 9.000 others inherit $10k (a small advantage). That's redistribution of wealth and it's as much 'coercion' as a regular tax rate.
It's not a perfect solution (without flaws) or a complete solution (one that solves every problem), but inheritance tax makes a lot of sense and I reiterate, it's funny people being so hypocritical about it.
> If the millionaires wish to remain millionaires, the money cannot be idle. It has to be invested in value producing activities that generate a return.
So what?
Investing is not giving. Investing may generate wealth, but if there's no redistribution, the rich will get richer and the poor will stay poor.
I think there's a middle ground to be found here. What if everyone gets the necessities and some basic niceties, and the most productive get the rest? You'd be working for luxury and status, as opposed to necessity, but isn't that motivation enough?
What qualifies as the necessities and basic niceties? That's a very broad category that fluctuates based on where you live. Necessities + basic niceties in my current area cost a significant multiple of somewhere else like the Midwest USA. In turn, this might incentivize people to move from Midwest USA to other area USA if they're getting more $$$ and thereby raise the total cost of the program.
What qualifies as the necessities and basic niceties? That's a very broad category that fluctuates based on where you live.
It doesn't really matter, because people can move. You just give the same to everyone, and let people choose whether they prefer to live large in Midwest or frugally/working in NY.
some sort of consumerism-socialist arrangement? i suspect youd end up with lot of folks who realize they can sit back and do nothing and sustain themselves. the labor pool of low-income jobs dries up, employers have to raise wages to attract workers, and the price of goods and services goes up. I'm sure there is some balancing point, but we dont know where that is (maybe thats the fear)
Bucky Fuller always inspires disagreement, but I think you'd have a difficult time making the case that the Jamestown Colony from the year 1607 is in any way relevant to this discussion.
Comparing Jamestown to today is nonsense. Technology has advanced so much further it's not even funny. We are now capable of nearly completely automating factories. Sure there still have to be people to do that automation and to maintain the machines, but it doesn't take very many people to do that.
With industrial agriculture, 2% of our population is producing the vast majority of our food. With experimental ecology based agricultures, we could see a form of agriculture that takes even less work (it's based on perennials, so you don't have to plant every year) to produce just as much or more. If we can sort out automated recycling we will reach a place where we no longer need to mine. Mass transit on rails just begs for automation and provides people an easy way to get around.
We are shockingly close to a post-scarcity society. Not quite true post-scarcity, where no one needs to work and automation produces all we need, but a society where we very small handful of people can produce enough for the rest of the world.
We'll still need a system that rewards those people, yes, by why punish everyone else? Why force everyone else in working increasingly pointless jobs just because we need to reward the few people actually working necessary jobs? And interestingly enough, we aren't currently rewarding the people working the necessary jobs. If the economy rewarded people according to the importance of their work, farmers would be paid like financial executives.
The other part of this coin is that, while there are absolutely lazy people in the world, there are just as many people who will naturally gravitate towards doing some sort of "work". I would argue that most people would get bored and dissatisfied just sitting on the couch watching television all day. Instead they'll spend their time pursuing their passions. For a lot of people this would probably be "useless" art -- music, theater, fiction, etc. But, hey, if we already have enough people doing the useful things, then why not?
But for others it will be things like science, engineering, invention, and so on. The first several generations of scientists were men and women of leisure. They were wealthy aristocrats who didn't have to work if they didn't want to. But they did work. They choose to work. They choose to do often incredibly monotonous data collection because they were fascinated by the natural world.
There's no reason we couldn't have a world where the vast majority of us are free to pursue whatever we wish. And I'm willing to bet that, in that world, we'd see an explosion of innovation and discovery.
One could argue that the current economic system has shifted to increasingly taking labor from the vast majority of producers while providing a minimal amount of compensation, all while a tiny slice get a vast amount of compensation.
Because most producers simply don't get enough of a margin above subsistence, a wide range of society dosen't have the resources to make investments in new businesses (or new personal investments) and our economic potential suffers. If too much of the economic excess is concentrated into too few hands we end up with an inefficient command economy.
What the BBC article describes to us should strongly hint to us that the current work arrangement is a local maxima in the efficiency of our social/economic system, and that other arrangements should be looked at to yield better social and economic benefits. And honestly, I think that labels such as "Socialism" and "Capitalism" have done a lot of damage in the short-circuiting of analysis of economic systems (ie. in the vein of "This is socialism" we we know that doensn't work...). We really have to move beyond classifying into those broad categories and deciding policy based upon what broad camp one believes in.
Most people argue that technological advances made since Jamestown mean that we literally absolutely don't need everyone to work, because we are no longer an impoverished subsistence society.
I concur, we've made significant technological strides since then and it's nice that we've pushed our standard of living from swampy subsistence to one of the best in the world. However, that doesn't address the thrust of the argument which is if you create a society that rewards sky-gazing it creates the probability of a disincentive to work. Are there counter examples where this kind of society as worked in the past, and if so, why aren't they with us/significantly more influential today?
I don't think you understood me. Let's say 80% of people won't work if they don't have to (I think thats not true, but to pick a number). Until today, that meant that allowing people not to work meant that society would collapse and everyone would starve because it wasn't possible to produce food and shelter for so many without their help. Today, it is possible due to technological advances that did not ever before exist. Thats why there is no example of it working before but people believe it could work today.
Well, yes. Most people who suggest such things aren't considering what it would take to get humans to work because they assume all the work will be done by robotic slaves.
> The colony barely survived because people lacked the incentive to work
This is a narrative, not a plain fact.
Many people continue to do work without incentive. They feel demotivated, they don't need the money and can go live in mom's basement. They do it out of boredom, even habit or inertia.
Also, it can be difficult to determine people's incentives, they're not always aware of those themselves, so short of telepathy you can't always claim to know whether one is there or not.
Going back to school and dilly-dallying is mostly only really going to be viable if your parents are the ones who earned a big enough living to support you. I know people like that.
Maybe corporations should adopt poor people or commission huge parties or works of art.
This quote reads as advocacy for unconditional basic income. I don't think education would ever be considered "dilly-dallying" in a society where poverty is generally impossible.
Hopefully that would also mean education would become cheaper.
Actually, given how expensive education is right now in the states, you could probably take the money one would spend on educating someone, put it in stocks or whatever, and have a nice 20+k yearly income, for which two people can rent a cabin in the mountains, grow their vegetable garden and chill.
To be honest, people pay me to do a job, but I am a fraud. I don't work for a living. Somewhere on a piece of paper my name is printed and it says that I will receive a sum of money each month in exchange for some effort at programming computers or some such thing, but I never really pay attention to it.
I program computers all day. It is quite an enjoyable pastime and I look forward to it almost all the time. Although it would seem like it is better to selfishly work on my own personal projects all the time, I have found that if I do things that other people like, it makes them very happy. I really enjoy making other people happy. It is fun.
I have not always thought this way. At one time in my life, I tried to limit the amount of things that I did for other people. I wanted to make sure that I always prioritised my goals above theirs. I would feel resentful if I were forced, through the circumstances of living, to do things that were not of my choosing. I demanded compensation. No matter how much compensation I received, though, it never seemed enough. Let's face it, I was giving up my time -- my life -- to further goals that were not my own. How much money should I receive to give up my life? I have never been able to answer that question.
I suppose there must have been a day where I changed. If there was, I can't recall it. Whatever happened, I started to realize that I was enjoying what I was doing. Not all of it, of course, but at least some of it. I went to my boss and I said, "If you have more things like this, can you please let me do it?" He was quite pleased to hear my question and readily agreed. Over time, I asked for more and more things that I enjoyed and my boss gave me more and more of those things. Eventually, virtually everything I was doing were things that I enjoyed.
There have been times where I was stuck in situations that I didn't enjoy. Most of the time it is because I lacked some skill to do a task, or because I lacked the ability to interact gracefully with certain people. These are big challenges for me. I enjoy challenges and I push myself to see if I can overcome them. Some days I give up and sleep, or play video games or cry. The next day I am usually ready to try again. I have crossed some big mountains this way and it is something that makes me very proud.
It has happened to me that I have found myself in situations where I just could not cope with what was going on. In those cases, I have simply gone somewhere else. I'm lucky because I live in a rich and free society where I can do what I please. I admit that I fully utilise this freedom and feel sad for others that can not do as I can do. Sometimes I feel a bit guilty, but should a seed planted in rich soil struggle because other seeds are not so lucky? I think there is no point in making life any harder than it already is. I will take my luck wherever I can get it.
In this way I have found that I can align myself so that people pay me and I do not work. I'm not saying it's easy. It has taken me decades to work out how to do it for myself. I just think that it isn't as hard as many people think it might be.
Sorry for the slow response. I didn't notice your question. I hope you see it!
I currently live in Japan. I started my career in Canada and have worked in the UK as well. Different countries have different challenges. For example, it's easy for me to do what I do in Japan since I have given up the "salary man" track a long time ago. I think it would be quite difficult, socially, to make that kind of transition in Japan, though -- especially if you are married. Also in Canada, no matter what kind of low paying programmer job I got, I was never going to starve. There was never any real risk in trying to optimise my happiness even if I ended up pissing off my boss and getting fired. Of course, as it turned out my efforts to be happy only increased my success at work so everything was fine in the end. As they say, your mileage may vary.
The quote does not imply this is the way things are, it's talking about what he believes things should be.
Yes, of course many people have to work nonsense jobs now or else they'd starve, but that's because we don't have anything like basic income. With basic income, the lack of food and shelter you refer to wouldn't be an issue -- at least for citizens of the country with basic income.
I agree that basic income would be a godsend. It would remove most of the basic fears that people have, giving them more freedom than ever.
But is it gonna happen? I don't see how it's going to work, maybe a few experiments here and there, but it will take a massive shift in thinking (especially for those in power, with the money/power) to make it a reality for everyone...
In the meantime, people will have to compete not only with each other, but also with robots to get a job, any job...
I'm guessing his point was that we're so accustomed to relatively comfortable living (especially here on HN), that we take valuable things for granted.
That leads to a sense of entitlement and confusion. We don't see how valuable the things we have are, so we end up thinking they should be "free", without realizing that nothing of value is actually free, because otherwise it wouldn't have value.
So if we experienced real hardship, our thinking would shift, and we'd appreciate valuable things more and we'd feel less entitled.
My point in another, heavily hissy-fit-downvoted message, was that everything of value costs something to produce, and therefore things can't just be handed out for free, because the things themselves are not actually free.
The same applies to "free money" in the form of Basic Income. People like to fantasize about not being personally responsible for their choices in life. Instead, they'd just get free money every month without having to work. "We have the technology!! Why aren't you giving me free stuff?! Damn capitalist oppressors!!"
People should think about how things work in the real world.
nothing of value is actually free, because otherwise it wouldn't have value.
That's not how it actually works; price is only bounded by the value is brings, not proportional to it. For example, air is literally indispensable to life, but good luck selling it.
things can't just be handed out for free, because the things themselves are not actually free.
Sure they can; they've always have! Roads, cops, healthcare, education; hell, you're European, you should know. And plenty of people already live without working.
Maybe expanding it to the levels of allowing everyone to not work is (still?) unrealistic, but claiming "things can't be handed out for free" is silly.
> That's not how it actually works; price is only bounded by the value is brings, not proportional to it
Price can be whatever the hell someone feels like asking for something, which already invalidates your claim. I can ask for $500k for a bucket of shit, but you probably wouldn't be willing to pay it.
But there's a set price already, staring you in the face, making your claim look silly.
Now what you might be getting at is that the price you're willing to pay is bounded by the value you perceive in something, and that's certainly correct.
People aren't willing to pay for air because they have all the air they could possibly want to use at their disposal already. Air just is there. The fact that you can't survive without air doesn't mean you assign an extremely high valuation to it. You don't even think about air, let alone how much you'd be willing to pay for some in some specific situation.
> Sure they can; they've always have! Roads, cops, healthcare, education; hell, you're European, you should know.
You're just showing your ignorance here. None of the things you listed are actually free, as in, without cost. All of the services you listed are provided by people working in exchange for money, and the money has to come from somewhere, and it's not free. Someone needs to do something productive to pay for all of that, and.. well, it's actually our hard-earned money they're spending. Go figure.
> Maybe expanding it to the levels of allowing everyone to not work is (still?) unrealistic
That much we can agree on.
> claiming "things can't be handed out for free" is silly
Nice strawman there. That's not a claim I've made. Read again.
> People like to fantasize about not being personally responsible for their choices in life. Instead, they'd just get free money every month without having to work. "We have the technology!! Why aren't you giving me free stuff?! Damn capitalist oppressors!!"
People also like to fantasize about what others would do within a Basic Income situation. Not themselves, of course, they're better than that. But all of the unwashed masses, why, they'd waste all they were given, and demand more!
> People should think about how things work in the real world.
People should also do a little research into what happens when people try it in the real world before spouting their mouth off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income#Pilot_Programmes ...but why ruin their own perfectly good superiority complex?
No, I get it, I wish it was true. I also like to dream of a world where each person/family has their own group of robots that do the basic hard work for them, leaving them to pursue creativity, research and development of new things, explore the unexplored.
But the reality is that people are selfish and don't really want to see others succeed.
They spend more money on luxury cars, houses and technology that benefits only them. Charity donations make up a small part of it, and that's mostly because it makes people feel better about themselves (if only more realized this).
Their money sit in banks, being lent to other people under sometimes outrageous terms, and they buy land and resources that they don't allow others to use, claiming it belongs to them and they're storing it for "the future", even though they know very well they're going to die in a few decades and none of it will really matter.
"If we're gonna "understand" each other, first we gotta make 'em suffer like we're sufferin'! Like when they stop a fight because someone got injured! But I know that'll never happen… that's why there'll always be war. It always rains here and I hate it. It's like this whole country is a big crybaby. I'm going to change it… and protect everyone!"
So basically 9,999 people are completely dependent on the work of one person for them to survive and prosper. Sounds really rosy, for everyone involved.
Those 9999 people would be completely fine if they were born earlier. We enable some people to be incredibly productive, at the cost of other peoples ability to support themselves.
"But society came and paved over the place where all the roots and berry plants grew and killed the buffalo and dynamited the caves and declared the tribal bonding rituals Problematic. This increased productivity by about a zillion times, so most people ended up better off. The only ones who didn’t were the ones who for some reason couldn’t participate in it.
(if you’re one of those people who sees red every time someone mentions evolution or cavemen, imagine him as a dockworker a hundred years ago, or a peasant farmer a thousand)
Society got where it is by systematically destroying everything that could have supported him and replacing it with things that required skills he didn’t have. Of course it owes him when he suddenly can’t support himself. Think of it as the ultimate use of eminent domain; a power beyond your control has seized everything in the world, it had some good economic reasons for doing so, but it at least owes you compensation!"
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/burdens/
An interesting question that comes up is why British hunter gatherers were slow to adopt agriculture when there is a 2,000 year gap in when wheat was first introduced and when Britain become more agricultural. One possibility is that they simply didn't want to become more agricultural.
"..it may well have been the case that the Mesolithic peoples of Europe really did not want to switch to an agricultural economy, but at some point they would have had to switch as their own hunter-gatherer economy would have ceased to be viable as they lose more land to this encroaching advancement of arable agriculture."
Arguably this is (almost) already the case. How many people work to supply you with food and water as a percentage of the entire workforce? These are essentials without which you could not survive, yet very few people (in developed countries) actually do that work.
Human nature is curious. People want to invent interesting things, that should be self evident to anyone who has been around open source software. You make it sound like 9k people are ganging up on some poor unsuspecting person to make them invent things to keep the world turning.
> We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living
Right, because valuable things don't actually cost anything to produce! That's why they can just be (automatically) handed out by some big Magic Nanny-Fairy Machinery.
We should all just get whatever we want, because we deserve it!
Every time there is any thread about anything remotely socially progressive you are there espousing your highly conservative viewpoint. This made me curious and I am really trying to understand what life experiences could have led you to have such views. I have a few questions that might help paint a clearer picture if you would be so kind? If you decide to answer please answer honestly.
Where did you grow up?
What were your parents jobs?
How much did your parents earn in yearly income?
Have you ever not eaten for multiple days on end because you couldn't afford to buy food?
What do you work as?
How much do you currently earn?
How do you personally calculate the cost and value of a good or service?
Do you understand the difference in the meaning of the words 'want' and 'need'?
Sure, anyone is allowed to hold such opinions. There is no right or wrong. The point is that opinions should be based on critical thought and then articulated in a way that reflects this. Take Marc Andreessen for example. Many of his views are very different to mine but he articulates them well and can back them up by showing his thought patterns. I respect, listen to and learn from him because of this even though I often do not agree with him.
All I was doing was pointing out that his life experiences are nothing but a fantasy to all but less than 1% of the world's population. I have never met someone who has no choice but to work in a whatever job they can find have such skewed views so your subsistence farmer proposition is highly if not completely improbable.
Sillygoose was born with more economic purchasing power than most people will ever achieve in their whole lifetime no matter how hard they work.
If sillygoose wants to be taken seriously he should first of all deal with the core premise of what we are talking about rather than make up something that he can then argue against even though it has nothing to do with the topic at hand. When he says "We should all just get whatever we want, because we deserve it!" he has made up a premise that no one else suggested to discredit a perfectly viable suggestion (UBI). That adds nothing to the conversation and deserves to be called out.
Where "skewed views" primarily means "opposing the idea of a universal basic income based on the moral principle that people should earn what they receive"? Because that's what I got out of his comment.
Exactly. How can someone who was born with more economic purchasing power than what most of the worlds population can achieve in a lifetime have the view that people have to earn what they receive? Did he earn the right to be born into a wealthy family? The world is not that simple and doesn't work on such one dimensional premises. Once that is acknowledged then there is a foundation upon which a discussion can be built.
Why not? Someone whose mother died giving birth to them can still believe murder is wrong. Heck, even someone who has consciously murdered another person as an adult can believe that. Humans are rarely capable of perfectly following their own moral codes, but that doesn't make that morality invalid. Especially when the "violation" happened as a circumstance of someone's birth that they themselves had no control over.
So I guess 2 + 2 makes whatever the hell you want it to?
> he articulates them well and can back them up by showing his thought patterns
What if his thought patterns are all fucked up, and completely detached from reality? Wouldn't it be better to change your views based on reason, logic and evidence?
I'll be throttled again real soon, if I can even post this one anymore, so I'll paste a reply that was meant for another comment of yours.
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> As I suspected you have never experienced any financial hardship. This is fine in itself but is very telling in how you perceive the world.
Having experienced it wouldn't change anything about what's rational and objective though.
> It's easy to calculate the value of something that has no direct value to you. It's called a cost benefit analysis and it is the corner stone of any business education but is applicable in many fields beyond business.
I can't help but wonder if you're trolling me, but here goes..
Since value is subjective, it cannot be calculated, because calculations require units, and there's no unit for how much you happen to want something at a particular moment. It also can't be measured or represented externally, outside of your mind.
If you're engaging in a cost / benefit -analysis, that implies that you do perceive value in something. That would be the "benefit" part. But you still can't put exact, objectively accurate numbers on the benefit.
You can, however, decide how many dollars you're willing to lose through a course of action, and you can expect to gain a number of dollars from it. But that only represents your subjective evaluation of how much something is worth to you, in terms of monetary units.
> It is however impossible to do this accurately if you are incapable of any thinking apart from ego-centric thinking.
That's insulting, especially coming from someone who's woefully unequipped to correct me on economic matters.
> If you do understand the difference then you are purposefully corrupting the discussion. Please stop doing this.
Yet another wild-ass accusation. Could you please stop?
> Every time there is any thread about anything remotely socially progressive you are there espousing your highly conservative viewpoint.
I don't think it's a liberal versus conservative issue so much as an individualist versus collectivist issue. I think social conservatives, who have a predisposition towards thinking of communities in terms of reciprocal social obligations, have a role to play yet in pushing forward things like basic income.
Everyone has a role to play. I wouldn't think it healthy to ignore or disregard certain view points out of hand just because they are different to mine. That is not the point, rather it is important to base discussion in critical thought and not purely emotional reaction (though this has some value in itself too).
I don't ever recall reading either of you or GP's comments before so maybe I'm missing something. But since when is saying "producing things has a cost" a 'highly conservative' viewpoint?
"Producing things has a cost" is n obvious, meaningless assertion; the actual suggestion here is that everyone only deserves whatever they manage to produce. That's a fairly conservative viewpoint.
It's interesting how you can recognize an Anarcho-Capitalist viewpoint when you see one, but can't recognize that being an AnCap basically just boils down to being moral, sane, rational and consistent.
Most self-proclaimed "Anarchists" I come across are actually something like Marxists, nonsensically railing against evil capitalist oppressors, without wanting to even discuss what capitalism means.
I went to one of their gatherings once, and out of around twenty people, only one seemed rational and open-minded.
The rest were intent on figuring out what kind of "activism" they'd engage in, and didn't want to discuss whether what they were doing actually made any fucking sense at all.
> Every time there is any thread about anything remotely socially progressive you are there espousing your highly conservative viewpoint.
Oh? Well, from my point of view I'm espousing independent thinking. Questioning things is a sign of doing that.
> Where did you grow up? What were your parents jobs? How much did your parents earn in yearly income?
I grew up in Finland, in an upper-middle class family.
> Have you ever not eaten for multiple days on end because you couldn't afford to buy food? What do you work as?
Nope. A developer.
> How much do you currently earn?
Around three thousand euros per month, before taxes.
> How do you personally calculate the cost and value of a good or service?
I don't. Something either has value to me or it doesn't. If you've actually read my messages, you may have noticed me talking about how value is subjective. In a nutshell, Value is utility as a means towards an end.
For example, how do you "calculate" the value of something you don't want at all?
> Do you understand the difference in the meaning of the words 'want' and 'need'?
As I suspected you have never experienced any financial hardship. This is fine in itself but is very telling in how you perceive the world.
It's easy to calculate the value of something that has no direct value to you. It's called a cost benefit analysis and it is the corner stone of any business education but is applicable in many fields beyond business. It is however impossible to do this accurately if you are incapable of any thinking apart from ego-centric thinking.
It was not clear that you understood the difference between want and need from your post. If you do understand the difference then you are purposefully corrupting the discussion. Please stop doing this.
No, we should all be able to get whatever we need because for the first time in history, we can.
If individuals would like to pursue even more (ie the things they want), they should be free to do so, so long as those wants don't occlude the afore stated needs of others.
The interesting thing is that we (humanity) could now actually do this if we wanted to. In the past, the laws of physics (and our lack of knowledge) prevented this. Now only politics do. The "Magic Nanny-Fairy Machinery" is real, and it looks like in the end, all it will require to operate is natural resources. We are piss poor at equitably distributing preexisting natural resources amongst ourselves.
I'm guessing his point was that we're so accustomed to relatively comfortable living (especially here on HN), that we take valuable things for granted.
That leads to a sense of entitlement and confusion. We don't see how valuable the things we have are, so we end up thinking they should be "free", without realizing that nothing of value is actually free, because otherwise it wouldn't have value.
So if we experienced real hardship, our thinking would shift, and we'd appreciate valuable things more and we'd feel less entitled.
My point in another, heavily hissy-fit-downvoted message, was that everything of value costs something to produce, and therefore things can't just be handed out for free, because the things themselves are not actually free.
The same applies to "free money" in the form of Basic Income. People like to fantasize about not being personally responsible for their choices in life. Instead, they'd just get free money every month without having to work. "We have the technology!! Why aren't you giving me free stuff?! Damn capitalist oppressors!!"
People should think about how things work in the real world.
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Suppose Service X costs you $500 per month to produce. If you keep giving it away for free, you're incurring a loss of $500 per month. That is not sustainable.
In a similar fashion, running the Nanny-Fairy-Machinery and producing things with it would definitely cost something, and that's why giving the output away for free wouldn't be sustainable. It's a Marxism-tinged pipe dream.
>Suppose Service X costs you $500 per month to produce. If you keep giving it away for free, you're incurring a loss of $500 per month. That is not sustainable.
>In a similar fashion, running the Nanny-Fairy-Machinery and producing things with it would definitely cost something, and that's why giving the output away for free wouldn't be sustainable. It's a Marxism-tinged pipe dream.
The reason any of this is being discussed is because the cost of producing basic needs should be going down because of automation, technology, etc. and won't be stuck at $500 or whatever value you choose over a long period of time. It's not impossible for Service X to get to the point where its cost to customers is not worth handling actual currency from its customers (which is what happens if the number you pay always remains at $500/mo).
Eventually we get to employ robots to do hard labor better than any human can for longer periods of time until we're paying fractions of a penny per hour in 'wages', initial cost and maintenance included. The ability to do this just wrecks any intuition we have about what it costs to produce things.
The idea is that $500 is not a fixed cost. First technology came for labor (ex. farming that used to take man-years of labour now takes hours and will soon require effectively 0 man -units), now its even coming for capital as well (a small lump of clever sand can perform what millions of dollars of capital equipment used to do). The only real fixed cost in the long run is going to be the natural resources required to produce things, which are here already. All that remains to us is to decided how to distribute these amongst ourselves.
Most of our political effort right now seems to be spent maintaining an ugly clot of laws and regulations attempting to artificially maintain that hypothetical $500 "cost" and not answering that deeper question.
Sillygoose should get whatever they want for playing the game of capitalism the luckiest and the best (but mostly the luckiest), and everybody else who is unluckier or less good should suffer, to provide for all of sillygoose's wants as cheaply as possible, rather than having their own basic needs met.
Because if they got their job done and left they would be fired. If they got their job done, they would be given more work. So one takes the maximal amount of time to do a task given the requirement that they be in the office for 8+ hrs a day.
"My only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired."
Yep this exactly. Do you want to do 10x more work for the exact same amount of pay or do you want to stretch out the work by a half hour here and there, get it done but at a good relaxed pace when your creativity can be brought to full bear on the tasks?
Parkinson's Law, which was a sarcastic joke about bureaucracy, only really happens when employees are not engaged in their work or they're forced to be in the same spot for 8+ hours a day. I have 10 things to do within 2 week "sprints". Should I get everything done in a first week (maybe work a few hours on the weekend if need be) and then be tasked with more tasks and not get rewarded for this at all? Or should I just do 5 things the first week and have fun on the weekend and then finish the other 5 things later?
This is why hourly pay and salaries are crap. You aren't getting paid for value; you're getting paid to sit in a chair (even if you work remotely) and you're getting paid so that the competition doesn't hire you away.
If they have 8 hours of work time and finished their tasks in 6, does that mean they have exhausted their usefulness to the business? Why not spend these 2 hours doing some small miscellaneous tasks?
>Why not spend these 2 hours doing some small miscellaneous tasks?
Because that's scope creep and it can create the expectation that it's part of my job, so then I'll be responsible for it. Down the line, if one of those misc tasks becomes the ire of someone else and my name is attached to it (comment, commit, etc.), they'll contact me further down the line, perhaps when I'm dealing with something of my own. Then, at least, I have to explain that I don't maintain that and in the worst case (which has happened), I have to fight to not be responsible for it right then.
There's a balance in having your name associated with 'things' in a business. Some people might be good at being a know-it-all, being well-known, and handling everything (why aren't they running their own company?), but you'll increase your chances of interruption the more wide-spread your name is.
Yep exactly. Try adding unit tests to legacy code when your coworkers consistently ignore it. They'll be praised as fast workers who kinda sorta get the job done. All you'll get is called out for being slow and be tasked with fixing someone else's mess and your code won't be a maintenance burden.
It feels like in software dev we can just make messes and move on without accepting responsibility. Increasing scope on yourself with those small misc. tasks also means accepting more responsibility than most software devs accept which makes you a target when things don't go smoothly either through your fault or someone else's.
The biggest catch is that those 2 hours that you have butt in seat means you can't work on your own skills/side project for fear of the employer owning the code. The only thing you can do is take online courses at Coursera or Udemy as they're general enough skills.
Often lack of infrastructure, or communication about what needs doing. Traditional businesses are poorly documented, and not transparent, so knowing what you might do and how is often extremely difficult.
Partly. But there is usually no method of discovery either. In a software company there is an issue tracker and you can just go and fix bugs if nothing else, that doesnt exist in a traditional company.
Wouldn't a traditional company also benefit from using the same or similar tools for managing work as software companies? (mostly a rethorical question)
A lot of white collar workplaces have their homebrew Excel workbooks to keep track of tasks and a lot of meetings that fill up everyone's time in order to organize activities, leaving little time for the actual work to be done.
It isn't just the ability to see what needs to be done, or the desire to put in extra effort or risk. When the individual sees no additional benefit for the risk they will not partake in the activity. It is precisely because the worker isn't compensated for working harder or more efficiently that they don't.
I have worked on plenty of projects that are time critical where compensation scales with the quality of the output. Think a theater performance or catered event. Time on clock matters, but completing the project faster and with a higher quality benefits ALL parties involved via profit sharing. The owners of capital want to pay based on time because they want a higher payout.
Sure but that's daily grind boring stuff that doesn't improve your skills very much and doesn't instill confidence in the long-term future of the company.
Because if you fill those extra 2 hours Bob's managed to accrue with more work Bob will be sure to inject a few more HN/Reddit/etc visits into his 8 hours next time. There's rarely any motivation, gain or benefit in taking on extra work in your standard 9-5 job
Because now you are responsible for all followups on those small miscellaneous tasks, and those might come up when you don't have two extra hours in the day.
I know you're probably saying it tongue-in-cheek, but not really. I'm a fairly lazy person; it bothers me to no end. I wish I could do more work more reliably, but I can't (yet! growth mindset).
A degree of laziness might look like having your priorities in order, but they're not really the same thing
If you feel like it's a problem and you're trying to fix it, I honestly wish you nothing but the best of luck. Personally I'm wary of being obsessed with being productive -- especially at work.
I had a bit of breakdown towards the end of my university days, due to setting some unrealistic requirements for myself. I wasn't allowing myself time off because I had 'quotas' to meet, and that took a toll and I had to basically hide away for a few months, while it dawned on me that the quotas didn't come from anywhere and I needed to calm the fuck down and get my priorities in order.
Now I have a regular job and I'm doing OK. But I don't let my time estimates rule me, I make time for breaks, and I don't stay after hours unless there's a deadline. And honestly even now I hope to knock a few hours off my weekly contract soon, because I feel like I'm spending too much time at a desk working on other people's projects (for money) when I could be, you know, baking bread or reading Wikipedia or hanging out with friends (if they weren't all at work, that is). In contrast, I have a co-worker who seems to love staying till 8 in the evening closing Jira tasks being "productive". Hatever. That's not where I want my wrinkles to come from.
edit -- I suppose maybe you're right, though. What I mean is maybe more that "what looks like laziness from one perspective can be called prioritizing from another". Less sound bite-y, though.
There is laziness and there is procrastination. Leaving that soda bottle on the floor is procrastinating picking it up; I'll still have to do it later. Having a small box to fill with soda bottles that I dump once every few weeks is laziness. Not making my bed when I'll have guest over or I need to make it before going to bed is procrastination. Not making it because there is no reason for it to be made before I get back into it is laziness (of course there are suprise visitors and such, but that is just cases where hueristical optimizations are imperfect).
For software developers, being lazy is a good trait. Say you knock out all the work you needed to do in a day in 6 hours and then fill the other 2 hours with fixing bugs or other low level tasks to fight the "I don't want to be lazy" urge.
Chances are those bugs or low level tasks are truly unimportant and not a priority for the business, right? If they were, then one of your team mates would have been working them as a priority.
You probably can't start tomorrows work since you are waiting on a team mate to finish their work for the day. If you try to help them out it will slow them down.
This is probably only for knowledge workers. If you are doing manual labor like building a shed for bicycles, you should be able to help out and do other tasks.
"And it’s not only at the bottom of the pyramid. There is a dirty secret I have discovered in the fifteen years I have spent consulting and coaching organizational leaders: life at the top of the pyramids isn’t much more fulfilling. Behind the façade and the bravado, the lives of powerful corporate leaders are ones of quiet suffering too. Their frantic activity is often a poor cover up for a deep inner sense of emptiness. The power games, the politics, and the infighting end up taking their toll on everybody. At both the top and bottom, organizations are more often than not playfields for unfulfilling pursuits of our egos, inhospitable to the deeper yearnings of our souls.
This book isn’t a rant about large corporations gone mad with greed. People who work in government agencies or nonprofits are rarely more exuberant about their workplaces. Even professions of calling aren’t immune to organizational disillusionment. Teachers, doctors, and nurses are leaving their field of vocation in droves. Our schools, unfortunately, are for the most part soulless machines where students and teachers simply go through the motions. We have turned hospitals into cold, bureaucratic institutions that dispossess doctors and nurses of their capacity to care from the heart. "
"The way we try to deal with organizations’ current problems often seems to make things worse, not better. Most organizations have gone through many rounds of change programs, mergers, centralizations and decentralizations, new IT systems, new mission statements, new scorecards, or new incentive systems. It feels like we have stretched the current way we run organizations to its limits, and these traditional recipes often seem part of the problem, not the solution.
We yearn for more, for radically better ways to be in organizations. But is that genuinely possible, or mere wishful thinking? If it turns out that it is possible to create organizations that draw out more of our human potential, then what do such organizations look like? How do we bring them to life? These are the questions at the heart of this book. "
Before we get into a discussion about basic income and drones making us obsolete, can we talk about cutting hours? First, lets get back to the standard 40 hour work week. That'd be a big step. And after that, can some of us work less? Half of my day is spent browsing the internet out of boredom. I'd get more done if the day was shorter. Better yet, let me telecommute and set my own hours. You'll get the same results out of me, if not better, and I'll be a happier fellow.
I totally relate to you. I'd myself personally prefer going half-time (20 hrs/week), with the option of working extra hours. (Perhaps a 5-hours-a-day 4-day work week.)
In my case it's the lack of documentation about a huge system (ecosystem, I'd rather call it), in contrast to an overengineered methodology and process, which involves mandatory code reviews by people unfamiliar with the code and 6 test phases before production.
If I crank 10 lines of code a week I consider myself lucky, and it won't take less than 3 weeks for them to hit production.
The combination of that with long builds and releases (30min minimum) makes me always have something to do, but I'm always waiting for something to be able to move on (build to be finished, answers from experts, validation by QA...). That's where HN and r/programming kick in.
I sincerely hope this (10 lines of code a week) is hyperbole. I would be fine with 3 weeks to hit production - not everybody works on a SaaS, I've had six months release cycles - but... not writing code?
I've probably not even gotten 10 lines a week at some jobs. One gig was mostly all ad hoc reporting stuff, with a lot of cut and paste of previous impls. Another place I and two others spent a year on a project that should've taken 2 months, I didn't write any new code at all for at least 6 months of that project. Specifically there was a lot of back forth, requirements changes from the business owners, on the part I wasn't involved with, before the project went live.
This was typical for the first 10 years of my career until I took a lead position. Now I work all the time, and I focus on organizing and coaching up my team so I don't have to do as much.
When the code base is bad enough, fixing a bug can take a small code tweak but days to discover and days more to test. Especially if refactoring bad code isn't an option at the time.
I think this involves setting some clear boundaries and expectations. I learned some things while I was consulting that I've carried into everything since:
- After a certain time each evening (7pm for me), stop sending email. You can still write and respond to it but schedule it to go out the next morning. If people see you respond at 2am, they'll begin to expect it.
- Do the same for weekends. Schedule email for Monday morning. If people see you respond on Saturdays, they'll begin to expect it.
- Only check email every N hours. I've found N=3 or 4 is best. This is the hardest for me. If you respond to every email in minutes, they'll begin to expect it.
- If you're not explicitly on the To line, filter it from your inbox. I have an "other stuff" folder where email goes if I'm not explicitly on the To line. I check this folder 1-2 times/day at most. If something is important to me, address it to me.
- Have a fixed todo list each day. If someone brings you a task, put it at the end of today so it often ends up tomorrow and communicate that. (Obviously, if something is really important, you can shift the order but that should be an exception, not the practice.) If you drop everything every time someone asks, they'll begin to expect it.
- Leave the office at a predictable time each day. I try to leave by 6pm. If you occasionally stay late, they'll begin to expect it.
- Don't answer your phone the first time someone calls. I always wait until their second call or if they email/text/dm too. If you're always-accessible, they'll begin to expect it.
- Don't take your phone into the bedroom at night. I leave mine charging on my desk at the other side of the house. If you answer your phone in the middle of the night, they'll begin to expect it.
Because we are playing the game. Some call it presenteeism, other call it face time, some even view it as the boss owning your ass during the work hours. But basically, we don't really give a fuck for the organisation, for the team, for the project, for the job. We just do enough to keep the gig until something better rolls along.
We know you would have no hesitation to cut jobs and other such when it suits, so don't expect any more from us.
> In this respect, entire occupations might be considered phoney - from life coaches to "atmosphere co-ordinators" (people hired to create a party vibe in bars) to "chief learning officers" in the corporate world.
People hired to create atmosphere in bars might be "phoney" in an object-level sense, but as far as their job goes presumably they do provide an actual service to someone, by causing more people to visit the bar.
People creating a vibe in pubs doesn't feel like a bullshit job. They're providing a service to other pub goers, making it a more pleasant place.
You can't ignore pleasure and satisfaction of other people when considering a job is useful or not. In the end, those are the goals of anything we do; that the job does it directly rather than indirectly (by say improving industry, which makes life easier, which means people have more free time, which provides happiness/satisfaction) doesn't make it 'bullshit'
I think the "bullshitness" of a job is determined primarily by the person that does the job, if she judges it to be socially useful or not (under assumption that being the person doing the job, that is an expert, she is the most qualified to judge its utility).
So, someone creating a "phoney" friendly atmosphere is a bullshit job, even if it increases the bar attendance, while a genuine entertainer (like a magician) is not a bullshit job. Even though both may be payed the same, both may have to smile when they don't really have reason to, and both may lie (in case of magician). The dividing line is that phoney friendly atmosphere is not socially useful thing (as judged by both by people who do it and common sense), while a magic trick may be.
> You can't ignore pleasure and satisfaction of other people when considering a job is useful or not.
Extreme example would be a drug dealer - his job is not useful yet he provides pleasure and satisfaction (and also gets it himself, in making money). It's not necessarily a bullshit job, because drug dealer does not have to care about it being socially useful.
The pub should A/B test having the person there, and not there, and look at the bar sales. That would determine if it is bullshit or not.
If the person creates a vibe that gets more people there, e.g. patrons texting friends to stop in, or increased bar sales by people staying longer then it might be worth it.
Of course if the bar hired bartenders that created an atmosphere of fun whilst doing their jobs then that would be even more profitable.
I don't think it was ever different. The idea that there should be enough time to sleep and have hobbies, that's the new thing. Just because our parents already experienced these privileges doesn't mean it's an old topic.
And if something like this happens so regularly, so naturally, I think instead of logically arguing about it we should worry more about how to handle that. I'm thinking about that other article were sales people were working together to make it looks like they all would work 80 hour weeks.
Last but not least let's not forget that our bosses also actually don't care abut our work hours. Caring would mean that they would need to look at hour work schedules and time tables, etc, instead of going to the golf club. For them it's more important that they can make a good impression on their bosses and customers as well. As long as we deliver that impression they don't mind that we all act like we are working 80 hour weeks, including them.
It is an intristic part of every tech job to stay informed on new technology, trends in the industry and possible problems arising. HN provides information on such topics (and more), so reading HN is not wasted (and even if it was wasted time, it wasn't as wasted as the 50th meeting for the same shit topic because no one wants to make a decision).
As others have mentioned, doing "just enough" work is a by-product of a inefficiencies of the hierarchal approach of managing via command and control. Holacracy instead is network centric.
I don't know if I completely buy into the effectiveness of Holacracy but I can see how it it is better motivating to Producers. For example, I tend to write better code knowing that it will be peer-reviewed by another dev I respect.
because I pay you for 40h of productivity per week, not a fixed amount of output? for the latter, consulting/freelance exists.
if you get paid for 40h per week, the expectation is to devote those hours to the benefit of the employer. do your tasks, if you have time to spare, think of other benefits - improvements, better ideas, learn, etc.
people that finish a task and then wait to be given another are the bane of the workplace. you never hire them at startups, but at some size they creep in and kill, kill, kill any company. walk into HP, Oracle, IBM today and you'll see them, in droves. that is why you can lay off 30% workforce at that size with no sizeable impact on your customers.
There is likely a certain organization size where many sub organizations or groups exist and work gets to a mode of waiting on so-and-so to do that thing.
Big companies like to organize around what they perceive as efficiency - putting common workers together and having common practices, etc. This leads to a waterfall delivery model where in order to x, y and z you need three different groups and they all have requests coming in all directions.
Small companies, including startups, simply don't have that org structure so you would never see that behavior since it isn't needed.
This isn't a type of person, it is a type of organization structure. That is why you hear it being so common across completely different businesses of similar size.
There is a good model in larger companies where you have entire vertical areas of responsibility as a group or organization. They are held accountable for delivering something in total and don't have many other groups to interact with for delivery. Kind of like a startup or small company inside a company. Many upper management types don't like this because they are seen as something they can't control. I've heard the Virgin companies are organized in this manner.
Are you paying hourly or salary? If salary, you are paying for what should be able to be done in 40 hours a week, but if it takes 45, you expect it to still be done, no? So if one can get it done is 35, why do you expect 5 more hours to given free?
