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In my mind, it boils down to an extremely simple question - if money didn't exist, and you didn't have to work to stay alive, would people do job x or job y?

The answer for many jobs is yes. We know this because volunteers exist, personal projects exist, people help each other fix their roofs and cars and fridges, etc.

In a society like this, things might move a little more slowly (probably we wouldn't have the airline or public Transit systems we have now), but things would absolutely still get done.

> The answer for many jobs is yes. We know this because volunteers exist, personal projects exist, people help each other fix their roofs and cars and fridges, etc.

Volunteers and especially personal projects really strike me as activities one undertakes when they have secondary means of survival and/or safety nets. The latter is commonly mentioned as problematic in terms of requiring GitHubs from job applicants.

The existence of these people is not sufficient, we also have to prove that these people are not distributed in some highly biased way, which I suspect, they are. There could be a lot of consequence to such biases. For instance, software developers creating software that blind people can't use.

I've done personal projects precisely because I don't have another safety net.

Posting my projects here on Hacker News gets attention, which might possibly lead to a job offer. (In practice this doesn't work all the time, but it's been more successful in the past than trying to cold-email HR departments). I think personal projects show my interests and skills better than interviews.

On that note, I am looking for work, and I'll do your (2 month) project for free just to get a reference letter. The 2 month limit is because I'll be out of cash by then.

> For instance, software developers creating software that blind people can't use.

I think you'll have much better luck with such things with the hobby group. Commercial software is done by focusing on tasks that make money. Blind people are unlikely to make you money, unless you fall under regulations that will fine you for not catering for this group. Hobby software is focused on making the actual artifact, the program, better. Getting it accessible to blind users is clearly making it better.

I mean, you're kind of framing it as a yes or no situation. It's more a question of degree.

And you could theoretically look at history before the modern concept of capitalism to see what gets done and what doesn't. I'd argue that saying we didn't have airplanes is underselling it by quite a bit - we went through how many centuries in which things barely progressed? And I'm talking things like "kids not doing quite as much".

Things progressed and changed every single century. Just not like some it happens in a tech tree in a computer game. Unfortunately history gets taught as something that is teleological, with things only having value if they bring them closer to what we consider important. So people look at multiple centuries of scholastic thought and proclaim ''well, that was a waste of time!" because it wasnt the scientific method.

I find it hard to believe that people would just band together and volunteer to build things without a monetary (or an equivalent) incentive.

Say, we're at the beginning of the neolithic age, and our village has just discovered agriculture, and the magic of iron ploughs. We already have food supply enough for 6 months.

There's just one small farm left, someone needs to go mine for iron ores, and someone needs to plough the fields, someone needs to sow the seeds.

One person 'volunteers' to do all three tasks because they couldn't agree on who'll do the mining.

The village decides to feed this guy while he does all these things, because he can't hunt while he's working. The 'volunteer' realizes that he could share part of his food with someone else in exchange for some help with iron ore mining and plough-building.

Ok we're now back to the monetary system.

You're coming at it with a framework of thinking that has already been immersed in present ideas about money. Check out, Debt: the first five thousand years. We tend to under estimate how differently people of different time periods and cultures think.

People absolutely band together and volunteer to build things without a financial or other material incentive. They do it for fun, from open-source projects to festivals like Burning Man.

The catch is, of course, that they do so after having secured the material means for that. You don't go play music just for fun is you're starving. But when you reliably are not starving, you can find resources for having fun.

maslow-pyramid.png should be attached here.

Completely agree. I was responding to OPs assertion that even that is not necessary.

There are places where money doesn't exist, and you don't have to work to stay alive. There are still tribes in Amazon area in Brazil who live by hunting and gathering.

I'm not sure if you find their social, cultural, and material progress sufficient for your taste.

How is hunting and gathering not working?

No one is paying them to do it. That's the difference. Our society has drawn a line in the sand: if you're not getting paid for it, it's not work.

This is why people completely discount volunteering, childcare, elder care, community associations, and more when they talk about the economy. If it's not earning a profit for somebody, it's not considered work.

It's not "work" in the sense that you're not hired and told what to do. You fend for yourself, this way or another, fishing today, picking fruit tomorrow, etc.

But it of course is not living without any labor at all, Eden-style.

The problem with intellectual property is that it favors the sum, rather than the rate, of innovation. Companies have a natural incentive not to innovate. Since you make profit by not spending the revenue of your previous innovation on new innovation. If you want to have continuous innovation the profit should instead be based on your rate of innovation. Meaning that you don't get a monopoly on past achievements. That is how you don't have to wait decades for new cars or rockets while people with spreadsheets calculate their most opportune moment to start innovating again.

It's weird how different graphics cards are from pharmaceuticals. Both have big startup and research costs, but GPUs are basically obsolete in a couple years, they run the supply out and constantly plan to move to the next model. Pharma you can do that, or build a portfolio and collect rents for a while.

It's weird that patent durations are one sized fits all, even though how long you can capture value is completely dependent on the industry.

Where did you get that I want to only see innovation from rich people? I explain in the next sentence the type of people who I do not want in positions of power, those who take anti-competitive steps. I do not think that is at all synonymous with people who have no resources. You put those people in power and they fuck their workers.

Anyway, even with temporary monopolies, the legal system is stacked in the favor of those with money, so I don't really see how that helps people with no resources.

There's nothing wrong with people getting paid for doing good work, and nothing wrong with that work being widely available, for free, to everybody who can use it. The problem is fixation on an economic system that simply doesn't work in every situation. Information shouldn't be packaged and artificially rationed just so that it can be crammed into a market model.

The thing is it’s not just people.

Corporations are shifting copyright law to their favor.

And as institutions they can do things that individuals can’t. Like aggregate content and become forces of nature in their own right.