How many Einsteins never left the patent office? What other contributions were never made, because dude who could have made them decided food and shelter were more important than aspiration? That is a societal loss, and we only have ourselves to blame for it.
I know people even in supposedly high-value intellectual workplaces (like academia, where I am) who don't find any value in their work but stay in it for completely external reasons which have nothing to do with knowledge-generation (family/PI/societal expectations, fear of disappointing others, fear of being unprepared for the 'real world').
I agree with the point that it's the pressure to do anything that keeps people[1] in shitty lifestyles.
[1]: using "people" to mean those who have sufficient privilege to have the flexibility to choose their work.
edit: word
"The solar system can support a trillion humans, and then we'd have 1,000 Mozarts, and 1,000 Einsteins. Think how incredible and dynamic that civilization will be," Bezos boasted during a speech at New York's Yale Club, which was transcribed by Business Insider.
I wonder if can't figure out something as simple as how to allocate the basic rewards of our system socio-efficiently if the future will turn out more like "The Expanse" than "Star Trek". And if we focused on simply getting all the near-Einsteins out of the patent office (as you said) here on Earth first how much faster the goal of colonizing the star system would be achieved.
I bet a number if naturally gifted kids just don't receive such a boost, and don't spend as much time and effort on unfolding their unique talents. Young Mozart worked a lot, sometimes against his wish.
I play (alto and soprano) recorder and violin, amateur-casual, and listen to almost all styles there are at least occasionally, and depending on mood and context find amazing things in many places. The kind of music Mozart knew is such a small subset.
What may have suffered, not sure, is the ability to play an instrument. Given how easy it is to listen to music made by others anywhere there is no need to learn how to play. On the other hand, using computers and modern music tech in general you can compose and play music that Mozart had to get a hundred people together for, and you don't need to train your synthesizer to play your notes.
When I imagine I would meet a medieval society the one thing that I would want to bring is a synthesizer (and solar panels and good speakers), and a huge electronic library of music. We have come a looong way in the last one- to two hundred years, with ever increasing speed in new musical developments.
I think Jeff Bezos is smart which is why I doubt he holds to any comments indented for layman audiences.
People who could afford to be were more well rounded.
People also use to live in smaller communities. So they understood each others' roles. Many people in smaller communities also had multiple roles/jobs. There are studies that small towns also produce better athletes for this reason https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279469393_Community...
With specialization I think that the overall general knowledge of people has declined.
The volume of knowledge the protagonist displays is phenomenal, in my opinion.
>He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.
Of course he was also a visionary in this idea of alienation, which makes up the core of his early work and is persistent through his mature work. To him, this alienation from one's species-being to achieve ends set by others is only a core part of class society, and it can be overcome.
But it is true that specialization leads to alienation, or (a term I think might express it better) isolation or disconnection. I'm disconnected from the fish I eat, because I'm a computer programmer and not a fisherman. I'm disconnected from the professional fishermen and women, too. That may not have been the sense that Marx meant, but it's also true.
> where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes
and
> society regulates the general production
seems like it's still a bit of a challenge
There was no Golden Age. People have always been the way they are now.
I don't know how old people are or how much they've dealt with people who are truly poor or uneducated, but the narrowness of experience is really telling when you do. How much taste and sophistication is one supposed to develop if they can't even read, or never travel? But that was the norm not so long ago.
"Back in the late 1940s, when the Census Bureau started collecting this type of information, roughly 20% of the population moved in a given year, Ihrke referenced. Since then, the rate has fallen to between 11.5% and 12.5%." https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/americans-moving-at...
Imagine that they are fired. How do they earn their subsistence? Earth is now too crowded to live by hunting, and subsistence farming is even worse than wage slavery. The only available option is some kind of organized work for the marketplace.
'Internal Knowledge', is the paperwork that goes into knowing a specific job in a company. It multiplies rapidly as managers keep inventing more of it to protect their positions. It is useless, and cannot be used in another company. Companies use it as a form of punishment, you have to do this in our particular way or you won't get promoted.
But from what I've seen, people are dying to learn new things. Companies just don't want to teach employees anything new, so they won't leave and find another job. I've worked factory jobs, where this was the defacto policy. Don't teach any new skills to the new hires, they'll pickup and leave.
I'll give that there is no point in "work for the sake of work", and that bullshit jobs probably shouldn't exist, but the real question comes down to this: If you are not going to earn your own keep, who is going to earn it for you? Why the hell should somebody else's effort be spent sustaining you when they could be following their own aspirations. A 5-year old can understand this, but apparently many college educated westerners cannot (It usually clicks after they start paying their taxes)
A modern economy in a democratic state is built by the collective will of the people. No entity at the top setting rules, no modern economy. So: why the hell should everyone else agree to create and maintain a system that doesn't serve their needs to a degree that, taking into account the constraints of reality and not killing the golden goose et c. et c., satisfies them, regardless how nice a place you've found for yourself in same system?
However, when welfare is badly managed and is essentially given out to anybody, is overpaid because "muh rights to basic standard of living," and without adequate consideration of where the capital comes from to provide the welfare service, then there cannot be a sustainable welfare. The government does nothing but drain capital away.
Poor voters will always vote for the politicians who promise them freebies (out of other people's capital savings!) It is only savers who have skin in the game and who ultimately have the moral right to decide how their hard earned capital should be spent.
Youth for the past few decades have been fed a heavily distorted image of reality where they are expected to believe that capitalists are evil and that government is protecting them from those evil capitalists. It's no surprise they have no idea that capitalists are providing 100% of the funding of their welfare systems, and that their government only consumes the capital - it creates nothing, and cannot survive without the capitalists which fund it.
Capitalists are of course not these evil monsters who only care about getting rich at the detriment of everybody else. They're just regular people who try to improve their own lives, and accidentally improve other people's lives in the process if they succeed.
You really love capitalism: https://www.prageru.com/video/why-you-love-capitalism/
EDIT: I'm also quite entertained (though not in a good way) that we're having this conversation on the internet, in which it's being claimed that the government "creates nothing".
You cannot separate income and especially capital from the system we all collectively buy into (well enough not to rage-vote it out of existence, anyway). It's not magic'd into existence out of nowhere. It is nothing without laws, a military, treaties, some basic market-creating norms, the joint stock corporation, opportunities churned about by trust-busting (when we bother), and so on.
And no, that doesn't mean all your stuff belongs to everyone. It does mean that drawing an absolute and immutable line between what's yours and what's societies is more complicated than "it's mine, so there". There's no context to give capital meaning in anything like the sense anyone today expects, without society, without the state. The whole thing's "unnatural" and just because the system tilts one way or the other when regulation is adjusted doesn't mean any particular direction is absolutely correct or the natural state of things.
[EDIT] and more to the point, the various OECD states seem to have a decent track record of not killing the golden goose, while also protecting basic human dignity and providing more benefits to their population than the economy might give them "naturally" (Ha!) Bad, yes, but then look at what there is to compare them to, historically or now.
I'd imagine there are many positives to the system that you are ignoring simply to find the next Einstein. Which is kind of a fallacy, because science is not done by a lone genius but by teams of researchers over decades.
Maybe there are people in the world whose aspiration is to do those unglamorous things that need doing, just to keep the societal wheels properly greased. There are absolutely enough people in the world who are civically-minded enough that they'll take on crap work that needs doing, without obligating everyone else also to do what is, for most of them, also crap work, but which doesn't do those "socially necessary" things, and instead merely shuffles papers from one folder to another.
I fail utterly to see how "there are some things that need to be done" is most appropriately addressed by "Ok, make everyone do something..."
EDIT: Phrasing
If something needs to be done, someone has to do it. The person who is going to do it either must be forced (slavery) or compensated such that they do the unpleasant, necessary thing voluntarily (payment). If others, who do not want to do that thing want to reap the benefits of it, they can choose to force the other person to do it through violence or they can produce something else of value to exchange. That's why everyone who is able-bodied is ethically required to contribute to society: the only alternative to free exchange is forcing someone to be your slave. For those who are not able-bodied, the able-bodied among us voluntarily enslave ourselves on their behalf, to lift their burdens. But if you have the means to work and you choose to be a burden on society or your loved ones, that is an unethical choice.
evolution, for example, marches forward via experimentation over efficiency: billions of organisms, each slightly different, some highly viable, most marginally so, and some not viable. that's super-inefficient! it has to be easier to find the handfuls of best individuals and propagate them to the next generation, right?
capitalism, too, is inherently inefficient--people deploy capital in all sorts of ways, often profitlessly. it's not like we have one restaurant chain for each type of cuisine.
if the answers are so obvious, why don't we get it right the first time?
My highest "good", and the thing I want to optimize for, is human potential. So maybe Bob wouldn't have been another Einstein, but he could have invented something that made millions of people's lives marginally easier. But Bob had to pay for his (involuntary, on his part) existence, so he ended up driving a garbage truck instead. It's not a bad job, and he's not unhappy, but he knows there's something more, something missing. Do we really want to blame Bob for the structural forces that made "ensuring you can continue to eat" a question he even had to ask?
I'm arguing for a model where everyone is structurally enabled and encouraged to find their own best fitness function, on the theory that such a diversity of thinking and technique will yield a vastly richer world than the "you can have Coke or Pepsi", "Google or Bing", and so on one which we seem hell-bent on ending up with.
EDIT: That's not a question of efficiency. It's one of whether we're structurally dis-enabling people from living their best lives. If we are, what are we trading that for? So the fraction of a percent that already owns most of everything can own a little more of it?
Because, in my categories, when you argue for Capitalism, that's ultimately what you're arguing for: not iPhones and every kind of ethnic restaurant you might want, but more wealth concentration. If that weren't the case, then wages should have risen alongside prices.
Instead, this rising tide is only lifting the biggest boats, while only the waterline is rising for everyone else, and that seems awfully likely to end badly for pretty much all of us. Just look at the history of more or less every other time people have resorted to trying communism in response to exploitation. Those tend to be among the worst outcomes, don't you think?
EDIT 2: Preemptively, no, I don't think the fact that (some) people can buy iPhones or big-screen TVs or whatever means things are great. The real measure of the health of an economy is better taken with things like the prevalence of precarity, than how whiz-bag a thing someone can buy, if they happen to have the right number of monkey status points available at the moment of purchase.