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Comment by cercatrova | Hacker News Reader

When I read stories like this, I always think of the systemic factors that are creating this behavior; that America, and indeed many countries in the world, do not have the social safety nets to take care of its own people when they can't work anymore. It would be better and more efficient for a nation as a whole to take care of its children so that they can choose their own avenues of success rather than needing to choose between two hard choices. Imagine where mankind could be if we had everyone being able to have the basics, and ample free time to think, to explore, to experiment, to create. I dream to see such a world, and to see the human progress that results.

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> ... so that they can choose their own avenues of success ...

At present 'success' in practice is basically synonymous with 'resource consumption'. At a guess that is going to be a very sticky connection that might even be wired in at the biological level; it seems to be quite consistent across the different cultures I know of.

It is not possible to liberate people to pursue success by improving the social safety nets. People who use their free time to advance society are as rare as hens teeth; even most of the productive people use their free time to advance their own interests or their immediate families interests.

I think there is a good argument for making sure everyone has few-questions-asked access to ~9,000 kJ/day of food and some sort of safe housing to live in. We live in wealthy times. But a social safety net isn't going to set people up for success in any way that is meaningful to most people.

> I think there is a good argument for making sure everyone has few-questions-asked access to ~9,000 kJ/day of food and some sort of safe housing to live in. We live in wealthy times. But a social safety net isn't going to set people up for success in any way that is meaningful to most people.

I find that a very sad view. Many people I know can't start a business or do risky things because of food, shelter, medical insurance/premiums. I know I'd jump if I knew that if/when I failed, I wouldn't be destitute.

Right now, doing such is primarily relegated to inheritance, familial money, or miraculously winning it 'big' (Horatio Alger stories). They have the cushion. They can fall back to safety within family money. They have connections.

We don't have any of those things going for us. But then again, people also think we're just too lazy or unmeaningful. No, we just know what's being risked, and we can't make that choice with the threat of destitution.

The bottom goes pretty deep in the US.

> Many people I know can't start a business or do risky things because of food, shelter, medical insurance/premiums.

I believe that's a personal thing, some people would, but most wouldn't. Some people would get hyper productive if everything was taken care off, others would barely leave their flat.

> I know I'd jump if I knew that if/when I failed, I wouldn't be destitute.

You wouldn't be in Western Europe. Yet, very few people jump and take a chance. I don't think that the effect is that large, if it exists at all - don't forget that social safety nets come at a price: (very) high taxes, lots of regulation, entrepreneurship isn't looked at the same way, the systems are rather static.

At present 'success' in practice is basically synonymous with 'resource consumption'.

This reminded me of one of my favourite quotes from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri:

"Resources exist to be consumed. And consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? None I say! Let us take what is ours, chew and eat our fill."

-- CEO Nwabudike Morgan "The Ethics of Greed"

Point to evidence that free time leads people to do these wonderful things.

In a macro sense, biological life/evolution, economics, and production of goods points to innovation and efficiency gains being made by risking one’s time/enengy/resources in hope of creating a new local efficient outcome.

Free time has nothing do with that.

Yeah,

I like our world isn't wonderful as is.

Imagine what a peasant from 300 years ago would think seeing what their work would be value at today.

Its peanuts in our perspective, but not starving is a start, eating meat would be a luxury, being able to see a doctor.

Hating ourselves is trending right now, sad.

I would certainly hope that 300 years of techonological progress would offer the basics to a "peasant".

I believe the peasant's king would be just as astonished.

Do you think our world isn't incredible, and by far the best a human could ever hope for so far?

> by far the best a human could ever hope for so far?

Wow. I am without words.

All I can say is, some people have bigger imaginations than others and being a slave to capital is not always paradise.

The bit about the king completely misses the point. Again, I would hope that in 300 years, technological progress UNDER ANY SYSYTEM would afford "miracles" in the eyes of kings or peasants. jfc.

The entire open source software ecosystem?

Arguably, the advances we have now in modern day is because we have generally decided that everyone should be able to read, write, do arithmetic. Now we have a massive funnel (the entire generation) to do innovation. This is a much larger pool than was possible with a very narrow subset of the population capable of these things.

We also know that stress and poverty actually reduce the brain's capacity to think, and even moreso, a child who suffers from stress/hunger/general poverty has a stunted brain development due to exposure to stress in their formative years. So, naturally, we can say that not having systematic stressors like hunger, economic insecurity, health concerns, etc. would lead people to have greater capacity for wonderful things.

In a making stuff up sense, you can fit near any narrative you want to near any set of data about our history. Consider, used to be there was literally nothing to do for the majority of the day/night for folks. Yes, you could tend the garden and such, but that was done before sun was fully overhead or you would suffer exposure symptoms. You could watch the herds, but that was mostly passive, for mostly the same reasons.

With that narrative, many scientists in history were not people that didn't have to do some of these boring things. They were people that filled their free time with experimentation and other observations.

Of course, that is just one narrative to fit to the data. I'm sure there are others. But it is not just incumbent on one side to give evidence. Can you point to evidence that free time is not beneficial? Observationally, as a parent, forcing my kids to have boring free time has led to them doing/learning as much as forcing them to productive learning time. (Indeed, I've grown sympathetic to the argument that productive learning time often isn't either of its claims. )

The inventor in a shed is a well trodden meme. Pre 20th century most science seems to have been done by rich amateurs. The most interesting blogs I've come across are just interested amateurs trying things out.

I'm not sure there's a linear relationship between free time and scientific progress, but people need free time to scratch their itches, and sometimes this itches progress our understanding of the world.

I like the idea of those things. However, this is HN, and full of people that would try to be productive/creative for society if they had a safety net that allowed them to pursue awesome endeavors. Many people work to earn money, not to free up time so pursue their passions and hobbies. There are a significant amount of Americans that would enjoy the safety net by watching Netflix, eating, gambling, etc. There is nothing inherently wrong with those things if you enjoy them, however, a benefit of the current model is that people who aren’t creative/ambitious/driven end up spending 40ish hours a week working on things that are useful for other people or businesses.

I’m not sure I see a case where the economic machine speeds up by giving people limitless free time.

I like the idea of a safety net for healthcare btw, bc even privately we pay too much, and the current system sucks to use, pay for, experience, etc. A world where the basics are given sounds nice, but there are a seriously concerning amount of people that are wildly lazy (I wish there was a dataset to measure this I was aware of, but I’m going off of the towns I grew up in and people I knew.)

I’ve been unemployed for a significant time period. The pressure to work is huge. I’d bet with a safety net, most people would still be working a similar amount of time.

Possibly, but there are a lot of people unlike yourself that don’t feel a major pressure to work, some might continue but there would be more currently employed people that would choose not to work as much, than currently unemployed people that would choose to start work under a big net IMHO.

Just with the arithmetic of 5ish% of unemployment. People who start working under a net can only be 5% of population. People who stop working or work much less could be up to 95% of population. Much bigger percentage has possibility to work less under that system.

Sure. Other comments in this thread are throwing out numbers like 99% of people would chill at home with tv on all day just because of a safety net. I wasn’t sure what sort of degree you were going with things.

Of course more people would take advantage of the system, but Americans overall as a society don’t like excessive laziness and put pride in some amount of work being done. Not working and being poor is frowned upon generally. To keep things loose, this is true for at least greater than 50% of the country.

> Imagine where mankind could be if we had everyone being able to have the basics, and ample free time to think, to explore, to experiment, to create.

Western Europe has vast social safety nets going way beyond "the basics". Yet you don't see an explosion of innovation, culture, art, philosophy or what have you. They may not be related, or a full belly isn't hungry and doesn't look for ways to fill itself.

You do though, you’re just not aware of it. When you look at the cultural life of French cities for example, it’s 1000x richer than the cultural life of an American city the same size. And one could easily argue they don’t cover « the basics ».

That may well be, but that's just one aspect France has generally always been known for (whether it's accurate, I don't know). New musical styles, for example, mostly came from the US in recent decades. Whether Broadway can be compared to Paris' musicals, I don't know. I just don't see the explosion that you'd expect. Europe should have Star Trek technology if that was the case ;)

And sure, you could argue that they don't cover the basics, but you'd have to expand the understanding of basics, tbh. Germany gives you shelter, food, health insurance, money to spend on culture, public transportation, free education including university, a TV etc pp. That's beyond basics in my book. Sure, a car isn't included, but you don't need one either.

France is ahead in fashion and few other art forms. America is ahead in popular art because LA is the silicon valley of culture and has the population of Europe.

After a certain point it's a language and population thing, and France has a language barrier compared to english.

I've never really understood fashion, so I can't comment on that (Whoever makes the models wear the most ridiculous outfit wins?). However, why isn't France going to Mars? Where is France (or Germany, or Sweden etc for that matter) creating the Internet, or GPS, or Hip-Hop, or Jazz, or doing cutting edge medical research? It's not that they don't do that at all - it just, that, if the safety net was such a strong driving force, we'd be light years ahead of the US. And we're really not.

While I hear your point that the explosion of cultural proceedings is below the utopia mentioned here, it may be worth noting that the WWW was invented by a guy born in London working partly for the French government. That was Tim Berners-Lee ;)

Yeah, I'm not arguing that nothing happens in Europe, just that it's not overwhelming - which it would have to be if the social safety nets were a deciding factor.

I don't that social safety nets play a large role - for most academics, researchers, engineers, artists, there's a de facto social safety net (via tenure, high income, patents, equity, stock options, grants, strong job security etc), so a general safety net doesn't improve their situation and output. And having a general safety net also doesn't by itself increase the amount of people of exceptional skill and/or ability.

I'm not against safety nets (though I do believe that we've gone too far and have created strong negative incentives), but I do believe that "our society will be like Star Trek" doesn't hold water. We have them, and our societies aren't like Star Trek.

Regarding culture superiority, I feel like it's just that the big and wealthy countries manage to spread their culture the most, and that's what catches on in the world. If jazz and hip-hop were invented in the Czech Republic instead of the US, there would be much larger chance of it staying just a local phenomenon, and the world would be taken over by some other cultural trend instead.

Possibly, but I'm not convinced. France and Germany spend lots of money to subsidize their artists, the French have gone so far to order radio stations to play a quota of French music - yet despite their wealth and their size (on the European level at least), they don't dominate culturally.

That's not to say that it couldn't be random that a lot of the recent advancements happened in the US, I just don't find it likely.

The problem with subsidised art (or subsidised anything really) is that the money in large part goes to the people who are well connected and great at weaseling their way into funding. So, there's a constant stream of always-mediocre French, German etc. (state-funded) movies in local artsy cinemas in Poland, which no one wants to watch, because they're mediocre.

In other words, the film makers are not subject to the market forces, they don't need to make something that the audience actually wants. The official stats of the PISF (polish state institute which funds movies) say that only 4 out of hundreds funded movies have recouped the state investment via tickets and other sales. The rests are flops, which is not a problem for anyone involved. That's how you get bad art.

Yeah, I've been having similar feelings. The state acts like a monopoly on culture and so the focus isn't on the audience but on the grant administrators. At least we're creating a proxy indicator for studying the tastes and likes of the officials that decide what gets subsidized ;)

I think you should vary your news sources, or pay more attention to the names. A large amount of cutting-edge research comes from EU universities and companies, especially Germany, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, UK. Related business ventures will always pop up in the US first though, due to the vast investment capital.

> A large amount of cutting-edge research comes from EU universities and companies

I'm not attacking European universities and companies, I'm not arguing that there isn't any great research, I'm saying it's not a multiple of the US, which it really should be if "have a strong social safety net and the possibilities are endless" was true.

« Has generally been known for », is your cultural biases showing.

Spend a year in France (or Germany for that matter), you’ll realize that the social safety net isn’t as good as it is, but also that a lot of things you wouldn’t notice. France has a shit-ton of food innovations you’ve never heard of, great universities, the world record on rail speed, vibrant local theater life in almost every town. You just can’t know about those things if you’re not there, just like people outside the US have no idea what life is like in the US.

It's partially because, in Europe, the states are funding arts in a myriad of ways (grants for writers, video game designers, major money for covering costs of making films, tons of museums etc.), while in the US, even the major philharmonics are only funded by private sponsors. In EU, if you're very good at networking, art can be relatively easy money.

Many systems would be "better and more efficient for a nation as a whole" if everyone was 100% selfless and treated the welfare of others as exactly as important as their own welfare.

Sadly, the way the universe works, any such system is open to free riders who take more than their share.

Tragedy of the commons.

The only solutions we've found so far are:

1. Assign people control of what they create, so they can benefit from their own efforts, and are thus incentivized to make those efforts. Side effect: People who didn't/can't create much have a really hard time (this is what you're concerned about).

2. Assign control of what people create to a central authority that redistributes it evenly, and also have that central authority kill anyone who tries to change or exploit the system. This hasn't tended to work out well.

1. You don't need to get "more health". You get treated and you feel better again.

2. All people should have the right of food. I don't care how much you make, who you are, or whatever. You live, and that's your right. We should be working on automated farms so we can grow this locally.

3. Same, for water.

4. If you don't have a place to sleep, we provide you one. May not be big, but a place to sleep and call home is essential in solving homelessness. And it provides a way out of the poverty trap.

5. Communication should be inexpensive. I would prefer free for lower bandwidth. Its an essential for jobs and so much more. An internet connection is one of the biggest ways into self sufficiency.

I admit this sounds utopian, but the problem I have with such set-ups is they remind me of perpetual-motion machines.

Even this humble level of safety net that you propose is incredibly expensive. Who does the hard work of building the small apartments? Who comes out and works on the plumbing when it clogs? And who picks up the trash every week and takes it to the dump? Who runs the water plant, the electrical plant, and who runs the fiber out for even the free, slow tier of internet? Who makes the base model of phone or laptop that everyone would be entitled to? Who tends the robots at the automated farm? Who polices the buildings and neighborhoods full of all these otherwise-indisposed inhabitants? Who provides medical care?

Answer: The Government. The Government offers decent pay for all these dirty jobs, to keep these resources available even to those who pay nothing. Where does the Government get the money to pay all these people? Answer: Taxes. Taxes on whom? It can't be taxes on the general populace, because they don't have any money, which is why you propose these things be free. So it must be taxes on the upper tiers, people who are working more than the baseline. They could settle for the free stuff, but they choose to work to earn more and get more.

But my objections are twofold.

1. It just doesn't seem fair. All these people that are rich and supposedly could share their wealth with the rest of us, like Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who are billionaires, they didn't have to do the things that made them rich. They chose to work at the things that made them so. If instead they chose not to do those things, then they wouldn't be billionaires, and that would be two fewer people you could tax the dickens out of.

2. It just doesn't seem like it will all add up in the end, at least not forever. Even though there are lots of rich people, I don't think there are enough rich people to keep society going forever off their taxes. First of all you would have to tax them so hard that it would be demoralizing to them. And it would be demoralizing to others who also would consider doing something to become rich.

A dream I have that might work is that every able-bodied person is required to work, but the standard work week is halved. If I only had to work 20 hours a week at my day job, I would be ecstatic, and I think I would have enough time for my hobbies, art, open-source contributions, and other things that people are talking about benefit the rest of society, if only people were given a breath to work on them.

I still think 40 hours a week is pretty hard, especially when you consider that people who work only 40 hours a week don't work only 40 hours a week. Add in commutes, runs to the grocery store, chores, home repairs, and other the other work you must do, unpaid, it adds up easily to 50% more. And I have not even mentioned parenting.

If people could live comfortably working 10-20 hours at an official job (not counting the other work I mentioned), that would be paradise. I don't think I would even want to work 0 hours a week. I would start to go stir-crazy.

> America, and indeed many countries in the world, do not have the social safety nets to take care of its own people when they can't work anymore.

I don't see any good alternatives to having children take care of their parents. Abuse is common at even the most expensive nursing homes. You can't always blame the caretakers either because being constantly surrounded by grumpy, dying people has a huge psychological toll.

> You can't always blame the caretakers either

What? There is absolutely no excuse for elder abuse. Are you kidding with this?

While I agree with you, it’s an extremely hard job for the reasons he stated. Low pay, dealing with nasty people, doing demeaning work. It’s not exactly a career most people choose.

Abuse isn't necessarily physical. Most of the time it's negligence, which is more forgivable.

> Imagine where mankind could be if we had everyone being able to have the basics, and ample free time to think, to explore, to experiment, to create.

Realistically? Probably better than 99% of people would play video games and watch TV their whole lives. Not everybody is oriented to be an artist/author, an inventor, a scientist, or some other creative type.

> Not everybody is oriented to be an artist/author, an inventor, a scientist, or some other creative type.

More people probably are naturally oriented in a way compatible with that (perhaps not to be commercially successful at it, but that's expressly not an issue) before they are aggressively socialized out of it by people who want to prepare them for the economic necessities of surviving in the world we actually live in, where indulging such an orientation without the particular combination of skill and luck needed for commercial success is often a recipe for misery.

Lack of public recognition for their creative efforts would just as aggressively socialize the less talented people out of trying to create for all but the most determined.

>Realistically? Probably better than 99% of people would play video games and watch TV their whole lives. Not everybody is oriented to be an artist/author, an inventor, a scientist, or some other creative type.

More people than you'd think, not saying they'd be good at it but they'd do more than play video games all the time. Nowadays you have people streaming, making podcasts, making tf2 hats, youtube videos, cosplay, fan-fiction, dancing, playing non-professional sports, graffiti, etc, etc.

If for every thousand people that spent all their time playing video games- or doing other enjoyable activities that don't leave a lasting legacy- one person was allowed to create an invention or make a scientific discovery or write a great novel, our civilization could easily still come out ahead. I also doubt it would be nearly so binary. I believe that most people do possess self-directed creativity and productivity, in varying ways and to varying degrees.

The percentage of people who take full advantage of being freed from working to survive isn't terribly important; it's the number.

More likely the freeloaders would just spend their time doing activism to get even more hand outs from the producers.

Given time, everyone would become producers in some form or fashion. There are studies regarding boredom and people would rather electrically shock themselves than sit still. If you had no job and money coming in, sure you would binge Netflix or do some other mindless activity, but how long can you keep that up? A week? A month? A year? Sooner or later you're going to get up and do something interesting. Humans have innate natural curiosity, like when you were a child, touching and noticing everything. Through excess work, that wonder is taken away because people must work to survive, but imagine an endless summer where you're tinkering in the garage, or writing code for a new project. Imagine the possibilities that people could come up with, new inventions and new ideas that eventually will propel the human race forward.

Some people are indeed doers. I don't think the majority are though. Look at people on welfare, that's not how they behave.

I think you're confusing what you would like to happen with what is likely to happen.

Even a good safety net is not going to provide more than the bare minimum. I don’t think I would stop saving and start blowing all my money even if the government decided to guarantee I wouldn’t be homeless or hungry under any circumstances.

Inclusive vs. Exclusive systems. A good (and comprehensible/relatable) overview can be found in this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12158480-why-nations-fai...

What does it mean for a nation as a whole to "take care of" its children? Or specifically, what is it beyond public schools that we'd want to satisfy that?

Is it simply better public schools where they're doing poorly, or something else I am missing?

Rights of the Child,https://www.unicef.org/child-rights-convention/convention-te... is a reasonable baseline.

Yeah, this is pretty reasonable.

I'm curious, when you start getting into how to educate children in a way to have them fulfill their potential, how we measure whether or not we're succeeding. I definitely do not think we are (in the US). I also perceive a "will" to succeed, but everyone disagrees on how to make that reality, and I don't believe that this sort of list, while reasonable, does much to help in the way of solving the problem. I'm not saying it's a bad list or I disagree with it, it's just not prescriptive in terms of, "This is how you help children reach their full potential."

(And then we start getting into questions about what is full potential? If we're thinking in a short-sighted way, full potential is probably limited to their usefulness to the economic system balanced with their own relative mental health.)

I meant children as in its citizenry, metaphorically, as one could see the country as a maternal manifestation of the will of the people. Literally though, sure, we would need better public schools that are more equalized in teaching science and philosophy, or other such disciplines. I admit I haven't delved too deep in thinking about that part.

> ample free time to think, to explore, to experiment, to create

People would probably go crazy from the boredom and start killing themselves. Work and struggle are good and inspire more creativity and inventiveness than doing nothing

There were (and still are) whole families of aristocrats who never needed to lift a finger in their life, and they seemed to find ways to not be too bored. I've never heard of high degrees of suicides amongst the very rich.

That's because, in order to cement an image of being better than others, aristocratic suicides were usually reported as accidents. In Europe during the Middle Ages, suicide was condemned by the church of course, and penalties were laid against the estate. That's in Europe; in other places in the world, it was expected, and rather common. For example, what is a duel, other than a suicide pact? In the absence of actual struggle, humans will make something up to be offended by so they can struggle against it. It is human nature.

Of course, today, suicide is less of a taboo, and indeed suicide rates are higher in richer neighborhoods, as one would expect: https://www.businessinsider.com/link-between-wealth-and-suic...

> It would be better and more efficient for a nation as a whole to take care of its children

What exactly do you mean by that? State raising children? No families? That sounds dystopian to me.

That’s an interesting jump to make. I’ve never heard any one say that’s the way to go. You’d have to have a 99.99% extremist view to be serious about no families.

They likely mean what is the more obvious assumption. We take taking care of all children as a serious problem and try to have certain benefits happen for all children. IE they shouldn’t be going hungry or not going to school.

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