The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.
Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy.
-- John Maynard Keynes [0]
My personal conspiracy theory is that the age of abundance has already come but we just don't know what to do with it other than keep working our BS jobs.
> The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance.
Do dogs think of their masters in this way? We know what happens to dogs that don't want to live out of their masters hand, they are put down. Will the same thing happen to humans without masters?
It's hard to solve things like poverty when a tiny minority is hoarding most of the increase in wealth, and in fact often profits or draws political power from maintaining inequality in its various forms.
https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty
"In 1990, there were 1.9 billion people living in extreme poverty. With a reduction to 735 million in 2015, this means that on average, every day in the 25 years between 1990 and 2015, 128,00 fewer people were living in extreme poverty.17
On every day in the last 25 years there could have been a newspaper headline reading, “The number of people in extreme poverty fell by 128,000 since yesterday”. Unfortunately, the slow developments that entirely transform our world never make the news, and this is the very reason why we are working on this online publication.
Recently this decline got even faster and in the 7 years from 2008 to 2015 the headline could have been “Number of people in extreme poverty fell by 192,000 since yesterday”. In the recent past we saw the fastest reduction of the number of people in extreme poverty ever."
I seem to have severely underestimated the ability of HN readers to see basic economic data that's both well known and easy to look up like the rate at which the wealth of different demographics is changing as uncontroversial, which is...well, it's a thing.
So either you've overstated the difficulty of solving poverty or overestimated the amount of hoarding or overestimated the impact of hoarding on the rate of solving poverty. Perhaps the amount of wealth someone has isn't entirely relevant to the amount of poverty, since wealth is not a zero-sum game.
Resource allocation being equal is not a prerequisite for eliminating poverty. Kings used to have all the wealth but the poorest American today still has a much better standard of living than the wealthiest kings from just a 200 years ago.
What Keynes means by economic abundance is not the state where everyone has equally large bank accounts. Economic abundance is when even poor people have machines clean their clothes for them.
A tiny minority isn't hoarding all the washing machines, cell phones, and air conditioners.
But a great many people don't have washing machines or air conditioners. You can rent the former, at the cost of more money and time. People die every year from lack of access to the latter.
It's not like air conditioners themselves are necessarily insurmountably expensive, although that varies by location, but you have to factor things like socioeconomic access to housing that comes with or allows it, as well as the cost of power to operate it sufficiently, plus having it be affordable enough that you already have it before it's a heat-stroke-and-die problem for you to not have it.
Sixty year olds with bad hips and fixed income don't generally go out and buy an air conditioner because it's hotter that year. Not everyone is a healthy twenty year old male with flexible disposable income, and sometimes people die because of the assumption that those form a useful ideal model of the overall population.
Particular definitions of wealth depend on what's contextually useful, and are thus quite varied. But I've yet to see one that deals with having an increasingly poor Gini coefficient in a way that makes that a desirable outcome, or which absolves people of intentionally pulling on it for their own benefit without regard for how that impacts millions of others.
People doing obviously shitty things to society are doing shitty things to society, and you'd expect a good definition or model to show as much. If you fit an elephant to the data and squint in a way that makes it sound like it's actually good, when that contradicts observable reality to first order, it's probably a bad model.
The idea that people pay other people for no reason at all is completely divorced from reality.
Typically person A pays _someone else's money_ to person B, and the someone else (person C) isn't around to pay attention to the details.
I think that makes all the difference, especially when it's iterated over many layers of indirection.
A is in some sense a custodian of what person C values, but that indirection means A is also optimising to keep A in a job without distracting too much from the joy of running a fiefdom, hiding the fact they don't really know what they are doing, etc. So A is paying B for what A thinks looks good enough to C, not necessarily what C would actually value if they understood what was going on.
Let's suppose that indirection only adds a tiny amount of BS, say B is doing 10% BS work to satisfy A's misguided impulses (using C's money not A's), and 90% what C values.
Then add a full economy. Now B is paying D using money they got from A, who got it from C. B is optimising to keep B in a job, so they try to do things that look good to A, while avoiding too much effort for B. To keep ths model simple, let's say the BS adds up and C's money ends up paying for D to do 20% BS work and 80% what C values. But it's all in a good cause, as far as C knows, this is great stuff - literally, the best money can buy.
Throw in a few more layers of indirection and the BS compounds.
Of course the world isn't that simple. By your definition, D's work is all meaningfully valuable to B, B's work is all meaninfully valuable to A, and A's work is all meaningfully valuable to C.
So this does not mean people pay other people for no _local_ reason.
But it's not transitive. C's money may be paying for D to do work that is not meaningfully valuable to C, despite everyone in the chain providing value to each other.
So is it BS work or isn't it? My take is that a significant fraction of work is BS when viewed from a wider perspective: what does this work do for society, people more broadly; yet at the same time, it is much more useful when viewed looking at neighbouring relationships, close up. After all, a job helping someone else keep their job is of immense personal value to the latter person, so that's a factor in how they allocate their ability to spend other people's money.
Since "helping someone else keep a job" is highly valued by those people whose jobs are kept, it's almost inevitable that a big feedback system emerges in which a significant fraction of all work paid for is for the purpose of keeping people in jobs.
P.S. http://www.berglas.org/Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/I...
Working in this industry, in particular if you are not in SV, you see the variety of people, purposes, and goals that comprise tech companies.
As far as what I do personally, I've focused my career in the public sector since 2012, writing software that saves money for school districts. I watch the pricing models that our sales team comes up with to be aware whether they cross the line where our fees are greater than the cost savings, and therefore would cut into student funding. My side projects focus on building tools to help the creative efforts of my children. In short, I try to avoid work that is purely money-driven.
Most people appreciate what I... no we do. Every app and site I've worked has been liked by both clients and customers.
Instead, the tech 'backlash' side is being played up by the media rather than the public. Likely because technology and the internet in particular has decimated their business model, and the people working there aren't exactly happy about it. But that's not the sentinment of most, it's just looking like it is because the folks with the largest megaphones are the ones most against it.
Do I feel some dissonance in some things? Sure, I guess I've always found it hard to reason that someone making say, hundreds of thousands or millions/billions of pounds or dollars a year really deserves that much more than everyone else. But that's not really a tech thing.
To much tech is likely not helpful. I think social media makes people lonelier, porn and online games are also not completely nonproblematic. If you plot a curve with amount of tech on the x-axis and happiness on the y-axis then I think it would look like a parabola (hill). And most people in the Western world are probably beyond the maximum.
Someone will object that pacemakers save lives, Facebook helps people reconnect with old friends and Fitbit motivates people to get in shape. That is all true, but such tech-enabled activities seem to be in the minority... Like reading news sites for 15 minutes per day is time well-spent. But reloading news sites and idly browsing through headlines every 15 minutes per day is a waste of time.
We are nerds, we should be able to spot bullies and their tactics well by now. As a minimum we should not allow them to bully us.
Can you or anyone else elaborate on this? I'm really not aware of this negative sentiment.