* Fiat currency
* Economics is not a real science
* I understand what the author is trying to say, but I don't like how he says it
* I didn't read the piece, but website that published it is problematic
* The title is clickbait, and I'm unaware of the concept of newspaper headlines
The fact that you say you read the article and this attack was your best comment... well I’d say one of these comments is basically worthless and it’s not the guy who pointed out the problem with the title.
Furthermore, a lot of people go to the comments first for a variety of reasons. Nothing wrong with that either.
“By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return."
It's not the same story.
Edit: I'd like to see the downvoters argue against the notion that some work is more essential than other work. Hasn't the COVID-19 crisis opened your eyes to this reality?
It was talking about honest, real work.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
That's in the site guidelines too: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
We might as well say, you're a slave to oxygen and water, then you die.
To me, the infrastructure and experimentation and science that leads to all homes having reliable, potable water is miraculous.
There’s very large swaths of the planet where you are supposed to drink only bottled water, from a bottle unsealed in front of you.
Let's look at it from this perspective: what percentage of your country's workforce is actively involved in providing clean water?
If it were such a huge effort to provide for relatively basic human needs, then I'd imagine we'd have more people working on that and less people working on advertising, entertainment, rent-seeking, making & marketing disposable novelty products, etc.
As for what portion of the population is needed to provide clean water, I don’t see how that is a useful or measurable metric. Certainly the discovery process of cleaning the water, the materials science in creating the pipes, learning about lead poisoning and changing that, and so on and so forth is a huge effort in my books.
Also, going forward, access to clean water is looking like it will be a source of conflict. It’s not in the timescale of the next 5 to 10 years, so people take it for granted, but certainly the grandchildren of today will have to deal with procuring this “effortless” resources.
One might even say the same for oxygen in developing countries where poor people have to live next to factories under a permanent cloud of pollution. They literally can’t go for a run because of a lack of clean air!
Is that the "natural" order of things? Certainly it isn't, at least no more than markets or money represent a "natural order." In fact, we can make a convincing case that the tainting of fresh water is the direct consequence of this kind of market-oriented thought.
The author seems less concerned with what "happens easily" than with what is taken as a kind of natural law. The dominant ideology of the present (for which he is presenting an intellectual history) supposes that market forces are this natural law. It is this supposition that cannot stand up to long term history. We are better off reading anthropology and sociology when trying to understand the origins of money and exchange than we are economists, who simply invent facile notions of their origins seemingly out of thin air
This article seems to want to return to a pseudo-Rousseau view of the world where the wilds are religious.
Given the context of this article, it's then worth asking: were the "markets" of the Magdalenian also "robust"?
More people have mobile phones than have access to improved sanitation.
Without it, you die early of disease.
Humanity really didn’t even control their poop all that well until a couple of hundred years ago with the invention of the modern toilet and the S-trap.