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Comment by erik_seaberg | Hacker News Reader

Harvesting food is terrible work. How do we motivate people to do it when we aren't making any stuff for them to buy?

It's a modern disease to think the only reason people work is because of money and the fear of being homeless.

In WWII the US increased agricultural production in order to feed Britain and the Soviet Union. Despite very tight limits on non essential goods. Workers took their wages, paid off debts or them in the bank.

Even if we somehow completely shut down production of stuff to buy, and all existing stocks disappeared... there are plenty of people that would accept large paychecks to save for later. We need less than one percent of the population to be harvesting food.

We use machines to do it and improve productivity. Then we employ people to make the machines.

We can only motivate them because their alternatives are much worse.

Eh? People will harvest food to not starve. You don't even have to pay them.

To avoid starvation, people only have to harvest enough food for themselves. They don't have to harvest food for millions of other people who aren't harvesting food themselves. But there's no way for all those millions of other people to go and harvest their own food. That's just not the way food production is set up. Nor should it be, if we want to have anything more than a bare subsistence standard of living.

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