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Comment by sm4rk0 | Hacker News Reader

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Capitalism is fine, just don't treat it as a religion (looking sternly at you, HN crowd) and know that it needs to be fixed from time to time. We've been patching capitalism for centuries if not millennia: abolishing indentured servitude, environmental protection, public education, workers' rights, market regulations...

All that needs to be done is to properly mandate maximum work hours (no overtime even if the worker is willing).

> All that needs to be done is to properly mandate maximum work hours (no overtime even if the worker is willing).

We are close to that in Norway already. See https://www.arbeidstilsynet.no/en/working-conditions/working...

Quote:

The Working Environment Act defines working hours as time when the employee is at the disposal of the employer. The time the employee is not at the disposal of the employer is referred to as off-duty time.

There are limits for how much you may work per 24-hour day and per week. These limits are laid down in the Working Environment Act, but may also be regulated by your employment contract and by any collective agreements.

The limits prescribed by the Working Environment Act for normal working hours are:

    9 hours per 24 hours

    40 hours per 7 days

If you work shifts, nights or Sundays, normal working hours are 38 or 36 hours a week. The duration and disposition of the daily and weekly working hours must be stated in your employment contract.

The employer shall keep an account of the employee’s working hours. Calculation on the basis of a fixed average

The normal working hours may be calculated on the basis of a fixed average. This means that you may work more than the limit for normal working hours during certain periods in exchange for working correspondingly shorter hours during other periods. The average number of hours worked must be within the limits for normal working hours.

end quote

I'm pretty hardcore capitalist but I also have started to think more about the ideas that go under the heading "market society" -- namely, that everything has its price, that we'll trade away all kinds of things, family time, vacation, meals with friends, etc. for some kind of price. That everything can be bought and sold, that everything has its price.

Some things have to remain outside the realm of market exchange. Marriage is a good example. You just can't put a price on it. Ditto for kids, and a lot of other highly meaningful life experiences.

I think the problem is thinking that markets and commerce are the whole story. They aren't. There's just so much more to life: serving others, community, family. None of this is anti-capitalist per se.

> From above, we can only conclude that capitalism and profit-oriented economy are insane

I don't see the conclusion. I can only see there are many specific problems with capitalism.

The quote starts with "In a sane world" and from the rest of the quote we can see that we're not living in such world. Isn't that enough to conclude that the (most of the) world is not sane, ie insane?

A major function of capitalism is to direct human attention towards utilitarian valuation, which produces the growth-and-exploitation formula we are familiar with: more stuff is made, more land is developed, but it is often done by overfitting to market prices.

But increasingly we are turning the valuation process over to algorithms, sensors, and other precision instruments. If we extrapolate this onwards, the market exchange will become vestigial in not that many years: the algorithms involved will already know how much can be sustainably produced, consumed, transported and trashed, and there will be known bounds to personal and societal consumption relative to planetary capacity. At that point, transition away from capitalism will seem obvious. And we might be closer to this point than it looks.

But what will happen when we get to that point? What world will these algorithms create for us? Will it be the utopia of Earth in Star Trek? Or will it be a "Disneyland with no children"[0], once economy becomes fully self-contained and eliminates its dependency on humans, leaving Earth to be inherited by machines endlessly working and trading, with no sentient being to see it or enjoy the fruits of that labor?

[0] - A phrase coined by Nick Bostrom, in "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies":

"We could imagine, as an extreme case, a technologically highly advanced society, containing many complex structures, some of them far more intricate and intelligent than anything that exists on the planet today – a society which nevertheless lacks any type of being that is conscious or whose welfare has moral significance. In a sense, this would be an uninhabited society. It would be a society of economic miracles and technological awesomeness, with nobody there to benefit. A Disneyland with no children."

> At that point, transition away from capitalism will seem obvious.

I expect the global population to be reduced and/or reprogrammed over time (via genetic interventions) long before I expect techno-capitalist industrial society to implode.

The horror that is possible with technology is essentially unbounded, and any discomfort caused to humans can be overcome through drugs and similar measures. Hell, we're already medicating people in first-world economies in extraordinary numbers.

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