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Comment by Joker_vD | Hacker News Reader

Reading this argument is always pretty surreal. There is some amount of population that is employed to provide the most basic commodities: food, fuel, medicine, infrastructure maintenance, logistics, healthcare, etc. Even if everyone else would go to lockdown, they still can provide the same amount of food, medicine, etc. Well, physically, at least.

But apparently the economy is arranged in such a way that even though it's absolutely in the realm of physical possibility to keep those people working and supplying the rest of the population that have to sit down and not work with all the stuff needed for survival, it can't be done for economical reasons. Because apparently the economy that we have can't be made work this way? For some reason?

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You seem to be assuming that a certain portion of the population needs to work, and the rest of the population doesn't really need to work.

This is just not true, at least not in the timeframe of months/years that we're talking about. Or at least, not true while continuing to enjoy a fairly modern lifestyle.

I mean, we can definitely get rid of anyone working in education, for example. And get rid of anyone working in anything that helps with education (e.g. software for education, etc). We can also get rid of anyone working in entertainment. Or tech. That is definitely doable. It just means a huge portion of the population can't do 90% of the things they do all day (i.e. jobs aside, how much time do people spend watching TV, on the internet, etc?).

But it is true, isn't it? There are lots of people who don't work and still live (relatively) well. And today, thanks to the technical progress, this number is larger than it was, say, 500 years ago.

Well yes, we're more productive, so a lot less people work. E.g. people usually retire, young people usually don't work, people usually work fewer hours, etc. That doesn't mean we can just cut most of what is left and still have everything we want.

I mean, do you think that most people are not really productive most of the time? As in not doing anything that will be missed? Can you point out those things? Again, we still need teachers, we still need fairly large amounts of people to continue producing forms of entertainment, we still need fairly large numbers of people to keep the internet working, etc. Where are there huge swathes of jobs that you are OK with just not having anymore?

"do you think that most people are not really productive most of the time?"

lawyers, bankers, patent trolls, most government employees, middle management, motivational coaches, ...

Hmm. Yes?

But to get back to the original topic, I'd agree with Joker_vD that we have lots of services around where the economic damage of pausing them for a few months seems rather low. I mean closing schools for 3 months now is something you could easily catch up for in the upcoming year(s).

> lawyers, bankers, patent trolls, most government employees, middle management, motivational coaches, ...

I mean, I get where you're coming from, and I am sure there are at least some percentage of people that are not very productive. But I think that most of the time, what looks from the outside like a waste of resources, is born from not knowing many of the details.

That's why every time some post on HN mentions that $RANDOM_STARTUP has $SUCH_AND_SUCH employees, there are always both comments stating that having so many employees don't make sense, and other people with experience explaining exactly why it makes sense.

And no offense, but if you think that lawyers and bankers as a class are not necessary, then I think you simply don't know much about what they do or why they are doing productive work.

And even if you think that the amount of lawyers/bankers/government is too high, and that we could make those jobs more productive (meaning fewer hours worked to achieve the same result), I'm pretty sure the way to get there isn't to just say "ok, let's just turn off these professions completely with almost no preparation. Good luck!". This is usually a process that happens over many years.

> I mean closing schools for 3 months now is something you could easily catch up for in the upcoming year(s).

I completely agree, and if we are only talking about 3 months I agree that it's relatively simple. But we're already what, 8 months into this? And it looks like we're going to be in this situation for another half a year, at the very least?

To get back to your parent post, whether we can or can't organize our economy to have more people not working in general (and I argued that we can't!), the economy right now isn't organized that way, so for now at least people do need those jobs. And I think your parent post exaggerates just how many people are dying (e.g. seeing dead bodies on the street is an exaggeration, for the most part).

Given our current economic system (which I'm in favor of, to be clear), the situation really is hard for many people. It's really true that people are losing their life's savings, and much worse, given the current situation. It isn't an easy thing to do, even if you agree that these drastic measures are necessary to prevent a worse outcome (which I agree with!) It's the very definition of a lose-lose situation.

Also, military. Imagine if we could remove all of the military in the world? The savings would be quite large, I'd think. And the best thing, with no armies around, we would need no army for protection from other armies, so it all works out!

It's but a pipe dream, of course, but a nice one.

Again, the size of the modern military forces is another indicator of how much of population can be removed from doing any sort of productive work without crushing the economy. Throw in the military industrial complex which diverts lots of resources while producing mostly the tools of destruction that, again, are mostly either used up during the training or left unused and scrapped 50 years later.

So, back to the original topic. Suspending all those services doesn't directly impact the ability of the "production of basic commodities" part of economy to keep providing those necessities, they impact it because of the way the flows of money set up. If all the restaurants in Seattle close, it's not like the farmers in Washington suddenly physically can't grow as much as potatoes and raise as much cattle as before. They can, so there is no reason for the restaurant workers to starve or go unsheltered, the production capacity hasn't decreased, it's just the way the distribution of goods is arranged that such deterioration in quality of life may happen.

Let's not forget second or third order effects. A restaurant isn't just a restaurant: it involves a lot of other parts of the economy (for example, maintenance, supplies....).

So, the moment you shut down something "nonessential" you're actually hurting also other, apparently unrelated economic activities.

IOW, it might end up hurting also those providing "essential" services.

I was talking more about the flow of goods (and services), not about the flow of money. After all, the main point of the economy is to arrange the production and the distribution of the goods, not of money.

If the economy is arranged in such a way that when the demand for restaurant food sharply drops down, it suddenly means random people, not even in the restaurant business, can't afford to eat (?!), well, that's not a good way to arrange things, is it now?

Well, you know how it is. This is in a socialist government with quite high taxes, but the money has to always flow to the upper echelon of society, not the poor mom or dad that want to feed their kids. But then again, you don't need a crisis, we have the money/production for everyone to have the minimum conditions to live, but hey, some billionaire wants another comma in their net worth so...

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