Comment by setr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by setr | Hacker News Reader

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As a general rule, there are usually more shitty jobs that need doing, than people who actively want to do those shitty jobs.

In your scheme, you need one person to want to be captain, to support a thousand-crew ship. You'll probably need fifty people to specifically want to be janitors to support that one person. Five hundred to be generic crewmen. A few to CxO. Fifty to be middle managers. And so on.

I'm not sure the ratios work out the way you'd expect. For every person who wants to be a captain, you need an army to support him, and I'm not sure you have so few people who want to be in charge (take any high school group activity: someone always pops out at the "leader" -- by choice or necessity -- even in groups as small as 3. Those groups that don't gain a leader inevitably fail, due to disorder and chaos).

And if such a population ratio does not exist, and the man who wants to be captain cannot be captain, then you have scarcity, and politic.

Even among the "hardcore engineers", who revel in their non-leadership roles, that only holds as long as the system itself does; a bad manager, captain, etc, can completely kill the joy of such engineering, at which point, you find a new leader, or an engineer attempts to become a leader by (perceived) necessity.

> As a general rule, there are usually more shitty jobs that need doing, than people who actively want to do those shitty jobs.

I'd argue that's true by definition: a "shitty" job is one where the value of the job to others induces recruitment not only beyond people who actively want to do the job, but so far beyond as include people who strongly prefer to avoid the job but who can't (or, at least, perceive that they can't) afford to turn down the money. And not just to include the last group, but to include them as a sizable fraction of the people employed in the job.

You're right; it can be shortened to: as a general rule, there are usually shitty jobs that need doing.

or alternatively, there are usually more jobs that need doing, than people wanting to do them.

But the job needs to be done, so supply and demand comes into play. In a resource rich world Why should somebody doing a shitty job be paid low wages.

If you need the job done and because we are not resource constrained you are going to have to do something to make that job attractive. Maybe even address the things that make the job shitty or even do the work to automate it so the janitor can become a dancer like he always dreamed of.

In a resource rich world, the trade-able resource will change, to something that is scarce (why would you do work for something next to worthless, due to abundance?). Reputation, artisan skill-based product, mechanically induced scarce resource (ala Bitcoin), etc

You’ll just be paid low wages in the new resource.

But regardless, we’re still far and away from “let everyone do only what they wish”; sure everyone might survive (due to presumed abundance of survival resources ), but to do as you wish for any job reliant on others, you’ll need to coerce others to do things they don’t strictly want to do.

And so we have scarcity, and politic.

The resource-abundance means the janitor can also optionally do nothing — he doesn’t necessarily need to janitor against his will — but it doesn’t mean he can become a dancer (that anyone will watch). He can become a dancer only so far as one might do alone, in their room, but to be trained, or to do it in the professional arenas, or to be watched, etc requires the coercion of others, with requires him to be sufficiently wealthy in something valuable, which must be scarce, and naturally unevenly distributed.

And he might janitor to save up to be a dancer.

Of course, you could always pretend to have an audience in a VR simulation, or an army of robots, but that’s perhaps a fairly pathetic fulfillment of his dream.

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