The Abolition of Work (2002)

Choice, of course.

Autonomous adults generally aren’t compelled into recreation by an authority.

Welfare in most developed countries is enough not to starve and not to become fully homeless. But in many countries, it does not go one inch beyond this. Subsisting on welfare is indeed a very uncomfortable life. But it is not literal starvation to death.

Well that's the rub, you don't want to work, you want to eat. The food has to come from somewhere. Even if you were a forager, other animals want to eat the same food.

> I suppose that’s technically a “choice”, but only by the most ruthlessly literal definition.

"Technically correct, the best kind of correct." More seriously we are talking about survival and food. Its hard to imagine a more ruthless domain of inquiry.

You can sit there and twiddle your thumbs until entropy does its thing, or you can choose to work against it.

You can hunt, gather, and farm. Or you can do something in exchange for credits to get food from other people who do.

The fact that starvation is possible in a rich country is by design. It is not a necessary fact of the economy.

subbing out death for aging, which is far and away the leading cause of death, I think this is a good metaphor. The first step is to persuade people that work, like aging, is bad [0], and that abolishing work is a comparatively neglected social cause relative to the harms caused.

We might have to live with work for a long time now, because scarcity abounds; but there's no point pretending that's good, or lionizing work for its own sake. It sucks to work at "a job that slowly kills you" [1], just like it sucks that we get old and die.

[0] https://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html (discussed previously here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24770566)

[1] Radiohead, No Surprises: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5CVsCnxyXg

We have had the ability to automate most work for two decades. Food, clothes, furniture, electronic devices, all of these could be produced with close to zero human labor. Why don't we?

After exploring a market (agriculture) in order to launch my own automation company, I have come to the conclusion that it is not the tech that we lack, it is the will. A culture change is needed in order to make people realize that a work-less society is:

- possible

- desirable

- is not going to make them poorer

> Poor people will do the things that rich people don't want to do in order to keep their lives at the level they want.

Yes, that's a fact of life. The things that people don't want to do are still things that (mostly) need to be done.

I think a big part of the argument is that "getting a lot done" may not be as valuable as we have been led to believe, and the things that we give up may be more valuable than we have been led to believe.

If we assume that a human often does what is in the best interest of that human, it is not at all surprising that we may have been misled by our fellow humans about where value lies.

I wonder if that's a typo, but there's no determinism all the way up from position of an electron in the core, and thru protein binding, which is also non-deterministic. That's why they run that COVID Folding@Home stuff - to assess how well vaccine particles can bind to a virus thru variations - lone "hit" or "non-hit" don't matter much.

That non-determinism alone is a great source of suffering, even before we get to "embodiment" and "need to feed that embodiment". ;-)

Your sudden shift to such a low-level critique makes it impossible to, say, distinguish a c-corp from a coop (or even c-corps of different sizes, for that matter). Both are merely "impossible to gain freedom from" in your sense.

It's like a submitter defending a spaghetti patchset by talking about the complexity of modern chipsets.

I don't think the recycling schemes (illusory and otherwise) were introduced on the assumption that the public would get so addicted to rubbish separation that we'd eventually be able to eliminate the need for any paid garbage collectors though. Or indeed that many people don't view rubbish separation as 'work' imposed on them, to the extent many local authorities collecting household waste have to threaten fines or at least noncollection of waste to enforce compliance.

As for less developed countries, they usually have an abundance of flytipped waste because they don't pay [enough] garbage collectors and whilst there's the occasional eyecatching 'clean up this beauty spot' activity nobody wants to play the garbageman game all year round...

- Businesses being incentivized to pay as little as possible

- Workers not being treated with dignity, not allowed enough time to recover from being ill or take vacation to mentally recharge

- Workers being pressured to maximize for output rather than their own experience at work

Of course work can be great for some people, but it’s intentional blindness to look around and tell the worlds workers most of us are in a position where work is fulfilling rather than a demanding stressor that asks more of us while corporate entities attempt to cut pay and benefits. You can call it overemphasis on short term thinking or a systematic failure of capitalism. But work is demanding and often even unforgiving to most workers.

So, I'm not sure that those who produce (or distribute) it will agree at once "let's give right away half of produced for free". But if you pressure them much, they might "agree" to cut the production in half. But you may imagine where that could lead.

Finally, you may expect the government to buy half of it right away to give away for free. Well, good luck with running with that line for president, probably won't work even in Sub-Saharan Africa. And likely the food will still be trash when reaching the target audience, due to government efficiency.

1) Most people would not be content with just the basics. We like shiny new stuff like iPhones or fancy clothes or nice food

2) Even if there was no scarcity of anything, our distribution systems (Globally) are pretty poor. I doubt we could flip a switch and begin distributing resources to everywhere in the world that needs them.

Scarcity in the economic sense just means there are material limits to the things people want. It's not a synonym for "rarity."

> Food? Not at all, tons and tons are thrown out daily.

The places that are throwing out food also have charities and food banks so that few people actually starve to death. People who starve to death are in parts of the world with poorly functioning distribution systems. The people in those parts of the world who have food don't throw it out, they lock it up so they can give it to their friends.

> Housing? Well there's enough of that for everyone we just don't know how, and don't want to, distribute it.

This is a good point and there are homeless people in cities with vacant housing.

> Clothing? Even though people burn through clothing almost as quickly as food, it is produced in surplus so much that we invented fashion.

Crucially, there are very few naked people but the things people want to wear are still of limited supply.

> Classical economics has no explanation for this modern surplus of production.

Its literally called "capitalism"; People with means of production make profit by producing commodities and this incentivizes other people to invest their surplus in additional capital and compete to produce more commodities. This expansion of production drives the marginal rate of profit down which causes people to invest in producing other things; the capital and products are thereby multiplied over and over and the result is a system that makes these basic things extremely plentiful and low cost.

> What necessity exactly is scarce in 2020?

Human labor, time, space, raw materials, and products that are the output of specific processes that cannot be commodified in this way (art, haute couture, and antiques are examples)

The opposite state of this is poverty, a condition in which humanity has lived for 99% of its existence. In the modern day, technology and evolution in economic-political systems have enabled us to produce wealth at a large scale, enough to support hundreds of millions of people living with more material comforts than any medieval king. It took a hell of a lot of work to get here.

To argue that "Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world", then, is to put the cart before the horse. Work is precisely the attempt to alleviate ourselves of poverty. Work, coordinated well and magnified in its output by technology, which itself progressed due to a combination of work and the play of creative-minded individuals, creates the wealth we enjoy today.

I think this essay provides too many fancy words and not enough details about how to achieve this utopian vision of a world of all play and no work, in which economically productive activities are perfectly aligned with our human pursuits so as to produce wealth, leisure, and comfort for all.

For example, this following passage, in which he proposes the abolition of the auto industry:

  Next we can take a meat-cleaver to production work itself. No more war production, nuclear power, junk food, feminine hygiene deodorant — and above all, no more auto industry to speak of. An occasional Stanley Steamer or Model-T might be all right, but the auto-eroticism on which such pestholes as Detroit and Los Angeles depend on is out of the question. Already, without even trying, we’ve virtually solved the energy crisis, the environmental crisis and assorted other insoluble social problems.

I am all for being an optimist, and all for evolving culturally so that we can work more happily and efficiently, and all for employing technology to achieve these things, but this essay isn't it. It would make sense if we lived in the Culture of Iain M. Banks, cared for by hyper-intelligent AI, but that's so far away in the future as to be barely worth considering right now.

As of today, work and a culture of work has produced our rich society. It's also produced its share of problems — rich diseases, soulless office cubicles, environmental degradation — but abolishing work culture is not the answer. The problems you mention of distribution and recycling of surplus is going to be solved with — dare I say it? — more work.

The anti-capitalist project - based off my brief and limited political philosophy reading - seems to be an infinite one: not only is there much to build but more imperatively, there is an entire world to destroy.

That's not even 100th of what they do.

One of the most important services they provide is that they are the ones who make sure the deal comes together, which means coaxing the buyers and sellers in to agreeing, without which the deals would just fall apart.

They show houses for people, which means sitting and wasting time some stranger's home, then showing the people who come there around while telling them about the house and answering their questions. This takes hours and hours of their time.

They drive buyers around neighborhoods and go with them to see houses.

They arrange and attend engineers' inspections of the house.

In the midst of this pandemic these alone are life-threatening tasks. But even when there's no epidemic, real estate agents have to go to strangers' homes and be there alone, and for women (who make up the majority of real estate agents) this is not always safe.

Then they guide and give advice to buyers and sellers. I guess you could call this "giving information for a fee", but it's not the kind of information that you're going to get from a database. It includes negotiation advice, advice on what kind of offers are or are not likely to be accepted and why, what problems there are with the house and what needs to be done to fix it, etc. Depending on the agent, that information could be the fruit of decades of experience in the business that the clients are getting.

They'll also get their clients in touch with reliable professionals who can do the work that their clients require (like fixing some part of the house), etc.

They often read over contracts that their clients sign, explain them to them, and advise them regarding them (you'd think it's the lawyers job to do this, but lawyers often don't).

They often advertise for their sellers... for free. That means the real estate agents pay advertising fees out of their own pockets, and they don't get that money back until and unless the house sells.

They also have to put up with asshole buyers and sellers, and clients who lie to them.

They take calls at night and on weekends from clients that have absolutely no respect for their time.

...and best of all, they often do all the above (which takes a lot of time and effort) completely for free, as many clients will take all these services, advice, and help and then change their mind and not want to buy or sell after all, or change their mind and go with another agent... after using dozens of hours of the real estate agent's time, for which the real estate agents don't get paid a penny (as they only get paid if the house is sold).

Someone very close to me is a real estate agent, and I just constantly feel so bad for them because they're constantly getting screwed by their clients and slaving away for absolutely no money.. occasionally they get lucky and actually eventually get paid.. usually after many months of effort, but so much time is wasted for absolutely nothing.

And then on top of all that, so many people hate and look down on real estate agents, so they have to put up with that too.

Not that it's all bad. Some clients are decent, and even nice people.

But I'd still never, ever want to be a real estate agent and put up with all that shit. Just not even remotely worth it.

If we were to distribute products and services such that this person could do something on the 'create side' - we'd all be poorer for it because their value is likely in 'coffee making'.

Anarchism is nonsense.

> Access to those things are provided conditionally upon their satisfactory performance. What conditions are you proposing that governments require to be met?

As soon as we hire people we provide them with all these basic perks, they are not conditional, because we believe if we are sending soldiers to fight we better provide them with the best chances of succeeding. Its the same idea society-wide. If you mean you fire the employees that don't perform you'd be right, but governments could create brackets. The point is, in this day and age there's no reason why we couldn't provide every citizen of a developed society all these basic things. You could argue shelter is the most expensive but there are examples like Singapore solving the issue society-wide.

[1] https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/10/06/3-how-americans-v...

I do, and I'm not in a particularly big state (small New England one.) Yet I pass empty miles and miles of forest, often without a single building in site. Even in normal streets I can go fifteen minutes down my road by car, and the houses thin out to nothing.

Unless you restrict the world to maybe what, the 100 most dense megacities, there's insane amounts of empty land out there. We are not that dense. The owning and restricting of land through law in many ways seems to be more a part of capitalistic society than a requirement; people have to own land to make money or not make money.

My perspective is that people who allocate capital see this effort as workers becoming rent-seekers. So there are capitalists, and a capitalist rent-seekers; and there are workers, and worker rent-seekers.

> if the there already is redistribution,

So if people are opposed to the rent-seeking, they might fell that the correct decision is to avoid increasing the amount of rent-seeking.

> The flipside of that concept is to have privatized profits but collectivized negative externalities.

This exists and is terrible.

> That's not to mention entire industries consisting in intelligent and skilled workers spending their lives redistributing wealth from a wealthy person to another (traders, corporate lawyers, etc.)

So some of this is actual productive work that allocates capital or resolves disputes, and its not always easy to draw the line between parasitic activity and productive activity in these domains. Even if the line can be drawn in theory its not clear how to regulate it. And the regulatory effort is itself vulnerable to parasitism, rent-seeking, and capture by the object of regulation.

The problem is these people don’t need a house, they need a full time caregiver to manage their addictions and mental illnesses. The government and people are somewhat happy to give welfare payments but not cover the expense of giving the level of care these people need.

Or, the value of the money continues to decline.

If you measure house prices in bitcoin over the past 10 years, then house prices have been in decline relative to bitcoin. This trend is likely to continue for some time.

Under disinflationary money, houses will become a consumable rather than an attempt to store wealth. The cost of housing will decrease over time (although wages will also decrease over time). Having a home sat there not collecting rent will cause you to lose money.

The desire to redistribute wealth will hit a hurdle when the wealth owners can store it in their heads and have it be completely unseizable, plausibly deniable and undetectable anyway.