Comment by maerF0x0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maerF0x0 | Hacker News Reader

> Money and labor are both more abstract than fruit, so there is a little bit of leeway to interpret employment transactions as being non-zero-sum.

This paragraph gets into something i've been pondering about GDP/societal wealth. Imagine we have a carpenter and a plumber both sitting idle and who needs eachothers' services. If they cannot agree upon an exchange or price then the system loses out on the potential productivity. The system as a whole is made poorer by actors being disagreeable.

I have often wondered how rich life could be if we were more agreeable to give to the other the gifts of our marginally unused productivity (rather than giving it to netflix, facebook, instagram, and tik-tok...)?

Would poverty be erased, or other desirable things be achievable?

Now look at the ideas of a minimum wage or of being frugal. Both are a kind of refusal to participate in the economy leaving behind marginal potential value creation. If we refuse to spend our money it doesnt fund development of projects, if we refuse to work at a certain rate we lose out on the goods that could have been built.

Anyways that's a musing I was reminded of by this piece.

> I have often wondered how rich life could be if we were more agreeable to give to the other the gifts of our marginally unused productivity (rather than giving it to netflix, facebook, instagram, and tik-tok...)?

You think life would be better if we all never stopped working and simply 'did our part' 16 hours a day without compensation?

that is approximately the most negative spin you could have made on my point.

The point is that if the trade doesn't occur, both parties lose out on what good could be and sometimes we cannot actually see the good but could value the good of the other. I'm not saying everyone should go work for bezos for free because his utility will rise. But more like in normal community interpersonal relationships. Say a small business owner wants to use some services, but cannot afford an expensive experienced person like a large business could (Say a high priced contract engineer) during a quiet period the resource goes idle and the business loses out, when both could have had some value if one would be more agreeable and say "look, I'm not working right now and sure I'll work for X% off for that reason and because I like you"

And where it fits with the commentary on minimum wage is that it technically would be illegal if that percent off dropped below minimum wage, then no trade could happen leading to vicious cycles rather than virtuous ones. The business that got its website built can make more sales and can pay more for high priced engineers. Whereas the business that cannot get a website built loses out on sales and cannot give any future work to the engineer. There's a sort of symbiosis in the health of the actors in the system and their ability to pay for generally good things.

You've painted the above comment as a negative spin, but I'm not really understanding, in your post, where it isn't just a less extreme version of this same spin.

You're suggesting a human should spend otherwise free time (which would otherwise be spent enjoying leisure, which we can presume has high positive value for that human) to generate value for others, in the hopes of receiving value in return?

In a system where this isn't an iterated version of the game (e.g. you're only playing against other actors a small number of times each), I don't see how this could function without systems like social credit which are abusable at higher levels than the individual actors.

Yeah, i think part of what maybe you're assuming into the picture is that the engineer in the question is overworked and their labor has a net negative utility in their life without sufficient compensation to make up for that negative.

I see it more like people like/love their craft and sometimes it makes sense to just do it because one likes, and somehow gets "something" out of helping the other person too.

Think about a depression where people are refusing to work for eachother because no one can pay, nonetheless an engineer could build a website for a business just because they know if the business goes under it has perpetuated and exacerbated the depression... another more quaint example might be a cobbler who would fix people's shoes for whatever they can pay, because if he sticks to the normal price few could afford it and he'd be idle, but if he's generous enough to just do it anyways then at least the one in need is no longer.

In typing back and forth I guess it basically boils down to charity. The idea that charity could potentially nullify and turn around a vicious cycle in an economy because folks selflessly added to virtuous cycles. It doesn't have to be as brutal as a depression, but could be simple as a local business person you care about who cannot compete with the unlimited funds or whatever from another company.

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