Comment by maybelsyrup | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maybelsyrup | Hacker News Reader

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> for those who no longer wish to work

> to those who don't wish to work

> those who choose not to work at all

> the same for working and for doing nothing, that people choose the latter

You're making my point for me with the arbeit macht frei dog-whistles here. So let me be clear: if "work" is defined as "millions of white and blue collar professional lives before Covid, lives replete with Kafka-esque meaninglessness in the former group and actual, medieval misery in the latter", then what I am saying is:

1. Yes guy, exactly: people no longer wish to "work", by that definition.

2. This is a good and deeply hopeful thing.

A society that's serious about human flourishing will grapple with these questions on a deeper level than "what's the unemployment rate?" or "should Amazon be lauded for 'creating jobs?'" Covid has forced us to grapple with them.

The usual Cato Institute talking points all involve pointing at the poor and moralizing about how they don't want to work, but comments like yours hold less and less water as time passes, largely because of shit like Covid. The notion - your notion - that there's an enormous class of people out there who are nothing but shiftless layabouts who fundamentally want to leech off of the rest of us is a strawman. While I'm sure there's a parasite or two out there, human beings of every class find deep meaning in labor. But the labor has to be meaningful!! Or, at least, not soul-crushing or immiserating. (And let's not even get into the really fun side-claim I'd make that there are proportionally way more parasites at the top of the socioeconomic pile than the bottom.)

So: to the extent that anyone doesn't want to work, they don't want to work because the labor available to them is innovatively life-ruining and in most cases vastly underpaid. To want to work in such conditions when there are suddenly alternative choices, as you imply they should, is to be deeply ill. Actually insane. And more of a reflection of where your heart is than anything else.

I usually read "People don't want to work!" statements as a sentence fragment. It's the first half of a whole statement. The second half of the statement is a variation on: "for the shitty wages or conditions I'm offering and will rescind at a moment's notice for any made up reason I can imagine".

The idea I get from the Cato echoing types is if you have a job you should beg and scrape and genuflect for your betters to thank them for their grace in employing you.

I think this meme accelerated after the 2008 financial crisis. Companies contracted but demanded more work from their remaining employees. Feeling fortunate to be employed they increased individual output to cover for the reduced head count. Companies screwed over employees then shrugged their shoulders with the "it's the economy" refrain.

Yes this is exactly right. There's a logical endpoint to their worldview: feudalism. It's got everything they want: the jobs (100% employment!), the genuflecting, the huge profits.

Yes, some are calling it "techno-feudalism".

I think I first heard it from Yanis Varoufakis (https://youtu.be/YpOLHSzZ8jc). Watched as many interviews of him as I could find during those long days at the beginning and middle of the pandemic. He's an exceedingly sane person.

Yeah I wasn't gonna make a whole big thing about it, but I didn't pull that out of a hat. I know Varoufakis, but I hadn't heard him talk about techno-feudalism. In fact I'd heard the phrase "neo-feudalism" from people like Jodi Dean and Joel Kotkin, who have good stuff on this (though who's to say - I'm neither an economist nor a historian). I'll try to find YV's stuff and read it, I love him and I'm sure it's well thought out.

I think you're focusing on the wrong things (for instance, no one called anyone a leech). The fact is, we don't live in a post-scarcity society yet. Until we do work can't be about meaning, it has to be about need. Look around your house and life. Count the number of things you own and services you use that are not fun to make or maintain. Until that number hits 0, the majority of society will need to be forced to do jobs they don't want to in order to survive.

Things can definitely be more equitable than they are now, and should be if we truly want a meritocracy, but let's not get caught up in the delusion that society can exist without people doing shit jobs they don't like.

Post-scarcity is often talked about in binary terms. We've either reached post-scarcity or we haven't.

I believe the transition to post-scarcity will be gradual, that it will happen faster in some sectors of society than others, and that this process may take multiple generations to complete. This has been the case with every other major economic shift, why would it not be the case with post-scarcity?

If this is how the transition to post-scarcity occurs, societies will eventually hit a point at which many people still need to work to produce our economic output, but far fewer than currently do. How will our economic system handle that situation? The selling of labor is the primary mechanism by which we distribute resources, but if we get to a point where only 20% of the adult population are needed in the labor force then how do we distribute resources to the remaining 80%?

Now, where things get really interesting is that "needed in the labor force" is not a binary thing, either. What if there's a big slice of the population from whom we only need five hours of labor a week? And they coexist alongside another slice of the population from whom we need forty hours of labor a week?

Maybe we're already a few steps down this road.

We are indeed already a little ways down that road, and the answer we've come to is: Everyone still has to work.

Most jobs that people have now aren't strictly necessary. If everyone gave up their leisure time to do all of their own cooking and cleaning, a massive set of jobs would disappear overnight. If we all at local, another. And the list goes on. Effectively, what happens is, we invent new jobs that are based on want as opposed to need. It's easy to look at that picture and say 'there is so much unnecessary work that happens!' but really, that X% of the economy based on want is required for price discovery of the rest. That is what your last paragraph is touching on, how do we decide who does what and how much? In capitalism, the answer is price discovery, and for that to work, everyone has to participate in the market.

If we're to have a true market then we need to eliminate a bunch of market distortions, in particular the 30-hour threshold where a job is considered full-time and the 5-hour binary cutoff for unemployment, so that people who want to work somewhere between 5 and 30 hours a week (which I suspect is actually most people) can actually express that preference by offering a price for that much labour.

> In capitalism, the answer is price discovery, and for that to work, everyone has to participate in the market.

This is precisely what I'm getting at. We've built a system on the assumption of a forty-hour full-time work week, with a goal of minimizing unemployment and (recently) maximizing labor market participation. We did this because we need participation in the market for effective resource distribution.

What happens when our economy simply does not need that much labor to produce all the economic output we want? Do we force people to continue participating in the labor market in makework jobs just so that they can have access to resources? To what extent are we already doing this?

> We are indeed already a little ways down that road, and the answer we've come to is: Everyone still has to work.

But logically it would seem that should be: Everyone still has to work, but a little less than hitherto.

Now the question becomes, how much less?

Meaning, in my view, is not a switch; it's a dial. We can have some more than we have now.

Overall I agree with you: I'm not naive, nor am I a utopianist. I'm fine with more equitable. But we're so entrenched in the status quo that it feels like you have to talk like a revolutionary to get even a shred of "a little more equitable".

Edit: wait though what's a "post-scarcity" economy, anyway, concretely? I've heard since I can remember that we grow enough food as a species to feed everyone (and yet we throw tons of food out) - is that not a decent marker of being post-scarcity? We seem to have enough wealth in the US to be in neverending proxy or non-proxy aggressive wars against various groups of poor and largely non-white people - that wealth, used slightly differently, has got to be some kind of dent in all sorts of scarcity, no? I'm not writing this to attack you whatsoever; I'm genuinely curious. Post-scarcity is a phrase I've heard smarter people than me utter every now and then, and it only just occurred to me that I've never actually figured out what it meant. (I'll Google it now of course but I'd love to hear your perspective all the same. Cheers.)

Post-scarcity just refers to a time after scarcity, which is defined as limited resources. In a world that is post-scarcity, everyone can have everything they want (materially) without infringing on anyone else's ability to have the same.

The reason it gets brought up is because the moment one person's needs or wants infringe on another's, there needs to be a way to decide who gets what. Generally, this is what people are talking about when they talk about various economic systems. You come up with different mechanics that use the distribution of goods to incentivize the production of more goods.

The only way we escape the economic games that need to be played, to keep people working and producing things society needs, is if we no longer need them to produce anything. Then you no longer need the incentives and feedback loops that tie consumption to production, and people are generally free to do whatever the hell they want.

By definition, this is impossible to achieve. Assume that some person says I want what everyone else has. There is no post scarcity. It is better to think of it as meeting a set of pre-defined needs. These needs can change over time. for e.g., internet access. But framing it as wanting everything I could possibly imagine is a straw-man.

Yeah, I've always maintained that there are too many people with unbounded greed for a "complete" post-scarcity to be achievable. There's a "greed is good" crowd, and then beyond that, there are those who aren't even concerned with whether it's good to be greedy, they just want to win at others' expense, spitefully. A world where they can't take from other people is not desirable. The first time I got to know someone with this attitude, I started out thinking it was a front, or a joke, but it wasn't.

The idea of post-scarcity brushes over that dark part of human nature, and assumes we can figure out how to cooperate, even absent antisocial misanthropes. In Star Trek, they have "figured it out", but the transition to post-scarcity is understandably only vaguely described.

I couldn't agree more. The idea itself is grand, but it's not adaptable to chaos. So long as human personalities are scattered around a bell curve, the more competitive and materialistic of us (which includes those of us who want humanity to pursue scientific development since it is extremely capital intensive) will force the competition to continue.

How is it a straw-man? Impossible or not, it means what it means.

Thank you for articulating what I often have a lot of trouble figuring out how to say.

Work, in general, is stupid. The entire concept of it is inane. My fantasy version of utopia is a peaceful, post-scarcity society where no one ever needs to work, and automatically gets a life of luxury simply because it's available and costs nothing. Many people will choose to fill their time with things that look a bit like what we now call work (if you tilt your head and squint just the right way). Many will devote their lives to the pursuit of furthering humankind's knowledge. Many will choose creative endeavors that in today's economy would be judged worthless. Many will focus on their families and enjoy their time with them. And yes, some will choose to sit around and do nothing all day but eat junk food and watch the utopian equivalent of TV all day.

And all that is not only ok, it's awesome! Obviously this is a fantasy world, and we can't live in it. But we should think more about that as a goal, and shape things as best we can. Let's stop creating bullshit jobs just for the sake of full employment, and figure out what really needs to be done, and what doesn't. There's so much wealth in the world that we could certainly find an alternative that could keep people housed, clothed, fed, and then some, if there isn't a job available for them.

Our current system is just based on personal greed and cynicism. If we don't evolve beyond it, I fear we won't last as a civilization (or possibly even as a species) for many more centuries.

> My fantasy version of utopia is a peaceful, post-scarcity society where no one ever needs to work, and automatically gets a life of luxury simply because it's available and costs nothing.

Contrast with... "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever." -- George Orwell.

Sadly, I think we're still closer to Mr Orwell's vision at this point in time, in spite of have more material comforts and resources available than at any point in history.

To get to your utopian vision, we'll need to permanently break free of our primate instincts. That's not going to be easy.

The liberation from material bondage is a goal for most of the world religions. Where does it begin? When people quit being vain. Therein lies the rub.

> those who no longer wish to work

This reminded me of an old political cartoon I saw at the Abraham Lincoln museum: https://www.loc.gov/resource/pga.04994/

It shows Lincoln with his (supposed) supporters and their requests, one of whom is depicted as saying, "I want a hotel established by government, where people that ain't inclined to work can board free of expense, and be found in rum and tobacco."

You might enjoy my digital catalog of the Library of Congress: www.locserendipity.com

Very very well said. This needs to be shouted from the rooftops. Along with a line from a reply below: 'There’s no “labour” shortage. There’s a “wage” shortage.'

I regret that I have but one upvote to give to this comment. Thank you for absolutely crystalizing so many of the thoughts and feelings that have been floating around in my head over the past 15 months.

Cheers but no need -- I'm just repeating what other smarter people have told me. Take whatever you got from my comment and put it to good use: pass it along to someone else, or just go out into your community and lend a hand to those in need. Good luck

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