I wonder if the economists have ever considered a society where brainy people are happy and proud to perform basic sustenance work- construction, manufacture of textiles, farming, driving, etc.
I would guess working class white people in the 1950s US were overall more content than today, even though many fewer of them had college degrees. They were happy performing "sustenance work", because they were able to start those jobs out of high school, support a family, buy a house, etc.
(Massive caveat for the people who were excluded from this system back then.)
They don't seem any worse off because of it.
The hardest part of the top tier universities is getting in. Being an actual university student is the time in life when most Japanese slack off, get part time jobs and devote lots of attention to their hobbies. Skipping class is normal in most departments and largely what you get your degree in is meaningless.
Japanese university grads merely have to graduate and based on the school they went to will determine which prestigious companies they can successfully apply to. New grads apply to the company, not a specific position and companies allocate their new hires based on what positions they need filled.
Ever tried making a decent knife? Or keeping a bonsai tree alive? For 100 years?
(This can be taught to/learned by some chimpanzees, BTW. …but I think there are no such examples in the wild without substantial human contact.)
Today we teach arithmetic to first graders, or earlier, start learning basic geometry in grade school and get the full course on geometry around 7th or 8th grade.
Music, of course, is not part of "STEM" and is no longer considered a valuable thing to learn, and astronomy, if it's taught at all, tends to be "here is the sun, the moon, and planets. Memorize this mnemonic for the names for the planets: My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas. Whoops, I mean Just Served Us Noodles", and most people who go into astronomy don't really get courses on it until they enter college.
Basically, those that are more "brainy" need a higher level of mental stimulation in order to not be bored. Being given too much mental stimulation relative to your intelligence/skills results in anxiety. The sweet spot is somewhere in between and we seek this sweet spot (or at least stumble upon it and remain sticky to it).
People then sort themselves over time into these buckets s/t (generally), the brainy people end up doing brainy things, and the not-so-brainy people do less-brainy things. Reversing of roles would be mutually detrimental to both parties.
I'd argue on that basis that stimulating board-games can save the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...
How do you reconcile expecting the rewards of other people's labor if you wouldn't be willing to do the same labor yourself?
And, reversing your logic: If my job is not open to them (presumably because they don't have the skills), and I do their job, who's going to do mine? They aren't. And they aren't going to do their job, either, because I took it. How does that make anything better?
My apologies for not explaining my own thoughts clearly, but when you and I say "job", we're talking about two different concepts. You are talking about a 261-day/year 8-hour/day commitment to a set group of tasks, and I am talking about "the collection of tasks that end up providing a quantity of goods or service" without any of the expectations that it's full-time or year-round attached to it. This may seem like an asinine distinction, but I'm not proposing a vision of society where you leave your current profession and work full-time at some mundane outdoor job, but rather a vision of society where you are capable of rendering some assistance in order to offset the bulk of labor required to produce the goods and services that unpleasant "non-brainy" jobs currently produce. I don't want you to give up your current amount of free time, or your medical care, or your access to entertainment and food, but neither do I want you to remain satisfied that other non-smart people labor for you while you do smart-guy stuff that you enjoy.
If you could learn the tasks that they perform, you theoretically could offset the amount of time they have to spend outside by occasionally performing those tasks. It likely wouldn't take away from your ability to perform the tasks at your current "job", whatever that may be.
I am not a socialist or a communist, and as I've said in another comment I don't really have a full-stack solution built out in my head that would make all of this magically work out, but it seems very wrong to me that the electronic-gentry portion of society is comprised of people sitting in air-conditioned offices thinking "god, I'd never work outside", but still tweeting angrily when the power goes out during a heat wave and the city employees don't fix it fast enough.
But, to use your other example, the power goes out. You don't really want amateur me trying to restore the power. You want a professional doing that, because it's much more likely to work, and much less likely to have negative consequences. So having me "render assistance" is not likely to be either welcome or useful.
In the same way, you don't want me wandering around a construction site looking to be helpful. I'd be more likely to get killed than to do much good.
So... Yes, I'm willing to pitch in, outside, if needed. No, for many jobs you don't actually want me doing that, no matter how much sympathy we have for the people having to work out in the heat.
And none of that takes anything away from my initial point, which is that no, I don't wish that I did manual labor outside instead of my nice air-conditioned job. Right now I'm really grateful for my nice indoor cubical farm.
If you want to go anywhere with this, maybe the direction is that we ought to pay people better who have to work outside, rather than paying them less than indoor people.
Just as you went from unskilled in your domain to skilled in your domain, so could you theoretically go from unskilled in construction to skilled in construction. I know you don't want to become an expert in construction, but how much of that want is based in the fact that in the current build of society, the only way to become a construction expert is to accept years of low pay in terrible conditions with awful coworkers in 100-degree-heat? Don't you think that somehow, using the combined man- and brain-power of the billions of people alive, we could form some kind of society where you might be able to learn and perform some construction without needing to accept the complete sacrifice of your quality of life to do it?
The problem with "paying people better to work outside" is that the entire concept of paying people to do anything, ie rewarding people with money, require that the most unpleasant jobs be done by people who must choose between the job and starvation/exposure or violence (serfs or slaves). That's why the easiest, most brutal jobs are always done by the lowest-IQ immigrants. If you were to pay them more, per your suggestion, the price of the reward of their labor goes up (berries go from $6/carton to $38/carton), the demand for the reward of their labor goes down, and they get laid off and are back to having no way to secure food, shelter, and medical care. (There are some exceptions to this rule; construction workers in the US are usually decently-compensated, but the US is an anomaly because we subsist based on the efforts of serfs and slaves in Asia, who mine and refine our rare earth minerals, assemble our tech, etc.)
I had a part time job planting trees in high school. I knew I got into a good university and part of me was feeling like I was privileged to be able to go to college when the other people I was working with might not have the same opportunity.
But then I heard one of them say "thank God I'll be graduating soon and won't have to do school work anymore."
And realized they had zero interest in pursuing the path I was on.
As a writer I like said- "you get upset when a toll booth operator takes a long time to count your change, but if they could count change, they'd be an engineer like you are."
But that's not to say if you gave the backhoe operator the same number of years experience learning programming as the software engineer, they wouldn't be just as good at software development.
"Blue collar", "the trades" are just so broad in scope it's an unfair comparison. It becomes much easier when you look at specific manual labor professions and specific developer professions.
I pay them directly for their labor, as simple as that. I guess I'm not sure what the confusion is. Everyone wants the best job they can get given their skills and luck. Nobody is going to be shoveling asphalt in the sun for fun if their part time astrophysicist gig covers their expenses.
It's a slave mentality. Do you believe that we, the people in society, set up the component parts of society and thus have the right to rebuild those component parts as it suits us, or do you believe that concepts like "jobs" and "laws" are naturally occurring phenomena that we are owned by?
I am immune to the siren call of endless improvements in the amount of money I receive. I have reached a high enough standard of living that I don't need any more goods or services than I already can get, and I'm not particularly rich as far as Americans go (about 65th percentile according to a recent income distribution calculator).
My goal is to convince as many people as I can to start thinking about what quality of life they would be satisfied with, figure out what labor and materials are required of them and their community to provide that quality of life, and then cut everything else out of the picture. We don't need the rat race, we don't need our elders worrying about how they'll afford the doctor, we don't need people working 80 hour weeks at minimum wage so they can afford a crappy apartment. We just need the materials and the labor.
The more people buy into "I've got to get the best job" mentality, the more impossible realizing any sort of overall improvement in our labor-time-to-reward ratio is.
(I know I sound like a communist, but I don't believe in the labor theory of value, and most self-described communists I talk to call me a right-wing extremist.)
As you say, people should think long and hard about their life goals, and in my opinion, would probably be happier with a different work life balance where they can afford it.
However, I don't see a world in which I would work part time at a job less enjoyable with worse pay than my current one. I would rather optimize to work the minimum hours at the best compensated job I can find. (e.g. why work 50-50% at white collar job and terrible job, when I can just work 51% at the white collar job).
Sure, there are major challenges to most people doing this, but removing those barriers is a lot more realistic that introducing job swapping that people don't even want. The simple place to fix the problem is uncouple health and other benefits from employers. The current system discourages part time work because employers have fixed costs per employee. Once you break this link, more people will work part time.
I still don't think I've successfully explained this concept of changing the job-as-endless-labor to job-to-produce-specific-amount.
Have you ever gone out and built something for yourself, like a shed?
Yes, I love building things for myself and my friends, but I wouldn't want to do it as a low paying job. In fact, doing it as a job would give me less time and money to do it for myself and friends. For me, that is just hopping off one economic hamster wheel and onto another. My job is complex and hard enough as it is, doubling the required skills and cutting the time to learn them sounds horrible. I'm fully aware that sharing jobs might be more attractive for the guy shoveling asphalt 100% of the time
> I got snippy in another response to you on a different comment chain.
No worries, at least to me it seems like you are engaging in good faith, listening to answers, and responding to what people are saying instead of talking past them. I can live with a little snippiness as long as people are coherent.
In order to provide you with the lifestyle you take for granted, several million actions must be undertaken by people around the globe (drill for oil, watch hospital patients, build N95 masks, etc). My question is- how many of those actions could be undertaken by people who consider themselves "brainy", the completion of which would guarantee a similar lifestyle to those same brainy people?
I know this is a little utopian- I don't have a full stack solution made up- but when your street gets a pothole, some man comes out and fixes it in the hot sun. Why don't you fix it? Well, you don't have the tools, or the expertise, or the legal right to do it. Furthermore, you don't have the time to do it, because you work 40-60 hours per week yourself at a white collar job (I'm assuming, given you're on HN during the workday). Many people think that someone's full-time "job" should be fixing potholes, and so people think "well I'd never fix potholes, I don't want that as my career". But wouldn't you learn how to fix potholes if you only had to fix potholes when they showed up near you, instead of for 40-60 hours per week every week?
You can walk on to a pothole crew and be considered a functional crew member inside a single season. Sure, I don't want you fixing my potholes because you don't know how to do it, but if I happened to live next to those pothole guys, I'd be happy with my neighbors fixing my potholes. Now, let's assess the difference between them and you: they have at least a few hundred hours of pothole repair practice, and you don't. It's too bad that you're incapable of learning how to do that.
I bet you think that good grades are important, don't you? Without grades, you never know what kind of unqualified whack job might start Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, Whole Foods, Uber, Dell, Dropbox... that's why we need those pothole guys to only ever work on potholes- you never know what kind of whack job might start jackhammering your street and "making the situation worse for everyone else".
That's not really fixing the potholes, they're basically putting a band-aid on it and calling it a day. "Fixing" a pot-holed street in a long-term sense may require literally rebuilding that piece of the street from the ground up.
And that's even before considering the way management and coworker selfishness and ineptitude becomes a physical safety threat rather than an irritation.
I made a comment one day about how this wasn't so bad, getting physical activity, breathing fresh air.
They told me to get a job in a nice air conditioned office. I wouldn't want to still be doing this when I was their age.
I do not agree that society must be set up in this manner. Each job produces a good or a service. In order to produce that good or service, a certain amount of raw materials and a certain number of skilled labor hours must be expended to produce it. It is more efficient, from a scaling perspective, to hyper-specialize and make the same people do the same drudgery day-in-day-out, which is why those gentlemen were stuck in that job. The market makers demanded efficiency, and things fell into place such that those gentlemen were pigeonholed into being grass-planters.
The point that I am making is that there isn't any particular reason (besides an incessant demand for shareholder value in dollars) that the raw materials and skilled labor hours must be allocated in the caste-method that we currently use in modern society. Those guys have to plant grass all day every day because if they don't, they can't buy food, afford shelter, have a doctor look at them, or receive medical supplies. I am certain that we must find a way to look past this system to achieve any of the high-minded goals that people like to argue over, like the 4-hour workweek, or equitable education, or mass literacy, or an end to hunger, or...
>4-hour workweek, or equitable education, or mass literacy, or an end to hunger.
It also allows the guy shoveling asphalt in the sun to live in an air conditioned house with fancy electronics and medical care.
Come on, man. This is simple. I recently got a $10,000 hospital bill for an ultrasound, for which insurance decided I owed $1800. It doesn't cost $10,000 for an ultrasound, that's a made up ratio calculated by accountants trying to maximize their firm's ROI. An ultrasound costs {materials, refinement, assembly, shipping, and operation}, none of which require anyone to work constantly; the market has simply set it up that way because everyone working constantly yields great market valuations in the system that the owners of the markets set up.
A comfortable life-shelter, food, clothing, medicine, border security- for you, me, the asphalt guy, and everyone else does not require all of the labor hours that are presently expended in the world.
It happens, but the asphalt guy probably has coverage, like 92% of Americans. [1] There are a long list of simple solutions that can increase this percent and bring costs down, but people working less isn't on it as far as I'm concerned. I just don't see the connection.
>A comfortable life-shelter, food, clothing, medicine, border security- for you, me, the asphalt guy, and everyone else does not require all of the labor hours that are presently expended in the world
If anything, bringing the costs of goods down and increasing access to them will increase the number of labor hours needed. More and cheaper ultrasounds means more {materials, refinement, assembly, shipping, and operation}, not less.
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-27...
I don't need fast foods restaurants, television, professional sports, overnight shipping, cheap smartphones, endless software updates, new computers, new cars, etc. Cut the parasitic, hedonic treadmill of consumption and you free up billions of labor hours that could instead work on {materials, refine, assembly, shipping, and operation} and then just go home afterwards and talk to their families or work on their own projects.
Apparently there are presently 9.82 million unemployed Americans. Cut the ones that can't work (either because of character issues or because of disability issues), add the rest to the pile of people theoretically freed up by no longer producing piles and piles of useless crap and entertainment, and you've got a tremendous amount of intellectual capital available to work on real goods and services.
There's an indoctrination aspect to this; people would have to be convinced that they don't need all this crap, and I admit that's a hard sell.
Their in lies the "Hard Problem". The unemployed and uninsured guy can't pay for an ultrasound, but there are millions of people willing to line up for the next candy crush clone or similar garbage product. Cash is the incentive to make more ultrasounds, but that guy doesn't have it.
You can tell someone that they would feel better after volunteering or working at a homeless shelter than playing candy crush, but like you said, it is a hard sell.
It is temping to say that the government should get into the ultrasound business, but IMHO, you will just get government brand ultrasounds at twice the price. Somehow we need to make a cultural change about how individuals spend their wealth and limited time.
> The point that I am making is that there isn't any particular reason (besides an incessant demand for shareholder value in dollars) that the raw materials and skilled labor hours must be allocated in the caste-method that we currently use in modern society.
Maybe, but you don't have any strategy for changing the current system, or what kind of system should replace it, or how to demonstrate that system will be better than the one we have now.
I am finding it particularly difficult to convince people that they should even look past the current system. If you read through other comments on other chains in this thread, people are trying to explain to me that I could never convince someone to work half-time at a white collar job (where they endlessly produce code and then clock out) and half-time at a blue-collar job (where they endlessly shovel asphalt and then clock out), while at the same time I'm trying to convince them that it's possible to create an equilibrium of demand with output by simultaneously reducing aggregate demand and moving around aggregate output. If there's an end goal to your labor- produce this much and then stop producing until repairs or new units are needed- you don't have to work all the time at these horrible jobs.
Right now, people work in white collar jobs in order to justify their right to the results of the blue collar jobs. If you don't write code, you can't afford the berries that Driscoll's ships to your grocery store, so you write code and make $150k/year, and you buy your $6 carton of berries, and the migrant berry pickers make $18k/year, and the truck driver makes $80k/year. But you're the end user of the berries; if you instead knew how to pick or knew how to drive, you might have a chance at getting the berries to your table without needing quasi-slave labor.
I don't want to live in a country where I get stuff- materials, goods, etc.- from people who are always struggling. We can't just UBI our way to luxury space communism, because then no one will pick the berries, because right now the "berry-picking job" is defined as "12 hours per day in and out of the hot sun".
This is what I'm trying to say- find some way to make sure that I can provide myself with shelter and see a doctor when I need to, and I'll go pick the damn berries and drive them back myself. Many seem to be responding with "no, that's impossible."
"I am finding it particularly difficult to convince people that they should even look past the current system."
Look past it all you want. But once you start using the power of the state to make it come about, the potential for devastating unintended consequences are very high.
If you want to be a well rounded human who picks berries and also writes code, knock yourself out. If you want to write Medium articles advocating for this lifestyle, knock yourself out.
But if the vast majority of people just want to specialize and pay people to perform other tasks, that's their prerogative, too.
As for the berry pickers, the UBI-like effect of the Covid stimulus programs in the US showed that giving people an income floor is very effective at raising wages rapidly, as people can turn down jobs that they don't think adequately compensates them for their labor.
Your sort of radical individualism, which is mostly accepted by the tech gentry, has proven absolutely disastrous for the less intelligent and other historically disadvantaged people. From birth, the modern American is subjected to the most refined consumer propaganda that has ever existed. The towns and cultures that our ancestors grew up with have been chewed up and spit out by mass tech and capital. People are constantly manipulated by cable news, advertising algorithms, television, computer programs- fast food restaurants are literally designed by "psychologists" and "product researchers" to induce hunger. The average American- not the average American you know, I mean the actual average American- is incapable of choosing culture or principles over the momentary rewards of money or satiation of various appetites because of the conditions imposed upon them by people like us, who have the ability to create controlling mechanisms.
One of the tools used to manipulate the other people in the U.S. is a model of society created in the 1900s, where you go to school for 16 years and then you work at the same career for the rest of your life, drawing a consistent paycheck and performing the same actions over and over again. In the 1970s, the IRA and the 401(k) were invented and pushed in order to free companies from the financial burden of providing pensions, and to siphon more cash into the investment market. Someone who has been convinced of this model of society is unable to argue about anything other than financial compensation. They are kept in a simultaneous state of envy for the rich and contempt for the poor. UBI makes sense to them because it would not require any change to their life, which is why everyone clamors for a higher salary, rather than for a life that they can be proud to live.
If you are content to live your own, satisfied, educated life and let the rest of our society fall victim to predatory markets and invasive habit control, because "that's their prerogative", then you are a coward.
People need to be empowered to individually make the choice to opt out of this system on their own. Persuasion to take that course is fine and noble.
But do you honestly think putting some group of people in charge of "protecting" people from all these bad influences, will truly lead to that small number of people acting completely altruistically in the best interests of society? Or they will be sorely tempted to use that power to manipulate society to the ends they personally deem most important?
One of the biggest problems I see with current discourse, is all memory of 20th century history seems to have been completely forgotten. There were large parts of the world that did away with all the consumerism and capitalism. They ended up killing 10s of millions of their own people, through starvation and enforcing their control by killing dissenters.
You and I are the authority; we can do the educating and the protection. People are being taken advantage of every day by various agents that wish to exploit them for various purposes. Those need clear, consistent messaging from people they respect that explains and illuminates the many pitfalls of modern society and offers a path through which to learn society-building skills and self-reliance. Leaving them to their own devices does not create a healthy, unified community; it merely leaves them ripe for the harvest by the banks, the insurance companies, advertisers, fast food corporations, car companies, etc.
It is uninteresting to me to be compared to the communists and the Nazis. It will turn out better for us all if you allow yourself to think more creatively than that. Contemporary society does not need to choose between absolute individualistic chaos or absolute control, although the fact that society is populated by many people who think exactly as you do makes that duality seem like the only outcome possible.
As long as we prioritize economic efficiency there will be an never ending treadmill of improving efficiency. Until we start bringing human factors into the equation we will stay on this path.
The difference is that the rock-digging is primarily for myself and my family, rather than for shareholders. Would "brainy" people need a higher level of mental stimulation if they were doing road-building work on their own street? I certainly wouldn't be happy as a truck driver, but I could easily work as a truck driver for a month straight if the reward was significant time off that I could spend with my family and friends.
I'm not doing a great job at explaining this- a lot of people have been trained to believe in the necessary division of labor, but their belief that they could never do manual labor allows the overlords of society to keep everyone in the rat race. If you think you could never work in a textile factory because you need more mental stimulation than that, then you won't ever consider a vision of society where you help produce textiles.
If people really want a ten-hour work week, we need to be building everything that we use in our society for ourselves, not relying on serfs in foreign countries to do the grunt work while we do "stimulating work", i.e. building elaborate processes for white collar companies providing services that we don't actually need.
We’ve done a great job of hiding-away slavery in the name of consumerism and “uplifting” third world economies.
Instead, I would love to see a world where repair and reuse is the norm.
And chasing after the largest/outrageous/most-expensive/trendiest is nothing short of embarrassing.
Yeah, if you want to keep the aggregate demand of your society consistent, it makes sense to have fewer than 2 children. (I don't necessarily support government prevention people having more than two children, but a really self-aware group of humans wouldn't spawn uncontrollably.)
> At what point does "immigration" become "mass immigration"
The fact that you're asking me that question implies that my definition is drastically different than your definition. So- I think we can agree that if the entire population of Omaha, Nebraska (475,000) moved over the span of one month to Tahiti (280,000), that could be called "mass immigration", with disastrous consequences for the local culture, politics, ecosystem, etc. So, if you'd call that "mass immigration", which I think you'd be foolish not to, what about that makes it "mass immigration"? Whatever your definition is, it'll be different from mine.
It's not very helpful for you to say you oppose something if you are using a different definition of that thing than everyone else.
Of course I agree with you that doubling the population density of a complex society in a month would lead to negative effects, and you can use that as the threshold for classifying a situation as "mass immigration" if you want, but there's still a tautology there, as you're effectively saying you're against "too much immigration", which is true of just about everyone's position on immigration.
(I suppose some people might think that "too much immigration" cannot occur in practice, because any country that is desirable to immigrate to would have the resources to adapt quickly enough to people arriving at the rates that current transportation systems make possible).
To give a tighter upper bound, though, rather than considering the population of Omaha, let's look at the population of the whole of the US. In 2019 (so before the pandemic) the population growth rate was 0.60% per year, whereas in the past 70 years, the highest rate was 1.76% (in 1956).[0] So empirically I think we can say that the population growth rate could be almost triple what it is today without that growth rate itself being the cause of "disastrous consequences for the local culture, politics, ecosystem, etc.".
However, it is still possible that all of those aspects are negatively affected by the current population density, and that the "ideal" growth rate is negative. What all that means for immigration policy is a further step removed from the data available, but I hope that the above is helpful for thinking about these questions.
[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/popu...