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Comment by ksdale | Hacker News Reader

We're very privileged to be able to wonder when enough productivity is enough. A huge portion of the world's population still lives in abject poverty and increased productivity would absolutely benefit them. And I think there were people 100 years ago making the same argument as you, that technology had advanced far enough that there was no need for more.

FWIW, I agree that the focus on productivity at the exclusion of everything else is bad, the point of productivity is to live well, but I think there's a lot of the world that doesn't live well, and I think it is perhaps a failure of imagination to not believe that we could live better as well.

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I find it rather ridiculous to view the inequities of society as a problem that should be solved by increasing productivity. I absolutely have a feeling that some of our biggest productivity gains have come on the backs of and sometimes maybe at the cost of worse quality of life in some parts of the world.

Extremely cheap labor improves productivity numbers.

>> I absolutely have a feeling that some of our biggest productivity gains have come on the backs of and sometimes maybe at the cost of worse quality of life in some parts of the world.

Our biggest productivity gains came from burning coal, then oil. Productivity only started being sightly decoupled from oil usage since the early-mid 2010s.

If you take gdp numbers and divide them out among the population of the entire world, you get a world in poverty. Though I agree that many of the gains are ill-gotten. There's still nowhere near enough in absolute terms, though. Enough food, but not enough housing, electricity, clean water, appliances...

> If you take gdp numbers and divide them out among the population of the entire world, you get a world in poverty.

World GDP per capita last year was about 10,000USD.

Surely a globally equal society at that level of wealth is preferable to what we have now.

I'm not sure about that at all. I assume you don't sit around thinking that you have several times the amount of income that you need, or that your taxes should be several times what they are now?

It's safe to say the U.S. does a terrible job providing for it's citizens given the wealth of the country, but the European states we often hold up as models have gdp's per capita that are 4 or 5 times 10,000USD. That seems like the bare minimum we'd want to shoot for, rather than ensuring that everyone in the world lives like the fine people in Namibia.

There's an assumption baked into capitalism that growing the pie is more important than fussing over dividing the pie. This has historically held true.

Focusing on equality is a distraction. If the poor are at the same level of poverty over 20 years, it doesn't matter whether the rich got richer or poorer. The fact is the poor are getting richer too, just not as quickly as the rich.

I'm not a free market ideologue. I'm just a practical person. If any system proves to be better at lifting up the poor I'll take it. Currently it seems a largely capitalist system with welfare and healthcare is a highly effective system. Certainly more effective than systems which try to destroy the markets.

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