Lol, why should I work day and night? Why should I build a company and hire people if nothing good will it bring me?
If I do not earn a great amount by giving up my personal free time and risk my entire life, i wouldn't do it. That's easy.
If I do not earn a great amount by giving up my personal free time and risk my entire life, i wouldn't do it. That's easy.
Maybe I've been living in Sweden too long and the emphasis on living your life is maybe a bit too high here but the idea of working day and night to earn "a lot more" feels like game theory.
> If I _don't_ break my back and give up my life then someone else will and I will lose out in the big picture!
We shouldn't live to work, we should work to live.
If you're not getting fulfilled in your work and/or you're giving your life to your job then you're not really living- you're a meat robot.
Yeah because it is a prisoners dilemma type situation. If everyone starts working harder but people don't start consuming harder there is less work to be done which consolidates work to the hardest working members without actually helping the overall economy.
The economy wants 10 cars (aggregate demand), 10 people build 10 cars, 5 decide to build them twice as fast which means 10 cars are being built which means the last 5 don't have to work but they also didn't get paid and cannot afford the 5 extra cars which means aggregate demand is now 5 cars and some of the hard workers also get fired. If everyone built one car then nobody would be worse off.
The root cause of working day and night is to maintain or increase your socioeconomic position so that you are able to obtain scarce (demand greater than supply) resources when you want to. This can apply on a tribal level (family all the way to country and alliances).
For example, large amounts of people around the world want avocados all the time all year round, but there are insufficient avocados to go around. How are the limited number of avocados allocated?
The last 5, being uncompetitive in car building, ought to choose a different field for which they are competitive. If they don't work, they don't eat and thus drop out of "the game".
Citation needed for the above.
Maybe their standard of living largely comes from the high taxes imposed on the rich. Or maybe it comes from decades of free education, or maybe from the oil reserves of some scandinavian states.
Or maybe we just don't know; and that's ok too. I'm just saying that we shouldn't be so sure that the protestant work ethic is the necessary and sufficient thing for a good standard of living.
Won't someone spare a thought for the minimum-wage, physically-risky lifestyle of the startup founder?! And you need your own car! You know, it's a more dangerous job than being a cop!
...oh, oh wait, that's pizza guy, sorry, I too get those "jobs" confused all the time!
FTFY
At the very least if someone chooses to work day and night to build, society should be celebrating them— not discouraging them. It may be bad from their perspective, but civilization as a whole cannot advance without people like this. All of the rest of us are free-riding off people like this both past and present.
I think it’s really great the European culture of la vita dolce. But the reality is virtually all new products and companies come from places with less cultural aversion to working nights and weekends than The Continent.
Greed-obsessed lunatics is a different subset ( with overlap ) but play a very different role in societies.
Your view of innovation on The Continent is likely 10% true and 90% PR. You just don't think about innovations as European because we don't put faces on companies.
However, those people should not be able to use their extra earned money against the rest of us, who made different life choices.
There are still many non-scarce things you can spend your extra money on.
An example of what you can do: buying expensive cars.
An example of what you can't do: buying up land so that everybody else has to pay higher prices for housing.
if they are non-scarce, then you already have obtained your required amount, and thus no longer demand more.
> buying up land so that everybody else has to pay higher prices for housing.
buying up assets, since assets would be scarce, allows you to demand payment for their use, and thus, ensure your future financial situation is secure.
It sucks for those who don't own assets, but this system resolves the conflict of how to assign assets amongst people. And it gives those who don't own assets the motivation to work harder. The resulting society will then have more aggregate wealth than before.
Your assumption here is that you can trade human work hours for finite natural resources on some market, and that everyone has to pay for those resources on the market. There is nor reason why you should be able to do that, rather the natural system is to allocate all finite resources equally to each person and then you an pay for those with your work, but you working harder to pay a person to share his resources with you wouldn't affect anyone else in the economy unless they too wants to have extra of that resource.
What if no one wants that 1 hour of labor? What if more people want 1 hour of a certain type of labor that exceeds the supply of that certain type of labor?
Doesn't have to be hours, the hour was just to represent that it is a human working and not a finite resource. Different human work can be valued differently.
It sounds like we can assign bandwidth to the highest bidder then. Who needs Net Neutrality?
Seriously, the problem with your thinking is that you're stuck with the idea that our current economy is the only and most fair way to divide resources.
The fact that it is expensive is what defines it as scare (i.e. lots of demand relative to little supply).
How about using a less fuel efficient vehicle? Is that “against others” as it uses up the non polluted portion of the environment?
> An example of what you can't do: buying up land so that everybody else has to pay higher prices for housing.
Land is not the same everywhere. Low humidity, Mediterranean climate, coast California views are extremely scarce and in high demand. How are you going to fit 8B people onto the world’s desirable land?
If you want better than median living conditions then you work for it. There is no reason why it should be free to live in the best parts of the world if not everyone can, otherwise the privilege of living there would be a source of injustice.
It is true that if you want a luxury resource, like a very attractive location to live in, then others working more for that position means you also would have to work harder if you want to have it. But I don't consider people competing for luxury resources a problem, no that is a feature and is what makes the economy tick. If you don't want that rat race you have to live in median conditions.
>An example of what you can do: buying expensive cars.
Why are expensive cars not scarce? They're ultimately built using scarce resources (eg. steel, rubber, plastic, labor).
The voters do. People vote for corrupt politicians since they care about other things. They would do that even if you didn't have capitalism. The problem is therefore the implementation of your democracy and not capitalism. Removing capitalism while keeping the flawed democracy would just result in another Soviet scenario or even worse.
So the problem isn't capitalism, it is corrupt democracy. A corrupt democracy will try to do whatever it can to enrich its politicians, like taking bribes from companies etc. A healthy democracy doesn't take those bribes. You can find many countries where politicians works mostly for the people and not for companies, that is how it should be.
Keep going down the rabbit hole and the problem is corrupt humans. Transparency to enable everyone to keep everyone else in check is the only solution I can see.
At some point, that reward is going to be traded for something else that's in demand and where the demand exceeds the supply. If you interpret that as "use their extra earned money against the rest of us", then it seems that you are going to have to disallow the notion of rewarding those who decide to work more than average.
Mots people work hard because they want to succeed, not because they want to get rich.
You never become a great athlete for the money, you become a great athlete because you want to win. You never start a business for the money, you go $BIG_CORP if you want money, you start a business because what you want is success.
In 90 years the western world has never been as inegalitarian as today, do you think people in the sixties didn't create anything?
What happened to the Microsoft hate that used to be on this forum?
Calling Microsoft innovative is a little... off, right?