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Comment by kube-system | Hacker News Reader

Art, entertainment, and communication are not new human creations. These jobs are the result of psychological needs that humans have. Maslow's Hierarchy is more than a cave, nuts, and berries.

Furthermore, not everyone can survive without specialization of labor. Prior to specialization of labor, it was much more common for people to die young, and the world's population reflected this.

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Specialisation of what labor? We've always had hunters and gatherers, and still do. We've always been specialised.

What I'm saying is Maslow's scale is tipped upside down with an overabundance of leisure and scarcity of high quality basic fulfillment. There's so much entertainment, that we can afford for a few markets to crash and disappear, hence why I called them "made-up".

We have tons of high quality basic fulfillment. Food is higher quality, more abundant, and cheaper than it ever has been. Educational attainment is the highest it has ever been. Global measures of violence are at historical lows. Specialized healthcare is more available than it ever has been.

I think you've got cause and effect reversed. It's our exceptional progress on basic fulfillment that has enabled our economy to support these so-called "made-up" jobs.

I don't necessarily agree. Food has always been "organic free range humaine grass fed unpesticized sun-shined unprocessed" - nowadays you'd go bankrupt buying everything from certified health stores. Education is aimed at an acceptable mean in large groups instead of pedagogues. Death and injury rates are down because of advances in medicine - people are inexplicably violent still (please read or listen to Lt. Col. Dave Grossman). European healthcare is great.

Was it the specialization of labor, or the harnessing of vasts quantities of stored energy in fossil fuels? I’d wager on the latter.

Agriculture brought 2 or 3 orders of magnitude in population growth. Industrialization of fossil fuels brought about 1.

Agriculture alone, or fueled by fossil fuels?

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