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Comment by clairity | Hacker News Reader

it's also short-sightedly self-centered. the better solution is moving the economy toward being wage-oriented, with asset income being periphery, rather than our current asset-focused system.

make money by doing stuff rather than having stuff, the latter of which is the epitome of economic rents.

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I guess you're advocating that people work until they drop dead?

Was there a period in humanity, or in the life of any living creature, where they just sort of stopped engaging in productive activity and it was a good thing? Maybe we need to create more meaningful and sustainable work that fits into people’s life cycles, but the idea of working your entire life is not a tragedy. FIRE is a scam.

> Was there a period in humanity, or in the life of any living creature, where they just sort of stopped engaging in productive activity and it was a good thing?

Humanity as a whole? I don't think anyone has advocated that here, just a certain segment of the population in their later years. As for any living creature, I didn't spend any time doing anything productive over the weekend, and I think it was a good thing. In fact, I've been doing that every weekend for a long time, and I plan to keep doing it!

So why not do it every day of the week instead?

Doing enough work to survive is a fundamental part of life. Technology and society function to either make that work easier or lower the amount of work that needs to be done. Take either of those away and you're going to be spending much less weekends doing "nothing productive".

meta point is that this is why nuanced conversations on the (texted based) internet are a waste of time. You and the person you're quoting are not really talking about the same thing. In a conversation you would go back and forth and figure that out; on the internet that's not required.

> You and the person you're quoting are not really talking about the same thing.

The reason I responded to the parent comment was that it seemed to me like they were misinterpreting the person they were responding to; the original comment that started this thread was that people who only have wage-based income instead of asset-based income would not be able to effectively retire and would have to work for their entire life. The response to this was to argue that if people didn't work, then humanity wouldn't progress. I don't see why "humanity needs productivity to progress" implies "every human needs to be productive for every moment of their entire life", which is why I responded with both a direct answer (i.e. arguing that people should be able to retire is not arguing that people shouldn't be productive _ever_ in their life) and a tongue-in-cheek response (nobody actually is productive every single moment in their life).

there's the story that pre-colonial Hawaiians lived in abundance and basically didn't work for 4 months of the year (see e.g. https://www.hawaii.edu/uhwo/clear/home/HawaiiLaborHistory.ht... ). So that was a system where everyone could stop engaging in productive activity because as a society they agreed that they had "enough" for the year and it would be more fun to have a vacation than to have "more".

Presumably if their population grew too much this would no longer be the case?

There are a huge number of activities which are "productive". Children need around 60 hours per week of attention between the ages of 1 and 5.

no.

Then what are you advocating for? If people can't parlay wages into assets that can at least perform in the same ballpark as wages then "work until you drop" or "crank out kids like a pre-industrial subsistence farmer" is what you'll get.

It takes roughly a career to amass enough assets to retire on and that's with a slightly reduced standard of living in retirement.

Unless you want to assume population growth forever (seems unwise IMO) you need one average career to generate enough surplus to pay for an average retirement. So far, buying assets (usually a mix of real estate and fractional ownership of financial instruments that are ultimately backed by companies and governments) is the most efficient way we know to accomplish this goal.

Let me run this wild idea by you real quick: What if we, as a society could somehow pool our excess wealth for distribution among the elderly and infirm who are unable to work productively. This would provide everyone with a sense of, you might say, security that benefits society as a whole.

To answer you first question/comment (because you are not as original as you think you are): That is why robust electorate, transparent public governance, and durable anti-corruption institutions are so important.

The obscene rents being in government coffers is somehow magically better than in some billionaire's bank account? You can make bullshit ideological arguments about the intrinsic goodness of one or the other all day but the fact of the matter is that any system of providing for retirement other than literally just saving up resources (which would be horrendously wasteful) and then spending them over retirement is going to necessitate contributions by currently productive members of society. Money has to flow from worker to grandma somehow. And there's always intermediaries. And they always take a cut. Maybe it's you that's not that original.

> retirement is going to necessitate contributions by currently productive members of society

That is the point.

> And there's always intermediaries. And they always take a cut.

Should they not be compensated for their productive work?

> Maybe it's you that's not that original.

That is the point.

When the Social Security trust fund runs out you're going to find out really quickly that this "wild idea" doesn't work for the same reason Marxist Communism fails in the real world: you can't get the majority of a population to genuinely and altruistically operate within that system, especially when unexpected or abnormal events occur, like the baby boom or periodic market crashes.

no. must everything be taken to an extreme, made tribal and ideological?

note the phrase "asset income being periphery", which implies an optimum. the ability to own one appreciating asset is great. owning two is probably ok in most cases. 90 is highly unlikely to provide a net social good.

Ever heard of a pension?

Edit: sorry that was a bit snarky. The point is that there are other ways to ensure people have a reasonable lifestyle once their 'working days' are over. Those schemes are probably best to be tied in some way to contributions, but they certainly don't need to be simply a savings plan, they can be a means to provide social support for those that cannot contribute to the same degree as others.

edit: oops, wasn’t talking to me but will leave the below unedited for posterity (and to show my posterior).

again, that’s a logical leap that i was careful not to make. small-time investing can have positive externalities on an economic system; industrial, mechanized investing, not so much. if we didn’t try to turn everything related to money into a get-rich-quick gambling scheme instead of the (imperfect) accounting mechanism it was originated to be, we’d be much better off, pensions and 401(k)’s included.

Kids aren't the only system of elder care capable of avoiding the "side effect" of generating bonker rents for billionares.

With economic rents the dilemma is not simply between doing stuff and having stuff. It's between having something which others can have as well (through reciprocal property rights) vs. claiming to own things which actually belongs to someone else (surplus labor resulting from enclosure of the commons) and then pledging what you don't own as collateral for loans.

you seem to be describing the tragedy of the commons, not economic rents.

The author of the original "Tragedy of the Commons" paper lamented that he did not title it "Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons", later writing a follow-up by that name: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21236819/

And Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel in economics for her work describing the mechanisms used by real-world communities to effectively self-manage Commons: https://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-princ...

i guess there's one situational intersection, alluded to by @randbox, between the tragedy of the commons and economic rents, which is when someone (illegally) takes control of the commons and literally charging rents for assets they don't actually own.

offhand, i can't think of a practical and contemporary example of this though.

"making money by having stuff" is the basic move of capitalism. The stuff you have is called capital, and our economic system is at its core the "ism" of "having stuff".

I'm not disagreeing with you re. what I'd rather see us move towards, but there's a whole lot of existing money and power entrenched in the idea that having money is a great way to continue having money.

sure, but in the long arc of history, we're past the peak of capitalism, groping for the next iteration to move us forward. to overcome the ossification you describe, it's time to take our positive learnings (assets are ok, wealth concentration not so much) and apply it to a new -ism. the current beneficiaries can come along, stay behind, or we can fight over it, just as in the past. that does mean that this progress likely happens in a different part of the world than "the west".

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