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I live in Australia. Australia produces 190% of the food it requires, exports 71% of its agricultural production, and only 2.2% of its population work in agriculture. In earlier societies around 60% or more of the population worked in agriculture.

I don't believe most of this increasing agricultural productivity is due to us buying things from poor countries, although it's probably a factor at some level. I think it's due to the increasing technological sophistication of farming: the breeding of more productive crops, the use of tractors, the use of fertiliser both synthetic and man-made, better understanding and monitoring of soil health, better storage and better supply chains, new weedkillers, automated and partially automated animal handling, refrigeration and freezers, and everything else.

I do understand that someone has to do some work, but if we could have 8.8% of our population work in agriculture for 10 hours a week and not have to compete for housing against 40 hours a week incomes[0], that would be pretty great.

[0] Numbers are wrong: farmers work more than 40 hours a week. I think they explain the general point well enough, though.

People need more than food. Healthcare, education, electricity, water, the fancy phone or computer you’re reading this on, the infrastructure that connects it together with everyone else - all of these require people working in order to exist.

Food is just part of the human consumption. Starting with the agrarian society, we as species are having it very easy TBH. Disasters happen and some places are chronically problematic but overall food is solved problem since many millenniums.

Thanks to the developments in the last century, incredibly small percentage of people directly produce the food. However this is due to paradigm shift, these people are capable to produce so much food is thanks to other people who produce their tools and resources used in production of food. Still huge number of people are working in feeding the population, just indirectly.

I don't buy the argument that people living in Australia would starve to death if everyone in the world gradually halved their working hours over the next decade. I think current consumption here is so far above subsistence levels that there's a lot of room to drop without facing famine.

This is less clear-cut for anyone in a society that's close to subsistence and I'm not in any way suggesting that we should all cut our hours by 50%, but why not 20%? Even if food production decreases linearly, we'd still be at a 152% surplus, right?

If halved working hours result in reduced output of the needed chemicals and machinery, that would definitely mean that less food will be produced. If Australia can keep up paying more than the rest and purchase the needed resources and machinery, then other parts of the world will starve and Australia will be just fine, I guess.

Ideally, paying more should be able to convince people to work and prevent supply chain shortages but if for some strange reason people all over the world insist on working less some people who are less fortunate will definitely need to change their diet or even die.

> Ideally, paying more should be able to convince people to work and prevent supply chain shortages but if for some strange reason people all over the world insist on working less some people who are less fortunate will definitely need to change their diet or even die.

And you'd have to assume nobody would change jobs. It's a useless extrapolation.

I think you're suggesting that

- the world is at literal subsistence level overall

- all nominal gains in productivity are just shuffling numbers around

- if anyone at all stops working, people will die

This seems obviously untrue given the increase in agricultural productivity. I know a few farmers, and none of them think agricultural productivity has stayed the same. Additionally, it seems really obvious that lots of industrial production is now going towards making luxury cars, TVs, smartphones, bigger houses, better healthcare, etc. and that not all of these are necessary for agricultural production.

Even further, global food insecurity has been decreasing. Only 8.9% of the world's population are food insecure, and prior to the war in Ukraine, those people mostly didn't live in agriculturally productive areas. I find it hard to believe that the remaining 91% are living off the work of the 8.9%. I think a much simpler explanation is that agriculture has actually gotten more productive even if you include the cost of making tractors.

On this topic, a question I've had for a while but never learned the answer to is: if nobody did anything outside farming, how expensive would farm equipment be?

I assume there's some scale benefit to agricultural vehicles from the production of everyone else's vehicles, and likewise the construction and maintenance of the transport infrastructure to get food from the farms to the people, but I don't know whether or not that scaling benefit is enough to change the conclusion.

Part of it is that there's a certain amount of food each person can reasonably eat - so if you want to feed a hundred people you can have, say, five or so with modern equipment farm the field and feed all 100, or you could have all 100 work with more outdated equipment (think: horses, etc) and farm the same amount.

I think I’m asking a different question: if we could actually work much less? Can we really feed people if everyone who isn’t currently a farmer or making farm equipment/consumables stopped working, or are greater economies of scale needed to keep the cost of that farm equipment and those consumables low?

Large swaths of people do work that is not even remotely related to farming, even if you need Google and AT&T for the companies that make the supplies farmers need, there's no arguable way the entertainment industry as a whole is necessary for farming or farming equipment. And I daresay there are others.

Possibly.

But also possibly (at least given my limited economics awareness): everyone who uses a motorcar increases the scale of the automotive industry, and the automotive industry gets cheaper per unit the more units are made, so the fewer cars get sold to video game develops the more expensive tractors get.

Same for petrochemicals, steel.

I don’t have any answers, it’s just a question I doubt I can as yet even manage to phrase well enough for the average real economist to consider interesting.

Humanity is much more productive per capita than 50 years ago, but we are collectively working more hours, not less.

The goal should not be for everyone to do no work.

The goal should not be for everyone to work full time and fear unemployment.

Part of the problem is that people have been conditioned into accepting this weird binary division between Work (measurable, institutionalized, subordinate labor) and Not-Work (everything else) that doesn't exist in healthy societies.

The kibbutzniks worked a lot harder than U.S. office workers, but didn't have the problem of alienation and the epidemic of mental ill-health (plus chronic inflammation, obesity, et al) that we have.

Almost all of us want the institutional, authoritarian nightmare we call "Work" to die, and it's past high time that it does... but, unfortunately, we've been stripped of our imagination when it comes to the question of how work (that is, useful activity) will get done without it.

Collective farms similar to kibbutz also exist in the US. They are an option for those who prefer that lifestyle. You can even start one yourself.

Who are you to tell everyone what their goals should be?

We work more in large part because we consume much more. Increased consumption requires increased supply which requires increased production which means more work to be done.

Debt also provides a large motivator, and just as you get close to being out of it you easily pick up more.

Debt is just a product of consumption.

Shelter costs have also increased massively, not only because shelter has gotten better but because there’s more room in people’s budget for landlords to capture.

Medical and educational costs have risen in the US, I would argue for the same reason.

And some adversarial work has expanded for no reason- look at all the effort spent in high frequency trading that could be replaced by venues running auctions every 100ms instead of having competitions for fractions of a microsecond.

If your boss is gonna take as much labor out of you as possible, no matter how productive you are, and no matter what advances in production methods you have achieved, productivity doesn't matter so much.

Unsure why the post is downvoted, this point of view is really interesting. Could you link some reference materials to explore this more?

I think the topic is quite nebulous but I recall some articles on these issues here on HN that reached the front page. I recall something about historical ratio of the non-working elites being about the same and societies crumbling over that threshold.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction

I guess you can read “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism” by V.I. Lenin to explore the topic more

I am downvoting because the comment acts as if it's a mystery where all the wealth gains in productivity have gone.

It is NOT a fucking mystery, and I'm outraged that so, so many people are or act oblivious to the obscenely obvious cause. (Since it's not actually obvious to everyone, thanks to shit education and propaganda, the uber-wealthy have hoovered up the gains in productivity and kept it to themselves.)

It's very clear by looking at the numbers [0], and it's outrageous to ignore this factor and blame a slightly older population.

[0] - https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/productivity-workforc...

And no one cares about your diatribe or outrage.

The point is that there is always an elite or wealthy class, pick which group you like best.

Always, for all time this is what happens in society. Don't care about your one example of some communist paradise that was great.

>The point is that there is always an elite or wealthy class, pick which group you like best.

Citations required

I do not agree whatsoever, just because you don't have the imagination to come up with a better system for organizing labor and resources doesn't mean it isn't possible

How would you organize labor and resources such that there is no elite class? How do you enforce whatever rules are required and ensure that those enforcers don't become the elite themselves (if nobody else..)?

I'm not holding my breath. As of yet, no one has had the imagination. This has become a fav piece of rhetoric by ancoms who believe complex supply lines, infrastructure and essential services could be maintained, let alone improved upon, with a "flat hierarchy" society doing away with representative democracy. No one can take that seriously. The universe hates a vacuum and you can be sure that, as in the past, if goons have an opening to seize power under the guise of Communism, with their party being the only legitimate, then they will. Removing checks and balances will do that.

Citations aren't required, a basic knowledge of history, though, that is required and what you lack.

The idea, your idea is that there's a way to tell everybody what to do to make all the things work and everyone will follow the plan and like their spot in it. You lack the imagination to recognize individual will let alone the fact that society works because there are millions of experts making choices everyday. No central planning board to 'organize' 'labor' can accomplish that or house the knowledge of these individuals

So what, giving up so easily on problem so obvious is usually done by people who are well off and actually have to lose, or those who for some basic reason don't understand they are also the ones getting fucked over (ie patriotism can push folks easily in very stupid positions and in the same time make them feel good about their actions).

If you traveled a bit around the world, maybe you could see that nothing is binary, and neither is this topic.

Elites always exist in some form, yes. They do not always have to be so disproportionally distanced from rest of population like in US, not in democracies, not so untouchable. There are tons of countries, ie in Europe who are managing this in much better way.

The wider problem/situation I see is that US is much more everybody-for-themselves-and-fuck-the-rest because it maximizes direct incomes of few (ignoring how much they will spend on ie healthcare or education of their kids, these 2 can easily wipe out aby gains for middle/upper middle class), rather than living in actual modern society.

The logic of 'contributing back and improving place you live actually comes back to you too and creates something better for future of you/your kids' somehow didn't click in US that much. I saw first hand rather primitive knee-jerk reactions in ie bible belt in US that equate well working society with socialism, (I guess phonetical step not too big, logical though much bigger) and well that's communism and you should be deported/jailed/shot on spot.

Its evidenced by many comments here. People are well off and the system has worked for them so we see the attitude of "it's working for me, fuck everyone else who didn't work the way I did or wasn't born into the right circumstances"

People that have never been outside of the US think they are living rough. They also like to compare their living with only the most egalitarian societies in the world instead of 'the world'. Odds are pretty great that you live in comfort everyday. Your concerns then get to be centered around all the material things you lack. And, odds are great you've never had to sacrifice much of anything. Nothing real. You would never commit to working in a place you didn't want to go or taking a bad schedule because you, right now, want everything. You deserve it, don't you.

That's the attitude that, unfortunately, will also be found in America.

So, for those that have worked, have sacrificed, we aren't interested in hearing the solutions posed from a homogenous society of one distinct culture and obvious problems with irregularities or deviations from the norm.... Here's looking at you Nords

The problem isn't that wealthy people exist, the problem is what percentage they get. It makes a big difference whether the top 1% own 10% of the wealth or 50% of the wealth, for example.

That could fix a lot of issues if you just look at America in isolation. The truth is though, even with the insane wealth distribution in America, the middle class here still makes a good amount of money. I regularly see people on here scoff at low six figure salaries. Those salaries are virtually impossible in many parts of the world and the only reason they're so easy in America is because we are exploiting developing nations the same way the ultra wealthy here are exploiting us. If we actually tried to redistribute the wealth that the ultra wealthy has accumulated, it would go to developing nations and not the hackernews crowd.

> despite the increase in productivity we also have increased lifespan which results in large number of retirees who consume the resources for much longer than before

Don’t forget "rising living standards" which in Western cultures is an euphemism for "extravagant consumption".

> It really boils down on how many people need how much resources and how many people produce these resources. You can argue over who should be your bourgeoisie, should it be (...)

How about we don't succumb to the desire to pull strawmen and focus on simple things to accomplish such as being able to make a honest living that leaves you with disposable income after covering all your cost of living with a simple 9-to-5 job?

Where does this need to create the illusion that there is possibly no grey area between a homeless slacker and a glorious millionaire investor?

Is it too much to ask the most prosperous economy in the history of the world to allow workers to actually live a modest life with your salary? Otherwise, why would those workers continue to support that absurd society?

> you can have a lot of bananas from Honduras if your society can make great apps that Hondurans love and willing to trade their bananas

Yes, or alternatively, you can live in a society which uses coups, death squads, and puppet dictators to keep Honduran labor cheap.

Unfortunately that's true. There are also many other models to have elites, some more fair or less cruel than others.

This way or another the main equation never changes. That is, the resources we consume are below the resources we produce. Left or right, communists or capitalist or other kind of ideologues are just different groups of people who have different ideas on how to distribute the roles.

This is a point that many people seem to ignore

US foreign policy and actions of private companies have absolutely decimated other countries, cultures, and economies so now those countries are reliant on the income from rich US capitalists exploiting their populace's dire straights. That we placed them in.

> because despite the increase in productivity we also have increased lifespan which results in large number of retirees who consume the resources for much longer than before.

The retirees in your example, with great probability, either have to rely on outside support (be it children or social security), or they will die with lots of wealth left over (aka inheritance). I hate to sound like a crummy communist, but this is a distribution problem, first and foremost.

Communists aren't crummy in the least, the ideas are important for developing new ideas that work better than our current system

They are definitely crummy. Communism isn't a new idea. It's a very old, very bad idea that's repeatedly failed.

I mean, how about we just take the wealth from the 10%?

How about it? You still wont be able to eat those numbers, albeit the numbers would be slightly bigger for some.