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Comment by armchairhacker | Hacker News Reader

Roughly how much "work" does every person in the world need to do so that every person in the world can live a minimal but decent lifestyle?

Of course, some people will want and take more than "decent", some people are disabled so its unreasonable to expect and unfair to demand for them to contribute the same amount, some people genuinely like to work all sorts of jobs (including hard labor), and speaking of, there are different jobs and no one way to quantify their "work".

But this is a good starting point to answer the question: how much work is "enough"? With modern knowledge and medium-scale factories, can people spend 15-hour weeks producing enough to live comfortably, or do you need the average person to work 20-hour weeks of hard labor (or have 1/3 of the population work 60-hour weeks)?

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I also think this is a tricky but fun question. First off, what's minimal but decent? Maybe owning a phone with internet access and 4 changes of clothes. Eating enough nutritious food every week. Having a comfortable place to sleep, indoor plumbing and ease in moving about a 10 mile radius. Healthcare for emergencies only.

That might total the equivalent of $50/week in consumption and $20K in sunken costs per person in the developed world. Much less in developing nations.

You're thinking in terms of tens of hours when we could get by on minutes of work per day, if we optimised for comfortable survival. At the cost of stagnation. But not a bad trade-off to consider.

GDP/hour of labor is a really interesting metric. For the US it is about $75/hour.

Romania has the second highest GDP/h in EU. Why? Because of undeclared employment / illegal work.

I am guessing you mean GDP/capita-hour, if it was only gdp/hour that would imply Romania is the second largest economy in Europe

Sorry, I meant GDP/hour-of-labor.

Or actually in that context it makes sense, I apologise

Is that really true? https://data.oecd.org/lprdty/gdp-per-hour-worked.htm , set the base to US dollars instead of 2015 normalized. Most EU countries and the EU average of $54.20/hour seems to be above Romania's figure of $38/hour.

You're asking the wrong question. Regardless of the specific number of work hours that would be necessary to live a minimal but decent lifestyle (however you choose to define that), some people will always choose to work longer and harder in order to raise their social status. That status is often denominated in money but it can also take the form of possession of scarce resources, athletic skills, physical appearance, or fame. Most people are very status conscious and will then work harder themselves in order to keep up with the competition (or at least not fall too far behind).

You might claim that this status seeking is irrational or unhealthy or whatever, but that's a moot point. It's fundamental human nature and will never change.

social status is, by definition, cultural, and cultural values are malleable.

i think it's also worth pointing out that work is perhaps not so connected to status as may be assumed. there is plenty of work that provides no status, and it seems to me that higher-status people work less.

Social status is indeed cultural, but the search for it comes from deep instincts found in a lot of other mammals besides us. Trying to go aginst the search of a higher social status is trying to stop gravity.

By definition of “social status” or by definition of “cultural”?

That something is malleable doesn’t imply that it is infinitely malleable.

Also yes, more work does not correspond to higher status in any monotonic way like that. This doesn’t cause any problem for the claim that some people would opt to do more work in order to gain more status?

> social status is, by definition, cultural, and cultural values are malleable

Is it? It turns out it's usually easier to tackle "fixed" characteristics coming from biology or physics. Cultural / social aspects are usually near-impossible to change by any single person or group.

After you acquire a certain amount of resources, you’re able to care less about increasing your social status-for what else does “more social status” bring, if not more resources.

I’m unable to avoid thinking back, again and again, as Shohreh Aghdashloo voices Avasarala in The Expanse talking about how they have UBI (Basic) because they can’t provide enough jobs-and if you take it you can’t work.

We’re heading directly there, not as we produce things off-world (for now), but as we automate and head more and more towards post-scarcity. Our current models of microeconomics (and maybe macro, I can’t say) only hold up under a scarce amount of resources. If we somehow let a combination of “not-scarce-resources” plus a level of centralization over control of production and delivery of those not-actually-scarce-to-produce resources, but which cuts out people who don’t do “X” (whatever “X” is), we’re going to have an especially nasty problem.

The things that people really want and which signal high status will always be scarce. You can't make more real estate in desirable areas. Ferrari intentionally limits production numbers to create artificial scarcity.

> for what else does “more social status” bring, if not more resources.

Different treatment from other people.

Even if humans would continue to attempt to gain social status by training to become buff pole-vaulters, I think it would be a massive improvement if that status seeking was decoupled from the economic system.

> Roughly how much "work" does every person in the world need to do so that every person in the world can live a minimal but decent lifestyle?

It turns out people have to work harder for that than they do working under a free market system, where they get to keep what they earn.

> they get to keep what they earn.

And 'earn' what they're allowed -- 'earn' is kind of a weasel word in that sentence.

It is not a weasel word. If free market workers were only "allowed" some money, they would all be working at minimum wage. I personally know many working for well into 6 figures.

It's under a non-free market system where the government sets your non-negotiable pay, i.e. what you're "allowed".

"What they earn" only has meaning with respect to some wage; if one works a job at some wage then what they earn is just a matter of arithmetic, no matter if that wage is set by a government, a monopolistic employer, "the free market", or something else.

A more interesting question is: how should we as a society set wages to best benefit society? Your answer, I gather, is to leave it to the market. I'm not sure what my answer is, but I do believe the current state of affairs ain't it. For one, I believe the guys that pick up the garbage (an essential and incredibly unpleasant, dangerous, and physically demanding job) should make at least as much as a software developer. If the market disagrees, then that's a small hint that maybe markets aren't the end-all-be-all of economic organization.

Try to transcend for five seconds the decades of propaganda you've sustained -- capitalism is not a law of nature hits bong.

Your scheme of society (government) deciding everyone's wages. Many times. It doesn't work out very well. In fact, people in those societies are always trying to get into the US, where wages are set by the market.

BTW, you're free to donate whatever you feel is just to your garbageman.

> Try to transcend for five seconds the decades of propaganda you've sustained

Are you sure I'm the one affected by decades of propaganda?

For one thing, you appear to subscribe to the Labor Theory of Value, where someone's effort and time determine their wage, rather than what actually happens is what one produces that determines their wage. The LToV has been thoroughly discredited. It's pretty easy to discredit:

Consider someone digging a hole in the ground. He works hard, sweat pouring off his body. Then, he fills it in again. What value has he produced? Nothing. What would you pay someone to do such a thing? Nothing. I bet you pay for results, not sweat, when you pay someone to do something for you.

This thread feels so odd to me. I studied economics and I understand things intellectually the way Walter does. LTV for sure does not work. The market decides things by marginalism.

But I also live in the real world and I think there's just a gigantic number of people who are paid something different from what they ought to be paid.

We may just be seeing the beginnings of it now in the UK, with lots of strikes about to happen.

I'm also well read enough to have heard all the arguments, sadly. It's the same over and over. "It's not a real free market" as the counterpart to "communism has never been tried". "People get paid their marginal product" is another one.

"If you don't like it, why don't you just pay the guy/government yourself" is another wiseass answer I've seen in these debates.

The orthodox economically literate answer somehow to me is not satisfying and needs some reassessment.

> another wiseass answer

There is a deeper point to that - that people tend to be free with money as long as it doesn't cost themselves. People behave very differently w.r.t. what is "worth" spending money on when it is their money, as opposed to someone else's.

> what they ought to be paid

How do you propose to determine that amount?

> is not satisfying

Nothing human is perfect. But in trying to get that last step towards perfection often just makes things worse. There's no such thing as a perfect free market. Nor would a perfect free market produce perfect results. It's just that, so far, nobody has devised anything that works better. The solutions I see people propose have all been tried before. If they worked, we could point to them.

> There is a deeper point to that - that people tend to be free with money as long as it doesn't cost themselves. People behave very differently w.r.t. what is "worth" spending money on when it is their money, as opposed to someone else's.

This is typically where people drop in their Milton Friedman video/meme: "With my own money... with someone else's..."

Which has a grain of truth to it, just no nuance.

> How do you propose to determine that amount?

Certainly the answer isn't "whatever the machine spits out". Which at the bottom of it is what free market fanatics are saying. At least we should work on the machine so that the inputs are something sensible.

A link to the Milton Friedman video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBWXuptwJpg

> Which has a grain of truth to it, just no nuance.

I see it in action all the time. In the small, parents know that kids are sloppy with money given to them. When they earn the money, they suddenly get careful with it. In the large, politicians play on the "tax the rich" theme because that means someone other than the bulk of voters will be paying the bill.

> free market fanatics

This sort of thing discredits your postings. It isn't necessary to be a fanatic to study economic history and see how well it works. The evidence is pretty compelling - far more than a "grain" of truth.

I think the main thrust of the point is that we often overlook and under appreciate the people who labor on our behalf. Hopefully Covid made it more clear how essential some of the less regarded professions are.

Personally, I’d us to take care of those folks like they took care of us. The market works okay, but isn’t perfect and can miss a number of negative externalities that it doesn’t always account for - and yet the bill always comes due.

> Your scheme of society (government) deciding everyone's wages.

I'm not (necessarily) suggesting that the government decide everyone's wages. Leaving it to the market is just another way for society to determine wages.

> you appear to subscribe to the Labor Theory of Value, where someone's effort and time determine their wage

That's not what the LToV says. To start, a wage is a price, and Marxists draw a distinction between price and value.

But that's also not even the point I was trying to make. My point was: "one keeps what they earn" is a truism under any system, if "what they earn" is taken to mean "what they're paid". If, instead, "what they earn" is taken to mean "the price of what they produce", then that's obviously false under capitalism wherein companies make profits, so I assume that was not your intended meaning.

The company's profits are not taken from the worker. The company provides a framework within which the worker can produce value, and the company therefore gets a share of it.

Otherwise, the worker could do the work outside of the company and get it all.

You're just saying that the company collects economic rent from the worker for the privilege of accessing the "framework", in different words.

What we need is for workers to control the means of production so that eventually one guy can become the king and rule by decree.

I think this is a question with an impossible answer. Life on Earth is far to varied and chaotic for any baseline value. Just like an ecosystem, everything is in constant flux.

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