At some point we have to rethink what "contributing to the system" means. What are web developers designing ads for online casinos contributing?
The status quo is so bizarre. Human life has no inherent value unless it makes continuous contributions to "the economy". It would be economically most efficient to drop dead on the day you retire. Thanks, human!
All of this to keep a machine running that wrecks the planet and everything living on it, including ourselves. Probably some 50% of the economy is pure bullshit that nobody asked for, just keeping each other busy.
At some point we lost the plot. The economy doesn't work for the people anymore and drastic productivity increases have somehow not really improved our lives in terms of freedom, time, physical/mental health, quite the opposite.
You mean that 50% of the economy is bullshit that you think nobody should ask for. You and I may agree that developer at an online gambling company is economically useless, but the their boss certainly doesn't and the gamblers probably don't either.
Even if we accept your premise, you can't just assume that tanking the economy will only cut out the useless jobs instead of the useful ones. Useful jobs are perhaps more likely to survive, but that's not always going to be the case. During the next recession, people will more likely give up on a solar roof than give up gambling.
> The economy doesn't work for the people anymore and drastic productivity increases have somehow not really improved our lives in terms of freedom, time, physical/mental health, quite the opposite.
People's lives are objectively improving. It mostly just happening in Asia though. It requires a lot of money to build power plants, hospitals, and water towers, and much of that was financed by selling "useless" trinkets from the West.
It’s the software running on all our “wet ware” that convinces us to value productivity and money over human life, the environment, or happiness. It is the paper clip maximizer and it’s happily churning away.
But we’re not maximizing paper clips we’re maximizing profits .
Why would we value the environment over human lives? That just seems like nature-worship.
Why not?
If trees could just all agree to remain short, they wouldn't need to waste resources to outgrow each other to reach sunlight.
What I love most of all about this is the fact "the economy" has only existed for a few hundred years.
I wonder how modern humans found purpose for the previous 199,700 years?
Obviously this cannot be true. "The economy" isn't some magical object somewhere, but the emergent behavior from all our needs, desires and faults. If something is truly not wanted by anyone, nobody will pay for the work to get done. That's the magic of the invisible hand of capitalism. Doing stuff that truly nobody wants and getting paid for it is usually more of a feature of socialism and bureaucracies.
There are cases where individual motive leads to macro behavior that's not desirable by any individual, those are the cases where we need to tax negative externalities or regulate, depending on the problem. These issues usually don't emerge though because nobody wants something but because too many wanting a thing creates side effects that nobody likes. The book Micromotived and Macro behavior by Thomas Schelling covers that nicely.
One of the best known examples is the PR-manufactured tradition of diamonds in engagement rings, which sky-rocketed the demand for diamonds in the general population.
Another great example is the huge industry of "supplements" which is legalized fraud on a massive scale, selling useless pills to people with a promise of making them better in some way, and relying solely on the fact that it's hard to prove that they don't actually do anything since their claims are so vague.
These are prime examples of entirely artificial demand created out of whole cloth through manipulation. There are numerous other cases of more subtle effects, where marketing is significantly inflating a demand which would exist but be much smaller otherwise (toys, smartphone upgrades, new cars every few years, beauty products, fashion etc).
Is that an issue? There's not much demand for 8k ohm SMD resistors from people, but people do want smartphones that require 8k ohm SMD resistors to manufacture. The same applies for stuff like managers and other "bullshit jobs". Nobody wants them, but they're nonetheless required to keep the company/economy humming along. And if they're actually not required, then the economy that supposedly cares what's "economically most efficient" should have eliminated them.
There is a mountain of trash end-products out there, which marketing is creating the want for. These products may not otherwise exist without the manufactured want, and could be removed entirely without much detriment to the very small amount of people that conscientiously decided of their own free will they wanted that product.
Marketing is what makes something like a Peloton a viable business, rather than those customers just taking a regular static bike and adding a tablet mount to the handlebars.
In some senses, I think the economy isn't always looking for the most efficient methods. I believe there is some political input involved to keep everybody's heads down under a quagmire of pointless work, so those people (even in a democracy) don't start asking too many questions. Some people could easily be automated out of work, yet they aren't, despite the efficiency it would bring.
To each their own, but I'd be fine with a huge amount of (what I deem) useless products and jobs being removed from the market. Most serve very little real purpose and as somebody else stated, are destroying our planet and wasting away the best years of our lives to attain them.
I would frame it with a different emphasis. Want is inherent to living organisms, humans and others alike. The economy discovers, amplifies, and satisfies our wants. But it is also important to remember that economies emergent, not some external object imposed on humans.
It's not magical, granted. "The economy" is a subjective state (eg metrics) that solely resides in the human mind, rather than a singular thing.
It most certainly is and I have not encountered anything to indicate otherwise. Individual transactions are no more relevant than GDP is. These are individual metrics or acts that influence those metrics, which try to quantify aspects of an aggregate concept.
Here's where the money went:
https://www.federalbudgetinpictures.com/federal-spending-per...
And that doesn't include all the state and local government.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fiscal-deficit-idUSKB... (Republican tax cuts to fuel historic U.S. deficits: CBO)
Sources at bottom of the first link.
This doesn’t include healthcare cost inflation due to a grossly inefficient healthcare model.
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe...
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2...
The US does have a lot of sovereign debt, no doubt, but that’s not why Labor isn’t seeing a greater share of the productivity gains since the 70s. A loss of collective labor power and 10% of the country owning 89% of public equities gets us here.
To arrived at an improved end state, one would need more unions and labor organizing, as well as perhaps ratcheting down the work week to 4 days.
https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
https://www.epi.org/blog/growing-inequalities-reflecting-gro...
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-of-...
Globalization seems like a major factor that's often ignored for that. We had productivity gains. We didn't benefit from them as much as expected because people in Asia had bigger productivity gains. Joe six pack now competes with people in China working 996 instead of just his neighbors like in the 70s.
The other political sports team cuts taxes for the rich too. For instance they recently removed the cap on the SALT tax deduction which primarily benefits rich people, largely in coastal cities, i.e. those most likely to vote for and donate to them.
Some members of congress, apparently from both major parties, are proposing legislation to raise the cap from $10,000 to $100,000 or otherwise raise or remove the cap. But these proposals are not certain to go anywhere.
That said, there are some jobs we can easily label as zero wroth. E.g., jobs where people dig pits and fill them up (common in job schemes in socialist countries). These are jobs that powerful folks invent to remain in power by bribing poorer folks.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mgnrega-easy-jobs-may-harmed-...
A mega job-guarantee program to alleviate massive rural distress may have had an unexpected, deleterious effect: luring India’s skilled labour away from the organised sector. ... Lured by the lesser effort involved—MGNREGA jobs like digging pits and filling them don’t need any skills—they leave their factory jobs to work for 100 days under the program and then take up other contractual jobs for the rest of the year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokku_kooli
Nokku kooli is a euphemism for extortion by organized labour unions in Kerala under which bribes are paid to trade union activists in exchange for allowing unaffiliated workers to unload their own belongings and materials.[1] This happens with the tacit support of political parties including those in government. In Malayalam, 'nokku kooli', translates into 'gawking wages' or 'wages for (just) looking on'.[2]Yes, but unlike in socialist governments, companies with a lot of bullshit jobs will die due to being inefficient. Thats the point of capitalism. Nobody has to work to support other able bodied humans rent seeking off their labor and capital.
But in the US this is not true, as we don't have true capitalism in the US, we have a socialist mix and the govt can sometimes prop up inefficient companies.
But in socialism, authoritarians will remain in power for decades even if the majority doesn't like it. Rent seeking is a natural state of affairs in more socialist countries.
This is the "no true capitalist" fallacy. The reality of capitalism is that big companies get to impose whatever they want on any smaller entity they want. They may either do so directly (e.g. when operating in a weak country, like Chiquita's Banana Republics) or by co-opting government (either in cahoots with an authoritarian government like the USSR or China, or a democratic government like the USA or Europe). And big corporations will always have local fiefdoms with bullshit jobs, since corruption rears its ugly head in any large org - be it Oracle or the US Federal government.
> Thats the point of capitalism. Nobody has to work to support other able bodied humans rent seeking off their labor and capital.
Before claiming such hilarious idealism, maybe take a look at the capitalist US South and the way it was built by 150 years or more of slave labor.
How is it different from the "no true socialist/communist" fallacy that is more common?
> Before claiming such hilarious idealism, maybe take a look at the capitalist US South and the way it was built by 150 years or more of slave labor.
A free market requires free participants. Therefore, the US South was not purely capitalist. Also, slavery was not the only component in building the South. Other continents and countries have/had slavery for longer periods and are poorer.
The US South was an exploitative mix of socialism + capitalism that was defeated by the more capitalist and freer North.
> The reality of capitalism is that big companies get to impose whatever they want on any smaller entity they want.
Which exploitative project by a company has the lifespan and reach of CCP or Soviet Russia's decades long exploitation and rent seeking?
The difference is Oracle can't force you to buy their database for your small company but you have to pay gawking wages even if you are a poor person.
> weak country ... or by co-opting government (either in cahoots with an authoritarian government like the USSR or China, or a democratic government like the USA or Europe).
Thank you, thats my point. They can't survive long unless they are supported by an authoritarian govt or by a weak govt.
It is obvious now that we are arguing in circles with you supporting my point. So I guess we can end the conversation here.
However, that is not how those terms are normally defined or used. Capitalism means "an economic system where most enterprises are wholy owned by those who invest the initial capital". This differs from earlier economic models like feudalism, where enterprises were typically wholy owned by a lord through hereditary rule.
Socialism is normally defined as "an economic system where most enterprises are wholy owned by the workers who work in them".
Socialism can very well be a free market system, just like workers co-ops compete today with other worker's co-ops and more traditional capitalist corporations. Conversely, an economic system doesn't stop being capitalist just because there are tariffs or subsidies or other interventions by the state.
In particular, you can have a purely capitalist system with slave labor, since workers' rights are entirely irrelevant to whether a system is capitalist or not. In fact, freeing slaves has usually posed a problem to those with capital, and so the states that forced them to free their slave typically had to reimburse the owners for their loss of property as if they had nationalized a piece of land.
Later edit:
> Thank you, thats my point. They can't survive long unless they are supported by an authoritarian govt or by a weak govt.
My point about the weak government was that a powerful corporation faced with a weak government will just hire its own mercenaries and do what it wants, ignoring any law (usually forcing people to work) - like Chiquita and other banana companies did in South America.
In the context of this discussion, they're contributing tax revenue. Very important for pension plans!