The businessman and the fisherman (1963)
thestorytellers.com
thestorytellers.com
A businessman gets into a taxi and starts talking to the taxi driver about (of course) business. The taxi driver is in a great mood and explains that today is a good day, this is his last trip since he has made the $400 he aims to make in just two hours. The businessman asks him what a bad day looks like, and the taxi driver says he might have to drive for ten hours to make that $400, and he’s miserable the whole time.
The businessman asks why he stops at that specific number, and the taxi driver replies that he starts out $300 ‘in the hole’ for car and medallion rental, so he has to make that back plus some more for his take-home pay. The businessman suggests to the taxi driver that good days like these are when he should do his epic ten hour shifts, and he should go home early on the bad days even if he loses money that day, as the extra money from the good days will more than cover the small losses on the bad days.
I guess the moral of both of these stories put together is that sometimes businessmen have good advice and sometimes they don’t.
It's the kind of privileged statement coming from naive knowledge workers who believe that intellectual challenges are the ultimate measurement of difficulty.
Personally, I think having a job where your only challenge is solving puzzles is one of the most privileged and lucky one could have, especially if it pays well.
I'd invite anyone who's a knowledge worker to go work a 'dumb' job for multiple, mindnumbing and nonstop hours. Love this idea that taxis and McDonald's aren't "hard work" and therefore undeserving of respect or fair payment.
Hardest jobs I've ever had were those that were the most boring and you were explicitly unable to distract yourself to get through the day. Driving a taxi would actually be up there for me in terms of difficulty because at least if you were doing some repetitive manual labour like washing cars you could throw on music/podcast, zone out and you'd be healthier on your feet all day.
Driving a taxi means you have to go through repetitive, mind-numbingly boring operations for hours a day, but the whole time you have to maintain focus to avoid accidents. You cant watch anything, and because you have customers who might not like what you're playing, you probably don't have a choice in what music you listen to either. You're sitting all day barely moving, so by the end of the day you're completely stiff and don't even have the satisfaction of having physically worked hard.
This is all btw under the assumption of a "classic" taxi job that barely even exists now. Most actual drivers work for uber/lyft, which adds a whole other layer of exploitation, pressure and stress. Good highlight of this is the Financial Times Uber Driver game. https://ig.ft.com/uber-game/
Driving a taxi isn't hard work and if you think it is then I congratulate you for having such a blessed and entitled life that you are able sit in judgement and call me ignorant.
I have enough, and I turned my entrepreneurial spirit towards public good instead of revenue. I take days off when it’s sunny, and reintroduced play into my work. I am back to Paul Graham’s “do things that don’t scale”.
I am dismayed by the amount of greed among people far wealthier than me. Their quest to grow a number beyond rational purposes causes them and a lot of people around them immense grief. We would all benefit if they worked on other goals.
In any case, the pursuit of money beyond meeting your own needs is more often than not destructive. I find that this story is a good reminder that you can have a financial goal beyond which you enter maintenance mode and focus on other things.
At the highest levels it’s about power and control and shaping the world to what you want it to be
It’s all neurotic anxiety about not having the ability to do whatever you want unimpeded forever and generating “generational wealth” so that literally your kids kids kids will be ensured that they don’t have to go to public school
Go live around billionaires a while and it’s blatantly obvious that everything is just about calming fears and anxieties but with a never ending desire to get more on behalf of whatever in group they relate.
'But those who are determined to be rich fall into temptation and a snare and many senseless and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin
For the love of money is a root of all sorts of injurious things, and by reaching out for this love some have stabbed themselves all over with many pains'
Only way to know when is enough is if you make a pact with yourself that you;d end your life when it becomes miserable and you are no longer independent.
Absence of content is exhausting.
It is happening to them.
The problem is that our culture also suffers from this disorder and glorifies the disease.
Then society collapses because if everyone is doing the bare minimum, there isn't anything left over for basic government services.
I'd also like a citation on the claim that "basic government services" require profit-making (and presumably taxation to go with it) that is substantively different than the fisherman's approach to life.
Then someone brings in a trawler that scoops up all the fish, and the heretofore independent fishermen now need to do something to convince the seafood company to give them the fish sticks now pooped out by the ship.
So the fishermen become tax accountants and baristas, to provide services for the fish company's clerks.
Net, there is now more economic activity and more GDP. Whereas before, the country only produced as much fish as the fishermen needed to eat (and some surplus to sell at the local market), now it also produces tax services, and espresso services, and fishstick exports.
This lasts for about a decade until the fish stocks are depleted.
The fishermen, who used to live in bamboo huts they'd rebuild themselves every few years, now live in concrete apartment blocks, and they can no longer afford rent.
"The Dawn of Everything" covers, with multiple redundant stories, why this concept of "the way human civilizations evolved" is wrong. That doesn't mean that none of them did, but absilutely not all of them. It certainly wasn't a straight path from hunter-gatherer to <what came next> more or less anywhere in the world.
In a society where few people earned more than Nx the lowest (pick your own N), this distribution of tax origin would look very different.
Think of it a different way: suppose a government explicitly targets being able to spend 23% of GDP on government (i.e. publically) chosen goals. How does it collect 23% of GDP? Well, if everyone earned precisely the same, it would collect it equally from each person. On the other hand, if one person earned 99% of GDP and everyone else combined collectively earned the remaining 1%, then obviously the super rich person will be be paying almost all of the tax revenue themselves.
The current situation in the US is obviously not this extreme, but the thought experiment shows why it works the way it does.
Also important is the concept of marginal utility of income, which describes how each additional currency-unit of income becomes less and less significant as your total income grows.
In short, 10%-pay-80% reflects the other decisions that have been made about how the US economy works (or doesn't work), and don't have much to do with taxation in general, or the provision of public services.
Which is a reflection of an intensely unequal distribution of productivity and value creation.
I've also lived under communism, where they ignored this uneven contribution and tried to squash the incomes uniformly. The result was quite predictable: we were equally starving, of course. Except the nomenklatura, but that's another story.
Well, I can't disagree with that claim. But it's not really all that interesting, in and of itself. The question is: to what extent, and with sort of multiples, should differences in wealth/income reflect the distribution of productivity/value creation?
There are a wide range of answers to that question, all the way from pure commune-style uniformity to contemporary US "capitalism". The only thing that is abundantly clear is that neither of these extremes work all that well for the majority of the people who live under them.
The best answer in that not only was the only one that got us fed unlike the alternatives that only brought suffering, death and starvation but also got us such an amazing wealth that we have the luxury to sit and debate such issues from opposite corners of the earth, in real time, on magic devices connected to the freaking cloud.
As an Eastern European, I lived through the transition from the horrors of communism to the benefits of capitalism and while it wasn't easy I am a living testament to the immense success story this change brought to these lands.
And you can also plainly see the reverse transformation from wealth to misery brought by switching away from free markets in countries such as Argentina or Venezuela.
Ignoring for a fact that having magic devices that do some esoteric operation isn't a useful measurement of any kind of 'wealth' (as if having the privilege to own an iPhone while working 10 hour mind-numbing days at an amazon warehouse is 'luxury'), you do realize that the fact you're posting here when most of the world under the free market lives in abject subsistence poverty speaks to the fact that our system only works when we're able to parasitically suck wealth, resources and labour from less powerful countries.
Also, somehow doubt those pensioners and others in the 1990's who lived through the former USSR's transition to "the free market" were really enjoying their new found freedoms as life expectancy, wages and quality of live plummeted except for a handful of the very same nomenklatura in charge before becoming even more insanely privileged than before.
The 'free market' in this conception is just letting the 'nomenklatura' types of people be even more insanely wealthy than everyone else because now they have even less guardrails preventing them from exploiting and manipulating everyone around them for self-enrichment.
I mean those who stayed in the country, because an amazing number were enjoying their new found freedom of simply going to a capitalist country to try and improve their lot in life. Funny how none of them western exploited were in any hurry to go and enjoy the communism wonders. The walls and bullets at the border were all to keep us "lucky" communists in!
And you haven't seen abject poverty and dehumanization until you've visited a communist orphanage...
I do not agree with you.
First of all because "the free market" is so vague as to be capable of encompassing a huge variety of economic arrangements with wildly different outcomes. Secondly because it absolutely was not "the only one that got us fed" - any sufficiently long read of history will make that clear. Thirdly, because it is far from clear what the role of the ill-defined "free market" has been in the development of magic devices connected to the freaking cloud. Involved? Probably? Responsible? I'd say probably not.
But it's fine, I'm not trying to convince you. We just don't see the world in the same way.
I'm sure this same scenario played out during aztec human sacrifices. Someone asks "do we really need to do all these human sacrifices to ensure a good harvest?" and the other responds "well, maybe not, and its not satisfying for everybody, but its probably the best answer we found so far. Do you want to live off bugs in the jungle? That's your only other choice, sorry"
The entire point of the story is to get people to consider to what extent that makes sense, and under what circumstances.
If you consider a good life to be precisely how the fisherman already lives, it takes a rather compelling argument (and it make even require compelling force) that he should behave otherwise.
That's a pretty big if. I'd start with asking how is dental care in his village. Does the village doctor use anesthesia? Would the anesthesiologist accept fish as a payment, and how many fishes a pain-less root canal treatment costs? Maybe after learning the answers to these questions I'd consider some other definition of a good life.
I think you'll find the dentist to be just fine.
Sometimes it feels like we are already half way there.
Yes, there are pains and stresses along the way... as with most things worth doing. However, the feeling of having created something is just as satisfying to some as sculpting or fishing to others.
There's also something to be said about creating meaningful employment for the people in your community.
Maybe if one engages in rock fishing or cliff jigging and slips off a wet rock, they could get a debilitating accident.
Didn't like for years it but I've finally taken up sport fishing myself last year, after a Greek taught me how they do it and let me try. Shore spinning can be very relaxing and one can enjoy water sports at the sea even in a Bf 4 breeze or during swell conditions when the red flag is up.
Now if I go to the seaside I also bring my tackle along with the wetsuit and swimming goggles. In some countries you need a fishing permit (Croatia, Italy). In Greece you only need it for commercial fishing.
He was "lucky" he died too, if he survived he would've faced a disabled life in a place with no health care or general services beyond basic. Such was the life on the remote undeveloped seaside.
His wife and kids though surely would have liked to be left with something more than the fishing tools, boat and shack...
His wife, who in the 1800s, would never have been recognized for her work, is today known as one of her country's greatest contemporary sculptors, and has exhibited at Tate Modern, the Guggenheim and has a show next month in Rio.
The fisherman used to talk with pride about his family's accomplishments when sipping retsina with his friends on the dock.
I'd start just before chapter V if you want to get right into it -- the ending is truly delicious, and quite inline with OP's story, enjoy.
Short and concise indeed. But then again, I read full Ana Karenina, and it was worth it.
(Then everyone clapped, and a bald eagle flew overhead and shed a tear on the etc etc bla bla shitpost on a shitpost)
On land, it's hunter gatherers and farming or logging.
> How cruel the whites are: their lips are thin, their noses sharp, their faces furrowed and distorted by holes. Their eyes have a staring expression. They are always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something, they are always uneasy and restless. We do not know what they want, we do not understand them, we think that they are mad.
Very few of the tribes in the more barren west lived on land bountiful enough for this utopian fantasy.
“Who would make the iPhones then?”
Nobody cause they wouldn’t exist
Getting ripped on opium is no different than getting ripped on morphine. Modern medice has that too. The difference is that modern medicine has far more tools in the bag before something becomes a terminal illness.
No, it's not a startup. It is just a business to take care of my wife and me.
This is why. This story is what I tell people when they say I should make it a startup.
I considered investment and growth, but having been down that path a couple of times, instead decided to just set modest goals and work hard to achieve them.
I feel better already.
-- Linus Torvalds
Myself... I'm not that extreme, but the good ideas from so many business books could be summed up in a few paragraphs.
Sure. You can also forgo reading most fiction by simply reading the Wikipedia plot summary.
Let’s be honest: fishing in the USA is a tough full time job, even if you love it. You can’t relax by the ocean catching a few fish to pay rent and support your family.
For a classic Western version, see Plutarch’s story:
‘What the favourite of the King of Epirus said to his master may be applied to all men in the ordinary situations of human life. When the king had recounted to him, in their proper order, all the conquests which he proposed to make, and had come to the last of them; “And what does your Majesty propose to do then?” said the Favourite. “I propose then,” said the King, “to enjoy myself with my friends, and endeavour to be good company over a bottle.” “And what hinders your Majesty from doing so now?” replied the Favourite.’
Although I was worth less than nothing (i.e. negative money from CC/student loans), these are among my happiest days. Once I found employment as a nanny/driver I was allowed to sleep in the servant's quarters — and eventually built my own room in an unused garage.
Definitely having a family to feed, in addition to one's self, would make this kind of lifestyle impossible — but I fear as wealth inequality increases, and more people are living in multi-generational living arrangements: family entrapment (both caring for children and parents) will increasingly be how destitute get by [taking care of them].
I will never be homeless again. Just an awful existence.
""" An elderly man was strolling when he noticed a young man lying under a tree, appearing relaxed. Curious, the elderly man asked him why he was resting and doing nothing. The young man responded with a question of his own, "Why should I do anything?" The elderly man, slightly puzzled, answered that by doing something, the young man could become rich. The young man inquired, "Why do I need to be rich?" The elderly man explained that being rich would allow him to have everything he wanted and ultimately do nothing. The young man responded with a smile, "Well, I'm already doing nothing. """
Also I asked ChatGPT about different philosophical aspect of the story:
""" This anecdote touches upon several philosophical themes, including the nature of happiness, the purpose of work, and the concept of wealth. Here are some angles we can consider:
1. Hedonism: The young man's attitude can be seen as hedonistic, as he focuses on enjoying the present moment and experiencing pleasure by doing nothing. This philosophy prioritizes personal satisfaction, suggesting that happiness is found in the pursuit of pleasurable experiences.
2. The Paradox of Work and Wealth: The elderly man's response reflects a societal belief that hard work and accumulating wealth are necessary for a fulfilling life. However, the young man challenges this belief by demonstrating that he has already achieved a state of relaxation and contentment without wealth. This highlights the paradox that people often work hard to achieve a state of happiness or relaxation that they could have experienced without the need for wealth or material possessions.
3. Simple Living: The young man's perspective can be seen as an endorsement of a minimalist or simple living philosophy, which values experiences and well-being over material possessions. This viewpoint suggests that happiness can be found in a simple, unencumbered lifestyle that prioritizes personal fulfillment over the pursuit of wealth.
4. The Myth of Sisyphus: The anecdote can be seen as a variation on the story of Sisyphus, a character from Greek mythology who is condemned to roll a boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down each time. This story is often used as a metaphor for the human struggle to find meaning and purpose in life. In this anecdote, the young man has seemingly found his own sense of meaning by rejecting the common belief that wealth and success are necessary for happiness.
5. Taoism and Wu Wei: The young man's attitude can be linked to the Taoist concept of wu wei, which means "non-action" or "effortless action." This philosophy emphasizes the importance of living in harmony with the natural flow of life and not forcing change or action. By lying under the tree and doing nothing, the young man could be seen as embodying the concept of wu wei.
6. The Pursuit of Happiness: The anecdote raises the question of what it means to be happy and how to achieve happiness. Both the elderly man and the young man have different perspectives on what is necessary for happiness. This can lead to a broader discussion on the nature of happiness and the various ways individuals seek to attain it.
These are just a few philosophical angles that can be derived from this anecdote. The story serves as a starting point for deeper discussions on the meaning of life, happiness, and the value of work and wealth in modern society.
"""