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Comment by danbruc | Hacker News Reader

Yes. If you work for 10 years and then just consume stuff for the rest of your life without lifting a finger, stuff for which other people work all day long to produce it while at the same time probably not enjoying a quality of life anywhere near yours, that is deeply unjust and I consider it immoral to desire such a life.

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I would have paid double my taxes over my career if the US would spend it on elevating the poor. But asking me to not retire, to give away my savings to very few people? What, that’s not ethical.

What if I made a lot, but spend very little? Shouldn’t that weigh in, if your issue is consumption level?

What if in my early retirement, I go around lifting people up in non-monetary ways?

What if my job earned me a lot of money but was ultimately doing something I found socially harmful? I should continue working to the detriment of my mental health and against my principles?

We can elevate the poorest and decrease the amount of work the median/average person must do.

keyword references: degrowth, UBI

My point is very simple and we do not have to discuss all the edge cases. Working x hours and consuming stuff that took y hours to produce where y is much larger than x is unjust. All the rest are details.

I make widgets. I work 8 hours and make 8 widgets. In my spare time I make a machine to make widgets for me.

I've finished my machine, and it can make 16 widgets in 8 hours as long as I turn the crank. So I sit and turn the crank for 8 hours a day and make 16 widgets. Am I immoral yet? I just doubled my productivity for the same amount of work.

Now I pay someone to turn the crank for me. They work 8 hours and I give them 8 widgets, and I keep the other 8. They are doing the same 8 hours of work that I was doing, and I do nothing but make sure they keep turning the crank.

Am I immoral now? Why? I built the machine and I get 8 widgets a day out of it, the same amount I got when I was building them by hand. The crank turner also gets 8 widgets in 8 hours, the same amount I was producing by hand.

So the crank turner does less work for the same output, I do no work for the same output. But both of us have the same resources as my competitor who makes 8 widgets by hand.

Is it moral for the crank turner to exchange their 8 widgets for his? What about me?

In the first case no, in the second yes.

Great that you reduced the need to work. You are a hero to society.

Not great to use that as a reason to control others.

How am I controlling others? They are willingly turning the crank. They still get 8 widgets and they do less work than if they built the widgets themselves.

Everyone is doing better in this scenario than when I was building the widgets alone.

Sure, everyone [1] is better off, but that just sets the bar too low. You and the other guy each turn the crank for four hours, that is the fair outcome. If you insist, you get a couple of extra widgets for inventing and building the machine.

You spend a week building the machine, time worth 40 widgets, but you want - ignoring your finite lifetime - infinite compensation for that, free widgets forever for a 40 widget investment.

[1] A bit nitpicking, in the exact case you presented, the other guy might not actually be notably better off. Instead of manually making eight widgets for himself - assuming he is as skilled as you - per day, he now spends four hours making his widgets and then four more hours making your widgets. This can of course easily be tuned to actually make him better of or that might already be the case if turning the crank also improves the working conditions over the manual process.

Wouldn't my time be better spent inventing more widget making machines to improve the lives of everyone around me?

Why is both of us turning the crank for four hours the ideal and fair outcome?

What then is a more fair outcome in your original scenario where producing widgets was the only activity?

If you keep working, making other inventions, that is a completely different scenario. That you should do your share of crank turning only applies to the scenario where turning the crank is the only work that needs to be done.

Clearly crank turning isn't the only job, since machine inventing must exist as another possible job.

But even if the machine is the only invention that will ever be made, it's still not fair that we each crank the handle the same amount of time, because I invented the machine. I built the machine and presumably spent my widget money on making the machine. My contribution was amassing the capital and resources to make the machine. I should get some benefit from that.

I already wrote that you can have some additional widgets for inventing and building the machine. Even if I had not mentioned it, that would be a reasonable thing to do, if I insist on splitting the crank turning work, you can pretty safely assume that I am also willing to split the inventing and building work in one way or another.

But even if you would not get anything for inventing the machine, it would not really matter significantly. As you both keep turning the crank, the relative amount of work you both did would approach one half and both of you would have half of all the widgets. Compare that to the other scenario where the guy does all the crank turning, there the relative amount of work you did approaches zero as the guy keeps turning the crank making his relative amount of work approach one.

Are you better at inventing than the worker is?

Are your subsequent inventions better than the art they create?

Do we really need double the widgets?

I mean, the top post on this site yesterday was a self-balancing cube someone invented. This is precisely the community that should understand that inventions for inventions’ sake aren’t necessarily improving anything.

> Are you better at inventing than the worker is?

It would seem so, since I made one and they didn't.

> Are your subsequent inventions better than the art they create?

Not sure what art has to do with it. If they want to make art they can get a job making art instead of turning the crank.

> Do we really need double the widgets?

The market will decide that. If we don't then no one would buy them and it would no longer make sense to produce so many.

> I mean, the top post on this site yesterday was a self-balancing cube someone invented. This is precisely the community that should understand that inventions for inventions’ sake aren’t necessarily improving anything.

Interesting you should bring that up. That cube improved our understanding of self balancing machines and how to build them. That understanding can lead to better self balancing things, like maybe walkers for the disabled. You never know what it might lead to until you make it. Even machines that "have no purpose" have a purpose, of showing us what does not work or what does not make sense.

Are you saying time has objective value?

If it took me 50 hours to whittle a doll from a piece of wood, I deserve 50 times the hourly salary of whomever buys my doll?

I think that's really stupid, just like the labor theory of value.

You are morally and intellectually superior.

How bizarre it is to have strongly prescriptive opinions about other people's time-value preference, and then to mistake those opinions for moral principles.

Ok, so capitalism isn't your thing. Fair enough.

I wonder where the limits are though. What if I save up and take a month off? Is that immoral? What about 6 months? A year? Or do I have to have some justification for it that you find acceptable (like having kids or mental health, etc?)

Or is it just immoral to not be constantly working while other people are working?

To a first approximation, you work for one hour, you get to consume stuff that requires one hour of work to produce. I don't care if you work your ass off for some time and then retire early or if you work very little or very much as long as your consume at most a proportional amount.

What about different working conditions? Is one hour in a coal mine the same as one hour as an actor?

What if a person has a debilitating illness that prevents them from working but is also expensive to take care of?

Come on, people have written thousands of pages about economy over centuries, I wrote a few sentences here. Of course there are differences between working conditions, individual abilities, and whatnot, that is why I wrote to a first approximation. You are not really expecting that I say something about every possible aspect and edge case in the comments here?

Let us justify why some high ranking managers deserve to retire wealthy after a couple of years while their employees at the factory floor have to work for the rest of their lives while never coming close to the wealth of their higher management.

Nice, the labour theory of value and the lump of labour fallacy lumped into one

I might be wrong, but is the labour theory of work not supposed to explain how value works in the economy and is criticised for not making the right predictions? I am not saying that this is how the economy works, I am saying that this is how it should work, that it would be fair to exchange an hour of work for an hour of work. Whether this is actually realizable, is another question, because there is more to prices than the amount of work spent.

So, nobody is "allowed" to watch movies or play videogames then.

Let me guess your take on folks who never work, are able bodied/minded but live off the state.

You should not be able to do that, the system should discourage it. But I think one likely has to tolerate this to some extent because trying to completely eliminate it will probably negatively affect people that rightfully claim such benefits, for example having to constantly prove that they are eligible.

But what if I inherited it?

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