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Comment by lupusreal | Hacker News Reader

If every company that offers goods or services prioritizes "worker happiness", by for instance refusing to excise unproductive divisions, then the result will be a world where everything costs more and takes longer. Not just consumer goods, but any sort of public infrastructure project, R&D, etc. If you think it takes too long or costs too much to build a school or fix a road in America these days compared to a few generations ago, it would only get worse. Every single sector of the economy would start dragging its feet with no regard for efficiently getting shit done.

If only some companies are coops, then those have to compete with companies that aren't and consequently they have to work efficiently or fail. The idea behind making them all be coops seems to be removing this pressure to perform. Bad idea.

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Everything already costs more, because companies make crazy margins to make Bezos richer instead of making their products cheaper.

If coops could be more productive for less money they could beat out their competition without needing it outlawed. It should be easy for them if what you say is true, no Bezos means they have more margin to work with but they struggle to compete... Hmm..

"If companies who don't optimize for profit optimized for profit they would be the same as the companies who optimize for profit" is fairly obviously true, and also useless.

So are you conceding that an economy built entirely out of coops would suffer from reduced productivity?

You're asking me if an economy that optimized for happiness instead of productivity would suffer from reduced productivity? Yes, yes it would, and it would also suffer from increased happiness.

Again, this is a culture thing, where I'm saying "I don't care about being productive, as long as I'm happy", and you're coming from a Protestant work ethic place of "but how can you be happy if you aren't productive?".

I think you're confusing productivity with profit. Regardless of how company profits are distributed, our society needs productivity. I pointed out that coops are less efficient in terms of productivity, and you responded by complaining about how much money Bezos has. Redistributing the money won't make up for a decrease in productivity, which will harm society as a whole.

As for me being some sort of Christian; I'm not and I take that as an insult. Kindly go fuck yourself.

I disagree that a decrease in productivity would make society worse as a whole. For example, the change from Serfdom to a more standard 40-hour work week certainly lowered productivity, but it also made society better.

Also productivity is complicated because humans are complicated. You may assume that, say, 50 hours of work is more productive than 40. But I doubt it - from what I've seen, it might be less productive. Even though more time is spent.

The average productivity per person today is vastly greater compared to subsistence farming times. We have much more leisure time now made possible by an increase in productivity due to machines, technology, and better division of labour. (Though I argue our current debt based money system which requires constant inflation is stealing our productivity and that's why we still feel like we're on a treadmill despite massive gains in production). This greater productivity is what allows us to consume not only more stuff, but a wider variety of stuff, and stuff of better quality than in the past.

As for 'the change from serfdom', if you're referring to the improved working conditions following the peasants revolt, remember it took the Black Death to wipe out 50% of the population in England, consumption went down, but the potential productivity of survivors would not have changed much, so landowners had to pay more for laborers to attract manpower for farming.

A decrease in productivity relative to consumption is not good, as it just causes low-supply driven inflation and makes everybody poorer. That being said, I believe the quality of productivity / consumption also need to be considered, not just aggregates. It's entirely possible a lot of productivity is just garbage products and irrational consumers are happy to consume or are tricked/bamboozled. ZIRP and excess monetary expansion facilitates these distortions, giving investors cheap money to stimulate production in dubious industries, and giving consumers cheaper credit to purchase products of dubious value.

I think we're thinking of productivity differently. Humans, themselves, are not more productive. But our output is more due to technology.

I think sometime in the future working will be completely optional. Would this be infinite productivity, or zero?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workforce_productivity Near zero time spent working to produce infinite goods - so yes it would be infinite as per the definition.

Again, this is a culture thing, where I'm saying "I don't care about being productive, as long as I'm happy",

And you're free to work part time or switch to a lower-paying job that you enjoy more. I did the latter recently; it's great, and I'm thankful that our economy is so productive that I can still afford everything I need.

But that’s a restricted vision where being productive is a graal vs being useful for the society.

Coops don’t want to beat the competition, they want to be a useful structure for A) their clients and B) their workers.

If they manage to do A+B, they have already won. They don’t need or want to beat out competition.

They don’t play the capitalists game, they play the real game of "in a working society, workers want to be useful and customers wants a good service". There is nothing more to happiness of a society. Everything else is just about making rich people more rich.

Yes exactly. This is why, European countries, with the strongest worker protection, such as Norway, Sweden, Germany etc. are so much poorer and far behind than US in terms of QOL and quality of goods they produce.

Why do you think that prioritising worker happiness would lead to refusing to excise unproductive divisions? Do you think people like working for a company that doesn't do anything?

Honestly that’s pretty false.

There are lot of countries out there in the occident where you can’t "excise unproductive divisions" and where firing a worker without a solid reason is hard and dangerous for the employer.

And guess what, they have a cost of living that is comparable to the US (except for housing which is currently shitty all over the occidental world).

Ok, you may say that the US is the first worldwide economy or whatever. And what ? A good economy is just a tool to help societies flourish. If you have a powerful economy but your citizens are sad and depressed, you are loosing the society game anyway.

Being efficient at getting shit done is probably important for global happiness, but that’s up to a point.

If people in US are sad, it’s not because schools are too long to construct or because roads are too long to fix, it’s because nobody even decides to build/fix them because it benefits "only" to the community.

Humans don’t inherently hate working, that’s even probably ingrained in their genes, they just hate being exploited.

Your opening paragraph here reads to me like the first decade of Google.

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