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Comment by croes | Hacker News Reader

The countless hours of voluntary unpaid work by many people shows don’t act only for their own benefit

True-ish. But try talking to some old folks, about the vastly reduced scale of such volunteer work since (say) the 1950's. That "voluntary unpaid" stuff would include religious organizations, civic groups, housewives, ...

You need time for that.

It’s true that first you care for yourself but after survival is secured many people care for others without profit concerns.

But if you need more time to satisfy your own needs you have less time for others.

It seems to me that capitalism discourages that behavior. If the system is setup to be transactional, and you can't rely on others reciprocating altruism if you need it; then it seems like engaging in altruism would be for suckers.

True-ish. But in older-fashioned communities - long-term stable, extended families usually present, participation in many altruistic groups and activities are established norms, everybody's noses not buried in web browsers and smart phones - there's this thing called "social capital". And, as a generality, it's at least as important as the monetary kind.

True-ish. But when you say 'older-fashioned communities' I have a feeling you are speaking through nostalgia or a rose-tinted view of an idealized past. Can you name some of these older-fashioned communities that exist today, and how they are different from the ones you are contrasting them to?

capitalism is so that strangers with no reason to cooperate can via the market. It should have nothing to say about you network or closer relations and how you interact. Altruism has a large place in life but in general it is directed to friends and family then your larger social groups.

Nit: That's not the defining property of capitalism. The defining property of capitalism is that the means of production are privately owned, as opposed to e.g. market socialism.

America's in-person group membership plummeted across the decades[0], but I don't know about overall volunteerism. It may just come in different forms. Anecdotally, here in NYC volunteer orgs are stuffed to the gills; spots to clean my local park fill up in days, finding any weekend activity on NY Cares can be hard.

More concrete data are hard to find, AmeriCorps' only started in '02. We can look at volunteer rates across demographics[1] but it's likely true that volunteer hours drop off with age.

[0] see: Bowling Alone (needs a post-COVID update, though)

[1] https://americorps.gov/sites/default/files/document/Voluntee...

There are more kinds of compensation than money

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