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Comment by djoldman | Hacker News Reader

> Employees, no matter what their job, crave recognition, autonomy, and a personal connection to work, which is why they often contribute more than they’re paid for. Baker’s point is that celebrating workers’ “proactivity” disguises an essentially exploitative relationship.

The story of the modern Western economy is that all the low-hanging fruit has been plucked from the tree of technological and productivity improvements (in the context of the regulatory environment).

Therefore, the proportion of profit and revenue rooted in exploiting human flaws is and will continue to rise.

Examples are:

* Humans engage with drama and negative content (ad supported media)

* Humans overindex on a sense of family/belonging/tribe (employers as family extract more work for less pay)

* Etc

Perhaps the biggest is regulatory capture and exploitation of regulatory loopholes.

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> Humans overindex on a sense of family/belonging/tribe (employers as family extract more work for less pay)

That’s an interesting remark, because in hyperindividualistic societies, the family is actually undervalued. So if employers use a sense of family to exploit employees, it isn’t because people “overindex” family. It’s because we underindex it, because we have a distorted and disordered relationship with family.

That is, given the familial nature of human beings and their basic need for family, and given the effect hyperindividualist societies have of encouraging and incentivizing the alienation of people from family life, it is not surprising that people might begin to view their place of employment as a kind of surrogate for family, at least at an emotional and frankly superficial level, especially when the employer encourages that kind of perception.

So, hyperindividualist societies actually predispose people to that kind of manipulation. A person from a healthy family is less vulnerable to it. His family life is his primary social home and his primary social point of reference.

Sounds like exactly what happens when an empire is on its way to collapse. It eats its young.

The irony of "higher" standards of living is that meanwhile, African countries, and a few strict islamic ones, have much less of all this and they're the only places reproducing at faster than replacement rate.

It's just a human geography thing. Developed countries reproduce less because they provide greater autonomy to women. Underdeveloped or developing countries reproduce much more.

Turns out if you give women a choice to have children, a lot of them will say no. They'd rather have career. Having children has, like, a lot of downsides. It can literally kill you.

There's no magic number of people that we have to have. The fertility rate will continue to fluctuate depending on the circumstances. Currently the balance of incentives-disincentives regarding having kids in many places is simply favoring the "not" side.

Having a smaller population with advanced automation technology is completely okay. And if a society feels it really values having more people around through births (and not through migration for example) they can alter policies to support families. (For example see how the child tax credits policy is not made permanent, also it's ridiculously small compared to cost of living and cost of child rearing. Then there's the cost of education, cost of having a bigger house, then there's the whole fucking problem of logistics, which is extremely costly in the US [because streets are not kid safe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43364761 )

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