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Speaking as a U.S. citizen, I think the problem should not be approached as "stop people from doing frivolous things", but rather "government should fund the commons". Of course this doesn't make government perfect, but generally it appears to be the most successful way to achieve things like caring for the elderly and disabled, building monuments, protecting wild areas, etc. Turns out we do all these things to some extent, just not as much as some (myself included) might like.

Which is to say, a well run society should have room for BOTH frivolity AND supporting the general welfare of its people. Perhaps our current troubles are the result of many people thinking that supporting the general welfare IS frivolous.

"We the People of the United States, in Order to

- form a more perfect Union,

- establish Justice,

- insure domestic Tranquility,

- provide for the common defence,

- promote the general Welfare, and

- secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,

do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Yeah, seems like a good idea to me

Somewhat related thought:

World power consumption is around 20 TW (of which around 3 TW electricity), that's very roughly 2 kW per person (obviously not equally distributed).

A human consumes around 8600 kJ of energy in their food per day, or roughly 100 W (search for "basal metabolic rate"). Most of that is needed just to keep the body running, but around a quarter or so can be converted to physical work: an average human can perform some 75 W of physical work over an 8h shift (75 W for 1/3 the time, so 25 W on average).

That means that everyone has (on average) around 80 "people" worth of energy working for them (2000 W of energy consumption per person / 25 W of average usable energy output per person).

It took me a reread to realize what you were saying.

If 745 is one horsepower, is 25 W one personpower?

Yes, or you could say a human power is 75 W (but only 8h a day).

And the point is that we use some 2000 W, so have the equivalent of 26.6 people working for us nonstop (requiring 80 people total on 7 day a week shift work).

Thanks for the correction. 75 W is indeed the pp equivalent to hp. (I chose "person" over human to avoid the initialism conflict.)

Why is useful important? Back in the day residents would sometimes get a western good and they would save the packaging (think plastic spray can lids) because it was color unlike the soviet versions. Both worked (well we will assume though cheating putting water in in a cleaning bottle was not unknown when quotas were not met), but consumers want that beauty.

which is to say a lot of needless things are still highly desired.

I don't know about useful, but right is important. You could imagine if everybody spontaneously started going around doing wrong. To some unclear extent this is what normally happens, and those people doing wrong should stop. It's not even entirely their own business, right and wrong: even when they have property rights on their side, it's still OK for other people to pass comment. And it could be that colored bottle caps are a waste of time and attention, and wrong, and that can be an opinion. But morality doesn't respond well to central management.

Religion may not be as important as it once was, but the history of Catholicism would seem to be at odds with that.

Now I'm unsure whether I'm supposed to consider it as a source of morality, or as another kind of colorful packaging. I guess you're going for the "central management of morality" angle. But it doesn't micromanage - much - and it isn't really enforced.

There's a certain percentage of "available labor" spending that, if it goes away, causes death directly. Maintaining the power grid and the cold storage network comes to mind, although of course both of those resources are massively overpowered if you're thinking "survival only" and not "make sure gas stations have Klondike bars".

Indeed - I often feel like the vast majority of the internet is effectively our pyramids.

How many very smart, motivated folks do we have working on essentially ads and related indirect monetization strategies for the very small amount of the internet is the "good stuff"

Don't insult the pyramids.

Probably society would look worse. Almost everything in the world is search-dominated. E.g. one might as well say “if I didn’t have to inspect every element in arrays imagine how much faster I can sort them”. Well then there are lots of arrays you can’t sort. That’s life.

A large amount of labour is dedicated to the search problem. “What is valuable?” is a tough question. Pepper, nutmeg, mace made us a seafaring people. Easy to think “what if we only did the stuff we need” but is meaningless sentence. “What we need” is not something someone can state.

About 1% of people are involved in farming, add a few more percent for food distribution, building maintenance and water bottling and you have your rough answer. Pretty much all of us are doing frivolous nonsense in survival terms.

[Something about supply chains.] Who makes bottles? Do the farmers have plows, or just pointy sticks? I guess it could look like the neolithic, if you allow them pottery, and that's a kind of survival, but do you also want to protect them from invasion and diseases? How much survival is the aim? Wouldn't science, and innovation, and creativity, help improve survival? So ... imagination? Comic books? Pets? Poodle manicurists? But of course survival ceases to be the main goal by this point.

That frame doesn't account for all the technology and logistical support for farming. For example, where does his tractor come from? You need an industrial society to be able to build tractors, fuel them, etc. You need a transportation network to import oranges from Mexico. And so on.

Without a tractor, there'd be a major percentage of the population working on farms.

Survival also requires medicines, trained doctors and nurses, and medical devices. For starters.

The most productive societies are ones where the people are free to do what they want. The more people are regimented and taxed, the less productive they are.

Undoubtedly, but productivity does not directly equate to beauty, health, happiness, satisfaction, morality, civic engagement, justice, etc.

A life of indolence does not lead to any of those things. We simply are not built that way. We were built to struggle.

For once, I agree with you!

Yay!

But for what end?

"Productivity" for the sake of what?

Work for the sake of work is worthless.

For the sake of you living richer than medieval kings.

Peoples' wants are unbounded.

Nobody knows what percentage. Besides, people want more than to be fed, sheltered, and protected from violent attacks. Undoubtedly they are often wrong and want ridiculous pointless things, but nobody knows exactly which things are the wrong things. That's why we have a diverse society of idiots, all trying different things.

What intrigues me is that all of it is considered "economic activity", and counts toward GDP and is considered beneficial, even flower arranging and witchcraft accessories and cloud-connected sneakers. Somehow that assessment ends up being correct, because nobody knows for sure which parts are bullshit.

I agree, but surely with some strict definitions, you could get within 5%.

I am intrigued by the same thing you are. How does it all count as economic activity? What percentage of the flower-arranging has to be done to ensure that the medicine-manufacturing can be done? It's such an endless chain--"I pay the credit card fee on my purchase of custom stationary to the credit card company and the credit card company rolls it up in its revenue projections and forecasts a more profitable Q3 so their stock price increases so the portfolio-holding lenders are more lenient with their loan terms so Pfizer takes out a larger loan to build a factory in Bangalore to run the manufacturing lines..."

If the custom-stationary buying stops, so does the factory-loan lending... and vice versa.

I'm trying to imagine the chain in reverse order, and without reference to money but just to things people want. So Pfizer has this idea to organize people to make more medicines. But this is slightly risky, because it's not a shoe-in that people want more medicines. So they need permission, and lenders can grant that, but only if the lenders' other, um, projects have been successful recently, which equates to "consumer confidence", and that is due to millions of flower arrangers (or equivalently frivolous businesses) successfully pleasing flower-likers. It seems to amount to: if people are generally making one another happy in small silly ways, they have the courage and imagination necessary to try doing bigger stuff. If not, they're all like "I didn't even get to see any pretty flowers this week, I'm in survival mode now", which means they aren't throwing much permission to do stuff (money) around, and consequently there's no will to try anything, and that's a depression.

I note that Pfizer's new factory is a venture, and although it's medical it's debatably not necessary for survival: it's not part of homeostasis.

We can't ex ante compute what humans activity is critical for the forward preservation and growth of humanity.

We can do targeted resource allocation for what we deem promising threads.

We can identify simple failure states to avoid for known recurring issues (plant food now or starve next year.)

But for the vast majority of areas a new venture is required by new people creating new things.

Humans don't simply find, but generate meaning (some that coheres only in imagination, some that coheres to facts in the larger world, some that do both over time.) human meaning generation is a kind of random walk where each human is the write head for a path, the causal chain is too complex for any given discovery or "economically" useful thing to be easily predicted.

Destroy art and maybe people will become too depressed to do anything, or will lack enough noise/inspiration in their thinking to have an insight.

Many of these things are impossible to unwind.

In a very broad sense, essentials like health care and transportation also dramatically increase GDP. In the US, going to the doctor costs a lot more money and dozens of people get paid for coding, insurance, billing, and payments which all do not directly improve the patient's health. People are required to buy cars, fill them with gas, pay for storage, pay tolls, and pay to fix them are also contributing to economic activity.

But these costs are basically taxes in a different form.

There is a slight truth to the conspiracy theory that "doctors keep people sick because it's good for business", in the same way that building appliances that last forever isn't a good business strategy.

> in the same way that building appliances that last forever isn't a good business strategy.

I'd reframe that as people don't want to pay for an appliance that lasts forever.

There are exceptions. Things built for professional use are of a much higher quality. For example, restaurant grade kitchen equipment and appliances are far more durable than consumer ones. Of course, they cost quite a bit more, too.

> people want more than to be fed, sheltered, and protected from violent attacks

People want to be free. Being infantilized by being fed, sheltered, and protected by others rots the soul.

One of the proudest days of my life was when I told my dad I no longer needed any support from him. Unexpectedly, my relationship with him suddenly changed. He started treating me like a man, rather than a child.

You seem to think your experience is universal.

Scratch the surface, and people are the same.

There's a short story about a man who dies and goes to heaven. A person appears, and says the man can have whatever he wants. The man asks for this, and that, and voila! He gets it. Whatever he wants. His slightest wish gets fulfilled immediately.

But after a while, he gets bored. He asks the person, he didn't think heaven would be so boring. The person replies, you aren't in heaven, you're in hell.

Be careful what you wish for.

I wish at least to be protected by the army in some disastrous circumstances, I think. Pathetic or not.

My dad told me that during WW2, if a young man was walking down the street in street clothes (rather than in uniform) he'd be spat on.

> nobody knows for sure which parts are bullshit

I'm pretty sure it's all bullshit and the universe is just random chaos, unless you could convince everyone that there's some kind of objective higher purpose that they all should be striving towards. People just figure out which things they believe to be non-bullshit and go in that direction. Perhaps the only guaranteed purpose for life is to continue itself, which seems awkwardly recursive.

Or as Terry Pratchett put in Hogfather:

"Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet," Death waved a hand, "And yet you act as if there is some ideal order in the world, as if there is some... some rightness in the universe by which it may be judged."

Yes, but you can see this both ways. You could also say that there isn't any purpose to be found anywhere else, so all the purpose must be in the recursive grind of continuing - or growing, or exploring, which are a couple of other values. Learning. If we have this idea of purpose, why not attach it to some candidate quest or value? What's wrong with recursion anyway? Too meaningless to be your goal? You must have higher ideas of purpose, then.

People have a ton of different values, but a lot of general agreement, because this is some knowledge about reality, moral knowledge, a work in progress.

> You could also say that there isn't any purpose to be found anywhere else, so all the purpose must be in the recursive grind of continuing

I really like this angle and do find my own solace in this approach, but I've never quite been able to convince myself that it's not essentially just an artificial or manufactured purpose. Which is fine. It's useful for my own goals and personal growth. But it still feels like a very localised view. If there is some kind of global maxima, I certainly haven't heard about it yet.

I worried about the ultimate purpose for years and years, and people would offer me unsatisfactory answers like "the point is, there is no point". But in the end I just looked up a long list of commonly held values, and thought: OK, so I don't agree with all of it, and what I'm left with is an incoherent laundry list of values, and the overview of the whole thing is very impressionistic, but fair enough. Got to be Popperian about it: we're guessing, badly, and trying gradually to do better. The point is, there are several vague points.

Something like 30% of our GDP is advertising - a pursuit I’d claim not just worthless but actively making everyone else’s life just a little worse.

Sports are part of what makes life worth living though :)

> Something like 30% of our GDP is advertising

It peaked at under 2.5% of GDP in the late 1990s, and is significantly less now.

https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/oct/rise-digi...

You're both right, but were thinking in different terms:

As of 2025, advertising is responsible for approximately 21.9% of the total U.S. economic output, according to a study by S&P Global Market Intelligence commissioned by The Advertising Coalition. [prnewswire.com]

Here are some key figures from the study:

Total U.S. GDP (2024): $47.5 trillion

Advertising-driven economic activity: $10.4 trillion

Direct advertising spend: $491 billion

Jobs supported by advertising: 29 million (about 18.3% of the U.S. workforce)

So while direct advertising expenditures account for about 1–2% of GDP, the broader economic impact—including downstream sales and employee spending—brings the total contribution to nearly 22% of GDP.

> Advertising-driven economic activity: $10.4 trillion

That’s not advertising, that's almost entirely sales “stimulated by” advertising, which are, even in theory, sales the particular seller would not have made without advertising, but not, even in principal, necessarily additional economic activity from advertising.

So even in expanding “advertising” to “due to advertising”, its at best a vast overestimate (and the “jobs supported by advertising” statistic is downstream of that statistic and suffers the same problem when treated as if it were additional rather than largely reallocation.)

Without advertising, how would you know what products were available? How would you know where to obtain them?

Coke is the biggest spender - what about their product do we not know about?

You know about them because of their advertising.

When I see an ostrich chasing a limo driver and a liberty mutual jingle plays, I’m not being given any useful information.

I know about jarritos too and don’t recall having seen any ads for them.

If ads were useful and benefited my life, I’d watch them on purpose instead of them being forced on me.

> When I see an ostrich chasing a limo driver and a liberty mutual jingle plays, I’m not being given any useful information.

You remember Liberty Mutual.

> them being forced on me

That's the price you pay for "free" streaming.

That’s not useful to me & I know, it’s free because me internalizing their propaganda is useful for someone else.

your original pitch was that without ads I’d never know about new products that I might legitimately be interested in. The vast majority of ads are not that

i also see ads in digital billboards and there’s nothing I can do about that

> your original pitch was that without ads I’d never know about new products that I might legitimately be interested in

And I stand by that.

For example, in the 80's I subscribed to computer magazines for the ads. The same for hot rod magazines.

Specifically w.r.t to advertising: In socialist contries there is often only one single brand of a certain product. This removes the need for advertising. But without competition, productivity goes south with time.

Socialist products never seem to be competitive in the world market. Nobody wanted to buy Soviet cars outside of the USSR, for example.

People seem to like Medicaid just fine though

Literally in no way comparable to having a single brand of deodorant.

And yet modern socialists are very keen on public healthcare and not very keen on controlling the means of production to enforce a single brand of deodorant. So… perhaps your mental benchmark is wrong?

There are notable exceptions. The AKM and RPG-7 are some of the most widely marketable weapons of all time.

Yes, there are exceptions. The Soviets also poured resources into making quality watches.

But they were unable to generalize this.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, various companies sprang up to sell Soviet goods. I bought a marvelous small telescope, an old-fashioned electro-mechanical telephone, and a mechanical submarine clock. (Note that these were all obsolete technology.) They were all made by former military suppliers.

I would make two points.

The first is that where labor is allocated is a function of culture. We currently live in a consumerist culture. Consumerist culture wants cheap stuff and lots of it and it wants it now. Convenience is god. And we want money so we can keep buying more things and newer things, so we work and work to make that money. Old things are frozen into museum pieces alien to everyday life instead of undergoing use and development and enrichment, because they make no sense to us and we can't develop things as we don't have a direction. So whereas a gothic church may have previously received baroque spires if the gothic was meager, today, most modifications are bound to look like a downgrade. Think of the really awful proposals for the rebuilding of Notre Dame. Save for a few brain damaged architects, nobody liked them.

The second is that leisure is the source of all culture. I'm not talking about recreation or relaxing by the pool with a piña colada (nothing wrong with that per se, but this is not what leisure means). Leisure is activity that isn't oriented toward practical ends, at least not in the intention. They are the activity of a free man, at least at that moment. This spirit of leisure was at times festive, at times contemplative and worshipful (the highest form of leisure), at times something artistic and musical. Today, we live in a world of total work. Work defines us. Whereas the cultures that produced the beautiful architecture we all admire today worked for the sake of leisure, today we work for the sake of work. We are engines running in a parking lot. We can rev them at high horsepower, perhaps even move aimlessly around the parking lot, but we aren't going anywhere. We don't have an address to go to.

The word "culture" is related to the word "cult" and "cultivation". Whereas in previous ages people believed in the transcendent end of human persons, a belief that ordered their lives and generated their culture, what does a consumerist culture take as the highest good? What is the end of our lives if not the ash heap? This can only produce weariness and distraction and entertainment that has no patience for authentic play or for the kinds of efforts that outlive us. There is no love in consumerism. There is no heroism. There is no genuine awe inspired by a great, honest-to-God promise. There is no festivity or celebration. The salt has lost its flavor and is good for nothing except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.